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the stone floor.
    Hal said, ‘Are you going to give me the man’s name?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then thank you for your time and co-operation,’ said Hal, and turned to leave.
    Kirby let him go out and then followed him. The door of the house closed behind them.
    ‘Fucking cheek,’ said Kirby, as they walked away. ‘You could do him for that, sir.’
    Hal laughed.

    The two platoons were back in Episkopi at dusk. Tompkins and Walsh marched the Greek boy off to the guardroom, with Walsh carefully carrying the evidence. Hal didn’t think about him again, but went to the mess and had a drink, then Kirby drove him back into Limassol, to Clara and the girls, with Hal sitting up front and both mostly quiet, comfortable with one another.

Chapter Four
    Clara lay against Hal in the close darkness. The blankets on the bed never seemed quite dry, but they were warm and heavily tucked around them.
    Obedient to convention, the first bed they had ever shared was on their wedding night, in a hotel in the New Forest, to be near Southampton for the boat back across the Channel the next day. Hal, newly promoted to captain, only had a few days’ leave and they couldn’t have afforded a longer wedding trip anyway. The hotel was accurately, but still somehow misleadingly, described as ‘an old coaching inn’, and had been recommended by a friend of Hal’s. It was a disappointment, and the bed most disappointing of all. The room had uneven, poorly covered floors. Clara’s going-away suit hung neatly in the wardrobe as their every tiny movement was announced through the pipes, boards and hollow bulging plaster of the cold building, a wedding night broadcast to the world at large.
    It had not been everything the four years of their engagement had promised. Before that viciously creaking bed, four years of writing letters and visits – far too short, far too infrequent – when they had kissed incessantly. Clara’s family saw a tall, cool-faced young soldier, plainly uncomfortable in their presence but somehow needing their daughter badly enough to stay in various cheap boarding houses and bed-and-breakfasts to be near her, never going anywhere else, always faithfully there, while Hal and Clara, alone in knowing what they were together, frustrated themselves kissing. His fingertips on the pulse of her neck, her lips on his knuckles, his thumb on her temple, her hairline, his arms circling her – they had been in a long daze of need for one another and that hotel, that room, that bed did not deliver them from it.
    But the night had its own success because Hal and Clara had, almost despite themselves, a deep affinity. In their love and flirting, they liked to point out their differences, but their observations were similar, as if they had been brought up together some forgotten time and only now found themselves with contrasting lives. They easily made a world to inhabit when they were together. They played within it. They had not slept all night, the night they were married, had boarded the boat bright-eyed with dazzled exhaustion and strange joy, and every bed they had been in since then – all more satisfying than that poor beginning – still had a little of that first bed in it, those first long hours of their free companionship.
    This bed, like that one, rested on an uneven floor. There was some light coming from the bulb at the top of the stairs so the outline of the door glowed.
    Her head was under his chin and he couldn’t see her face, but he could see the shape of the blankets over her body and feel her pressed against him inside the warm bed, her head fitting well into the hollow there. He was holding her hand. He could feel her wedding ring and the small diamond next to it under his thumb. He didn’t think they needed a bigger bed. He liked to be so close to her all the time and not miss anything. When she spoke, he felt her voice in his chest, through her back. ‘This bed is definitely tipping towards the