Slapton Sands (20 page)

She nodded. She was familiar enough with the posters. Everyone was.

‘It's as simple as that, honey. I don't want to turn a slogan into a prophesy.'

Rachel thought that two things helped the American military maintain their secrets better than the British were able to do. The first was the fact that they were in a foreign country. No matter how welcome they were made to feel, participating in choral societies and harvest festivals and whist drives and village sports days, they were guests confronted by a culture so alien to them that it couldn't do
other than remind them at every baffling turn of the reason why they were actually there.

The other consideration was their stubbornly insisted-on autonomy. Yes, they pedalled out on their bicycles to win hearts and minds in Britain's rural heartland. Their endurance marches often concluded at convenient wayside inns. They baked cakes for school Christmas parties. But they lived on their own bases, guarded by their own sentries, eating rations shipped from Australia. Unlike the Anzacs, they were never billeted with British families. Even if they committed a crime in England, and some were caught doing so, they were tried and punished under American military jurisdiction. The worst case involved a GI who shot to death his English girlfriend in full view of the owner of the tailor's shop in the Midlands where she worked as a cutter. More typical was the case of two GIs stealing a car at gunpoint. They'd been drunk, lost and footsore, and they'd needed to get back to their base.

Rachel Vine learned the details of both these cases from Pat, who took an interest because in civilian life he'd worked as a lawyer in the state prosecutor's office in New York. In both the cases he told Rachel about, the victims had been British. Both crimes had been committed on British soil. But the offenders were tried, found guilty and punished by American military courts. The shooter would have gone back to the USA and got the chair, Pat told Rachel, if he hadn't put the gun under his own chin after killing his footloose sweetheart. The GI highwaymen were
properly found guilty. Their jail sentences were served in the United States.

America's citizen army was in but not of Britain, just as its soldiers were in but not of the army itself. They were training for a job. They'd do the training, do the job and then go home. And in the meantime they'd keep the secrets they were supposed to. Maybe Pat would have cracked under Gestapo thumbscrews, the threat of a dawn firing squad. But seduction, as Rachel Vine discovered, left her ex-lawyer tight-lipped about what he did during the daytime.

Of course, she told Alice, there were other ways of knowing what went on at Slapton Sands.

Rory Carnegie was a Scottish trawlerman forced south by some scandal involving an unsafe boat that sank with all hands in a squall off Aberdeen. The tragedy taught Rory a bitter lesson about maritime safety. But the lesson came too late as far as the licensing authority for fishing out of his home port was concerned. Exiled south, he tried fishing first out of Penzance, but fell foul of a Cornish cartel of boat owners who slashed his nets and put sugar into the fuel tanks of two of his craft as they sat at anchor. What was left of his little fleet limped along the Devon coast as far as Dartmouth. Here, Rory was greeted grudgingly. But at least his boats were not vandalized in the night.

His Aberdeen mishap had cost eleven lives. He remained a careful man with a pound note. He was a Scot, after all. But he sent his boats out after Aberdeen alert to every safety requirement. They had life rafts, gimbals compasses, distress
flares and, if they were of a tonnage expected to fish beyond coastal waters, two-way radios.

The radios were top notch. But this was a happy fluke. Rory bought them as a job lot from a Liverpool shipping agent who sidelined in bankrupt stock. The wireless sets were American. A manufacturer in Chicago had been pitching them to the German military, on the point of signing a deal when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Americans in the South Hams claimed not just land but a substantial square mileage of sea. Putting all that water out of bounds to fishermen did two things: it put the trawlermen's backs up, and it quickly enriched the fishing stock.

Rory Carnegie fished the forbidden Devon waters with impunity. He fished Start Bay, his boats the only ones to do so. The Americans were often on the water. But Rory was never caught. He listened to the American boats giving their positions, communicating orders and instructions on an open frequency, able thus to steer well clear of them. Incredibly, they didn't bother to encode or scramble their radio transmissions. Rory eavesdropped on them. And so, one disastrous day in April 1944, did the German navy.

‘How did you know him?' Alice asked.

‘Black market,' Rachel Vine said. ‘Grey market, really. It wasn't a case of spivs selling nylons and contraband whisky on street corners. It was strictly perishables, foodstuffs with toff appeal and a short lifespan. And no lineage, if you get my drift.'

