Take or Destroy! Read Online Free Page B

they’d just come in from the desert. There was something of the same worn look about Hockold. He was tall and slender, thin-hipped in a pair of old doeskin trousers bleached almost white, but under the mixture of nonchalance and professionalism which made up the side of him that was a soldier, there was also an uncertain discomfort that told her he was shy.
    A young officer in neat khaki was eyeing her hungrily from a nearby table, and she decided he’d probably been on a troopship coming round the Cape for two months and was desperate for female company. Trying to draw Hockold out, she indicated him with her eyes.
    ‘You’d be surprised how often one of them tells me I’m beautiful,’ she pointed out. ‘If I were, I might be flattered. But I’m not.’
    ‘You look all right to me,’ Hockold said with a brisk enthusiasm that was overstressed enough to tell her that he wasn’t in the habit of paying compliments to women.
    ‘You’ve been in the desert a long time,’ she smiled. ‘It’s what you’d call a good Scots face. Scotswomen have a tendency to look better as they grow older.’
    ‘At least that’s something for Scots husbands to look forward to.’ Hockold’s comment was brusque. ‘Often in England it’s the other way round. Leads to quite a lot of ill-will after about twenty years.’
    He sipped at his drink, staring into it as though he were searching for something else to say. He still looked grim and ill at ease, and she guessed that some of his awkwardness had come from being lanky and ungainly in his youth.
    ‘Are you engaged or married or anything?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m a widow.’
    ‘Oh!’ He looked uncomfortable and she saw to her surprise that he was actually blushing. ‘Rude of me to ask.’
    It was a long time since she’d seen a mature man blush in front of her and it oddly endeared him to her. ‘It’s a normal enough question,’ she said quickly, encouragingly. ‘I don’t mind.’
    He tried to make up for his gaffe. ‘Was your husband army?’
    ‘Yes,’
    ‘Dunkirk?’
    ‘No. Bomb. He was with Bomb Disposal. One of them killed him.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    She shrugged. ‘It’s history now. We didn’t know each other long and we were only married two months. What about you?’
    ‘Much the same as usual.’ Hockold gestured with his glass. ‘Regular cavalry. Got a little tired of swanning up and down in the blue in a tin box on wheels so I did a bit of long range stuff for a change and finally found myself attached to Loftus’s lot. They left me behind in June to see what I could find out.’
    ‘When did you come out here?’
    It was the question everybody asked sooner or later and he smiled because he’d arrived in the Middle East even before Dunkirk, one of Wavell’s small and rather amateur force which had deluded Graziani into believing it was twice as strong as it was and in 1940 had even smashed him back beyond Benghazi.
    ‘I was one of the first,’ he said slowly, and she knew he wasn’t shooting a line. ‘But they’ve decided now that I’ve had enough, and there’s talk of bringing me back after this next little business.’
    ‘Do you want to come back?’
    He sat for a moment thinking of the wastes of shaly soil and trying to exist on a meagre quarter of a gallon of water a day.
    ‘Yes,’ he said in the clipped way he had of speaking to her, so different from the way he spoke to Murray. ‘Been spitting sand out for three years now almost without a break. Should be pleasant to be able to take a bath regularly.’
    ‘At least you’re honest.’
    He shrugged. ‘No. Just frightened. Can’t go on for ever. Been nicked twice. Nothing much, but it’s a sign. We all catch it in the end if we go on too long. This time Loftus insists.’ He smiled again. ‘If I survive.’
    She didn’t know what to say, sensing an honesty that had become unexpected in Cairo where everyone still contrived to live as if it were peacetime, dining and drinking and