Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  I told her about my old man, and his three types of sexual relationships.

  She said, ‘My mother told me nothing about men at all. My father tried to, the pet, just before I went away, but I don’t actually think he knows very much.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That I would meet nice men and nasty men, good-looking men and ugly ones, young ones and old ones, rich ones and poor ones . . . but that, no matter who, most of the time all they’d be thinking about was how to get my knickers off.’

  I laughed, but it was a bit of a rueful one. ‘Your old man might know more than you think. But since this thing with Daisy, I’ve been worried, so I came up to talk to you. I appear before you as a penitent.’

  ‘What’s worrying you?’

  ‘The boundary. Where you draw the line.’

  ‘Explain, Charlie. What boundary? Your last few words are not far from gibberish.’

  ‘Do you know how men talk about women when women aren’t there?’

  ‘How could I? Women aren’t there. You said it yourself.’

  ‘I think you know what I mean . . .’

  ‘Yeah . . . sometimes women can be almost as bad, you know. Have you heard the A hard man is good to find joke?’ I hadn’t: it sounded like Mae again. It’s just the sort of thing she’d say. I shook my head, but she didn’t elaborate. She said, ‘Tell me about this boundary.’

  ‘It’s the one you shouldn’t cross. There are some things you can do to get a girl into bed, and some you can’t.’

  ‘I agree, and if you think like that you’re probably going to get it right most of the time. Are there any of these stratagems that worry you particularly?’

  ‘All of them, now I begin to think about it. Dating a girl is beginning to feel like a transaction – maybe I won’t ever ask one out again.’ She offered me one her Turkish fags and I accepted. We plumed the air around us in scented smoke.

  When she spoke again it was to say, ‘Maybe both our fathers were brighter than we gave them credit for: yours told you how to look at sex through the eyes of a woman, and mine told me about it from the point of view of a man. They almost sound like warnings, don’t they? The way I see it – and after this I want to change the subject – is that the difference between a man’s attitudes and a woman’s is that if you lure me up to your room when I don’t want to sleep with you, and you lock the door, I still won’t want to sleep with you. In fact I’ll probably like the idea even less. On the other hand, if I lure you up to my room when you don’t want sex, and lock you in with me, you’ll soon end up changing your mind – maybe you’ll even think it was your idea in the first place. I think it’s what they call the sexual imperative. We have different priorities, that’s all. Now change the subject.’

  ‘That hasn’t helped.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to, Charlie. I’m on the other side. Are you going to buy me a drink later . . . before you go back?’

  I agreed to meet her in the Families Club later on. It had big wicker chairs, cooling fans and long drinks.

  With some time to spare I hitched a ride down to the Blue Kettle. David Yassine was on the steps outside smoking a big cigar, and chatting to an MP and an Egyptian copper. The place was obviously still off-limits. As he stepped back he met my eye, and inclined his head briefly towards the alleyway a couple of buildings down. It led to the Kettle’s back courtyard. I had my small automatic in my trouser pocket, and kept my hand over it like a wanker as I walked into the shade. I needn’t have worried. The one Arab I met grinned, and touched his head; he was one of Yassine’s boys who worked in the club. The Fat Man met me under the fire escape, led me past another Gyppo copper, and on through to the bar. There were half a dozen Europeans, all of whom looked the other way, and a sprinkling of wealthier Arabs. Altogether your usual Wednesday afternoon crowd, I thought.

  ‘You’re very good at this,’ I told him.

  ‘Blame the Welsh. You want a Stella?’ He nodded to a bar boy. Two beers appeared as if by magic. I’ve asked it before, I know, but how did they do that?

  ‘And what have the Welsh to do with it, pray?’

  Amazingly, he switched to an outrageously ripe Welsh accent: he sounded like Lloyd George. Another bleeding David. Goliath can’t have been too far away.

