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Prologue

‘O Lord, you know how busy I must be today; if I forget you, do not forget me.’

Every morning, in a hundred deserts, his mantra, his ritual. Everyone has one. Irrational, pathetic, but a blanket. If he says it, things will be all right. Over and over he whispers it, blind in the bitter darkness, and reaches down his chest and kisses the St Christopher.

‘O Lord, you know how busy I must be today. If I forget you, do not forget me.’

He still has five minutes before reveille, five minutes to meditate on creeping out of the safety of night and heading north into the light, floating in and out of sleep and barely minding the icy condensation dripping onto his sleeping bag, the breaths and snores. In his cocoon, in his trance he buries himself from the outside world but can still not escape his stomach’s terror. On the spectrum of human emotions, when you are stuck on that left edge, the fear and hopelessness of knowing that this day you will risk destroying everything dearest to you, that is a lonely place. Golgotha. He remembers a poem to himself.

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear …

Hushed awakenings …

‘Boss, boss. Reveille. 4.30. Let’s get ready. It’s fucking freezing.’

Lance Corporal Miller shakes his shoulder and he grunts assent. His brain starts to shed the fog. Struggling out of the sleeping bag, he gets out of the little canvas shelter at the side of the Scimitar. Pitch black, biting wind. He can hear the murmur and stumbling of the rest of the boys getting up. He joins Miller and Davenport and they fumble with the tent, packing it all away on the side of the wagon. Davenport checks her over – track, running gear, oil levels – and starts the engine. Miller jumps in the turret and fires up the radios.

He leaves to go and check on the rest of the compound. An officerly check on the troops, in fact a cry for company, a scream for help. He needs someone to talk to, who will tell him it will be all right.

Please can everything be all right?

He comes to Corporal Jesmond’s wagon. The two crews were leaguered together that night with their Scimitars while his other two car commanders, Sergeant Trueman and Corporal Thompson, were in another compound, ready for their part in the day.

‘Morning, boss! It’s gonna kick off big time today, I reckon. We’re good to go, hundred per cent. Cocked, locked, ready to rock. Sleep well?’

Relief, his crutch. Chatting with Jesmond amid the boys getting themselves and the wagons ready, he is dragged from the left of the spectrum. 0500. Thirty minutes to H-Hour. He steals up to a camp bed next to a crumbling wall.

‘Clive?’

‘Hmmm?’

‘Morning, mate; it’s five. Another day in paradise.’

‘Hmmm. Thanks, bud. Any news?’

‘Nothing, mate, quiet as the grave. The boys push up in half an hour.’

‘One day we’ll remember this with fondness, I suppose.’

‘Yeah, mate. What a farce. What the fuck are we doing here?’

What are we doing here?

Moving on. The first weak light, just a film of it, starts to halo the hills to the east. It would be on them soon, sunlight searing across the globe, valley by valley. Where was it now? It would have passed Tibet, have eaten the Wakhan Corridor and would now be nibbling Kabul before vomiting that out into day. Please delay. Please leave us. Light meant action. He struggles up a rickety ladder to the rooftop, and finds the infantry sniper eyeing the gloom to the north through his night sight.

‘Morning. You OK?’

‘Not bad, sir, not bad. Just looking forward to it kicking off, to be honest. Morning, Talibs. My name’s Dr 7.62 mm, and today I’m going to give you a lecture about bullet wounds – to the face!’

With deft, blind ease, the sniper’s own ritual begins. He unloads his rifle, thumbs the rounds from the magazine onto a rag and oils up the breech.

‘You’ll be OK though, boss, in those Scimitars of yours. Safe as houses, them.’ He grins sarcastically.

‘Yeah, cheers. I’d rather be in a baked bean tin; that’d be more use when you’re about to drive through a medium-density minefield.’

‘Bet you’re looking forward to unleashing that 30 mil.’

‘Honestly, I’ll be delighted if bugger all happens. Keep an eye on us anyway. What’s the phrase? Rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. Get my drift?’

‘No probs, boss. I got your back. Any fucker comes into this scope while you fellas are in contact they’re getting it. ’

The halo grows bigger and the undersides of the cirrus, way up high, start to reflect the light in flames of red and yellow. Rosy-fingered dawn again. Pure epic.

Was this epic?

