The Exit Club: Book 3: The Professionals Read online

  When they had finished bathing, they dried each other down and started dressing for dinner.

  ‘You really like him?’ Marty asked, meaning Paddy Kearney.

  ‘Yes,’ Ann Lim assured him. ‘I like him and I think he’s your friend, so stop worrying about it.’

  ‘He warned me about marrying you. He tried to talk me out of it.’

  ‘I know. He told me. But he only tried talking you out of it because he knew it would be difficult– and that’s what friends are for.’

  Not as difficult as it might have been, Marty thought as he dressed himself. A few problems here and there, a few embarrassments, but here we are, still married. Love conquers all.

  After emerging from that hellish swamp near Selangor, in 1952, nearly seven years ago, he had alternated between more patrols in the jungle, the ulu, with short breaks in Penang, usually staying in a relatively cheap hotel where he and Ann Lim could make love; though often also visiting her family home in Tanjung Tokong, attempting to win over her father. He didn’t have to work at it. Ann Lim’s father, Lee Kong, had started life in Singapore as little more than a coolie, without the benefit of formal education, but he had worked like hell to educate himself and rise above his station. Eventually becoming a successful exporter for the British rubber plantationers of Perak state, located south of Penang, he was, though lacking in arrogance, quietly proud of himself and admiring of other men of initiative. When he learnt about Marty’s background (working for his father, starting his own business, fighting in North Africa and Malaya) he viewed him as one of his own kind. More importantly, because he was without a male heir, he had subconsciously adopted Marty as his own, bringing him into the fold. Subsequently, when Ann Lim’s two sisters, Kathy and Mary, had flown off to Paris to attend finishing school, Ann Lim was allowed to remain in Penang and become engaged to Marty. A few months later, Marty went to see Paddy Kearney– recently promoted back to his original rank of captain – to obtain official permission for the marriage.

  ‘You must be mad,’ Kearney bluntly told him. ‘These mixed marriages rarely work. You’ve just been promoted to corporal; let that be your reward. Go back to England alone, Corporal Butler, and find yourself a nice English girl. You’ll be better off that way.’

  ‘I want to marry her, boss.’

  ‘It’s ill-advised and the army officially disapproves of it, which will be of no help to you at all. Believe me, I personally have nothing against the woman – I have met her, as you know, and found her quite charming– but the odds against the marriage working are considerable. Racism is a fact of life. It also exists in the service and budding careers, such as your own, can be blunted by mixed marriages. Don’t do it, Corporal.’

  ‘I want to marry her, boss.’

  ‘I strongly disapprove.’

  ‘I’m not here for your approval, boss. I’m here for your permission.’

  ‘You’ve always been a hard case, Butler, and you know you don’t need my permission when push comes to shove.’

  ‘Your informal permission, boss, would be a great help when it comes to push and shove with officialdom.’

  ‘I’m surprised you can pronounce that word, Corporal, but you can state that you have my permission and I’ll arrange all the relevant paperwork vis-à-visthe army. Good luck to both of you.’

  Marty had wanted to have Captain Kearney as his best man, but service protocol dictated otherwise. Instead, the former ‘bad boy’ Pat O’Connor, now an excellent SAS corporal, though one still prone to troublemaking, was best man in a ceremony that took place in an English church in Penang, attended by a beaming Lee Kong, his two daughters, Kathy and Mary, who had flown in from Paris just for the occasion, a few of Ann Lim’s friends, both English and Chinese Malays, and a lot of Marty’s grinning SAS mates. The wedding ceremony was followed by a noisy, drunken reception in George Town’s Broadway Bar, which Marty had taken over for the day. The honeymoon was two weeks later in Kuala Lumpur, then Ann Lim moved into an army house on the mainland, located near RAF Butterworth, and Marty went back into the ulu for more dangerous patrols. A few months later, when he was transferred back to Aldershot, Ann Lim, now his wife, went with him.

  The following years had been divided between tours in the new Federation of Malaysia and boring periods back in Aldershot, doing practically nothing. Ann Lim had endured his many absences with stoicism and surrounded him with love each time he returned. They had a good, strong relationship.

