Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Good. I’ll wait until I hear from someone. If you don’t get him out, we’ll need to find him a solicitor.’

  ‘A psychiatrist would be more use. What did I do to deserve this?’

  ‘Have a father who worries about you, I think, sir. Shall I tell him that you’re safe and well?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant. Thank you.’ I didn’t apologize, because deep in my heart I knew the old man was right.

  I put the receiver down, and then lifted it again to ask the switchboard for another number. Then I took a deep breath before speaking to Dolly. I needn’t have worried: she thought it was terribly funny.

  For the Beach Club, the military had probably nicked Cyprus’s best bathing spot. No wonder the buggers wanted us off the island. I headed down there in an old pair of KD shorts I thought I could wade in if I had to, an even older KD shirt open and flapping, and a pair of new plimsolls. The Hank Janson I hadn’t finished was in my back pocket and a towel over my shoulder. I couldn’t help reflecting how people pay money to do this sort of thing on holiday. There was a row of gaily painted Billy Butlin beach huts, like a terrace of small houses, and anyone who wasn’t sleeping in their billet was probably in a deckchair under a sunshade here. There were a few empty ones, so that was all right. Occasional stewards, with trays of glasses of cold beer beaded with moisture, moved among them. That was all right, too. The Brown Jobs had managed to make a nice set-up here on the quiet.

  I hadn’t gone ten yards before a voice from the 1940s spoke to me. It was just as I was passing a big beach shade. There were two deckchairs. One was occupied by a woman.

  She spoke again. ‘Hello, Charlie; small world.’

  Adelaide Baker was Grace’s mother, and Carlo’s grandmother. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but her legs and arms were firm and tanned. Tennis? She must have been nearly fifty but her body, under an inappropriately white swimming suit, was still as good as money could buy. Millionairesses seem to have this system that defies the ageing process: it’s called cash.

  At first I couldn’t speak. Then: ‘Hello, Addy. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Visiting someone. How about you?’

  ‘Passing through.’

  She took a great gulp of cold beer from her cold glass, and then pressed it between her tits. It left a damp patch on her costume. Then she offered it to me – the beer, I mean – which was a surprisingly intimate gesture. ‘Thirsty?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  I drained it, and then scooped two more from the tray of a passing steward, pausing to sign the chitty with a Mess number I made up on the spot.

  It was her turn to say, ‘Thank you.’

  We had absolutely nothing to say to each other, and a million things to say, all at the same time. She smiled like royalty.

  ‘Passing through, Charlie . . . for how long?’

  ‘A few days.’

  ‘Have dinner with me tonight?’

  I didn’t have to think about it. ‘Why not? Where, and when?’

  ‘There’s a restaurant run by the NAAFI for waifs and strays and in-betweens like me – about ten minutes along the beach. It has the really tacky name of Casa Aphrodite but their fish is the best you’ve eaten since the war.’ It was funny, but for hundreds of thousands of us the war was still our touchstone: our reference point.

  ‘OK,’ I told her. ‘I’ll see you at . . .’

  ‘About half past eight. Jacket and tie.’

  ‘What about socks and shoes as well? I suppose it’s a posh sort of place.’

  She pulled a face. ‘Stop mocking me, Charlie: you were always too good at that. Go away and lie in the sun for an hour; your body is excessively white. We can talk tonight.’

  I probably regarded her steadily for a moment, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, we can.’

  ‘You can tell me about my grandson.’

  ‘OK.’

  As I walked off she began to hum ‘The Beguine’. I took it away inside my head – the Tommy Dorsey version that is.

  Was this an accidental meeting? From the moment she’d spotted me Grace’s mum had made all the running. That was interesting. She wanted to talk about Carlo: so was this where I would begin to lose him?

  Chapter Eight

  That old feeling

  She wore a floaty, cream linen summer dress which had never been near the clothing ration. It left her tanned shoulders bare.

  I remarked, ‘I don’t know how you do it, Addy.’

  We drank Stella from cold glasses. I can forgive a woman anything if she knows when to drink beer.

