Making It Up (16 page)

He was at the rear of the patrol, urging on stragglers. When a grenade exploded only yards away, they flung themselves down while the sergeant fired a few bursts with the bren gun at their invisible pursuers. Then they got up and plunged with new commitment over the last hundred yards toward the road—a chaos of vehicles and men. They gunfire was intensifying; it was clear that they were under attack from the hillsides both behind and beyond.

The road was a wide, rough track, busy with jeeps, trucks, and Centurion tanks. An officer was directing the men pouring down from the higher ground. They were to head south by any means available: “Hitch a ride if you can; otherwise, just keep moving.” The pass ahead was held by the Ulsters, and the tanks were returning fire from the road, but the enemy was attacking the withdrawal : “Keep your eyes open, and take cover if you need to.”

He heard the officer, looked at the cluttered road, the hostile hills, and thought: Where? He saw wounded men sitting and lying by the roadside, bloody field dressings on heads or limbs. He saw dead men. He saw tracer from an enemy machine-gun position on the opposite hillside. And then willy-nilly he became a part of this disheveled rout, men straggling ahead in groups, some of them helping out a wounded companion, vehicles crashing along the rutted dusty road, tanks with guns blazing.

He kept stumbling, made unsteady by exhaustion. The roadside was littered with debris—equipment that had been jettisoned, the occasional burnt-out vehicle. And when he looked back he realized with an icy twinge of fear that the enemy were clearly visible—the whole place crawling with figures, running along the ridges, leaping down the slopes.

Any truck that passed him was already filled with men, and equally the tanks that were also operating as evacuation vehicles, with men clinging to the hulls as they lurched over the uneven ground. The sergeant, walking beside him, said caustically, “Like Newcastle in the fucking rush hour. And we've missed the bloody bus. Have a smoke, sir.” They paused to light cigarettes, and as they did so both heard the whine of a shell and flung themselves into the ditch that ran parallel to the road.

He lay facedown in damp reeds as the explosion rocked the ground. At the same instant, something hit his leg, slamming into it like a kick in the calf on a football pitch. When he sat up, gingerly, he saw smoke billowing from an upturned jeep, and a body on the road. He looked down; blood was seeping through his trousers. His leg felt entirely numb—not painful, just an absolute numbness, and he could only move it with difficulty, as though he were trying to haul someone else's limb.

He looked for the sergeant; he was still lying facedown in the ditch. He crawled over to him, and then he saw that the back of the man's head was one sickening mess of blood and bone.

He tried to stand up, and could not. He was weak and dizzy. He knew that he should do something about the wound, and started to fumble for a field dressing. A truck loaded with men hurtled past, and another tank. A mortar exploded farther back along the road; the whole place was a cacophony of noise. He found the dressing and pulled his trouser leg up. And then someone was squatting down beside him: “Can you walk?”

He shook his head.

“Here, let's have a look.” An Irish voice; a lieutenant from the Ulsters. The lieutenant bound up the wound, which was hurting now, a deep throbbing pain. “It's not too bad, but it's enough to get you out of this. You'll be going home, my friend. Just hang on—there's a carrier coming through behind with other wounded. They'll pick you up. Good luck.”

He saw the man go, running to join other hurrying figures. He sat in the ditch, and became aware of more scurrying men, coming down from the hillsides, descending upon the road, dozens of them, scores, and he realized that these were not their own men; this was the enemy, these were Chinese infantry.

Two Chinese leaped across the ditch, only yards away, glanced at him, and ran past. He groped for his pistol, and realized that he no longer had it; he must have lost it when he and the sergeant flung themselves into the ditch. A tank came roaring up and he saw to his astonishment that Chinese soldiers were swarming onto the hull. Others were pouring after it up the road. The tank fired, two of the Chinese fell, the rest ducked down beside the road.

He tried again to stand, and found that he could, though pain shot through his leg. He began to walk, uncertainly: “. . . just keep moving.” An Ulsterman with his arm in a sling caught up with him and they moved along side by side. Chinese soldiers ran past. He heard another tank approaching, and the burst of fire coming from it. The Ulsterman said, “Christ, better get down,” and they dived for the ditch. There was searing pain from his leg, and he must have blacked out. When he surfaced, there were two Chinese standing over him, one of them holding a pistol.

He saw the Chinese gesture that they should get up, and knew that he would not be going home, not now, perhaps not at all.

A
few years ago, I met up with a woman I had known when we
were both young. She had gone to work in the United States when she was twenty, had married there, and never came back. Now, she was a California matron, with children and grandchildren, her voice and mannerisms entirely American except that here and there was just a hint, a flavor, of the English girl that she had been—like those elderly GI brides one sometimes sees on television programs, reminiscing against a backdrop of their former selves lined up on the quayside over half a century ago. Looking at her, listening to her, it was as though she had undergone some metamorphosis. She had not just grown older; she had shed one skin and assumed another.

