On waking in the morning he climbed to a lookout rock and scanned the sea with John’s binoculars hoping for some spectacular scene to fill his eyes — other than the usual files of men and donkeys. Perhaps one dawn I’ll see a huge P & O liner stranded on the rocks below. Or maybe I’d wake in the night, startled by the grinding noise of its collision, then by hordes of destitute Algerians streaming by the cave intent on loot, and materials for the army. And I would go out and join them, walk down to the great liner and help them strip it of its luxury for their subsistence against the all-beating elements.
During the long days of waiting they talked little, considering how much each had to say, as if saving the flood of it for the safety of Lincolnshire. He hoped the storm would let go its fury, for he wanted to cross on a leaden calm. The prospect of gliding along over a great watery placidity attracted him after the torment and turbulence of the last year. Or perhaps it’s my only hope of a rest, he thought, before the greater confusion to come. What right had anybody got to a peaceful life?
‘Does Albert know you’ve come out here?’ he asked, on a walk they took together through the drizzling mist.
‘The less I talk, the more I do. I only discuss what I’m not going to do. But on this occasion we were all having dinner, including Myra, and I did tell them I was coming here.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That I was a fool. But I felt sufficiently in control of myself to agree with them, and still set off.’
‘Don’t you think you were lucky to find me?’
‘I believe in fate. I was fated to.’
‘You just happened to meet me.’
‘Fate.’ John snapped out the word, like a saw going through wood.
‘Suit yourself.’
‘Albert will judge when we get back.’
He smiled, careful to make it compassionate should John take it into his occasionally muddled and paranoid head to snatch at the revolver bulging under his torn and stained coat. ‘I might be more inclined to talk about it in Lincolnshire,’ Frank said. ‘Let’s hope we get through that black sea. We might be in for months of gales. Makhlouf told me it was sometimes like this all winter.’
After dark he couldn’t sleep. It was still raining, a night laden with blackness. John slept in the shelter wrapped in coat and blanket, oblivious to the chill, stretched out straight and peaceful as if still in his army bed in England. It seemed that nothing could trouble his sleep, and Frank envied such animal-like capacity for indulging in it. He himself had lost it, being on his way out, while John took to slumber as if he might be here for good, which made Frank superstitiously wonder whether or not he’d ever feel the deck of a good steamer under his feet.
The sea was boiling up, as if the devil would make tea with it. Stretch out your arm with a kettle on the end and it would get snapped off. The wind was a mad steamroller, could push down trees, throw a helicopter against a cliff-face like so much spit. It roared along the coast and over the sea out of control, dangerous because of the night, crushing stars and pine-cones — though ships were moving through it. The roar was so great he expected boulders to be thrown up into the forest. The ship must attack the storm if it is not to be smashed itself. It sets out on an offensive against nature in which survival is a great victory. From a fish in water he would become a ship if and when he left Algeria, set out on his fight against the all-conditioning soul-moulding world. To fight was the only way to combat extinction, to mount the totality of his mind and body against annihilation by the sedate and backward sliding world. Yet he felt, in his agony of suspense, and the infinite postponement of getting away, in the tormented state of mind at being forced to leave and yet not wanting to, that for him complete victory was impossible because he had not been tempered in the true steel of the materialist world. In fact just plain victory was out of the question. You can conceivably break through the enemy lines, but you die on the barbed wire. Or, at most, you cut out your enclave in no-man’s-land, and hold off all comers, friend and enemy alike, until you have dug galleries and catacombs in which to work out your ideas to the bitter end. The conception of wide-open spaces beyond the bloody lines of battle and death is only a dream, valuable only for drawing you into the conflict in the first place. But it is a conflict in which neither armistice nor surrender is ever possible to contemplate.
The storm lessened, and one night a boat waited offshore in the mist. Men were grunting by with loads on their backs. The moist hills rolled behind them. He stood outside and an FLN officer shone a torch in his face. ‘You go down in an hour, at two o’clock.’
Back in the cave he took papers from a briefcase. ‘Both of you.’ They crouched. He counted ten one-thousand-franc notes. ‘This is your pay, a thousand francs a month. Please sign here.’
Seven pounds ten for a year. He’d expected nothing, but that was what the ordinary FLN soldier received. Then he gave it back. ‘Keep it, for the cause.’
They embraced. ‘We won’t forget what you’ve done for us,’ the officer said. ‘Tell everyone how we fight for our liberty. A guide is waiting for you outside. Here is your laissez-passer. You have plenty of time to get down.’
It was six hundred feet and three kilometres to the sea. Baked within and sweating outside, he hauled up his pack, and they set off for the rocks. He felt lean and nimble, not turning to see whether John was lagging behind. His arms were bars of steel, currents of energy running in to keep them working. Young lambs bleated from under carob-trees. How had they survived? It’s a wonder God didn’t turn in his grave at what was perpetrated in this war. He could no longer think of it. Such things would come to him later. They trotted the brown wet soil, filtering between trees, the last bouts of wind knocking into them, thorns ripping at his ragged slacks as if to send him out naked. The full moon was half-hidden, clear, then obscured, and plain again.
John fell, and he turned to help. ‘Keep it up. We’ll soon be on the boat.’
He was gasping as if his chest-wall would splinter. ‘Leave me if I can’t keep on. Leave me alone.’
Frank could not believe that the boat and a certain sort of liberation was so close. Their party descended steeply, no path to be seen, an occasional smoothness under the feet if they didn’t look down too often or anxiously. ‘I won’t leave you,’ Frank said, ‘not even if you throw an epileptic fit. Come on, get up.’ He took his belongings, heard him panting behind, and followed the vague shadow of the guide waiting below.
The sea made no recognisable noise, and the wind had become part of their breath with its soft hissing. The raingrit lifted but showed nothing, then came down again. He felt himself going quickly to the edge, towards some endless sudden drop of the land. On waking as a child he stood on the bed, still in his dream, and walked to the edge, fell off into his world of wakefulness — and a broken ankle. You stopped falling, and there was no broken drop that the body could not take nor the soul catch up with though badly jarred. When they rested he felt the power of John’s set eyes wildly against him. ‘Let’s smoke,’ he said. ‘Shield everything.’
‘The sky won’t see it,’ John smiled. ‘Its black eyes are shut tight tonight.’
‘They’d better be. Your fags will just about last till we hit Gibraltar — or wherever it is we’re dropped. I’ll take you out to a meal — by way of thanks and gratitude for you having come all this way to get me back safe and sound.’ It was impossible that they’d ever reach anywhere, except the stony ground of this bleak coast, in a thousand gobbet-pieces after the French warships blasted.
John threw down his unlit cigarette, stood and looked around as if the bars of the world were shutting in on him. He ran back up the hill, springing and zigzagging like a mad goat, stones and soil scuffing from under his feet, scattering at Frank who chased him. He ran to the left, a shallow outflanking move that soon set him in front. He leapt from a treebase and brought him down. John foamed and kicked, but Frank fixed his limbs and bones tight. A rattle shook his throat: ‘Let me go! Let me go!’