The Letter Bearer

by Robert Allison

  But how to announce it, there’s the difficulty. How to break it to his genial captors? Why leave, after all, when he has become so settled? And of course he can’t explain it to them, can’t sketch or draw the reasons in any way they might understand. It’ll feel like a betrayal, inevitably. After all they’ve done for him. It’ll feel like a desertion.

  From the cover of his den he spies Fierce Chap striding towards an animal pen, a young goat in his arms. Perhaps the ideal fellow with whom to broach the matter. A man whose general disdain might dispose him towards granting a release.

  He weighs the opportunity for as long as he dares, then snatches up a blanket and holds it over his head as he slips out into the downpour, stepping carefully across runnels and streamlets until he arrives within yards of the Berber, the blanket over his head already sodden.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he says. ‘I’m going that way.’ He points eastward along the coast. ‘To the British road.’

  The Berber sets down the kid in the corral and returns his unblinking attention to the rider.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s time for me to go. I can’t stay here. I’m going back. Today.’

  Is that it? Is it done? It’s hard to tell, Fierce Chap’s expression remaining quite unreadable. Which one could take as either assent or disapproval. Or simply a lack of comprehension. Though at least when the rider turns away from him to head back to the grain store, there are no threats to follow him, nor any promise of retribution should he try such a thing. Simply the same inscrutable silence. But perhaps the Berber is already planning how to pass on the news to his compatriots, while adding his own particular counsel: that to let their prisoner go would be the wisest choice, given the tides of war. Or that they should simply attribute his leaving to the same supernaturalism that brought the entire day. The rains came, and the Englishman left. People must make of it what they will.

  They provision him as best they can for his journey, supplying him with bread, chickpea cakes, strips of dried meat and a handful of dates. They fill a water skin for him and help heave it over his shoulder. One of the women bestows a blessing upon him, though in performance it seems more an admonishment. May God bring you to your deserved path.

  Fierce Chap is elected to be his guide for the first part of his travel, chagrined though he appears to be at the inconvenience, and a small group gathers to see him off, Happy Chap, Rude Chap and Dour Chap among them. He’s not quite sure how to say his goodbye to them, no one stepping forward to offer their hand or submit themselves to an embrace. Certainly the most inert of farewells. He decides in the end to offer a salute, which he realises must look absurd even as he executes it, his fingertips snapping smartly to the cloth of his headdress. The instinct of an officer, despite all. Though he imagines they must all recognise the charade.

  When the ceremony is concluded, Fierce Chap leads him from the perimeter of the village, their route taking them beyond sight of the settlement and across a dishevelled coastal plain, its thin topsoil rinsed from a jumble of stone crests like the rudders and sternposts to a capsized fleet. And then through a wide, tree-lined cleft in the ground, rainfall cascading through the higher branches. The Berber all the while walking on ahead, occasionally casting a backward glance to make sure of his charge. His shoulders invariably drooping whenever he sees the rider pause to collect his breath. Are all foreigners so exhausted by war?

  As they begin their ascent to higher ground the rain at last abates, though the soil remains by turn slippery and cloying, every steppe and platform treacherously greased. And if the rider had believed himself capable of the efforts required, then the doubts are quick to return. Those butterfly lungs, a straining heart, the consequences of altered air pressure and extreme humidity. Already from the corner of his eye he can see Fierce Chap looking to him with concern, as though he might be witnessing the slow collapse of a building or the opening of a great chasm.

  He sits heavily and stretches out his fingers, finding a stream of collected water. The beginnings of a great flood, if there were any God at all. An Old Testament cleansing, every soldier and combatant sluiced from their trenches and leaguers out into the ocean. A grand release for all.

  And perhaps only with such a cleansing could the most infamous of acts be expunged. The betrayal of one’s comrades, the abandonment of a wife, the murder of a prisoner of war, all those charges already entered into the record as rumours and echoes, inimical to his every future. And, most damning of all, the spectre of that minutes-long wait during which he will look to the open turret of a tank, knowing at the same time that all inside will be fumbling in that cramped and smoke-filled cell to unhook themselves from belts, wires and hoses, each of them squeezing themselves up against scalding metal to try and push their way out, their lungs filling with poisons, their skins beginning to shrink and blister. Hoppy, Oxo, Jack, Lindo, Fitz.

