by John Harris
As Colonel Charlton prepared his car for the journey he heard someone cough behind him.
The two war correspondents, Wye and Russell, had arrived in Jijiga that morning, their faces plastered with the muddy masks of sweat and dust.
‘We’ve heard that Bidiyu’s fallen,’ Wye said. ‘To this Sixth Column lot.’
‘That’s right,’ Charlton agreed. ‘I’m just going along there to make contact.’
‘Mind if we come along, too?’
‘No trouble at all. Got your own car?’
‘We had,’ Wye said. ‘But the battery’s dead and the self-starter’s out of action, and we kept having to ask the lorries coming up behind to give us a push start. But then the rear spring gave on these bloody awful roads and the body started slipping sideways.’ He grinned. ‘We tried to ram it upright with a truck but it didn’t work. We’d be glad of a lift.’
Harkaway woke slowly. A warm breeze was coming through the open windows, stirring the netting curtains. Outside he could see palms and a few gum trees and could smell the wood smoke, the old smell of Africa. No matter where you went – even in the city – you had it with you always.
He turned his head to find Danny staring at him. She didn’t return his smile.
‘What’s up?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Got the willies? We’re winning, you know. We’ve licked the Eyeties. The Boys are pleased. I’m here in old Twinkletoes’ very own bed. And you’re alongside me. What more can you ask?’
She didn’t answer at once because she had a feeling he was slipping away from her even before she’d managed to grasp him.
It was hard for her to understand. All her life despite occasional setbacks, she’d been supported by her belief in her Bible and the religious teaching she’d undergone so that she could fight back against despair, but suddenly she felt that this time it wouldn’t provide the answer.
‘What are you going to do next?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t we finished now?’
‘The war’s not over,’ he said briskly. ‘Even if it’s stopped in Bidiyu. I’m an Old Testament type myself and I believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The Italians have sown the wind; they’re entitled to reap the whirlwind.’
‘Aren’t we going to Mombasa? Or South Africa?’
Harkaway gave her his foxy grin. It seemed colder than ever. ‘I haven’t got Twinkletoes yet,’ he said.
‘Do you have to have him?’
‘The bastard said I’d go begging for mercy. I’ll just show him it doesn’t pay to say things like that about George Harkaway.’
‘Don’t push your luck too hard, George.’
‘You think it’s luck?’
‘No.’ But she hesitated as she replied because, in fact, she did. They had been lucky. Things had gone right all along the line.
He was obviously unimpressed by her warning. ‘He’s nothing but a piddling little Italian ice-cream salesman,’ he said. ‘My family have been soldiers since Pontius was a pilot.’
‘I guessed as much.’
He seemed pleased. ‘Does it show?’
There was a long silence, then he went on slowly. ‘My family,’ he admitted, ‘have been army for generations. My father was a general. And he wasn’t the first. My grandfather was one too. There were one or two others, too, in the last century. Famous ones.’
‘I’ve never heard the name.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to enlist under my own name, do you? I’d have been spotted at once. I made it up. You ever heard of General MacDonald Tremayne?’
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t, of course. He wasn’t one of the Twelve Apostles.’
It was insulting but she said nothing, beginning to feel a nagging worry for him inside her.
‘There’ve been Tremaynes in the army since the Civil War. It’s bred in the bone. What I know I didn’t learn at Sandhurst. I imbibed it with my mother’s milk. I heard it talked about over the dining table from the day I first started joining the family at meals. It’s not a profession with me. It’s an instinct.’
‘What happened, George?’ she asked gently. ‘You were an officer, weren’t you?’
Harkaway hesitated a moment then he nodded. ‘Once. They sacked me. I borrowed another chap’s car. I took it for a weekend when he was away on a course. He wouldn’t have known but I fell in with some friends and got a bit drunk and smashed it up. And unfortunately, he didn’t like me, so that “borrowing” became “stealing”. The police took a dim view of it, too, because he hadn’t intended it to be on the road and it wasn’t insured. I didn’t know, but it made no difference. I ended up in court. The army showed me the door.’
‘For that?’
‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘there was a bit more to it than that. There was a dud cheque, too. It was damn’ silly, really, because I could have had the money from my father if I’d asked. But I was young and a bit stupid. People are at that age. I once rode a motorbike down the corridor of the officers’ mess. Showing off.’ He paused, his mind far away. ‘Actually the bookie I gave the cheque to was pretty decent about it. He knew me and didn’t want to make an issue of it but when they started making enquiries after the car incident it all came out. I wasn’t cashiered. Family name and all that. But I had to leave, all the same. I enlisted again under an assumed name and asked to be posted out here.’ He frowned. ‘If I’d waited until the war broke out, I could have got a commission as easy as falling off a log in one of the other services. It was a bit of a mess.’
‘I’m sorry, George.’
His frown deepened. ‘It probably wouldn’t have happened if the bastard who owned the car hadn’t been a narrow-minded, mealy-mouthed, arsehole-creeper who went to church on Sundays. You can see why I don’t like ’em much.’
She touched his arm, gently, affectionately. Despite her doubts, she had ended up in his bed. She had won him and she longed to keep him. ‘Don’t go, George,’ she begged.
‘I have to. It isn’t over until I’ve got Twinkletoes.’
Her eyes were tragic. ‘Do you even know where he is?’
‘He went north into Ethiopia.’
She stared at him for a long time, holding the sheet to her throat to hide her nakedness. ‘That’s farther away than ever from Mombasa or South Africa. Will Gooch and Paddy Tully go with you?’
‘They’re like me. They can’t stop.’
‘You’ve persuaded them?’
Harkaway shrugged and smiled. ‘They don’t take a lot of persuading,’ he said. ‘They’re neither of them very bright lights.’
‘You’re using them. You’ve used us all.’
‘Not you, my white-breasted Bronwen.’
‘What am I doing here then?’
She fell silent, realizing how far she’d moved from the moral atmosphere of the life she’d been brought up to live. She was behaving like a loose woman and enjoying it. Suddenly her life had blossomed and she’d come to realize that she needed love. Even her face had changed; the taut, bleak look that had once been there had gone.
She studied Harkaway as he went to the window, naked like herself, strong, muscular and confident. It was Harkaway who had shown her the way, but she had a suspicion that for the future their paths were going to diverge and that she’d have to look elsewhere for affection. Harkaway was too busy, too ambitious – probably, she had to admit, too ruthless – for her to make a life with him.
He swung round from the window. ‘Will you come with us?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve had enough of living rough. A woman needs a bit of comfort. Her make-up’s different.’
‘So’s her plumbing. And thank God for it.’
He approached the bed and grabbed for her. She pushed him away.
‘I’m your warrior lord,’ he laughed. ‘You’re my favourite wife!’
He snatched away the sheet and she screamed. Then he jumped on the bed and did a lopsided dance.
‘The magic of the east,’ h
e said. ‘I always used to wonder what it was that Rudolph Valentino had that I hadn’t got. My sister had pictures of him posted all over the inside of her wardrobe. Always with a bare chest. He was always being photographed only in his pants.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’m not even wearing my pants.’
She was unable to avoid laughing at him and he knelt beside her and pushed her back on to the pillows.
‘They went for him in a big way,’ he said. ‘Lots of swooning. Lots of kissing. Like this.’ He kissed her fiercely, his hands moving over her body. ‘Net curtains just as we have here. A warm breeze. Balmy nights. And a bloody big bed,’ he yelled as he dived for her.
For a while she struggled against him, laughing and shrieking, then she stopped suddenly and melted in his arms. He bent over her, kissing her throat and breasts, until her breath came quickly.
‘Oh, George!’ she begged, her eyes moist with tears. ‘Don’t go away! Please don’t go away!’
But he did.
That afternoon, the Sixth Column lorries, together with a few extra they’d taken from the Italians in Bidiyu, roared out of town. To Harkaway’s Boys had now been added a few Ethiopians who until the day before had been wearing the uniform of the Italians.
