Toll for the Brave. Jack Higgins

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СКАЧАТЬ information that I had spent three of the best years of my young life serving with the American Airborne in Vietnam including a sizeable stretch in a North Vietnamese prison camp, had the same effect as if he had been hit by a rather heavy truck.

      He told me that I was about as acceptable in his eyes as a lump of dung on his shoe which seemed to go down well with the group who’d been hanging on his every word, but didn’t impress me one little bit.

      I told him what he could do about it in pretty fluent Cantonese which – surprisingly in an expert on Chinese affairs – he didn’t seem to understand.

      But someone else did which was when I met Sheila Ward. Just about the most spectacular woman I’d ever seen in my life. Every man’s fantasy dream. Soft black leather boots that reached to her thighs, a yard or two of orange wool posing as a dress, shoulder-length auburn hair framing a strong peasant face and a mouth which was at least half a mile wide. She could have been ugly, but her mouth was her saving grace. With that mouth she was herself alone.

      ‘You can’t do that to him,’ she said in fair Chinese. ‘They’d give you at least five years.’

      ‘Not bad,’ I told her gravely, ‘but your accent is terrible.’

      ‘Yorkshire,’ she said. ‘Just a working class girl from Doncaster on the make. My husband was a lecturer at Hong Kong University for five years.’

      The conversation was interrupted by my sociologist friend who tried to pull her out of the way and started again so I punched him none too gently under the breastbone, knuckles extended, and he went down with a shrill cry.

      I don’t really remember what happened after that except that Sheila led me out and no one tried to get in the way. I do know that it was raining hard, that I was leaning up against my car in the alley at the side of the house beneath a street lamp.

      She buttoned me into my trenchcoat and said soberly, ‘You were pretty nasty in there.’

      ‘A bad habit of mine these days.’

      ‘You get in fights often?’

      ‘Now and then.’ I struggled to light a cigarette. ‘I irritate people or they annoy me.’

      ‘And afterwards you feel better?’ She shook her head ‘There are other ways of relieving that kind of tension or didn’t it ever occur to you?’

      She had a bright red oilskin mac slung around her shoulders against the rain so I reached inside and cupped a beautifully firm breast.

      She said calmly, ‘See what I mean?’

      I leaned back against the car, my face up to the rain. ‘I can do several things quite well besides belt people. Latin declensions which comes of having gone to the right kind of school and I can find true north by pointing the hour hand of my watch at the sun or by shoving a stick into the ground. And I can cook. My monkey is delicious and tree rats are my speciality.’

      ‘Exactly my type,’ she said. ‘I can see we’re going to get along fine.’

      ‘Just one snag,’ I told her. ‘Bed.’

      She frowned. ‘You didn’t lose anything when you were out there did you?’

      ‘Everything intact and in full working order, ma’am.’ I saluted gravely. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been any good at it. A Chinese psychiatrist once told me it was because my grandfather found me in bed with the Finnish au pair when I was fourteen and beat all hell out of me with a blackthorne he prized rather highly. Carried it all the way through the desert campaign. He was a general, you see, so he naturally found it difficult to forgive me when it broke.’

      ‘On you?’ she said.

      ‘Exactly, so I don’t think you’d find me very satisfactory.’

      ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ She was suddenly the lass from Doncaster again, the Yorkshire voice flat in the rain. ‘What do you do with yourself – for a living, I mean?’

      ‘Is that what you call it?’ I shrugged. ‘The last of the dinosaurs. Hunted to extinction. I enjoy what used to be known in society as private means – lots of them. In what little time I have to spare, I also try to write.’

      She smiled at that, looking so astonishingly beautiful that things actually stopped moving for a moment. ‘You’re just what I’ve been seeking for my old age.’

      ‘You’re marvellous,’ I said. ‘Also big, busty, sensuous…’

      ‘Oh, definitely that,’ she said. ‘I never know when to stop. I’m also a lay-out artist in an advertising agency, divorced and thirty-seven years of age. You’ve only seen me in an artificial light, love.’

      I started to slide down the side of the car and she got a shoulder under my arm and went through my clothes.

      ‘You’ll find the wallet in my left breast pocket,’ I murmured.

      She chuckled. ‘You daft ha’p’orth. I’m looking for the car keys. Where do you live?’

      ‘The Essex coast,’ I told her. ‘Foulness.’

      ‘Good God,’ she said. ‘That must be all of fifty miles away.’

      ‘Fifty-eight.’

      She took me back to her flat in the King’s Road, just for the night. I stayed a month, which was definitely all I could take of the hub of the universe, the bright lights, the crowds. I needed solitude again, the birds, the marshes, my own little hole to rot in. So she left her job at the agency, moved down to Foulness and set up house with me.

      Oscar Wilde once said that life is a bad quarter of an hour made up of exquisite moments. She certainly gave me plenty of those in the months that followed and that morning was no exception. I started off in my usual frenzy and within minutes she had gentled me into making slow, meaningful love and with considerably more expertise than when we had first met. She’d definitely taken care of that department.

      Afterwards I felt fine, the fears of the hour before dawn a vague fantasy already forgotten. I kissed her softly under her rigid left nipple, tossed the sheets to one side and went into the bathroom.

      A medical friend once assured me that the shock of an ice-cold shower was detrimental to the vascular system and liable to reduce life expectancy by a month. Admittedly he was in his cups at the time but I had always found it an excellent excuse for spending five minutes each morning under a shower that was as hot as I could bear.

      When I returned to the bedroom Sheila had gone, but I could smell coffee and realised that I was hungry. I dressed quickly and went into the sitting-room. There was a log fire burning on the stone hearth and she had her easel set up in front of it.

      She was standing there now in her old terry towelling robe, the palette back in her left hand, dabbing vigorously at the canvas with a long brush.

      ‘I’m having coffee,’ she said without turning round. ‘I’ve made tea for you. It’s on the table.’

      I poured myself a cup and went and stood behind her. It was good – damn good. A view from the house, the saltings splashed with sea-lavender, the СКАЧАТЬ