Slapton Sands (6 page)

She took this in. ‘The eighteenth-century guy with the bad skin and the ponytail, right?'

‘Thought you were a historian,' Oliver said. ‘His skin isn't too badly pockmarked. Not for the period. They didn't have vaccinations in those days, you know.'

She looked at them both. Neither of them was smiling. ‘
Poldark
,' she said. ‘Is this, like, a homoerotic thing?'

‘Look,' Oliver said. ‘It's Sunday night, right? They used to have
All Creatures Great and Small
on. Then that finished. Now they have
Poldark.
It's pretty gripping, actually.'

She looked at David, who shrugged. ‘Don't knock Ross Poldark,' he said. ‘Not from a position of ignorance.'

She decided to let it go. She was grateful for the company. And she filled the ensuing silence by telling them about the circumstances in which she had awoken that morning.

‘Fucking odd, if you ask me,' Oliver said. Which she thought about the most redundant sentence she had ever listened to. Then he brightened up. ‘You hadn't taken
any drugs, had you?' Then he aired his Peter Cushing theory.

‘You can rule Cushing out completely,' David said, after Ollie returned from the loo. ‘I read a magazine article about him once. He's been a recluse since the death of his wife. He's a recluse and a non-smoker. He speaks to his wife on the other side. And he goes for long walks on the beach. He isn't even very cosmopolitan. And, as you've confirmed, he's filming in Elstree.'

Oliver was staring at his friend. ‘What kind of magazines do you read?'

David looked uncomfortable. ‘It was at the dentist,' he said. ‘There was a limited choice.'

‘Do you two think this is funny?'

‘I think you were followed from the pub,' David said. ‘If we rule out the bloke upstairs with the broken leg, it's pretty obvious what happened. An attractive woman, drinking alone, possibly a bit the worse for wear …' He shrugged. ‘Maybe you need to change your locks. Maybe you need to talk to the police.'

‘I thought England was safe.'

‘Yeah,' Oliver said. ‘Safe from the Black Panther. Safe from the Cambridge Rapist.' Alice and David looked at him. ‘Safe as houses,' he said. ‘Sorry.' He got up abruptly to go to the loo again.

‘What did your friend just apologize for? Did he fart again?'

‘I don't think so. It's a reflex. It's a public school thing.'

David sat opposite her making circles in spilled beer on the wooden tabletop. The City Arms was one of those pubs where they didn't bother to put beer mats out. He'd look much better, she thought, with shorter hair.

‘Do you like those bodice rippers with James Mason and Margaret Lockwood?'

He lifted his eyes. ‘Just
Poldark
. You don't want to read too much into it.'

She nodded and tried not to smile.

He sighed. ‘I like listening to Taj Mahal and Mahalia Jackson. I've just finished reading
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
What a page-turner. Unputdownable. Ingmar Bergman is my favourite film director. I've probably seen
The Seventh Seal
more often than my gran's seen
The Sound of Music
.'

Alice sipped her beer. English beer was still an effortful ritual for her. ‘Is any of that true?'

‘I'd stand a better chance of sleeping with you if it was. Better than none, anyway. But the truth is I like listening to the Faces.'

‘And watching
Poldark.
And Roberto Duran.'

‘How do you know about Duran?'

‘I read the papers,' Alice said. ‘He's a world champion.'

David nodded. ‘There's more to you than meets the eye. Even more, I should say.'

‘Why do you box?'

‘My father and grandfather boxed. I've been doing it
since I was eight years old. It's college that's the novelty, not the boxing.'

She took another, willed sip of her beer. The City Arms was a Whitbread pub. She was drinking a draught beer called Trophy A. It was what they insisted was an acquired taste. She thought Trophy C-minus would have been a better name for the brew. ‘So what is your favourite film?
The Woman in White? The Scarlet Pimpernel
?'

He smiled at that. But he said: ‘You really ought to go to the police. And you should stay well clear of that flat until you do.'

‘My dad was a cop,' she said. ‘I'm not innocent about crime.'

Even to her own ears the claim sounded stupid.