After I left university, I worked for a couple of years as research assistant to the then professor of race relations at Oxford. One day, he was visited by an American academic colleague. Maybe they ran out of professional small talk, or maybe my employer had other commitments—anyway, he brought this man into my office after a while with the suggestion that I take him for a conducted tour of Oxford. Fine by me; it was one of those golden October days—far preferable to be out and about rather than moldering at a desk. I did the visitor proud: a choice selection of colleges, the Bodleian, the Ashmolean,
Christ Church meadow, the river. He was entranced. We got on famously. I was twenty-two; he was—oh,
old,
forty at least, an avuncular figure. Let's be clear, this is not a tale of lost romance. Over a farewell drink in the Mitre he asked what I had in mind for the future—noting, presumably, that my present job was a pretty dead-end affair. I think I said something about wanting to travel at some point. He gave me his card: “My university has postgraduate programs that might appeal to you. Let me know if you're interested.”

The first time I crossed the Atlantic, and woke to birdsong that was wonderfully
wrong,
I knew that evolution is true. I lay listening to the dawn sounds of a New England morning—blue jays, mourning doves, chickadees—and these were like some significant refraction of my Oxfordshire mornings with their wood pigeons, blackbirds, and robins—like, and yet quite unlike. I knew then that first hint of this alluring alternative universe. I have known the same sensation in Australia, once again, waking into the Wonderland of alien bird calls and being filled with wild exhilaration, a euphoric response to this diverse world.

 

She said, “We're almost there. Another mile or two, I guess.”

Ben was driving. Carol had the map spread out on her lap. They had progressed from motorways to major roads into this thicket of lanes, the car now squeezed by greenery as though they wound into the land itself. It was the first trip to England in eighteen months, the first since her mother had died, the first in which she had no parent to visit, no anchor. She was forty-nine, and she thought that this parentlessness felt as though you had gone to sea in a small boat and found yourself out of sight of any shore. There was no longer that distant, reassuring shape. Nothing now between you and the horizon.

Ben switched off the radio; he kept putting it on for the news. “Do you think Mrs. Thatcher is mad? I mean that. Clinically unhinged?”

The backdrop to this trip was the Falklands War. In hotel rooms, in the hired car, the disembodied babble of politicians, of government spokesmen, of Parliament, traveled with them daily. They knew by heart the names of ships in the British task force; they sounded like the language of hymns—
Endeavour, Invincible,
Fearless
. The Argentine aircraft carrier was called
The Twenty-fifth of May
.

“If she is, then the rest of the Cabinet are too.”

He patted her knee. “I don't hold you responsible for your compatriots.”

She said, “You better not. Anyway, I'm not sure that they are, anymore.”

He was her second husband, an economist at Harvard. They had been together for five years. Her first marriage, from which the children came, had melted away, diminishing from initial happiness long ago when he and she were young, through discontent to an ultimate indifference; both had been glad to step aside, without much rancor. The children were now in their early twenties and busy with their own lives. She had met Ben a year after the divorce, and knew a contentment with him that sometimes made them both incredulous. He too was on a second shift.

She did not know what to expect, at the end of these twisting lanes, when eventually they reached the house. She had not seen Aunt Margaret for years, except briefly at her mother's funeral. Let alone Uncle Clive. Colonel Clive Baseley. She stared out of the car window into the intimacy of hedgebanks and trees whose branches sometimes whipped the glass.

Each time she saw this country again it seemed so small. So neat, so dapper, so miniature. The little hedged fields, the dinky villages. It had surely shrunk? She had never seen it thus when she was young; it had been quite normal then, ordinary, expected. Now, it was a constant surprise. She found herself gazing in mild astonishment at landscapes that were eerily familiar, but also quite alien—those church towers, the flowery facades of pubs, terraces of tiny houses.

Ben had been amused, on their first visit together, penetrating parts that he had never seen on his previous brief scholarly visits, attending some conference or plunging into libraries. He had remembered that Mark Twain comment on the English countryside: “Too pretty to be left out in the rain.” Suburban landscape made him laugh: “Why does everyone fence themselves off from everyone else?”—staring at the ranks of firmly segmented front gardens. They thought of the communal greensward of their own prosperous neighborhood back home.

“But look at all the roses,” she said. And yes, the whole place was rampant, explosive with silken blooms.

In earlier years, when she had come back with her young first husband, then with babies, then with growing children, it felt each time as though she visited her own past. This place was not now, but then—the then of her childhood and adolescence, of her early youth. There it still was, a landscape that seemed to be less and less connected with her. She had left it behind, but it continued, impervious to her defection. It carried on, with its red London buses and its familiar accents and its Sunday roasts and its cups of tea; it did not seem to realize that it was somehow stuck, that it existed in some other time frame. At first, this had been endearing; she drank it all in, eagerly identifying sights and practices that she had half forgotten. They were comforting; they seemed to put her in touch with a lost version of herself.

And then, over time, something happened. What had been engaging and reassuring became vaguely threatening, even hostile. It was she who was out of step, who could not cope with changed circumstances. At some point there had been a subtle shift in the relationship; where once she had been the benign nostalgic visitor, the lamb back in the fold, now she was the outsider, someone who received the polite treatment meted out to any transient. An invisible door had closed, and she did not know if it was she who had conjured it up or those others in that now-distanced place through which she moved, a world in which things were done differently.