‘That’s what you joined for.’
‘I did. But—’
Paul Swain waited a moment and then said, ‘Change of gear. Never easy, but never dull.’
Dan stood up. He said, too forcefully, ‘I just don’t want the unit to lose cohesion. They fight so much better in small groups. I don’t want them all getting scattered on leave.’
‘I see, Major.’
‘I do miss the smell of cordite, though. I love it. I’d wear it as aftershave if I could.’ He moved to the window and looked out. The boys in the gun park had been silently at work with their oil and wadding, and on closer inspection had been clammily pasty with hangovers.
‘Had a good time, Denny?’ Dan had said to one of them.
The boy paused for a moment. He stood straight. ‘Honking, thank you, suh.’
Dan smiled at him. He felt an enormous affection welling up and out of him like the warmth from a brazier. ‘Celebrating, were you?’
The boy risked a smirk. He caught the eye of his mate working on the other side of the gun trails. ‘Completely spangled, suh.’
Dan smiled again now, just thinking of them. They loved being in a band of brothers; they loved doing what they had been trained to do. It was so important, at all times, not to fail in front of them, not to give them cause to doubt, even for a second, that their very best endeavours would be both noticed and rewarded.
He had given Gunner Denny a brief nod. ‘Take note of what the sarnt says to you about celebrating. He won’t be wrong. Letting off steam and getting into trouble is the good and bad of getting home.’
Denny didn’t flinch. ‘Suh.’
‘Dan?’
Dan turned round. Paul Swain was still standing by Dan’s computer.
‘You wanted to discuss the homecoming parade?’
‘I did, Paul. I do. The CO says medals to be awarded on the polo field. We must get McCormack back for that. And a family day. We must think about that. Family. All that fanfare. OK?’
Paul Swain smiled. ‘OK.’
‘A few pink jobs in with the blue ones—’
‘I hear you.’
‘Happy?’
Paul Swain gave a sketchy, slightly mocking salute. ‘Homecoming parade, Major. Medals. Particular attention to the wounded. Family day. Action.’
‘Can you stop the car a moment?’ Dan said.
Gus pulled the car into a muddy space beside the road, under a scrawny belt of larch trees. ‘You OK?’
‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘Just – not quite ready to go home.’
There was a short pause. Gus switched off the engine. ‘Me neither.’
Dan glanced at him. ‘Anyone there? At home?’
‘Nope.’
Dan waited.
‘Kids are at school,’ Gus said. ‘Kate is in London. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Kate’s in London.’
Dan said quickly, ‘Come and have supper at ours. Alexa’d love it.’
‘Thanks,’ Gus said, ‘but I’ll grab a bite in the mess. I’ll go back there when I’ve dropped you.’ He grinned briefly. ‘I might catch a sight of the new girl subbie they’ve appointed to target information. She has a habit, apparently, of coming down into the mess at night in her pyjamas and coolly picking up a plated meal to take back to her bedroom.’
‘A looker?’
‘Blonde,’ Gus said shortly.
Dan said, ‘I’m not going to have a drink tonight.’
‘Oh?’
‘I – I can’t concentrate. I’m still too amped to concentrate. Drinking makes it worse.’
‘Or bearable.’
‘Maybe.’
‘What Kate doesn’t get,’ Gus said, staring straight through the windscreen, ‘is that I don’t drink to blot out the bad stuff I’ve seen and been a part of. I drink because – because I miss the good stuff.’
‘We haven’t been back a week yet.’
‘I know.’
‘The trouble is,’ Dan said, ‘that on ops, everything is important. Everything. Nothing is taken for granted. You can trust the next man with your life, for God’s sake.’
‘I expect,’ Gus said, a little sadly, ‘that you could trust Alexa with yours.’
‘When I was out there,’ Dan said, ‘when I wasn’t thinking about the battery, I was thinking about her. And the girls.’
Gus grunted.
Dan said, ‘It was a bit crackpot, I suppose, but I sort of told myself I was protecting them.’
Gus turned to look at him. ‘You bloody what?’
