Ormerod's Landing (11 page)

Marie Therese spoke to the fishermen. No one answered for
a moment, then the older man, apparently having made some
decision himself, replied. She smiled at Ormerod. 'We are going into prison,' she said.

'So soon?'

'It is not like that. There is an old fortress on the island, from
the last century. I have seen it marked on the maps. It has eight sides and it is sunk into the ground. They will keep us there.'

'They've agreed to hide us then?'

'Not with a good heart. They are telling me the Germans will
be over soon to look for their missing friends. Our comrades
here do not want to hide us too carefully because, in the first
place, they say there are not many places to hide. I don't believe
that. But if we are caught hiding then it would be bad for the
population. They would have reprisals on them.'

Ormerod nodded. The small boat was at the anchorage now

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and they were able to step out into the translucent water only inches deep and then on to the soft beach. A woman with a cooking pot in her hands and some sunburned children appeared at the low cottages and watched. 'I can't say I blame them,' said Ormerod. 'They look as if they are having a nice
peaceful sort of life. You can't blame them for wanting to keep
it that way.'

She sniffed. 'They are in it,' she said practically. 'They are in
the war. Deep with us. They will have to learn that.'

Ormerod politely helped her from the boat, taking the petite hand and holding her small elbow. 'You're not going to make
yourself very popular, lady,' he thought, looking at her.

She seemed to read the thought. 'They will not like me,' she
sniffed. 'There are few who will. But they must be taught to fight, to resist. The French must make up for the past.'

'But they won't hide us.' He was beginning to walk up the beach.

'No. They say we can keep out of sight. But that is not the same as hiding us. We can take shelter in one of the cells at the old fortress.'

They were at the top of the shingle now. The morning air
was unstirring, full of warmth and promise. Chickens stalked
about and a man in a wide white hat rode a bicycle on the single track road with not a glance in their direction. On the
other side of the island a dog began to howl. The woman with
the cooking pot had been joined by two others. They looked rough and simple. Children dangled around them. They all
backed away as the two strangers and the fishermen reached the
top of the beach. One of the woman said to the oldest man: 'We heard shooting.'

'It was nothing,' he said. 'Nothing to worry about.'

The woman looked suspiciously at Marie-Thérèse but hardly
gave a second glance at Ormerod. Ormerod thought how odd
it was that women so rarely trusted women. For the first time Marie Therese seemed uncomfortable. She turned to Ormerod as if she had to say something to get away from their glances.
'This place has been the same since the days of William of
Normandy, the Conqueror,' she joked. 'And some of these women look as though they've been here since then.'

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The oldest man began to plod along in the direction of the
large house and he indicated that they should follow him. 'They
are being difficult,' said Marie-Thérèse. 'Cowards. Keep your
gun ready. We may need to persuade them to do things our way.'

'You're not choosy who you shoot, are you?' observed Ormerod. They seemed accidentally to be walking like prisoners, with the Frenchmen grouped around them.

I cannot afford to be,' she shrugged. 'One day it may be necessary for me to shoot
you,
Dodo.'

'Let me know in advance, will you?' he grunted. .

'It may not be possible.'

They had reached the top of a small incline that had begun
with the beach. Now a man came from the courtyard preparing to mount a bicycle and with two dogs at his feet. He
was obviously some sort of leader because the men treated him
with deference. Marie-Thérèse was not prepared to let them tell the story, however, and she pushed her way forward. Speaking quickly, she soon covered the circumstances and, turning the advantage with an ease that made Ormerod nod
with admiration, began to ask questions in her turn. Her words
came out quickly and forcefully. The man, reluctantly at first
as his position was usurped, began to answer. Eventually he
turned to the others and spoke volubly. The old fisherman
answered him, shaking his large, teddy-bear head. The others mumbled agreement. The man returned to Marie-Thérèse. He
spoke slowly now, but it was clear to Ormerod that they had
decided on their position and they were not going to move from it. Eventually the girl turned to him.

'They have no guts,' she said briefly. 'Not even for France.
They will not hide us. They say we can hide ourselves, but they will not hide us. They will leave a boat for us to get to the mainland but they will not take us.'

'Can't blame them,' sighed Ormerod. I wouldn't in their position either. Have they got a cup of tea?'

The leader of the men understood. 'Please come with me,' he said in English. 'We have some Liptons. The quicker you leave this place the happier we will be.'

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Three hours later Ormerod awoke in the dry dimness of a
nineteenth-century room in the fortress. It was piled with nets,
lobster pots and other tarry equipment. The happenings of the night and the early morning had drained him and as soon as
the Chausey fishermen had shown them their refuge, he had
stretched out on some dry nets and fallen into the deepest sleep.
At first he was conscious of Marie-Thérèse moving about, but only vaguely, and then not at all. When he awoke she was not
there. A fan of sunlight was coming through the ill-fitting
doors. He looked at his watch. It was half past eleven. As he
stretched he felt a dozen aches. He stumbled to his feet and
disturbed three mice who were gnawing at some tallow in one
corner. They startled him as much as he startled them. He had reached for his pistol, only to put it away with relief when he
saw what had caused the noise. He scratched himself and made
for the narrow sunlight.

The rough door opened easily and the warmth of the strange
enclosure outside the cell came to him. It was like a symmetrical crater, a hundred feet across, with octagonal stone walls piled up around and the close atmosphere of the Sep
tember day trapped in its confines. What had been soldiers' quarters and cells all around were now small storehouses for
fishing and agricultural equipment. There was a decrepit
dinghy lying in the centre of the space, weeds and wild flowers climbing enthusiastically over it, pushing their tendrils through
its split boards. Alongside the boat was a group of small
sheltered trees between which fishing nets were slung to dry. Outsized bees and flapping butterflies moved around the walls and the flowers. Ormerod sniffed appreciatively and looked up
to an octagon of cloudless sky. It was a lovely day to be an invader.

