A Game for Heroes. Jack Higgins
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a while.
Mary sat at her easel half-way along the beach, an old straw hat shading her from the sun, and painted the headland for what must have been the tenth time, although she argued that it always looked different, depending on her mood. She turned and looked out to sea searching for me, then waved. I waved back, dived in and started to swim for the shore.
She was waiting for me, a towel ready in one hand, my eye patch in the other. Not that my scarred face bothered her particularly. She had been a nurse too long for that, but she knew it still bothered me.
I dried my face, pulled on the patch and grinned.
‘Marvellous out there. You should try it.’
‘No thanks. Ask me again around July. I’ll go up and see about lunch, Owen. Don’t be long.’
She gave me a light kiss on the forehead and I watched her go through the wire and start up the path, aware of a kind of nostalgic affection and nothing more than that, which made me feel guilty on occasion.
We had met as students before the war and when they had carried me into that military hospital in Surrey five months previously pumped full of drugs and barely conscious, hers had been the first face I had seen on waking. Her husband had been killed in action, navigating a Lancaster in the Dresden raid. We had been living together for three months now, ever since my discharge from hospital.
I took my time about dressing, then walked across to the easel. She’d only got as far as the sketching stage with this one, but it was good – damned good. I picked up a piece of charcoal and tried a line or two myself, but without much success. Where perspective is concerned, two eyes are better than one and although I seemed to have adjusted in most things, I had a feeling that my painting days were over.
I lay down on the sand and pillowed my head in my hands, narrowing that one good eye to focus on a razorbill that dropped through space for a perfect landing on the cliff face.
It was all so incredibly peaceful. Only the sea rushing in, the cry of a gull, a white cloud drifting. Who was I, then? Owen Morgan, sometime artist – of sorts. Novelist – very much so. Poet – debatable. Soldier, walker-in-darkness, hired bravo, cut-throat. It all depended on your point of view. And what was I doing caught in this pleasant limbo where one day eased into another and the horizon’s rumble was thunder and not guns?
I must have slept, but only briefly. A gull cried harshly bringing me back to life. I was instantly awake, a habit hard come by in dark places, and got to my feet. If I didn’t look sharp there would be Mary seeking me, the dinner burning and the devil to pay.
I went through the wire and started up the path, head down. I had barely reached the warning notice when a voice called, ‘You down there!’
I glanced up, squinting into the sun and saw an American army officer standing on the brow of the hill, although who or what he was, it was impossible to say from that position with the sun behind him.
‘I want a word with you,’ he said.
It wasn’t a request, but an order delivered in fine Bostonian tones, the kind of voice you get in New England and nowhere else in America and usually from a member of that happy little band whose ancestors stampeded to be first ashore from the Mayflower. I didn’t like his voice and I didn’t like him for all sorts of excellent reasons so I didn’t bother to reply.
He spoke again with an edge of exasperation to his voice. ‘I am looking for Colonel Morgan. They told me at the house that he would be down on the beach. Have you seen him?’
Looking back on it now, I can find every excuse for him. He was gazing down on a small, dark man, badly in need of a shave and the old blue Guernsey sweater and the black eye patch didn’t help. And neither, I suppose, did the gold ring I was wearing in my left ear at the insistence of Jack Trelawney, the landlord of the Queen’s Arms up the road towards Falmouth, who believed implicitly that it would improve my sight and had pierced my ear lobe on one memorable evening with a darning needle and the assistance of half a bottle of pre-war Scotch.
He moved down out of the sun and close enough for me to see that he was a major by rank which wasn’t surprising when one considered his medals. DSC and Silver Star with Oak Leaf clusters for a second award which could mean everything or nothing. As someone once observed, only the man who holds an award knows what it is really worth and only the people who fought with him in the same battle can guess. On the other hand, when he came a little closer so that I could read the shoulder flash, I saw that he was a Ranger, and I’d always heard that there was little to choose between them and our own Commandos.
‘Have you seen him?’ he demanded patiently.
He was lovely. A sort of turn-of-the century American abroad having difficulty with the peasantry, straight out of the pages of Henry James.
‘Well, now, that would be a difficult question to answer,’ I answered in a fair to middling Cornish accent.
‘You’d better buck your ideas up then, hadn’t you?’
The hard Scots voice came as something of a surprise as did the hand that grabbed me by the shoulder and swung me round. Another Ranger, a master sergeant this time which made the Scots accent all the more intriguing. He had a raw, bony face and hard eyes that were swollen by the scar tissue of the prize fighter. A bad man to cross on a fine April morning.
‘Come on, laddie, start trying a little harder,’ he bellowed and shook me like a rat.
A good, tough soldier, just the man for a foray by night or a bridgehead landing under fire, but I had existed, survived for five years, in a world he had never known. A world where strength was not enough and courage was not enough. Where each new day came as a miracle. One survived, mainly by not caring whether one did or not.
I placed a hand on the hand that held me, twisted exactly as prescribed by a Japanese gentleman at a pleasant old country house in Surrey in the spring of 1940 and dropped to one knee. He rolled twenty feet down the hill into a gorse bush.
I looked up at the major and smiled gently. ‘He made a mistake. Don’t let him make another.’
He stared at me, puzzled, and then something clicked in his eyes. He knew then, I think, but before he could say anything, the master sergeant was coming back up the slope with the speed of a wounded bear. When he was about six feet away, my hand came out of my hip pocket holding the old spring blade gutting knife I’d picked up on that first job back in Brittany in the second year of the war.
There was a nasty click when I pressed the button and the blade jumped into view. He stopped dead in his tracks, then crouched and started to move close.
‘Grant, stay where you are! That’s an order!’ the major cut in crisply.
Grant still crouched, glaring at me, murder in his eyes and then another voice called, high and clear, ‘Owen, for heaven’s sake; what on earth’s going on down there?’
The man who hurried down the track was in his sixties with snow-white hair, a long, rather ugly face and steel-rimmed spectacles. He wore an old Burberry and carried an umbrella and resembled to a remarkable degree the public image of an Oxford don. Which was exactly what he had been when we first met, although his talents had run to darker ends since those golden days.
I put up my knife and groaned. ‘Oh, no, not you, Henry. Anything but that.’
Major Edward Arnold Fitzgerald and his Highland-American bully-boy moved stiffly away after Henry’s formal introduction and I shook my head.
‘The trouble with Fitzgerald’s kind is that they can never take a man as they find him.’
Henry’s eyebrows went up. ‘But my dear Owen, that is precisely what he did do. Have you glanced in the mirror lately? I should have thought it unlikely that there is more than one half-colonel in His Majesty’s service at the moment sporting a gold ring in his left ear.’
‘You always did say I was an individualist,’