Crossfire Page 6

  ‘And where exactly do you think you stand?’ she said.

  I stand on only one leg. Now, what would she say to that?

  ‘You tell me,’ I said.

  But, throughout the whole evening, she never did answer my question even though, in a roundabout manner, I asked it three or four times. In the end, I took her silence on the matter to be answer enough, and I wondered who was the lucky man.

  At ten o’clock, as people were beginning to drift away, I asked her if I could walk her home.

  ‘How do you know I walked?’ she asked.

  ‘When you arrived you were too wet to have simply come in from the car park.’

  ‘Clever clogs!’ She smiled. ‘OK. But just a walk home. No bonus.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it called a bonus before.’ I laughed. ‘No wonder all those bankers are so keen to keep their bonuses.’

  She also laughed, and we left the pub in congenial companionship but with her hands firmly planted in her coat pockets so there was no chance of me being able to casually take one of them in mine.

  Part of me longed to be with a woman again, just for the sex.

  It had been a long time. It was six months or more since I had talked a girl into my bed with stories of heroic encounters with a mysterious enemy, stories of men being men, sweating testosterone through every pore and satisfying ten maidens each before breakfast. I was good at the game but recent opportunities had been limited, almost non-existent.

  Six months was a long time with only the occasional misplaced sponge by a blushing nurse to fulfil the need.

  I positively ached to ‘have a bonus’ with Isabella, even here, in the street, in the still-pouring rain.

  But there was little likelihood of that and my chances weren’t exactly helped when she suddenly stopped.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ she asked.

  ‘What noise?’ I said, stopping next to her and dreading the moment.

  ‘That clicking noise?’ She listened. ‘That’s funny. It’s stopped now.’

  She walked on and I followed.

  ‘There it is,’ she shouted triumphantly. ‘It’s you, when you walk.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said quietly. ‘Just the boots.’

  I could see she was confused. I was wearing rubber boots. They would make no noise, certainly not a clicking noise.

  ‘No, come on,’ she said. ‘That’s definitely a sharp metal sound and you’ve got wellies on. So what is it?’

  ‘Leave it,’ I said sharply, embarrassed and angry. In truth, more angry with myself for not saying than with her for asking.

  But she wouldn’t leave it.

  ‘Come on,’ she said again, laughing. ‘What have you got down there? It’s a toy, isn’t it? Part of your chat-up technique?’ She danced away from me, looking down, searching for the source of the noise and laughing all the while.

  I had no choice.

  ‘I’ve got a false leg,’ I said quietly.

  ‘What?’ She hadn’t really heard and was still dancing around, laughing.

  ‘A false leg,’ I said more loudly. She stopped dancing.

  ‘I’ve only got one leg.’

  She stood still, looking at me.

  ‘Oh, Tom, I’m sorry.’ I thought for a moment that she was crying, but it might have been the rain on her face. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said sharply.

  But it wasn’t.

  Isabella stood in the street getting wetter, if that was possible, while I told her everything I could remember about being blown apart by an IED and my subsequent medical history.

  She listened, first with horror, and then with concern.

  She tried to comfort me and I despised it. I didn’t want her pity.

  Suddenly I knew why I had come back to Lambourn, to my ‘home’. I must have subconsciously understood that my mother would not have given me the lovey-dovey consoling parental hugs I would have hated. She would not have tried to be reassuring and sympathetic. And she would not have tried to commiserate with me for my loss. I preferred the Kauri ‘get on with your own life and let me get on with mine’ attitude.

  Grief, even the grief for a lost foot or a lost career, was easier to cope with alone.

  ‘Please don’t patronize me,’ I said.

  Isabella stopped talking in mid sentence.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it felt like it,’ I replied.

  ‘God, you’re awkward,’ she said. ‘I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ I said rather cruelly. ‘I’m fine without it.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, obviously hurt. ‘If that’s the way you feel, then I’ll bid you goodnight.’

  She turned abruptly and walked away, leaving me standing alone in the rain, confused and bewildered, not knowing whether to be pleased or disappointed, angry or calm.

  I felt as though I wanted to run, to run away, but I couldn’t even do that, not without a cacophony of metallic clinking.

  On Monday morning I went to Aldershot to try to collect my car and my other belongings out of storage.

  Isabella came with me.

  In fact, to be totally accurate, I went with her.

  She drove her VW Golf in a manner akin to a world championship rally driver.

  ‘Do you always drive like this?’ I asked as we almost collided with an oncoming truck during a somewhat dodgy overtaking manoeuvre.

  ‘Only when I’m not being patronizing,’ she said, looking at me for rather longer than I was happy with.

  ‘Watch the road,’ I said.

  She ignored me.

  ‘Please, Isabella,’ I implored. ‘I don’t want to survive an IED only to be killed on the Bracknell by-pass by a lunatic woman.’

  She had phoned the house early. Too early. I had still been in bed.

  ‘That Warren woman called for you,’ my mother had said with distaste when I went down to breakfast.

  ‘Warren woman?’

  ‘Married to Jackson Warren.’

  I’d been none the wiser.

