A child’s voice, young, interested, unbroken. I was sixteen; the boy looked about nine. He was wearing a grey cap, grey jacket, white shirt, navy-blue striped tie and white socks, which he’d pulled up almost to his pink kneecaps. He held a satchel over one shoulder, and a bag of hard sweets, stuck together on the paper, in his other hand. Vincent Rankis’s face still had a lot of growing out to do, and it was immediately apparent that the years between ten and eighteen were not necessarily going to be kind in this regard. The already-thin hair sticking down from beneath his cap foretold its scarcity in later life, but his eyes glistened with the old, familiar intelligence.
I stared at this child, hundreds–maybe thousands–of years old, and remembered that I was just sixteen, an orphaned teenager from Leeds trying to be cool.
“Yeah,” I replied in my best local accent. “What’s it to you?”
“My dad sent me to find you,” he replied firmly. “You dropped this.”
He handed me, very carefully, a blue paper notebook. It was cheap and a little tatty, and bore inside some unfortunate child’s French homework, pages of the stuff declaring je m’appelle, je suis, je voudrais running down neat rulered margins. I flicked through, then looked up to say, “This isn’t…”
But the boy was gone.
Chapter 77
I didn’t see Vincent again until 1941.
I did indeed study law, going to Edinburgh University to shiver away over great fat books whose pages crunched with the generations of microscopic paper-munching insects who had lived, bred and died between the judgments. Knowing I would be called up, I pre-empted the moment by enlisting in a Highland regiment, and spent three months being trained in the art of charging at dummies, shooting from behind the safety of a hill and shouting “Kill!” until my ears rang with it. I had a distant recollection that my unit would be largely useless until late into the conflict. We would spend a lot of time training, if memory served, in the art of winter warfare, in expectation of an assault on Norway which wouldn’t come, and finally be dispatched to Normandy several weeks after the beaches had been secured. The worst we’d have it would be in the Ardennes, and I fully intended to keep my head down when that moment came. This would be the seventh time I had fought in the Second World War.
I saw Vincent Rankis as if by chance, though there was no such thing, during one of our quieter times, waiting for orders in our barracks in Leith. Our days were spent studying maps of places we wouldn’t attack, practising manoeuvres we wouldn’t perform and waiting for orders we didn’t want to receive. Then a sharp “Attention!” and we all snapped up for the arrival of the major and his minions. I was a grudging second lieutenant–grudging in that I didn’t especially relish my commission, and grudging in that it had been grudgingly given in light of my merits and capabilities, as compared to the usual requisites for the post. I had only held my commission for three weeks when my captain complained that I just didn’t talk properly, and rather than at once slip into the more RP accent that I knew was required, I turned up my northern gruff to the point where my reports frequently needed translating for the unfortunate man, much to the amusement of his highly Glaswegian sergeant.
It was the Glaswegian sergeant who had called us to attention that day, but the major who spoke. He was a decent man who didn’t deserve the death by howitzer that awaited him, but his decency was never of a kindly sort, merely the fixed determination that those who died on his watch did not die because of his inaction.
“All right, gentlemen,” he grumbled as if the weight of his facial hair prohibited anything but the bare parting of his lips. “We’re just having a look round. Lieutenant August, meet Lieutenant Rankis.”
I nearly laughed out loud when I saw Vincent dressed up in an officer’s uniform, complete with shiny buttons, cleaned hat, smart boots and a salute so sharp you could have roasted a rabbit on it. He was a boy–a sixteen-year-old boy–yet somehow a hint of beard around his chin and an extra pair of socks shoved down the calves of his trousers and across the back of his shirt had been enough to deceive the army into awarding him a commission. I was never more grateful for the poker face years of being a junior officer on the receiving end of ridiculous orders teaches a man, and earned for my pains a flash of brilliant smile from Vincent’s teeth and eyes.
“Lieutenant Rankis won’t be with us long,” went on the major, “so I want you all to impress him, please. If you need anything, Harry there is your man. Lieutenant!”
Another round of salutes. When dealing with senior ranks you had to get used to having a trigger elbow, as well as a trigger finger. I glanced over Vincent’s shoulder and saw the sergeant trying not to laugh. Had he too noticed the fresh face on our infant officer, and the slight bulge around his thighs where he’d padded his uniform to more butch and manly dimensions? I focused on my poker face and salute, and when the major was gone shook Vincent’s hand.
“Call me Harry,” I said.
Chapter 78