Slapton Sands Page 18

  Compton turned his hat in his hands, racked by the craving for a smoke. A Lucky and a cup of hot, strong coffee. What would he not give for that blissful combination of humble comforts? He was no glutton. He was hardly one for the soft life at all. His childhood had taught him how to go hungry for days. But now, he panged inside his sore body for the simple pleasures he would continue to be denied for he didn’t know how long. Who was this damned Fitzpatrick? He’d discover soon enough. They were pulling back the canvas entry flap to the army lawyer’s office, grabbing his manacled arms, bustling him under-prepared into his unhappy audience with the citizen army brass.

  Fitzpatrick’s office was fuggy with cigarette smoke. Smoke hung in a sour haze to about halfway up the height of the room. The big zinc ashtray on the colonel’s desk carried maybe a pack and a half of butts. There was a bottle of Benzedrine on the colonel’s desk. Compton couldn’t tell how many pills had gone from the bottle. And he had no way of knowing how recently they’d gone. But the foil seal on the bottle neck was broken and the bottle was nowhere close to full. The colonel had his elbows on the desk and his head behind his hands. His telephone, one of his telephones – Compton saw that there were two – began to ring. The colonel ignored it.

  ‘Unshackle him.’

  The white hats hesitated.

  ‘Do it!’

  They unlocked the chains constraining his elbows and wrists.

  ‘Thank you. Dismiss,’ the colonel said.

  And the white hats were gone.

  ‘You can salute, soldier,’ Colonel Fitzpatrick said to Compton. ‘At least, you should be able to. The Brits claim they didn’t break any bones.’

  He saluted stiffly.

  The desk telephone was still ringing. It was an insistent, insinuating sound. It was an itchy sound this early in the morning, Compton thought. If you carried the rank, you’d throw the fucking thing out of the window.

  Then it stopped.

  And Fitzpatrick took his hands away from his face.

  Compton knew him. They all did, every soldier in the camp, by his nickname, which was Hollywood. He had that look about him, of Gable and Flynn. Except that Fitzpatrick didn’t have his Hollywood face on now. He’d aged, or something. He didn’t look right. He looked emptied out, angry and all emptied out. In the run of routine, he was a man so dazzlingly handsome you couldn’t even get angry about it. Jesus, you half-wanted to fuck him yourself. But not now. Now, Colonel Hollywood looked ill, cancerous.

  ‘Cops printed you, right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Didn’t do nothing, sir.’

  ‘Save the bullshit, soldier.’

  The phone rang, the other one on his desk, a different tone, the same insistent plea to answer it. This time it worked. Fitzpatrick listened, said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘uh-uh’ from time to time, contributing nothing. Compton remained at attention. Day was coming into the colonel’s quarters now, subdued and English. The dawn in these parts didn’t announce itself. It was a sly insinuation of apologetic light.

  ‘Stand easy, Compton.’

  Compton did. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Compton?’

  ‘You look terrible, sir. Sir, you look worse than me.’

  ‘You’re a disgrace to your rank, lieutenant,’ Fitzpatrick said. ‘You’re an affront to that uniform. If I had my way you’d be in the brig, now, wearing a full set of irons on a homeward-bound rust bucket out of Liverpool. Any justice, a U-boat would put your miserable ass on the bottom of the Atlantic. Otherwise, you’d be on your way back home to break stones with your ankles chained.’

  Back at attention, Compton said nothing.

  ‘You have a major exercise, what? Tomorrow?’

  ‘The day after,’ Compton said. ‘In front of the generals.’

  Fitzpatrick sat and seemed to consider something other than what they were there for. His insults, his threats, had been half-hearted, the rhetoric of a man going through the motions. Whatever was on his mind, it didn’t have much to do with a cut-up pimp or a hooker carrying a brand-new scar.

  ‘Do it right, in front of the brass,’ Fitzpatrick said eventually. ‘Do it right. Forget about Paddington.’

  ‘I have, sir,’ Compton said. Which would soon enough become the truth.

