The Corporal's Wife (2013) (50 page)

Wally murmured that it was a pretty bloody stupid place for a phone conference. Where would he rather be? At the front door, welcoming his bloody kids and waving off the ex-wife with her new shag to Travelodge. Where would Ralph rather be?

Mikey said, remembering he had once been a soldier, ‘I confirm your instruction. Quote, “cut and run”, unquote. I’m repeating your observation, quote, “Your lives and your freedom are the only matter of importance. You should dump everything surplus and make best speed.’’ Unquote. Am I hearing this right?’

Ralph would rather be in a house in mid-Wales that needed a new roof.

Zach thought they were close to an edge. He thought Farideh was crying quietly beside him, that the cold was brutal and— He was jolted.

Mikey’s voice: ‘You don’t want Foxtrot? You don’t need her? Quote, “surplus to requirements” unquote. Yes, she’s slowing us. Yes, we expect it to be difficult, closer to the border. Yes, I can drop her. Might leave her at a bus stop. I’m sure Foxtrot’ll think of something. Quote, “Not, any longer, our problem”, unquote. I reckon the buses round here are pretty regular . . . Been a pleasure speaking to you, and a pleasure working for you.’

Mikey contorted himself to insert a hand into his pack. He stood up. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I like the order given me or not. It’s clear-cut and there’s no room for misunderstanding. They don’t have a defector – either they booted him out or he ran away from them. Without him, they have no need for Foxtrot. It’s an order. We leave her. She’s also a handicap to us as we approach the border and it’s spelled out that our priority is to make the safe haven of Turkish territory. Sorry, but that’s how it’s going to be.’

She understood.

‘Thanks, Wally, for the distraction,’ Mikey said. ‘If you’d asked me, I would have said that I’d rather be anywhere other than here,
anywhere
. Two-minute break, then we go. That’s all. It’s not negotiable and it’s from the head honcho.’

More rummaging, cigarettes produced, hands cupped over a lighter flame. Zach realised that the discussion was over. The guys reckoned it right that Farideh – once worth their freedom and likely their lives, now without the value of a can of beans – could turn around, go down the hill, might be allocated a torch and allowed to keep the pistol. Hands washed. He was not offered a cigarette. Neither was she. The guys were on their haunches and the wind deflected off them. The snow had turned back to sleet and dripped from Zach’s nose and chin. He was a passenger they tolerated. She was not.

He weighed the worth of an order.

The cigarettes glowed in the dark and the wind made them burn fast. Zach understood the phrase ‘cut and run’. It was of naval origin. For quick movement, the rigging teams would slash the yarn that held the sails furled, and the sails, released, would catch the wind and the ship would move. But ‘cut and run’ today implied cowardice, and also that a decent cause should be abandoned. To the guys, it wasn’t a big deal. To him? His mind churned.

The cigarettes were thrown down.

Ralph coughed, convulsing. Zach supposed it to be the first law of holes: if you’re in one, stop digging. It was close to ‘cut and run’. Ralph coughed again, spat, then hoisted his rucksack.

They had given Ralph Cotton a fair education at that school, sufficient for him to earn entry to a good, if not prestigious, regiment. He had learned at school that points of principle tended to be sharp and generally achieved little. He had learned in the regiment that most officers were keen to appear conventional and enthusiastic; he had found that tiresome. The job, in the shit-heaps of Iraq and Afghanistan, was acceptable, but the bullshit days in the garrison town at home had bored the hell out of him: he had become used to the concept of men looking after each other, watching backs and protecting. To him, the regiment’s battle history was interesting in the sense that conflict had raged for it in some equally stinking shit-heaps as those he had experienced.

Sacrifice, and walking into the firing line for the benefit of the rest of the section, platoon, company, had not seemed sensible. A sergeant had been zapped, charging a machine-gunner in Helmand when his frightened teenage squaddies were pinned down. At the send-off from Bastion, the padre had intoned, ‘
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends
.’ Ralph had not bought in. It would have been simpler to call in a fast jet strike and dump half a ton of explosive on the bastard, and the sergeant would still have been holding down a corner of the Red Lion or any British Legion bar. The best ‘love’ Ralph had experienced during his years with the regiment had been in the arms of the woman in the company commander’s married quarters.

He regarded himself as a survivor, as did his father and mother. Their tax returns were minor works of art, and his sister . . . Ralph Cotton saw himself, again, riding in Minnie’s car, the beaten-up Morris Minor that somehow kept going, up the avenue of old beech trees that flanked the drive. There was no chance that his ‘love’ would stretch to dragging this woman along in the slipstream of their flight. He didn’t feel good about his acceptance of that situation; neither did he feel bad about it. He didn’t look at her and was careful not to nudge her as he came past her, but the snow was impacted where she had stood and he slipped, barging against her. They had a hell of a barrier ahead of them and to burden himself, and the guys, further – a handicap enough to have the language guy with them – wasn’t on. Actually, a good call from London to ditch her.

‘How did I do?’

‘Quite well.’ Her fingers, working at the taut muscles of his neck, calmed him, a talent of Sara Rogers.

‘Won’t win me any plaudits,’ Tadeuz Fenton observed. The sofa in his office pulled out to make a bed, but she would use the one she had set up in the outer office. She had found blankets and pillows in the store by the lift.

‘They’re better, of course, without her. Stands to reason. Hideous ground to cross, but they’re fit, able and resourceful. With her it would have been like driving a car with the handbrake engaged. And men under pressure will always do something stupid when a woman lags behind and needs carrying. To their credit, they put up no argument.’

‘I think you were right, Tadeuz.’

He almost laughed. ‘You know I was right. It had to be right because that was the approach you suggested. No complaint.’

‘There are still chestnuts in the fire, ripe for pulling out. I have a good feeling.’

