Small Wars (18 page)

Chapter Eleven

Davis, confounded by his treacherous weakness in bringing Grieves and the others to trial, was seeking an easier route to absolution: he thought about Clara. He tried not to, but she had the irresistible pull of the forbidden. Her being married was ecstatic danger enough. He knew it couldn’t be an erotic obsession, she was a married woman, and a mother: it must be love.

A young boy, a boy of only about fifteen, had been brought into the guardroom, and SIB were deciding whether or not they would send him to Camp K. Davis did not allow himself to imagine what might happen to the boy, or what his own part in it would be. For the past few weeks the interrogations had been perfunctory, and he was thankful for that.

The boy was put into a cell and, although so far untouched, his presence was a constant irritant to Davis, a piece of sharp grit in his eye that would not come out, painful and affecting his vision. He would walk past the cell with the boy in it, his face slightly turned away. He dreaded the summons to question him and hoped it would not come.

It did come, though, on an overcast day when the flies hung lazily in the air with no breeze to push them away. Davis was smoking, fifty yards up the hill from the guardroom, when a private was sent to fetch him. It was late morning.

‘We’re going to have a go at Alexis Dranias this morning,’ was all that was said.

Nothing had been done to the boy yet; perhaps nothing would be.

‘What is your name?’

‘Your uncle is Thanos Artino. Tell us about him.’

‘What connection do you have to EOKA?’

‘You are named in this letter signed by Dighenis himself. And this one. Why?’

Davis was surprised that his capacity for dread and disgust had not diminished. The boy was kept awake, standing, for hours at time, and with each interrogation, seeing his deterioration, Davis jumped through the same hoops in the circus of his mental process. Steeped in shame, he condemned himself, but always, in the back of his mind the thought:
This is still within the realms of acceptable. If something really bad were to happen, I’d do something
. He knew he had failed before, that Clara’s husband had been right to call him a moral coward, but he couldn’t easily give up the idea of himself as honourable. He clung to the notion that he had a limit, that his threshold lay somewhere, uncrossed, and ready to save him, if only he were given the opportunity. So far, he hadn’t been asked to leave the interrogation and the boy was unmarked, but he felt disgust in the pit of his stomach, hot and rising, as he continued to translate:

‘We know you are associated with these men. We have information about you. Answer the question.’

And the boy, unscathed and confident, looked back at him silently.

They questioned him for a long time, perhaps three hours. Then he was hooded and left, but not alone – not to rest – with his arms above his head, hands on the wall of his cell. Davis went into his small office, the SIB officers back into theirs. Cups of tea were made for them, and Davis’s thoughts, battered to breaking, slipped away to settle on Clara.

Clara Treherne. In his innocence of women, he blushed at the thought of her. He tipped back his chair and closed his eyes and thought of her and thought of her, her image a balm to the cuts in his conscience, until he was calm and comforted, cushioned by familiar desire and rejection. Had he been a student of psychology, rather than classics, he might have examined why he was romantically fixated on the wife of a man whose authority and principle he admired and resented in equal measure.

On the last day of Hal’s unit’s two weeks on ops there were riots at the school in Limassol. Hal’s vehicle had been well back in the wide street and he saw the schoolchildren – most were girls – running towards the soldiers in their white ankle socks. They threw rocks and bottles, while the British soldiers, behind plastic shields, tried to protect themselves. None of them wanted to be fighting little girls. They took injuries they shouldn’t have – gashed heads, burns from improvised petrol bombs – just to avoid clashing with them. It was an ugly sight: the embarrassment and polite professionalism of his men, forced into slowly mounting retaliation by the angry, taunting children. Girls and young boys had been manhandled, reluctantly, and the Greeks were quick to cry, ‘Not fair,’ at the brutality of the British. The same day, a roadside bomb had killed one of Hal’s men, Private Hopkins – the driver of a lorry – and injured three of his passengers.

Hal still had his regular meetings with Burroughs.

‘Men all right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We’ll be getting even more crowded around here soon. Third Battalion the G—G—will be here by next week.’

‘I see.’

‘None of your boys hell-bent on revenge for Hopkins’s death?’

‘No, sir, not that I’m aware.’