  What can he do?

  Leant upon the shoulder of his guide, the rider recommits himself to the remainder of the ascent, both men at last arriving upon a plateau described in fieldworks and acres of tilled earth, where the Berber is able to point out the familiar interval of blankness that lies south of the mountains. And through it the pale track of the coastal highway, picked out now by sunlight.

  Sensing that this will be their moment of parting, the rider takes himself aside and pulls from his postbag both of the letters written to her – one from the turret of a tank, the other from the squalor of a prison cell. As if there might ever have been a choice between them.

  You will be brave again when I am gone.

  He places the first letter back into the postbag, crumpling the second into his pocket. He turns back to Fierce Chap and extends to him the bag. ‘Please take these. For when the British come.’

  The Berber continues to view him with some suspicion, unsure whether to receive the bequeathal as gift or liability.

  ‘In case you were wondering . . .’ says the rider. ‘My name was Second Lieutenant James Tuck of the Third Tank Regiment, 7th Armoured Division, His Majesty’s Middle Eastern Forces.’

  His confession received with a correct and proper silence.

  There ought in the end to be some gesture of gratitude, he thinks. At least an acknowledgement of companionship. But before he can arrive at any appropriate means to deliver either, the Berber has already turned to begin his journey home. The rider watches him go, at once moved to a sense of loss. But then what should he have expected? They were never friends.

  For a while he sits to observe the distant road, busied now and then by passing traffic. Soldiers on their way home. Or perhaps resigned to their next engagement. It’s all beyond him now.

  Though if he stares long enough, he can see past the highway into a greater expanse, where that temple of previous imaginings still awaits. No longer some fabulous basilica but a smaller and more austere building, steepled in grey stone. And within its doors an oak-panelled annexe, then a corridor leading to a high-ceilinged chamber, quite empty except for a single desk. The length of the room lit gloomily by a clerestory of arched windows, the wind every now and then bringing seeds against the glass in a steady tap-tap-tap. Just like the impact of small-arms fire against steel plate. Exactly that sound.

  And if he will look closer still, a scattering of papers on that lone desk, each inscribed with the beginnings of a great work:

  Dear Mrs Hopgood-Banks,

  Mr and Mrs Oxburgh,

  Mr and Mrs Warren,

  Mrs Lindqvuist,

  Mr and Mrs Fitzhugh,

  Signora Lucchi,

  I’m writing to let you know that I knew your husband. Your son.

  And that they – to their dire misfortune – knew me.

  In the next life, he decides, I shall become everything expected of me.

  He picks himself up, using scrub as handholds to secure himself, and begins his renewed ascent towards that high boundary between land and sea, the sun once more strong against his back. A pilgrimage tha
t sees him trek on into his own shadow until it becomes broken over scree and sedge, diffuse beneath a lace of branches. The shape of him given up at length into the sheltering vaultworks of a gorge, its base piped with a congruency of currents and breezes, each met and resolved as though by agency of some perfect and unfailing lung.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all the team at Granta, particularly my editor Max Porter for his astuteness and enthusiasm in steering the book towards its final version. Sincere thanks also to my agent Karolina Sutton for ensuring the novel passed into such good hands.

  A special thank-you to historian David Fletcher, who was kind enough to guide me around an M3 Grant, and for his insight and expertise on the subject of tank warfare. (Any errors in the text are certainly mine rather than his.) I am grateful to John Lamb for his assistance with the German, and to Gaetano D’Angelo for his help with the Italian. My thanks too to all those who gave moral and material support along the way, including Celia Brayfield, Fay Weldon, Philip Gwyn Jones, Karin Lowachee, Chris Johnson, Henry and Frances Parlour, Philippa Maffioli, and Pat and Malcolm Hobson.

  I am indebted also to the authors and editors of the following books, all of which were valuable in providing inspiration and detail for the rider’s journey: Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas, Prisoner from Alamein by Brian Stone, A Tankie’s Travels by Jock Watt, It is Bliss Here by Myles Hildyard, Last Letters Home edited by Tamasin Day-Lewis, The Desert War Trilogy by Alan Moorehead, and Tank Men by Robert Kershaw.

  And finally I must express my deepest thanks and appreciation to Selma Parlour, for her dependably incisive readings and for her patience and encouragement throughout.