very sunny. Hal saw Clara and the twins – their outlines sharpening as the glare settled – with bare legs and covered tops, playing by the water. He jumped out of the Land Rover while Kirby was still turning it on the sand to go back through the tunnel and ran towards her. ‘Having fun?’
Clara grabbed him and held onto him, full of joy.
‘I went home but you weren’t there,’ he said.
‘We were here.’
‘So I see.’
He kissed her, he wanted to make love to her and held onto her tightly, trying to let go but not able to yet.
The twins were jumping about. He looked at them at last, went down onto his knees and let them push him over. The skin on their bare legs was dusted with fine sand. He tickled them, carefully, one after another, their sand-gritty feet pressing into the palms of his hands. They giggled and choked with laughter as he put his face into their tummies and pretended to bite them, as Clara lay on her back and closed her eyes, smiling.
With the sun blinding them and the cliff above them, they played in the sand.
That evening they left the girls at home and went to the Limassol Club. The Limassol Club was where the British went for a change of scene from the mess, and to entertain their wives. It was a big white building, well guarded, in the part of town near the governor’s mansion.
Mrs Burroughs had organised a reading of The Tempest in the garden and had chairs set up in a semi-circle. The women had to share roles, but there weren’t very many men interested so they had whole reams of text to themselves.
The men Evelyn Burroughs had roped in were two young subalterns, and they read their parts blushingly, grateful to be asked and for the gentle attention of married women. There were lanterns in the garden with moths around them, and the dark night behind was springlike. The women wore cardigans or wraps over their dresses and held their books near the lanterns to see.
Inside, the bar was crowded, noisy laughter and cigarette and cigar smoke drifted slowly from the open doors.
Hal knew that he was tired, but didn’t feel tired. Every few moments, almost without realising, he felt a small tug on the invisible thread that tied him to Clara and glanced out into the garden.
It was good for her to have a night away from the children. He tried not to, but just occasionally he resented the strain the girls put on her. He was very proud of the way she had managed the move to Cyprus, dimly aware, and ignoring the feeling, that this was a danger time for her. He was relieved they had moved onto the base – he could sense a relaxing in her and he thought she really was happy, not just pretending for his sake.
Clara, in the garden, was enjoying herself. Hal may have had his first small triumph as a soldier, but she’d had her first triumph as a real army wife. She hadn’t cried and clung to him and told him not to get blown up. She had spent the day having lunch with Deirdre Innes, taking the children to the beach, and when he’d come back she hadn’t cried either, but laughed.
She hadn’t been listening to the reading, but was lulled by the language and her own thoughts.
That morning she’d had letters from home, and from James, now stationed in Malaya. Her mother understood it was the everyday things Clara wanted to hear about. Just as Clara wrote to her mother about where she did her shopping and the beaches, so her mother wrote back to her about a sudden hailstorm that had battered the spring flowers – she had spent a morning kneeling in the wet soil, to tie them to stakes – or a trip to London to see about finding a flat for Clara’s younger brother, Bill, nearer to his chambers in the City. She didn’t write of missing the children, or her own and George’s constant anxiety for Clara and her brother. Clara kept the letters together, and read parts of them to Hal, whose own mother’s letters were brief and tedious.
A third man came across the garden to them.
‘Ah –
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