Slapton Sands Read online

  Agitated by this, she followed enamel signs pointing the way to the museum tearoom to wait for David and to complain to him about it. The tearoom was cramped, but it had a nice view of yellow lawns and high trees through its single window. The trees were so full of foliage that the shaded areas underneath them still held the deep-green colour of undamaged grass. A ceiling fan turned slowly, agitating tearoom smells.

  There was a large tea urn on the counter and behind it, to Alice’s surprise, the spreadeagle wings of an Italian Gaggia machine. She ordered a cup of coffee from a woman behind the counter who looked like the kind of volunteer who could have been there at least since Chamberlain’s reluctant martial response to the invasion of Poland. She smiled with the sweet smile of someone you could trust to keep the home fires burning.

  Alice looked at her watch. London was David’s treat. It was David’s surprise. She could hardly castigate him for bad timekeeping. Anyway, he was only a couple of minutes late. English boys were subjected to Wilfred Owen in their adolescence, much in the way that Boston Catholics were subjected to the catechism at the age of six. The sweet melancholy of the verse never left them, much as the terror of hellfire never subsequently left the poor Catholic Boston boys. He’d be up there now, rereading ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and sniffling into Kleenex. Or since he was English, more likely into his shirtsleeve.

  ‘Hello, dear.’

  Alice looked away from the window, startled. She’d been enjoying her spiteful little reverie, and the interruption had come as a shock. The tea lady slid a cup and saucer on to the tabletop and sat down in the chair Alice had been waiting for David to occupy.

  ‘I’ve come to cheer you up,’ the tea lady said. She’d brought her bag with her to the table and rummaged in it now and put a packet of Players Navy Cut cigarettes and a Zippo lighter on the tabletop. She offered Alice the pack and then lit up, inhaling deeply and then blowing smoke in a dissipating jet towards the ceiling fan. She was slender, bottle blonde, her hair pulled back in a too-youthful ponytail. Her eyes were a startling green and they watched Alice slyly.

  ‘You’re an American, aren’t you.’ It was a verdict, not a question.

  ‘The accent so obvious?’

  The tea lady inhaled again and shook her head. ‘I’d have known anyway. The jaw, the teeth. The length of your limbs. You’re like a thoroughbred filly.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Like that singer.’

  ‘Please don’t say Joni Mitchell.’

  ‘Joni Mitchell’s a Canadian, dearie. I was thinking of that nice American girl, the one who sings, “You’re so Vain”.’

  Alice nodded. She took a sip of her coffee, which was very good. She said as much.

  The tea lady smiled. She said: ‘What is it that’s got you all of a bother?’

  ‘Please don’t take this as an insult. But I came here expecting to learn more about America’s contribution to World War Two.’

  ‘That makes a change. Most people are brought here by Wilfred Owen.’

  ‘I don’t mean stuff about Bikini Beach and Iwo Jima,’ Alice said.

  ‘I know what you mean, dear. You mean the bomber crews in East Anglia. Or you mean the infantry in the South-West of England.’

  Alice felt her heart start to accelerate. It could have been the coffee. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  The tea lady let out a throaty chuckle. It was a sound rich in tobacco and innuendo. ‘I was born in Kennington,’ she said. ‘But I was a land girl in the war. I met my share of Yanks. More than my share.’

  ‘Where were you a land girl?’

  ‘Not far from Totnes.’

  ‘Not far from Slapton Sands, then.’

  The older woman appraised her. She didn’t look like a tea lady any more. Any vestige of the servile manner she’d amused herself by adopting with Alice had vanished now. Alice could feel the excitement swell in her chest. It was for moments like this that she studied history. The woman looked at the electric clock on the wall and raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s my break, for half an hour, any time from now until five that I choose to take it. And there’s a pub over the road serves an excellent gin and tonic. Join me for half an hour. I’ll tell you what I know about Slapton Sands.’

  David came into the tearoom just as they were leaving for the pub. Alice didn’t explain what she was doing, where she was going, but asked him if he could while away another half-hour in the museum. He agreed readily enough.