Twenty past five. Not long now. He picks his way back to the Scimitar. The pitch blanket has slowly been drawn back, and the sky is rich purple. As he passes the infantry, all around is a hive of battle preparation. Rifles being oiled, grenade pins checked. New batteries on radios, spares checked for power. Crucifixes kissed. One rifleman reads a passage from his Bible to his mates. They all listen. Last gulps of water slugged, biscuits crammed down. Nervous smiles, black humour. Extra tourniquets handed around by the medics and stuffed into pockets. A corporal checks all his section’s morphine syringes are in their left thigh pockets, with secondaries behind their body armour in case their legs are blown off. Vallon metal detectors ‘sing’ as their users test them on the metal eyeholes on their boots. Endless belts of machine-gun rounds are piled into rucksacks, draped around necks. Some young soldiers are carrying so much weight they have to be lifted to their feet by their sergeant and then left to stand there, panting, bent double. They can barely see from beneath their helmets, eighteen-year-old boys ripped from their mothers and today off to kill other mothers’ sons. A sardonic crow watching all this from a wall cackles. What are these men doing?

He climbs onto the turret next to Miller. ‘All right, Stardust, how are we? Radios?’

‘Dropped in, boss, and radio checks done with Three One. Sights are up and running, laser’s gleaming, ECM’s all in.’

‘Good lad! Dav, engine?’

‘No dramas, boss. She’s held up OK.’

‘Thanks, lads. Top work. Dusty, let’s load her up.’

They drop inside the turret to load the Rarden. In a wordless drill Miller elevates the barrel to give him more room as he draws up a clip of three rounds from the centre rack and slams them into the feed tray. He winds the loading handle on.

Dunk, dunk … gaDUNK. The first round clunks in the breech and he slams another clip into the feed tray. The familiarity of the drill and the sleek shells embolden him and help get some blood flowing around freezing hands. He loads and cocks the machine gun.

‘Awesome, Dusty. We’re looking good.’

Scrabbling out of the turret, he looks at Jesmond behind them, who gives him the thumbs up. He’s been good to go for ages. His gunner, GV, next to him in the turret, wags his trigger finger with a grin. He can’t wait. The best gunner in the squadron, he will be busy today.

Slowly, slowly, he leaves the left of the spectrum.

Through the gloom the night starts to spill its secrets. Fast Pace lies to the north in bland, poker-faced silence. How many IEDs does it hold? The Farad gardens, which they fought through two days ago, lie to the south behind them. Their tall pines and cypresses tower over the poorer families’ crops.

The radio bursts into life; it’s the commanding officer, needing to know if the Scimitars are ready to go. ‘Hello, Tomahawk Three Zero, this is Minuteman Zero Alpha. Callsigns leaving my location now. Confirm you are ready to move north to support when they are engaged. Over.’

He seizes up. He is lost, frozen.

‘Um … Hello … er … Minuteman Zero Alpha, this is Tomahawk … er … Three Zero. Yeah … er … roger … er … Wait.’

Snap back.

Come on!

‘Tomahawk Three Zero, roger my callsign. Complete at immediate notice to move and will push north once Vixen are in contact. Your intent understood. Over.’

That’s better.

‘Hmm. Bit of a crowbag there, wasn’t I, Dusty?’

‘Don’t worry, boss; the lads will have loved that!’

Nothing. They wait. Over the radio come sitreps from Vixen, pushing up with the ANA to Fast Pace. When they come into contact the Scimitars will storm up to support them. The radio gives encouraging news: progress is good, all quiet, no Taliban. No IEDs found so far. He starts to shiver in the turret. Stamping his feet on the seat, he cocks, unloads and then loads again his pistol. Cock, unload, load. Cock, unload, load. Miller hums to himself as the purple turns ever bluer.

Gunfire to the north.

‘Hello, Minuteman Zero, this is Vixen Three Two. That’s us now in contact. Small arms, RPGs. Wait out.’

We’re on.

‘Hello, Tomahawk Three Zero, this is Minuteman Zero Alpha. Vixen callsigns in contact. Move now, move now. Acknowledge. Over.’

‘Tomahawk Three Zero moving now, making best speed. Out to you. Hello, all Tomahawk Three Zero callsigns, this is Tomahawk Three Zero. Move now, move now. Out.’

Up north the crickets’ croak of automatic fire intensifies after the first, tentative fumblings. Tracer bounces off walls and arcs into the sky before fading like shooting stars.

Where will the bullets land?

‘OK, Dav, let’s go.’

The wagon complains through the gears. He looks back at Jesmond and gets another thumbs up. He reaches the gate.

