through the Black Forest to Switzerland. The lorry was set upon by hungry men hoping for food. The contents were ransacked. The letters were lost.
Tom would be ‘missing, presumed dead’ until the war ended or he died.
‘Darling, boy!’ It was Pamela who met Alan off the train at Winchester. She hugged him tight, burying her face in his neck. When she at last released him, her face was wet. ‘My poor loves, my poor loves.’ She was crying for Tom, whom she’d loved as a mother, and crying for Alan, who’d lost a brother. Alan was unable to speak in reply.
At home, it was the same with his father, and with Tom’s father, Jack. They were pleased to see Alan, of course, but his presence only made Tom’s death more real.
‘He was the very best of officers and the very best of men,’ said Alan to Jack Creeley, when their voices had steadied.
‘Of course, he was – you and him both … And I say this war’s a dirty rotten stinking shame, lad, pardon me. You’ll have to pardon me for saying so, but anything that could take a man like him …’ Creeley’s voice crept out into silence.
Alan spent three weeks at home. Glorious autumn weeks, with the great elms blazing yellow and gold along their boughs.
It had turned out that the shell blast had done more damage than first realised. A needle-sharp splinter had burrowed through Alan’s chest, piercing both lungs. Almost invisible from the outside, the splinter had remained undetected by the original doctors. The longer the splinter had remained in place, the more damage it had done. An operation to remove it had been successful, but further surgery would be needed once he was strong enough. A couple of house guests, a pair of London debutantes, now working as nurses down in Southampton, silently left before his arrival, to give the patient all the rest and quiet he could get.
Alan arrived home so weak he had to be carried to bed. But in the glow of love and warmth, he began to heal. His lungs remained poor, but his body began to grow stronger again. Apart from his lungs, he felt almost whole.
But more painful than any physical damage was the mental scarring. Alan found it almost impossible to sleep in his first-floor bedroom. The wide windows and exposed position made him feel vulnerable to the shell and rifle fire that he continually expected. After three nights of struggling with his fears, he gave in, and took over a boxroom on the ground floor, built like a bunker and with a four-foot stone wall between him and the outside. He slept with a candle burning all night.
Across the hall, in the nursery, there was a large-scale map of the Zagros mountains: a map that Tom had put there fourteen years before. A blue pencil line in Tom’s wobbly nine-year-old hand marked out the family oil concession. Some nights when sleep was hard to come by, and the air laboured in and out of his struggling lungs, Alan took his candle and went into the nursery, staring at the rough contours of the map, in the mountains north of Shiraz. He had promised Tom he’d go there and find whatever there was to be found. Would it be oil or just dry earth? There was no way to find out, except the good old-fashioned way: with a drill.
Some mornings, when dawn had broken over the winter sky, he was still there in his nightshirt, with his candle, looking at the map and wondering, wondering …
It sometimes felt as though finding oil was the most important thing in the entire world.
Norgaard rolled over on his bunk and handed Tom a handful of acorns.
‘Pissed up against an oak tree on my way back from the factory today. I found these.’
Norgaard had a handful himself and he began cracking the shells and crunching up the nut inside. Tom did the same, chewing carefully. His stomach was beginning to balloon outwards, but all it held was painful wind. He tried vomiting sometimes, but all he had to vomit was stale air, and the retching brought no relief. Each time that happened, he thought of Alan Montague. Anger, bitterness and self-pity jammed together in a ball that hurt every bit as much as the wind in his belly.
‘What were you up to before the war?’ asked Norgaard, ‘and I’m not asking you to list your ten biggest ever meals.’
Tom grinned. Most conversations in the camp these days were about food, or soap, or beer, or the countless other tiny things of life. ‘Oil,’ he said. ‘I was in the oil business.’
‘You don’t say?’ Norgaard sat up, dropping his acorns into the blanket. ‘On the drilling side or … ? Hey, d’you even have oil fields in England?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Marketing. And no, the country’s as dry as a bone.’
‘Bet the King’s mad as all hell about that … Which company?’
‘Standard, actually. Standard of New Jersey.’
Tom expected the patriotic Norgaard to be pleased with his reply, but instead Norgaard pursed his lips and spat. ‘Goddamn Rockefeller. Ruined the industry for all of us. And dissolution was a bust. Standard of New Jersey, my ass.’
They continued to talk. Before the war, Norgaard had been an independent oilman, a driller with his own crew.
‘And every time we sent the drill bit down, we more than half expected to hit the smell of oil. Boy, I never sharpened the drill so carefully as when I was on my own thirty acres. Every single time you do it, you could find oil sands glistening on the end of the bit.’
‘Did you ever make a strike? For yourself, I mean.’
‘Twice, just twice.’
‘Yes?’
Tom’s hunger vanished, his thoughts of home, his anger with Alan. He was transfixed, the old addiction biting harder than hunger.
‘First time was a little well up near Bradford, Pennsylvania. First day, I pumped thirty barrels. Two weeks later, eighty-five. Four weeks later, no matter what I did, the well gave me ten barrels of oil, if I was lucky. I ended up selling that well for the price of a new pair of pants. Two miles down the road, on land I’d offered on but never clinched, a friend of mine made a strike. Three thousand barrels a week that son-of-a-bitch got out of there.’
Tom breathed out in awe. This was the sharp end of the oil industry, where luck, adventure and geology all met in one glorious mix. ‘And the second strike?’
‘Second strike was sweet as a dream. I called the well Old Glory right from the start. Drilling was as easy as slicing butter. Hit gas after two thousand feet. Three hundred feet later and we were bathing our feet with oil. Six hundred barrels a day, Old Glory produced at her best, God bless her.’
‘And?’ Tom knew that Norgaard was playing with him, but he couldn’t help but fall for the man’s game. ‘And?’
‘And John D. Rockefeller stole every last drop … He owned all the refineries in the area. The price he paid for oil wasn’t hardly worth the cost of hauling it. He sweated me out of what