  It was almost an hour before she returned and located him, waiting for her in the main foyer and pacing. He said: ‘What did that woman say to you?’

  ‘That you were a real looker,’ Alice said, grinning. ‘But no more, honestly, than a girl like me deserves.’ It was the truth. It wasn’t the whole truth, but neither was it a lie.

  Alice Bourne’s train journey to Totnes proved Champion right in one regard at least. England was burning. Scorched fields smouldered between the ancient boundaries of ditches that were empty trenches now. She saw the dry beds of streams and ponds that were patches of blistered yellow mud. Ferns atrophied by sunlight and lack of moisture blazed bright yellow between trunks of trees that were still green and reluctant to ignite. But they smoked and were charred, bark burning on them in the smoke, in the unrelenting storm of the summer heat. The scent of woodsmoke, now bitter, now sweet, infiltrated the carriages of the long express. It was an InterCity train. Its final destination was Plymouth. Alice decided to walk its swaying gangways to the buffet car. She didn’t crave British Rail tea or, worse – she’d been warned – the culinary horror of an InterCity sandwich. But she wanted a point of comparison. Thirty-odd years ago Americans in uniform had travelled the same route by the same means of transportation. They’d have had thicker heads, after a night in the West End of London, most of them, than that which cider and lack of sleep had given her. Tea and home-grown apples, or maybe rock cakes, would have comprised any refreshment available at the end only of a long and probably uncomplaining queue. They had come from the land of plenty to the home of shortage, where there was no sugar to sweeten the beverage you queued for and metal was in such short supply that the spoon to stir your tea with hung from a chain on the counter in case it was stolen. One GI had written home about a consignment of bananas he’d somehow seen liberate its way from the black market into the hands of some hungry English children. They hadn’t known how to eat the fruit. They’d started chewing at their bananas with the skin still unpeeled.

  Jesus, Alice thought to herself, making her way through the undulating train. They’d have passed through stations deliberately deprived of names to confuse an invader. And the ruse had succeeded, except that this invader came from Michigan and Maryland, and not from Prussia and Bavaria. He brought with him not the bayonet and the firing squad, but chocolate and hope. And generosity, Alice thought. And when it counted, he brought with him the determination and the courage to fight.

  In the pub opposite the War Museum, Rachel Vine, who would never in the memory of Alice Bourne be reduced again to the status of a mere tea lady, had asked Alice some questions about herself. ‘What prompts your interest in this stuff, dearie?’

  ‘Something that shouldn’t have happened there. The men who died deserve an explanation.’

  ‘It won’t do them any good now, will it?’

  The pub was ornate, late Victorian, full of heavily carved wood and pious shadows. In another life, the bar itself could have formed the pulpit of a church. It felt comparatively cool in the dark corner they occupied, but nowhere was true sanctuary from the heat in England that summer. Ice tinkled and melted in bluish shards in the gin in front of Rachel Vine. There was no other sound. The few other customers were sunning themselves on the pavement on the seats outside. So they had the place to themselves.

  ‘Was your father a soldier?’

  Alice shook her head. ‘Born in 1925. Too young for the draft. He was a cop. A police officer.’

  The look on Rachel Vine’s face suggested th
at the use of the past tense was not lost on her. She sipped her gin.

  ‘He died, was killed, in the line of duty,’ Alice said. ‘My brother was a soldier, killed in the line of duty also.’

  ‘May I ask where?’

  ‘Khe Sanh.’

  Nothing. Then: ‘Oh, love.’

  The windows in the pub were narrow arches of decorated glass. Light flared through the few pellucid fragments and burned gold patches on to the hardwood floor. A service would not have been out of place, Alice thought. She could imagine the staff of the War Museum sitting in august rows amid solemn incantations and the swirl of incense, commemorating something. It was only over the road. But they would come, delivered in a charabanc. Their dignity would demand it.

  Rachel Vine lit a cigarette. ‘Vietnam was a catastrophe whichever way you look at it. I’m not qualified to argue the rights and wrongs of a foreign war. But you only had to watch the news and read the papers to see that your soldiers were badly led. They were encouraged to underrate their enemy. And they were never really clear about what they were fighting for.’

