when we go home. You know, dazzle her with Perthshire … Eh? Oh, well, she tore strips off Errol, and he just laughed and said: ‘Why, darling, I didn’t know you cared,’ and swanned off, cool as be-damned, to take Jean swimming. And now, having wrecked her future, and Tex’s, he goes around blithe as a bird, as though nothing had happened. Yes - a total tick, slice him where you will.”
A fair assessment, on the face of it, and the temperature dropped noticeably in the mess when Errol was present, not that he seemed aware of it. Otherwise the incident was closed; for one thing, there were far more urgent matters to think about just then. Political trouble was beginning to brew in our former Italian colony, with noisy nationalist demonstrations, stoning of police posts by Arab gangs, and the prospect that we would be called out to support the civil administration. If there’s going to be active service, the last thing you need is discord in the mess.
Even so, Errol’s next gaffe came close to blowing the lid off with his bête noire, Cattenach, the second-in-command; it was the nearest thing I ever saw to a brawl between brother-officers, and all because of Errol’s bloody-minded disregard for other people’s feelings. He had set off early one morning to shoot on the salt flats outside the town, and came breezing in just as we were finishing breakfast, calling for black coffee and telling Bennet-Bruce that his shotgun (which Errol had borrowed, typically) was throwing left. Bennet-Bruce asked if he’d had any luck.
“Nothing to write to the Field about,” said Errol, buttering toast. “In fact, sweet dam’-all, except for a couple of kites near the Armoury. Weird-looking things.”
Cattenach lowered his paper. “Did you say near the Armoury? Where are these birds?”
“Where I left them, of course; somewhere around the Armoury wall. They weren’t worth keeping.”
Cattenach looked thoughtful, but went back to his paper, and it wasn’t until lunchtime that he returned to the subject. He brought his drink across from the bar and stopped in front of Errol’s chair, waiting until he had finished telling his latest story and had become aware that Cattenach was regarding him stonily. The second-in-command was a lean, craggy, normally taciturn man with a rat-trap mouth that made him look like one of the less amiable Norman barons.
“You may be interested to know,” he said curtly, “that the ‘kites’ you shot this morning were the Brigadier’s pet hawks.”
There was a startled silence, in which the Padre said: “Oh, cracky good gracious!”, and Errol cocked an incredulous, eyebrow. “What are you talking about - hawks? Since when do hawks stooge around loose, like crows!”
“They were tame hawks - something unique, I believe,” said Cattenach, enjoying himself in his own grim fashion. “A gift to the Brigadier from King Idris, after the desert campaign. Quite irreplaceable, of course, as well as being priceless. And you shot them. Congratulations.”
Well, you and I or any normal person would at this point have lowered the head in the hands, giving little whimpering cries punctuated by stricken oaths and appeals for advice. Not Errol, though; he just downed his drink and observed lightly:
“Well, why didn’t he keep them on a leash? I thought it was usual to put hoods over their heads.”
We stared at the man, and someone protested: “Oh, come off it, Errol!”, while Cattenach went crimson and began to inflate.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, and Errol regarded him with maddening calm.
“What d’you expect me to say? I’m sorry, of course.” If he was he certainly didn’t sound it. “I’ll send the old boy a note of apology.” He gave Cattenach a nod that was almost dismissive. “Okay?”
“Just… that?” growled Cattenach, ready to burst.
“I can’t very well do anything else,” said Errol, and picked up a magazine. “Unless you expect me to rend my garments.” To do him justice, I believe that if anyone else had brought him the glad news, he’d have shown more concern, but he wasn’t giving Cattenach that satisfaction - just his cool half-smile, and the second-in-command had to struggle to keep a grip on himself in the face of that dumb insolence. He took a breath, and then said with deliberation:
“The trouble with you, and what makes you such an unpleasant regimental liability, is that while most of us couldn’t care more, you just couldn’t care less.”
No one had ever heard Cattenach, who was normally a quiet soul, talk with such controlled contempt - and in the mess, of all places. A little flush appeared on Errol’s cheek, and he rose from his chair, but only to look Cattenach in the eye and say:
“You know, that’s extremely well put. I think I’ll enter it in the mess book.”
That was when I thought Cattenach was going to hit him - or try to, because Errol, for all his composure, was balanced like a cat. Suddenly it was very ugly, the Padre was making anxious noises, and the Adjutant was starting forward, and then Cattenach turned abruptly on his heel and stalked out. There was a toe-curling silence - and of course I had to open my big mouth, heaven knows why, unless I thought it was time to raise the conversation to a higher plane.
“Why can’t you bloody well wrap up, just for once?” I demanded, and was told by the Adjutant to shut up. “I think you’ve said enough, too,” he told Errol. “Right - who’s for lunch?”_
“I am, for one,” said Errol, unabashed. “Drama always gives me an appetite,” and he sauntered off to the dining-room, leaving us looking at each other, the Padre muttering about the pride of Lucifer, and the M.O., after a final inhalation of the Tallisker, voicing the general thought.
“Yon’s a bad man,” he said. “Mercy is not in him.”
That was a fact, I thought. Not only had he shown a callous disregard for the feelings of the Brigadier, bereaved of his precious pets, he had strained the egalitarian conventions of the mess to the limit in his behaviour to Cattenach - who, mind you, had been making a meal of his own dislike for Errol. It was all enough to make one say “Tach!”, as my grandmother used to exclaim in irritation, and lunch was taken in general ill-temper - except for Errol, who ate a tranquil salad and lingered over his coffee.
And then such trivia ceased to matter, for at 2.15 came the sudden alarm call from the Police Commissioner to say that the unrest which had been simmering in the native quarter had suddenly burst into violence: a mob of Arab malcontents and bazaar-wallahs were rioting in the Suk, pillaging shops and fire-raising; one of the leading nationalist agitators, Marbruk es-Salah, was haranguing a huge gathering near the Yassid Market, and it looked only a matter of time before they would be spilling out of the Old City and rampaging towards the European suburbs. Aid to the civil power was a matter of urgency - which meant that at 2.45 the two three-ton trucks bearing the armed might of 12 Platoon pulled up on the great dusty square east of the Kantara Bridge, and I reviewed the force with which I was expected to plug that particular outlet from the native quarter.
In theory, the plan for containing unrest was simple. The Old City, an impossible warren of tall crumbling buildings and hundreds of crooked streets and narrow alleys, spread out like a huge fan from the waterfront; beyond the semi-circular edge of the fan lay the European suburbs of the Italian colonial era, girdling the squalid Old City from sea to sea in a luxurious crescent of apartment buildings, bungalows, shops, restaurants, and broad streets - a looter’s paradise for the teeming thousands of the Old City’s inhabitants, if they ever invaded in force. To make sure they didn’t, the 24 infantry platoons of our battalion and the Fusiliers were
