A Good Clean Fight (15 page)

Kerr was rational and intelligent and he resented being bullied by his senses when there was no obvious cause, so he consulted the family doctor. “Olfactory hallucinations,” his doctor said with the utter confidence of a man who, by lucky chance, has read all about it in a new book only the night before. “Some people hear things, some see things, others taste things. You smell 'em. Perfectly harmless.”

“Good God,” Kerr said, weakly.

“Jolly useful in your line of work, I should think.”

Kerr was a solicitor and he defended a lot of criminals.
Alleged
criminals. Like all solicitors he was an officer of the court with an obligation to the truth. If a defendant came to him and said, “This is the story I'm going to tell in court,” Kerr refused to represent him. He was a serious young man and a good lawyer, and word soon got around that if you wanted Mr. Kerr to defend you it was smart to assure him you were telling the truth.

As a result Kerr made a living and heard a lot of lies.

Small lies didn't worry him. It was the gross distortions
of fact, the lies that stood truth on its head, which made him angry. He usually knew them when he heard them: most people are bad liars. And quite soon he began to notice this sudden whiff of stinking fish in his office as a new client told his tale. He trusted his judgment. When the case came to court, Kerr had a way of slightly lowering an eyebrow, or sometimes he might put a slightly different inflection in his voice. It was enough. The magistrates knew. He knew they knew. He had done his duty by his client and by the court.

Came the war. As soon as he put on khaki the olfactory hallucinations stopped. Kerr had almost forgotten what bad fish smelt like until he sat listening to Jack Lampard describe the deaths of Corporal Harris, stabbed by a German sentry, and Lieutenant Waterman, bombed by Stukas. The stench of dishonesty was in his nostrils again. He actually recoiled an inch, so great was the shock; and then he disguised the movement with a sympathetic nod.

After Lampard had gone, Kerr sat and wondered what to do. He could always question Mike Dunn or Corky Gibbon, perhaps even Sergeant Davis or Corporal Pocock. What if their answers proved that Lampard had been lying? What then? If he took no action it was all a waste of effort. If he took action, the trust between Lampard and his patrol was badly damaged. Obviously something peculiar had happened out there in the blue. On the other hand, the raid on Barce airfield had been highly successful: aerial reconnaissance showed many burned-out wrecks. So Lampard had told the truth about
that.
Kerr tossed Lampard's report into his out-tray and put the matter out of his mind.

But it refused to go; it drifted back and made a quiet nuisance of itself. He opened a desk drawer and took out a battered copy of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
He found the story of the battle at Tefila, with T. E. Lawrence's account of how he got a DSO on the strength of a report
he himself had written “mainly for effect.” Someone had underlined Lawrence's final remark:
We should have more bright breasts in the Army if each man was able without witness to write out his own dispatch.
Kerr grunted. He took the report from the out-tray and stuffed it in his briefcase.

*   *   *

It took Jack Lampard ten minutes to walk from Captain Kerr's office to Mrs. Waterman's address. He hated every minute of it. Unpleasant people kept trying to sell him things: fly whisks, Arab chewing gum, sunglasses, perfume, shaving brushes, cigarettes, hand-tinted pornography and twenty other sorts of rubbish. They ran backward in front of him, shouting upward, they smiled with broken and blackened teeth, they shoved and kicked each other and, worst of all, they
touched
him, pawing his arms and stroking his shoulders until their dirty little hands infuriated him and he struck out. But they were almost always too quick. He hit only one, an insistent, whining cripple whose nose had been half eaten away by disease. Lampard's knuckles smacked his nose and sent him sprawling, and Lampard strode on, feeling stained and contaminated.

If the Arab street-salesmen were bad, the general noise was worse. Cairo was always clogged with traffic. Cars with broken exhausts revved and roared as they tried to fight their way through tangles of foul-tempered camels and overloaded donkeys and stinking motor-bikes and people, people, always too many people, all of them shouting to make themselves heard above the racket of the shouting of the rest. Those with horns or hooters or whistles used them ceaselessly. Radios blared. Lampard didn't like noise, filth or tradesmen at the best of times. Cairo was loud and squalid and a constant pest. He clenched his teeth and thought of the purity of the desert.