  It was raining when Johnny Compton left the colonel’s tent. There was no wind, and the air tasted rank with diesel from a column of tanks and troop carriers churning mud and making slow progress leaving the maintenance yard where they assembled for a metalled road and another day of manoeuvres. Already there was the crack of small arms fire from one of the ranges. The sound was shrill and sustained, the sound you got with high-velocity rounds. It was the snipers. The snipers were out there, concealed and patient on the range. Compton walked between the cookhouses and the neat rows of Nissen huts, the barrelled accommodation blocks glistening in the rain and that weird, greenish light you got off the sea when cloud and rain obscured the sun. Jeeps were firing up and a party of Negro soldiers were pitchforking hay from bales on the back of a truck to give tyres purchase on tracks churned to mud by their vehicles and the persistent English weather.

  He still wanted a cigarette and a cup of strong coffee. He wanted to curl under a blanket and have warmth and comfort tender to his wounds. He wanted to understand just exactly why they had let him get away without appropriate punishment for what he’d done. But he’d go down to the shore, first, before addressing any of that. Some forgotten thing nagged at the mind of Johnny Compton. So he went down to the shore to try to remember, amid the relative seclusion of the tripwires and the tank traps and the beached Higgins boats, exactly what it was that had eluded him.

  Five

  Dartmouth, 1976

  Alice Bourne travelled to Dartmouth early on the morning of her fourth full day in Devon. She spent the previous three making observations and notes, taking photographs and talking to residents, mostly elderly, who had been mature adults in December 1943 at the time of the enforced evacuations. She had arranged to do this in the weeks prior to her arrival by corresponding with two helpful parsons with a parish each in Strete and Chillington. She’d embarked on the plan expecting tortuous negotiations with various church bodies and diocese. That is what would have happened at home, she knew, before access to individual interviewees could even have been considered in principle, let alone organized. It was part of the fallout, the trickle-down, from Watergate. Even the most innocent Americans were paranoid about talking openly to strangers armed with tape machines and notebooks. In the country for which the term ‘open society’ had been coined, it was a sad irony.

  In England it was very different. Both priests, or strictly speaking one priest and one vicar, were happy to put her request informally to their flocks without referral to a higher counsel. More than half a dozen parishioners said they’d be happy to speak to the American historian. So Alice spent two afternoons consuming tea and biscuits and cake and listening. And trying not to think of the fort at Bembridge, of the weed manacles trailing from foundations thick with the promise of entombment and rot.

  She didn’t learn much of significance that she hadn’t already known or guessed. But the sheer scale of the Slapton operation began to become clearer to her. The evacuees tended not to have been evacuated very far. Most took lodgings with friends or relatives within tantalizing closeness to their old, forbidden homes. They spoke of skies over the south Devon coast dark with American aircraft in massed formations. Windows would buzz and dogs howl in their kennels with the dense, vibrating volume of their engines.

  ‘It used to set my teeth on edge,’ one woman told Alice, who nodded and sipped from a china cup. ‘Mind, I still had my own teeth then.’

  Troop lorries and armoured convoys would block every road approaching the clandestine base in vast traffic snarls of strutted canvas and caterpillar tracks and shouting, purposeful men. Searchlights in powerful clusters carved silver beams above Start Bay in the dead of night. The b
oom of heavy guns from American battleships anchored off the coast would peal like persistent thunder as the white lightning of their muzzle flashes jittered through the sky. Men were in and out all the time, every American combat soldier stationed in Britain seemingly schooled, in the months and weeks before Normandy, in what the Slapton operation had to teach them about their daunting, clandestine task.

  ‘How the Germans didn’t know they were there beggars belief,’ a retired postmaster said to Alice. ‘But they landed nearly half a million men in two days on the Normandy beaches. Can’t do that sort of thing without practice. It’s a bit like eggs, isn’t it?’

  Alice sipped her tea. ‘Like eggs?’

