I was also beginning to feel my years. I feared I came across as matronly, a somewhat quaint and ridiculous figure among the long-haired, lithe and youthful reporters. Don’t get me wrong. Like you I’ve been blessed with strong bones and my skin has always worn the years lightly. Despite my aversion to exercise, I was still trim. I dressed well. It wasn’t my physical appearance that aged me so much as a kind of heaviness, a fatigue that stared out at me from the mirror every morning. Looking back, I think I was already casting off my mooring ropes, ready to drift in a different direction.
One blissfully cool evening in November, I wandered down to the bar at the Continental Palace hotel, where I was staying with most of the other early-bird journalists. I had spent the day driving around the countryside with an interpreter, trying to gather material for a piece on government efforts to build civil defence forces in vulnerable villages. After bumping around the potholed roads, trying to sweet-talk angry, silent villagers and slipping knee-deep into filthy water while crossing a rice paddy, I just wanted to sit in a corner with a cold 33 beer and let the traffic fumes and motorcycle honking anaesthetise me. I was staring vacantly into the busy street when a tall, gangly, balding man, carrying a raincoat over his arm and an umbrella, came up to my table and said in a London accent that had had its edges polished off: “Are you Lina Rose of the Gazette?”
I nodded, annoyed that he had punctured my empty reverie but not that surprised to be so easily identified. There weren’t that many women reporters on the ground yet and I had been in the country long enough for people to know how and where to find me of an evening. Saigon was like one of those decorative snuffboxes they used in the 18th century – glittering, ornate, smelly on the inside and very small. Nowhere to hide in a snuffbox.
“Wonderful. May I join you for a moment? My name is George Wallis and I’m from the British embassy.”
He held out a large, knobbly hand. After a beat, I shook it and gestured to the chair.
“Be my guest. It’s a free country, for now anyway.”
He laughed nervously, draped his coat over the back of the chair and sat, fumbling awkwardly with his huge black umbrella until he finally propped it against his chair.
“Can I order you another beer?”
I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette, not taking my eyes from his twitching, sweaty face.
“But I have to warn you,” I said. “If you’ve come to wheedle information out of me, you’re barking up the wrong tree. You’ll have to read my reports in the Gazette, like everyone else. I have no intention of becoming friends with anyone from the embassy, thank you.”
The blush that fired his cheeks and forehead made me wonder just how desperate the Foreign Office was if this was the calibre of operative they were sending to war zones. The umbrella slid onto the floor. Jumping forward to catch it, he knocked the table, sending my empty bottle crashing to the floor.
I relented a little. He might be a Waughesque bumbler but his eyes were kind and like me, he was no teenager. Maybe he too was feeling displaced in this young man’s war.
“Sorry to be so blunt,” I said. “It’s just that in my experience there is no such thing as a free beer. If you’re offering me a drink, which is gratefully received by the way, I feel obliged to tell you, from the outset, that I intend to drink your beer and give you nothing in return. I hope you understand.”
His blush deepened, he shook his head with a wry smile and signalled to the waiter for two beers.
“Am I that transparent?” he said when the waiter had brought our order.
“I’m afraid so,” I answered, lifting my bottle towards him. “Cheers.”
We drank in silence for a short while but I couldn’t keep it up. I was tired, my usual prickliness had been deflated by the tough day and I hoped a little conversation in English would silence the frightened voices of the people I had interviewed, which were still echoing in my head.
“Have you been in Saigon long?” I asked.
He leaned forward too eagerly.
“Since the beginning of the year. Feels like forever. I came over from Malaya. I’d been there for a couple of years.”
“Where are you from originally? I think I hear London though you’re doing a good job of disguising it.”
He smiled.
“Yes, I was born in the East End, round Leyton way. Haven’t spent much time there since I was a boy though. I signed up at 21 just as the war started and then afterwards, I came back and everything was so dreadful that I just turned around and took myself off straightaway. I went to India first, travelled a bit and then ended up getting a job at the High Commission just after partition. It was pretty messy but good for my career, as it turns out. I’ve been on the circuit since. Not quite sure what I’m supposed to be doing here but I think that’s quite a normal feeling for British diplomats these days, what with the Empire shrinking and the Cold War and all of this.”
He waved his hand around the bar that had filled up with beefy, loud GIs, hollow-eyed hacks and shiny-haired, doll-like Vietnamese girls.
He asked me a few questions about myself. I gave him my edited highlights – born in St Albans, spent the war at the Ministry of Information, natural segue into journalism, Paris, Korea. I had it down pat by then. He didn’t push for extra details. People of my generation rarely did. We knew that those hide-all façades were there for a reason – to spare blushes on both sides of the wall.
“I know you can’t tell me what the British are doing with the Americans – we all know you’ve got a hand in the strategic hamlets programme…”
I paused, just in case, but he held up his hands and would only smile. Maybe not so Waughesque after all, I thought, smiling back in spite of myself.
“As you know, we Brits are not directly involved in this particular shindig and long may that continue,” he said.