  It had been snowing at Arlington when they lowered her brother into the earth. Washington had been bitterly cold that day. Snow gathered in clumps on the jackhammer and picks they had used to break the frozen ground at the graveside. Falling snow made the grave tools look like ancient relics as it blurred and covered them.

  ‘How different was it in your war?’

  Rachel Vine snorted and flicked her peroxide head towards the door. ‘You won’t see or read anything about it in Bedlam. That place is more of a mausoleum than it is a museum. But the Yanks I met knew bloody well what they were fighting for. They trained to the point of exhaustion. And they had bloody good commanders. As subsequent events demonstrated.’

  Alice rose out of her seat. ‘Will you have another, Rachel?’

  ‘I will, dearie.’

  ‘What were they fighting for?’

  Rachel Vine drained her glass and held it out for Alice to refill. Alcohol had coloured her face under the thick foundation on her cheeks. She had strong facial bones, and the skin over her cheeks was still taut, but glowing rosier now. ‘Victory,’ she said. Then she said: ‘You’ve come a bloody long way, love, to look for America.’

  If you faced its destination, the land burned only to the right of the route of the train. Its rails followed the coast. To the left, salt marsh and sand defeated the threat of fire. England’s island character sat moored and beached and aground through the windows on the left of the journeying train, in hundreds of small, stalwart boats. Pugnacious craft, most of them were, Alice thought. Shrimpers and fishing smacks and dredgers and salvage boats. There were dinghies of the sort that Boy Scouts learned to sail in. She saw the odd pleasure cruiser, but nothing that could have been described as a gin palace. A scrumpy palace, maybe, she thought, seeing one dilapidated craft. It listed at anchor, white paint peeling like scrofulous skin from its bow.

  She sipped her British Rail tea in the buffet, rocked rhythmically by the rails, watching the view of the coast go by through the window. The window in her own carriage was filthy and she wanted to see as much of the country as she could. The buffet was quiet because few people were travelling on the train. She sipped her tea and looked at the horrible beige and brown British Rail logos and the horrible white, modular, Formica-covered fittings, and she wondered how the Apache had the nerve to go on about Naugahyde so.

  She shared the train with occasional men in suits who sat with attaché cases and pink copies of the Financial Times and sometimes calculating machines in front of them. Rank among the businessmen seemed to her signalled by the width of stripes on Bengal business shirts and florid fishtail ties. There were a few pimply boys on the train, too, with shorn hair, dressed in jeans and denim jackets. They all had their things in green duffel bags hoisted on to the luggage racks. David had told her to expect what he called squaddies on the train. To and from their barracks, they always used British Rail, he said. They’d been ordered to wear civilian clothes to travel in since the IRA shot one of them on a suburban railway platform in the autumn of the previous year. But the duffel bags gave them away, didn’t they? And they showed the ticket collector a travel pass that wasn’t punched, the way her ticket had been punched.

  Alice smiled to herself at the realization that her homesickness had entirely gone. She was excited about Slapton Sands.

  She very much intended to see David Lucas again. Coming from where he did, he’d had every right to exact revenge on the spitter in the leather jacket, with its painted-on anarchy symbol and its diaper pin fringe. It hadn’t been the English equivalent of redneck bigotry, sneering at differences you didn’t understand and lashing out at what you felt in some uneasy way was a threat to you. He seemed a very easy-going character, quite happy to have the piss ripped out of him by his friends, occasionally by her. He’d been brought up rough. If he was mean, as his boxing friend had claimed he was, she thought it probably a retaliatory meanness. She didn’t get the impression that he’d pulled the legs off spiders as a child, or torn the wings from flies.

  Alice had seen her share of institutional callousness, of casual sorority bullying. She’d heard a fair bit, too, about violence, eavesdropping on the conversations at her father’s cop poker vigils. She was honest enough to ask herself the question: what would David have done if the guy had stayed on his feet? And she knew the answer was: hit him again. It was an intimate thing, to have someone hawk and spit the mucus from their lungs or sinuses into your face. It was a violation. Alice felt she had learned a thing or two about violation in her own recent experience. In a way, she envied David his opportunity for swift and clean-cut retribution. She envied him even more his talent for it.