‘Dunc will sort them out when they come over, smooth over any pangs of conscience. Bit tired, sorry and all that. I feel very confident.’

She kissed his forehead and smoothed his hair, dimmed a light, switched off his phone and tucked the blanket around him. She wondered what the morning would bring. Around her the building slept. The river was quiet: cargo barges had stopped running till dawn and the pleasure craft were back at their moorings. She could see the top of the London Eye, and thin lines of traffic coming to the bridges. She would have walked away from anyone who wanted her to bet that the men would leave the corporal’s wife. She closed the door.

They fed off stress and the anxiety that whitened knuckles. It was so good. She kicked off her shoes, unzipped her skirt, hung her blouse on a hanger from the wardrobe. Her alarm would wake her at five. She lay on the bed. Sensible of the guys not to bring sentiment into the argument. The woman was nothing to them. A positive spin was required, and she’d do it.

She took a step back and seemed to stagger, then limped another half-dozen paces.

Zach stood his ground.

Ralph called him.

He hadn’t seen her limp before the satphone link had been made. He hadn’t noticed either the change in the weather but it must have get warmer – the wind had slackened, the snow had gone, and the sleet had been replaced by a fine rain that lashed his cheeks. She had turned away. Small mercy, they hadn’t asked her for the pistol.

Wally called him. His voice was less clear than Ralph’s had been: another indication that the force of the storm had moved on – the words didn’t hang on the wind.

Wally called: ‘Do the goodbye, like it’s a railway station, and get to us. She’s tough. You’re not part of it. She’ll win through. Now, get the hell on.’

He could see, from their torch, that each of them had faced him. Now they swung away, hesitated. Mikey snapped his fingers and they began to walk. Zach watched the torch move away.

He assumed they believed he would touch her hand, mutter something, then run. Forget the cold, the wind and the wet, and up the hill into their arms. He’d get a cuff on the shoulder, a bit of man-talk, or just a grunt. They’d have told him they were going home and taking him with them. He expected they were going slowly to let him catch up. He’d have looked back once, they’d have reckoned, and seen the small back and the floating hair.

There had been that short, stifled conversation.

There’s no going back?

His answer.
No going back.

There was never a chance of turning back
, Mikey had said, before the call and the changed direction.

When they had started to walk after the death of the old wagon, she’d said,
With no turning back, I have no more need of it. Perhaps you might want to have it
. He still didn’t know what she had given him.

Who had the torch? Her or him? Where was it? In his rucksack or her pocket? He searched, found it, pencil thin with a beam sufficient for reading a map in a darkened car. He brought it out of his chest pocket, switched it on and took the shape from his pocket. He had her identification card. He read her name, her date of birth, her place of residence, her marital status, and saw the passport-sized photograph of her, a scarf covering her forehead, her cheeks, nose, lips and chin. She was dead without her card, and she had given it him. She had no clothing left that was ‘good
hijab
’. A van had been hijacked, tourists beaten and robbed, a policeman assaulted, and it was likely that two of the
basij
were dead. There was no turning back. When he looked up the hill and saw their footprints, Zach understood that the link between them was broken. They would not come back for him.

They were fighting men. They’d taken casualties, seen blood. They would have learned not to ‘make drama from crisis’.

She limped, trailing her right leg. He thought that if she’d had a stick she would have leaned on it. He went after her.

Her arm was gripped. She tried to pull away, and failed. Zach spun her round. Her face was below his, but she confronted him. She said, ‘Go and catch up with your friends. Leave me.’

He slapped her face. It was the first time she had been hit since Mehrak had blacked her eye. Zach hadn’t hurt her but her skin stung and her eyes watered. She hit him back.

Farideh had not fought Mehrak. Then, her husband had dragged her out of their bed and had clutched at her thick nightdress, which she had refused to let him lift. She had tumbled onto the rug, and he had lifted her by her hair, then punched her. As the blows had rained on her, she had wondered if Mehrak would kill her. It wouldn’t have been a big thing if he had because he was a ‘wronged’ husband and she was a ‘stubborn’ wife; he was a member of the al-Qods and connected by work to an all-powerful member of the élite, while she sat at the reception desk of an insurance company. He might have killed her, but did not. He had crumpled and wept. He was pathetic. If she had killed him, she would have hanged. If he had known of her men – Johnny and the Captain – and denounced her, she would have hanged.

Probably the swing in her arm would have warned that she would retaliate, but he didn’t lift his hands to protect himself. She caught him on the nose, then punched his stomach. He turned. Anger burned in her. He backed away and she followed.

No words were said, but their shadows merged. He rode her next blow. She came close and lashed out. He caught her shoulders and Farideh caught at his clothing. He dropped the torch. For a moment the beam was on his face and she saw real anger. She fell and dragged him down. His weight was across and against her.

‘You hit me!’ she spat at him.

‘You were faking.’

‘You hit my face, without provocation.’

‘You were faking and that was reason enough.’

‘Faking?’ she echoed, confused.

His breath was on her face. ‘You faked being hurt.’

‘Why would I—’

‘You faked being hurt, starting to limp.’

‘I did that?’

A little of his warmth seeped into her clothing. She reached up and held his head, her fingers in his hair. The anger leaked away.

He said, ‘You faked being hurt to give me the excuse to leave you. You pretended you couldn’t keep up, that you were the burden that would slow us. You did it to make it easier for me.’

‘How easier?’

‘I was supposed to turn away from you and jog to them. I would have carried it for the rest of my days.’

‘Carried what?’

She had hurt him – but not by punching; with the limp. He said, ‘I would have seen your face, Farideh, every hour of every day of every week. I would have remembered my last sight of you and hated myself. You didn’t have to fake an injury. I would never have left you.’