Kamila Shamsie - A God in Every Stone

— I’m surprised to find you here tonight.

— I could say the same of you, Miss Spencer. How did you get here from Campbellpur?

— So you knew I was on the train.

— Of course. Why are you surprised to find me here?

— I’d thought you’d be behind locked doors, making important decisions about important things.

She couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness as he removed a cigarette from its case, and patted his pockets.

— Catch.

She threw her lighter at him; it flashed silver in the darkness, and disappeared into the water. Without a word, barely a sound, he slipped off the diving board, the sleeves of his jacket briefly ballooning before the water dragged him down. Viv stood up, wondered whether to call for help from the men in deckchairs who remained engrossed in their conversation, and settled instead for lying flat beside the pool, her sequinned garter looped around her wrist, and plunging her arm into the wavering darkness. Diamonds of light flared in the water; something pressed against her fingertips and she started to jerk away before she recognised the familiar shape of the lighter and closed her fist around it.

Remmick pulled himself out of the water, and lay down on his back with a squelching sound, eyes fixed on the jut of the high diving board. Viv struck the lighter, was amazed to find it working, and offered him a lit cigarette. When he didn’t move she held the cigarette a few centimetres from his mouth and his head eased off the cement floor to take it between his lips, the length of a filter between her fingers and his kiss. She found herself imagining something that should be ludicrous, and by the catch of his breath knew he was imagining it too. She moved a few feet away, and everything that had started to happen stopped. When Remmick spoke his words leaned into each other, and she realised he was drunk.

— Remember when the Tochi Scouts were here on leave and one of them rode a motorcycle up the stairs of the diving board and then dropped — whoosh! — into the pool?

— Whoosh? I must have missed that.

— Really? ’Twasn’t you? Could’ve sworn it was. Anyone else would’ve been thrown out of the Club, but everyone recognised those fellows spend all that time in the tribal areas, Peshawar the oasis where they can let their hair down. That’s what it is, you know. An oasis. The place which isn’t all those other places in the Frontier.

— Or wasn’t all those other places?

He closed his eyes and there was a sound which was almost a sob.

— How bad is it? Viv asked. He held his arm up and pushed the sleeve back so she could see his wristwatch.

— What time is it?

— Nine twenty-three. No, wait, I think your watch has stopped. Must be the water. A few minutes past then.

— Within an hour we’ll have abandoned the Walled City.

— Who?

— We. The British. We’re pulling out the troops.

— Why?

— Because idiots and cowards are running things.

He crossed his arms over his chest like a pharaoh, eyes still closed.

— And you’ll have to leave tomorrow. All women and children being evacuated.

— Could you please sit up and start making sense?

Several seconds passed in silence. The men in the deckchairs stood up and walked across the lawn toward the verandah, not looking in her direction, their eyes fixed in front of them in a way that made it clear they were aware of her and would take back news to the dining room of an assignation beside the pool. She tapped Remmick’s forehead with the lighter. His eyes opened and he said, Go back to England.

— We did something terrible yesterday, didn’t we?

He put his hands to his ears, began to hum ‘Makin’ Whoopie’, and she shivered, wondering what could bring this man — always so assured, so solid — to this teetering place.

— The lorries, she said. The humming stopped, almost mid-note.

— Who told you?

Viv tasted blood in her mouth. It wasn’t her imagination. There was blood, real blood, she was swallowing it. And an ache in her tongue where her tooth had driven into it.

— Someone in a position to know, she said, and her voice was measured, without judgement.

— What was done had to be done, he said.

She closed her hand around the solidity of the lighter. There was a lesson she’d learned many years ago, though she hadn’t understood it at the time: how to coax information out of someone, how to make them believe you would never use it against them.

— If there’d been funerals this morning, all those bodies paraded around the street!

In her voice there was just the right mix of horror at what would have ensued and sympathy for the decision that had to be made to prevent it. There was a tiny exhalation — she understood it to be relief — from Remmick, before he responded:

— Mayhem. Absolute mayhem. The bastards, beg your pardon, would have whipped the entire Walled City into a frenzy.

— But we’ve lost the City all the same?

— Bolton — he’s cracking up. Somehow they’ve got him convinced that there’s a dam about to burst unless he withdraws the troops. It’s madness. We’ve contained it. We’ve done what had to be done.

— How many were there in the lorries?

She placed a hand on his shoulder as she asked the question; a woman appreciative of men who did what had to be done.

— I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

— Where were they taken?

— Six feet under. Beyond that, I don’t imagine anyone other than Caroe knows.

— Caroe?

— Man in charge of it. He’ll go far.

A lone cricket chirped in the vicinity of the oleander tree.

— Shall I tell you something I never understood, she said. My mother had a friend who lost a son in the Great War; he was buried in France. This was a woman who couldn’t venture more than ten feet from her house without treating it as if she was going on the Grand Tour. But on Armistice Day she heard the news on the radio, walked out of her door and didn’t stop until she was at her son’s grave. He’d been dead three years. Why should standing at a grave matter? But it mattered more than anything else in all the world.

Remmick sat up, then stood, entirely steady on his feet.

— You will keep your own best interests at heart, won’t you, Miss Spencer?

— It’s a vexed matter, to decide what those might be.

— Oh, not really. For instance: it wouldn’t be in your best interests to give anyone reason to go over the unfortunate matter of your wartime record.

Viv stood too, and slipped her shoes onto her bare feet, which gave her the advantage of several inches over him.

— Unfortunate. So speaks the man who was sipping tea at Dean’s while his countrymen were in the trenches at the Somme. And while I was nursing those men.

— You see, the question of your loyalties. I don’t like bringing it up. But I kept my eye on you, after you left here. I know about the letters you sent to the War Office, accusing a man who worked there of lying to you, and of murdering — what was your phrase — a man with more nobility in his little finger than the entire War Office has in all its bloated carapace?

— I barely remember those letters. I was. . upset.

— Yes, that was clear. And it was clear why. But if this proclivity for the King’s enemies should prove to be habitual –

— Proclivity?

— You used to speak to me about him, though never before you’d had a drink or two. Men aren’t such fools in matters of the heart as women like to think. So, that was the Turk. And now you’re here to see the boy to whom you had that unnatural attachment. People used to talk about it — I always defended you. He was just a child. But he’s a grown man now, with a Red Shirt brother.