Soldier's Daughters

by Fiona Field

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Susie, but her tone sounded doubtful.

  Maddy looked at her. ‘You don’t think so.’ Her eyes welled up with tears again.

  ‘Maddy,’ said Susie, almost desperately, ‘I don’t know what to think. Truly.’

  ‘He’s been away an awful lot recently.’ Maddy twisted the tissue in her hand. ‘So many weekends.’ She gazed at Susie, willing her friend to contradict her, to say that, of course, Seb wasn’t the sort to stray, but Susie nodded in agreement. ‘So it could be true, couldn’t it?’

  ‘We don’t know this.’

  Maddy sipped her tea. ‘So this is why I came back. I don’t want my mum to know – not till I know the truth. Mum…’ Maddy paused. ‘Mum thinks…’ She paused again, not wanting to sound horribly disloyal to her mother. ‘Mum isn’t Seb’s number one fan. She thinks I could have done better than marrying a soldier.’

  ‘An officer,’ corrected Susie. ‘And a fine athlete and an Oxford graduate.’

  ‘Even so…’ said Maddy. ‘And I knew if I stayed with my parents I couldn’t have pretended all was tickety-boo when…’ She glanced at her phone. ‘When it might be anything but.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Susie. She sipped her tea. ‘God, this is a mess and Seb’s only just flown out to Kenya. When’s he due back? When will you be able to talk to him? Are there any comms out there?’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not unless I go through official channels and I can’t do that – I can’t expect the chief clerk or Andy to relay a message to him about something like this.’

  ‘Maddy,’ said Susie, gently. ‘Look, I don’t want to sound like an old misery but have you thought about what you’ll do if…?’

  Maddy stared at Susie and finished the sentence for her. ‘If it’s true?’

  Susie nodded.

  Maddy sighed. ‘I wouldn’t be hurting like this if I didn’t love him so much. And I do, Susie. I can’t imagine life without him. I’d stick with him. I’d take him back in a trice. I don’t want him to go… leave me. And the children…’

  ‘Do you think it’d come to that?’

  Maddy looked at Susie, desperation written clearly on her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what I’m up against. I don’t know who this person is. I can only assume it’s someone he met rowing.’ She gave a bark of mirthless laughter. ‘After all – he’s got previous. It’s how we met. So this is probably some young single athlete, all bronzed skin and drive and ambition, full of health and vim and vigour. Not a knackered mother whose figure has gone to pot and who has the energy of a tired sloth.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Susie. ‘You’re lovely and you know it.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Susie sipped her tea. ‘You sure it’s a rower?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘No, but it seems logical.’

  ‘It’s just…’

  Maddy’s brow creased. ‘It’s just what, Susie?’

  ‘No, it’s probably nothing.’ Susie took a gulp of her tea.

  ‘Susie?’

  ‘It’s just that friend of Sam’s, the one who came to your Sunday lunch party, was here, and if you remember, she was adamant she didn’t row and wasn’t ever likely to.’

  ‘Who? Michelle?’

  Susie nodded.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘She didn’t really say. She was a bit odd, though.’

  ‘No change there, then,’ said Maddy. ‘She was bloody odd the other time she was here. I couldn’t see why a lovely girl like Sam would want her as a friend. She hardly said a word. In fact, I thought she was more than odd, I thought she was rude and moody.’

  ‘So maybe she wanted to apologise to you.’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘Unlikely, especially as I had a bread-and-butter letter from her, thanking me. If she felt the need to say sorry for being such a mardy-moo she could have said so then.’

  ‘I suppose. The thing is, when she found out you weren’t here I gave her your phone number.’

  Maddy stared at Susie. ‘The house phone?’

  ‘I don’t know. I gave her the babysitting circle list, which has got both your numbers on it. I don’t know which one she put into her mobile. It could have been the house phone, but it could have been your mobile, it could have been both. God, if I’m right, Maddy, I am so sorry.’