‘Left … left stick … and again … You’re on now, Dav … Steady … steady … now right stick … Good lad … Now you’re clear … Foot down, pedal to metal, drive it like you stole it. Let’s fucking go for it.’

The engine screams as Davenport floors the accelerator and they burst down the track towards the sun. The flame is just at the horizon now, and the east is bathed in gold. At the track’s end they turn north and plummet back into the dying twilight.

Do not forget me.

Please don’t forget me.

On a sunny morning in August the parade ground is full. Young men and women in dark blue stand nervously, fiddling with their belts and caps and swords, making sure there is no fluff or dust on them. ‘Right, brace up. Show the movement!’ barks a voice. All fiddling ceases, and caps are put on hurriedly as more and more butterflies make them nauseous. The academy sergeant major, with rapid screams that their bodies seem to hear before their ears, petrifies them from nervy fidgeting to poised, chest-out attention. Not long now. Two minutes to march onto the parade. Colour sergeants, who have spent every day of the last year breaking these men and women into military service, take a last inspection, going past the rows and making last adjustments, like tigers licking dirt off their cubs. One of them stops at a cadet with straw-coloured hair and whispers to him, ‘Well, Mr fuckin’ Chamberlain, who’d ha’ thought it? Next time I see ye I’m goin’ to have tae call you sir.’

‘That so, Colour Sergeant?’

‘Aye, but it don’t mean ah’m goin’ tae enjoy it. Or fuckin’ mean it, ye little wretch.’ He grins fondly and moves on. The cadet and his friends laugh but are quickly silenced by his mock-serious glare. Thirty seconds left.

The academy sergeant major shouts, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in my regiment we have a motto: “Quis Separabit?” It means, for those ignorant pikeys of you unfortunate enough not to have had a classical education –’ he waits for the laughter to die before continuing ‘– it means, “Who shall separate us?” Just remember that. Every day of your lives. After this year no one, nothing, can separate you. Be you in Afghanistan or Iraq or Kosovo, or whichever next shithole it is that Her Majesty decrees that you go to in order that you might lead her men, if you live to be a hundred or if you die tomorrow no one can break the bond you have forged this year.’ He pauses to let it sink in. He sees them all thrust out their chests an extra inch. He loves military theatre. ‘Now, march to the beat of the drum, get on the heel, hold your heads high; today you are kings of all you survey.’ Pulses quicken, sweat trickles down necks. A band strikes up, and they march onto the parade ground.

Fifteen minutes later they stand immaculate as the band plays the ‘Radetzky March’, and an elderly retired general totters around inspecting the rows of cadets, mere hours away from joining their regiments as fully fledged junior officers. The general looks at them with envy – for their youth, for their straight backs and lean faces – but with sadness as well. Some of these boys and girls will not be alive in a year. As he passes the ranks of puffed chests and neat, clipped hair he looks at them and thinks of his own friends who are no longer alive and remembers his own commissioning parade. He sighs with tiredness and regret as he completes his inspection and shuffles his way back to the dais to begin his address.

The cadet with straw-coloured hair cannot stop himself from smiling, breaking the pattern of stern arrogance on everyone else’s faces. He has freckles on his nose, and raises his chin so sharply that he seems three inches more than his five feet nine. He sees his mother in the crowd, wearing a hat so large that those behind her are hidden entirely from view, and his smile breaks into a grin, which he quickly suppresses.

In the crowd he can also see a wheelchair, its occupant’s chest sparkling with medals hovering over a gap where legs should be. His mind suddenly moves away from the parade ground and far away to Afghanistan. The sweat that trickles down his neck now is not from heat. He glances back at his mother, almost to check that she is still there, and this time he doesn’t smile. A sadness comes over him.

They begin the slow march past. As they wheel across the parade ground in unbroken line, he can feel the fragility of his friends’ flesh as they press against each other.

He sighs. No turning back.

Who is this boy, with his dancing eyes?

Tom Chamberlain was born to fight in Afghanistan. That does not mean that he was a natural soldier, although he became a very good one; simply that the circumstances of his family history, birth and upbringing meant that for him joining the British Army was an absolute inevitability. Just as when a boy kicks a ball in a garden it is only going one place, smack bang through a window, so his mother acknowledged the moment he put on his father’s old army helmet aged four and started to march around his bedroom that he would end up, not just in the army but in a war with it.

