career: from Oman to Guatemala to the Falls Road. That wasn’t the same, she’d said. Nature was full of death and what looked like cruelty. What she had seen was something altogether more human – the face of evil. And he had not, and she hoped he never would.
Somehow this had created a distance between them. Not a rift – there was no conflict involved – but a distance. He felt that he had failed her in some way. That was ridiculous, and he knew it. But still he felt it.
‘Daddy!’ Marie cried out in exasperation. ‘Pay attention!’
Docherty grinned at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about Mummy,’ he explained.
His daughter considered this, her blue eyes looking as extraordinary as ever against the rich skin tone she’d inherited from her mother. ‘You can think about her when I’ve gone to bed,’ Marie decided.
‘Right,’ Docherty agreed, and for the next ten minutes he gave her his full attention, completing the wrapping of Ricardo’s present and conferring parental approval on Marie’s suggested alterations to his positioning of the silver balls and tinsel on the tree. And then it was bedtime, and his turn to read to Ricardo. When he had finished he stood for a moment in the doorway to Marie’s room, listening to Isabel reading, the bedside lamp making a corona around his wife’s dark head as she bent over the book.
He walked downstairs, blessing his luck for finding her. Few men, he reckoned, found one such woman in their lives, and he had found two. True, with both there had been a price. Chrissie had been killed in a road accident only months after their marriage, sending him into a downward spiral of drunkenness and self-pity which had almost cost him his career and self-respect. Like Margaret Thatcher, he had been saved by the Falklands War, and in the middle of that conflict fate had led him to Isabel, who came complete with a hurt he longed in vain to heal. But he wasn’t complaining – now, at the grand old age of forty-two, Jamie Docherty would not have swapped places with any man.
He went through to the kitchen, opened a can of beer and poured it into the half-pint mug he had liberated from an officers’ mess in Dhofar nearly twenty years before.
‘How about one for me?’ Isabel asked him from the doorway, a smile on her face.
He smiled back and reached for another can.
She sat down on the other side of the kitchen table, and they shared the silence for a few moments. Her smile had gone, he noticed.
‘What is worrying you?’ she asked suddenly.
You, he thought. ‘Nothing really,’ he said, ‘maybe the future. I’ve never been retired before. It’s a strange feeling.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Let’s face it, we haven’t even decided which continent we’re going to live in.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ she said. ‘Let’s get Christmas out of the way first.’ She put down her half-empty glass. ‘You still want fish and chips?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I’ll go and get them.’
‘You stay with the children. I feel like some fresh air.’
And some time on your own, Docherty thought. ‘You sure?’ he asked.
‘Sí, noes problema.’
Docherty continued sipping his beer, wondering how many other households there were in Glasgow where all four occupants often moved back and forth between English and Spanish without even noticing they had done so. He had become fluent in the latter during the half year’s compassionate leave he had spent travelling in Mexico after Chrissie’s death. Isabel had acquired her bilingual skills before meeting him, during the seven years of her enforced exile in England.
Still, their linguistic habits were hardly the strangest thing about their relationship. When they had met he had been a ten-year veteran of the SAS and she one of the few surviving members of an Argentinian urban guerrilla group. If the Sun had got hold of the story their marriage would have made the front page – something along the lines of ‘SAS Hero Weds Argie Red’.
In the public mind, and particularly on the liberal left, the Regiment was assumed to be a highly trained bunch of right-wing stormtroopers. There was some truth in this impression, particularly since the large influx during the eighties of gung-ho paras – but only some. Men like Docherty, who came from families imbued with the old labour traditions, were also well represented among the older hands, and among the new intake of younger men the SAS emphasis on intelligence and self-reliance tended to militate against the rightist bias implicit in any military organization.
On returning from the Falklands, conscious of Isabel’s opinions, Docherty had thought long and hard about whether to continue in the Army. Up to that time, he decided, none of the tasks allotted him by successive British governments had seriously troubled his conscience. When one arrived that did, then that would be the time to hand in his cards.
So, for most of the past ten years he and Isabel had lived just outside Hereford. Her cover during the mission in Argentina had been as a travel-guide writer, and a couple of enquiries were enough to confirm that the market in such books was expanding at enormous speed. She never finished the one she was supposedly researching in southern Argentina, but an offer to become one third of a team covering Chile was happily accepted, and this led to two other books on Central American countries. It meant her being away for weeks at a time, but Docherty was also often abroad for extended periods, particularly after his attachment to the SAS Training Wing. Whenever possible they joined each other, and Docherty was able to continue and deepen the love affair with Latin America which he had begun in Mexico.
Then Marie had arrived, and Ricardo two years later. Isabel had been forced to take a more editorial role, which, while more rewarding financially, often seemed considerably less fulfilling. Now with Ricardo approaching school age, and Docherty one week into retirement from the Army, they had big decisions to take. What was he going to do for a living? Did they want to live in Scotland or somewhere in Latin America? As Isabel had said, there was no urgency. She had recently inherited – somewhat to her surprise – a few thousand pounds from her mother, and the house they were now staying in had been virtually a gift from Liam McCall. The priest had inherited a cottage on Harris in the Outer Hebrides, decided to retire there, and offered the Dochertys an indefinite free loan of his Glasgow house.
No urgency, perhaps, but much as Docherty loved having more time with Isabel and the children, he wasn’t used to doing nothing. The military life was full of dead periods, but there was always the chance that the next day you would be swept across the world to face a challenge that stretched mind, body and soul to the limit. Docherty knew he had to find himself a new challenge, somehow, somewhere.
He got up to collect plates, salt, ketchup and vinegar. Just in time, for the ever-wonderful smell of fish and chips wafted in through the door ahead of his wife.
‘Cod for you, haddock for me,’ she said, placing the two bundles on the empty plates. ‘And I bought a bottle of wine,’ she added, pulling it out of the coat pocket. ‘I thought…’
The telephone started ringing in the living-room.
‘Who can that be?’ she asked, walking towards it.
Docherty had unwrapped one bundle when she returned. ‘It’s your old CO,’ she said, like any English military wife. ‘Barney Davies. And he sounds like he’s calling from a pub.’
‘Maybe they’ve realized my pension should have been twice as much,’ Docherty
