Thunder in the Blood Page 11

  ‘Rory and Ruth’s place,’ I said when she answered. ‘What’s the number?’

  Rory came to the flat. I remember thinking what grown-up clothes he was wearing, corduroy trousers, heavy brown brogues, shirt and tie. I let him in and offered coffee, but he shook his head and sat on his own in the living room while I got dressed. More than anything else I wanted to talk, but he had Ruth in the car downstairs and he was keen to get me back to their place. Back home, we’d all have brunch together. Then we could have a proper sort-out. I nodded, quite numb. It sounded very sensible. Not Rory’s style at all.

  We drove across London, down to Greenwich, where Rory was renting a top-floor flat in a big Victorian terrace. The flat was small and cosy and I spent most of the weekend sitting in a puddle of sunshine in the living room, the windows wide open, gazing across the rooftops towards Blackheath, trying to make some sense of what was going on inside my head. Ruth was with me a lot of the time. Her concern was scrupulous. She sat for hours in a straight-backed wicker chair beside me, holding my hand in hers, encouraging me to talk, scream, rage, weep, whatever it took to empty out the poisons and make me better again.

  Part of me, utterly detached, listened to her voice, a low monotone, unrelenting. She’d learned her psychology from books. She was word-perfect on the latest theories. She was caring and articulate, but it was like being part of a seminar back at Cambridge, the careful application of logic and reason and a great deal of reading. There were ways to get me better, ways I could help myself. I nodded and grunted and said how grateful I was, and once or twice I looked beyond her, seeing Rory in the shadows, sprawled on the floor, half listening, his nose in the paper. Once, just once, he looked up and winked, the therapeutic high point of that long, exhausting weekend.

  I returned to Fulham on Sunday evening in a taxi. Rory and Ruth had an invite for a dinner party in Docklands. They offered to cancel, but I said I wouldn’t hear of it. Rory walked me down to the waiting cab. Saying goodbye, I could see Ruth up at the window, looking down, her arms crossed, watching Rory.

  ‘Take care,’ he said. ‘Stay in touch.’

  I nodded, standing on tiptoe, kissing him on the cheek.

  ‘I will,’ I said, as I got in the cab.

  The following week came and went. A doctor’s note spared me from Curzon House and I had a number of conversations with Beth Alloway. At first, she sounded remarkably sane. She’d left hospital and returned to the cottage. Her husband’s suicide had come as no surprise and Laura seemed to be coping. The word suicide was hers. During the third conversation, I asked her how she was so certain.

  ‘He’d talked about it,’ she said, ‘often.’

  ‘He came to see you? In the hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said that life was impossible. He said he was the meat in the sandwich.’

  ‘Whose sandwich?’

  There was a silence at this point. Then I asked the question again.

  ‘Yours,’ she said at last. ‘Your sandwich. And those Iraqis. Actually, he never told me that much but I’m not stupid. I can tell. Your lot wouldn’t give up. And neither would they. Something was bound to go wrong. He knew it was.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But something did go wrong?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘The week before he died, before they found him. Something upset him, something bad.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say.’

  I nodded, remembering the DTI messages dancing across my computer screen, the Customs and Excise heavies in action in the Midlands. So far, to my knowledge, they’d made only one visit. Maybe Clive Alloway was next on their list. I went back to Beth at this point, trying to pick up the conversation again, trying to nail down the connections, but she told me she didn’t want to know.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she kept saying, ‘and gone.’

  I tried to apologize again, to find some form of words, but Beth had already put the phone down and so I sat there, staring at the floor, wondering whether I’d got it all out of perspective. Northern Ireland had certainly taught me a great deal about casualties, about the umpteen victims of political violence, but it had all seemed somehow different across the water. There, like it or not, we were fighting a war. In war, you expected bloodshed, grief, loss. Back in the UK, there was no such war. All Clive Alloway had tried to do was make a living. And now, thanks no doubt to the national interest, he was dead.

