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 hindsight, 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.