by Rosie Thomas
From two tables away Martin Frobisher lifted his hand to us in an ironic greeting. Xan gave him a nod and I studied Xan’s face from behind the shield of my sunglasses. He had shaved this morning, but he had missed several patches and the stubble glinted in the sun. I imagined him in the dawn light, somewhere between here and the wire, with a tin bowl of warm water and a tiny mirror balanced on the bonnet of a truck. The faint white rims of old sweat stains marked his khaki shirt and dust caked in the eyelets of his boots. When he took off his socks and underclothes, a miniature sand shower would patter round his feet. I had seen that happen.
It felt strange to be sitting on the veranda at Shepheard’s with him, patiently waiting for our beer, when only an hour ago I had no way of knowing even if he was alive or dead.
And if it was strange for me, I reflected, how much more disorientating must it be for him?
I said quietly, ‘Am I allowed to ask where you have been?’
He jumped, as if his thoughts had been a long way off. He did smile at me, then rubbed his jaw with one hand. ‘On a patrol.’
‘Was it bad?’
‘I have had better experiences.’ He spoke lightly but the taut muscles round his mouth revealed his distress.
Surprisingly, the waiter was back with us. He put the beers down and Xan’s had hardly touched the table before he swept it up and finished it in two long gulps. The desert left your mouth parched and your skin so leached of moisture that it felt as stiff as paper. And yet here was Xan now, surrounded by chic French and Egyptian women, and the pink-faced, well-fed officers from GHQ who directed the background to war operations from behind their desks.
I couldn’t know what he had seen in the course of the last seventeen days but the likely images gnawed at me, jarring with the cosmopolitan scenes on the veranda.
‘Sorry,’ Xan said after a moment. ‘I promise I’ll liven up once I’ve had something to eat.’
I leaned forward and touched his hand. ‘It’s all right.’
He did revive when he had eaten his sandwich and most of mine. He sat back again in his chair and grinned at me. ‘Now all I need is a bath and some sleep, and you.’
‘All three shall be yours. Xan, it wasn’t a social call you were paying on Roddy Boy this morning, was it?’
In the weeks that I had known him I had tried not to press Xan with too many questions. Up until now we had done our best to live in the present, and the present was always parties and joking and a blind determination to have fun. But today I found it very hard to accept that I should know so little. I also knew that he wasn’t volunteering any more information because he didn’t want to make me afraid for him.
He looked around at the nearest tables before answering. Everyone was talking and gesticulating or trying to catch the attention of the waiters. No one was taking any notice of us.
‘No, it wasn’t.’ And then, after a pause, ‘How much do you actually know about what he does?’
In theory, I was only supposed to handle routine typing, filing and administration. All confidential signals and memos were dealt with by army personnel, and collected and delivered by me in sealed folders marked Secret. But Roddy had long ago decided that I was trustworthy and he also liked to impress me by letting drop how key his role was. Quite often, he asked me to collect or deliver signals in clear to the cipher clerks because the junior staff officer whose job it should have been was inclined to be too busy for this menial task.
I had lately started reading everything that passed through my hands, greedy for the smallest crumb of information, good or bad, that might have anything to do with Xan. So I now knew the names and quite often the general whereabouts of most of the commando forces who supplied us with intelligence from deep behind enemy lines. I was almost certain that he was with one of these highly secret groups, criss-crossing the remote desert in order to pick up information on enemy troop and supply movements.
‘A fair amount,’ I said cautiously.
‘And so you have heard of Tellforce.’
The sun struck splinters of light off Xan’s empty glass and cast hard shadows over the white field of the tablecloth.
A child with sores all over his scalp had been leaning against the steps and grasping imploringly at the legs that went up and down in front of his eyes, but now one of the waiters went over and pushed him roughly aside. A thick wash of panic and dismay and revulsion rose in my throat, against Egypt and against the war.
‘Iris?’
‘Yes. Yes, I have heard of Tellforce.’
Another shadow fell across the table. We both looked up and there was Jessie James.
The two men exchanged a glance that excluded me.
‘I didn’t know you were back,’ Jessie murmured.
‘I got in a couple of hours ago.’
Then Xan was on his feet and they exchanged a brief handshake. Jessie hauled over a chair and sat down beside me, telling me that I shouldn’t hide myself away just because Xan was always off fooling around in the desert.
The sombre mood that had descended on Xan and me lifted again. Xan and Jessie drank more beer and I ordered a tiny thimbleful of thick, sweet coffee. Jessie was full of the latest gossip and funny stories about people we knew. One of his fellow Cherry Pickers had won a mule in a poker game with a group of Egyptian traders. He had ridden the mule home from the card game and installed it in the garden of his rented house, and now insisted that the mule thought it was a human being and therefore he had to humour it. He had bought it a straw hat with a hatband in the regimental colours, and he took the animal and its hat with him to polo games and race meetings at the Gezira Club. Whenever he smoked one of his Sobranie cigarettes he lit another for the mule and blew the smoke up the animal’s nostrils.
‘No,’ I protested.
Xan laughed and Jessie blinked at me. ‘D’you think he should make the mule smoke Woodbines? The two of them are very happy together. I’d call it a marriage made in heaven.’