  He had reacted in the Chelsea pub in a way he’d always wanted but not always been able to do. His cute black friend with the Peter Tosh dreads was right: David was mean. But only to people who were trying to be mean to him. He’d had the shit kicked out of him as a child, she was sure. And she was equally sure he had been in no position to hit back. Which meant that a grown man had done it to him. And Alice Bourne, sipping her tea on the Plymouth-bound train, would have bet money that that man had been his father.

  Her mind recollected the short conversation they’d had on Blackfriars Bridge. John would have to be told, if she were going to see David again. So there it was. John would have to be told. She felt pretty bad about that, because loneliness had impelled the relationship more than passion had, and John had done everything he could to erase her reluctant feelings of guilt about using him and to stir a passion she’d never truly felt. David Lucas was younger than she was. He was vain. He was closed. He was stubbornly loyal to ridiculous friends. He was from a background unlikely to provide him with a convertible Jaguar and a Bang & Olufsen stereo system like those among John’s many other coveted accoutrements. He was damaged, let alone closed. He had tragic taste in television drama. But the fact was that she could barely remember any more what John looked like. And when she allowed it, David Lucas could fill her with his scent, with the insistent strength and grace of his touch. Was it a crush? The idea of a crush was demeaning. Surely nobody suffered their first crush at the age of twenty-three?

  Two men tried to chat her up on the train. David had warned her that this would happen. She’d been incredulous, because the Plymouth express was scheduled to arrive at Totnes at one p.m.

  ‘They get horny without booze?’

  ‘I did. With you. Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘With strangers?’

  ‘Wait and see. Anyway, there’ll be booze. It’s an InterCity express.’

  She got to the buffet just as its shutter was being unrolled at ten-thirty by a man with ‘Steward’ Letrasetted on to a red waistcoat. She was fourth, she saw, in a thirsty but stoical queue. The three queue members in front of her ordered beer.

  ‘The trick is to get it while it’s cold,’ the man who was fifth in line confided from behind her. �
��They don’t have a cold shelf on the train.’

  ‘Hi, steward,’ she said, when it came to her turn. He was from Liverpool and his name was Jimmy. He didn’t dwell on the misapprehension. She didn’t draw his attention to the pun.

  The first picker-up was a squaddie, a teenager sharing his small features with so much acne that it was impossible for her to concentrate on any one area of his face without fear of causing offence. He kept talking about some assault course and asking her to punch him in the abdomen.

  The second suitor only displaced the squaddie because the squaddie assumed they were a couple. Such was the Bengal Lancer’s air of assumed intimacy that the squaddie actually apologized to him. And he had the smooth presence of mind to accept. The stripes on his shirt were of a lavish, almost plenipotentiary width. The slopes of its collar rose steeply from the lapels of his chalk-stripe suit. It was hot on the train, probably hotter than it was outside, except in the heat of the burning fields. But he wore his tie knot garrotte-tight around his shaven neck. He talked about the weather, the stock market and America—once having heard her accent. He had been to the Everglades on holiday and had seen Sinatra perform in Vegas. He was urbane and witty and incredibly boring. Alice would not have lain naked with him for all the stock on Wall Street. Behind him, squinting, the squaddie hovered in easy sniping range. Her tea was long finished. She decided it was time to make her way back down the shifting aisle through the long, connecting carriages to her seat.

  When she got there, she saw that her bookbag had gone. She had placed it on the table between the bank of four seats on her side of the aisle. She’d had the four seats to herself. Nobody, at least at Paddington, had got on and sat down in the seats. They were empty still. Fighting panic, she looked quickly along the parallel luggage racks on either side of her compartment. Her bookbag wasn’t there. There was luggage space between some of the seat backs, she remembered. David had briefed her on British Rail luggage culture, doing so in the event of a full train. But the spaces were empty.