The emphasis was most definitely his. It was well known at that time that the British supported the US policy and I wondered if George might be involved in the oddly-named BRIAM, an advisory group that had been set up a few months before and that some said was a cover for British military training of US and Vietnamese soldiers, using techniques developed during the 1950s in the Malayan emergency, or liberation war, depending on which side you were on. George didn’t look the type but then Hitler looked like a dandy, Churchill like a doddery uncle and Stalin like a jolly wrinkled grandfather, so you never know.
“Okay, so what do you think of the boys fighting here? Does it remind you of yourself?”
I must’ve been a little merry to ask such an odd question. Drunk, dehydrated and disoriented and probably also desperate for a kindred soul who could see this war as I did. Someone who saw life as I did. Another survivor.
He took a moment to answer.
“No. And yes. The fighting here is so different from what I experienced. I never fought in this part of the world. It was all on the Western Front for me and a little bit in North Africa. So, this doesn’t feel at all familiar. But then, if you talk to the GIs, and sometimes I do, it’s all there, all the same. You see them confused, scared and unsure. You can tell they’re overwhelmed, just as we were. Then it’s the morality of it all. No one ever asks a soldier how he feels about the rights and wrongs. You can’t really. You can’t ask because then he’d have to answer and then he’d have to think and if he did that he wouldn’t be able to fight and after all, that’s what he has to do. So yes, I guess some things never change. The human condition and its conditioning.”
He drained his beer and started to gather his belongings.
“I know you don’t want to give me any information. I respect that,” he said. “But would you like to meet up now and then, for a drink and a chat? It’s just that there are so few of us in this town. Don’t you think we Brits need to stick together a little? If only so we can make fun of the Yanks?”
I smiled and said yes. I’ve always found it useful to know people in embassies, even if their main interests are usually self-s
erving if not downright selfish. The same could be said for most of us journalists. Besides, there was something delightful in how out-of-place George seemed to be, despite his on-paper experience. He was like a student who excels at all subjects but who might still need help figuring out how to cross a busy road. I wondered if his apparent ineptitude and social awkwardness might be a mask that served him well but I detected a real vulnerability there too. A rawness that none of the young reporters had but that I recognised.
George and I became friends, or perhaps more accurately we were occasional drinking buddies. It was he who told me, quite by accident, what really pushed Robert over the edge into the unfathomable deep.
It was a few weeks after our first meeting and we were sitting in an outdoor bar on a street near my hotel, trying to make ourselves heard above the drone of chainsaws being used to tear down majestic hardwood trees at the bottom of the busy road. We didn’t know it then but the authorities believed the streets were too narrow for the military vehicles that would soon pour in. They were already preparing for the inevitable next phase. In the end, war is so predictable: once the engine ignites, the whole thing moves forward relentlessly. Even as we sat there that evening, plans to poison many more of Vietnam’s trees were being hatched in dim, panelled rooms far, far away, where shrewd politicians were preparing to cover their tracks with misleading words, like defoliant, pacify and body count. War murders meaning, Diane. That is why truth is always the first casualty.
George seemed melancholy, less chatty than usual, though the whining of the saws was making it difficult to hold any kind of conversation.
Finally, the day’s light began to fade, the workers packed up their tools and the mouth-watering smell of marinated pork being grilled enveloped the street.
“Are you okay, George? You seem very quiet this evening?” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “I am feeling a little down. I get like this sometimes but usually I can shake it off fairly quickly. I suppose you’d call it an attack of the blues. This time it’s lasting longer though. I don’t know what it is. Something about the air here right now, the smell of the flowers, or maybe it’s the war, the way it’s all going. Bloody hell, maybe it’s just the damn sound of those chainsaws.”
He sipped his beer. A skinny, big-eyed boy with blue shorts and red flip-flops leaned over the railing between our table and the street, holding out a bunch of pink peach flowers. I waved him away but George held up one hand to me while he rummaged in his pocket for change. The boy’s delighted smile seemed to hang in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s grin long after his whippet-thin body had disappeared.
George held the bouquet out to me.
“Pretty bedraggled I’m afraid but they’ll brighten up your room for a few hours, at least until the petals fall off.”
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” he smiled, taking out a white handkerchief and running it over his sweating head. “I’m not making a pass, or whatever it is those damned Yanks say. I just thought the flowers looked pretty and the boy looked hungry and you probably haven’t had any flowers for a while so I knew you wouldn’t reject this bunch, poor as it is.”
“That’s very cheeky of you. Maybe my hotel room is a rhapsody of flowers,” I said.
“If that was the case, I doubt you’d be here having a drink with an old fogey like me.”
I tilted my head to him. “Good point.”
“They look a bit like pink poppies,” he said. “I bloody hate poppies.”
We laughed together but his mirth was joyless – a birthday cake without a candle.
“Ah sod it! I’m going to tell you what’s eating me, bugger the security protocols. They took us on a trip the other day, to see one of the villages the guerrillas attacked. Or so they say. No one left to confirm whether or not that’s the truth. And don’t ask who took us, or where it was, or anything else, Lina, because you know I can’t tell you.”
I shut my mouth and wished I had my notebook discreetly on my lap. If George was about to dump news on me, I’d better hope my memory was up to the task. So far though, there was no exclusive here. We knew villages were being bombed or burned. This was nothing new, nothing that would distract my readers from their cornflakes, as McNeish would say.