‘You were a war profiteer?'

Rachel Vine squinted at Alice through smoke. Her eyes were misted, squinting emeralds. ‘I organized a lunch every Sunday for the disadvantaged children of Totnes, most of them evacuees. We're talking about a time in England of rickets, of polio, of plain old malnutrition. Lots of protein in fish, love. Lots of goodness in Rory Carnegie's cod and whiting.'

‘Oh God. I'm sorry.'

‘He was partial to truffles and asparagus. Lordly appetites for a Scot. And he had a sweet tooth. Most of them do, apparently. Sugar beet. Couldn't get enough of it.'

“I'm so sorry, Rachel.'

‘We'd go for a drink, after the trade. And he'd tell me what the Yanks were up to off the coast.'

A war profiteer. Alice couldn't believe she'd said it. She felt mortified.

‘Don't worry, love,' Rachel said, patting her hand. ‘You had to be there. And you should thank God, really, that you weren't.'

A gold Cortina headed the rank of minicabs at Totnes Station. It formed a convoy of one by a painted sign saying ‘Rank'. The cab's interior smelled of leatherette and, stalely, of cigarettes. There were quick splotches of Shake 'n' Vac on the corduroy carpet in Alice's footwell. The driver was sitting in a raised bucket seat, wearing a four-part seat belt that organized itself around a circular disc in the middle of
his chest. He looked a bit like a picture of a Red Arrows pilot Alice had seen in a photo essay in one of the glossy magazines that came with the Sunday newspapers. Except that his wrap-around sunglasses made him look like a Red Arrows pilot with the head of a grinning fly. Status Quo were playing on his cassette player. Judging by the acoustics, the speakers had been positioned beneath the rear seats. The Fly drove as fast as the Cortina allowed along empty, winding roads. The engine had been race-tuned, souped-up; you could hear the whine of its pistons even over the Quo. She cluched her bookbag, trying to distract herself from the obvious danger she was in by looking at a view mostly obscured by tall, tangled hedgerows. She felt a thrum of excitement in her stomach that had nothing to do with the speed of the car or the percussive thump of the music. She was here. She could imagine Jeeps and Sherman tanks and columns of marching men on these roads. The topography was the same. The roads had not been widened, painted with white central lines, punctuated by the reflective Catseyes that rippled under tyres on most of the English roads outside the cities. The South Hams seemed unchanged and unchanging. Surely, she would find here what it was she was looking for.

Her room in Strete was the upper room in a small cottage facing the sea. She was admitted and shown around by a neighbour of the woman who owned the cottage. ‘Neighbour' was a loose term, since the cottage was isolated, the only building on that section of the bay. But the
cottage owner had been called away to deal with some emergency concerning her daughter in London. Positioned under the eaves, the room had a cosy quality better suited to winter than to summer. But its double window opened on sand, sea, horizon and sky. There was no heat ripple to impede the view. Looking out over the water, Alice felt it was the most space she had seen since her arrival in England. At the margin of water and land, the sea gathered in long, undulant, foam-crested waves. They rippled shorewards, dense with strength and momentum, each different, each its own elemental proposition of force and teeming consequence.

David Lucas had been right: it was nothing like the coast at Whitstable, where the sea was constrained by the bulk of Sheppey and the shingle beach ordered by its neat rows of equidistant groynes. Whitstable bustled and crowed on the edge of the water. It cultivated oyster beds. Its snug harbour and nautical pubs and sailors' cottages somehow domesticated the sea. Here, by forbidding contrast, all was exposure. The sea was ragged and the sand desolate. The sea was blue, of course, under its blameless blue sky, which was different from her dreaming of it. In her dreams, the sea at Slapton was coloured a treacherous green. Despite the weird, enduring stillness imposed all over England by the heatwave, there seemed the suggestion on Start Bay of a breeze. It did nothing, really, to cool the air, but it delivered a faint, untameable tang of salt.