  ‘But… but… it can’t be her. She doesn’t row, she said so, so she could never have met Seb before that lunch party. It doesn’t add up.’ Maddy was bewildered. ‘No, it can’t be her.’

  But Susie wasn’t so sure. She’d seen how Michelle had looked during that second visit and the words ‘shifty’ and ‘furtive’ kept popping into her mind. Along with ‘deranged’, not that she was going to tell Maddy. Maddy had enough to contend with already.

  21

  The A330 Airbus droned southwards and Sam put her Kindle down on her tray-table then closed her eyes. She was bored with reading and anyway she hadn’t been concentrating properly on her book and had kept finding that she had to scroll back a few pages to pick up a lost thread in the plot.

  She knew why: her mind was full of other stuff. Her thoughts kept yo-yoing between Michelle and her problems, and what she was going to find out in Kenya. The CO’s briefing had been pretty unequivocal about what they might expect. He hadn’t beaten about the bush when he’d opened with, ‘Right, first off, almost everything you will encounter in the bush is out to kill you.’

  Colonel Notley had gone on to talk about the deadly results of getting bitten. It seemed that everything from insects to lions had a taste for humans. Then there were the other dangers: the sun could burn you to a crisp in minutes; the chances of getting septicaemia from scratches or cuts were monumental; and, finally, if you were foolish enough to have sex with any of the locals you were more than likely to end up with HIV or some other STD. Frankly, thought Sam, the CO hardly sold the place as the holiday destination that civvies thought it was – although civvies got to hang out in five-star resorts.

  ‘Of course,’ the CO had said, ‘I would hope that both you and your soldiers will steer well clear of the local women or, ahem, men… but I want you to drum it into every last man-jack, or woman, in your command that if we do find anyone consorting with the locals we’ll take a very dim view of it.’ He clicked a slide to show a map of the area. And then another slide with a larger-scale map showing the main camp in the middle – and, as far as Sam could ascertain – bugger all else. ‘Featureless’ and ‘back of beyond’ were words that sprang to mind.

  He’d gone on about various other aspects of the exercise and had finished with, ‘This exercise is to test the soldiers of the battalion in basic infantry skills, to test us, the officers, in our leadership skills, to test how we interact with the other units in the battle group and to test the command and control of higher formation. It will be hard, it will be hot, but, if we all follow standard operating procedures it should not be dangerous.’

  But that was the thing… should not be dangerous kind of implied that it could be. And although Sam had known when she’d signed up that being in the army meant that her job description could include stuff like ‘getting shot at’ she hadn’t really thought about risks like snake bites or being a lion’s lunch. She wasn’t sure if the butterflies that were now flapping away in her stomach were as a result of excitement at going to a foreign and rather exotic country or fear about what the country might have in store.

  It didn’t help matters that the colonel had also briefed them about the kit that was permanently stored out in Kenya and the state of it. The vehicles, apparently, were relatively new – well, new compared to the lot they’d replaced – but the succession of soldiers who went through the exercise area felt very little responsibility with regard to them and thrashed the engines and took them across terrain in a way they wouldn’t dream of doing to their own battalion vehicles. Sam had b
een warned that she and her team would probably be working around the clock to keep everyone mobile.

  Hot, suffering dodgy conditions and probably overworked – whoopee. Still, the other advantage of being in the back of beyond was that she wouldn’t get plagued with daily calls from Michelle wanting a shoulder to cry on. Sam felt a bit mean as she thought this but, honestly, Michelle was pushing their friendship to the limit.

  Michelle rang the Fanshaws’ number for the fifth and, she’d promised herself, final time. It was answered on the third ring.

  ‘Hello, Maddy here.’

  Maddy! Michelle was so stunned at getting Maddy and not Seb that she slammed the receiver down. Shit, what was she doing back? Susie had said she’d be gone for ages, weeks at any rate. Michelle stared, horrified, at the phone on her desk as if she expected it to morph into a cobra or something else unpleasant.

