He folds the map and puts it back in his pocket.
‘That’s what I assumed,’ he says. He smiles. He has the red-eyed, fixed look that they all have. A few hours earlier Claudia listened to a man talking in the deliberate, slurred tones of, as she thought (faintly incredulous), a drunk. Until she realised that what she was hearing was the voice of exhaustion. Many of these men have not slept for nights on end. The last push was only three days ago.
And they begin to talk not of pushes or of flaps or of the next show, but of another time and another place. ‘When I was a child,’ says Tom Southern, ‘I was fascinated by the idea of deserts. Who wouldn’t be, raised in deepest Sussex? It all stemmed from the notion of John the Baptist howling in the wilderness, and the illustrations in the Sunday School Bible – all those people in fancy dress with camels and donkeys. We once made a flour and water relief map of the Holy Land, I remember, with the Red Sea painted bright blue and Sinai a good hot yellow. Sometimes when I look at the maps in HQ I remember that.’
He has been here six months. Training in the Delta and now commands a troop of tanks. Was in last week’s action.
‘The nearest I’ve ever been to a desert,’ says Claudia, ‘is the beach at Charmouth. My brother and I used to collect fossils there. Fight over fossils.’
‘There are fossils here,’ says Tom Southern. ‘I found one yesterday. Would you like it?’ He rummages in the pocket of his battle-dress.
‘Thank you,’ says Claudia. ‘It’s a starfish, isn’t it? Goodness. All this was sea, once, then.’
‘Must’ve been. Which somehow puts one in one’s place.’
‘Yes,’ says Claudia. ‘It does.’
They sit, hands cupped round tea-mugs. Inside the tent the New Zealander’s typewriter still clatters; the skyline still roars and sparkles; the shadowy figures plod to and fro across the sand.
‘I keep a diary,’ says Tom. ‘Nicely cryptic, of course, in case I get put in the bag. But one of these days one may want to remember what all this was like.’
‘What is it like?’ asks Claudia after a moment.
He lights a cigarette. He stares at her. His face, in the moonlight, is not brown but a blackish colour. ‘Hm… What is it like? Let’s see…’ But before he can go on the New Zealander appears, shuffling typescript and offering a hipflask of whisky. And it is decided that Claudia (who protests, of course) shall sleep in the Press Tent while the others will use the truck. Tom Southern is going to the coast tomorrow to bring up some tank replacements and has offered them a lift.
Claudia lies in a sleeping-bag in the tent. She does not sleep much. Once she raises the flap of the tent and looks out over the sand. There are other tents around, so small that she can see the booted feet of their occupants sticking out at one end. Elsewhere, bundled shapes lie up against trucks and jeeps. A petrol can cooking-stove quietly smoulders. She turns on her side and the starfish, which she has put in her pocket, grinds against her hip. She takes it out and lies with it in her hand, running her fingers from time to time over the gritty stone, the five symmetrical arms.
No, I don’t still have it. I used it as a paperweight in the Cairo flat. It lay on the table in front of the mesh-covered window before which I was writing, looking out on to a garden brilliant with zinnias and bougainvillia and red canna lilies. A garden boy would sweep the paths, very slowly, all morning, or wander with a length of hose among the flower beds, chivvied by the French landlady. When I left I gave Madame Charlot the few bits and pieces I had accumulated – the brass tray from the Mouski, the leather pouffe, the primus stove. Perhaps the starfish is in that garden, edging a path.
Madame Charlot referred to herself as French. In fact her father was Lebanese and her mother one of those essentially Cairene figures of an ancestry as complex as the city – a tiny red-haired old lady whose native language certainly appeared to be French but who also spoke Arabic and Russian and a maverick form of English. She and her daughter festered their days away in an overfurnished under-aired room full of Empire chairs and sofas from which they emerged to harry the servants and cast inquisitive looks upon their tenants. Madame Char-lot’s sharp eyes would peer from beyond the latticed wood folding screen that shielded their private rooms as Camilla’s admirers clattered up and down the stairs. When in the evenings we entertained friends on the balcony of our flat she would patrol the garden, watering the lurid lines of zinnias and glancing covertly upwards. She always wore shapeless black dresses, topped by a grey cardigan in winter, and with stockings throughout the stifling Cairo summer. I never once heard her refer either to the war or to her husband who was never seen or heard of. Both, presumably, were inconveniences kept at bay by ignoring their existence. When I returned from that trip to the desert I told her where I had been and she persisted in referring to ‘votre petite vacance’. Did she ever consider what would happen to her should the Germans reach Cairo? She and her mother would simply have melted into the cosmopolitan soup, I imagine – have become someone else, changed their skins to fit the background like those other old Cairenes, the chameleons that lurked in the garden trees, skew-eyed and spiral-tailed, creeping invisible along the branches with their three-fingered gloved hands.
