Soldier No More

'You're just like Sidonius Simplicius,' said Lexy. 'He decided in the end that it was interesting, once he'd worked out how to play both ends against the middle. Then he said it was all the will of God, anyway. But he hadn't been raped in the dummy5

process, of course.'

'Indeed?' Audley half shrugged. 'But. . . well, that's what I thought, at all events, mes amis: I really believed that I could lose myself in the past, in the old dark ages, using my understanding of the uncomfortable present as the key to it all ...' his expression twisted '... from the comfort of a senior common room at Cambridge, naturally—that goes without saying.'

The man's bitterness went without saying also, thought Roche. He was eaten up with it, beneath his self- mockery.

'But you didn't get a fellowship,' said Bradford brutally.

Audley bowed to him over his glass, which was empty again.

'Hubris, my dear fellow. And it was a rather juvenile theory, anyway.'

'Oh, come on, David! You haven't done too badly,' Lexy's natural instinct, once she had realised the concealed wound, was to apply soothing ointment to it.

'Yes,' Stein nodded. 'And, come to that, you could probably get a fellowship somewhere now, if you wanted to. That book of yours was well reviewed in the TLS—the Byzantine one . . .

Maybe not Oxbridge, but one of the newer places. Or the States—'

Audley winced. 'I don't want a bloody fellowship in one of the newer places—or the States. . . or Oxbridge, damn it.'

'Yeah—of course! You told us. You want your old job back.'

Bradford twisted the blade. 'Maybe you should go crawling dummy5

back to Forbes, and ask for forgiveness.'

'Mike!' admonished Jilly. 'Lay off!'

The American shrugged unrepentantly. 'Tit for tat, honey.

Just being helpful.'

'Helpful!' Jilly gestured impatiently. 'But why, David? You still haven't explained why.'

'Haven't I?' Audley blinked at her. 'I thought I had.'

'You haven't, darling,' said Lexy. 'Not a word. But—'

'Sssh!' Jilly waved her down too. 'Go on, David.'

Audley shifted on his stool uneasily, as though unwilling to strip his seventh veil at the last.

Stein chuckled darkly behind his glass. 'The great David doesn't want to admit the truth.'

'What truth?'

'He's bored, Jilly dear—plain, old-fashioned bored . . . Bored and lonely—lonely and bored!' The Israeli nodded to himself, and then to Audley. 'And it's a dangerous combination, that—

in a man like you, my friend. It makes you ripe for any mischief, any wickedness in this wicked world.' He looked around at the rest of them. 'Such men are dangerous, believe me. We would do well to leave him alone—to leave now, before it is too late . . . or he will drag us down with him into some fatal adventure of his.'

'Bored?' Lexy echoed the word incredulously. 'But he can't be bored— with all he's got. . . And he can't be lonely—he's dummy5

got us, Davey.'

'My dear—we're merely the ingredients of his boredom.

Boredom isn't just not having anything to do. It's not being able to do what you want to do. If you can't do that, then everything else is weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—believe me, I know.'

'How do you know, Davey?' asked Jilly.

'Because it's an infection, Jilly dear—a parasite in the blood that never leaves you once it's there. It can lie dormant for a few years, but it's there waiting for you to weaken. I know because I've got it too, you see—maybe not David's particular bug, but my own special bug.'

What bug, Davey?' asked Lexy.

'None of your business, Lady Alexandra,' said Stein.

'He likes to fly planes,' said Bradford. 'A common bug.'

If you say so,' Stein shrugged. 'But I'm not complaining.'

Audley laughed. 'You've got nothing to complain about. You get your jollies from the poor damned Egyptians at regular intervals. All I get to do is write books. And they're no substitute for the real thing, I've discovered.''

Lexy sat up once more, this time almost as though pricked.

'Simplicius!' she exclaimed.

'I beg your pardon, Lexy love?'