  Then she began to calm down and she thought more logically about the situation. If Maddy were home and Seb was now, presumably, in Africa – or would be imminently – maybe it was the perfect moment for the two of them to have a little chat. After all, wouldn’t it be doing Maddy a kindness to put her in the picture about the sham that her marriage had turned into? Michelle looked at her diary. Good, the weekend was free. Maybe she’d take a spin down to the country.

  Immi was awoken by the bing-bong of the aeroplane’s tannoy and the guy sitting next to her shuffling about. She wondered how long she’d been asleep. Long enough, she thought, judging by the vile, stale taste in her mouth as she swallowed. She reached for her compact to check her appearance. Oh, God, she’d dribbled. She had dried drool down her chin. Hastily she tidied herself up and ran a comb through her hair.

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ said the squaddie next to her. ‘You’re still the best-looking soldier on the plane.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She preened slightly.

  ‘Still, given what the rest of us look like, that isn’t saying much.’

  Immi stuck her tongue out and good-naturedly told him to piss off.

  She felt the plane lurch slightly; a second bing-bong rang out.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the pilot speaking to inform you that we’ve started our decent into Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. We should be on the ground in about thirty minutes. I hope you have enjoyed the flight.’

  Well, no, she hadn’t, thought Immi, but she didn’t think the RAF would be likely to listen to anything she had to say about the dozen or so suggestions she had as to how their service could be improved. Decent soap and soft loo roll in the lavs would be a start.

  She amused herself for the limited remainder of the trip by thinking up all the other ways the RAF could begin to rival commercial airlines and was almost surprised when she felt a hefty thump and realised they’d touched down. She was thrown forward in her seat and bounced off the one in front as the pilot applied reverse thrust and the brakes. Another thing to add to the list – be gentler to the passengers.

  As the plane slowed and began to turn Immi gazed across the aisle and out of a porthole, and thought that what she could see looked like what she’d seen on arrival at almost any other airport she’d ever landed at. A big complex of terminal buildings, a bunch of aircraft sitting on their stands and some moth-eaten grass – except this moth-eaten grass was rather browner and dustier than the stuff they’d left behind at Brize. So this was what Africa looked like.

  And when she got off the aircraft she discovered what Africa felt like – nice and warm – well, nice and warm compared to the UK. And they were high here. She’d been told it was about six thousand feet so wasn’t it like Ben Nevis? Which might explain why it wasn’t completely baking even though they were almost smack on the equator. But it smelt of aviation fuel and warm concrete like any other airport. She pitied the lads who were on baggage detail unloading the plane; being this high it was going to be tiring. Obviously with all the guns and ammo on board there was no way the local baggage handlers could be allowed to do it so the soldiers were forming human chains and hauling everything into the eighteen-tonners that had been driven onto the pan where the huge RAF plane was parked. All being well, everything would catch up with them at their first stop – the British Army Training Unit, Kenya or BATUK as it was referred to in the endless movement orders Immi had processed only a few weeks earlier.

  Immi shuffled forward with the rest of the soldiers, who were not unloading the aircraft’s hold, to pass through Kenyan immigration and then into a separate holding area in the main terminal till the movement officer led them to the coaches that had pulled up outside.

  Immi wasn’t sure what she had imagined Nairobi would look like but, if she was honest, it was a bit of a disappointment. Actually, it was a massive disappointment. She hadn’t expected to see mud huts and grass skirts but she had expected something more, well, African. For a start the roads were a joke; they seemed to be one continuous pothole. She supposed the roads might have been really dangerous if they’d managed to travel at any speed but the driver was barely managing to get out of second gear; the traffic was mad. And it was worse than mad, it was psychotically, suicidally mad, with little minibus taxis mounting the pavements to get round the jams, motorcycles going the wrong way up one-way streets, thousands of pedestrians jay-walking or stepping off pavements in front of moving vehicles, and everyone seemed to think that traffic lights and stops signs were advisory rather than mandatory. And then there was the rubbish: piles and piles of it heaped up at the side of the road, along the pavements, dumped on street corners with people in rags picking over the rotting, stinking detritus. Immi felt her skin crawl at the sight. Fancy having to do that? How desperate did you have to be to want to rummage through that sort of shit? she wondered.

