Apple Blossom Time (10 page)

It’s nice to be wanted!

Pansy went into her interview looking as though she were on her way to execution. In a way, she was. The CSM stood by the door, holding it open.

‘Right, Millport, you next,
jeldi.
Put your hat straight. Lef’. Ri’. Lef’. Ri’. Lef’. Ri’. Halt. W/434004 Lance Corporal Millport, ma’am.’

I gave Pansy an encouraging smile as she quick-marched past me, then hung around the orderly room as nervous as though I were on the carpet, waiting for her to come out.

‘Well?’ I demanded when she reappeared, quick-marched back out again by the CSM and dismissed. ‘Oh, Pansy, was it awful?’

‘Not that bad, really. They’re too used to girls like me to make a song and dance about it. There’s a well-defined procedure, so no-one need feel embarrassed. Do it by the book – paragraph 11 – I swear she had the manual open on her lap!’

‘But are they sending you back to England?’

‘Oh yes – eventually, when there’s a passage, but that might not be for ages – months, maybe. Miss Carstairs was quite clear about that. Exigencies of war, et cetera. Using up a berth that could be used by fighting men. Should have thought of that before I did what I did. Let down the side. Thought better of me. I don’t deserve my stripe. Don’t I know there’s a war on, blah, blah, blah.’

‘But it’s not fair. Why don’t you tell them what happened? Or will you let me tell them? Pansy, please?’

‘No. No. It’s my business. I got myself into this mess. I don’t want a fuss. And they won’t let me work after three months – can’t have soldiers popping buttons on parade…’

Her passivity made me so angry. Her acceptance of blame, the mantle of martyr that was almost visible about her shoulders, that she had worn so cheerfully since she was a child … if she hadn’t been Pansy, I could have throttled her.

‘Then what’s going to happen?’

Then she gave a short laugh that startled me, that didn’t sound at all like Pansy. ‘They’ll send me off to a house for naughty girls. Apparently, I’ll have lots of company there!’

*   *   *

I wrote as soon as I could to tell everyone about my coming marriage. I wrote: ‘James and I are going to be married.’ Simply that. Then I stopped and looked at the words. There they were, in wishy-washy blue ink on rough paper. It must be true then. Somehow, it still didn’t seem real. Perhaps because James had disappeared within minutes of his proposal, I felt that it must all have happened to someone else, that I was just a spectator. We hadn’t had a chance to discuss the when and where and how. Or even the why. But someone must have believed it, because I was deluged with good wishes – from Mother, from Tom (who was scarcely ever known to write to anyone), from Grandmother and from Kate.

I didn’t tell anyone about Pansy.

Well, you are a dark horse. Mother has just told me that you’re engaged to be married to some gorgeous young man (and he must be gorgeous or why are you even thinking of marrying him?). It was a complete bombshell. We’d no idea you were even slightly serious about anyone, let alone thinking of tying the knot. You lucky thing! I always knew you’d beat me to the altar – wasn’t your favourite story ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’?

I’m simply bursting with questions. How old is he? How tall is he? What colour are his eyes? Tall, dark and distinguished, I’ll bet. Do you have a snap you could spare? I’m longing to see my future brother-in-law! Doesn’t that sound odd? I’ll be a terrific auntie to all your littlies.

Has he given you a ring yet? Choose something romantic and oriental, something that will always remind you of your exotic meeting. Oh, and make sure it’s expensive (very), while you’re at it. Useful insurance. I would. Fat chance!

We’re all so sorry that we won’t be with you on the great day, but that’s war. Grandmother feels quite done out of a marquee on the lawn – not that there’s much of a lawn left any more and a marquee in the onion bed doesn’t have the same style, somehow. (By the way, you don’t say when it is? Soon? No point in waiting, these days.) Still, a wartime wedding is frightfully romantic (though there’s rather too many of them these days to be really smart) and at least you’ll have Pansy as a friendly face from home. She’ll make a perfect bridesmaid and I shall be spared the agonies of having to wear frilly pink organza! Will you have time to have a honeymoon? Where will you go and what will you do?????

Write soon and tell all!

Love and kisses from Kate.

P.S. There’s no-one in my life at the moment. Laszlo turned out to be an absolute cad and a married cad at that. Still, a girl can hope, can’t she?

