Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

Had it said Eismark? Of course, now with the growing day, reception was getting patchy. She didn't know why; how did radio waves (whateverthey were) know the difference between light and dark? She left the bowl and water and sat down to listen very carefully to the crackling, wavery voice.

When the news bulletin had finished, she went back and refilled the kettle, picked up the bowl, and started to soak her hand again. She felt frightened but not sure why; perhaps it was just being reminded of the wide uncaring world beyondthe dale. Should she try and speak with Leni? She didn't even know if Leni was still alive; she had been meaning to get in touch for so long, and always putting it off. But maybe this time…

The water cooled. She stood up and walked carefully to the old upright piano by the window. Some of the feeling had come back into her hand, along with the tingling, but never the old flexibility and certainty. She stared at the flat muscles, waggling her fingers and willing them to belong to a 25-year-old girl again, and promising herself one – only one – glass of brandy before the first pupil arrived, and then only after she had done her own practice.

What had she set them to learn for this time? It would have been something from Kinderszenen; nowadays it almost always was. You came back to Schumann as you came back to the scenes of your own childhood that were like unbreakable toys, always bright and unchipped when the rest of your life had worn vague in the memory.

She sat down, and instead of the scales, her hands fumbled into the gentle nursery notes of Träumerei. The first aeroplane of the day rushed past up the valley, ripping up the dreaming and the loneliness with its crackling thunder.

With a proper sense of His responsibilities, God had provided a vivid blue-and-white sky that quite obviously wasn't going to leak a single drop of rain on the crisp rows of Volvos, BMWs and Rovers parked around the playing-field in the valley. After all, as the vicar had argued in his prayers the previous Sunday, if thefêtewent well they should not only be able to pay off the final cost of re-roofing the vicarage, but have something left over to relieve famine in East Africa. It was the best bargain he had been able to offer God in months.

Harry Maxim knew nothing about the vicarage roof and not much more about starvation in East Africa, but he was reasonably familiar with the ceremony of the English county turning out in its best weekend clothes to buy cucumber sandwiches for a Good Cause. He drifted down the avenues of gossip between the stalls and marquees, a slim man in his middle thirties with shortish fair hair and a concave face that had hard lines running down around the hopeful smile that he had decided was the proper expression for the occasion.

To the experienced military eye – and there are usually plenty of those, both male and female, at a Kent villagefête- he didn't look particularly like an Army major, but nor did he look not like one. If they thought about it at all, theyjust concluded that, with his loose-cut olive blazer, he couldn't belong to one of the Very Best regiments and wondered who had invited him. It didn't occur to them – and why should it? – that if you sometimes have to wear a shoulder holster, loose jackets are very useful.

However, that afternoon Maxim was quite unarmed. He bought himself a cup of tea and miniature sausage roll, then thumbed through a stack of old 78 records, hoping for a black Brunswick label that could be an early Duke Ellington. He hadjust given up hope when the loudspeaker said somethingjovial about seeing the future defence of the country was in good hands and there was a volley of shots from the cricket pavilion. Maxim joined the tide as it flowed that way.

Two sections of Cadet Force schoolboys with long hair straggling from under their berets were attacking the pavilion across the cricket field; the actual wicket was roped off so that the attack had to split unrealistically around it. They moved in the classic pairs, one firing while the other lumbered forward in a zigzag run-at least when they remembered the boy sergeant's constant exhortation to: "Keep one foot on the ground!" He was aged about sixteen, with a dark angry face and a uniform that fitted.

Then somebody tried to throw a smoke candle while lying down, and sent it wild. Orange smoke billowed up from the bald but still sacred turf of the roped-off wicket and a unanimous gasp of horror came from all round the field. The battle stopped dead.

The boy sergeant stepped over the rope, kicked the candle clear and stepped back looking angrier than ever. "You stupid cunts," he raged in a penetrating undertone, "just lying there like stuffed pricks…"

"Roger,"said a lady in a wide hat just in front of Maxim, "did that boy say what Ithought he said?"

"Probably didn't know what it meant," grunted Roger, who had cropped grey hair and a deep tan. Then he caught Maxim's glance and smiled. "But he'll need to get his biology sorted out before he's much older."

"Roger,"Mrs Roger said.

The attack began again. The light machine-gun section waved a rattle from the flank, the pavilion fell to a frontal assault and two prisoners were roughed up with obvious sincerity. The loudspeaker congratulated the professionalism of the 'young warriors', the crowd clapped and wandered away, and the boy sergeant went on looking angry as he herded the platoon across toa Land-Roverparked at the corner of the field.

There, an adult sergeant in a Paratroop beret took over andinsisted on all the rifles being properly cleaned and all the unfired blanks handed in, including the ones that had been 'forgotten' so that they could be experimentally toasted on a kitchen stove.

Maxim hung back until the last cadet had scurried off to the tea tent, then the sergeant swung round with a sharp salute and a broad grin.

"Good afternoon, sir. Glad you could make it." He clinked the brass cartridges and shook his head, still grinning. "They think you were born yesterday. They never think you might have been a cadet yourself. "

They shook hands. "Jim, I didn't expect to find you cradle-snatching."

"Just part-time I'm working for my father-m-law. He's got the garage over on the main road." Jim Caswell nodded at the steep green slope behind the church "Goodjob?"

"It could be. Mostly desk work, but…" He was a solid-chested man, a little shorter and younger than Maxim, but with the ageless middle-aged look that long-serving sergeants acquire. Caswell would be serving still but for a permanently stiff left arm that came from drivinga Land-Roverover a Claymore mine while 'advising' on anti-guerilla tactics in Abu Dhabi. The Army would have kept him on – but no longer with a Paratroop cap-badge.

"You seem to be getting across the language all right," Maxim commented.

Caswell chuckled and rubbed his moustache-a straight bar of dark hair-with his right wrist His left hand wouldn't reach that far. "That lad spent a week outm Germany with the Woofers, spent twenty quid of his own money and his folks don't have that much at all. He's all right I think we could get him." Maxim had guessed that the boy had picked up his style from real soldiers, but not that Caswell would be taking the cadets so seriously-or still calling the Army 'we'.

Alone in the corner of the field, they leant against the warm metal of the Land-Rover Caswell half-offered a packet of cigarettes. "You've still given up, have you'"

"I still dream about it."

"I've heard that. Funny." He took one himself and lit it deftly, but all one-handed "Your boy, young Chris, he's getting on okay7"

"Yes. He stays with my parents downm Littlehampton, he goes to school there. It would be impossible, just me and him in London…"