Danny watched them go, an empty feeling in her breast. For weeks Harkaway had been her sun and her moon. Despite his autocratic manners, he’d come to mean more to her than anyone else in the whole of her life and now he was gone, and she had a feeling life would never be the same again.
Sick at heart, she turned away as the last vehicle, the last marching man, the last straggling woman disappeared from sight. Grobelaar was sitting on the remains of Guidotti’s triumphal column, playing his harmonica. As he saw the tears in her eyes, he slapped the spittle from it against the palm of his hand and put it in his pocket. Almost without her realizing it, he stood beside her, lean, faded, and battered-looking with his lined tanned face and glass eye.
‘Why did he have to go?’ she whispered.
Grobelaar shrugged. ‘Because he can’t stop, man,’ he said. ‘He’ll probably never stop.’
She sighed and turned away. He remained where he was and she swung round, looking at him questioningly.
‘Tot siens, Danny,’ he said.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It’s Afrikaans for “So long.”’
‘Are you going away, too?’
Her heart sank. She and Grobelaar had always been curiously close to each other, separate from Gooch and Tully, partly because they were civilians and partly because they’d both suffered more from Harkaway’s ambition. When she’d been at her lowest, it had always been Grobelaar with his sad, self-disparaging smile who’d given her the comfort of his own disillusioned self, reassuring because he always seemed in a worse state than she was.
‘What are you going to do, Kom-Kom?’
He shrugged and gave her his sad cobwebby smile. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘After that’ – he shrugged – ‘Ek weet nie. I dunno, man.’
‘What’s it like in South Africa?’
‘Like this. Big. But more beautiful. Man, you’ve never seen such flowers as they grow in the Cape.’
‘I’ve never been to South Africa.’
‘You should come.’ Grobelaar put his hand on her arm. ‘Kom, Kerel,’ he said. ‘They’ve opened the cafés again. I’ll buy you a beer.’
The column was several miles outside Bidiyu when they saw the car approaching. It stopped in front of them, blocking the road, and Harkaway rose in his seat to yell over the windscreen.
‘Get out of the bloody way,’ he said. ‘We’re in a hurry!’
‘Hold it, hold it!’ A man in a civilian bush jacket was climbing from the car. ‘Just hang on a minute! Who are you? You from Berbera? This force that was landed there by the navy? We’re trying to contact this outfit that calls itself the Sixth Column.’
Harkaway grinned. ‘You’ve contacted it,’ he said. ‘This is the Sixth Column.’
The war correspondents eyed each other. Colonel Charlton climbed out.
‘You’ve got a lot more transport than we expected,’ he said.
‘We helped ourselves to what the Italians left.’
‘Artillery, too.’
Harkaway smiled. ‘One gun. An Italian 75-millimetre that they forgot to take with them. Three, I suppose, if you count two pack guns. But they only fire toy shells. We’ve got machine guns, though, and mortars. Old British Stokes and now a few Italian ones.’
The three men were walking forward now, eyeing the long string of lorries, cars and armoured vehicles with wonder. Behind the vehicles was a column of men on foot, Somalis for the most part, many of them carrying spears and accompanied by their families and animals. Suspicious black faces peered at them as they halted in front of Harkaway.
‘There are a lot of you,’ Charlton said. ‘Where did you get your chaps?’
‘Recruited ’em.’
‘You Colonel Harkaway?’
‘Yes.’ Harkaway grinned. ‘But you won’t find me in the army lists. I promoted myself.’
‘Bit naughty,’ Charlton said. ‘The army prefers to do it. Looks better.’
‘Thought it would help,’ Harkaway explained. ‘Knew the Eyeties liked a bit of dignity so we made our own pips and crowns. Up to this morning we even had an ATS captain. Missionary we picked up.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Left her in Bidiyu. She was a bit sick of living rough.’ Harkaway gestured at Gooch and Tully. ‘Second-lieutenant Gooch and Captain Tully.’
Charlton studied the two figures. ‘Are they really officers?’
‘Not on your life. But they do the job just as well.’