P.P.S. Guess who turned up the other day? You never will, so I’ll have to tell you. Martin! Isn’t that amazing? He was on leave from some sort of army film set-up. Mrs Buckland has moved back to Ansty for the duration – says her nerves are shot to blazes. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they – no-one ever had nerves quite like hers! He looks frightfully dashing in khaki and with three stripes up, too. He outranks both of us! We went for a quick drink together in the Green Dragon, for old times’ sake, and ended up gossiping until closing time. Ted Colebeck threatened to throw us out! I must say, he’s turned out better than you’d imagine. I do like older men. They really know how to treat a girl!

I read the letter over and over, but I read the P.P.S. more often than anything else. I tried to imagine Martin as he must be now. What would he be like? How would he have changed? A man, not a boy, married maybe – quite likely, and with children – Kate didn’t say, but she probably didn’t care, anyway. Yet the image that I conjured time and again was Martin as he had leaned over the stable door and said goodbye. I had waited and waited. But he had not come back.

And what possible difference did it make to me now? We were strangers. I didn’t suppose he’d thought of me once in all those years. All the same, I wished that Kate had not scribbled down her afterthoughts.

*   *   *

After some months of inactivity or of sporadic activity, on 18 November, preceded by two disastrous raids that achieved nothing but lost lives, Operation Crusader was launched with the aim of relieving Tobruk. The tanks of XXX Corps roared into the desert to hook upwards and destroy the enemy armour. Mainly infantry, XIII Corps was to surge along the coastal strip, avoiding enemy strong points at Halfaya and Sollum, to meet XXX Corps at Tobruk.

That was the plan. One hundred thousand men, 600 tanks, 5,000 other vehicles advanced through icy winds and driving rain. Sand turned to slush, clogging engines and bogging down vehicles to their axles. Men had to endure cold, wet grit instead of hot, dry grit working its way into their clothes, but it still caused desert sores, creeping under ridges of skin, into the most sensitive places.

By 19 November the impetus of XXX Corps had been halted by the German airfield defences at Sidi Rezegh. XIII Corps was making progress towards Tobruk, but would have been in danger if Rommel had decided to concentrate his energies there. If he had known that the battle on 23 November –
Totensonntag
– would be the bloodiest and most costly to date, he could have driven the British forces right back into Cairo.

Instead, he made an impetuous miscalculation. Pulling his forces off the attack, he led them in a flat-out gallop for the wire of the Egyptian frontier, attempting to cut the British supply lines, stretching his own supply lines beyond their limits and cutting himself off from fuel and ammunition. Overextended, he was forced to retreat westwards again.

Rommel’s ‘dash to the wire’ had given XXX Corps time to recover and, by the end of the first week in December, a week of heavy fighting around Tobruk, he was forced to begin withdrawal from Cyrenaica. The exhausted British, weakened by the diversion of reinforcements to the Far East following Japan’s aggression at Pearl Harbor, were unable to pursue and confirm their advantage.

Tobruk was relieved. Operation Crusader was publicized as a resounding success.

But Rommel was only taking a breather. During the week following 21 January, he scattered the British 1st Armoured Division, roared through Cyrenaica again, burst through our defences at Sirte and retook Benghazi.

The legend of the Desert Fox was freshly embellished.

*   *   *

‘It didn’t feel much like a victory,’ said James, ‘but they told us it was, so it must have been. To read
Parade,
you’d think we’d chased the Afrika Korps all the way back to Berlin, with their tails between their legs.’

But you survived, I thought, and you’re here. That makes it a victory.

We followed the
sufragi,
Ahmed, up dingy stairs, green below the dado, cream above, just like an English boarding-house, and waited while he unlocked a door. He led us into a dimly lit room.

‘Very nice room,’ he said.

‘Is it all right, darling?’ James asked anxiously. ‘Will you be able to stand it?’

I looked around the shadowy, over-furnished room. It had the mildewy, graveyard smell of space shut up for a long time. Louvred shutters painted stripes of light and dark across the floor. Dust motes whirled in the light and landed on huge, dark, polished pieces of furniture, ornately French – a mirrored wardrobe, a dressing table, a stuffed chair, a long cheval glass. An enormous bed, stripped and bare, took up the whole of one wall. I turned my face away from it – it was too naked, too obvious – but everywhere I looked it was reflected back. The room seemed to be full of beds.