Mrs. Waterman took a long time answering the doorbell of her flat. When she did she was barefoot, her black hair was tousled and she was wearing a white cotton frock misbuttoned down the front. “I beg your pardon,” Lampard said brusquely. He hadn't wanted to come in the first place.

She held the door handle while she rubbed the back of her right calf with her left foot. “You're the best-looking man I've seen all day,” she said, “but then you're the only man I've seen all day so don't get excited about it.” Her voice was Home Counties English, pleasant enough but with a touch of huskiness that added strength. She looked twenty-three.

“Captain Lampard. I've come—”

“Don't tell me why you've come, I shan't remember and I honestly don't care.” She walked away, arms outstretched for balance because she was on the balls of her feet. It brought out the best in her legs. “I've already had the chaplain and a man from some benevolent fund and a rather grim type who asked if Tony kept a diary and two army widows who seemed to want to form a
club
, God help us, so you see I've been thoroughly taken care of. Debriefed. Isn't that the word?”

Lampard felt awkward, left standing in the doorway, so he came in and shut the door. “Yes. Debriefed.”

She sat on a couch and tucked her legs under her. “Very silly word,” she said. “You couldn't debrief me if you tried, could you?”

“Couldn't I?” He found a chair.

“Certainly not. I haven't worn any briefs since the really hot weather began. It was one of the things that used to make Tony very nervous. One of the many things.”

“Oh?” That reply seemed inadequate, so he said, “Your husband was a brave and conscientious officer, Mrs. Waterman. He will be much missed.”

“Not by me.” It was said flatly.

“I see.” But all that Lampard saw was her good looks. Although she didn't smile, hadn't smiled since she opened the door, Mrs. Waterman—gray eyes, clear white skin, neat, square-boned features—was attractive. “This has been a very painful time for you, Mrs. Waterman,” he said.

“Look, if you can't talk like a normal human being you might as well buzz off. In the past few days I've heard enough platitudes to stuff a sofa. What's this?”

Lampard, now thoroughly rattled, had got up and given her his letter. “I've brought it, so you might as well read it,” he said. He went past the couch and stood at the french windows.

She read the letter. “You make him sound like Lawrence of Arabia. Tony wasn't like Lawrence of Arabia.
Florence
of Arabia, perhaps. Old Flo. Dear old Flo.” She stood up and gave him back the letter. “Tony was a bit of an old woman, really.”

This angered Lampard. “The man was a gallant comrade,” he said sharply, “and a splendid servant of king and country.”

“And a lousy husband.”

Lampard tore the letter in half, and then in half again.

“Bet you can't do it three times,” she said. He tore the letter again. “Now give me the pieces,” she said.

“Go to hell,” Lampard said.

She grabbed his hand and tried to pry the fingers open, but he squeezed harder until she suddenly stooped and bit him on the wrist. “You bitch!” he shouted in a curious thin, high-pitched voice; but his grip had relaxed and now she had the pieces of paper. “Happy New Year!” she cried, and flung them in the air. “Goodbye, Tony, it wasn't nice while it lasted, so thank God it didn't last long.”

Blood was running down Lampard's fingers. “Well I'm damned,” he whispered.

“That looks nasty,” she said. “You're lucky I'm a nurse. Come this way.”

Grudgingly he followed her into the bathroom, where she was filling the basin with hot water. She added antiseptic and ordered: “Stick your hand in there and don't move it.” He obeyed. They stood and looked at each other in the mirror for the best part of a minute. “I don't know why you're so angry,” she said. “I didn't kill him.”

“It took me two hours to write that letter,” Lampard said.

She pulled down his head and kissed him on the mouth. He took his hand from the water. “You'll probably die,” she said. “You know what nurses' teeth are like. Riddled with plague.”

“In that case I might as well die in bed.”

They spent much of the day in bed. He bled a little onto the sheets, but not much.

Before he left, he asked: “Why on earth did you marry Tony if you didn't like him?”

