Slapton Sands Read online

  Slapton Sands

  Francis Cottam

  For Lisa. Always for Lisa.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Author’s Note

  A Note on the Author

  One

  Canterbury, June 1976

  The ground sloped gently from where they were gathered on the high slope of the hill. In the distance she could see the cathedral. It lay beyond a long descent of yellow grass and scorched hedgerows. The stumble of buildings at the margin of the city was indistinct from here. But even through the haze of summer heat, she could see the cathedral, a mile and a half away, impossible and real.

  Heat plucked at flesh under calico and cheesecloth. The wine was white and sweet and warm. Someone had put a portable stereo system on a tabletop and had shifted plates of cheese and pineapple pieces on cocktail sticks and trays of glasses filled with Liebfraumilch to accommodate its shiny metal case. The speakers looked feeble, but their sound carried with a bright clarity. Joni Mitchell was playing on the little stereo. The song was a familiar one to the ears of Alice Bourne. She owned the album. It was an album everyone seemed to own or share and play that summer. It had been released the previous autumn, when the critics had coldly received its charged lyrics and jazz inflection. Since then it had insinuated its way on to the playlist of every party that liked to think itself smart and discerning. Alice liked the album, and she didn’t. She liked the song, and she didn’t. Joni Mitchell sang it like a reproach.

  She was glad at least that they were playing something recent. Old stuff, familiar stuff, was an ordeal to listen to. It was an Englishman who had made that famous remark about the potency of music. Cheap music, he’d insisted. Cheap or otherwise, it was true. Stuff from home was sometimes bruising to hear. Homesickness was bad enough without melodic encouragement. She stood on the slope of the hill and wondered if she would listen in the future to music first heard in England and miss the place with the same melancholy longing. She’d heard John Martyn for the first time here; she’d heard Traffic and Roy Harper. The guests at the tutorial party clinked and chattered in hermetic little English groups on the dead grass, young women and young men, self-conscious in hats and silver jewellery, louche in wispy beards and linen. The music now was harsh with treble in the bright heat. No, was the answer to the question. No. She didn’t think she would.

  She looked down towards the pale shape of the cathedral. It rippled, too stubbornly solid for a mirage, too far distant for detail in the shimmering heat of the day. In her mind she sheltered for a moment in the shade of its cold stone. She explored with her memory its arches, its carved grotesques. It was the oldest structure made by men she had ever encountered. As a child she had travelled with her family to Monument Valley and Yosemite, to the Grand Canyon. The structural achievements of nature were awesome enough, but they were random. They were no more really than spectacular accidents. But the cathedral had been built almost a thousand years ago, with skilled deliberation, by men. Those men would never be dead to Alice Bourne. They lived on in their accomplishment. They had constructed history. And history, as Professor Champion insisted, was Alice Bourne’s abiding substitute for faith.

  The heat of the day stirred smells: tepid wine, cigarette smoke, cheese softening on sharp little stakes. She’d thought the pervasive scent of the English would be something, well, English. She hadn’t thought the entire nation would smell of wet tweed and horses, any more than she’d thought they’d smell of coal soot and carbolic soap. But the collegiate passion for Alliage perfume and Tabac aftershave had dismayed her nevertheless. She could smell them now, on ripening skin. Alliage and Tabac. It hadn’t occurred back in the unknowing anticipation of home that the British would wish it upon themselves to smell so Continental. Champion detached himself from his circle of pretty people just then and came over to where Alice stood.

  ‘Splendid isolation,’ he said. ‘Or just fortress America?’

  He was a good-looking man, apart from the moustache. Straight men of Champion’s age never wore facial hair like his at home. The moustache still looked to Alice like a melodramatic attempt at disguise.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just not great at mixing,’ she said.

  He glanced the way she was still looking, out over the scorched ground towards the city and the cathedral. ‘They say it’s the hottest summer for five hundred years,’ he said. ‘Forest fires combusting spontaneously. Rumours of water rationing. But you look pale, untouched by it all. Are you quite well?’