He felt his pistol, a mixture of comfort and anxiety to him,
in the holster below his armpit, stepped out into the trapped
sunlight and saw immediately the movement of a man, a
fisherman, who was sitting on the top of the wall where the
garrison guards had once been stationed. The man looked startled at Ormerod's appearance, but then waved in a relaxed manner and sat down again.

There was a flight of pocked stone steps leading from the

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floor of the small fortress to the parapet on the walls. He
walked solidly up them, hesitating near the summit before he
exposed his head to the skyline, then cautiously rose until he
was standing on the wall. It was a thick embankment like the fortifications found in a stronghold of the Middle Ages. There
was a sturdy carpet of grass decorated with small and vivid
wild flowers. The smell came back to him, the sweet dryness of
summer, something from childhood he had almost forgotten. He had lived a long time in the city.

Ormerod had a good view from up there. He could see al
most the entire length of the island. The lighthouse was upright
on the cliff almost at his back and before him the slim land
stretched, shaped like a veal cutlet, narrowing and then running to fat. He could see the church with its small tower and
below him a smaller steeple which he guessed was a navigational
seamark. There was a schoolhouse with children in its en
closure and scattered houses in the varying dells and alongside
the bay where they had landed that morning. In the anchorage
were several small boats and in The Sund, the channel between
the main island and the other rocks and islets, several more
were riding on the thickening tide. The rocks over which they
had been pursued by the two German soldiers that morning
were now as submerged as the Germans themselves.

Now he was there he felt better, relieved that all the waiting and the idiocy of his preparations were over. But it was some
thing of an anti-climax, even taking into account the excitement of the action that morning, for here the war seemed
further away than ever. Seagulls mewed impatiently over the water, a donkey brayed back; the air was full of scents and
humming and a thin web of smoke came from one of the bay
cottages and hung in the still air. Ormerod descended from the
wall and began to pick blackberries.

They were plump and luscious, just as he remembered them from youth but had never come across since. He selected them
ambitiously, always reaching for a bigger and better berry a
few inches deeper into the catching thorns. He had been oc
cupied like this for five minutes and his mouth was stained blue-
black when he noticed a half-concealed path that had come into view with his progress around the flanks of the bushes.

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With his newly-acquired carefulness he dropped down into the trench-like track and began to follow it with no great object other than to see where it went. It smelled beautifully rotten, bursting with late summery odours, and with small birds whistling in its green banks and wiry hawthorns. Eventually it curved and, to his pleasure, opened out on to a cupped beach, some two hundred yards away, without a footprint defacing the sand. Towards the centre of the beach were two tough rocks which seagulls sat on and shouted. The sea, a fine shade of green, eased itself without fuss on to the sand.

Ormerod in his summery mood was about to tread the beach, thinking perhaps that he might paddle in the sea, when he saw a movement only a few yards away to his left. His view was almost obscured by some tussocks of heavy marram grass so he eased himself up a minor sand-dune and, to his utter astonishment, saw Marie-Thérèse sitting naked in a good-sized oval rock pool. He felt himself blush for his involuntary voyeurism and pulled his head back below the grass again. He waited, his conscience hovering, then had another look.

She was sitting in the pool washing herself like some model Aphrodite. He was surprised at her smallness. She was not much bigger than a young girl, her body and her breasts well shaped, her hair lying carelessly across her forehead and shoulder, her face concerned with something between her toes. Ormerod withdrew his head and his gaze and lay against the warm sand.

Gently he allowed himself to fall down the slope of the sand and then, picking his steps, he withdrew towards the sunken path by which he had reached the place. He returned to the blackberry bushes near the old fort and sat eating the berries in the sun until, after ten minutes, Marie-Thérèse returned, also along the path.

'You look like a boy,' she said, but with a smile. 'You will have an ache in your belly.' She sat down on the same bank and he handed her some blackberries. She took them and throwing them up like a juggler caught them in her mouth.

'You seem happy,' he observed. He could not help but look at her breasts beneath the blue woollen jersey, guiltily thinking how he had seen them a few minutes before. He had never

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been a very sexual man and he had not seen many pairs of breasts.

'It is still summer,' she said, answering his remark. 'And I am back in France. That makes me happy. How do you feel?'

'Better after that shut-eye,' he said. 'I didn't realize how exhausting this invasion business can be.' He put some more berries in his mouth. 'There's a lot of these aren't there? Nobody seems to have been collecting them.'

'These people are lazy,' she said at once, nodding inland. 'Always they have had a good life here - as long as they did not ask for too much. Now they want to go on in that way, as if the war was nothing to do with them. As if France was still free.'

'You can't blame them really,' said Ormerod shaking his head. 'I wish nobody had thought of bothering me.'

'Fishermen make good spies,' she said regretfully, her face dropping. 'They move about and see many things. And they can make contact when they are out in the fishing grounds. They could be so useful.' She looked up again at him. 'And everyone is bothered, as you call it, in the end. Everybody. Nobody can keep away from the war.' She smiled wryly. 'Even when they run away from it, like the British.'

'You're not all that fond of us, are you?' said Ormerod.

She did not look at him. She threw another blackberry into her mouth. She turned towards him for further supply but he nodded at the bush. 'Pick your own if you're so independent,' he said.

She smiled at him. 'You, Dodo, have a heart. Whatever else you do not have, you have a heart. All I say is that unless your countrymen fight a little better and with more heart than in the past, then the Germans will be in London just as sure as they are in Paris.'