“Because he kept asking,” she said, “and I got sick of saying no.”

*   *   *

In April 1942 the British were losing badly, the Americans were still stunned by Pearl Harbor and the Russians were in the most terrible mess. It was, as has been said, Hitler's finest hour.

His allies the Japanese weren't doing badly, either. They had just conquered an empire that reached from the boundaries of India to within striking distance of Australia, and they had done it all in three months, at virtually no cost. They had taken Hong Kong in December, Malaya in January and Singapore in February. The fall of Singapore was the biggest single surrender in British military history. The Japanese also sank a battleship, the
Prince of Wales
, and a battle-cruiser, the
Repulse;
destroyed an entire Anglo-Dutch fleet; and sent a fleet of their own marauding
into the Indian ocean. This was not good for the prestige of the white man.

In Cairo, that prestige had already taken several hard knocks. Three months earlier, in January 1942, the new and exciting German general, Rommel, had surprised the British with a sudden assault that sent them scrambling back through Libya until they had lost two-thirds of all the land gained in
their
previous offensive. Rommel was now at the Gazala Line, getting his breath back, but nobody expected him to stay there long. Egypt was his goal; Egypt and the Canal. Britain would fight, of course, but Britain's recent record was not encouraging.

In 1941 British forces had failed to save Greece—their withdrawal was another Dunkirk—and then failed to hold Crete. The Royal Navy had lost command of the Mediterranean. Italian frogmen sank two battleships in Alexandria harbor and German U-boats sank the carrier
Ark Royal
and the battleship
Barham.
Malta was under siege, battered daily by the Luftwaffe.

Meanwhile, there were no lessons to be learned from the poor bloody Russians. At the start of 1942 their generals had launched several counter-offensives. Stalin knew no flexibility; his orders were to advance at all costs. The attacks failed disastrously. This left the German army dominant. It besieged Leningrad in the north, it was poised to take Moscow in the center—at one stage German troops reached the tram terminus and actually saw the golden domes of the Kremlin—and it threatened the oilfields of the Caucasus in the south. A glance at the map showed that, once he had the Caucasus, Hitler could swing south through Persia to Iraq and deprive Britain of an enormous amount of oil. It was no daydream. Iraq had rebelled against British control in the summer of 1941, and British forces had had to be sent from Egypt to put down the revolt.

All these developments were watched with great interest
by those Egyptians who could spare the time from toil (probably no more than one in a hundred). Egypt was neutral. The British were there strictly according to treaty agreements. Thanks to the war, some Egyptians were making fat profits, but that didn't mean the British were especially welcome and they certainly weren't universally popular. It even happened that when street demonstrations took place, the name of Rommel got shouted.

In these troubled times there was not a lot the British embassy could do to enhance prestige, but it did what it could. It held a reception to show the world that, contrary to rumor, everything was business as usual. Black tie and decorations.

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Lester got an invitation. He was in a foul temper and didn't want to go. She did. They went, and when they arrived at the embassy gates he had forgotten to bring the invitation.

“Bonehead,” Mrs. Lester said, and didn't care who heard.

The embassy official was polite but unshakeable and, with some Royal Marines behind him, certainly immovable. Entry was by printed invitation only. No exceptions. A matter of security, you understand.

They stood aside and watched a stream of guests go in while Lester hunted through pockets he had already hunted through. “Why didn't you ask me if I had it when we left?” he complained.

“Same reason I didn't brush your hair and take you to the bathroom.”

He gave up. “It's no damn good.”

“Pure Freud. You never wanted to come, and now you've got your wish.”

“Shut up and let me think.”

“News flash: Henry Lester thinks. The world holds its breath.”

A white Bentley pulled up with no more sound than the
purring of a well-fed tiger and the chauffeur went around to open the rear door. Lester hustled forward. The man who got out was about forty, sleek as a shark in a white dinner jacket, but with a chubby face, cheeks like polished apples and wide-awake eyes. He wore a discreet row of medal ribbons. Lester said: “Listen, you don't know me, I'm Henry Lester, special correspondent, Chicago
News
, but I wonder—”