As a boy he was never happier than when playing soldiers. Gardens were the Burmese jungle, any beach was Omaha or Utah, any street Stalingrad or Caen. A simple stick would become a pistol, flame-thrower or bazooka. As a six-year-old in 1991 he ran downstairs every morning before school to watch coverage of the Gulf War. It looked amazing – Scud missiles shooting gold up through the pitch-black screen and tanks screaming through the desert – and he sat transfixed and square-eyed.

However, while he idolized the army and anyone who had served with it, an unspoken fear gnawed away that if or when the time came and he found himself not just in a fight but with the responsibility of leading men in that fight, he would prove unequal to the task. He just didn’t think he would ever be up to leading men. How could sergeants and corporals, veterans of past conflicts, ever look to him for guidance? Would he be a popular officer, trusted and liked by his soldiers, or would they take against him? Could he cope? Always these shadowy doubts lay beneath the outward bravado.

The main shadow, the only shadow, cast over Tom’s childhood was the death of his father when he was eight. Leonard Chamberlain was a fine-looking man: tall, with a Roman nose and two uncapped chipped front teeth, giving him an oddly noble but friendly appearance. He was guilty of an aversion to hard work where charm and procrastination sufficed, and devoted himself to a blissful – if financially ruinous – life of Epicureanism. What he inherited when he was eighteen had by the time of his marriage to Constance dwindled to just enough cash to buy a farm cottage on the estate of an old army friend of his in Kent, near Chatham.

People often described Leonard as a wasted talent, and correctly, but he was more complicated than that. The army friend – Tom’s godfather Sam Hockley – and he had joined the same regiment together when they were nineteen and just out of school, and had cavorted, gambled and drunk-driven their way through service in Germany, Belize and Cyprus via a succession of hair-raising and improbable escapades, the stories of which became all the better for their frequent and ever more baroque embellishments. But one day, as he explored the attic, six-year-old Tom came across an old photograph of his father on a Belfast street corner, more angular but unmistakably him, talking urgently into a radio while a dead soldier was carried away in a body bag. Tom kept the photo in the drawer of his bedside table and would often look at it long after he had been put to bed by his parents.

A few months later Tom was helping Sam out on the farm and, as they put some cattle feed in a trough, asked him, ‘Godfather Sam, did you and Daddy ever have to fight baddies in the army?’

Sam paused, ambushed, pondering whether to obfuscate or to tell the truth. Bugger it, the boy would have to learn sometime. ‘Well, you see, Tommy, and promise me not to tell your father I said this, will you?’ He waited until he received a solemn nod. ‘Your dad and I were together in a town called Belfast. And it wasn’t very nice. A lot of people were doing horrible things. And of all the people with me out there, I’d say that your dad was the bravest. He had some tough times out there, but all his men loved him, and he made sure that a lot of them got home.’

‘So was he a hero then?’

‘Yes. Yes, he was.’

‘Were you a hero?’

Sam took off his flat cap and pushed back his thinning sandy hair. ‘Well Tom, I don’t know if I was a hero. But I was certainly surrounded by them. Now, you promise me to never tell Dad what I just said, OK?’

What Sam didn’t say was that Leonard’s problems – his alcoholism and spiral into near bankruptcy – had begun just after that tour of Belfast in 1979. Sam had seen his friend change from quite a serious-minded young man into a reckless, live-for-the-minute rogue. Leonard left the army in 1981, much to the chagrin of his superiors, who were grooming him for rapid promotion, and embarked on a three-year binge which knew no bounds and certainly every casino in the West End. Three years later, his inheritance down the drain, he woke up one morning next to a girl, had decided by lunchtime that he wanted to marry her and did so six months later.

She was Constance Rowley, a secretary at a law firm in London, heaven-sent for the undeserving Leonard. She took him out of London, away from temptation, and with Sam’s help and generosity – borne more out of irrational loyalty than financial sense – they moved into the Old Mill on his estate. Constance got a job with a firm of solicitors in Rochester, but Leonard never rediscovered the appetite for work he had once had. It was very strange. Even when Tom was born in 1985 he was disinclined to finance their lifestyle, which although comfortable was not luxurious, any further by getting a job. Constance let it stand. She slightly suspected, for one thing, that all was not well with him. As indeed it wasn’t. On Tom’s first birthday, a quiet March day with a grey clanging arch of sky hanging over the house, Leonard told her that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver. It was a hereditary condition, apparently, but both couldn’t help wondering whether it had been accelerated by the excesses of the past few years. They kept it very quiet and hoped desperately that Leonard would live as long as possible.

