Читать книгу The Sons of Adam - Harry Bingham - Страница 49

‘Darling, boy!’ It was Pamela who met Alan off the train at Winchester. She hugged him tight, burying her face in his neck. When she at last released him, her face was wet. ‘My poor loves, my poor loves.’ She was crying for Tom, whom she’d loved as a mother, and crying for Alan, who’d lost a brother. Alan was unable to speak in reply.

At home, it was the same with his father, and with Tom’s father, Jack. They were pleased to see Alan, of course, but his presence only made Tom’s death more real.

‘He was the very best of officers and the very best of men,’ said Alan to Jack Creeley, when their voices had steadied.

‘Of course, he was – you and him both … And I say this war’s a dirty rotten stinking shame, lad, pardon me. You’ll have to pardon me for saying so, but anything that could take a man like him …’ Creeley’s voice crept out into silence.

Alan spent three weeks at home. Glorious autumn weeks, with the great elms blazing yellow and gold along their boughs.

It had turned out that the shell blast had done more damage than first realised. A needle-sharp splinter had burrowed through Alan’s chest, piercing both lungs. Almost invisible from the outside, the splinter had remained undetected by the original doctors. The longer the splinter had remained in place, the more damage it had done. An operation to remove it had been successful, but further surgery would be needed once he was strong enough. A couple of house guests, a pair of London debutantes, now working as nurses down in Southampton, silently left before his arrival, to give the patient all the rest and quiet he could get.

Alan arrived home so weak he had to be carried to bed. But in the glow of love and warmth, he began to heal. His lungs remained poor, but his body began to grow stronger again. Apart from his lungs, he felt almost whole.

But more painful than any physical damage was the mental scarring. Alan found it almost impossible to sleep in his first-floor bedroom. The wide windows and exposed position made him feel vulnerable to the shell and rifle fire that he continually expected. After three nights of struggling with his fears, he gave in, and took over a boxroom on the ground floor, built like a bunker and with a four-foot stone wall between him and the outside. He slept with a candle burning all night.

Across the hall, in the nursery, there was a large-scale map of the Zagros mountains: a map that Tom had put there fourteen years before. A blue pencil line in Tom’s wobbly nine-year-old hand marked out the family oil concession. Some nights when sleep was hard to come by, and the air laboured in and out of his struggling lungs, Alan took his candle and went into the nursery, staring at the rough contours of the map, in the mountains north of Shiraz. He had promised Tom he’d go there and find whatever there was to be found. Would it be oil or just dry earth? There was no way to find out, except the good old-fashioned way: with a drill.

Some mornings, when dawn had broken over the winter sky, he was still there in his nightshirt, with his candle, looking at the map and wondering, wondering …

It sometimes felt as though finding oil was the most important thing in the entire world.