I finished my coffee and looked at my watch. Roddy might have gone off for one of his prolonged lunches, but he might equally be sitting at his desk and waiting for me to reappear.
‘I’d better go,’ I said reluctantly.
Xan lightly touched my wrist. ‘What time will you be free?’
‘About eight.’
The two men stood up and Jessie drew back my chair. I kissed them both on the cheek and left them.
I walked slowly back to GHQ through the stale mid-afternoon heat. Dogs lay beneath carpets of flies in the bands of slate-grey shade at the foot of high walls, and beggars slept with their galabiyehs tucked between their scrawny legs. I was remembering what I knew about Tellforce.
Later that day, after we had made love, Xan and I lay in my bed. My head rested on his chest and I listened to the slow rhythm of his breathing. Faria had gone to a big dinner that was being given by Ali’s parents for some cousins from Alexandria, and Sarah was in her room. Lately she had shown less energy and enthusiasm for her social life. She had been ill a month earlier with one of the debilitating stomach complaints that were Cairo’s special weapon, and was taking a long time to recover. Her skin looked yellow and she complained that the heat was relentless. Faria and I were worried about her.
It was dark outside. I could hear dance music being played on a gramophone somewhere nearby.
‘Are you awake?’ Xan murmured. His voice set up minute vibrations inside the drum of his chest.
‘Yes.’
He sighed and shifted position, combing his fingers through my hair and adjusting the position of my head so that it rested more comfortably in the hollow of his shoulder. I felt the weight of happiness, almost tangible, defined even more sharply by the constant counter of anxiety and by the certainty that we would have to part again very soon.
‘I love you,’ he said simply.
I smiled dazedly, my mouth moving against his skin. We lay and listened to the tinny scratching of the music, the small noises of the apartment.
‘Before Jessie arrived this afternoon you mentioned Tellforce,’ I began at last.
The name of the secret force had been in my head all afternoon. I didn’t want to hear how closely Xan was associated with it, but I couldn’t unlearn what I already knew. Once we had acknowledged his involvement, I reasoned, maybe we could jointly put the thought of it aside until it was time for him to leave again. And if I knew more, it might be easier for me to help Xan to forget it as far as possible.
‘This is between us,’ Xan murmured.
I twisted my head so I could look into his eyes. ‘I swear.’
‘Do you know what we do?’
From what he told me that night, which was only the bare facts, together with what I knew already, I was able to put together the picture.
Tellforce was an irregular group of officers and men who had been recruited for their knowledge of the desert and the ways of the desert. They knew the shifting contours of the sand seas, and the extreme heat and cold, and the brutal force of sandstorms. Before the war the officers might have been mining engineers or hydrologists or Arabists, but now their job was one of the most demanding of all the special operations. They drove patrols of heavy specially adapted trucks deep into the desert, moving far behind enemy lines and spying on their manoeuvres. They kept twenty-four-hour roadside watches from the sparse shelter of wadis or patches of scrub, and from these uncomfortable hideouts they counted every single truck, tank and car that passed, noted their numbers, and estimated the numbers of occupants. Collecting these snippets of information meant that Tellforce patrols were always at risk of being spotted by enemy convoys or aircraft.
They were also known as the desert taxis because they delivered commando raiders to their targets and then searched for the survivors and brought them out again. And they made their own lightning strikes on trucks, fuel and supply dumps and parked aircraft whenever an opportunity for sabotage presented itself.
‘I see,’ I said at last.
I had always understood that Xan must be involved in special ops of some kind, but the reality was even more daunting. The desert taxi service was always busy, and by definition in the most dangerous places. I passed my tongue over my lips, feeling them as dry and cracked as if we were out in the desert now.
‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.
‘I won’t,’ I lied.
‘Hassan is always with me.’
I remembered the impassive tribesman who had driven us out to the oasis beyond Giza, and instead of the car I pictured him and Xan perched in the cab of one of Tellforce’s 30 cwt Ford trucks.
I imagined the truck driving full tilt at a wall of yellow sand and ploughing up the face of the dune above a bow wave of dust, then rocking for an instant on the sharp crest. The monochrome immensity of the Libyan desert would stretch ahead, maybe with a tell-tale flash of sun reflected off metal or the dust plume of an enemy convoy in the distance, before the truck plunged under its own momentum down the cliff on the other side. There would always be the risk that the vehicle might tip over itself and cartwheel to the bottom.
‘We have been at Kufra,’ Xan continued.
‘We were out on a patrol alongside the Palificata and we happened to spot some unexpected enemy tank movements. Mark III Panzers. They just materialised out of nowhere, fifteen of them.’
I listened, keeping my breathing even to counter the swell of apprehension.
‘We were a half-patrol, just five trucks and a command car. We had been moving mostly at night and were about to leaguer under camouflage for the day when the forward vehicle signalled a halt. Luckily we had dune cover so we held up and watched them go by.’
Xan slid his arm from under my head and fumbled for a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his discarded shirt. He lit one and leaned back against the pillows. I waited for what seemed like a long time.
‘That was what I had to tell Boyce.’