Leonard spent his days inside armed with a history book and a bottle of wine or whisky. Whenever Tom, who had only the vaguest notion of his father’s fragility, came in Leonard would look at him with a sparkle and challenge him to a game of chess or backgammon, or tell him to sit next to him as he read him passages from histories of the crusades and the fall of Byzantium. Tom didn’t fully understand but was enthralled by the exciting names and the thought of entire cities being sacked.

When the end came it was swift. Seven year after his diagnosis, Leonard deteriorated in a couple of weeks; finally his immune system abandoned its long rearguard action. Tom was woken one morning at eight o’clock not by Constance crying but by the silence from downstairs. He tiptoed out of bed and down to the kitchen. It was all quiet; nothing had been touched. He felt the kettle. It was cold. Then he heard broken sobs from upstairs, and his fear vanished and numb realization hit him. He knew as surely then as he did a minute later when he opened the door to the bedroom that his father was dead.

The next week they buried him, Tom walking with Constance behind the coffin. There were no more tears from Constance; she had long known this was coming, and after the first shock, save for dabbing her eyes occasionally at the funeral more out of form than necessity, she did not weep. She still squeezed Tom’s hand though, all the way through the service.

‘Stop it, Mummy, you’re hurting my hand,’ he whispered.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Tommy.’ She smiled at him and relaxed her grip, but only for a moment before unconsciously squeezing it again, even more tightly this time.

After the wake, Constance ushered everyone out of the house and she and Tom sat forlornly in the kitchen, slowly getting used to the unwelcome quiet. Breaking the empty silence, as if seized with a sudden idea, Constance leaped up, went to her bedroom for a moment and came down with a letter in her hand.

‘Now Tommy, your father wanted me to give you this when you were fourteen or fifteen, but I’d like you to read it now. You should read it now, I think. You’re old enough. Daddy wrote it to you just last week. Would you like to read it by yourself? If you want to I don’t mind, but if you want me to be with you then of course I will.’

Tom’s heart felt light as she handed him the stiff ivory-white envelope, bare save for ‘To My Darling Boy’ in his father’s beautiful spidery handwriting. He gulped.

‘Um, don’t worry, Mummy. I’ll read it outside.’

Tom walked outside and Constance shut the door after him, ruffling his hair as he passed her. The letter felt heavy, heavier than the paper in it. He climbed over the fence and walked to his den, cut out of the middle of a large rhododendron. The setting sun bounced off the undersides of the leaves in yellow and gold. He fingered the envelope for some minutes, before gently prising it open. He unfolded the letter.

My Dear Tom,

Please forgive this letter. I so very much wish that I could have said all of the following to you in person. Face to face is so much better than the cold written word, but at least you will, should you want to, be able to keep this letter for a while. I am afraid that I did not talk to you before I died for two reasons. First, aged eight you are too young, I think, to deal with the concept of speaking to a man about to die, and I want to keep you young for as long as possible. You will be annoyed with me for not treating you as a grown-up, but I hope you will understand. The second reason is that I could not have brought myself to have spoken to you; I simply would not have been able to witness your reaction. So there you go; half out of concern for you, half for me. Please forgive my cowardice: I hope you understand it.

Tom, by this stage you will know all there is to know about looking after your mother and being the man of the house. I know you will have done a superb job, but I am just so sorry that a boy so young has had to grow up so quickly, too quickly. I know that you and your friends are impatient to grow up, but one day you will realize that it is a magical thing to stay young for as long as possible.

So I will not lecture you about looking after Mummy; you will be doing that already and as I head towards death (gosh that is strange to write!) her safety is mercifully not on my list of worries (though the future of the English cricket team and your tree house surviving a storm are). You are a brave boy, Tom; I have always known that. Mummy may have told you that you were very ill when you were born; you actually very nearly died and the doctors and nurses had given up hope. One doctor told me, when you were at your worst, that you would not survive the night.

The next morning that doctor came and saw you. Not only were you still there but you had somehow, from the night, drawn from some great invisible reserve of strength. The doctor was amazed; no baby had ever made such a recovery in that hospital, and all the nurses after that fawned over you, saying that you were their little hero.

I wish I could have spent years and years writing this to you. I wish I could put down every single bit of advice I have ever heard myself, but I will limit myself to the following, in no particular order, but as they come into my head, apart from the last one, which is the most important advice I have ever been given. Some of it you will understand now, some you will understand later, some you will think is just rubbish!

