and martyr, trouper and English lady, mother and pain in the neck.
Mickey looked at her with sudden, silent fury. But then he remembered that lately—over five years? Ten?—the arrogance had mutated into something more complex and harder to dismiss, a plaintive clinging, a petulant self-pity. Elspeth had struck a chord with the ethic of the officer’s wife; but the greater truth was that Frances Christie would cheerfully have walked to Siberia if someone, anyone, had specifically requested her company. Now she stared in silence at the window, helpless, miserable, and yet still obtrusive and crying out to be bullied.
“Mother, do you want to try and get some sleep? It’s past midnight.”
“Oh, I hardly think I shall be able to sleep like this. Never mind. I can catch up once we’re there. You try, if you want to.”
“No, I’ve got a couple of hours of work ahead of me yet. I just thought . . .”
“I’ll wait and see what your father wants to do. I suppose they’ll be yacking into the small hours.”
Mickey winced, but there had been no reproof in his mother’s tone. It was funny, the way a woman’s grievances seemed to surface automatically in her conversation. Then he smiled, as he reflected how this generalisation, like so many others, excluded his own wife. Elspeth seemed to have no grievances at all. Maybe that in itself would irritate him, in time, and foul the sweet, narcotic taste of her. But for now he was content to relish the freewheeling ease of the ride, and laugh at his luck.
“Mother I’m going to have a stretch and a breath of air. Will you be all right?”
“Yes, Mickey, all right.”
He put his papers to one side, got up, checked his pockets for cigarettes, and opened the door.
There was a pleasant breeze in the corridor, and noise, and movement under the floor. Mickey took a few steps away from the compartment, and pulled out the new packet of duty-free cigarettes. There was a flurry of green at the other end of the carriage, a perfectly pressed uniform, a peaked cap. Mickey looked uneasily, wondering if the man were going to tell him not to smoke. Was he police or army, or what? He wore a gun, but he looked about sixteen, marching self-consciously with his eyes on the window-sills. Finally he stopped, and nodded.
Mickey held out his packet and said;
“Cigarette?” The peaked head shook once. “It’s OK?” Another nod.
“Are you British? Passport, please.”
Mickey handed over his passport and lit up while the youth made a creditable but transparent pretence of understanding its contents. It occurred to him that his first words could easily have passed, in the noise of the corridor, for German, and he said;
“How did you know I was British?”
The officer looked up quickly, a helpless look.
“Please?”
“How,” said Mickey, “do you know, that, I, am British?”
The passport was handed back, slowly. Mickey smiled.
“You. . . You look British.”
“Ah. Right. Thank you.”
“Thank you!” said the boy, and beamed, maybe with pride at the passable “th” he had just produced, took a step back, and saluted. Mickey nearly laughed, but managed just to smile again and give a stupid little wave as the young soldier, or customs official, or policeman marched, more boldly now, into the next carriage.
Mickey turned to the window, and considered his reflection. So, he looked British, did he? How nice. Of course the man had been referring to his clothes, the crew-neck sweater, the cords. The face certainly evoked no bowler hat, no cricketing nonchalance. To him it often looked barely human, let alone British. It was a poor inheritance, worn by his father as a young man, before the straight nose had been smashed twice in different wars, and age had blurred the black sharpness of the brows to feral grey. The face was getting a second chance.
He let his lazy eyes focus deeper into the dark, beyond his own image, and realised he was standing outside the compartment where his father had been giving up his life story, though Elspeth wasn’t there. There was just the old man, sitting with his arms folded and his long legs tucked and crossed under the seat, staring, like his wife, like his son, into the void beyond the glass. This was the famous soldier, Lt General Sir Herbert Christie, V.C. and all the rest, slumped in a corner without bearing, looking, as he always had to Mickey, like a retired office-boy who had hoped for nothing better.
He wondered how much Elspeth had so far been bored or disappointed by her subject, and decided to stay put until she came back. She had not known his father very long, had never really had the chance to find out what an unlikely hero he was. Well, she would know by now.
Mickey remembered the questions and the taunts of schoolboys unable to believe that the diffident Old Boy presenting the prizes was really what the headmaster had claimed. He remembered, also, turning into the drive at the start of one summer holiday, the two serving officers walking away from the house, and the words he caught as they passed;
“Bloody strange. Of course the record commands the highest respect.”
What he could not remember was the last time he had asked his father to tell him a story, a real war story, a tale of his own daring career. Simple reticence, common to men who have lived through combat, Mickey could have respected, even as a child. But there was none of that. There were campaigns and bombardments and solo missions, and wounds inflicted and sustained, and blood, and burning flesh, and death. There was everything except excitement. The great events of the mid-century were presented without emotion, a history crib of dates and battles. The child quickly lost interest in the story, and sank instead into unhappy acceptance of a narrative in which listener and narrator alike seemed superfluous. His father was talking about his own life, and yet talking, as though he had also lived, merely to pass the time. The record commanded respect, true, but precious little pride or admiration, the building blocks from which a small boy creates love for his father. Respect alone was a dry thing. There were many men still living, many Germans and Chinese, who respected Herbert Christie. For this was a great man, this crumpled figure in a corner, staring through the watery, twice-reflected shade of his own son. He hadn’t moved. He was still sitting and living just to pass the time, waiting without impatience for the next thing to happen.
“Hey, what are you doing out here?”
“Just getting a breath of air.” Mickey turned and looked down at the glistening peaks and dimples of make-up that he recognised as his wife, and thought Why does she always look so happy? “Mother was getting a bit much, as well. How’s the interview?”
“Oh, Mickey, it’s just amazing. I just had no idea. I mean, what a life! And you know the really strange thing?”
“No, Pet, tell me the really strange thing.”
“Your father is so humble?”
“Ah.”
“He is amazingly humble. And he’s just such a big man, you know what I’m saying?”
“Humility. I see. I’d often wondered. Have you got much out of him, then?”
“Have I ever! My note pad’s