  ‘Who’s Jackson Warren?’

  ‘You must know,’ my mother had said. ‘Lives in the Hall. Family made pots of money in the colonies.’ She had sounded very old fashioned. ‘Married that young girl when his wife died. She must be thirty years younger than him, at least. That’s the one who called. Brazen hussy.’

  The last two words had been spoken under her breath, but had been clearly audible nonetheless.

  ‘Is her name Isabella?’ I’d asked.

  ‘That’s the one.’

  So she was married.

  ‘What did she want?’ I’d asked.

  ‘I don’t know, do I? She wanted to speak to you, that’s all I know.’

  My mother had never liked being in a position where she did not know everything that was going on, and this had been no exception.

  ‘I didn’t even know that you knew that woman.’ She’d said the words with a mixture of disapproval and nosiness.

  I hadn’t risen to the bait.

  Instead I’d gone out of the kitchen into the office to return the call to Isabella.

  ‘I’m so sorry about last night,’ she’d said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Please can we meet again today so that I can apologize in person?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I’d said. ‘I’m going to Aldershot.’

  ‘Can’t I take you?’ she had replied rather too eagerly.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I’d said. ‘I’ll get the train from Newbury.’

  ‘No.’ She had almost screamed down the phone. ‘Please let me take you. It’s the least I can do after being so crass last night.’

  So here we were, dodging trucks on the Bracknell by-pass.

  Everything I owned, other than my kit for war, had been locked away in a metal cage at an army barracks in Aldershot prior to the regiment’s move to Afghanistan. Everything, that is, except my car, which I hoped was still sitting at
one end of the huge parking lot set aside for the purpose within the military camp down the road from Aldershot, at Pirbright.

  ‘Let’s get my car first,’ I said. ‘Then I can load it up with my stuff.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But are you sure you’ll be able to drive it?’

  ‘No, I’m not at all sure,’ I said. ‘But I’ll find out soon enough.’ It was something that had been worrying me. My Jaguar was an automatic, so at least there were only two pedals to cope with, but both of them were designed to be operated by the driver’s right foot. I planned to use my false right for the accelerator, and my real left for the brake; two pedals, two feet, just like driving a Formula One racing car.

  ‘But are you insured, you know, to drive with only one leg?’

  ‘To be honest, I’m not really sure about that either, so I’m not asking. I had intended cancelling my insurance and taking the car off the road before I was deployed but, somehow, I never found the time. It’s been taxed and insured for the past five months without anyone driving it so they must owe me something. And I haven’t told the insurance company about being wounded.’

  She drove in silence for a while.

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell me you were married?’ I asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she replied.

  ‘It might.’

  ‘What exactly might matter; the fact that I’m married or that my husband is more than twice my age?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I’m actually amazed you didn’t know already. Everyone else seems to. Quite the scandal, it was, when Jackson and I got married.’

  ‘How long ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Seven years now,’ she said. ‘And before you ask, no, it wasn’t for his money. I love the old bugger.’

  ‘But the money helped?’ I said with some irony.

  She glanced at me. It was not a glance of approval.

  ‘You’re just like everyone else,’ she said. ‘Why does everyone assume that it’s all about his money?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ she said defiantly, ‘it’s not. In fact, I won’t get anything when he dies. I said I didn’t want it. It all goes to his children.’

  ‘Are any of them your children too?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ I could detect a slight disappointment in her voice. ‘Sadly not.’

  ‘You tried?’ I asked.

  ‘At the beginning, but not now. It’s too late.’

  ‘But you’re still young enough.’

  ‘I’m all right. It’s Jackson that’s the problem.’ She paused as if wondering whether she should go on. She decided to. ‘Bloody prostate.’

  ‘Cancer?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighed. ‘It’s a bugger. The doctors say they’ve caught it early and that it’s completely controllable with drugs. But there are some, shall we say, unfortunate side effects.’

  She drove on in silence, swerving round a slow-moving truck just in time to avoid an oncoming car.

  ‘Has he tried Viagra?’ I asked.

  ‘Tried it?’ She laughed. ‘He’s swallowed them like bloody Smarties but still not a flicker. It’s the fault of the Zolodex – that’s one of the drugs. It seems to switch off his sex drive completely. That’s the physical side; mentally, he’s as rampant as ever.’

  ‘I can see that would be a tad frustrating,’ I said.

  ‘A tad? I’ll tell you it’s extremely frustrating. And for both of us.’ She looked at me as if in embarrassment. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Far too much information.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m really quite discreet. I’ll only tell the Sunday papers if they pay me well.’

  She laughed.

  ‘From what the Sunday papers said after our wedding, you’d believe that I only married him for the money and that sex between a twenty-three-year-old woman and a man nearing sixty was all in the imagination – his imagination, that is. What rubbish. It was the sex that attracted me to him in the first place.’

  I sat in silence, just listening. What could I say?