When I came back I was ill. I typed with a rising temperature, bribed Camilla with a bottle of ‘Evening in Paris’ to take the stuff down to the Censors’ Office and then lay rocking in bed for a week with malaria, wondering if it had not all been a figment of the fever.
The place is stirring long before sunrise; but it has never really slept. The orange glow of cooking fires lights up the pre-dawn darkness. Claudia shares with Jim Chambers and the New Zealander a half pint of water for washing. By the time it is light Tom Southern appears from the Command Tent with a sheaf of maps and papers saying they must get a move on. They get into the truck – Tom driving, Claudia alongside, the other two in the back. Jim and the New Zealander are in uniform – the ubiquitous perfunctory uniform of corduroy trousers, battle-dress jacket and overcoat. Tom tells Claudia to fix her green and gold War Correspondent badge more conspicuously to her person – ‘or you’ll raise even more eyebrows than you do already.’ He thinks he may be able to wangle them a few minutes with the C.O. of the tank regiment that led last week’s push. He will drop them off at the airstrip by the coast road whence they will get a lift back to Cairo. Jim and the New Zealander argue between themselves about their chances of commandeering a truck from somewhere and trying to get up to the front. ‘Not you, old girl, I’m afraid,’ says Jim to Claudia. ‘You’ll have to be satisfied with getting this far.’ Claudia does not answer, distracted by what she now sees – a concourse of shabby men in blue-green ragged uniforms squatting in the sand, hundreds of them (she tries to make a quick count, sorting them into blocks of ten); the truck bumps past them, going fast on a belt of hard gravelly sand, and as it does so the men eye them apathetically, except for a few who discern Claudia’s gender and gaze astonished. One rises to his feet and with elaborate pantomime blows a kiss. The New Zealander laughs: ‘Trust a bloody wop!’
So that is the enemy, thinks Claudia. This is what the enemy looks like – a lot of down-and-out Italian waiters, average age about twenty-one. She says, ‘They don’t look particularly distressed.’ ‘They’re not,’ says Tom. ‘They’re damn glad to be out of it.’
They move, all day, through the smouldering debris of what has gone before. This is the area of last week’s enemy advance and subsequent retreat. This thousand square miles of emptiness has been wrestled over for five days and nights; it has exacted the lives of several hundred men. And it is untouched, thinks Claudia. Already the sand is starting to digest the broken vehicles, the petrol cans, the tangles of wire; a few more storms and they will sink beneath it. In a few years’ time they will have vanished. She watches Tom Southern pore over his maps; these scribblings too are arbitrary – the sand has no boundaries, no frontiers, no perimeters.
She talks, during the day, to innumerable men. Tom Southern stop
s to have a word here, exchange some information there; they lose themselves in this tract of sand that is both empty and populous. Scores of vehicles are on the move – solitary motor-cyclists bumping doggedly across the wastes, trucks, armoured cars, ten-ton lorries in long stately files, battered tanks being taken back to base workshops, ambulances, jeeps. And those who are not on the move have established themselves, hunched down into the landscape in makeshift arrangements of shacks, shelters, holes in the ground. Claudia squats above a trench and talks to two soldiers brewing tea within. They hand her up a mug. They are men of the 1st Argyll and Sutherland and have been at the front for two weeks. Spare and wiry, like a couple of fox terriers, they seem very much at home down there in the sand (thus, thinks Claudia, must their ancestors have come to terms with another kind of remorseless terrain); they advise Claudia, though, not to come in for a look – ‘the bluddy Eyeties was in here, and they’re not too fussy how they live.’ And indeed the latrine smell billows upwards as Claudia returns the mug with thanks, makes some notes and rejoins the others.