  Mid-summer is a blur. My doctor was kind enough to extend my sick note. I phoned work and told them I wouldn’t be in for a bit. Then I drew £2000 from my compensation and flew to Paris. I booked into a modest hotel on the sunnier side of Montmartre and spent the days walking the streets. I knew the city well from my student days, and each morning I set off with no plan whatsoever, content to surrender to the kind of existential half-life I’d only ever read about in books. When I was hungry, I stopped to eat. When I was tired, I ducked into a bar, or sprawled on the grass in the Bois de Boulogne, or found myself an empty bench on one of the quais down by the Seine. In the evenings, I went to the cinema, sitting anonymously in the back, the storylines a mystery, the dialogue pure gibberish.

  I returned to London at the end of July, no better, no worse, just as confused as ever. Deep down I think I now knew what I wanted, but three weeks in Paris pretending to be Albert Camus had taught me that getting it was another matter entirely. The priest, bless him, had only been half-right. Maybe in God’s good time. Maybe never.

  Rory turned up the day before the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. He arrived, unannounced, at seven in the evening. He was wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. I was immensely pleased to see him and I told him so. He kissed me at the open door and ruffled my hair. He smelled, I remember, slightly desiccated: that distinctive Whitehall smell that goes with shiny linoleum, mushroom walls and the dusty, bomb-proof net curtains I knew they favoured at the MOD.

  I took his briefcase, sat him down and poured him a large Scotch. I’d had the bottle in the kitchen for weeks. I hadn’t touched it. Rory looked up at me, his glass raised. Like me, he was grinning.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, ‘your very good health.’

  I offered to cook for him but he said he wouldn’t hear of it. He knew of a place in Bayswater. He’d been there a couple of times. It served southern Indian food, wholly vegetarian, and he thought I’d like it. I felt, at a stroke, newborn. I didn’t know why he’d come and I wasn’t about to ask. All that mattered was that he was there. That lovely priest again. Thank God.

  The restaurant was empty. We sat at a table at the back, the dishes of Chana Dhall and Mushroom Dupiaza garlanded with onion and fresh coriander. For a while, we talked about Ruth. She had, it turned out, gone away on a conference. Rory thought it might have been to do with something called Gestalt therapy.

  ‘She was very helpful to me,’ I said, ‘last month.’

  ‘I know. I was there.’

  ‘It was kind of her. All that time she spent. I must have bored her witless.’

  ‘Not at all. She showed me the notes.’

  ‘Notes?’

  I stared at him and he grinned back. Ruth had written me up. In two short days, I’d become a case history.

  ‘What of?’ I said ‘What was the matter with me?’

  ‘Affective depression.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Do you think she’s right?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He reached across and touched me lightly on the face. ‘I just want you to get better.’

  Afterwards, we walked back to Fulham. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the grass in Kensington Gardens newly mown, couples strolling in the warm darkness. At home, in the flat, I made a pot of coffee and laced it with more Scotch. Rory had taken off his jacket and was flat on his belly on the carpet next door, sorting through my collection of CDs. His ta
ste in music, like his whistle, was dreadful.

  ‘No Neil Diamond?’ he said vaguely. ‘Nothing half-decent?’

  I knelt beside him with the coffees. He had a long, narrow body, very wiry, thin hips. I’d seen him once in the shower, after a windsurfing expedition to a club in north Cornwall. Like me, he had red hair, though in his case it was slightly sandier. I touched his arm, indicating the mug of coffee. He rolled over and looked up at me.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘how are you?’

  I thought about the question, rocking back on my heels. I hadn’t felt so peaceful for weeks. Months. It might have been an illusion, a happy conjunction of good food, Kingfisher beer and the company of this glorious man, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like something entirely different. Something I’d never felt before.

  ‘I love you,’ I said simply.

