Soldier No More

—until that evening, that never-to-be-forgotten evening, along the very beach from which Julie had swum out. . .

along which they had walked so many times, to which he had returned. . . all you have to do is swim out until the current takes you, and cherishes you—

'—anger, certainly, Madame.' Pain. 'Anger—yes.'

Nod. 'Yet you remained in the Army?'

Smile, bitterly but knowingly. 'But anger against whom?'

Against whom?

He had felt, even beyond anger and bitterness and grief—he had felt impotence!

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He could have ripped open the brief-case, and scattered its contents along the way, or made a bonfire of it. But they had copies of it, and other officers to carry it—the uselessness of the gesture, as well as his own cowardice, had baffled him, even though the thought of going back to teach in England without Julie had filled him with despair.

And then, out of the soft blue of the Japanese evening, had come the offer of revenge, unexpected and unlocked for—

revenge, yet at the same time a keeping-faith with Julie and Harry, and a keeping-faith with his own idealism —

Or had it really been idealism?

It was hard to think back now, to remember what he had really thought— how he had really thought, and why he had thought as he had done: it was like trying to capture the thoughts of a stranger, to re-capture his own thoughts from time past.

Anger and bitterness and grief and impotence and . . .

And boredom?

Perhaps if the war had flared up again ... but it was clear at British headquarters, even to the errand-boys, that the Americans and the Chinese had both had enough of Korea—

Perhaps if Julie . . . but without Julie the idea of going back to do what they had planned to do together, always together

—

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Instead, there had been nothing but anger and bitterness and grief and impotence, and boredom and cowardice and irresolution and uncertainty, and maybe plain foolishness too, and maybe also idealism—but at the time he had only recognised the first four of them, and the last one . . . But they had been enough, all of them together, to open the wound through which the parasite had entered his blood-stream, to take him over— Christ! Was that how it had really been?

'Anger against whom, Captain?' Madame Peyrony prompted him gently, watching him with an intentness entirely devoid of gentleness.

The contrast between the voice and the expression was disconcerting, even almost frightening: that intense stare, half-veiled but not concealed by the wrinkled eyelids, was better suited to Genghis Khan's eyes, or Clinton's, than to those of an old lady in her boudoir—better suited to a small room without windows than to a boudoir.

Anger against whom? He must lie well now, and better than well, his own instinct more than Raymond Galles shouted at him: the past he must remember must be the version which the Comrades had so carefully created for him, not the newer and heretical interpretation which had directed his actions over the past few days.

He sighed. 'I had a friend once, Madame ... a brother officer in Tokyo ... he was knocked over and killed by a police car.'

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Pause. 'The police car was badly driven.' Pause again. 'But it was pursuing a bank robber nevertheless.'

She continued to stare at him, giving nothing away.

'I suppose I was angry with the police driver . . . even though the road was slippery at the time, I was angry. But not for long.' Final pause, longer than the others. 'Without the Communists, Madame ... or without the Russians, if you prefer . . . Joseph McCarthy would have been just another stupid politician.'

There had been a lot more, to be used as required, according to the depth of the interrogation. The six-year-old lines came back to Roche with mocking clarity, even to the small amendments he had decided to make on his own account (no patriotic young Englishman would have referred to 'Soviet expansionism' in a month of Sundays when he meant simply

'Russian aggression'...).

But this was not the time and place, and not the interrogator, for a lot more. The lie they had given him would stick here, or not at all, Roche judged.

Madame Peyrony subsided slowly into her chair, becoming somehow smaller and more ancient as she did so. 'I will have a little wine now, Captain, if you please.'

Perhaps it was not the lie which had stuck, but the truth itself. Because somewhere along the years, and particularly since the bloodbath in Hungary last year, he had realised that the lie was the truth indeed—that the false reasons they had dummy5

given him to give to the British ought always to have been his own true reasons for fighting them—that he had deluded himself, and been deluded; and that, worse still, that Julie and Harry had in some sense been deluded too, and had played an innocent part in deluding him.

But he had to pour the wine.