Mary was one day into her thirty-first year. Her birthday had been celebrated – if 'celebration' were the appropriate term – the night before with a small dinner for herself and a few friends. Her husband's friends, to be precise. She had almost none of her own in this distant corner of Exmoor where the gorse and heather did battle with the sou'westerlies and on a damp day the slurry trickled in the general direction of Withypool. This was her husband's house, his world and his life, as it had been his father's before him. Something she had accepted when they had married seven months before and something that, in the loneliness of night, she knew had all been a wretched mistake.
It wasn't as if she had been a naive spinster. There was little to be naive about growing up in the cobbled backstreets of Burton-upon-Trent, in the shadow of the breweries and the Marmite factory with their rich, overpowering smell of yeast. Mary had been one of four sisters with a father who had a serious problem with both alcohol and employment. Too much of one, none of the other.
To say her family was dysfunctional would satisfy only the most unimaginative of sociologists. It wasn't dysfunctional, it was a disaster. When her father was drunk but still capable, which was often, he would inflict on Mary and her younger sisters, but particularly Mary, the most appalling suffering and indignities. Fuck anything at hand today, for tomorrow would bring oblivion. By contrast, her mother lived not for today but for the afterlife, being utterly devout. She was also stubbornly blind and deaf, a woman who never saw, and never heard, who refused to believe in the presence of evil even when it was sitting at her breakfast table. Life for Mary, even as a nine-year-old, was already a bitch.
When she was eighteen, shortly before she was about to go to university, her father had come home with a drinking mate, someone to whom he had lost a substantial and ridiculous bet. Mary was supposed to be the payment. As the two men had stumbled through the front door, she had fled through the back in her bare feet. She never returned. University was out and within six months, in desperation, she had ended up at the only warm place on the High Street that would welcome her, a recruiting office, so she had joined the Army. It didn't take them long to recognize the raw but irresistible talent of their new recruit. Soon it had been Sandhurst where sheer persistence had made her runner-up for the Sword of Honour, and simple excellence had put her at the top of the academic order of merit. Then it had been Blandford (top of the troop commander course). 30 Signal Regiment at Nuneaton. Germany. Angola. Bosnia. Northern Ireland. Namibia, where she had helped plug an election structure into the creaking southern African country even as she was being shot at by rebels. No postcards home, not from here, even if there had been anyone to send them to. Then Ethiopia, coordinating food drops. Training for life, and for death. She'd discovered the stench of death in abundance on the flood plains of Bangladesh, a country which, in her view, should never have existed, and probably wouldn't for much longer if the sea levels continued to rise. Signals were 'teeth-arms', at the cutting edge of every major military encounter, and she had been there, anywhere there was a challenge, at the edge. Sometimes too near the edge. Yet in the armed forces a woman is inevitably a target. A target of fun, and occasional abuse, of discrimination and desires. Mary Wetherell was more of a target than most, because she was not only cropped-blonde with a figure that was athletically feminine, even in mud-washed fatigues, but she was also remarkably determined – hell, in order to survive a father like hers, you had to be. She asked for no favours, nothing more than the chance to stand and compete upon that most elusive of hallowed plots, the level playing field, and the Army was an equal opportunities employer, or so the recruiting officer had told her.
It hadn't worked quite like that. She never seemed able to shrug off the fact that most of her colleagues were men with unfair advantages like university degrees, while in turn they never seemed able to accept that she was as good as or often better than them, or to forget that she had breasts. No one ever stopped noticing that she was a woman, whether under instruction on the Staff Course at Camberley, in the officers' mess at Rheindahlen or stuck in the middle of the fratricide of Bosnia. If she eased up and was too friendly with the men, they regarded her as a regimental recreation centre, yet when she refused the first offer of a drunken fondle on a Friday mess night they called her a frigid little feminist. Bike or dike.
Never just plain Captain Mary Wetherell.