Dan stared straight ahead too now. ‘Didn’t you feel that? Didn’t you think that even if you couldn’t justify killing for its own sake, you could always make a case for killing to protect people you love?’
Gus shook his head. ‘Mental …’
‘It’s not,’ Dan said. ‘It’s just understanding that if you are protecting something precious, you can get your head to a place where anything seems justified.’
Gus sighed, as if arguing with Dan would be a complete waste of breath and effort. He said, ‘Would you say that to Alexa?’
‘Nope,’ Dan said.
‘Why not?’
‘More protectiveness. I don’t want her to know what we saw and did. Especially the close shaves. I most definitely do not intend for her to know that. If I tell her something, even something with a happy ending, like the medic who told me to grind my knee into Flasher’s thigh, between his wound and his heart, to stop the blood flow, and it worked, I’d still leave her with the image, wouldn’t I, and then she’d be wondering what I hadn’t told her, what happened that didn’t have a happy ending. She’d be picturing the blood and the piss and the—’
‘Stop it, Dan,’ Gus said. ‘You’re fucking sweating.’
‘I don’t want to sweat in front of Alexa.’
‘At least,’ Gus said, ‘she’s there.’
‘Fuck me,’ Dan said. ‘Fuck me. So sorry—’
‘Maybe it’s for the best, Kate sticking to her routine. I don’t want to be a nuisance round her. I’ll have adjusted a bit more by Friday.’
Dan bent forward and put one forearm across his eyes. Gus put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?’ he said again.
Muffled, Dan said, ‘I should be asking you that.’
‘I’m no more OK than you, mate. Brave face, fighting talk. That’s what we do.’
Dan raised his head. He said, ‘You long for home, don’t you? You fight for it. But what you forget when you’re away is that ordinary life won’t kill you, except by accident, so of course everything looks pretty small here by comparison. And pretty dull.’
‘There are some advantages, though.’
‘Name them.’
‘Booze,’ Gus said.
‘OK,’ Dan said. ‘Sex.’
‘Beds. Pillows.’
‘Food on a plate.’
‘Girls out of uniform.’
‘No fleas,’ Dan said.
‘Showers.’
‘Not,’ Dan said, ‘lying for hours in some fucking desert waiting for action and having to roll on your side to pee.’
Gus nudged him. ‘Families?’
Dan looked at him. They grinned at each other. ‘OK, altar boy,’ Dan said. ‘Families.’
‘Look at the guys who haven’t got them. Look at someone like Denny in your battery. The regiment’s the first family he’s ever had.’
‘Your kids,’ Dan said.
‘I’ll see mine on Sunday. You’ve still got your little bombshells at home.’
‘Isabel isn’t.’
‘Isabel—’
‘She’s a great kid,’ Dan said. ‘I’m relieved she’s away at school. She needed the stability.’
Gus leaned forward to turn on the ignition. ‘What if you’re pinked? If you’re promoted?’
Dan looked at him sharply. ‘Why d’you say that?’
Gus shrugged. ‘I know you’re thinking of it. We both are. We’re the age to start thinking about promotion, aren’t we?’
&
nbsp; Dan said, ‘I don’t want it to come between us—’
‘It won’t.’
‘It might. They’ll be writing up the command reports already and we can’t all be on target.’
Gus put the car in gear and peered into his side mirror. ‘We’re young yet. We’ve got eight years or so.’
Dan said, ‘I’ve done about seven already. As a major.’
The car swung into the road.
Gus said, ‘I never thought about it while we were away. All those tensions just vanish. Now we’re back and eyeing each other up already.’
Dan said firmly, ‘Nothing’ll happen before February.’
Gus swore briefly at an unsteady cyclist. When he was past her, he said, ‘Just as well. There’s plenty to cope with right now, don’t you think?’