  Joni Mitchell sang, the song sinuous and sardonic. Alice thought she had preferred the singer in her folky, confessional phase.

  It was true that she was pale. She was sleeping badly. She had persisted in dreaming what she thought of as the cormorant dream. She always awoke from its jarring strangeness and always found it difficult to get back to sleep again. Perhaps the heat was part of that. Champion was right: the weather was unrelenting. She’d seen smoke herself, in distant columns rising from English fields. She’d seen flames billow at dusk from a burning barn. She’d seen fire consuming a field of corn stubble. She’d dreamed the dream again last night.

  ‘Maybe you’ll be forced to reconsider,’ Champion said, smiling behind the concealment of his moustache. ‘If the South-West of England starts to ignite, you might find your destination unreachable.’

  ‘Forest fires won’t stop me,’ Alice said. ‘I grew up with them. And the place I want to go to is on the coast. If they close the roads I’ll hire a boat and sail there if I have to.’

  ‘You’re that determined.’

  ‘I am.’

  He turned to faced her. ‘You should, you know. Reconsider.’

  She didn’t answer him. In the cormorant dream, it occurred to her that she could smell as well as see. The cormorant itself smelled harsh with salt and tar. There were fish blood and the iridescent scales of fish smeared on the bone of its beak.

  ‘It’s too recent,’ Champion said. ‘The subject lacks the concealment of time. It’s transparent, isn’t it?’

  Alice was silent.

  ‘There’s nothing to discover.’

  She didn’t want to antagonize him. He would be marking her graduate thesis. Others would read it, but his was the assessment on which the merit of her work would finally be judged. Her chosen subject was an event that had taken place on the Devon coast thirty-two years earlier. How did you define recent? She was of the belief that there was nothing much to be gained yet by poking through the still-spilling entrails of the Watergate affair. But it was already on the history curriculum here. The overthrow and death of the Marxist President Allende, whatever hand the CIA had or had not had in the coup, was also considered a fit subject for seminars. Yet the ink was barely dry on the Chilean leader’s obituaries. The history department were happy to study events far more recent than the one she wished to explore. It was a question more, she thought, of emphasis than chronology; of the sway of academic fashion. On the literature curriculum, they examined Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and analysed the protest songs of Bob Dylan; studied whole litanies of domestic American disenchantment. There prevailed an end-of-empire mood in the history department. The United States was an empire in terminal decline and Vietnam had been the proof. Now was not an expedient time to say good things about Americans.

  Joni Mitchell was proving the point. The record was playing for the third or perhaps the fourth time. Champion fixed Alice with his eyes and appeared to read the direction of her thoughts. It was a disconcerting talent, if he did possess it. ‘Strikes me this whole album’s about the vacuity at the heart
of affluent America,’ he said. ‘Yet it’s quintessentially a West Coast sound. I didn’t know you people harboured anything like this artistic capacity for self-criticism.’

  ‘I don’t know that we do,’ Alice said, looking towards the bright silver box spinning the record under the sun. Quintessentially, the singer-songwriter who’d recorded it was a Canadian.

  ‘Have you been having bad dreams again?’

  ‘It’s the weather, I suppose.’

  ‘You should get out of Whitstable. The place would give anyone nightmares,’ Champion said. ‘Come and live in the town. Much more accommodating.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, not meaning it. She’d thought Whitstable was a town. Canterbury was a city; the cathedral made it so. ‘Maybe I will at that, professor. When I get back from my trip to Devon.’

  His mouth twisted under the moustache, and he kicked dead grass with the toe of his shoe. ‘You’re set on it, then?’

  ‘I am,’ Alice said.

  ‘Military history,’ he said. ‘With your mind. Three thousand-odd miles, to come and beat a bloody drum.’

  Champion receded from her, and she shivered in the heat.