  ‘When I was a boy – before your European war, see – my father sent me to Britain to finish my education. For a year I lived in a small Welsh town named Lampeter. That was in Cardigan I think, and Cardigan is a dry county, which meant that the bars do not open on a Sunday. No booze. So the local public house, the Railway Tavern, held Bible classes every Sunday . . . and the only difference between a Saturday night out-of-control drinking session and the Bible class was that for the Bible class on Sunday you entered the premises from the back door, and the local policeman was there to let you in . . . just like the Blue Kettle when your military policemen have closed it down. Blame it on the Welsh. Cheers. Another?’

  ‘Yes, please. Can we sit at a table and talk?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Another beer, and another conversation. I agreed to try to find out when the MPs were going to lift the ban on the Kettle. Then I asked him, ‘Tell me, David, if, theoretically, I wanted to have a couple of men punished – not severely hurt, but punished enough for them to always remember it – are there people through whom that could be arranged?’

  He made a steeple of his hands, and rested his mouth behind them like one of the devout at prayer. ‘Of course. Yes, it could.’

  ‘Even if those men were British officers?’

  He took longer to reply. His eyes were hooded. I couldn’t read him.

  ‘Yes. Even if they are British officers.’ I hadn’t missed the change of tense.

  ‘. . . and you, personally, wouldn’t be put at risk? I shouldn’t want that.’

  He smiled. When he smiled his face changed shape: became squarer. His beard and moustache framed his mouth like pubic hair.

  ‘Thank you for thinking of me . . . but no, I would not be at risk. What would they be punished for; these two theoretical officers? What is their theoretical sin?’

  ‘Using a woman as if she was their own; when in fact she wasn’t. Not asking her permission.’

  ‘Has the woman been damaged?’ I realized that he was thinking in terms of commodity. I’d met men like that before.

  ‘Not on the outside. But inside her head? Yes; I think possibly she has . . . and she is a friend. It pains me.’

  ‘But that cannot be allowed.’ It was something to do with the finality of those five words, and the way his decision related to me rather than to Daisy. It gave me a glimpse of what Susan and the rest of them might be up against. ‘You have their names, and their stations – these men?’

  ‘Not yet, but I think I can get them.’

  It was another landmark on the road that led to the making of a proper Charlie out of me. Eight years ago on the squadron I’d met some real chancers. Before that I’d been wet behind the ears. Now, although they weren’t going to get killed for it, I’d just called down a hit on a couple of guys. How the hell had I come to this?

  Yassine shifted in his chair, and looked around the bar. There were a few more people in it now, mainly rich Egyptians with uniformly beautiful, Westernized Arab women half their age. He said, ‘Are we finished now? Our beer is. We could sit up at the bar . . . one of the girls is going to dance soon.’

  It was Mariam of course, and I was entranced again: so were all of the other guys in the bar. When she came and perched on a stool between us, after the show, they were probably jealous. What had I said to Susan about it feeling like a transaction? I gave Mariam a few Egyptian pounds for her dance, and hoped she felt a little sad when I left at 1800. I wanted to catch Haye with an e coming off duty.

  As I stood to leave, David Yassine asked me one question. His eyes were twinkling, and his little mouth wore a mischievous little smile. ‘These men who might be punished, Charlie: is it possible that they are the sam
e two officers who Mr Watson has suggested might be punished?’ Ah.

  ‘Did he give you their names?’

  ‘Yes he did.’ Bloody Watson! Whenever you thought butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, you forgot the knife up his sleeve.

  ‘Then leave it with me for the moment; I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Come back and see me when you get back from the desert; some time next week.’

  ‘How did you know I was going out?’

  He shrugged, smiled and splayed his hands out. I knew exactly what he was going to say.

  ‘There was one particular woman,’ I told Haye with an e. ‘Yes, darling?’ She leaned forward, and I lit her cigarette for her. She was pretending we were sitting in a club in Happy Valley in the 1930s.