  ‘I was eighteen when I first met him. He was fifty-four, but he didn’t look it. He used to play golf with my dad every Sunday morning. Then one Sunday when Mum and Dad were away he came round to make sure everything was OK. It seems Dad hadn’t told Jackson he wouldn’t be playing golf that week, at least that’s what Jackson told me at the time, but I’ve since often wondered if it was true.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, we ended up in bed together.’ She laughed. ‘And the rest is history, or in the papers, at least.’

  ‘Was Jackson married at the time?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘With two children. They’re both older than me. But his wife was already ill by then. She had breast cancer. I helped look after her for nearly three years until she died.’

  ‘Were you sleeping with him all the time?’ I asked.

  She smiled again. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But did you live in their house?’

  ‘Not to start with, but I did for the last six months or so of Barbara’s life. His son and daughter treated me as their kid sister.’

  ‘But did they know you were sleeping with their father?’

  ‘They didn’t exactly say so,’ she said, ‘but I think they knew. Their mother certainly did.’

  ‘What? Jackson’s wife knew that he was sleeping with you?’

  ‘Absolutely. We discussed it. She even gave me advice about what he liked. She used to say it took the pressure off her.’

  Annoyingly, at this point we arrived at Pirbright Camp so I heard no more juicy Warren revelations.

  Isabella remained in her car while I went into the guardroom to sign in.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the corporal behind the desk, ‘I can’t let a civilian onto the camp without suitable ID.’

  ‘What sort of suitable ID does she need?’ I asked him.

  ‘A driving licence or passport,’ he said.

  She had neither with her. I’d already asked.

  ‘Can’t I vouch for her?’ I asked.

  ‘Not without proper authority.’

  ‘Well get the proper authority,’ I said in my most commanding-officer voice.

  ‘I can’t, sir,’ he said. ‘You would have to apply to the adjutant, and he’s away.’

  I sighed. ‘So what do you expect me to do?’ I asked him.

  ‘You can go in, sir, but you’ll have to walk to get your car.’

  ‘But it’s miles away.’ The park was at the other end of the camp.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said adamantly. ‘That’s the security rules we’ve been told. No ID, no entrance.’

  I suppose it was fair. In the army one learned very early on that rules were rules. Security was security, after all.

  ‘Can you please get me some transport, then,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said again. ‘There’s nothing available.’

  I stepped back and lifted my right trouser leg up six inches. ‘How am I going to walk to my car with this damn thing?’ I lifted my foot up and down with its familiar metallic clink.

  ‘Afghanistan?’ the corporal asked.

  I nodded. ‘IED. In Helmand,’ I said. ‘Four months ago.’

  ‘No problem, then, sir,’ he said, suddenly making a decision. ‘Just get the lady to hand this in when she leaves.’ He handed me a temporary vehicle pass. ‘Just don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’

  False legs clearly brought some small benefit after all.

  Funny how rules can be so easily ignored with the application of a modicum of common sense. Security? What security?

  I found it was surprisingly easy to drive with a false foot. A few practice circuits of the car park and I was ready for the public highway. And I was much more confident about arriving safely at my destination with me driving with only one real leg than I had been in Isabella’s VW with her driving with two.

  She insisted on following me the
nine miles from Pirbright to Aldershot.

  ‘You might need help carrying your things,’ she said. ‘And you won’t get much of it into that.’

  True, my XK Jaguar coupé was pretty small, but Isabella obviously had no idea how little I had acquired in the way of ‘stuff’ during fifteen years in the army. I could probably have fitted it into my car twice over. But, who was I to turn down the help of a pretty girl, even if she was married?

  We negotiated the busy Surrey and Hampshire roads without any mishaps and, surprisingly, without my Jag being overtaken by Isabella’s dark blue Golf, although I was sure she was going to on a couple of occasions before she obviously remembered she didn’t know the way.

  ‘Is that all?’ Isabella was amazed. ‘I’d take more than that on a dirty weekend to Paris.’

  I was standing next to two navy-blue holdalls and a four-foot by four-inch black heavy-duty cardboard tube. Between them they contained all my meagre worldly possessions.

  ‘I’ve moved a lot,’ I said as an explanation.

  ‘At least you don’t have to engage Pickfords to shift that lot.’ She laughed. ‘What’s in the tube?’

  ‘My sword.’

  ‘What, a real sword?’ She was surprised.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Every officer has a sword, but it’s for ceremonial use only these days.’

  ‘But don’t you have any furniture?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not any?’

  ‘No. I’ve always used the army stuff. I’ve lived in barrack blocks all my adult life. I’ve never even known the luxury of an en-suite bathroom, except on holiday.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘What century is it?’

  ‘In the army? Twenty-first for weaponry, other than the sword, of course, but still mostly in the nineteenth for home comforts. You have to understand that it’s the weapons that matter more than the accommodation. No soldier wants a cheap rifle that won’t fire when his life depends on it, or body armour that won’t stop a bullet, all because some civil-service jerk spent the available money on a flush toilet.’

  ‘You men,’ Isabella said. ‘Girls wouldn’t put up with it.’

  ‘The girls don’t fight,’ I said. ‘At least, not in the infantry. Not yet.’

  ‘Will it happen?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ I said.

  ‘Do you mind?’