The eleventh commandment. Never get caught. If you obey this one you don’t have to worry about any of the other boring ten. Apart from ‘Honour your father and mother.’ You must do that!

Always, always say please and thank you. It will amaze you how many grown-ups do not do this.

Never be rude to girls.

There is no such thing as a stupid question. If in doubt, just ask!

The ancient Greeks had a great saying, ‘Nothing in excess.’ I have no doubt that you’ll see what that means later on in life. Unfortunately, probably only because you will have done something to excess or gone too far. But learn from it!

You will do well to learn this quote from Walter Scott about the mess you will get into if you start telling lies: ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!’ Never a truer word spoken.

Have a child. It is the best present in the world. But not for a few years at least!

I don’t know who said this, but like virtually every other good quotation it was probably Johnson, Wilde or Churchill. ‘The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.’ Tom, I never worked very hard, and as you can see I haven’t been that lucky.

You were born into a family which, if not wildly wealthy, at least does not struggle. Remember to look after those who have not had the advantages of a loving family and a good education and relatively secure financial background that you have. This will become clear later in your life. You will come to understand what I mean.
In terms of university, jobs, exams, etc. I have two things to say.

From me, your father. You must do very well and get a first at university. And then you must join the army, and after mastering that you must be in the cabinet, having made yourself (legally) into a multi-millionaire.

From me, Daddy. As long as you are happy, Tom, and add value even to just one other person’s happiness, do whatever you want to do. If you don’t want to go to university, don’t. If you don’t want to touch the army with a bargepole, don’t. If you don’t want to work, don’t. But always add value.

Goodness me, Tom, I know I will wake up tomorrow and reread this and think it is all drivel. But I don’t think it is. In any case, I am putting it in the envelope and sealing it now. I must go now; goodbyes are better short and sharp.

Tom, I do wonder how you are going to do, but I am not scared about it.

God speed, and with love, with all the love in the world to you, my brave, brave boy,

Daddy

Tom noticed that there were splodges on the paper, some old ones that were dry and some new ones his own eyes had made. Fearing for the letter’s survival, he folded it up into its envelope and hugged it to his chest. Tears were now streaming down his cheeks, and he ran back to the house, scratching himself on thorns, running, running through the dusk’s purple towards the light of the kitchen door, which was already being tapped by moths. He hurled the door open and threw himself into Constance’s lap, where he stayed for an hour crying his eyes out. He didn’t feel very brave at all.

Leonard’s financial legacy was not impressive. They were able to stay – just – in the house, and while they weren’t ever exactly poor, Tom was denied the holidays and treats that his classmates had. But he was very popular at his primary school, where he always came top of the class while managing to be one of the chief mischief-makers. Constance was sad that she wasn’t able to afford to send him away to boarding school, but while Tom accepted having to go to the Henry VI Comprehensive in Chatham, a low, sprawling, prefabricated structure whose grim facade hid some excellent teachers, Constance seemed dumb with embarrassment every time she had to admit to one of her old friends that he wasn’t at an independent school. Tom, however, true to form, settled in without a problem. He was still the same old Tom, still climbing trees just out of curiosity to inspect the birds’ nests at the top, still unfailingly generous-spirited to all who met him, and he fitted in with his new classmates with consummate ease.

Due to the combination of his father’s charm and his mother’s brains and ability to work hard, Tom eased into Cambridge, securing a place to read English at Sidney Sussex College. When he put the phone down after hearing his A-level results he hugged her, almost lifting her off the ground. ‘Thanks, Mum. If it wasn’t for you this would never have happened.’ Constance was thrilled. As he ran off with his lurcher Zeppo through the woods to go and tell Sam she flopped into a chair. So far, she thought, Tom’s doing all right.

Three years later, after his final week at Cambridge, Tom took the entrance exam for the army. To his great relief he passed; he had made absolutely no provision for anything else. Halfway through July, after a month of helping on Sam’s farm, he got his results: he had got a first. To celebrate, in August he left with his girlfriend Cassie Foskett to travel around Europe by train.

He had always felt insecure around Cassie; he couldn’t ever really believe that she was going out with him. They had been in the same college at Cambridge and had shared tutorials since the start. It was only at the end of the first term that Tom had summoned up the courage to talk to her properly outside a tutorial, over-engineering a meeting in a coffee bar to talk through ‘bits of Austen that he was having trouble with’. She humoured him, and Tom soon found that behind a cool, fierce exterior lay a warm smile and an infectious, cackling laugh.

