It was when he sat down and removed his sunglasses that I received my greatest shock. The eyes-those fine grey eyes-were empty, clouded with a kind of opaque skin of indifference. For a brief moment when anger had blazed out of them back at Fuad in the labour camp, I had seen the old Sean Burke. Now I seemed to be looking at a man who had become a stranger to himself.
He poured a cup of tea, produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, something I’d never seen him do be-fore and the hand that held it trembled very, very slightly.
‘I’ve taken up a vice or two since you last saw me, Stacey boy,’ he said.
‘So it would seem.’
‘Was it bad back there?’
‘Not at first. The prison in Cairo was no worse than you’d expect anywhere. It was the labour camp that wasn’t so good. I don’t think Husseini had been right in his head since Sinai. He thought there was a Jew under every bed.’
He looked puzzled and I explained. He nodded soberly when I finished. ‘I’ve seen men go that way be-fore.’
There was silence for a while as if he couldn’t think of anything to say and I poured another cup of tea and helped myself to one of his cigarettes. The smoke bit into the back of my throat like acid and I choked.
He started to rise, immediately concerned. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
I managed to catch my breath and held up the cigar-ette. ‘Something I had to manage without back there. It tastes like the first one I ever had. Don’t worry-I’ll persevere.’
‘But why start again?’
I inhaled for the second time. It tasted rather better and I grinned. ‘I agree with Voltaire. There are some pleasures it’s well worth shortening life for.’
He frowned and tossed his own cigarette over the balustrade as if attempting to right some kind of balance for what I had said went completely against his own expressed beliefs. For him, a man-a real man- was completely self-sufficient, a disciplined creature controlling his environment, subject to no vices, no obsessive needs.
He sat there now, a slight frown still in place, staring moodily into space, and I watched him closely. Sean Burke, the finest, most complete man-at-arms I had ever known. The eternal soldier, an Achilles, without a heel on the surface, and yet there were depths there. As I have said, he seldom smiled for some dark happening had touched him in the past, lived with him still. His spiritual home was still the army, the real army, I was certain of that. By all the rules he should have had a staggeringly successful career in it.
During his brief moment of fame in the Congo, the newspapers had unearthed his past in detail. Born in Eire son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant minister who had fought passionately for the Republic in his day, Burke had joined the Irish Guards at seventeen during the Second World War and had soon transferred to the Parachute Regiment. He’d earned a quick M.C. as a young lieutenant at Arnhem and as a captain in Malaya during the emergency, a D.S.O. and promotion to major. Why then had he resigned? There was no official explanation that made any kind of sense. Burke himself had said at the time that the army had simply got too tame. And yet there had been a story in one paper, cautiously told and full of innuendo, that hinted at another explanation. The possibility of a court-mar-tial had he not resigned that would have sent him from the army utterly disgraced and I remembered again our first meeting at the ‘Lights of Lisbon’. What was it Lola had said of him? Half a man. Big in everything except what counts. It was possible. All things were possible in this worst of all possible worlds.
But that was not true, that my real self simply couldn’t accept on a morning like this. It was a beauti-ful world, this world outside the Hole, a place of warmth and air and light, sweet sounds, sun and colour to dazzle the mind.
He stood up and leaned on the balustrade, looking out over the sea. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it?’