“Anyway, I was walking around the huts – you know what it’s like: charred floors, crumbling half-walls and the smell of death everywhere. No bodies though. They never let the foreigners see the bodies. Not that they were particularly discreet. The ditch where they threw them was right there at the edge of the clearing. They hadn’t even bothered to rake over the earth.”
He stopped, lit a cigarette, picked up the flowers, smelled them and put them down again.
“It was a shoe that did it. A black canvas shoe half-buried in the earth. You could tell the foot inside it was small, but not necessarily a child’s. Not here. But before, in France, it would have been a child’s. It was a child’s, dammit. It brought it all back. The smells, the terrifying silence, the burnt, black trees. I was in Caen again, the day after we bombed the place to smithereens.”
I sat up straight. Caen, the town with the church on Robert’s last postcard.
“You were in Caen? When?”
“After D-Day. We landed at Lion-sur-Mer on Sword Beach and our first job was supposed to be to take Caen, to stop the Germans from pushing up to the coast.”
“My husband landed at Lion-sur-Mer.”
George shook his head.
“He was probably in a different unit. I don’t remember anyone called Rose. I’m sure I would’ve. He would’ve been mercilessly ribbed for that name,” he said, trying to smile.
“No, I don’t use his name, not since he died. He was Robert Stirling. But the other boys called him—”
“The Untouchable?” George’s eyes drilled into me. “You’re the girl he talked about all that time. The one who was working in London. The one he thought…” He paused, shook his head and rubbed his hand over his sweating pate.
“Jesus Christ. Robert. But…”
His wide brow furrowed. I tensed. I knew what was coming next and I took a deep breath. I was clear about what I was going to say but even all these years later, my sanitised version of the truth could still hurt. Like I said, war strips words of their meaning and after Robert died, I too was guilty of euphemism. I couldn’t keep pulling off the bandage. You do understand, Diane. Don’t you?
“He died after the war, didn’t he?”
I nodded.
“Yes, he died in 1947. We weren’t married that long. It was very sad.”
“I heard he killed himself. Is that it? I remember I bumped into someone from the battalion and he told me. He said it was the only way Robert could possibly go. Nothing else could hurt him.”
I said nothing and so he continued.
“You know, we used to fight over who would get to stand beside him when the balloon went up. We knew he’d make it so being next to him seemed the safest bet.”
“I suppose it was until it wasn’t,” I said.
George looked mortified.
“I’m so sorry. Good God, I wasn’t thinking. It’s none of my business. None whatsoever. Damn, this whole day has been one monstrous fuck-up after another.”
I said nothing but not because I was exploiting his confusion. I was lost in my memories. I hadn’t thought of that nickname, The Untouchable, for years. To be honest, I hadn’t thought that much about Robert himself for several years. It’s unforgiveable but most things we are forced to do to survive are unpardonable.
George’s face was in shadow now. Night had come suddenly as it always did in Saigon. I decided to ignore his question. My confirmation of Robert’s suicide was not necessary.
“Did you fight in Caen together?” I asked.
“Yes, although I don’t think I would describe it as fighting. Nor would Robert. It was the one time he was not untouchable. But then again, no one who saw what happened could remain untouched. Even then, even a
fter all those years of war.”
“Tell me.”
He shook his head.
“Long time ago. Nobody needs to go over that again.”
“Please. I need to know.”
CHAPTER 22
This, Diane, is George’s account of what happened in Caen. It is as accurate as it was on the night he told me. I have not forgotten one word. I can still hear him telling the story in a flat monotone that was more distressing than any emotional rant could have been. I took a few notes that evening in Saigon but I didn’t really need to. You don’t ever forget a revelation like this.
I need to stop using words like ‘ever’. You’d think I’d know better by now.
I will let George tell you the story because it is his to tell.
I made sure I was right beside Robert in the front of the ship as we came into the beach. It wasn’t just his reputation, the way he’d survived all the battles and campaigns without a scratch. It was something about the way he was as well, something about his face. He always managed to look calm. There was a little smile he’d give you just before the off, like this, with his eyebrows raised. Like he was laughing at it all. Like it was all a bad joke, a childish lark. You knew he didn’t believe it, he wasn’t one of the empty-headed ones who enjoyed the fighting, saw it as some kind of macho game. Robert was smart and that’s why his smile, calm and a little world-weary, helped us all more than he could know. If you ask me, that smile was why we all wanted to be beside him. That and the fact that we’d seen him help other lads out when things got tough before. He was truly brave and for those of us who spent the war wondering about our own courage, he gave us something to believe in. He gave me the smile as the bullets pinged around us, just before they opened the ramp at the front. Then we were up, queuing like good Englishmen to get off. I remember there was quite a swell and I could hear a bagpipe playing somewhere. It was surreal. Just before I jumped into the water, Robert straightened the spade in my pack, thumped me on the shoulder and pointed to a landing craft running alongside us, where soldiers were trying to get their bikes down almost vertical ramps into the choppy sea.
The Reckoning Page 23