The
sufragi
obligingly bounced the mattress up and down for us. A spring twanged. ‘Very good bed,’ Ahmed sniggered. ‘Very good bed for jig-a-jig.’

James’s face was scarlet. He busied himself with the shutter catches, making more noise than he needed to, catching his thumb in the latch. When he pushed the shutters outwards, they squealed. A flurry of dead leaves was pushed off the sill.

‘There’s a garden,’ he remarked, trying to sound more cheerful. ‘That’s a jolly useful thing to have when the hot weather comes again.’

I looked out to a sandy square. A cracked fountain stood in the middle, its basin stuffed with leaves. Creepers grew up the walls, long, long, bare bines with a tuft of growth at the top, resting for the winter or dead. The garden was full of a papery rustle.

Our landlady, Madame Bouvier, was laying out a line of saucers along the wall. From behind a bush, ears back, belly-crawling, came half a dozen mangy cats, only two still carrying a complete tail. The little woman in black, desiccated as her garden, crooned to them in Lebanese French. When she stood up, she noticed us watching. She straightened her red wig and smiled, a perky little smile, then waved, and the sun sparked coloured fire from her jewelled fingers.

There was an answering flash from the ring on my left hand – soft, pure, very yellow Arab gold, cushioning an opal, a rainbow trapped in a bubble. We’d wandered through the maze that was the bazaar of Khan el Khalili, lanes scarcely an arm’s stretch wide, dim as a cave, roofed by bright, white light. James was determined to find something worthy – as he put it – of me, if it meant he had to spend all he had. I was intent on finding something beautiful, but not outrageously expensive. In a cupboard-sized shop that smelt of mint tea and tobacco, we’d found what we were both looking for.

‘A ring for a queen,’ the seller had told us. ‘Queen Elizabeth herself has nothing more fine.’

Vee had drawn in her breath when she’d seen it. ‘Bad luck,’ she’d whispered.

‘Nonsense,’ I’d snapped, covering the opal with my other hand.

I think I will like Madame Bouvier. I don’t like her room, but I like her.

I turned to look at James. He seemed to be defeated by the awfulness of it all. But we’d looked at so many rooms already, rooms with bedbugs, elegant rooms we couldn’t afford, rooms over a brothel.

‘This’ll do very well,’ I said.

*   *   *

And so we were married, in the early spring of 1942, when the pleasant, English summer temperature of Cairo winter was rising and the sun had a sting to it again, a reminder of what was to come.

Grace borrowed a camera and snapped everyone and everything, but the film was accidentally exposed, so I have no pictures. I have to rely on memory. The camera never lies, but perhaps my memory does.

I see Vee and Grace in uniform, but with gardenias pinned to their tunics and silk stockings they had bartered for with the South African WAASes. Vee is crying and laughing and hugging and crying again, sometimes all at once. Pansy’s cheap cotton frock is straining over a bulk that looks indecent on such a tiny girl. Most of the time, she stands with her arms crossed and her shoulders hunched, as though trying to hide.

I see the padre, with khaki trousers visible below his robes, standing outside the little wooden hut he called the garrison church. I see Grace’s cousin George giving me a smacking, wet kiss on one cheek before he escorts me to the altar, and Major Prosser giving me a dry peck on the other cheek when I come back again, a married woman.

There is Madame Bouvier, still in black, but black velvet this time, stamped with gold. She is crying into a scrap of lace handkerchief and her rings still flash, though duller in the dim church.

I see me – how funny, how can I see myself? – thin and brown in a heavy, corded-silk dress copied by a Levantine dressmaker from an old copy of
Vogue,
how old I didn’t know, but certainly prewar. My strong, springy hair is veiled by the Brussels lace mantilla worn by Madame Bouvier to mass. It smells of her, of patchouli and tuberose and – surely not – cats? From sleeves that come to a point below the wrist protrude my rough, brown hands, but they are camouflaged beneath a bouquet of white lilac. I look unnaturally elegant, rather withdrawn, rather puzzled, as though I can’t quite remember how I’ve got myself into this situation.

I see James standing before the altar, young and grave in perfectly pressed uniform, blond-brown hair caught in a halo of light, the boy warrior. I see the sudden blaze of joy that lights his face, brighter than Madame Bouvier’s rings, brighter than I could ever deserve, as he turns to see me coming towards him.