Small Wars Read Free

evening. At twelve o’clock, it was the girls who pulled the short dark ribbons away, and completed their transformation into soldiers. Some chaps had their sisters do it or, God forbid, their mothers, but Hal – unaware of being watched now, or of anything else – would have Clara for his, and he wasn’t frightened about the promise it seemed to make between them.
    After this, and a few months in England on exercises, he was to be sent to Germany with his regiment. He would write to her from there, visit when he could, and when the time came – if she wanted it – he would marry her.
    In the dissonant laughing countdown to midnight, Clara reached up to his shoulder to untie the ribbon – had to take off her gloves at last to do it – and smiled at him.
    Hal saw nothing but the girl he was with and the service he was promised to, and in the deep silence at the centre of himself he made an absolute commitment to each.

PART ONE
    Limassol
    Ten Years Later. Cyprus, January 1956. During the Emergency.

Chapter One
    The army had rented them a house in Limassol, quite near to the harbour because married quarters on the base hadn’t been sorted out for them yet.
    Hal knew the weather had been bad on the crossing from England – even after Gibraltar – and he pictured Clara and the girls laid up in their cabins all the way from Portsmouth. He hoped they hadn’t been too sick; Clara wasn’t a good sailor. He had enjoyed his own journey from Krefeld, flying in bumpy weather with the countries of Europe and wrinkled blue sea passing below, like a clay model you could stick flags in, and move imaginary armies from place to place.
    Hal had been promoted to major, and transferred from his battalion in Germany to this one, alone, not knowing anybody. Everything had been new to him. He had set about the business of leadership and his new rank with steadfast energy, and was rewarded by a smooth transition. Sleeping alone in that house for a month, as he had, he missed the company of barracks, and the isolation was grating.
    The Limassol house was narrow, in a cobbled street, with no outlook to speak of and barely a lock on the door. It made Hal uncomfortable to think of it, the unsettling lack of security, and that you couldn’t see anything from the windows other than the crooked windows of other houses. If someone were to approach, or set a booby-trap, there’d be no stopping them. A few months before, in Famagusta, an EOKA terrorist had lobbed a bomb through the open window of a soldier’s house as his wife was putting the children to bed. Hal knew his instinct – his agony of responsibility – must be tempered and that the Housing Officer was doing everything he could to get him married quarters at the garrison. But the other soldier’s wife, in Famagusta, had lost half her arm in the explosion. Hal had spoken to the Housing Officer again that morning, reminding him, but beyond doing that he had no power: he must trust everything was being done that could be done. If he didn’t have faith, he wouldn’t manage, but with it, he could live with the knowledge of the other soldier’s wife and still have his own come to be with him.
    He lay in the bed that was too big for him, but would be too small for them both when Clara came, and imagined her leaving England for Cyprus. It had been a vicious winter all over Europe. Hal pictured a cold day at Portsmouth harbour, HMS Endeavour vast and cold too, and Clara waving to her mother.

    Hal was right. Clara had been sick on the voyage. Meg and Lottie hadn’t seemed affected by the heaving boat at all, perhaps being small and low to the ground their bodies weren’t so disrupted, and she’d had to run after them, bent over, up and down the slippery metal corridors of the Endeavour , what felt like all day, every day, for the whole journey. The twins were sixteen months and had discovered exercise, exploration and teasing their mother.
    Clara, whom Hal had taken to calling