  ‘Are you ready to go downstairs?’ Ann Lim now asked as Marty slipped his jacket on over an opennecked shirt, suddenly realizing, from what he saw in the mirror, that he would soon be thirty-eight years old: no longer a young man.

  ‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ he replied as he turned to face her. She was wearing a simple cotton dress that exposed her shoulders and throat, clung to her ample curves, fell to just below the knees and was buttoned down the front. She was also wearing high-heeled shoes and had her long black hair hanging loose. Though dressed informally, she looked like a dream and brought a lump to Marty’s throat. He slipped his arms around her waist, kissed her, then stepped back and smiled at her, holding her hand. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  They left the room and went down the broad stairs to begin their weekend with Captain ‘Paddy’ Kearney.

  The following evening, just after midnight, when the rest of the guests had left and the two wives had retired to their separate bedrooms, Marty and Paddy sat on in the latter’s dimly lit study, drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Marty didn’t normally smoke cigars, but he was enjoying this one.

  Despite his initial nervousness, the weekend had been almost perfect, beginning with the introduction to Paddy’s wife, Angela, whom neither Marty nor Ann Lim had met before. Always thinking of Paddy as being a dashing man, Marty had assumed that his wife would be some kind of sophisticated beauty, but she turned out to be a plump and homely woman who looked older than her thirty-nine years, the same age as her husband. She did, however, have a warm and ebullient personality that made Marty and Ann Lim instantly take to her.

  The children, two boys and a girl, had turned out to be as pleasant as their parents. Any other doubts Marty had been nursing about the weekend, mostly based on his unease with people not of the working classes, had been put to rest when Paddy proved to be a generous host with the drink, pouring it almost non-stop from the minute his guests came down the stairs to join him in the kitchen, which was, he said, his favourite place in the house.

  ‘Kitchens and booze go together,’ he said. ‘You can put a lot of bottles on a kitchen table and not feel guilty about it.’ His wife, Angela, had arrived home a couple of drinks later, flushed and amusingly flustered because her shopping had taken longer than expected and she felt bad about not being at home when her guests arrived.

  ‘At least it gave Paddy a head -start on the drinking,’ she pointed out, ‘so I bet hewas pleased!’

  After that it was plain sailing. The first afternoon was spent in the kitchen, where Angela prepared the dinner with Ann Lim’s help, both of them drinking wine as they worked and as the men, also drinking with relish, sat at the table. Dinner was served after they had all gone for a brief, brisk walk in the surrounding Herefordshire countryside. The dinner, for just the four of them, took up the rest of the evening and ended in the spacious living room where brandy was poured and the air soon thickened with cigar smoke. Some time after midnight, back in their bedroom, Marty and Ann Lim made love in a drunken haze that may have diminished Marty’s capabilities but did not diminish the pleasure for either of them.

  The following morning, after a leisurely breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, fried mushrooms and toast, all washed down with mugs of hot tea, the four of them went for another walk, this time ending up in Paddy’s local pub where clearly he and Angela were well known. Two more hours were spent in the pub, then, pleasantly drunk, the four of them walked back to the house where they had a light snack, went to their separate bedrooms for an afternoon s
iesta, then awakened to bathe and dress more formally for dinner that evening.

  At the dinner, Marty and Ann Lim met some of the people they had met earlier in the pub. As Paddy had promised, dress was not formal, though most of the women were dressed up for the occasion and all the men at least wore shirts and ties. The dinner made for Marty’s only uncomfortable time because although the other guests were friendly enough – and were, indeed, soon drunk and rumbustious, which seemed normal in this house– they struck him as being well educated, sophisticated, and certainly middle-class. They also reminded him once more that Paddy, though now his good friend, had been born in this grand house, educated at Cambridge, and moved in society with the kind of ease that Marty would never attain. This in turn reminded him that even though Paddy had adopted him in North Africa and Malaya, helped him become a firstclass soldier, and now treated him as a close friend, officers and the lower ranks did not usually mix socially and were not normally encouraged to do so. There were, as Marty knew, sound reasons for this, most notably the need for pragmatic judgement on the part of an officer giving orders to those under his command, so Marty, a soldier to his fingertips, though enjoying his midnight brandy and cigar, still felt a little out of place.

