Slapton Sands (13 page)

‘Wasn't so bad,' he told her. ‘We were willing enough. The Nazis were evil bastards, miss, if you'll excuse my language. I thought there was every possibility I'd die. The beaches
were mined. They had machine-gun emplacements and tanks and fighter-bombers to strafe our columns with. The more we learned about combat strategy, the greater that likelihood seemed. I thought I'd be killed. But I thought I'd kill a few of them first.' The grin deepened. ‘Turned out I was half-right, anyways.'

The declining sun had half-dipped now behind a building, and a shadow extended to cover the area in which Alice stood outside the Cathedral Gate. She shivered, thinking of bodies in rain capes, surfacing on an oily sea, the buoyant stink of decay creeping from creped fingers and corrupted organs as the corpses rose in dead battalions to litter the ocean. Had it happened like that? Had they died aboard their landing craft, killed by friendly fire in some catastrophic night rehearsal? Outside the pub opposite, as shade encroached across tables and chairs, the students were gathering their bits and pieces, their bags and books and paraphernalia, and retreating into the pub itself, into comfort and shelter.

It wasn't truly cold. It wasn't even chilly. And dusk was more than an hour distant. But Alice shivered again, thinking that perhaps the supper party wine had thinned her blood. Had it happened like that? Had they been killed by the guns of their own artillery batteries fired on them from the shore? She didn't know. She aimed to find out.

Outside the cathedral, a man had detached himself from the group listening to the guide. He was a slim, insubstantial figure with grey stubble on gaunt cheeks under an iron-
grey crew cut. Half-swallowed in the shadow cast by a cathedral buttress, he stopped moving at the moment Alice noticed him and stood perfectly still, as though listening, alert to something other than the well-practised patter of the group guide. The other tourists fiddled with lenses and wound on rolls of film, a couple of them tinkering with tape recorders hanging from thin leather shoulder straps. One dabbed sweat from his face with a handkerchief. The figure who had claimed her attention did none of this. He just stood, lurked almost, in the cadaverous shadow of stone. And then he slipped behind the buttress completely. Alice felt there was something vaguely troubling about the man. He hadn't looked like a tourist, dressed in a neutral shirt, a pair of drab olive trousers hung on bony hips. There was no camera, no straw trilby on his head, no accompanying wife. But it was the alertness that was odd, that slightly troubled her, that didn't sit quite right and perhaps was the thing that made her shiver again. He'd appeared taut, had the man, like wire. Had he been looking at her, from the shade of the cathedral, a hundred and fifty feet distant? Alice shrugged. He hadn't. Had he? Anyway, he was gone.

From the west, she saw David Lucas walking towards her through the narrow shadows of the street. It was eight-fifteen. He was punctual. But with a thousand dollars' worth of watch on his wrist, he had no real excuse not to be. She watched him walk towards her, able to picture him, now, naked under his clothes. She knew now how his body worked, how fluidly the muscles under his skin functioned
when he moved. He probably thought her promiscuous, possessed of the easy promiscuity he'd become used to and taken for granted in his student life. Ordinarily, this was far from the truth about how she was, how she viewed sex and regarded intimacy. She hoped there would be time for him to get to know her properly. And for her to get to know him. They'd certainly made a start. It hadn't been her usual way of going about things. Oh well. It was done. About David Lucas, at least, she now possessed some salient facts.

He had borrowed Oliver's car. It was a minivan the Apache was seldom apparently in any fit condition to drive himself. David had parked it in the car park near the West Gate, and they drove from there to Whitstable and her flat to fetch anything she hadn't taken that morning and needed to take with her to Slapton Sands. The flat felt cold when they got there. It was dusk. Alice switched on the light. Traces of fingerprint powder, fine like chalk, had trickled from the space where the note had been above the bed head to stain her pillow in a yellowy drift. She inhaled. That sluggish smell of the sea, of mud and salt decay, lingered about the place.

‘It was a ghost,' Alice said. And David stood from where he had crouched, with his back to her, running a thumb over the titles in her bookcase. ‘It was a ghost, David. You can feel the chill and dread of him.'

‘You've drunk too much wine.'

‘No. I haven't.'

‘I could smell it on your breath in the car on the way here.'

‘I'm not exactly drunk.'

He looked at her. ‘Who would haunt you?'

‘I don't know.'

He walked across to her and put his hand out, as if to place a reassuring palm on her shoulder. She took a step away from him, and the backs of her knees hit the edge of the bed. She sat, involuntarily, and then just as abruptly stood again. She brushed the backs of her knees with her hands. She looked up at him. ‘What's wrong now?'