She talks to an officer of the Black Watch, shaving meticulously beside his tent, who wonders if they haven’t met sometime in town, do you know the Broke-Willoughbys, by any chance? She talks to a sapper who warns them away from a suspected minefield in the next wadi – in the distance she can see patient figures probing the ground, yard by yard, marking out the sand with intricate spider-webs of tapes and posts. She talks to men who speak in the accents of rural Gloucestershire, of Wapping, of Kensington. She meets both reticence and outpourings: this man’s gun-emplacement was overrun and he was the only survivor – he describes what happened in the bleak unadorned language of a police report; another, his torso aflame with desert sores, has a girl friend in Cairo – will Claudia deliver a letter? She fills her notebook with scrawls. The sun has risen now and the flies crawl blackly over necks, arms, faces. The sand lodges in nose, eyes, ears.
They stop at a Company HQ. Tom Southern picks up Claudia’s box Brownie and insists on snapping her with it, leaning up against the truck, laughing and protesting. They have lunch: bully beef and mugs of tea. The water in the flasks they carry is now itself as hot as tea. Claudia sits in the shade of the truck and types while Tom parleys with a brisk moustached major who peers warily at her – ‘Press wallahs?’ she hears him say. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate just now, tell them. Sorry, old chap.’ Presently, though, he relents and comes over to stand for a few minutes in embarrassed talk –‘ ’Fraid we’ve got a bit of a flap on just now – lost radio contact with my CO. Otherwise we could have had a chat.’ He eyes Claudia doubtfully. ‘My chaps looking after you all right? I didn’t know Cairo let you ladies up here.’ ‘They don’t,’ says Jim Chambers. ‘Miss Hampton has a way with her.’ Claudia beams. The major, shaking himself like a dog, turns and scuttles back to his tent.
They leave this centre of civilisation and plunge on. They are moving away now from the main concentration behind the lines, and from the more conspicuously marked tracks. Fewer vehicles come into sight. Tom Southern halts more often to consult his maps, to use his binoculars, to check his radio. They are heading for the coast road by way of a supply depot. The route takes them along a shallow wadi; at either side the sand rises in sculptured ridges to a height of thirty feet or so, blocking off the view; the occasional rocky overhang provides a slash of black shadow, the rest is a relentless glaring white. Small fleshy plants start up here and there; once, stopping to free the truck from a patch of soft sand, they see the paw-prints of a desert fox dancing away up the slope.
When Tom next halts to consult the map Claudia excuses herself and sets off up the ridge. ‘Mind the rules, m’dear,’ says Jim Chambers. She waves a hand – never go out of sight of your vehicle. At the top of the rise she selects a handy rock and squats behind it on the sand in lengthy relief. Rising, pulling up her slacks, she gives way to temptation and walks a quick few yards beyond the rise to where she can see down into the next wadi – wider, deeper and not empty. For a hundred yards or so away is the wreckage of an armoured car, lying on its side, one axle ripped off. And beside it is a body.
Claudia hesitates. She walks quickly down to the wreckage. The man is lying face down. His hair is fair, his tin hat lies beside him, part of his head is in black bloody shreds, the sand too is blackened, one leg has no foot. Flies crawl in glittery masses. And as she looks at all this she hears from the other side of the smashed car a noise. She steps round to see and there is another shattered body but this body moves. Its hand lifts from its chest and then falls back. Its mouth opens and makes a sound.
She stoops down. She says, ‘I’m going to get help. There are three men with me – I’m coming straight back. Can you hear me? You’ll be all right now.’ She does not think that he can hear her at all. One of his eyes is a purple pulpy mess, the sand under him is dark black, his trousers have been ripped half from him and in the flesh of one thigh is a red hole into which you could put your fist. From it there crawls a line of ants.
She runs up to the top of the ridge. She waves and shouts. The others come. Tom Southern gets out his binoculars. ‘You’ve been down there. You’re a bloody fool. They hit a mine. There could be more.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ says Claudia. ‘There’s a man still alive.’ ‘You’re still a bloody fool,’ says Tom. ‘Stay there… Chambers, get the field-dressings from the truck, would you.’
He walks down to the truck in Claudia’s tracks, staring at the sand on either side. Once he stops, scrutinises something, stands again. Eventually he reaches the car and beckons to Jim Chambers. Claudia and the New Zealander watch from the ridge.
‘You OK?’ says the New Zealander.