  The cormorant dream was always the same. The pitch and toss of the waves and the tear of the wind would bring her to. She’d be hauled, wrenched out of sleep, swallowing back bile, queasy aboard some kind of boat. The boat had a shallow draught but was high-sided, and even standing, which she was forced to do in its comfortless hull, she could see only sky except when the craft rolled to starboard and the land formed a quick, ragged curve above the gunwale. Water sloshed around her knees at the bottom of the boat, and its plywood fabric groaned when the weight of the water it carried shifted through each barrelling roll. Its hull was flimsy and shuddered with the heavy slap of waves. Then, with bewildering suddenness, all land was gone, the pitch to starboard showing only a swell, green and glistening under early light. And then, with an eclipsing spread of black wings, the cormorant landed on the gunwale just above her and she flinched from it as it settled, its eyes empty above the beak and dense slick of feathers. She’d be filled with revulsion at the presence of the bird, recoiling from its stink and strange proximity.

  *

  Champion was talking to two of his undergraduates. There were two kinds of undergraduate guest at his party. There were his star students and there were those whom he couldn’t escape, allocated as their personal tutor. These two looked to Alice like the latter, in that neither appeared remotely bookish or ingratiating. One was dressed in denim and the other in a summer suit showing signs of dishevelment. The denim boy was on the university boxing team, she’d seen him through the window of the gym, skipping, on her way to the tennis courts. He had a head of Pre-Raphaelite curls that sat helmet-like above heavy features. His friend was trying for a more stereotypically bohemian look. He seemed, at the least of it, successfully drunk. The thirty-two-year-old catastrophe on to which she hoped to shed light had claimed the lives of boys no older than the two she now watched sharing wine and conversation with their tutor on a June afternoon. Could those boys possibly have been as callow as these two? She doubted it. She’d seen the boxer studying his mirror image as skipping rope, fast, in the heat of the gym, flayed sweat from his sculpted body. Narcissism was no great quality in a fighting man, but at least, unlike his wobbling friend, he’d have passed his army physical.

  At last, someone had changed the music. They’d put on Silk Degrees. Unless there was some seismic late shift in location or taste, this would for ever for Alice Bourne be in memory the summer of Boz Scaggs and Little Feat and Joni Mitchell. The Pre-Raphaelite boy had put the new record on. Now he came over to her. Dark curls descended to his shoulders, and there was a stud in one of his ears. He smiled at her. She looked at him and waited for him to say something. This ability to smile at strangers was a social skill she didn’t remotely share.

  ‘I saw you skipping in the gym,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I watched you walk by.’

  ‘You looked like you had eyes only for yourself.’

  His smile widened. ‘The mirror is more an aid to technique than a tool of vanity. I know how it looks. But it works.’

  ‘Are you a good boxer?’

  ‘Not bad. Are you any good at tennis?’

  ‘Not bad. We could hit, if you’d like.’

  She hadn’t meant to say this. She surprised herself.

  ‘I’d need some practice first,’ he said. ‘When an American says they’re not bad, they’re usually pretty good.’

  ‘Oh? And when a British person says it?’

  He pulled a face. ‘It means they’re not terrible. But usually they are.’

  He said ‘thee’ for ‘they’. The vowels in his speech were flat and short. It was an accent she had not heard before, she thought from the north.

  ‘I’m Alice Bourne,’ she said.

  ‘I know. Professor Champion told me. David Lucas.’

  He extended his hand, which surprised her, because shaking hands was something almost nobody she had met in England seemed to do. It was endearing, in a way that the stud in the ear and the curls were not. She didn’t believe him about the mirror.

  ‘What did Champion say about me?’

  ‘That it would be hard to make you smile. He was right.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘That you want to waste time and considerable intellect lavishing an entire thesis on some obscure wartime accident out of nothing more than misplaced patriotism. I’m paraphrasing.’

  She nodded and considered. ‘You seem quite bright.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For a boxer.’

  His dishevelled friend came over then. David introduced him as his flatmate and coursemate, Oliver Deane. Oliver wore a white shirt she reckoned had sat in the machine, neglected perhaps for days, following its most recent wash. Fatally wrinkled, it had then been ironed into a latticework of tiny creases. Oliver, drunk, did not shake hands with Alice Bourne. Instead he dipped his head slightly as was the fashion, like a reluctant horse testing bit and bridle, Alice thought. He began to speak, his voice slurry and public schooled, but Alice didn’t really listen to what it was Oliver said. Her eyes were on Champion, flirting in the middle distance with a pretty girl in a pretty dress with a tightly ruched bodice. It was hard to concentrate in the heat. In the cormorant dream, her clothes were stiff and constricting and weighed heavily on her, she remembered then. And her mouth tasted tarry and sweet. It was odd, this ability to taste and smell in a dream.