Relevant SIGINT and HUMINT, information gleaned from enemy signals traffic or human intelligence reports from reconnaissance patrols like Xan’s were Roddy’s raw materials. It was his job to assess and collate them, then build up a picture for the central command of our section of Intelligence. The work was done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Eventually the information was passed for encoding and onward transmission to commanders in the field.
‘Yes. Then what happened?’
Xan exhaled.
‘We watched them go by,’ he repeated. The lines drawn in his face told me that wasn’t all.
‘We waited. I started to hope that they must have missed the other half of the patrol too, even though they were in a much more exposed section than we were. Then after fifteen or twenty minutes we heard the Panzer cannons start up.’
I understood, then. Tellforce trucks and a command car would stand no chance against the armoured tanks’ high explosives and armour-piercing shells.
‘I gave the order to the men to hold off. We could have pushed forward after the tanks and done what we could, but …’
The silence uncurled between us. Doing what they could would have meant only one possible outcome.
‘The firing stopped after a few minutes and then we did move in.’
Xan described the scene in only the barest and most unemotive words. At first it was impossible to see anything through the smoke and churned-up dust. Then, as his little convoy crawled in the tank tracks, they came upon all that was left of the second half of the Tellforce patrol. Three of the trucks were on fire, the incinerated occupants spilling out of the doors or lying huddled in the sand. Most of the men were dead, the others badly wounded. The tank commanders probably assumed that they were coming up to the outposts of a more significant force. They had smashed straight through the isolated patrol and rolled on in search of bigger objectives.
The dust began to settle and the sun appeared as a pale disc above the eastern horizon. Xan left one detachment of men to dig graves for their dead companions and with Hassan and the wounded survivors he set off towards the distant first aid outpost at Kufra. Among the injured was the captain, whose legs had been blown off at the knees.
‘Burke and I were commissioned on the same day. He was a cotton trader before the war. There was nothing he didn’t know about the desert. I sat in the back of the truck with him, giving him sips of water from my bottle. He kept saying, “damn nuisance, Molyneux. Damn nuisance. I need feet in this game. Damn nuisance.” Over and over again. He died with the truck bumping and skidding over the sand. Bled to death.’
Xan stubbed out his cigarette with little jabbing movements. When I was sure that he had finished I put my arms round him and made him lie down again beside me.
‘I drove back to Cairo with two other badly wounded men who needed surgery. Somehow Hassan kept them alive until we got them to hospital here.’ It was five hundred miles. ‘Then I came straight in to see Boyce.
‘Boyce said the Mark IIIs couldn’t have been where they were. There was no Intelligence relating to them, therefore they can’t have existed. All the Axis supply movements are going the other way, up towards Tobruk. It’s quite straightforward, he kept insisting. Tapping his fingers on the folders on his desk. They know we’re going to make the big push for Cyrenaica, they’re preparing for it.
‘So in the view of GHQ, half of my patrol was wiped out by a mirage, eh?’
I had never seen Xan angry like this before. But in fact he was angry not with GHQ or Roddy Boy, but with the war itself.
I held him, trying to draw some of the rage out of him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured, but I was only trying to fill the silence with the reassurance of words. There was nothing I could say that would really mean anything. ‘It will be over one day. It will be done, and it will have been worth doing.’
He closed his eyes, then forced them open again, as if he didn’t want to contemplate what lay behind the lids.
‘Will it? Will it have been worth it?’
The dance music was still playing. That, and
the clatter of my typewriter, the twin sounds of my Cairo life. I felt suddenly choked with disgust at the meaninglessness of so much death and washed with grief for the men in Xan’s patrol whom I had never even known.
‘I don’t know,’ I heard myself admit.
After a moment I realised that Xan had fallen asleep, just in a second. I hadn’t realised the depth of his exhaustion. The music stopped with a sudden squawk, as if someone had irritably pushed the arm off the record.
He slept for twenty minutes, stirred in my arms, then jerked awake again. As soon as he remembered where he was a smile of pure relief broke across his face and he looked like the Xan I knew.
‘I’ve been asleep. Bloody awful manners, darling. Will you forgive me?’
I kissed his nose, then his mouth. ‘Yes.’
‘I feel better. I’m sorry about before. What’s the time? Come on, let’s go out to dinner. How about Zazie’s?’
It was ten thirty. Most of us in Cairo kept eastern Mediterranean late hours although some of the British still insisted on dining at seven thirty, as if they were at home in Surrey. I was already scrambling into my dressing gown and heading for the bathroom. If Xan wanted to go out drinking and dancing, that was exactly what we would do.
I put on the coral-pink silk I had worn for our dinner at Hassan’s oasis camp and picked up my Indian shawl.
‘You look beautiful,’ Xan breathed. ‘And you smell like heaven.’
Sarah was sitting in a corner of one of the sofas in the living room. She was wearing an old cashmere cardigan, badly pilled under the arms and down the sides, and there was a blanket drawn over her knees as if it were cold.
She smiled determinedly at us. ‘Hello, you two. Where are you off to?’
‘We thought we’d try Zazie’s.’
I glanced quickly at Xan. ‘Sare, why don’t you come with us? It’ll be fun.’