‘You flinched when I reached out to you.'

‘I didn't.'

‘You recoiled.'

‘Don't be so precious. I fell on my ass.'

But he looked hurt.

‘It's this place. It's haunted. Can't you feel it?'

David was silent. Through the ceiling, on Long John Silver's reel-to-reel, someone sang the chorus of a song celebrating the Court of the Crimson King. The song was full of a gloomy foreboding. It was growing dark. Alice wanted to leave. She wondered if they should go to the Neptune, sit listening to a jukebox full of sea shanties. In her mind, the pub seemed an impossibly snug and comforting prospect. The pub was Jack Tar dancing the hornpipe to the music of a wheezy accordion. It was not the Crimson King and the cruel antics of his malevolent court. But the pub was probably a bad idea. David Lucas already thought her
drunk. She filled a string bag with books and packed a few items of summer clothing. The Bill Blass suit stayed with her other good pieces, carefully stored on hangers or folded between sheets of tissue on shelves in the wardrobe. It wasn't the weather for Bill Blass. And Slapton Sands was not the place. ‘What are you doing?'

David was standing by the wall, running his finger along a seam of wallpaper above the bookcase. ‘Looking for signs of damp,' he said. ‘There aren't any. It's bloody odd. No damp, no condensation. But you can feel it.'

‘Let's go.' It was fully dark outside now. The doomy music thumped against the ceiling from upstairs. Alice thought, imagined, she told herself, that she heard a footfall, soft, on the linoleum of the kitchenette.

‘I wonder how a barometer would react in here?'

Alice said nothing. David gestured at the portable Olivetti on the desk. ‘Aren't you taking that?'

Fuck it. ‘Let's go to the Neptune,' Alice said. ‘Like now, David?'

He shrugged. He seemed genuinely reluctant to leave the little typewriter to abandonment and damp. She didn't want it any more. It angered her that the machine had been a present from her dad. She knew with certainty that she would never touch its keys again.

In the pub he told her about his summer job. St Helens Fort had been one of a series of defensive forts built by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston to protect the South of England from attack by sea and principally to defend the
naval base of Portsmouth harbour. The threat of invasion had supposedly come from French Emperor Napoleon the Third. The cost of construction had been astronomical. Work on St Helens had begun in 1867 but had been hampered by subsidence. It wasn't finally completed until 1880. This particular fort defended an area of strategic importance on the Isle of Wight and lay close to Bembridge. It had been used as a platform for anti-aircraft guns in the First and Second World Wars. It had been garrisoned as recently as the early 1960s but now lay decommissioned and derelict, the site of a proposed diving and navigation school, should the exploratory work carried out by David and his underwater colleagues prove its structural fabric to be sound.

‘I don't think any of the forts ever fired a shot in anger,' he said. ‘They proved pretty useless in the last war, when it came to defending Portsmouth from air attack. The dockyards and city were hard hit during the Blitz. An awful lot of the historic city was destroyed and of course a lot of lives were lost.'

Alice nodded. She was thinking of her good clothes gathering mildew, tendrils of damp, the strengthening insistence of decay. Her typewriter keys would clack with rust under the cold compulsion of unseen fingers in an empty bedroom. She would never go back there.

‘It's a violation of a sort, when war is brought to your home country,' David said. ‘It's an intimate sort of destruction. Rows of houses and shops and schools don't possess the neutrality of a battlefield.'

‘You sound as though you've studied the subject.'

He shook his head. ‘My dad was a teenager in Liverpool. Until they evacuated him to Wales. He ran away, lied about his age, joined the merchant navy.'

‘At what age?'

‘Dunno. Fourteen?'

‘He didn't like Wales?'

‘Lots of the evacuees were just child labour. He didn't appreciate digging spuds in a field at four in the morning.'

They were silent for a moment.

‘You do know what a spud is?'

‘Sure,' Alice said. ‘Spud. As in Spud Murphy.'

The minivan belonging to the Apache needed a new baffle on its exhaust. Or it needed a new exhaust. This unless someone had bolted a twelve-cylinder engine beneath its modest hood, Alice thought. Even above the noise of the exhaust, she could hear a half-full can of gas sloshing about in the area behind their seats. She stretched around to look back. The steel gas can was holstered in some kind of bracket above a rear-wheel arch. There was a tartan picnic blanket spread across the rear interior. Brown bottles of beer, or maybe cider, rolled and chinked in collision. There were even scatter cushions, tumbling back there when they climbed the hills and the baffle roared like that of a preening dragster on the modest, four-mile ascent to Canterbury.