  ‘Can’t make an omelette, dear. Not without breaking them.’

  The vast acreage of land occupied for all this preparation should have made security a challenge, if not an impossibility, Alice thought. But one of her interviewees begged to differ.

  A resident named Jane Cartwright went back to her cottage in Chillington to retrieve a keepsake forgotten in the original haste of the move. She didn’t think the Americans would patrol a particular area of the perimeter where they had built a formidable fence. At least, it looked formidable. But part of its course ran parallel with a dried-up ditch where Mrs Cartwright sometimes took her dog to crap when she walked it. And her dog had discovered a collapsed foxhole in one bank of the ditch that now provided a shallow tunnel under the fence. The keepsake was a moonstone ring given to her by her husband at the conclusion of his most recent leave. They’d spent their final evening before his departure at a country fair. He’d won the ring shooting targets with an air rifle at a sharpshooting gallery there. Mrs Cartwright’s husband was a soldier serving in Italy with the Royal Engineers. And one night she had a few drinks in a pub with two of her friends and, geed on by them, emboldened by alcohol, set off on her quest of sentimental retrieval.

  ‘It was a huge place to attempt to patrol,’ Mrs Cartwright said to Alice. ‘I knew the terrain like the back of my hand. I knew the Americans were billeted in Nissen huts and had promised to stay out of our abandoned villages. I thought it would be a cakewalk, quite honestly. I’d have attempted it sober, I’m embarrassed to say.’

  She was challenged about fifty yards in by a perimeter guard. He had a pistol, pointed at her, in one hand. The other held a torch, also pointed at her. ‘He was about six feet four and had an accent from somewhere like Arkansas. He was extremely, and I mean extremely, pissed off.’

  Alice must have looked shocked.

  Mrs Cartwright smiled. ‘I’m sorry, dear, but he was. I could hear approaching guard dogs, barking. Other sentry voices. So could he, thank God. Because he was very close in those moments to shooting me.’

  Alice looked around. She was listening to this anecdote in a Chillington vicarage. She could smell beeswax polish lovingly applied to burred walnut and oak. There were freshly cut flowers in several vases around the room. These churchmen always had a direct route to devout housekeepers. A tall clock with a pendulum and weights visible through a glass panel ticked audibly on the wall. Glassware on occasional tables and window ledges threw dancing, sun-suffused shadows.

  ‘They took me to a captain, who questioned me. Then they searched me, thoroughly, and took away my wristwatch and my cigarette case and lighter and—oh yes—my shoelaces.’

  Alice sipped her tea, which she could no longer taste.

  ‘They locked me in a room with no furniture or light. It smelled so heavily of disinfectant that I thought the fumes might make me suffocate. It was there to get rid of the other smells. Urine, faeces, vomit, you know. Vomit in particular has a smell that’s hard to conceal. Very acidic. It’s the stomach enzymes, apparently.’

  ‘How long did they leave you there?’

  ‘Could have been twenty minutes. Could have been an hour or even two. I’d no way of knowing. Certainly it was long enough to sober up.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I was taken to a car containing a chief inspector from the Devon Constabulary. I don’t think the chief inspector ever left the vehicle. I don’t think the protocol allowed him to set foot on their base. His driver drove me in handcuffs to Totnes, where I was strip-searched and interrogated for several hours by a chap and a girl from Special Branch. The girl was very keen to know what languages I spoke. They gave me something that made me puke so hard the retching burst blood vessels in my eyes. They gave me a half-pint glass of black molasses and a bedpan. If I had been hiding anything in my body, they would have found it. They held me for forty-eight hours while they corroborated my story. So the irony was that the Americans retrieved my ring. And they very magnanimously saw to it that I got it back.’

  Alice saw that Mrs Cartwright was fingering the ring now, on the third finger of her right hand. She was a neat woman, pertly figured, smartly dressed. Her hair was fine and frosted blue. Frosted probably, Alice thought, touched by the gesture, for this very encounter. Mrs Cartwright looked at her full in the face. ‘I’ve never told anybody any of this before. I can assure you it’s all quite true.’

