Soldier No More

too, you know.'

'Yes—but at least he'll be cleverly stupid—'too clever by half', that's what Davey and Mike say. And that's better than being plain stupid.'

She wasn't stupid at all, thought Roche. Even she made it a day for a full smile, in spite of everything. 'Let's say I'm thinking about you—and you couldn't be plain anything, even if you tried to be—' he caught his tongue too late as her face fell '—what's the matter?'

'Now that's a bloody-David-bloody-Audley-thought! Not good for nothing—just good for bloody-screwing!' She burnt him up with a scowl. 'So you can keep your thoughts, bloody-David-bloody-Captain Roche—I wouldn't buy one of them if you paid me!'

Before he could reply, she had slumped herself back on the towel, presenting only pink shoulders and tangled half-dried dummy5

blonde thatch in an uncompromising rejection.

Roche stared at her for a moment, and then gave up. He hadn't intended to offend her, but he had also screwed his own chances nevertheless. But then he had never had any luck, and that was the story of his life.

He frowned past her at the river, where the sun caught the ripples on the same stretch of broken water in which he had sported with all three of them yesterday—Lexy and Jilly and Steffy—when the world was young.

He could never do that again, never with Steffy and never with the same water, they had gone down to the sea together.

When it came to screwing, nobody had ever screwed anyone more thoroughly than the Comrades had screwed the British and the French, by Christ!

Hypnotised by the rippling light on the water, he put together the d'Auberon papers at last—

It wasn't just that the Comrades had known about d'Auberon and his precious documents all along, and hadn't worried about them at all—about the alleged traitor in their midst, who had fed back to Paris every thought the Kremlin had had, through Hungary and Suez, and every word of it nothing but the truth, checkable and double- checkable from every other Anglo-French intelligence source.

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Of course they hadn't been worried! Not about that. What they had been worried about, regardless of the British and the French . . .was the truth of those reports about the undercurrents of dissent which had been swelling ever more fiercely in their Eastern European colonies—through East Germany, still disaffected from the Berlin riots, through Poland, where patriotism and religion were inextinguishable, to Hungary, which had been primed to explode any minute by the irreversible tide of hatred even among good Comrades of the appalling Rakosi regime. And not the men in the Kremlin alone, by God! Even dear old Bill Ballance—red-nosed, superannuated, indiscreet, but always well-informed—

even Bill had been worried—

'Have another drink—to your next report on the incidence of scurvy in the French Mediterranean Fleet, say? The Froggies may hate us now—and the Yanks may distrust us even more than before—and the rest of the world may despise us for being a third-rate bunch of paper-hangers . . . but I can play Dr Pangloss to your Candide, young David, for this is still the best of all possible worlds, and I feared very much that it wasn't going to be—I was very worried that it wouldn't be!'

'What d'you mean, Bill?'

'I mean, young David, that we are alive and drinking, and not taking part in the Third World War—Leibnitz was right, and Voltaire was wrong. So I shall retire and teach dummy5

metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology in my old age, like Pangloss. Because, for our sins, we have been delivered from war and pestilence and famine—but chiefly war.'

'War?'

'Ah—but of course you've been away, on that smart course of yours—so you missed all the fun. Suez saved us, young David

—Suez and Hungary together! So it was all for the best in this best-of-all-possible-worlds.'

'How, for God's sake, Bill?'

'Why, very simply, dear boy. If there hadn't been any Suez—

if Hungary had blown up when everything was sweetness and light between us and the Americans—us and the French and the Americans . . . with what those CIA fellows were up to in Budapest—Christ! It could have been Poland in '39

again!. . . . Instead of which we took our chance at Suez, and offended the Yanks . . . and left the Russians a free hand in Hungary, thank God! But it was much too close for comfort, the Third World War. Much too close!'

'Over Hungary, Bill? Not over Suez?'

'Who'd want to die for Suez? Not the Russians. But they would have fought us over Hungary, no question—it's the one thing they're bound to fight over, to hold that frontier of theirs in the West, come hell or high water—that's why I was so bloody worried, young David. Because I've done my share, and I want to see old age and come safe home. And now at least I'll see peace in my time—'

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Yet even shrewd old Bill had only seen the half of it, through the rose-tinted spectacles of a grateful survivor.

He had seen it all as a marvellous slice of luck—the Joint Russian Intentions and Policy sub-committee feeding back the vital and authentic information which had nerved the British and the French to chance their arm in Egypt in the certain knowledge that the Russians would only bark, and not bite, because of what was happening in Eastern Europe . . .which, in turn, was happening precisely at the time of an American presidential election.

But it hadn't been a slice of luck at all, it had been stage-managed from start to finish.

Because, turned round, it was Suez and the collapse of the Western alliance—however temporarily—which had been perfectly timed for the Russians, giving them the free hand they needed to bring the East Europeans to heel. .