  The bus carried on its stop-start way around the outskirts of the city while Immi stared open-mouthed at the crazy driving and the sights of Nairobi until after an hour or so they reached their destination, the barracks where they would get their briefing about what to expect in Africa and where they would spend the night before being taken upcountry to Nanyuki, where they would start getting everything ready for the arrival of the rest of the battle group and also get acclimatised to the sun.

  The convoy of buses drew to a halt and everyone got off. They were led to a hall where bottles of water were handed out before everyone took their seats for the briefing. They’d been on the go for hours, what with the journey to the RAF base, then the endless wait, then the nine-hour flight… All Immi wanted was to eat and hit the hay but now she had to listen to the training major as he droned on about standard operating procedures, casevac arrangements, the dangers of heatstroke, dehydration, insect bites, septicaemia, malaria…

  And here was me thinking I might get a bit of a suntan, thought Immi. I’m not venturing outside ever, if that’s what can happen to you.

  ‘Moving on…’ said the training major.

  Oh Lordy, thought Immi. More? How much more was there to say? And it wasn’t as if any of it would apply to her, seeing how she wasn’t going to do anything but walk from her accommodation to her office and then back again at the end of the day. She wasn’t going to be out in the bundu, she wasn’t going to be lugging her body weight in kit around and she wasn’t going to be sleeping rough surrounded by bugs and snakes. What the heck of what he was banging on about was going to apply to her? She struggled to pay attention. One of the things she’d learned about being in a huge minority, when lecturers wanted to pick on someone to answer a question, they always picked on an easy target. And being one of four women in a roomful of men meant that the odds were stacked against her if this officer decided to fire a few questions at the audience. She tried not to think about how much she wanted a hot shower, a decent meal and a sleep…

  ‘You there, the blonde…’

  Immi was jerked awake by his voice and a nudge in the ribs from the bloke next to her.

  Fuck – she was right. The major was staring directly at her.

  �
��What’s one of the biggest hazards on the ranges?’

  She was about to say lions as a wild guess, when her neighbour whispered, ‘Civilian incursion.’

  Really? OK. ‘Civilian incursion,’ she repeated.

  The training major narrowed his eyes but Immi stared brazenly back at him.

  ‘Thanks mate,’ she whispered to her saviour, when the major moved on to cover the hazards of attacks from ivory poachers who had a particular liking for night-vision goggles – for fairly obvious reasons.

  ‘No worries,’ he whispered back. ‘Besides, you don’t look like someone who’s going to be yomping around the bush.’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ said Immi with feeling. And anyway, if she was out in the bush she’d be in a vehicle with the journo she was going to be looking after and she didn’t think this media type would want to risk his skin either. Didn’t reporters want to sit in bars, drink epic amounts of Scotch, smoke endless fags and chat up pretty girls to get the low-down on a scoop – or was that just ones in films?

  Maddy was being a dreadful slob, she knew: nearly eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning and she still hadn’t got either Nathan or herself dressed. But who cared? She had no plans, they weren’t going anywhere, all they were going to be doing that day was playing and loafing about so what did it matter if they didn’t get out of their pyjamas? Of course, if Seb knew he’d be horrified. His sense of military discipline and order would be affronted, but when the cat’s away… She felt a little disloyal, even entertaining the thought, but really, life was sometimes a lot simpler without Seb around.

  Nathan was happily employed stacking bricks in the sitting room so Maddy went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. As she filled the kettle at the sink she looked out of the window and saw a strange car parked outside.