‘I’m OK,’ says Claudia.
The two men return. ‘He’s been there a day or so, poor bugger,’ says Tom. ‘The search parties must have missed them.’ He looks at Claudia. ‘Lucky for him you picked that particular spot. I’m going back to the truck to radio the ambulance depot and we’ll wait till they come. I’ve done what I can for him – he’s not taking in much, poor sod.’
‘I’m sorry I was a bloody fool,’ says Claudia.
He considers her. ‘Well, you’re still in one piece. Don’t do it again if you want to stay that way.’
8
‘Lovely plant,’ says the nurse. ‘Your sister-in-law brought it, didn’t she? Gorgeous colour. It’ll be one of those hothouse species, I expect. I’ll put it nearer the radiator.’
Claudia turns her head. ‘That is a poinsettia,’ she says. ‘Indestructible things. They grow in sand. I should let it take its chance with the rest of us.’
The nurse sticks her finger in the pot and shakes her head. ‘No, dear – some sort of peat this is in.’ She moves it from the windowsill. ‘There – we don’t want it dying on us, do we? Mrs Hampton would be upset.’
No, she wouldn’t. She’d accuse me of slaughtering it. To herself, of course – not out loud. I have heard many of Sylvia’s silent accusations, over the years.
Typical of Sylvia to bring a poinsettia. As though she knew. The congenitally heavy-handed are capable even of unwitting brutalities.
This place has been a tiny seaside settlement. A line of rubble marks what were once small white stucco villas and a café. The café wall survives, with a Schweppes advertisement stuck to it, and the ruined houses are covered with swarming growth – trails of brilliant blue morning glory and a lace-work of scarlet poinsettia flowers. Claudia picks one and her fingers are at once sticky with white sap; she drops it in the sand and wipes them on her slacks. The flowers amaze her. Just now they passed through a camp in which sheets of asphodels and night-scented stocks had sprung up amid the tents; the soldiers walked among them, the air was fragrant.
‘It rained last week,’ says Tom Southern. ‘The seeds must lie dormant, I suppose.’
For months or years, thinks Claudia, what an extraordinary thing. And how even more extraordinary to stand here in this place at this time talking to someone about botany. T
he coast road is an endless rumbling jostling khaki stream of traffic, convoy upon convoy moving west, crawling at the slow remorseless army pace, tank and Bren-gun carriers, ten-tonners, ambulances, armoured cars. Beyond it the Mediterranean sparkles in a great blue curve with the grey outlines of ships perched upon the horizon. The sky echoes to the sound of aircraft.
‘You asked,’ he says, ‘what it is like out here. For purposes of your article, I suppose?’
They are sitting, now, on the low wall that once marked the forecourt of the café. Jim Chambers and the New Zealander have departed for the front, having wangled a lift. Tom Southern will hand Claudia over to an RAF chap who is going to the air field and has offered to put her on to a transport plane going back to Cairo. The chap is just seeing someone at the Command Post and will be back shortly. And Tom will move on, to collect his tank, rejoin his squadron, move forward again.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I wanted to know for myself.’
He hesitates. ‘It’s so many different things. Boring, uncomfortable, terrifying, exhilarating. In rapid succession. Pretty well impossible to convey.’ He looks intently at her. ‘Sorry – I’m not doing very well. It’s like the whole of life in a single appalling concentration. It does lunatic things with time. An hour can seem like a day or a day like an hour. When you’re flung from one state of mind to another with such speed the physical world takes on an extraordinary clarity. I have spent whole minutes gazing at the structure of a rock or the behaviour of an insect.’ He is silent for a moment. ‘My driver was killed in our first action. We’d trained together. It had been his birthday the week before. We celebrated with a tin of peaches and some whisky. He was twenty-three. And the same day he and I had seen a mirage in which there was an entire oasis village – palms, mud huts, camels, people walking about. I thought I was hallucinating until he said “Christ, sir – look at that!” You drive towards the things and as you do so they disappear, melt away before your eyes. But somewhere there is this mirror place going about its business in perfect impervious detachment. And now I think of my driver – Corporal Haycraft, from Nottingham – and when I’m dog-tired, moving around like a zombie, the one thing that bothers me is where has he gone? How can a man be sitting in a tank with you one day and nowhere at all the next? How?’