Dan walked across the grass in front of his house in the dusk, treading softly out of the sightline of the kitchen windows. He moved until he was against the wall of the house and could see in, hoping that Beetle’s acute and unerring instinct for his presence would not betray him. But Beetle was by the kitchen table, his back to the window. He was sitting on his haunches but his every nerve was strained to focus on what was going on just above him, where the twins, unimpeded by over-large plastic aprons tied over their clothes, were earnestly pressing cookie cutters into an irregular rectangle of brownish dough. Their hair was gathered up with plastic bobbins on top of their heads in absurd little tufts, and Flora had smudges of chocolate on her spectacles as well as on her face. Tassy simply had a broad smear of it across her mouth, like badly applied lipstick. Opposite them, and visibly restraining herself from assisting them, stood Alexa, in jeans and a tight cardigan, with a blue muffler looped round her neck like a cowl. She looked about eighteen.
There was a sudden flurry and Beetle leaped briefly into the air, snapping at a fragment of dough that had skidded over the edge of the table. The twins shrieked. Beetle, appalled at himself, dropped flat on the floor and quivered.
‘Smack him!’ Tassy demanded.
‘Certainly not,’ Alexa said.
‘He took my cookie!’
‘You pushed it.’
‘It slipped!’ Tassy screamed. ‘It did that, and he took it!’
‘He’s a dog. He’s a Labrador—’
‘He’s naughty!’ Tassy roared.
Flora looked at her sister. Then she picked up another piece of dough and offered it to her. Tassy glared at it, seized it and hurled it across the room.
‘NO!’ Alexa said to Beetle, before he moved, and then to Tassy, ‘What an ungrateful and horrible thing to do.’
Outside the window, Dan waited. The scene within made his heart turn over, even Tassy’s face, now scarlet with fury, her mouth a square of howling. He would give Alexa a minute more to cope alone and then he would go in, unannounced, and be the great and marvellous distraction. He watched her pick up Tassy and carry her, sticky and screaming, from the room, while Flora, having clocked the whole upset calmly from behind the one open lens of her spectacles, was proceeding with her cutting with ostentatious tranquillity. Slowly, with the air of one uncertain of his reception, Beetle rose from the floor and resumed his steady, avid watching.
Alexa came back into the room and retrieved the thrown piece of cookie dough. Flora didn’t look up. She laid two perfectly executed rounds beside one another. ‘I’m not screaming,’ she said.
‘Nor you are.’
‘I’m just doing good cutting.’
Dan could not bear to be a watcher any more. He stepped sideways and tapped on the window. Flora took no notice, but Alexa and Beetle were galvanized into action. Beetle rushed barking to the front door and Alexa came to open the window.
She leaned out to kiss him. She said, in a voice that seemed to absolve him from all events earlier in the day, ‘Would you like to come in and deal with your own home-grown Taliban?’
He held her shoulders. She smelled of baking and shampoo. ‘Sorry I was so long.’
‘It was six months last time,’ she said, ‘so what’s half a day?’
He felt limp with something close to adoration. He said, ‘Sorry all the same.’
‘I must go and open the door for Beetle. He’s going mad.’
She straightened up and ran across the kitchen towards the hallway.
‘Hello,’ Dan said to Flora, through the open window.
She turned to regard him briefly. ‘When these are cooked,’ she said, ‘you can have one. If I say so.’
‘Sorry I haven’t rung earlier,’ Dan said, into his telephone.
He was lying on the sofa in the sitting room, across the room from the television, which was turned on, with the volume down to mute. Alexa had done something to the room while he was away, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was that made it look so much warmer and more coherent. His Union Jack cushion was still there, and the brass shell case on the hearth, which now housed a collection of mad wooden tropical birds on sticks rather than a poker and tongs, but there seemed to be more colour somehow, and it looked softer. Were those different curtains? And was the striped rug new or just from another place?
‘I didn’t expect you to ring,’ George said mildly, from Wimbledon. ‘I knew you were safe. Your granddad would’ve shot me if I’d bothered you.’
‘I would too!’ Eric shouted from the background.
‘Are you at Granddad’s now?’
‘Yes, lad,’ George said. ‘It’s Tuesday. I’m here Tuesdays and Fridays. Wednesday he goes to bingo.’
‘Not a soul under seventy there!’ Eric shouted.
‘I’m fine, you know,’ Dan said. ‘I’m lying on the sof—the settee, with my boots off.’
‘And a beer, I hope.’
‘Actually,’ Dan said, ‘having a dry night. I tend to cane it a bit when I get back.’
