I looked back along the years. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Very good.’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘Nothing much to tell. We married young. I was a second lieutenant and she was an army wife.’
‘So you were a soldier.’
‘Until ten years ago, when I started working with Western and Continental. I’m still in the reserves.’
‘What rank?’
‘Colonel.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You must have been good.’
I laughed. ‘Good, but not good enough, tactically speaking.’ I found myself telling her about it.
I had worked my way upwards from my green commission with a rapidity that pleased me until I found myself a half-colonel commanding a battalion in Germany. I did not get on very well with my superior officer, Brigadier Marston, and the bone of contention was that we disagreed on the role of the army. He was one of the old school, forever refighting World War II, and thought in terms of massed tank operations, parachute drops of entire divisions and all the rest of the junk that had been made obsolete by the pax atomica. For my part, I could see nothing in the future but an unending series of counter-insurgency operations such as in Malaya, Cyprus and Aden, and I argued – maybe a bit too forcibly – that the army lacked training for this particular tricky job.
When Marston wrote my annual report it turned out to be a beauty. There was nothing in it that was actionable; in fact, to the untrained eye the damned thing was laudatory. But to a hard-eyed general in the War House, skilled in the jargon of the old boys’ network, the report said that Lt-Col William Kemp was not the soldier to put your money on. So I was promoted to colonel and I cursed Marston with all my heart. A colonel in the army is a fifth wheel, a dogsbody shunted off into an administrative post. My own sideline was intelligence, something at which I was particularly skilled, but my heart wasn’t in it. After a couple of years I negotiated very good freelance terms with Western and Continental, who paid willingly for my expertise. I would still be pushing pieces of paper around various desks but I’d be getting £15,000 a year for doing it. Marston, meanwhile, was in Northern Ireland, up to his armpits in IRA terrorists and wondering what the hell to do with his useless tanks.
I finished my story and looked up at Jill, who was staring hard at me. My army experience had exposed me to some brutal interrogation techniques, but Jill Salton could give my instructors points. ‘So that was it,’ I said. ‘I quit.’
‘But your wife had died earlier.’
‘I was stationed in Germany and my wife was flying out to meet me. The plane crashed.’
She said thoughtfully, ‘You must have married your second wife after you left the army.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘But how did you figure that?’
‘Any woman who can’t stand the pace of living with a man who works for an insurance company would never be an army wife.’ She put dishes into the oven and closed the door. ‘Dinner in thirty minutes. Time for another drink.’ She came over and picked up my glass. ‘For you?’
‘Thanks.’
As she mixed another shakerful of martinis, she said, ‘What was it like when your wife died?’
‘Bloody,’ I said. ‘It gave me a hell of a knock.’
‘I know.’ She was suddenly still and when she finally turned her head towards me her eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Bill. You understand.’ She slammed down the shaker and said passionately, ‘This damned house!’
The tears came, flowing freely, and I knew what the matter was. Plain loneliness. The reserve that stopped her communicating her inner feelings to her friends melted with a stranger. She was open with me because I would be gone within days and she would probably never see me again, never have to look into my eyes and know that I knew. People who travel receive a lot of confidences from total strangers who would never dream of relating the same stories to their friends.
But there was something else. As she said, I understood: I had been there too, and this made a common bond.
So she cried on my shoulder – literally. I held her in my arms and felt her body tense as she wept. I said the usual incoherent things one says on such an occasion, keeping my voice low and gentle, until the storm blew itself out and she looked up at me and said brokenly, ‘I’m … I’m sorry, Bill. It just … happened suddenly.’
‘I know,’ I said.
I saw her become aware of where she was and what she was doing. Her arms, which had been about me, went limp and to save her embarrassment I released her. She stepped back a pace and touched her tear-stained face. ‘I must look awful.’
I shook my head. ‘Jill, you’re beautiful.’
She summoned a smile from somewhere. ‘I’ll go and clean up and then we’ll have dinner. Don’t expect too much: I’m a terrible cook.’
She was right. She was the only woman I knew who could ruin a frozen meal. But it was another thing that made her more human.
II
We drove into San Martin in my car, the headlights boring holes through the quick-fallen tropical night. She sat relaxed in the passenger seat and we talked casually about anything and everything that didn’t concern her or her husband. She had come back after repairing the damage and we’d had another drink before dinner and neither of us referred to what had happened.
I turned a corner and nearly rammed a large vehicle approaching on the wrong side of the road. It was only strong wrists and quick action that saved us from a collision. The car scraped through a narrow gap which I thought would be impossible and then we were on the other side and safe.
I pulled to a halt. ‘What the hell!’ When I looked back I saw that whatever it was had not stopped.
‘A jitney,’ said Jill.
‘A what?’
‘A jitney – a local bus.’ Her voice was composed. ‘They’re a law unto themselves.’
‘Are they, by God?’ I put the car into drive and set off again, turning the next corner more circumspectly. ‘It was about here that I saw your friend, Dr McKittrick.’
‘He lives quite close by.’
‘Stern didn’t seem to think much of him.’
‘Abel Stern is a dyed-in-the-wool, pre-shrunk and pre-tested conservative. He thought even David was in danger of turning communist, so what do you think he makes of Jake McKittrick?’
‘Is McKittrick left-wing?’
‘Labels – how I hate them.’ There was a new edge to her voice, something I hadn’t heard before. ‘He’s a human being trying to make the best of things, as most of us are.’
I said, ‘You mentioned a quarrel between your husband and McKittrick. What was it about?’
‘That was years ago.’
‘I’d like to hear about it.’
She stirred in her seat. ‘Jake was a bright boy – lots of brains but no way to use them. He lived with his parents on a smallholding in North End but there wasn’t much of a future in it. David got to know him, saw the potential and sent him to the States for his education. Jake chose medicine and when he’d done his internship and taken his degree, he came back here to practise.’
‘That was very good of your husband.’