‘Spirits up, then?’

‘Not too bad, sir.’

‘Jolly good.’

Burroughs no longer asked after his father. Hal no longer confided in him any detail of his life – professional or otherwise.

Now it was paperwork, reports, and waiting to be back out there again.

Hal sat at his desk. The building was quiet around him. The door to Mark Innes’s empty office stood open. He was at Evdimou beach, probably, with the others. The air was still. It was in the quiet afternoon hours when nobody else was there.

Hal, who had always felt clumsy indoors with pen and paper, forcing the tedious sentences to form, had stopped leaving his office in the late afternoons, stayed at his desk for the solitude, so he did not have to speak to Mark or anyone. Between desk work and schoolgirl riots he’d take the riots, and either one was preferable to going home to Clara’s quietly examining face, the impossibility of relaxation and the intolerable sweetness of his daughters.

He was writing to Private Hopkins’s family. ‘Dear Mrs Hopkins, As your son’s commanding officer, the sad duty…’ The pen was slippery with sweat in his hand. It was important to get it right. Hal wrote slowly, making notes beforehand. He must imagine the man alive, the way he had been in life, what he could remember of him. He must imagine the effect the letter would have and also carefully not imagine it, not indulge himself: it wasn’t his grief. He was lucky, it was only the fourth letter of this kind he’d had to write. The last had been to Private Jenson’s mother.
Always popular with the other men. Was doing what he loved best.
In other wars, in real wars, the letters went out thicker and faster than they had in the few short months of his service in Cyprus. Other officers would do it properly, not like him; they wouldn’t make such a meal of it, examining every little thing, going back and forth over it the way he did. They would have something better than ‘he was driving a truck along the wrong road’ to say about it. At least a battle – at least they would have the name of a battle to have died in, not just a row of Greek letters most of them didn’t even understand, at least a country to fight against, or defend, not this small, dirty struggle. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his wet hands.

The heat was extraordinary. Even with the window open only hot air came in. It felt as if there was a furnace at his back, pushing the burning draught onto him, his shirt was wet with sweat and his neck was, too, his forearms. The high small sun had glazed the earth like a kiln and every metal, glass, wooden, flesh thing on the garrison was heated and heated so the very paper under his hand was damp and warm; the normally cool things – ink bottle, belt buckle, water glass – were slick with heat. The ink was drying brittle. His eyes were hot with blood that was heated in his moving veins. He would not go home. He would work.

Behind the wooden door to Mark’s office the telephone rang. Mark wasn’t there. Nobody else was there. It continued to ring.

It stopped.

It began again. The jangling rattle persisted. Hal stood up and went into the room, where papers were neatly stacked and the blinds drawn. ‘Hello?’

‘Captain Innes?’

‘No. This is Major Treherne. Who’s speaking?’

‘Sergeant Wells, sir, down at the guardroom.’ The sergeant was looking for an officer to come down. ‘Private Nugent, sir, he’s had some sort of fit. Can’t locate the battalion MO –’

Private Nugent was one of Hal’s. Hal had given him thirty days for drunkenness.

‘He seems all right now, sir, only it’s not my place to say.’

He shouldn’t have picked up the telephone; it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d normally bother with. ‘Come on, Sergeant Wells, there’s nobody else?’

‘Sorry, sir, there’s no officers here. All otherwise engaged.’

‘Otherwise engaged’ meant at home with their wives or at Evdimou beach; it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

‘All right,’ said Hal. ‘On my way.’

He had let Kirby go, so he took one of the cars reserved for officers and drove himself to the guardroom. The vehicle had been left in full sun and the wheel was too hot to touch, he had to nudge it with the heel of his hand to steer, the old car dropping hard into the pot-holes as it growled down the hill.

He returned the salutes of the privates who were on duty as he went up the hollow rough wood steps to the entrance.

He’d never been in the guardroom before, which was funny, given all the men he’d sent down there. There was a desk, quite high, and behind it a sergeant, who saluted him sloppily.

‘Major Treherne,’ he said to the sergeant, a stranger to him, ‘concerning Private Nugent.’

The entrance was crowded and messy, with rows of keys on hooks and stacks of box files with marbled paper spines peeling off them on thick wood shelves along two walls. There wasn’t much light.