‘Passion wagon,' David explained.

‘It's the vehicular equivalent to a slum, David.'

‘Say that word again. Say “vehicular” again.'

‘So that you can record me? So that you can ridicule me in front of the Naugahyde Apache and his faithful sidekick, Metric Larry?'

‘That was very funny, Alice. About the landfill site.'

Despite herself, she rested her head against his shoulder. It had not been the longest day of her life. The two candidates for that distinction had both featured gravesides. But it had been a long day. She was tired. It seemed weeks, not hours, since her interview with the Canterbury detective in the ice-cream parlour in Tankerton.

‘Put the radio on.'

David reached forward and depressed a toggle on the dashboard. Elton and Kiki came on about halfway through ‘Don't Go Breaking My Heart'. David pulled a face and searched for another station. There was a lot of static, something to do with the weather, apparently. Heat afflicted transmitters, made the stations remote. He got the Steve Miller Band and ‘Fly like an Eagle' and Alice leaned into him.

‘Do you like American music?'

She felt him shrug slightly. ‘Some. Soul, mostly. Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield. Blue Oyster Cult, however, you can keep.'

‘Gee, thanks. Neil Diamond?'

David laughed. ‘A genius.'

The road ahead of them was dark and narrow in the feeble beams of the Apache's passion wagon. Alice
wondered what precise quality it was about this modest pocket of yellow light that told her she was in England. In Pennsylvania, in June, the windscreen would have been smeared with the corpses of flying insects. The road would not have undulated so. There would be a greater sense of space out there; the void, the absence that the bleak plains of North America always suggested to the night driver. England and Wales combined occupied about the same volume of space as the state of Colorado. By American standards it was tiny and densely populated. Did it seem bigger, in the countryside, at night? She thought it did. She thought of this little country as a place that harboured secrets beyond its size.

‘Do you know anything about Slapton Sands?'

He lay beside her in bed for a long time before answering. They had not made love again. She wondered again what he had concluded from what they had done in the afternoon. But whatever his thoughts, they evidently didn't include the assumption of ready sexual availability. He was naked. They both were. It seemed a natural enough state between them. She felt relaxed, lying there beside him. Perhaps it was a reaction to shock. Perhaps it was fatigue. And she thought him beautiful to look at, lying next to her, his profile nubbed by starlight in the warm night.

‘It's not my period,' he said.

‘You think I'm wasting my time.'

‘I think only time will tell.'

She remained quiet for a while, aware of her own breathing. She wondered if he was sleeping. She said: ‘Do you? Think I'm wasting my time?'

He lifted himself on an elbow and leaned over her. ‘You told me you lost your brother at Khe Sanh. He was a soldier killed in a war most Americans don't think was worth fighting. The men who died at Slapton Sands had joined the fight for civilization. There was nothing ambivalent about their cause, or their sacrifice. But I think somehow it's grief for your dead brother that's got you into this.'

‘And my ghost?'

‘It's your brother haunts you, Alice. I don't think you've buried him yet.'

‘Thanks.'

He reached for her hand, which was unresponsive.

‘I'm sorry.'

‘No. But you're honest.'

His grandfather had been a sharecropper. His father had joined the army at fourteen and learned his soldiering in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt's Roughriders in the Spanish-American War. By the time the Germans sank the
Lusitania
, his father wore three hard-won stripes on his sleeve and was one of very few Americans with combat experience that could in any way be called military. A year after the sinking, Bob Compton found himself a platoon commander on the Western Front. He saw plenty of action, enough anyway to come home with a chest full of medals and a persistent cough caught from a French whore in Amiens. Johnny Compton, his only son to survive past infancy, was reunited with his dad at the age of six, a fortnight after the armistice amid the panic of the flu pandemic in 1918. Bob Compton survived the flu. His wife, Johnny's mother, did not. His French whore finally killed Compton senior in 1927 when he died of tuberculosis in a public ward in a Tennessee hospital. Johnny was fourteen then and determined to follow his illustrious father into the army. He was at his
father's bedside when the old man, by that stage of the TB an accurate description rather than any term of filial affection, finally passed away. Just before the last shallow breath left what little remained of his lung tissue, Bob Compton beckoned with a finger for his boy to hear his final words.