Fortunes of War

by Olivia Manning

‘Guy, look!’

  Guy, coming out from behind the paper, adjusted his glasses and tried to see what she was showing him: ‘You said something about our first camel — what did you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? After we left the ship at Alex, when we were on the train, we saw a camel. Our first camel. It could have been the very same camel.’ After a pause, she said: ‘Egypt is beautiful,’ and she felt sorry that they must one day part from it.

  Guy laughed and went back to his paper and Harriet realized he could not see what was beyond the window. Beneath his confident belief in himself, beneath his certainty that he was loved and wanted wherever he went, he was deprived. She saw the world as a reality and he did not. She put her hand on his knee and he patted it and let it lie there, keeping his gaze on the lines of newsprint. Deprived or not, he was content; but was she content?

  She was free to think her own thoughts. She could develop her own mind. Could she, after all, have borne with some possessive, interfering, jealous fellow who would have wanted her to account for every breath she breathed?

  Not for long.

  In an imperfect world, marriage was a matter of making do with what one had chosen. As this thought came into her head, she pressed Guy’s knee and he patted her hand again.

  Alexandria, when they arrived, was nothing like the city Harriet had visited during the ‘flap’. Then, with the Afrika Korps one day’s drive away, people were on edge, speaking German yet buying up food against a probable occupation, or else piling goods on cars, ready for a getaway. It had been a grey city under a grey sky, the shore deserted beside the grey, plashy sea. Now in the breezy, sparkling October air, people looked carefree, the most carefree being the young naval men still in their summer uniforms of white duck.

  ‘I’m glad we came.’

  Guy answered with serene certainty: ‘I knew you would be.’

  They were to meet Simon in the bar of the Cecil and they found him already there, a lone khaki figure among the naval crowd. He did his best to greet them cheerfully but they saw his spirits were low. Something, no doubt to do with his transfer, had disappointed him, but he was not free to speak of it and they were not free to question him. Though they might never see him again, there was nothing to talk about but the war and the Italian surrender.

  To relieve the atmosphere of dejection, Harriet said: ‘I think things will go our way in future.’

  Simon asked: ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘The Italians wouldn’t have changed sides if they weren’t pretty certain we’d win. Won’t it be wonderful when the war ends? We’ll be able to go wherever we like. Think of seeing Greece again!’

  Struck by the mention of Greece, Simon said: ‘You lived there, didn’t you? What was it like?’

  ‘We loved it.’ Harriet turned to Guy: ‘Do you remember how we climbed Pendeli on the day the Italians declared war?’

  ‘Will I ever forget it?’

  ‘Or those two old tramp steamers, the Erebus and Nox, that took us from the Piraeus? You sat on the deck singing: “If your engine cuts out over Hellfire Pass, you can stick your twin Browning guns right up your arse.” Did you really think we’d make it?’

  ‘Yes. I knew we’d make it somehow or other. We always do.’

  Guy and Harriet smiled at each other, aware that they were joined by these shared memories and the memories would never be lost. Then Harriet looked at Simon for he, too, was part of their memories and they of his. She said: ‘When we climbed the pyramid, the war was at its worst. Now it’s turned round.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Things are going our way.’ He laughed and for a moment he looked like the very young man of a year ago who, newly off a troopship, said of the desert: ‘I don’t know what it’s like out there’ and next day was sent to find out.

  Then, giving his watch a glance, he sobered and stood up. ‘I’ve got to rush. Sorry to leave you so soon, but we’ll meet when it’s all over.’

  ‘Yes, when it’s all over,’ Guy and Harriet both agreed.

  They watched him go. A shadow of anxiety had come down on his face and as he passed between the tables, he seemed older than the white-clad naval officers who might never have had a care in the world.

  He went out through the door and the Pringles were left looking at the room’s faded cream and gold, and its war-weary fawn carpet.

  Guy dropped his gaze and sighed. There was another friend gone. As he called for the bill, he said: ‘We might as well take the next train back to Cairo.’

  Outside, where the light was deepening, they walked along the Corniche, watching the silver kidney shapes of the barrage balloons rising into position above the docks.

  Putting his arm through Harriet’s, Guy said: ‘You’ll never leave me again, will you?’

  ‘Don’t know. Can’t promise.’ Harriet laughed and squeezed his arm: ‘Probably not.’

  That morning, Simon had been briefed about his impending move. He was not, after all, conducting his men to Italy. They were bound for an island in the Aegean called Leros where they might never hear a shot fired.

  Noting his downcast expression, the commanding officer said: ‘This is an important assignment, Boulderstone. You’ll be accompanied by a military mission with orders to put heart into the chaps on Leros.’

  ‘I’d been hoping for a bit of a barney, sir.’

  ‘You may well get it. The island is to be defended at all costs.’

  Simon assented: ‘Sir,’ but he was not impressed. He was to be marooned in the Aegean and likely to be left there till the war ended.

  After his luncheon with the Pringles, he spent the rest of the day organizing his men and their equipment on to the destroyer. Told where they were going, the men grinned and one of them said: ‘Piece of cake, sir.’

  Remembering how Harriet had said of Greece, ‘We loved it,’ he began to think that Leros might not be so bad after all. The convoy that was taking provisions to the Leros garrison sailed at midnight. Standing at the rail of the destroyer, Simon watched the glimmer of the blacked-out shore, the last of Egypt. He felt he had left his youth behind and was taking with him nothing but his memory of Hugo; and even that was sinking back in his mind like a face disappearing under water.

  ‘Not a lucky place,’ he said aloud, then, tired from the day’s activity, he took himself to his bunk.

  Coda

  Two more years were to pass before the war ended. Then, at last, peace, precarious peace, came down upon the world and the survivors could go home. Like the stray figures left on the stage at the end of a great tragedy, they had now to tidy up the ruins of war and in their hearts bury the noble dead.