  Rory said nothing for a moment. His expression, thoughtful, mellow, gave nothing away. Then he reached up for me, pulling me gently down, until I was lying on top of him, nose to nose. Then he kissed my eyelids, one after the other.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  About three in the morning, I woke up in the tiny bed curled against the wall, my back in Rory’s lap, his arms around me, the warmth of his breath against my cheek. We’d made love past midnight, Carmen on the CD player next door, the curtains drawn back, the wall stencilled with the lights of passing cars. It had been slow and tender and richly physical, the promised land I’d dreamed about in Paris, and afterwards I’d bent over him, blowing lightly, my lips an inch from his flesh, cooling him, caressing him, rousing him again, lapping and nibbling, taking him in, pleasing him. Then, he’d said very little, watching me, his eyes half closed. Now, up on one elbow, he traced a line across my face with his fingertips. When he got to the scar, he paused, feeling me flinch beneath him.

  ‘You were lucky,’ he said, ‘believe it or not.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so.’

  ‘Why?’ I frowned. ‘How come?’

  He smiled down at me, his fingers behind my ear now, tracing the knobbly stitchwork. Then he bent low and kissed my ear, his voice the barest whisper.

  ‘I was there,’ he said, ‘in the car behind.’

  9

  If I needed a coda for Rory’s extraordinary admission, more evidence that the world was going mad, I didn’t have to wait very long. Early next morning, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and within hours Curzon House was gripped by war fever.

  While Iraqi tanks rolled south, our bosses on the top floor cannoned around Whitehall, desperate to secure a piece of the action. The issues were clear cut. The Iraqis were guilty of naked aggression. They’d violated treaties, spilled blood, seized an entire country under the thinnest of pretexts. They had one of the biggest armies in the world and they were plainly prepared to use it. Unless they were stopped now, then God knows where it might end. Saudi Arabia? Dubai? Weybridge? Our bosses eyed the subversives files, the ones we kept on suspect foreign nationals, muttering darkly about the dangers of a fifth column, of betrayal from within, and someone deep in the government machine thought we must have a point, and lifted a phone and told us to get on with it.

  Down on the second floor, I and some of my colleagues watched this tiny sub-plot unfold. We all knew the files had been neglected and were way out of date. One or two of us had even written memos on the subject, months before. But headlines about international rape and pictures of marauding tanks do funny things to people and the premium was suddenly on action. Arresting dozens of luckless Palestinians was hardly going to stop Saddam in his tracks, but under the circumstances it seemed the best we could do. Later, in a series of discreet court hearings, the vast majority of the guys we picked up were shown to be completely innocent. Some, it turned out, were even members of the Iraqi underground, exiles opposed to Saddam. But at the time, none of that mattered. War is a narcotic. We lost our heads, our judgement. And even then, some of us knew it.

  Not that I cared. The first I heard of events in the Gulf was Rory standing naked by the bed, a cup of tea in one hand, my ancient transistor radio in the other. He was listening to the breaking wave of news reports with obvious relish. For the first time since the Falklands, there appeared to be a real opportunity for him to get shot.

  While he looked for his underwear, I tried to pin him down. ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Ruth’s back.’

  ‘Early? Before she expects you home?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Lunchtime?’ I smiled. ‘Here?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Only maybe?’

  ‘Aye.’ He nodded at the radio. ‘Hostilities permitting.’

  He phoned me at Curzon House later in the day. The news, he said, was bad. There were no plans for mobilization, no immediate prospect of the dispatch of British troops. Worse still, if and when the UN got its act together and the prime minister agreed to contribute to some kind of Task Force, there seemed little likelihood of Royal Marine involvement. You didn’t waste your precious commandos on the Iraqis’ tanks. Instead, you sent heavy units of your own.

  ‘Seventh Armoured,’ Rory said in disgust, ‘and the bloody Crabs.’ The Crabs were the RAF, another of Rory’s pet hates.

  We met that evening outside Green Park tube station. He kissed me on the lips, chuckling.

  ‘Home?’ I said.

  ‘Home,’ he agreed.