  ‘How I do what?’

  ‘Stay young: you look like a film star.’

  ‘Why thank you, Charlie.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I know you do. Cheerio.’ She raised her glass to me.

  ‘Cheers. I was twenty when I first met you, now I’m twenty-eight. I’ve aged eight years – probably more. You haven’t aged at all.’

  ‘When you talk like that, Charlie, I know why Grace fell in love with you.’

  ‘Grace never loved me at all. I think I was just some sort of light entertainment.’

  ‘Grace loved you. I think she still does.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘There, just when it’s all going your way, you have to break the spell.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that it’s easier for me to believe that she didn’t love me – not in a way that I would recognize, anyway. Why would you think she did?’

  ‘Because she told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This afternoon; after I mentioned I’d seen you.’ I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Bollocks! ‘And if you close your gaping mouth for a few seconds, she might even tell you herself.’

  She was at my shoulder. I heard her before I saw her. That slightly breathy girl’s voice which melted resolution.

  ‘Hello, Charlie.’

  Nothing trite. Nothing smart. Nothing funny. Just, Hello, Charlie, and I died. I didn’t know what to say, and for the first time since I’d known her, neither did Grace.

  Addy laughed, and said, ‘. . . Oops!’ and looked away embarrassed, but then she always had a cruel streak.

  Grace bent down, and kissed me on the side of my neck, between my ear and my shirt collar.

  Dead in the water, Charlie.

  Grace was wearing faded KD pants and one of those washed-out khaki cotton vests she’d got from the Yanks years ago. They were freshly laundered. The only concession she had made to an evening out was her shoes. I was used to seeing her in battered brown field boots, but this evening she wore a pair of light white slip-ons. Every other woman in the place was in full war paint, dressed for dinner and dancing, but it was Grace all the men looked at. She drew glances the way a magnet captures iron filings. There wasn’t a man in the place that evening who didn’t want to be me.

  Addy went onto the dance floor with an Artillery captain, and didn’t come back. Either she was being tactful, or just giving us space to fight. I had once fallen for Grace as hard as any twenty-year-old can. Then she’d left me, and crossed Europe with a motley group of medicine men, healing the sick and tending the wounded. But I had pursued her, which had been a bad thing to do. So she ran again, but not before leaving me holding the baby who had grown into Carlo. I met her again in 1947 and, just as I had begun to fall for her once more, she scooted again. This time for the embryonic State of Israel. She sailed up onto a beach on a tramp steamer with a group of illegals, and I hadn’t heard of her since. There was a candle inside a glass funnel on the table between us. She held her hands on either side of it, and they became translucent.

  I asked her, ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I didn’t until Mummy said she’d seen you.’

  ‘She’s very interested in Carlo.’

  ‘She’s his grandmother, but don’t worry – she won’t take him away.’

  ‘I did wonder.’

  ‘You’re turning into too good a father, Ch
arlie. The boys worship you – they’ll miss you when you’re away.’ How did Grace know that?

  ‘I miss them too. That’s funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  The windows were open: a sea breeze cool on my sunburned arms. After a comfortable silence she said, ‘Sometimes I envy you; but not always.’

  She lit a cigarette – untipped as always – and the smoke she breathed out momentarily encircled me. American: maybe Luckies or Camel.

  ‘It’s not too late to be a mother,’ I told her awkwardly. ‘I haven’t ever lied to Carlo. He knows all about you . . . and I think he’s rather proud.’ Then I changed the subject. ‘I always forget how lovely you are. You’re like Addy: she never seems to age either.’

  Grace looked away. Then she picked up one of my hands and examined it like a fortune teller as she spoke. ‘I got married, Charlie. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, how could I? It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It was the only way to stay in Israel. After all I’d done – conning that bloody old ship across the Med for them, full of the arms and ammunition they needed to stop the Arabs – they were going to kick me out. The only females they wanted were those prepared to spread their legs and think of Israel: breeding stock. Weren’t the Germans like that under Hitler?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Who did you marry?’