– =OO=OOO=OO-=
Her Commanding Officer was a particular problem. Lieutenant Colonel Abel Gittings was a very modern warrior with an OBE and MBE to show for it. That's what you get when you fight all your campaigns at what they call the 'politico-military interface' inside the Ministry of Defence rather than on a battlefield. A filthy job, he'd been known to say, surrounded by cigar smoke and politicians, but somebody had to do it. He'd fought with such skill in the Directorate of Military Operations that they'd promoted him to be Military Aide to the Chief of General Staff. You weren't going to get much farther away from the bullets than that. Chances were he'd probably survive to become a general, once he'd finished his tour as CO of Mary's regiment. Yes, a very successful soldier, was Abel Gittings.
Didn't stop him being a prick, of course, and it took a totally unambiguous prick to wander over to Mary's Troop Sergeant during an exercise on Salisbury Plain to enquire whether the troop was 'taking care of their little lady, making sure she's tucked up at night, got her bed socks on'. A few patronizing words that in a fleeting moment had destroyed all the respect she'd sweated so hard to build.
When he and Mary were alone, his eyes said it all. They wandered over her like a route march through the Brecon Beacons, marking every turn and undulation, and rarely making it as far as her own eyes.
One evening in the mess she had joined in a game of 'tunnels'. Simple rules. Pile all the soft furniture into the centre of the room to form the tunnel. Then two teams, one at either end. The object was to force your way past each other in the narrow and dark confines of the tunnel, run back to the starting position and down a pint of whatever was on the list before the next member of your team took over. A relay game of high spirits and considerable quantities of alcohol. When it had come to Mary's turn, Gittings had arranged for himself to be her opponent, intent not so much on pushing past her in the tunnel as grabbing and fondling every last soft bit of her. His hands were all over her, half an arse and a full raw nipple, and when the buttons started popping she'd decided she'd had enough, even from her CO. She'd left him with a fiercely bloodied nose. Yet he'd thought it great fun. Later he bought her a drink at the bar and quietly propositioned her. 'Swift and Sure, my girl. Swift and Sure!' he'd whispered, expropriating the Corps motto.
She told him in the most lurid terms to shove his active service up his own tunnel, and had been overheard. After that it was never going to be the same between them.
Two months later the Regiment was sent on its second tour of duty in Bosnia. An O Group was called and troop dispositions were announced. Bosnia was prime posting, a real war, everyone wanted in, and Mary's troop was to be sent again.
Without Mary.
Her troop was to be deployed under the command of a different officer, and Mary was about to be reassigned. As Families Officer. She was out of the loop, sidelined, humiliated. Nothing wrong with her performance, the adjutant had told her later when she'd kicked down his door demanding to know what the fuck was going on. It's simply that the CO thinks it's time for you to move on, take the next step. As a Families Officer? Anyway, Bosnia was inappropriate for her. That's the term he'd used, 'inappropriate'. She hadn't needed an Army field manual to translate. Inappropriate for a woman. After all, the men had to keep their eyes on the enemy, not on her arse.
Gittings had confirmed these details in the mess after dinner one evening, elaborating with a few more lurid descriptions of what he thought the most appropriate position for a woman like Mary should be.
It was, of course, unprofessional for Mary to respond in the way she had but, even in hinds
ight, the sweet-sour pleasures of the moment hadn't lost their freshness. She would for ever cherish that look of bewilderment in his alcoholic eyes – her father's eyes – followed by the first flush of pain in the moments after Gittings had hit the floor. She had bloodied and bent the CO's nose once again, and broken a tooth for good measure, but this time without the covering screen of the tunnel. She'd thumped him out in the open, in full view of the entire mess.
'Was that swift and sure enough for you, sir?'