  We went home to Fulham. I’d picked up some groceries at lunchtime – cooked Tandoori chicken, potato salad, a bottle of red wine, stuff I knew he liked – but we left most of it in the kitchen, taking the Rioja and two glasses to bed. After we’d made love, a little drunk, I rolled over and asked him about Londonderry again. We’d talked the night before, but I needed to be certain.

  ‘You’d been out there for a while?’

  ‘Eight months. I was in barracks. They gave me a room of my own. At Bessbrook.’

  I nodded. Bessbrook was a big army base outside Newry. It lay in a hollow behind coils of barbed wire and big thick walls, an old converted linen mill. I’d been in and out dozens of times, sometimes by car, sometimes by helicopter. Looking back, it seemed odd that Rory had been there too.

  ‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d known.’

  Rory shook his head. ‘Couldn’t,’ he said, ‘and wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Unfair on you. Unfair on me. Plus I was Mr Invisible. Meant to be.’

  ‘DIS?’

  He smiled at me, not answering, tipping the bottle to his lips and swallowing the last of the Rioja. When I kissed him, he tasted ripe, his tongue in my mouth, his hands pulling me on to him again. I resisted, pushing him away.

  ‘But you knew? You knew about the Londonderry operation? Padraig MacElwaine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Coincidence?’

  ‘Not really. We had an interest in the man. He’d been on to us before. It came to nothing and we’d had our doubts ever since. That’s why …’ He shrugged.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why we suggested cover. Four-five Commando were still finishing their tour in Londonderry. I knew some very good guys in the unit. We needed men on the ground, proper stake-outs. We thought we knew where MacElwaine would be taking you. So I was put in charge.’

  I nodded, listening, running a finger across his chest. Last night he’d told me he’d seen everything at the hotel. He’d watched Padraig pull the gun, he’d followed the Escort out of the car park and he hadn’t interfered because he knew exactly what was going to happen next. An informer of his own, a man he said he trusted, had sworn blind that I’d be taken back to the city. The man had two addresses in the Bog-side, one a flat, one a terraced house. Both had been carefully picketed by marksmen hidden in a variety of vehicles. I’d be taken to one address or the other, and before anything terminal happened to me, the trap would be sprung.

  In the on-going war, it would be a small but satisfying skirmish. Pad
raig off the plot. Three or four others off the plot. Another reason for the Provo High Command to start asking each other some of the harder questions. But it hadn’t turned out that way at all. Instead, the Escort had turned left, heading north, and Rory had found himself in enemy territory, no assets, no fall-back plan, just three terrorists, a couple of handguns and a woman he knew he loved. I looked at him.

  ‘Tricky,’ I said.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘You should have let it develop. That’s what the book says.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No.’ He nodded. ‘You’re right. I didn’t.’

  I put my head on his chest, feeling his hand on my head, his fingers in my hair. I could hear the whine of the Escort’s engine again, Padraig crouched behind the wheel, the smell of roll-ups, scraps of conversation from the back, the harsh Belfast accents.

  ‘I didn’t want you to get hurt,’ Rory said quietly.

  I looked up at him. ‘Great,’ I said.

  ‘It could have been worse.’

  ‘I know. I could have died.’

  ‘Worse than that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rory nodded. ‘MacElwaine had a nickname. In the Bog-side they call him Tupper.’ He paused. ‘You wouldn’t have known that, the way the operation was set up.’

  I frowned. This was new. This, he’d never told me.

  ‘Tupper?’ I said blankly.

  ‘The man had a reputation. With the women. Liked to help himself. Famous for it.’

  I nodded, absorbing this new piece of intelligence, thinking again about the meal at the hotel, the big meaty hands picking at the Dover sole, how plausible he’d sounded, and how naïve I’d been to trust him.

  ‘My lot knew all this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And still sent me?’

  ‘Of course.’ He shrugged. ‘Given the arrangements our end, it should have been routine.’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I nearly got killed.’

  ‘I know,’ he said again, soothing me. ‘And now we’re here.’