‘So,' she said. ‘I take it your favourite movie is not
The Seventh Seal
?'

‘I don't go in for lists. If I did,
The Godfather
and
The French Connection
would be pretty near the top.'

‘No foreign movies?'

‘They're both foreign movies. This is England.'

‘And Lucky Strike are foreign cigarettes.'

‘Chain-smoked by jumpy GIs flushing out Japs with flame-throwers on Iwo Jima,' David said. ‘Proffered to blondes in cocktail bars by private eyes in trench coats and trilbies.'

Smoked by state troopers, she thought, risking a week's pay over a single hand of cards in her father's den. But not commonly found in Whitstable.

The Apache returned then from what Alice could only imagine had been a festival of farting in the gents. The guy was turning out to be a clear and present danger anywhere near a naked flame.

‘You know what I mean,' she said to David Lucas. ‘You know what I mean by foreign movies.'

‘He likes
Enter the Dragon
,' the Apache said, catching on to their subject with surprising speed, for him. ‘And that was filmed entirely in Hong Kong.'

Alice Bourne didn't go home that night. She stayed at the house, on a road to the rear of the campus, shared by David and Oliver and three of their undergraduate friends. One of the sharers was on a geography field trip and she slept on his bed, in a sleeping bag borrowed from David, after fish and chips eaten from the paper it came wrapped in at closing time in Canterbury, grossed out by Oliver's saveloy and the pickled egg he swallowed whole in an evident bid to turn flatulence from an affliction into a quest. She slept under the
Easy Rider
poster Blu-Tacked above the bed head in the field tripper's room, alert to the smell of dope that permeated the bedclothes and the carpet and an easy chair spilling its grey and foamy innards.

Maybe it was the room. Maybe it was the gloomy nihilism of Lou Reed's Berlin, Oliver's choice of late-night listening before they all turned in – or, in his inevitable terminology, crashed out. But she awoke sweating at a quarter past six in David's sleeping bag having dreamed the
cormorant dream. And this time the lurching craft had been full of the hack and stink of Luckies, harshly smoked.

In the morning, she used their bathroom gingerly. English hygiene, she'd discovered, was a haphazard pursuit lacking commitment or persistence. Soap softened into green Communion hosts in shallow pools on the sink beside either tap. Neither sliver produced suds. The water was cold. Not truly cold, of course. Water would need to be drawn from some deep artesian source to emerge truly cold in the sweltering, ambient heat of that summer. But it wasn't hot enough to encourage suds. Someone had at least put out a cleanish towel for her, though. She didn't remember it having been there from brushing her teeth with David's borrowed toothbrush the previous night. Strange, she thought, scrubbing her teeth again, the purposeful mood a Monday had compared with the limbo of an English Sunday. She already felt focused, energized. She didn't feel as shaken as she had in the past by the cormorant dream. Perhaps she was getting used to it. And yesterday she had awoken to a worse shock than nightmares provided. She felt angry at herself, though, for not having gone to the police. Yesterday the intrusion into her flat had felt bruising and inexplicable. Today it felt like an opportunity spurned, a crime scene gone cold because of her own panic and hesitancy. She was outraged by the trespass, deeply angered by the fact of the violation now that the panic had dissipated. She wanted the offender caught and punished. Except that objectively there had not been much of a crime
committed. Everything of it was in what might have happened and what might happen still. Alice felt under threat but knew that the best chance of dealing with that threat had gone. The police would not take seriously a complaint made more than twenty-four hours after the alleged committing of an offence.