  ‘Were you indignant about your treatment? This was England, Mrs Cartwright.’

  ‘Yes, it was, dear. And it still is.’ She patted the embroidered wings of the chair she sat in. ‘And that pretty much answers your question, doesn’t it?’

  Alice heard the ticktock of time slipping by on the vicarage wall.

  Stands the church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?

  Wrong war, she thought confusedly. That was David Lucas, all that marmoreal, doomed youth and poppy field stuff. She hoped with all her heart for David’s safety, then, amid watery hazard, under his fort. Her own, poor brother had been doomed. His loss in youth had inspired no ardent verses, though. What was wrong with her? She’d drunk too much of what the Apache always called Rosie Lee. Or it was it just too much sun?

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Mrs Cartwright said brightly. And Alice knew that everything so far had been the mere preamble to this.

  ‘You had further dealings with them?’

  ‘Not intentionally.’

  ‘Go on,’ Alice said. ‘Please.’

  ‘It was one morning in the cottage hospital at Kingsbridge. I was doing all that dig for victory stuff and had got a septic finger for my pains. While I was waiting to be treated, two Americans came into the vestibule of the building, demanding to see a doctor. There was no doctor present, and they got the duty nurse. They screamed at her for blood plasma. And I do mean screamed. There wasn’t any, I think. It was only a cottage hospital. Their stocks pretty much ran to milk powder for new mothers who found they couldn’t breast-feed. Emergency blankets for the parish poor in very cold spells. They cleaned cuts and applied dressings to abrasions and burns.’

  ‘Did the soldiers say anything about burns?’

  Mrs Cartwright paused, as if trying to remember. Alice thought she remembered perfectly well. ‘No. They didn’t say anything about anything. They were rushing greatly and they were deeply distressed. They left with boxes of lint and bandages. Ampoules of morphine. A big bottle of ether. And a case filled with bottles of TCP. No blood plasma, I remember that.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure it was April of 1944.’

  Pretty sure.

  ‘Date?’

  ‘I think around the twenty-ninth.’

  Alice nodded. Birds were singing in the vicarage garden. It was a gorgeous afternoon. Weren’t they all, in England just now?

  ‘There was some catastrophe, wasn’t there?’ Mrs Cartwright said.

  ‘I think so,’ Alice said. ‘Yes, I think there was.’

  Mrs Cartwright nodded. In sunlight, you could see her scalp through her hair, see where the dye had congealed and gathered at the withering roots. This summer, Alice thought. It’s relentless and entirely without remorse.

  Alice took photographs of the beach at Slapton from various elevations. She was using a blac
k and white film originated by Agfa for medical photography. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been any good for landscape work in England. There wouldn’t have been sufficient ambient light. But it would work perfectly in this weather, she was told. The specific qualities of the film were subtle graduations of contour and astonishing detail over a considerable depth of field. She had borrowed the Leica camera and the lenses from the university photography club, and its secretary had advised her to buy the Agfa stock, after asking what she wanted the camera for. She made sketches and she wrote notes. She was gathering impressions, really. Her visit to Slapton Sands had never been about uncovering conclusive evidence. That lay, if anywhere, in a confidential report gathering dust in a file probably in Washington. She was here because the something covered up had happened here. She was neither a psychic nor a cop. She was a historian. She was here for the simple reason that however barren it proved in providing her with finished material, this place, this location, was her primary source.

  On her third day she called Professor Champion, using the telephone to do so in the cottage. Her landlady had still not returned, and in Alice’s mind she was by now assuming the status of rumour or myth. Champion had requested she call him once a week in his capacity as her course supervisor. He’d said to reverse the charges, which she did. He was still on campus, guest lecturing at the lucrative summer school they ran. Alice made the call at five-fifteen, still within campus office hours. The college switchboard must have closed for the long vacation, though. It didn’t respond. Alice eventually reached the professor directly on his office number.