  ‘A gang leader who gave me a dose on our wedding night. I walked out a month later, and divorced him exactly a year and a day after the wedding . . . with my new passport in my hand.’

  ‘Poor Grace.’

  ‘Poor us. I should have grabbed you while I could.’

  Pause. How would it have worked out if she had? The band was playing ‘That old feeling’, which could have been just plain sentimental, or simply one of God’s bad jokes: suit yourself.

  I meant to ask her to dance, but found myself saying, ‘I’d like to sleep with you again.’

  I don’t know whether the smile she shot me was sad or cheeky. Maybe both.

  ‘I’ll settle for that.’

  I didn’t want to smuggle her into my hut as the others would be bound to hear us. Grace was sharing a room with her mother, but they had a key to one of the beach huts, and Grace, being Grace, had it with her. We spent the night there. After we had made love, we sat on a thin mattress on the floor at the back of the hut, and through the open door watched the reflection of the moon on the sea. I hugged her to me. Her body was as spare as I remembered, and she had made love like a tigress. I had remembered that too.

  It was round about then I asked her, ‘What are you doing over here?’

  ‘Having a couple of weeks off from making a new country, and enjoying a holiday with Mummy.’

  ‘That’s probably a load of bollocks.’

  ‘. . . also unofficially negotiating favours between the State of Israel and the lords of the British Army. My new Israeli friends have found they need me, actually – I’m the stepdaughter of a lord, after all; and you dear Brits are still madly impressed by a title and a double-clanger.’ That was a bit of slang we used in the Fifties – it could mean either a double-barrelled name, or a bicycle’s derailleur front gear change. Take your choice.

  ‘Negotiating what kind of favours?’

  ‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.’

  We didn’t speak for a minute or two, and then I asked her, ‘Did I teach you that, or did you teach me?’

  She squirmed around to face me, said, ‘Does it matter?’ and then, ‘Kiss me again: we’re still very good at it.’ Everywhere my hands ran over her was naked and cool and tanned. She was almost olive-green in the moonlight, like a bronze statue of a pagan goddess. Grace’s small body had never failed to overwhelm me. Her sensuality was a real thing.

  She spoke into the hollow of my shoulder, ‘Don’t start falling for me again, darling. Not allowed.’

  I think I murmured, ‘ . . .’s too late.’

  I never bleeding learn, do I?

  Exactly the same thought that later came to mind as I was leaning over the lee side of Her Majesty’s corvette Wallflower, vomiting into the Med. The friendly CPO who had been detailed to look after me had protested, ‘You can’t get seasick in the Med, sir! Nobody can.’

  ‘Just you bloody watch me, Chief,’ I told him, and made another dash for the rail. The curious formality of the Navy demanded that I was in day uniform, but they made me wear my plimsolls underneath so as to not scratch the paintwork of their shiny ship. After a day I realized that ninety per cent of the life of a sailor consisted of cleaning his bloody ship. The nasty cow was spotless.

  Corvettes started their lives as cheap anti-submarine escorts for convoys; they should have ended them there as well. Whoever had been given the job of designing them had been asked to produce a vessel that would roll alarmingly, and pitch and toss in even the calmest of seas – and he hadn’t made a bad job of it. I reckon you could get seasick in a corvette tied up alongside, while resting on the harbour bottom at low tide. She was, in three words, an utter bastard. Corvette crews, of course, loved their vessels with a passion that passed all understanding, but that’s the Navy for you: as mad as monkeys.

  They spent the best part of three days bouncing around the Med looking for Port Said – I think we passed it twice during the night, but to be honest I was too sick to care. One odd occurrence was the smell that we steamed into on the last night: a sort of invisible fogbank of fetid mustiness. I understand that I was not the first to remark on it.

  ‘What’s that smell, Chief?’ I asked the CPO. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘That, sir, is the smell of Africa – more specifically, it’s the smell of Egypt.’

  ‘It’s horrible! Is it always that bad?’

  ‘Usually it’s worse: we’re still half a day away.’