  ‘I think we’d been madly attracted to each other for weeks, and as a result ended up irritating each other beyond belief . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So she came to my billet on the squadron one day, when there was no one else around, and just said Well, you’d better have me then, or something like that, and began to take her clothes off. It sounded flat; the way she said it. As if she didn’t want to do it but didn’t see that she had a choice.’

  ‘Did you . . . sleep together, I mean?’

  ‘Of course we did.’

  ‘More than once?’

  ‘Yes. She came back a couple of times. She was a bit of a tiger actually.’ Jennifer. Another Jenny. I smiled at the memory of her. She was one of those women you could have married if they weren’t married to someone else.

  ‘Was she married?’

  ‘Yes, how did you guess?’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that there are some situations to which your father’s rules don’t apply, Charlie. When that happens you can only do your best. Now, are you going to get me another drink?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Then you can walk me to the bus, and make a pass at me on the way.’

  ‘So that you can say no again?’

  ‘Of course, darling.’

  When I got back to Deversoir the base was shut down, and the bus I was in had to shuffle forward in a queue. An Egyptian copper rode the last few yards with us, and a burly sergeant checked us in one by one. A lot of nervous guys with Stens or Stirlings were hanging about.

  When I got back to the tent I asked Nancy, ‘What’s all the fuss?’

  ‘Red alert, old son. A couple of fellas went down to the Bitter Lake for a swim, and got grabbed by the Gyppoes.’ He made the throat-cutting gesture.

  ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘For their sake I almost hope so.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wild man blues

  Unusually, the terrorists returned the two swimmers alive. But in a terrible state. That was two days later. They were dumped at the main gate during the morning rush when the Egyptian trusties who worked for us were allowed inside. When the noisy, djellabaed, chitty-waving crowd had dispersed to their work areas, there were two bloodied bundles left in the road by the gate. No one saw where they came from.

  They had been caned on their arses with barbed-wire whips, until their buttocks were literally flayed. Unconscious; probably through loss of blood. Nansen was down there, and saw it all – he’d been waiting for a laundry parcel from the dhobi woman. By the time he returned the word was already around, but when I asked him what was up he just waved me to silence, grabbed his notebook, and wrote down a few pieces of what could have been Arab script.

  He said, ‘Not now, old chap. I’m trying to remember these.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Arabic words tattooed on the two guys they found this morning.’

  He worked for about ten minutes, and then leafed through a small paper-bound dictionary of Arabic and English. You could get them free at the NAAFI, and in the Camp clubs. The first thing he said when he finished was,

  ‘ ’strordinary.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Your Gyppo.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘As far as I can make out, these Arabic glyphs include hokm and maraa or marai.’

  ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘As far as I can make out, it means judgement by a woman, or has been judged by a woman.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Look, Charlie, you’ve got to start seeing things like a wog – the way those of us who’ve been out here a while see things. Getting these guys back alive is ’strordinary of itself. If we expected them back at all, it would have been as sliced-up bits of meat thrown over the wire, or dumped into the Canal. These two are given back alive, with arses they won’t sit down on for a couple of months, and a message to the perfidious Brits tattooed all over their guts . . . and the message is simply Leave our women alone. ’strordinary.’ He’d only just begun to use the word, and already it irritated me. It was one of those things we’d picked up from the latest Gainsborough film, and everyone was using it.

  ‘So you think they’d been misbehaving with Egyptian women?’

  ‘Respectable Egyptian women: the wog doesn’t give a toss about his whores. They must have been cuckolding the local nabobs, who’ve sent them back to us with a forceful reminder. The bosses will panic, and for weeks we’ll be buried in OODs about not tupping the local floosies.’ OODs were Orders of the Day, which were pinned up on noticeboards in the most unlikely places; so you could never keep up with them.

  ‘You’re right: that must be it.’ I muttered. I knew he wasn’t bloody right, but I wasn’t prepared to tell him what I did know. I hope I was casual enough when I asked, ‘What will happen to them?’