She was funny, Cassie. She seemed to Tom otherworldly, almost timeless, indefinable. She was a chameleon, both in looks and character. Sometimes she would wear floaty dresses and put flowers in her hair as though she was at Woodstock – what she wore around her college friends, when Tom thought she was at her most liberated and best. Sometimes though, when she was with friends from other colleges who knew her through the octopus-like public-school network that permeated the university, she would dress and act differently: immaculate hair and expensive, fussy clothes combined with a haughty, icy air. He didn’t mind this, but it puzzled him. As he got to know her better, it meant that Tom always felt that just when he was on the brink of really understanding her she would slip away from him.

Halfway through their second year on a warm March day they were lying on the banks of the Cam sharing the earphones to an iPod, listening to ‘American Pie’. The lyrics woke Tom out of his slumber near the end of the song. He brought himself up onto his elbows and looked at Cassie. She was asleep, or dozing, and he wondered how on earth he was going out with her. Messy hair tumbled over her face. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful, and he lay there transfixed. He was right there, right next to her, and his arm could feel the soft, near imperceptible rises and falls of her chest, but he still didn’t know what was going on inside her head, what exactly she thought of things, how exactly she saw herself. How she saw him. When he got close to her she always slipped away into the mist. Always turned away at the last moment.

She opened her eyes, green and soft, and stretched like a cat.

‘What you looking at?’

‘Nothing. Just trying to work you out. Riddle wrapped inside an enigma.’

She laughed almost derisively, and then her expression switched into sweetness and innocence. ‘More chance of getting the theory of relativity than of getting me. Sorry, buster.’

He looked hurt.

‘Don’t worry, silly. It’s not an insult. I just don’t think you need to worry about it. I love you, you know. And anyway I don’t understand you and I don’t lose any sleep about it.’ She smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘Come on. Lie down. Chill.’

In the third year they didn’t see as much of each other, as she lived out of college in a flat with some of her public-school friends and they both busied themselves with revision for their finals. Sometimes she asked Tom to house parties, invitations which he always found reasons not to accept as he found her friends quite intimidating – cocaine addicts dripping with privilege who would at best barely register and at worst baldly resent his presence. But they still shared tutorials, and Cassie spent a lot of time with him in college, occasionally accompanying Tom on visits to his mother.

A further complication was her parents, whom he found almost unbearably awkward. Her mother Lavinia at least talked to him, although as if he were an interesting curio rather than a realistic marriage prospect. Her father Jeremy, on the other hand, a successful QC as short of charm as he was long of wallet, acted as though Tom’s sheer presence in a room with Cassie sullied his daughter’s character. Still, Tom was unfailingly polite, and while he would occasionally, even often, make Lavinia laugh, he had no such luck with the old man, who was obviously desperate for Cassie to get her act together and ditch him at the first opportunity.

All this meant that throughout their final year, while Tom found himself falling more and more in love with her, the fear was growing within him that he would never be able to keep her, that she would slip from his grasp. But over that post-university, pre-army summer he had Cassie all to himself for four weeks.

And he loved Europe, being taken around all the great cities, churches and museums by Cassie, who seemed to know everything about everywhere they went. Tom had not been on many holidays and was initially embarrassed about his ignorance, but she laughed it off and took to her role as his guide and teacher with huge enthusiasm. Tom had never been happier, but sometimes at night when they were both drunk or when he looked at her during the day across a stuffy train he thought he could see something. What was it? Sadness? Coldness? Blithe indifference? But then she would look at him, remember herself and smile, blink sparkle into her eyes, and all his worries receded until the next time he caught the look.

Their travel plan was simple. Bouncing around cities and towns that took their fancy in guidebooks, they plotted a rough circle, going south through France into Switzerland, down into northern Italy, up to Austria and then beginning the route home from there. They stayed in dingy youth hostels and used the money they saved to go to the best restaurants in town. It worked like a dream.

One night, money nearly exhausted, they stayed in a hostel down a back street in Graz, with domestic arguments from nearby tenements and barking dogs a discordant lullaby as they tried to sleep. Tom, sweating in the late-summer air, lay in the dark watching a decrepit fan wheeze its way around above them. He heard her quietly crying.

‘What’s wrong, Cass?’ he prodded unhopefully.

‘Nothing,’ she stonewalled.

Tom sighed, picked up his book and tried to read by the bright moonlight; he would wait this one out.

