a distance. She felt uneasy about Freddie Payne from the moment he opened his over-confident mouth. Too much bloody nose, a class thing. Yet there was hunger in his eyes and, she thought, a glint of fear. Like a man who every day has to cross a tightrope just to live, knowing that one day he must surely fall. The air of confidence was a mask as carefully constructed as his expensively capped teeth.
Her feminine instincts played an entirely different game with the other guest, McKenzie, a Highland Scot by upbringing and accent. He was quieter, more intense, not so much withdrawn as watching. On watch, even. He was softly spoken but his sharp blue eyes never rested, as though searching a Highland river for salmon. She could smell the animal in him. She was both shocked and amused to discover herself looking for his wedding ring; she was still more amused to discover there wasn’t one. For a moment, Exmoor seemed very far away. So was Cambodia, from where McKenzie had recently returned after several months’ defusing land mines.
‘Why d’you do it, Andy? After all, there’s damn all money in it,’ Amadeus probed.
‘Perhaps I simply like making things go bang.’
‘Bloody dangerous work.’
‘Even more bloody dangerous if the work’s no’ done.’
‘Trouble with you, Andy, you are the most dangerous kind of soldier,’ Amadeus concluded. ‘Not only a rifle and a sackful of explosive, but principles as well.’
‘Little wonder there was no place for me in the modern Army,’ the engineer replied softly. He gave a perfunctory smile to take the cutting edge off his comment, but Mary noticed the humour failed to reach as far as his eyes. She also noted that Amadeus had spoken in the present tense, like a man who couldn’t let go.
Payne had arrived at the club by an entirely different route. Amadeus had met him during a tour of duty in Northern Ireland which, according to every other unit in the Army, was one of the few postings where Guardsmen did active duty with anything other than pink gins and pussy. Payne’s speciality had been reconnaissance, tracking bandits through the rough terrain of the border country and into the bad-arse areas of Belfast and Derry. Seeing without being seen. Not a soft posting, for had he been caught his ultimate fate was undeniable. A bullet in the back of the head. The only matter left to argument was what they would have done to him before putting him out of his agony. The choices ranged from a portable Black & Decker drill through the kneecaps to a sledgehammer applied with vigour to both his feet. Either way you weren’t going to walk to your funeral.
Payne had seen Amadeus’s letter while in a crowded commuter train on his way to his job in a Mayfair gallery. He had stood – he’d had no choice on that front, for even if he’d fainted he would have been kept upright by the press of bodies around him – and melted with self-recognition as he had read it, particularly the line about ‘a greater humiliation than surrender’.
He understood humiliation. On a daily basis. For Payne had married both well and badly. Well, because of his wife’s connections, the daughter of a former Governor of Bermuda whom he had met when serving as the Governor’s ADC; badly, appallingly badly, because she had turned out to be such a genetically untameable shrew. Her ceaseless harassment had been tolerable while Payne remained an officer in the Guards, their lifestyle maintained by regular subsidies from his father which covered mess bills, polo ponies, skiing in Villars and two spoilt daughters. Yet nothing lasts for ever. His father had fallen into that black hole of financial despair called Lloyd’s and, seeing no respite, had blasted his cares away with both barrels of a shotgun. A Purdey. Tortoiseshell stock, beautiful balance. A family heirloom, later to be sold along with all the rest. ‘The simple dignity of being shot’, in the words of Amadeus’s letter. ‘Nothing but spite and selfishness’, according to his wife, who regardless of Lloyd’s expected her comforts and connections to be maintained, may blisters abound in her crotch.
Payne couldn’t break away. There were times, dark times, when he understood how his father must have felt. He knew he had no grand intellect, that’s why he’d failed the Staff College exams. Twice. There were times when blowing out even a half-brain seemed like a reasonable option, if only to annoy his wife. But here, at least, in the Army & Navy Club, he felt safe, with his wife out of sight and hearing on that dark side of the moon they call Crawley. He felt revived, almost like old times, glad he had written to Amadeus.
The Colonel led them upstairs to the dining room, where they were seated in a quiet corner overlooking St James’s Square. On all sides towered portraits of great men.
‘How about a toast? To the heroes of our nation,’ Amadeus offered.
‘England expects?’ the Scot muttered.
‘Expects too damned much nowadays,’ Payne responded. ‘Lay down your life. Then pay for your own fucking funeral. Bit like marriage.’
With that, the game began.
As the hors d’oeuvres arrived, they began to compete with each other. During the first bottle they fought to prove how the British Army was still the best in the world; during the second they began to acknowledge that, arguably, this was no longer the case. Their best battles were behind them. By the time the third had been ordered, the game had focused on finding ever more vivid means of expressing their contempt for the politicians who had broken faith with them and with so many of their colleagues. The fourth bottle made it clear how much they thought it still mattered to them.
‘Know what those useless sons-of-Soviets are up to? Flogging everything – enriched uranium, any sort of surface-to-air stuff, even full-scale C&B armouries. It’s a nightmare … I know a private collector who bought a T-60 tank last month. Arranged it on the Internet. They even offered him high-explosive squash-heads for the bloody thing, just imagine … That pond life we have for a Foreign Secretary whines on about an era of peace. Doesn’t he know there are at least three active war zones less than a couple of hours’ flying time from London … Don’t bother flying. Fuck, come home with me. Hell of a lot closer than Chechnya. Warfare every damned day … D’ya ken, there are more terrorist groups out on the streets of Europe now than there were when they bulldozed the Berlin Wall … Hey, more means of delivery, too. Not just missiles but suitcase bombs, toxins … How long would it take to wipe out half of London Underground, d’you reckon? Probably got time to do it before the cheese course. Come to think of it, great idea, getting wiped out. Before those bastards in the Inland Revenue do it for me. How about another bottle?’
‘And when you’ve finished ordering it, Peter, shall we stop playing with ourselves and get you to tell us what the devil we’re all doing here?’
‘Ah, Mary, always the direct one. Tell me, how is your former Commanding Officer? Still crawling around on his hands and knees looking for the pieces of his tooth?’
‘I sincerely hope so.’ For a moment memories tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘But enough of the diversionary tactics, Peter. Cough. What are we celebrating?’
‘Celebrating? Not quite the word I would use.’ Amadeus’s tone grew pensive, almost sad. ‘Met a man the other day, my old RSM. You know the type – would take a raw recruit at breakfast, scare the shit out of him by lunch and by supper have him ripping tanks apart with his teeth. One of the most remarkable men I ever had the honour of serving with. Or getting legless with, come to that. Saved my life once. Mount Longdon. That’s when I swore I would always be there for him.’ He paused. ‘Know where he lives now? On the street. Swapped his uniform for an old dog blanket. Nearly killed himself rushing to pick up one of my cigarette butts.’ He rolled his glass between his palms but didn’t drink. ‘I felt ashamed. To the bottom of my being. I said to myself – this shouldn’t be. I owe him. And all the others like him.’