  ‘Immediate evac, I should think: it’s what happens to most of the casualties. They’ll be on a hospital ship up in the Med by tonight, with paste all over their bums. Ouch. Never more to grace these shores. I wonder how they’ll get the tattoos off.’

  The Wing Commander wasn’t in his office. I mooched around it, looking at the papers pinned to the wall. They were mostly stores lists. Anyone who didn’t know any better would imagine that our section was an HQ repository of high-value radio spares. We did that as well, of course, which is where people like Pat Tobin and our MT section came in. Daisy heard the noise I was making, and came out of her den. When she saw it was me she put on a genuine smile, and walked slowly over to give me a peck on the cheek. That was a first. Bloody hell; maybe she really had gone doolally.

  She said, ‘Thank you, Charlie. I told you not to do anything, but thank you anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘I know; but thank you for doing it anyway.’

  ‘Does it make you feel any better?’

  ‘Yes, surprisingly, although it shouldn’t do, should it? Revenge never gets you anywhere. I also feel a little guilty.’

  ‘Don’t: you didn’t do anything . . . and neither did I. Really . . . subject closed.’

  ‘I know. Your secret is safe with me.’

  Round in bloody circles. That sailor who’d been disciplined for writing up Welcome to Wonderland on Port Said harbour wall didn’t know how right he was.

  ‘How about I pass your thanks on to the person who might really deserve it?’ I was only digging myself deeper.

  ‘Only if you’re careful, Charlie. They must be violent men. Don’t get yourself into trouble.’

  I gave up. ‘Don’t worry; I won’t. When’s Mr Watson due back?’

  ‘This afternoon. He wants to see you before your next trip anyway.’

  That was OK. I wanted to see him as well. I wanted to see just what kind of trap I’d walked into when I answered his summons to that little office in Kentish Town.

  ‘Your holiday trip’s been put off; you can put the bucket and spade away for the moment. The Brown Jobs have had a significant transport failure.’ Watson was smiling like he’d just knighted me. The joke was obviously at somebody else’s expense.

  ‘What was that, sir?’

  �
��The wogs whipped one of their lorries. Right from under the nose of the MPs I understand. There’s hell to pay down there.’

  ‘I don’t understand, sir. The Egyptians want us out of Egypt so they can have the Suez Canal all to themselves . . . so how does stealing a lorry advance their cause? We’ll need the lorries to go away in.’

  ‘Do you know, Charlie, ever since I invited you to join us out here all I seem to have heard is you whining I don’t understand, sir in my lug? Can’t you shut up, and give it a rest for once?’ He was on fine form, having reappeared with a case of RN gin. ‘Anyway the Gyppoes who want us out of Egypt aren’t the same Gyppoes who steal us blind. The latter want us to stay until we have nothing left worth stealing, then they’ll join the chaps who want us out. Two or three years, that’s my guess. That lorry will be repainted and modified already, and someone will have turned it into a one-man road transport company operating out of Luxor, or somewhere similarly romantic. Cheers.’

  We were in his office, and M’smith was off to one side with a pile of message flimsies a foot high, leafing through them like a man seeking a winning pools combination. I lifted my glass.

  ‘Cheers, sir, and thank you for the drink. Didn’t I use to run a transport company myself before you got hold of me?’

  ‘It was only an air-freight mob, Charlie. Doesn’t count. You probably saved the company by volunteering to leave it, and rejoin the colours.’

  ‘I didn’t volunteer, sir. I am a pressed man, and we both know it.’

  ‘I think you’ll find you did, old son. I think you’ll find your statutory retention as a reservist ran out about three months before you came to see me, and begged me to take you back. No one could have forced you to come, so you must have volunteered.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Don’t swear, Charlie. Daisy can hear you, and she don’t like blasphemy. It’s not my fault if you don’t keep a note of important dates in your diary. If I had been you, I should have known when I could turn down the PM’s kind invitation to go flying again. The thing to do is settle down, and make the best of it.’

  ‘What about M’smith?’