‘I remember,’ George said. ‘I remember getting wellied for nights and nights.’
‘It was that bloody woman!’ Eric bellowed.
Dan raised his voice slightly. ‘You’re speaking of my mother, Granddad.’
George laughed. ‘He never misses the chance, does he? You sleeping?’
‘On and off.’
‘Sometimes,’ George said, ‘I didn’t want to close my eyes. That’s when all the pictures came back.’
‘It’s certainly an adjustment.’
‘How’s Alexa?’
‘Angelic,’ Dan said. ‘And the kids are so funny.’
‘So you’re all right, then?’
‘Dad,’ Dan said, ‘I’m all over the shop, as you can imagine, but I’m fine.’
Eric shouted from the background, ‘How many did you lose?’
‘Shut up, Dad,’ George said, taking his mouth away from the phone. ‘What kind of bloody question is that?’
‘Tell him too many,’ Dan said. ‘Tell him that counting them makes me want to commit murder.’
‘Poor buggers.’
‘It’s the limbs blown off, Dad. At one point we were losing a limb a day.’
George said, ‘They do wonderful work now, prosthetics and all that.’
‘It isn’t the same as having the arms and legs you were born with. I’ll keep going to Headley Court to see them.’
‘That’s right. That’s got to be right.’ George paused, and then he said, ‘Any … any chance of seeing you?’
‘Of course, Dad. I just can’t quite make plans—’
‘Or maybe we could come down to Larkford. If that’s easier. I’d love to see the kids.’
Dan closed his eyes. ‘I’ll ask Alexa.’
‘Wouldn’t want to be a trouble—’
‘You wouldn’t be. She’d love it. It’s just we’ve got all this homecoming stuff right now. Parades and things. I remember seeing you get the South Atlantic medal. I went with Granddad.’
George turned to his father. ‘Remember taking Dan to see me get the South Atlantic medal?’
‘Course I do,’ Eric said. He held out a hand. ‘Let
me speak to the boy.’
‘Granddad,’ Dan said, automatically sitting up straighter. ‘How are you?’
‘Grand,’ Eric said. ‘Now you’re back. Grand.’
‘Me too.’
‘You can’t be,’ Eric said. ‘Not when they take you off one planet and dump you on another in twenty-four hours. Bloody madness. We took weeks to get back from Aden, bloody boring but you got adjusted. Don’t take it out on that lovely girl of yours.’
‘Hang on a sec, Granddad—’
‘I’m not saying you are,’ Eric said, interrupting. ‘I’m just saying bloody watch it. Whatever you’re dealing with, ain’t her fault.’
‘I hear you.’
‘Good,’ Eric said. ‘Good. I heard something the other day, down at the Legion. The boys called Iraq the Gifa – the Great Iraqi Fuck All. And you’ve been in the Gafa – the Great Afghan Fuck All.’
‘Yes, Granddad.’
‘Take it slow, lad. Day at a time. Give my love to your girls, great and small.’
‘I will.’
Eric’s voice broke a little. ‘Take care of yourself, boy,’ he said hoarsely and then the line went dead.
Dan sat and stared at his phone. They’d be together in Eric’s stuffy sitting room, his granddad mildly bullying his dad, as ever, and then they’d crack open another beer and get a bit sentimental, and then George would go home to that bleak room he’d lived in since God knows when, past the pub where he’d probably stop for a whisky and never let on to his father that he had. They were timeless, the two of them, in their habits and routines. He’d try to go and see them, he really would. Maybe for Remembrance Sunday. They’d love that – suits and medals and a serving son and grandson with sand from a real desert still practically in his turn-ups. And they’d stand round the war memorial at the top of Wimbledon High Street, and the inscription on it would move them all to inward tears even if none of them could be shed in public.
‘All these were honoured in their generation and were the glory of their time.’
Dan swallowed. He could cry now, thinking of it, and of his father and grandfather, and their own histories and their pride in him. Oh God, the number of people who could not ever, ever be let down … It was wonderful, of course it was, it was a reason for going on, always going on, better and better, higher and higher; but sometimes it was just … just—
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