  ‘Well,’ Paddy said, after the other guests had left, Ann Lim and Angela had gone to bed, and he and Marty were alone at last, ‘Ann Lim certainly seems like a contented woman. The marriage must be working out.’

  ‘It is,’ Marty said.

  ‘Despite my grim warnings.’

  ‘Offered with the best of intentions. Ann Lim told me so herself.’

  ‘Sensible woman. But do you, in fact, have any problems?’

  Marty sighed. ‘It would probably have been more difficult if she’d been black, but being a Chinese Malay… Well, it wasn’t so bad. The odd shitty remark here and there, a few friends lost, but nothing too damaging. Nothing I couldn’t handle. The friends we have now are the friends we’re going to keep, so that makes up for the rest of it.’

  Paddy was silent for a moment, studying the ceiling, exhaling cigar smoke. ‘What about the regiment?’ he asked eventually. ‘Any problems there?’

  ‘Not really. Again, the odd remark, usually from a resentful crap-hat; rarely from one of the Originals. Also, the occasional veiled threat from some Rupert – usually about the hindrance my foreign wife could be when it comes to promotion. But invariably it was a Rupert doing his first three years and not about to qualify for another. That kind of officer. Apart from that, no real problems. Chinese restaurants are becoming popular in England, so maybe that helps.’

  Paddy chuckled. ‘Who knows? Food, like music, doesn’t require a common language and can certainly cross a lot of frontiers. So maybe you’re right.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Marty said. ‘They could do with it in Civvy Street. At least in the SAS we know what winning hearts and minds means. We’re taught to understand foreign cultures and find the value in them. That’s why being married to Ann Lim has caused a few SAS heads to turn: they’re more inclined to respect her for what she is. They see her purely as a beautiful woman, which makes them envy me instead of resenting me. If you learn to live with Malays and Chinese and the Sakai, you’re not likely to stay racist for long. That’s one of the strengths of the SAS and it’s one that I’m proud of.’

  Paddy shook his head from side to side, smiling as if at a private joke. ‘What an honourable man you are, Marty.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes. In some ways I think you’re the most honourable man I’ve ever met. You don’t think about it, you haven’t reasoned it out, you’d probably even deny that you’re that way, but believe me, you are. You’re a man of strong principles, my friend, and you don’t even know it.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m like that at all.’

  ‘There you are – you’re denying it.’

  ‘I’m not denying it. I’m just saying that I’m not like that. I mean, I’m not all that honourable. I’m just a workingclass lad, for Christ’s sake, who loves the regiment and wants to stay in it, so I do what I have to do.’

  ‘No, you do more. You operate by strict principles. You’re almost puritanical in your attitude to the regiment. You give a lot and expect the same from others.’

  ‘Well, yes, I think a man should give his best.’

  ‘And you’re angered by men who don’t.’

  ‘I think that’s pretty normal,’ Marty said.

  ‘It’s pretty unusual,’ Paddy retorted. He inhaled on his cigar, held the smoke in for a moment, savouring it, then exhaled it in a series of smoke-rings, which he observed dissolving slowly in the air. ‘Some day,’ he said quietly, ‘your principles are going to get you into trouble.’

  ‘Oh? How come?’

  ‘We must always weigh our principles against expediency– and that’s something you still haven’t learned.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, boss,’ Marty said, automatically reverting to this SAS form of address at merely being reminded of the regiment.

  Paddy noticed the change and chuckled. ‘“Crap- hats” for RTUs or members of the regular army, “Ruberts” for officers, and “boss” instead of “sir”. The SAS is creating its own language, as well as new ways of waging war.’

  ‘It sure is,’ Marty said. ‘I mean, take the word “basha”. At first it meant a waterproof shelter made from a poncho, but now it can also be a barrack room, a house, a bed – in fact, anywhere you can lay your head down. Of course, the best place to lay your head down is in the spider, which is the name recently given to the barracks because most barracks have eight legs, the dormitory areas, running off their central section. So, you know, you can now basha down in your spider and go to sleep muttering about crap-hats, the greens – that’s regular army soldiers, of course – Ruperts and even Head Sheds.’

  ‘What on earth’s a Head Shed?’ Paddy asked.