Charlton fished a notebook from his pocket. ‘I’m glad we’ve bumped into you,’ he said. ‘The general would like to make it official. He’s grateful for what you’ve done and he’s quite prepared to offer you real commissions.’
‘I’d rather have medical supplies,’ Harkaway said.
‘I could arrange for both. Better let me have your names.’
Harkaway gestured. ‘That’s Patrick Tully,’ he said. ‘The big chap’s Harvey Gooch.’
‘How did you come to be left behind the Italian lines?’
‘Got cut off when the rush for the coast started,’ Harkaway said casually, giving nothing away.
‘What about you? Who’re you?’
‘George Matthew Tremayne Harkaway’.
Charlton looked up. ‘Any relation of MacTremayne?’ he asked. ‘He was my commanding officer in the last bunfight.’
Harkaway frowned. Such a coincidence seemed hardly possible in this godforsaken place. ‘Relative,’ he growled. ‘Distant.’
Charlton wrote everything down carefully. ‘I doubt if you’ll end up a lieutenant-colonel, of course,’ he smiled. ‘But you never know. Where are you off to?’
‘I’m after Guidotti. He’s heading north. I’m going to stop the bastard.’
‘The RAF reports he’s got lorries and guns.’
‘My people report that he’s running out of petrol and that he hasn’t much ammunition for his guns. I’d rather take notice of them than the RAF. They’re closer to the ground.’
Charlton stepped to one side and peered down the long raggle-taggle column of men in multi-coloured robes and turbans.
‘You really going to have a go at Guidotti with that lot?’
Harkaway glanced back. ‘They’re not exactly the Guards,’ he admitted. ‘But they know how to look after themselves.’
As he made to gesture to his driver, Wye stepped forward.
‘Hang on, hang on!’ he said. ‘We’d like a word with you!’
Harkaway stared down his nose at him. ‘And who the hell might you be?’ he snapped.
‘I’m Asa Wye. Globe. That’s Russell. APA. We’ve been chasing you all over East Africa. We’d like a photograph.’
Harkaway smiled. He had no wish to have his picture plastered all over the newspapers. That could come w
hen he’d finished and a few people were busy eating their words.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘In a hurry. See them in Bidiyu. They know all about me.’
‘Who do, for God’s sake?’ Having found his story, Wye could see it slipping through his fingers unwritten.
‘Chap called Grobelaar. Known as Kom-Kom. With us until yesterday. Or there’s our own private Bible-thumper. Bronwen Ortton-Daniells. She’ll give you a story. She’s a good one herself, come to that, and she’d make a good picture, too. Not bad-looking.’
While Wye frantically wrote and Russell scrambled about in the back of Charlton’s car for his camera, Harkaway gestured at the Somalis who had climbed down to see better.
‘Mount!’ he yelled.
‘Here, hang on!’ Charlton said. ‘The general would like to know what you’re up to, so he can do a bit of planning. If you’re looking after the north, we can go straight on to Addis.’
Harkaway smiled. ‘You go straight on to Addis,’ he urged. ‘I’ll look after Guidotti for you. Now, if someone doesn’t shift that bloody car, I’ll shove it off the road.’
Startled, Charlton scrambled into the car and reversed it hurriedly. As he did so, Harkaway’s vehicle pushed past.
As Charlton stood watching the column pass, Wye swore and looked at Russell. ‘Get a picture?’ he asked.
Russell lowered the camera. ‘Three-quarter back view,’ he said. ‘It’ll show he has nice ears.’
‘He said what?’ the General asked.
‘He said he hadn’t time to come for a conference,’ Charlton explained. ‘But he said we needn’t worry about Guidotti. He could take care of him.’
The general studied him. ‘And can he?’
Charlton smiled. ‘I’d say he can, sir. He had those Somalis well under control. When he told them to do something they jumped.’
‘Then,’ the general said dryly. ‘I think we’ll let him get on with it. After all, Guidotti can’t do much harm to us, and our job’s to get to Addis. At least our flank’ll be secure, and if he doesn’t pull it off – and he might not, of course – then we can always sort it out when we’ve established ourselves in Addis. What did you say his name was?’