“But I resigned my commission in the Gunners.”
“And now, effectively, you’ve resigned from the Greek gunners, too.”
Then Ranklin said what was, to the Major, a very odd thing: “Did you collect my pay?”
The Major’s face stiffened with surprise. “I … I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me.”
Ranklin was wiping his face with a damp rag. “Well, I’m not leaving Greece without it.”
“I was told, unofficially, to pass on a message that I don’t understand: that if you don’t return to London there will be civil as well as military consequences. So shall we get a move on, Captain?”
It wasn’t quite that easy. Having conceded the Major’s basic demand, Ranklin made no effort to hurry. A small boy tending a fire by a large hole in the far wall made him a tin mug of coffee, and Ranklin sipped as he sorted through his kit. Most of it, along with battered tins of tobacco and sugar, he gave away to other officers and gunners who drifted in to say goodbye and scowl at the Major. Nobody even gave him the chance to show his haste by refusing a mug of coffee.
“Who’s the boy?” he asked.
“Alex? He just adopted us on the road. His parents are probably …” he shrugged. “He doesn’t say, doesn’t seem to want to remember them … I suppose it could have been our guns.”
“Some guns had certainly caused civilian casualties at a crossroads I came through. Don’t your chaps look where they’re shooting?”
“Of course not.”
The Major stared. “I beg your pardon?”
Ranklin stopped in the middle of packing a small haversack and looked at him. “Haven’t the Coldstream heard of indirect fire yet? We’ve stopped the sporting habit of putting the guns and gunners out where the enemy can get a decent shot at them. Now we skulk behind hills and forests and shoot over them.” He went back to ramming socks and underclothes into the haversack and said more thoughtfully: “And it works. It really did. Observation and signalling, the clock code, ranging, concentration – everything we’ve been practising since South Africa. It all came together and it worked. Our guns won.”
“Really?” The Major held the low opinion of artillery common among soldiers who have never been shot at. “Well, that’s something you can tell them back in London. And that it makes for a pretty messy war in this part of Europe.”
Ranklin slung the haversack from his shoulder. “We’ve been using French guns, the Turks have German ones. How’s it going to be different in any other part of Europe?”
The Major didn’t know; he just felt that it ought to be. Then he had to wait while Ranklin went in to say goodbye to the Brigadier – and, it seemed, the Paymaster. He came out of the station ticket office counting a roll of worn drachma notes and they walked back to the Salonika road.
Ranklin stowed the money away. “I suppose you’ve got no idea what they want me back for?”
“Not the foggiest, old boy. But after twenty years in the Army,” and he guessed Ranklin had also served nearly that long, “I’m only sure it’ll be something you never thought of.” He was too well-bred to have put into words his feeling about an officer who fought for money, but now he saw a chance to hint at it. “Perhaps they want you for some sort of job in Intelligence.”
CLIMBING SPY HILL
2
The first thing he noticed when he came on deck was the smell, steam and coal smoke, that was both exciting and threatening because it was the smell of travel itself. Just as, to Ranklin, the smell of wood smoke had once meant the security and comfort of his family home.
In the four months since the gun lines at Salonika, he had got back his normal slight tubbiness and his face its clean roundness, with a wisp of fair moustache as ordered by paragraph 1696 of King’s Regulations but invisible at more than a few paces. But what most people remembered about him was the permanent small smile that kept his blue eyes crinkled half-shut and gave him a look of innocent optimism, as if he were looking to buy a solid gold watch off the next stranger.
He had developed that expression over most of his thirty-eight years because he knew a more serious one looked absurd on his boyish face. But it was an expensive smile, attracting beggars and unnecessary but tippable help, and a misleading one. Ranklin leant firmly towards pessimism rather than optimism, no matter what King’s Regulations implied about it being All Right On The Day.
A long shudder rippled through the ferry as its engines slowed and they came into Cork harbour, past the Army forts that guarded the entrance and then the vast steel side of a four-funnelled liner pausing briefly on its run to, or from, America. In New York it might belong; here it looked ludicrously wrong, towering above the islands and headlands that cluttered the bay and standing rock steady while the tenders and bumboats serving it pitched and rolled in the swell.
Closer in lay a row of armoured cruisers, looking less warlike than industriaclass="underline" all drab, stiff complication like bits chopped off a factory and floated out to sea. And beyond them the port of Queenstown sat on terraces cut into the face of a long ridge that, low as it was, almost scratched the gloomy March sky. The western end, he knew from a map, was called Spy Hill – but so was the highest point in many ports, meaning just the place from which incoming ships were first espied.
He peered through the thin drizzle, searching for Admiralty House, and knew it the moment he saw it because he had seen exactly the same building in every port of the Empire he had visited. With its canopied balconies, tree-shaded garden and tall flagpole, it gazed out over the heads of whatever natives it happened to be guarding with that serene superiority that only the Royal Navy could achieve.
Ranklin smiled at it with renewed pessimism and felt resentfully in his pocket to make sure he had enough change for the porters and cabbies waiting for him ashore.
“Bad luck, your kit not catching up with you,” the Admiral’s Secretary said, politely assuming Ranklin wasn’t dressed as a civilian on purpose. “Happens to us all. Sherry or pink gin? I don’t suppose you know anybody; I’ll introduce you.”
The Secretary was a Staff-Paymaster, with a Commander’s stripes and well senior to Ranklin; fiftyish, bald on top, with a ginger-grey imperial beard. The Admiral himself was at a conference at Dublin Castle: “He sends you his apologies,” the Secretary invented kindly.
The rest of the dinner party was all male, all Naval, and more jovial than the first mouthful of the first drink could justify. Either there was good news around, or the Admiral’s absence was good news itself.
“How’s London?” the most senior – a real Commander – asked.
“Cold and wet and all the taxis on strike,” Ranklin reported.
“Yes, I read something about that,” a senior Lieutenant chipped in. “The cost of petrol, isn’t it? Eightpence a gallon. Damn it, we must pay more than that here, don’t we?”
“Since you’re the only one with cash to waste keeping a car on these roads, you should know,” the Commander said.
The Lieutenant shook his head. He had a face that was both lean and limp with a puzzled expression, as if the world were always moving too fast for him. “I notice you didn’t turn down the offer of a lift, but damned if I know what I pay for petrol.”
There was a general chuckle and a junior Lieutenant forgot himself and tried to be funny.
“Why don’t you get one of your clerks to embezzle David’s pay?” he suggested to the Secretary. “He’d never notice and you could divvy it up among the rest of us.”
This time there was a general silence and the Commander growled: “Not in the best of taste.”
The Secretary stepped in to save the bewildered Lieutenant. “You’ve been on leave, haven’t you, Ian? Well, I’m afraid one of the Paymaster’s clerks is up for misuse of funds – and Lord knows what else, when the investigation’s complete. Sorry to wash our dirty linen in public, Ranklin.”