She rinsed David's toothbrush and put it back in the toothbrush mug in the bathroom cabinet. The cabinet had a mirrored door into which he no doubt looked at his reflection every morning. Except that most of the mercury had peeled with time and damp off the back of the mirror so that any reflection was incomplete, streaked with absence. He probably thought that his long hair made him look like one of the Faces. Or perhaps he planned to pull it back into a ponytail like the one so fetchingly worn by Ross Poldark. Poldark's hair was bushy but straight. The Faces had straight hair, too, teased into those urchin cockatoos they all wore. The trouble was that David's hair was curly, and worn in the style he had it made him look like something out of a Burne-Jones painting. It put his appearance comically at odds with his nature, she felt, with that blunt accent and surly sense of obligation. He really wasn't Sir Lancelot. No more than his friend was an Apache. Oliver also wore his hair long. And he could have passed for a band member, his youthful face having that corrupt quality that drugs use sometimes inflicted. Inflicted or endowed, depending on your point of view. If Oliver was aiming for the debauched choirboy look of a Brian Jones or a Jim Morrison, he was
succeeding. She couldn't imagine him trying for anything less clichéd. He was the sort of young man who wanted to remind you of someone dead. That's what he had meant when he'd claimed to have a death wish. What he really wanted was the safe kudos of resembling closely someone drugs had killed. He was probably very popular with the girls. She imagined they both were. Unless there really was some homoerotic quality to their Sunday-evening television viewing. That
Poldark
business was, frankly, a bit worrying.

She'd rinsed out her underwear the previous night and strung it across a hedge in their back garden to dry. It wasn't as if there was any risk of rain. It seemed this summer like it would never rain again. Rain seemed impossible, more of a folk myth than the persistent feature of the English summer weather she had read about before her arrival. She couldn't remember having seen a substantial cloud. Now, wrapped in her towel, she retrieved her bits of laundry. Doing so reminded her that she would at some point have to go back to the flat in Whitstable. Her things were there. It was her home. She would have to do it today. But even if she accomplished her return in the daylight, night would come and she would have to stay there. In one way, though, going back was going to be a relief, she thought. She had begun to doubt the fact of the intrusion. When she went back she would see the physical evidence. She'd have the fact of it affirmed before she aired the room and discarded the cigarette butt and threw the ashtray away.

And she would have a witness. David Lucas had offered to come back with her and help her put a deadbolt on her door and window.

‘Is this a ploy, David? Like brandishing a copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
?'

‘Whether it's a ploy or it isn't,' he said, ‘it has more practical value than those strategies would. From your point of view.'

‘That's true.'

‘It isn't, by the way. It isn't a ploy.'

‘Good,' she said. ‘I wouldn't want to think you were wasting your time. I'm very grateful, though.'

He smiled. The smile was inward, for him rather than her.

‘What?'

‘You're pretty tough, aren't you?' he said.

‘Maybe American women are different.'

‘I've met American women before,' he said.

‘I'm not that tough, David,' she said. ‘I'm not so tough as I think I'm going to need to be.'

Her therapeutic Sunday in the library had yielded few salient facts about Slapton Sands. On the Monday she did better. She sourced a Church commission report concerning claims of looting and vandalism levelled against departed American troops once the native population had been allowed back into their villages in the late summer and autumn of 1944. Pictures, plate, gold Communion goblets, even christening fonts, had disappeared from churches that
had afterwards been smashed into ruins, their stained glass shattered, their roofs torn and holed. Subsequent papers, including the answer to a parliamentary question, showed that the contents of the churches had in fact been removed, faithfully inventoried and painstakingly stored. The damage to the fabric of the churches turned out not to be the work of bored and drunken GIs made vindictive by a bout of homesickness. The churches had been damaged by shellfire. The American military had used live ammunition in its practice assaults on the Start Bay beach heads. Some of the shells had gone astray. Tacitly, it was assumed that some of the churches and other blasted buildings had been used for target practice. It was hard to hit a target precisely with a gun mounted on a moving platform. And a moving platform was exactly what a battleship comprised in a ten-foot swell.

She'd found aerial photographs of Slapton Sands taken for the purpose of updating Ordnance Survey maps in the summer of 1948. There had still been rationing in Britain then, she recalled, examining the black and white prints on an epidiascope, adjusting the focus, searching for detail, for clues. There had still been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unexploded bombs in Britain's Blitz-damaged cities. Much of London still lay ruined. Regeneration was a decade away, the bravely symbolic Festival of Britain on London's South Bank still three years hence. Britain then had been insular, monochromatic, engaged in the grim economic hardship of victory.