  I wandered back to the rail: just in case. You ask any veteran the first thing they noticed about Egypt and they’ll tell you it was the stink of the fucking place. I know someone who was there just last year – she tells me it hasn’t changed a bit.

  When I rolled out of my bunk in the morning, the dear old Wallflower was pitching less – in fact she was rubbing herself to pieces against an endless stone wall that stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. As I began to stuff what little I had unpacked into my kitbag, the friendly CPO put in an appearance. He definitely had that And where the hell do you think you’re going? look in his eye.

  ‘Problem, Chiefy?’

  ‘Don’t think so, sir. Hungry?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I rather am. I’ll find my way to where I have to report, and pick up some grub on the way.’

  ‘You won’t want to be doing that, sir. This is Egypt, the land of cockroaches and diarrhoea; you wouldn’t know what you were eatin’. Besides; you can’t, actually.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘The Queen, sir. Her Majesty.’ And when I looked gratifyingly blank he informed me, ‘Navy regs, sir: unless she’s been paid off a naval vessel will have a commissioned officer standing by her at all times. The rest have scarpered for the weekend, begging your pardon, sir. That leaves you.’

  ‘But I’m in the RAF!’

  ‘ . . . know sir. The gentlemen did ’ave some discussion about that before they left, but the Captin opined that leavin’ you in charge would be in order, sir, so long as you ’ad a senior hand to advise you.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’

  ‘Hard bleeding luck.’

  ‘My thoughts precisely, sir: it’s very irregular.’

  I followed him on deck. The sunlight dazzled me and the heat roasted me. And then there was the smell of Egypt, of course.

  I was still half inclined to think that the Pongoes were playing a trick on me: revenge for my being sick all the way across the Med. It wasn’t a trick though: a corvette, small, nifty and, above all, exceptionally cheap, does not have all that many officers. I think I saw three the whole time I was on her. The bastards had abandoned me.
As had about three quarters of the crew. It did occur to me to protest the legality of this dodge, but who was there left to protest to?

  ‘How many of us are left?’ I asked him.

  ‘You, me, eight hands and the cook, sir.’

  ‘And I’m in charge?’

  ‘Theoretically, sir . . . although if you orders me to sea, or to move ship, I think you’ll find we have an engine breakdown.’

  ‘You realize that this is completely nuts? I know fuck-all about ships and sailors: I’m a radio man.’ I tapped the half wing on my chest.

  ‘Glad to hear that, sir. The signallers went ashore as well. They left their schedules for you.’

  ‘Where have your people gone, Chief?’

  ‘Down the Treaty Road to Ismailia, sir; except for the skipper. He’ll have gone on to El Kirsh. His wife’s in the married compound there. Gives him a chance to see her for a weekend.’

  ‘What’s in Ismailia?’

  ‘Arab persons, sir. The rest of our people have gone to the Blue Kettle. That’s a club. There’s a rumour going about that a very special lady dancer is putting in a bit of an appearance.’

  ‘Is this lady an agriculturist, by any chance? A bit of an animal-lover?’

  The CPO looked uncomfortable. ‘You might say that, sir. I’m surprised you knew about her already.’

  ‘You bastards! She was about the only thing in Egypt I was looking forward to.’

  ‘She gets about, apparently. You’ll get another chance if you stick around long enough.’

  It was blisteringly hot, and it stank – all manner of Port Said’s debris and refuse was being pushed up against the wall by the tide, and Wallflower was squatting blithely in the middle of it. A wallflower in a shit heap.

  ‘What about my report? Won’t they miss me?’

  ‘They don’t know we’re in yet, sir. That’s why the skipper stuck us this far up the eastern mole. No one will notice us for days. We’ll report in on Sunday night, and organize some transport for you next day.’

  ‘Got it all worked out, your skipper?’

  ‘That’s why they made him a skipper, sir.’

  Oddly, I wasn’t all that bothered. My well-ordered little life had been out of control ever since David Watson had reappeared in it . . . this was no madder than anything else that had happened to me since then.