‘Ah, yes, sir, thank you, sir. Just a moment.’

The sergeant went off through a door that had a dusty toughened-glass panel in it. Hal looked at the shelves and shelves of misdeeds. The files were stuffed and spilling with paper. The sergeant came back. ‘Through here, sir,’ he said, lifting the counter to come out and opening a door for Hal.

The corridor was clean-looking but stank of sweat and sourness that might have been piss or old wood, wet rags, creosote. Despite the heat that had followed him in and moved in the air, Hal felt a chill go over his skin – perhaps it was from the darkness: the windows were barred and covered with fine mesh in places too.

‘Can you wait in here, please, sir?’ said the sergeant, and opened the door into an office – at least, it was being used as an office: it had a desk piled high with papers and files, but had been a cell at some point; it was the right size for it, and the door was heavy with bolts on the outside.

He was left alone again. He could hear muffled sounds. He could hear boots, hobnails on the floors, and voices, a number of different voices, muted and broken. The walls were wood and plasterboard, the sound came through to him in different places, very quiet, in the honeycomb around him. And then a shout.

The shout was English, he thought, but the scream after it was unidentifiable. After the scream there was a return to just the sense of being in the middle of a building full of unseen men, some making noise, others moving about. And then there came a groaning, retching sound. Hal hadn’t heard a sound like it before.

He went back to the doorway, next to the bolted heavy door of the tiny room, and looked both ways down the corridor. He could see no one. He could just hear the murmur of conversation, then metal cups or plates, or something clanging at least, a long way off.

He waited.

It came again, a gurgling, choking sound, then high laughter immediately after and a heavy thud. It was coming from his right, round a corner.

The sergeant hadn’t come back.

Hal went to the doorway and stood, waiting. He couldn’t see him anywhere, or anybody else. He heard shouting, muffled by several doors, but still very angry, out of control; insane rage.

Hal started down the narrow wooden corridor – a bleach smell overlying the sourness – and went through the door at the end. The shouting was louder now. He turned a right angle after twenty feet and saw another, similar corridor, with doors on both sides. The shouting stopped suddenly. Silence. He waited. More sounds, confusing, then the gurgling retching he had heard in the small cell, louder now, then shouts, decipherable: ‘Come on!’

Hal was a voyeur, with the voyeur’s reluctant thrill of curiosity; he wasn’t accustomed to feeling like a trespasser anywhere. The cell doors were closed, except one, halfway down. He went quietly, not noticing his own stealth but aware of the edge of the doorframe coming towards him and the need to see what was on the other side of it.

Because of the angle of his approach, and the smallness of the lobby, he was very close to the two men when he reached the door. In the room to the right of the lobby, stood a private and a prisoner.

The prisoner, with his back to him, was hooded with an empty sandbag and in the stress position, hands up high against the wall. His bony back was dark-tanned and bare, his baggy trousers stained, both legs shaking. Hal noticed that the floor – wooden boards that were sealed tight in places and gappy in others – was wet. There was puddling under his boots and seeping around them.

Standing a few feet away from him, was Davis. Then the shouting started again, unseen – very loud and angry – a stream of obscene, disjointed abuse.

Davis looked at Hal. He seemed to gaze at him with love and wonder, as if he were a small boy who had lost himself somewhere in the dark and, in confusion, looked up to see his father. Then the blood rushed into his face, as shame dawned on him.

The private, assuming from Hal’s rank that his presence was authorised, saluted. Hal, ignoring him, turned so that he was in the tiny lobby and could see into the cell to his left. He had the sense that Davis was coming towards him, at his back.

The cell was crowded with people, it seemed. It took less than a second to take in everything.

A boy, a young boy, was lying on the floor. There was blood on his chest. The blood was pink from being mixed with water, in rivulets and drips and darker lines too, all down his front and running under his thin arms. His arms and stomach were red and marked with welts. His face was bruised and split open in places, the eyes swollen closed. His knees were drawn up to protect his genitals because his hands were bound behind him. He was barefoot. There was more blood and water on the floor, and a bucket of water on the ground. His breathing was noisy and laboured; he was coughing and trembling.