Suddenly she sprung up onto her knees. ‘It’s just … What are you doing, Tom?’

‘Um …’

‘I mean, look at you for fuck’s sake.’ Tears streamed down her cheeks, mixing with her mascara to form black streaks that clung to her cheeks in the pale darkness. ‘You’ve just got one of the top firsts at Cambridge University and you could walk, I mean walk, into any job out there. You would be snapped up, tomorrow, by anyone, and instead you’re joining the army. The army?’

‘But I’ve always wanted to join the army.’ Tom tried to take in what was happening. All he could think was that her father had put her up to this.

‘Look, Tom, we’ve all heard about the fucking army. Army this, army that. Well great, I’m sure there are some great guys in there, but look at you, Tom.’ That was the second time she had said that, and he fought down his anger.

‘What do you mean, look at me?’

‘I mean just that, Tom: look at you. You’ve got a brain the size of a planet, friends who love you, a mother who’s devoted to you, and you’ve got two arms and two legs, and you want to go and piss it all down the drain just to fulfil a childish fantasy.’

‘It’s not childish, Cassie,’ he bleated.

Gaining momentum she went on. ‘Oh shut up, Tom. Treat yourself as a grown-up for Christ’s sake. What are you going to do in five years’ time if, and that’s a big if, you ever get through this Afghanistan stuff, probably with some kind of drink problem and an inability to engage with anyone who hasn’t been in the sodding army, and that’s assuming you’ve even got any legs to walk on. No one, Tom, is going to care about it because deep down they’ll know that while you were dicking around they’ll have got themselves set up for life.’

‘I don’t know if I want that life.’ He suspected, deep down, that Cassie had a point.

‘Yes, you want that life, Tom. Why are you going to waste it?’

The street lamp outside flickered and the fan shuddered from a power surge as Tom’s throat went dry. You know what – bugger it. He decided to fight fire with fire.

‘I’m not wasting my time. Yes, I could go and work for whatever twats those tossers at all the milk-round events fawn over. I could go and make friends with a calculator and a spreadsheet instead of real human beings. But I’d look at myself in ten years’ time, Cass, with a massive, massive regret that I hadn’t done the army. It’s a young man’s game; anyone can be a banker, anyone can hang out with a calculator whether they’re seventeen or seventy. If I don’t do this now, Cass, I’ll never do it.’ He stopped, knowing this was only going one way, what she was about to say. It was her only logical move. And he wouldn’t have an answer.

‘If you do this, you lose me.’

‘Well Cass, I can’t expect you to stand it. If you want to go, just go. I can’t stop you.’ With that, Tom realized that she would go; he’d lost her for ever. At least her parents would be pleased, he thought bitterly. He sighed. ‘Come on, let’s tidy up your face.’ He rummaged in his rucksack for a T-shirt, crumpled it up and dabbed at her eyes. ‘You look like one of the living dead.’

She giggled just for a moment but then hardened and pushed his hand away.

‘We’ll talk about this in the morning,’ he said. ‘We need to sleep on this.’

She lay down again, the argument dying as quickly as it had started. Tom never heard her stir the whole night; he just kept looking at the fan.

They didn’t talk about it in the morning. For the next four days they limped back through Berlin, then Strasbourg, then Paris, more out of polite obligation to their original plan than any enthusiasm. Tom thought about suggesting a detour through the First World War battlefields but thought better of it. Probably not quite the time. Back in London they split at St Pancras, Tom to go home for a final week before Sandhurst and Cassie going on to a festival with some friends.

Waiting in the queue for her cab, Tom looked at her as she scribbled down his Sandhurst address. The late-afternoon sun bounced off high windows above them and lit up her hair. He knew that she’d probably only write him one letter at Sandhurst. He knew he’d never see her again.

She got into the taxi and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Bye, Tommy. Take care, please take care.’

‘I will, don’t worry.’ He felt completely alone.

‘I’ll write.’

‘Please; it’ll be such a boost.’

He leaned into the taxi and pressed twenty pounds into the driver’s hand.

‘Tom, don’t be ridiculous …’

‘No, I insist. I’m not going to be spending much in the next year or so, am I?’

He gently closed the door, smiled at her, turned and walked away. He didn’t look back. Cassie watched through the rear window as the taxi pulled away, willing Tom to turn his head. He didn’t. If he had, she would have seen him crying.

Barney Campbell

RAIN

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Prologue

One