Neither did I. Maybe I was learning that sometimes it’s nice just to be friends. I remembered the little bugger and his knife at Salamis, and couldn’t settle . . . I jumped at every noise. Even so, we got to know each other and smoked and talked, and left as soon as the sun began to dip.
Rolling back down the road to camp I was relaxed. None of the tension I had carried to Kermia with me. When Fiona stopped the Champ outside my quarter in the twilight she left the engine running, so the evening was ending there anyway. I turned in the passenger seat and said, ‘Fiona?’
‘What?’
I reached up, and kissed her cheek. It was dusty.
‘Thanks for coming.’
I liked her laugh.
Pete was sitting on his bed playing patience. He asked, ‘How did it go?’ These bastards always seemed to know my business.
‘Fine. Someone got shot in the hand by one of the local monkeys, but apart from that it was pretty routine. Watson’s new woman drove me there and back.’ I couldn’t remember if Pete had been at the services burial of the finger in ’44, or had missed it during one of his unofficial absences. His game came out. Nearly all the games Pete played did.
‘Wanna find a bar?’
‘No thanks, Pete. I fancy an evening in. Good book, roaring fire and smoke a couple of pipes. Thanks for asking though.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah. I told you . . . I just feel tired.’
‘Woman tired?’
‘No. Not woman tired. Just tired.’ He gave me the look, but for once he was wrong. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘You win. Give me half an hour to clean up and we’ll find somewhere to drink.’
Be careful what you wish for. Isn’t that what they say?
The roaring fire I’d longed for broke out in the cookhouse a little later. It was blamed on a waiter who’d been sacked for stealing sugar, and decided to become a hero of the revolution instead . . . We were all turned out to fight it. Not a bloody chance. The kitchen block was full of cans of fat and cooking oils, which exploded like bombs. The wooden building burned better than a Guy Fawkes bonfire. By the time I was trudging back to the billet between Pat Tobin and Pete we each had soot stains on our arms and faces and clothes, and nowhere to have breakfast.
‘I have a proper bottle of whisky – my boss gave it to me as an embarkation present,’ I told them. ‘What say we arsehole it?’
Pete grinned, but it didn’t seem to lift Pat’s spirits. Something was biting him.
Chapter Fifteen
The Lone Rider of Santa Fe
Warboys. I was sitting on the step of my billet reading Moby-Dick – a copy from the camp library. The step was in a nice slab of shade, and there was a bit of a breeze from somewhere. Warboys drove past alone in his little lorry, heading for Watson’s cricket pavilion. He waved as he went past. His truck stirred up the dust.
He returned an hour later, stopped and switched the engine off. It sounded as if it was a much better power plant than that in Pickles’s Auster. Maybe they should have started bunging Humber engines in their aircraft. The engine block ticked as it cooled. He didn’t get down from the cab. I took my pipe from my mouth.
Warboys said, ‘Your boss said you had a couple of days off. What are you going to do?’
I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t particularly want to go into Famagusta. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to Tony’s – I couldn’t think of anything better than lazing under one of Yassine’s fans with a glass of Keo in front of me. The problem was that if I didn’t run into Steve, I’d run into Alison, and I didn’t want to be responsible for an atmosphere of spectral doom.
‘Nothing planned. I’m enjoying my book, and not having to work.’ I waved my pipe at him.
‘Fancy seeing a couple of castles?’
‘Come again?’
‘I’ve a few days off myself, as it happens. I’ve been sketching the castles on the island in my spare time. I wanted to go back to Kyrenia and St Hilarion. I wouldn’t mind the company, if you were interested.’
He made the offer the way men always do; as if a rejection wouldn’t matter.
‘Can I get some pipe tobacco in Kyrenia?’ I asked.
‘I know a place where you can get anything.’
‘Then I can pack in five minutes.’
We headed back towards Nicosia on the road that I had driven with Fiona the day before. On Cyprus, Nic is like Rome: all roads lead to it. I asked him about sketching castles.
‘Not only sketches,’ he told me. ‘I’m making architectural drawings and schemes. I plan to do a book on the Cypriot castles one day. I met a mad novelist in a bar, and he encouraged me.’
‘Bully for him. Wasn’t that what T. E. Lawrence was doing when he joined the army and got into trouble?’
‘Yes, he was drawing Crusader castles in the Holy Land. One of my heroes.’
‘I feared that.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He was an idiot.’
He smiled. He didn’t take his eyes off the road when he drove. I liked that in a driver. He asked me, ‘How do you make that out?’
‘He promised Arabia to the Arabs, and then helped give it to the French – they’ll never forgive us