– =OO=OOO=OO-= The matter couldn't be left there, of course, but Gittings decided against a court martial. His bloody nose had quite a history of its own, there would be too much scope for awkward questions at a trial. Anyway, Mrs Gittings had already put up with as much lurid rumour as she would tolerate about what she referred to as his 'campaigns on foreign fields'. So, instead of a court martial, Gittings had held forth about the dangers of PMT and claimed credit amongst the men for 'doing the decent thing', protecting the regimental honour by having Mary sent away. Like a leper. Which in the Signals meant a posting to a Territorial Army regiment somewhere north of Newcastle – although to cover their exposed legal backsides they'd offered her the alternative of organizing the appeal for an extension to the military museum at Blandford. She'd have preferred the court martial and a firing squad.
Within five months she had quit in despair, her career destroyed, her confidence shattered as completely as a discarded bottle.
That's why she had married Oscar. In a moment of weakness. He was a stooping gentle giant of a hill farmer, a widower with two grown sons, and a good companion. OK, so he was old enough to be her father, but he was unlike her own father in so many ways. Oscar, for instance, had worked diligently, drank in moderation on every day except Friday and showed only fleeting interest in her sexuality. She hoped that at last she had found a partner who would share her needs rather than treat her body as an excuse for violence or as a prize in some Friday-night rutting festival, but Oscar showed almost no interest at all. He had a family, had already done his duty. At last she had found that elusive level playing field for which she had been searching, only to discover that it was as empty as it was flat.
Beside her, Oscar was beginning to stir, the smell of last night's stale cigar smoke still on him. She didn't feel like waiting for the usual exchange of greetings which were no longer meant, on her part at least – did he realize? A pang of confusion and guilt burst upon her, driving her from her bed. He wasn't a bad man, not like the others. It wasn't his fault they couldn't get newspapers delivered to such an isolated spot and had no conversation to share other than the tumbling price of milk quotas and the closure of the local post office. But it was his fault that they lived there, and her fault, too.
She stood in her bathroom shivering, and not just from the cold, failing to recognize the face in the mirror that was melting in tears at the thought of another day in their half-forgotten world on the middle of this moor, with its empty hearths and closed hearts.
She knew she would do anything for a change.
– =OO=OOO=OO-= Goodfellowe was enjoying the prerogative of a Member of Parliament, exercised on days when the Government wasn't about to fall, of loitering in bed.
Not that he was idling, of course. He was preparing himself for the tribulations that lay ahead by devouring the Daily Telegraph. Back to front, as was his custom in matters of the mind. First the sports section, where he discovered that something called Charlton Athletic was sitting on top of the Premiership. Mystified, he rubbed the shadows from his eyes and turned to the obituaries. The Lord Drago had died, leaving no family. Goodfellowe knew him – had known him – but then he seemed to know more and more of those featured in this column with every passing year. He read about a progress through the ranks of Party and Parliament that was written like the eulogy for a modern-day Alexander and was, of course, complete bollocks. Forty years ago, before they had changed the law and lowered the age of consent, Drago had avoided imprisonment only because he had once served in MI5 and had friends in necessary places – although fourteen-year-olds were still beyond the pale, even today. He should have ended up in Wormwood Scrubs, instead he'd ended up in the House of Lords, and now he had ended up dead. Goodfellowe sighed and wondered what sort of obituary he would get, indeed whether he would get one at all. He decided not to dwell and hurried on through business and fashion, discovering what he might do with his money. If he had any. Then, finally, a splendid front-page story reporting a bravura speech by Brenda, the Environment Secretary, in which she claimed to have 'honoured this Government's covenant, not just for today but with future generations,' by announcing an increase in spending on the environment. No mean achievement during these turbulent and tight-fisted times.
Sadly, as the newspaper reported with considerable malice, Brenda's rhetorical sophistication hadn't markedly improved since the days of last year's drought when she had advised the nation to 'dig deep and do whatever it takes' to conserve water, and her husband had been discovered showering with their next-door neighbour. A finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth, had our Brenda. Several pounds short of a pension.
