‘Some business; some private . . . to my family.’
‘You have a family . . . nice. Children?’
‘Two boys.’
‘Wife?’
‘No, just the boys.’
‘You are a widower . . . sad. Wife dead . . . you get a new one. Mariam is healthy: a woman like her would work hard.’
‘Thank you, but no. Not yet, at any rate. My wife is not dead; I just never married. Just a couple of phone calls would do for now. I would appreciate it.’
‘Of course. Whenever you please, but whatever you do remember the clicks.’
‘I will remember the clicks.’
‘And come and go across the courtyard. There is a British policeman at the front door now. It would be impolite to embarrass him.’
Ever since my pal Tommo had bought it in an air crash in ’49, there had been something missing from my life. Now I knew what it was: that special sense of danger and unpredictability he brought, hanging about at the periphery of my vision. God had now sent me David Yassine to fill that gap. Bravo, God.
I borrowed a pool Standard Vanguard from the commissariat, and drove over to El Kirsh. Finding the gears on its worn column change was like stirring the Christmas pudding. Haye was on duty, pleased to see me, but not pleased to be still working.
‘Call me next time; then I can swap for a couple of hours, and take you somewhere.’
‘You’re not the only person I came to see.’
‘. . . and telling me that will get you nowhere fast.’ But she was smiling, and that counted for a lot. I wondered if I’d get to see her in her bikini again. She handed me four letters that had come into the BFPO, had been sent on to the hospital for me, but arrived after I’d moved on. ‘These came yesterday. I was hoping you’d catch them. You can sit on the veranda and read them if you like. I’ll bring you a mug of tea.’ The British race has an unnatural fixation with tea; have you noticed that?
Two were from Elaine, one was from Dieter, and one from a person whose handwriting I didn’t recognize, but when I turned it over the return name and address were Flaming June’s. I decided to keep her for later. I read Dieter’s first. He had a superb, clear, small hand which put mine to shame, and wrote on pencil-ruled lines on airmail paper. It took me about twenty minutes to read, and told me enough for me to imagine their lives in Bosham in detail. After I had finished it, I let it lie in my lap while I stared out across the ugly camp and into the desert in the distance. Susan came out, touched my shoulder, gave me the tea and left again without saying a word. That was very clever of her.
Elaine’s letters were a mixture of news, gossip and technical questions that she hadn’t mastered before I left . . . and, in case I had forgotten, she signed one with a very suggestive drawing. I’d seen the same symbol in the sky before: fighter pilots can draw it with their vapour trails. I decided to call her at work tomorrow. I read recently that some sod thought he’d now invented a new business style which he cleverly called remote management, and probably got a knighthood for it. Give him a call somebody, and tell him we were doing it back in the 1950s.
Half an hour later Susan came out with her own tea, and sat alongside me. She asked, ‘Everything OK at home?’
‘Fine, but it slows you down when you read about it. There’s a whole life back there going on without you.’
‘I know. The services say it’s good for us to stay in touch, and encourage our relations to write . . . but sometimes I wonder.’
‘Wonder what, pet?’
‘They just couldn’t imagine what it’s really like out here; not unless they’ve been here themselves. I had a boyfriend in Nottingham who expected me to save myself for him . . . stupid idea!’
‘How long do you have to do?’
‘Two and a half; but they often extend that by six months, and you get no choice in the matter.’
‘How long have you been out?’
‘A year.’ I realized that, with a bit of luck, I would be home long before her, but didn’t say it. She added, ‘I finish in half an hour; do you want to come down to my place for a long, cold drink?’
‘. . . come up and see me some time?’
‘Try, if you don’t like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? That was Mae West as well, I think.’ She was smiling a sad smile that came of us talking too much about home. Egypt had taught me another lesson.
‘I’d love to come down to your place for a drink.’
‘And please make a pass at me; so that I can say no.’
‘OK.’
Chapter Twelve
Blackbird blues
‘I met a friend of yours in Ish.’
‘We are forgetting something, Charlie. Try remembering the sirs now and again.’
That was Watson of course. We were sitting under the fan in his office, with a Sundowner each, jostling for a foot of floorboards a degree cooler than the next.
‘I think this had better be a completely confidential conversation, sir. Sort of a chat between two old friends, before one of them fills the other in for compromising him.’
‘Ah, that sort of a conversation.’
I had surprised the pair of us by coming off leave a day early. The truth was, as a reservist back in Watson’s private air force, I didn’t actually feel as if I was in the services again, or subject to its bizarre vagaries. It felt more like being a member of an easygoing criminal gang. Ninety-six hours might have meant ninety-six to them,
