Soldier No More

—it's more like a castle than a church—'

Roche kept a straight face. That, of course, was why the church of Saint-Maur was worth seeing, precisely: it was a perfect bastide church, with its four flanking towers and parapet walks, and the downward-slanted loopholes with dummy5

their stirrup-shaped bases giving the defending archers wider fields of fire—an innovation (according to the Thompson notes he had studied on the train) which a bastide-expert like Captain Roche would unerringly identify as a legacy of 12th century crusading experience.

But all that would be lost on Lexy, whose historical knowledge most likely ended in King Charles II's 17th century bed . . . and who was now reaching half-proprietorially, half-shyly, for his hand with one of those grubby paws of hers.

But at the last moment she thought better of it. Instead she raised both the paws for his inspection.

'Oh God—just look at me! Father always says that I attract grime . . . but this is thanks to David, damn him!'

Roche couldn't avoid examining the hands of Lady Alexandra Perowne, which at close quarters resembled those of a garage mechanic, black-stained and calloused, and broken-nailed.

'That's bloody David's bloody engine oil!' exclaimed Lady Alexandra hotly. 'He thinks bloody cars run on petrol, faith and hope, and never a drop of oil or water, that's what he thinks! He's the cleverest man I've ever met—and he's an absolute bloody idiot with cars.'

So here was another curious and unexpected insight into David Longsdon Audley, then.

In itself it was hardly important—that the man didn't have the skills one might have expected of an ex-tank commander.

dummy5

But—what was important—it warned him of how little he really knew about the man even though he knew so much that others didn't know.

He looked up for a moment, away from Lexy's oil-stained hands which the river had failed to clean, and caught a glimpse of one of Saint-Maur's towers through a gap in the roof-line. Then he forced his eyes and his mind back to the hands.

'You do his car maintenance for him?'

'Well, he can't do it. And the others won't—not even Davey Stein, who's supposed to know all about aeroplane engines. . . and Mike's even worse— he was in the engineers during the war, he's always telling us, too—but he won't even hold a bloody spanner for me. I tell you, darling—they'll have me sweeping the chimney and rodding their drains for them before they've finished . . . Not that I couldn't do both those things—the trick is to keep turning the rods clockwise.' She frowned at him suddenly. 'Or is it anticlockwise?'

Roche couldn't help smiling at her. The three men had quite obviously got her hog-tied into doing their dirty work, but an informed guess suggested that she had held the ropes while they tied the knots—that what Lady Alexandra needed most was to be needed in some role other than in bed; and if that involved crawling under a car, rather than into the back seat of it, then she'd require even less encouragement for the former than the latter. Protests notwithstanding, Lexy was doing what came naturally, and was happy with it.

dummy5

And David Roche still had work to do, natural or unnatural.

'Davey?'

Lexy snorted. 'Yes—I can see life's going to get rather complicated, with all these different Davids . . . Davey Stein, I mean—Colonel David Stein— every time the Israelis have a war, they put him up a rank, so he'll be a general next time, David says—oops! I meant David Audley that time— sorry!'

'He's in the Israeli air force?' Roche judged that a little intelligent interpretation of Lexy's stream-of- consciousness monologues would not go amiss.

'Well—no. I mean . . . he's not a regular, like you. What David

—David Audley, darn it!—what David says is, every time Davey hears gunfire in the Middle East he just grabs the nearest plane and takes off... But he was in the RAF during the war, taking pictures —he flew Spitfires and things, you know...'

'He was in photographic reconnaissance?'

'Uh-huh, something like that. Shooting pictures, not people, is how David puts it, anyway.'

What David Audley said, and how he put things, appeared to dominate Lexy's views.

'He smokes a perfectly foul pipe, but apart from that he's rather a poppet,' continued Lexy. 'You'll like him— he's frightfully clever, of course. But then they're all bloody clever

—Mike too, in his own quiet way. I'm the only dumb one—the mechanic—' she exhibited her hands to prove it.

dummy5

'Mike Bradford—the engineer?'

'During the war he was an engineer. With the American Army—he's an American, did I tell you?'

Roche shook his head.

'Well, he is. And he was an engineer, though I rather think he was more a blower-up of things than a builder- up, from what he says, if you know what I mean. But he's a writer now

—novels about the war with rude words in them which make a lot of money for him—the novels, I mean, not the rude words ... Or maybe it's the rude words that make the money—

David says they're authentic, anyway. Or almost authentic, because in fact it seems every other word they said in the war was a rude one, and Mike hasn't gone quite that far.' She frowned at him. 'Although I can't imagine Father effing and blinding all the time . . . But I suppose it was all different then . . . Anyway . .