Oh, but what would the Telegraph do without her? On a bad news day – no divorces, no disasters, almost a day of despair for the newsroom – they were able to reveal that Brenda's citadel had been built with bricks of straw – and not even her own straw. In fact, she had done little more than rhetorically to raid the contingency budget that had been set aside by the Ministry of Agriculture to prevent hard-pressed farmers from starving, then in a gesture too far had classified it all as environmental expenditure on the grounds that most of the money was keeping the countryside green. Or, more accurately, being poured down a hole in the ground. Too bloody blatant, even for this Government. One day it would spin itself entirely out of control.
The letters page made for scarcely more comfortable reading. Clerics featured prominently this morning, with epistles deploring everything from the inaccuracy of church clocks to the most recent outbreak of pew power in which a congregation in Durham had mounted a picket line outside the cathedral. Their objective had been to insist on a return to King James and a few snatches of traditional organ music in place of all the clapping and community kissing. As Goodfellowe was frequently moved to note, God moves in a mysterious way; perhaps it would be better if God stopped dashing around and simply rested for a while to enable all these confused souls to catch up with Him. Or Her.
Another letter caught his eye. A broadside against the Government, damning it for its broken promises and fractured budgets, much like many other correspondents over the months, but this letter was of particular interest to Goodfellowe. Full of anger, yet written with simplicity and considerable dignity. It described the Defence Secretary as doing 'what no tyrant has been able to do since the days of the Norman Conquest, namely, single-handedly to threaten the security of the entire country.'
That description was inaccurate, Goodfellowe reflected. The Defence Secretary was no tyrant, rather an inferior form of ministerial life who had proven himself wholly incapable of standing up to the grasping demands of the Treasury, which was precisely why he had been allowed to linger in office so long beyond the point where any signs of usefulness had expired.
'Self-sacrifice is part of the military tradition,' the letter continued, 'particularly in order to save the lives of others, but to be sacrificed in order to save the life of an ebbing administration is an extraordinary breach of faith. There is nothing in this but shame for the Government, and growing danger for the country as a whole.'
Goodfellowe wriggled his toes in discomfort beneath the duvet. He agreed. The cutbacks had been appalling, even dangerous. He had thought so even as he'd marched through the lobby to vote for them. But what was he to do? Unlike the military, a backbencher is not immersed in thoughts about the nobility of self-sacrifice.
The letter fired its final salvo. 'For most soldiers, to be cast aside by their country is a greater humiliation than
surrender. Most soldiers would prefer the simple dignity of being shot.'
The letter was written by Colonel Peter Amadeus, MC. The Parachute Regiment. Retired. Obviously forcibly.
Goodfellowe gave a quiet squeak of surprise. 'I know this old bastard.'
'Which old bastard?'
He looked up.
It was Elizabeth.
– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'Nothing better to do in bed than read the newspaper?'
She was smiling. Bearing a breakfast tray. And completely naked. For a moment all his senses were filled with her, the soft curves of her body that caught the light from the window, those places of shadow and mystery, the almond-and-marzipan lips and eyes of… Eyes of what? He always had difficulty describing the colour of her eyes. Marmalade was about as close as he ever got. Full of sunshine and Seville. Not that he'd ever been to Seville, or had any idea what it was like. Except it produced tots of marmalade.
There were some questions he would never be able to answer about Elizabeth. Theirs was a relationship that had covered the spectrum between hell and the hurricane, and visited most of the storm centres in between. They had never fully trusted each other, since they were two people who found considerable difficulty in trusting themselves, particularly Goodfellowe, who had battled for what seemed half a lifetime to come to terms with his guilt and anger. His guilt arose because he was married to Elinor, his anger, even greater than his guilt, because Elinor was no longer, and could never again be, his true wife. Poor, tormented Elinor, locked away within the darkness of her starved mind and confined to a nursing home since the death of their son, Stevie. Not her fault. Perhaps not his fault either, but enough torment to have laid a trail of confusion upon his love for Elizabeth.
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