  ‘A senior officer, not just a common Rupert,’ Marty informed him with glee. ‘You want to hear more, boss?’

  Paddy grinned and shook his head from side to side. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘So since I’m drunkenly talking to a bloody Rupert and Head Shed, what did you mean when you said that I have to learn to weigh my principles against expediency? I’m confused, boss. I really am.’

  Paddy was silent for some time, as if deciding whether or not to reply.

  ‘Well?’ Marty asked eventually, now requiring an answer.

  Paddy sighed. ‘Remember that dreadful swamp in Malaya? Not the Telok Anson swamp of last year. The first one – the one near Selangor – nearly six years ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marty said. ‘Hell on earth. I still have nightmares about it. But what about principles against expediency? I had no principles then.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Paddy said. ‘And they almost got you killed. A female CT guerrilla came at you with a parangand you couldn’t bring yourself to shoot her, even though she was hell bent on killing you.’

  ‘I killed her,’ Marty said, not wanting to recall the incident. ‘I emptied my SLR into her. Damned near chopped her in two.’

  ‘That was the second time,’ Paddy reminded him. ‘The attack that took place after your friend, Tony Williams, fell into a punji pit and Trooper Burns, Rob Roy, had his head chopped off by the same parang that woman was swinging at you. You were mad by that time. You were practically out of your mind. But even then you hesitated – I saw you – you backed off – and it was only when you saw Trooper Burns’ severed head that you went over the edge. You killed that particular woman in a blind fury. In other words, you lost control.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Marty admitted. ‘I lost control and I’ve never forgotten it. It won’t happen again. So what about the first time?’

  ‘The first time you were attacked by a woman swinging a parang, you didn’t defend yourself at all. If Taff Hughes hadn’t shot her in the head, you would have been dead.’

  ‘True enough. That cold-blooded little bastard saved my li
fe. But I’m still not sure what point you’re trying to make.’

  ‘The point I’m trying to make, Marty, is that when the first woman attacked you, your damned principles about not hurting a woman nearly cost you your life. More importantly, your inability to sacrifice your principles to do what was necessary could have cost the lives of some of your fellow troopers. The point I’m also trying to make, Marty, is that when the second woman attacked you, your principles made you back away, which was wrong, and then you only did what you had to do when you lost your head, which also was wrong. In both cases, then, you failed to weigh your principles against expediency and instead, in both cases, behaved irrationally.’

  ‘I accept that,’ Marty said.

  ‘Principles, my friend, are all well and good, but not when they become a danger to yourself and, more importantly, to your fellow troopers. The final arbiter for the soldier is pragmatism. Don’t ever forget that. You’re too emotional, Marty. Maybe too puritanical. Those are virtues that could turn into vices and make you selfdestructive. I hope that never happens.’

  ‘It won’t,’ Marty promised.

  Paddy was silent for a moment, then he asked in a hesitant manner, ‘You still have nightmares about that operation?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marty said. ‘Even years after the event. The Telok Anson swamp was even worse, but the Selangor swamp was the first. It was also where we lost Tone and Rob Roy, so that’s the one I most dream about.’

  ‘It was a nightmarish operation,’ Paddy conceded. ‘No doubt about it. It was there I first realized that the nature of war was going to change and that a civilized war, the kind we mostly fought in North Africa, was a thing of the past. Wars are going to be much dirtier in the future and we’ll have to adapt to that.’

  Marty knew what he meant. Even seven years after that patrol into the Selangor swamp, he found himself having nightmares about it and often pondered, during the day, on the difference between it and the war in North Africa. There, the war had indeed been a gentleman’s war, with each side respecting the other, even on an individual basis, such as the treatment of POWs. It was a war that took place out in the open, in the vast desert plains, usually in brilliant sunshine, and this may have helped the men on both sides to remain relatively civilized. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the Malayan jungle, the ulu, where, in water and mud, in gloom and suffocating humidity, with an extraordinary variety of venomous wildlife, in scenery suggestive of man’s primordial origins, the human soul may have been driven back in upon itself, to its most primitive and ignorantly cruel nature. Certainly the war in Malaya, particularly in the swamps, had been one of the most ingenious cruelties and unremitting squalor. It haunted Marty even now and would not let him go.