  ‘Are you OK?’ It was David Lucas. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.’ ‘Hotel California’ was playing on the portable record player. She wondered if Champion would go home with the girl in the pretty dress. She thought about the weary walk up the lane to the bus stop and the toiling bus ride back to her digs in Whitstable and endured a sudden and intense stab of homesickness then.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ she said to David, offering Oliver, his drunken friend, an obligatory nod, turning to fetch her bag from where she’d left it in a pocket of shade under a tree on the slope. She’d taken the time and trouble to come to the party on the grass outside the college less to meet people than to try to win Champion over.

  But Champion had other things on his mind. And her professor didn’t honestly seem the winning-over sort. That discovery was the small accomplishment she would take away with her.

  She thought about the northern boy with the curls on the bus ride back. He’d said he wasn’t a bad boxer. According to his own reasoning, that should mean he was terrible. She didn’t think he would be, though. She thought it an odd pastime for someone with any claim to intelligence. But boxing hadn’t yet inflicted any damage to his face.

  Jocks and nerds were separate species in American collegiate life. But the dichotomy she was so familiar with from home didn’t seem anything like so clear cut or prevalent in England. She’d encountered really stupid sportsmen here, of course, b
rawny and privileged, doing courses with titles like land economy and agrarian science. She’d come across the rugby crowd, half-naked and bellowing lewd songs as they thumped out their drinking games in college bars. But almost everyone at Kent seemed to participate in some sort of sport. They played scratch soccer matches on the yellow grass of the campus. They flew kites. They played tag. They threw frisbies. There were incomprehensible games of cricket. Racing bikes were ridden along the undulating roads. A number of people drove to Broadstairs or Pegwell Bay to swim. Alice wondered why it was she found all this so strange. She swam most days herself off Whitstable beach, despite being pretty sure that amid the queasy panic of the cormorant dream she was quite unable to swim. It was strange because she’d thought the English sedate, stifled by a sort of class- and history-driven decorum. But the English played all the time. They frolicked under the sun.

  Alice Bourne occupied a room in a large house at the Seasalter end of the shoreline. She lived on the ground floor. She could always hear the water breaking in waves on the steep slope of shingle beyond the sea wall outside her window. The house had wooden floors, and sometimes she could hear the scrape of a crutch from above. The physics postgrad living up there had broken a leg in a motorbike crash, and the rubber ferrules on the tips of his crutches squeaked on the floorboards with his agitated movement. The crash had been a bad one, the break severe. He couldn’t get down the stairs very easily and was almost always up there, pissed off, fidgety. She could usually hear King Crimson or Genesis playing loudly on his reel-to-reel. Long John Silver’s crutch music.

  But Alice liked Whitstable. She liked the ice-cream parlour in Tankerton with its knickerbocker glory glasses and chipped marbling on old tabletops. She liked the taut slap in the wind of rope against the mast that held the harbour flag. Rigging thrummed in the harbour, beating a homely tattoo. She liked the painted-wood Victorian houses on Wavecrest. The reclusive actor Peter Cushing was rumoured to live in one of them, when he wasn’t elsewhere making horror films. There was a market near the railway station where the cheese was always processed and they sold confectionery that had a suspicion of fire damage about it. But the market was friendly, and the local fruit was good and cheap. Once she’d got used to their frankly weird opening and closing rituals, she’d come to feel comfortable in the Whitstable pubs. She’d eat half a pint of prawns in the Pearson’s Arms or sit on the breakwater outside the Neptune and watch the water, oily at sunset, stretching towards Sheppey as the sun descended, seeing out the day, sipping a glass of tepid Kentish beer.