*

Rory Carnegie had laughed, over his black market drinks with Rachel Vine, about the Higgins boats, the landing craft that the American strike troops came ashore in when they practised their seaborne assaults at Slapton Sands. Flat-bottomed, constructed of wood, they had the handling capabilities, he said, of a fruit crate with the lid removed. They were high-sided, not to provide their human cargo with armour, but simply to prevent them from being swamped. But they were notoriously difficult to manoeuvre. They steered badly and tended to broadside a swell of their own accord, regardless of what the steersman did with the tiller. Underpowered and heavily burdened, they didn't have the speed or mass to respond to what an uncertain sea was doing. And the Americans were learning on the job. Rory would watch through his binoculars, his nets dragged bulging to either side of his own wash, as the Higgins boats were delivered into the sea off an American cruiser and were buoyed this way and that in the unhappy chaos of a stranded flotilla, two or three out of a dozen of them making for their target of the shore with anything approaching certainty as the rest pitched and wallowed on the swell.

But the mirth dried on his lips fairly soon. Even Rory had to admit that the Americans were ferociously quick learners. They lost a few of their landing craft. They must have lost a few men with them, because the fruit crates sank with alarming swiftness and he never saw any rescue craft. But in weeks their handling of the Higgins boats became
dexterous and confident. They'd be dropped in a heavy sea and chug in a relentless, disciplined formation for the shore. Rory's crews began to see odd, fugitive lights flickering when they fished at night, and the Scotsman realized that the Yanks were practising moonlight assaults. Soon they were moonless assaults. Not long after, Rory stopped joking at the expense of the Slapton Sands Yanks altogether. It was the Americans, after all, who had constructed his excellent radio sets. They mean business, he said to Rachel Vine with a shrug. Rory Carnegie was not just grudging in his acknowledgement of others' accomplishments. He was a king among begrudgers. But she could tell he was increasingly impressed by what it was he spied on.

There was a note from her landlady on the bureau in Alice Bourne's room. It outlined the idiosyncracies of the plumbing and told her where her key was hidden. The neighbour had let her in. The note said that there was a bicycle she could gladly use leaning against the potting shed at the rear of the cottage. Under the note was a small map, detailing local amenities. These were scant, unless she chose to cycle to Dartmouth or Totnes. Hence the dimensions of the map. There was a pub at the northern end of Slapton Sands that served reasonable food. She would find tea, a jar of instant coffee, sugar and powdered milk along with a kettle in her room.

And someone had telephoned her here yesterday. A woman called Emerson seemed most anxious that Alice
return her call at the earliest opportunity. The landlady had written a number down. There was a payphone in the pub, she added helpfully. There was a phone in the cottage, too. Alice had seen it on its dedicated table under a directory on a chain in the cottage entrance hallway. But the English were peculiar, she knew, about the use of their phones.

Alice looked at her watch. It was two o'clock. She was hungry and she felt dirty from the train. But there was something she needed to do that did not immediately involve plumbing, a bicycle ride or Sally Emerson. She needed to walk along the coast road to Slapton Sands. She needed to look landwards at the coast there from the limit of the sea.

The coast road was a straightish, narrow strip of asphalt edged on both sides by tussocks of razor grass. Small avalanches of sand had trickled here and there down the banks on to the asphalt. At intervals, she saw grey ruins of reinforced concrete half-buried in sand and grass. She supposed these were the sangars and pillboxes built by the Americans as mock fortifications. Except that there was nothing mock about them, really. They had been built to the same specifications as the real thing and then defended with grim obstinacy by men using live rounds in their guise as the German defenders of conquered French territory. The concrete had weathered in salt and wind exposure, and the ribbed steel reinforcing rods showed here and there amid stains and trickles of red-brown rust. The fortifications were pitted in clusters and rows with craters gouged by high-
velocity rounds. If they had been defended stubbornly, they had been attacked with the fury of an invading force that faced extinction if it was driven back from its beachhead into the sea. She had read that they had trained and drilled with such exhaustive relentlessness that their war games became indistinguishable from actual combat. The citizen army resented their chickenshit tasks, the kitchen fatigues, the endless saluting of officers for whom they had scant personal regard. But they didn't mind so much the field practices designed to keep them from becoming disaffected and bored. And so they became highly efficient. And so when the real thing came, it was thought, they would do it by rote, performing their murderous, terrifying task with no greater fear or forethought than they would give to yet another drill.