Slapton Sands Read online

The English firefighter sitting uselessly beside his pyre of Blitz desolation had eyes that reminded her of those she’d seen staring from the faces of grunts pictured after combat missions in Vietnam. Desolate; they were desolate eyes. It was a look not just beyond consolation but beyond reproach. His eyes signalled that he had put his mind somewhere distant from all encroachment. His uniform displayed a rank beyond his years, and that was a puzzle to her she knew she would never solve. But after studying his face, she’d have bet money that this was a man who had seen things so awful that if he dreamed at all it was all his survival allowed him to do, to dream in monochrome.

  Champion insisted on thinking that she wanted to investigate the tragedy at Slapton Sands simply to commemorate the deaths of brave American boys happy to leave their homeland to fight the abstract concept of fascism. Her motivation was patriotism, pure and simple, he’d decided. She wanted to gain her doctorate by celebrating the courage and idealism of young American men who had paid the ultimate price for freedom. He had this phrase, did Champion, in her tense dialogues with him over whether Slapton Sands was or was not a fit subject for her thesis.

  ‘Let’s look at the salient facts,’ he would say. But there weren’t any, not really, which was really her point.

  Whatever had gone wrong in Devon had occurred in conditions of utmost secrecy, and the American military establishment seemed determined to keep it that way. She had tried and failed to get any kind of official response to queries about casualties incurred during training. So far as the US army was concerned, all casualties were casualties of war. The US navy said the same. She’d found some reference to Slapton and the Arlington Military Cemetery in a Senate sub-committee report after trawling for days through microfiche, but whatever had been discussed had been subjected to censorship then or since, which made the transcript meaningless.

  ‘This is not an article for Stars and Stripes,’ she’d said to Champion.

  ‘It’s a footnote,’ he’d said, reiterated. ‘It’s an anecdote. It’s a waste of a keen and resourceful mind.’

  And maybe it was, and maybe the professor with the moustache that made him look a bit like Joseph Conrad was right. But the thing was, she wanted to know. And she felt that this was something knowable. She had nothing of what her cop father would have termed ‘stuff we can take to the bank’. She had only the oral account of a soldier who’d missed the event getting drunk and laid in London’s Piccadilly and the discrepancies she’d discovered in casualty figures when the units involved had got to Normandy. But her instinct insisted there was something significant there. She felt that finding out the facts, solving the mystery, was important. And it wasn’t detective work to Alice Bourne. And it wasn’t an anecdote. To her, it was history. And its authentication, its telling as irrefutable truth, would provide her justification. It would also perhaps provide a fitting epitaph for the uncommemorated dead.

  History for Alice Bourne centred on values largely immune to cynicism and trends. History for her was about proof, fact: justification in truth.

  She was shuddered into consciousness, shivering, bewildered. Smoke lingered strong and acrid in the dream’s bitter aftermath. But she could not remember the dream. Its images had emptied from her mind. She gathered her duvet about her head and closed her eyes. But the smoke was real. Smoke hung, hazy, in the early light of her room.

  Alice lifted back her duvet and swung her legs out of the bed, smelling the unfamiliar smell about where she slept. Alone, she slept naked. She opened a drawer in her bureau and took out a clean T-shirt and a pair of knickers and put them on. She opened her curtains. It was only just getting light, the day breaking raw and insubstantial over the sea through the window. The T-shirt she had pulled on smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. Fear brushed her skin, and she felt a kind of claustrophobic panic she thought it necessary to fight. Then she saw the ashtray on her desk. It had been placed next to her typewriter, just to the right of the little Olivetti portable which had been her father’s gift on her last birthday before his death. The ashtray seemed a familiar object, circular and made of white, opaque glass, crenellated like the walls of a castle to accommodate the width of cigarettes rested between puffs. Didn’t they have these in the Neptune? Was it a souvenir from the pub? She hadn’t been that drunk, didn’t possess that jackdaw, student compunction for random theft.

  Anyway, the ashtray wasn’t empty. It contained a single cigarette stub. The stub was white, unfiltered, fouled heavily at its end with nicotine. And it wasn’t hers. Alice Bourne had never smoked a cigarette in her life.

  She felt cold. She fancied she could hear the snap and thrum of rigging on the harbour masts in wind grown terse, urgent. Water gathered and roared and hissed into shingle in her ears. Rubber insinuated squeaky crowded noises on the floorboards above her head. But none of this was real. The wristwatch on her bedside table told her it was five-thirty in the morning. There was no surf on the beach. The harbour was half a mile away. Long John Silver was sound asleep. The wind caterwauled only in her head. But smoke hung sour in the room, and the ashtray sat on her desk as its obdurate proof. Alice Bourne dressed quickly and fled. She escaped despite the fact that it was too early on a Sunday morning for there to be anywhere in Whitstable to go. She gained the beach and walked the tide line, trying to lose herself in its litter of rope braids and bleached plastic fragments and bits of waterlogged wood. She walked, hoping the breeze would tear the tobacco smell from out of her clothes. But the wind was somnolent and the day heavy already with its promise of burdening heat. No matter. She would walk for as long as it took.

  Alice was familiar with incidents of shock and trauma from the stories her state trooper father had brought home and regaled her and her brother with over family dinners. They’d lived fifty miles north of the tough industrial Pennsylvania heartland of Easton and Allentown. Her father’s district had been a sometimes bleak and difficult place to police, made mean by land recession and the shocking decline of Pennsylvania’s staple industry, which had been steel. Some of his tales were lurid, disquieting in their randomness and detail. Crime is a question of approach, he’d always insisted; of preparation. Cops expect bad things to happen. No one else does, not really; not all the time, not the way cops do.

  She’d been well enough schooled by her dad to know that it was shock now that prevented her from being able to consider properly the extent and implications of the weird violation she’d been subjected to. Perspective might come later but was impossible now. Beyond the fright and indignation, what she did have was the detail. And she needed to focus her mind with clarity on that. Her door had not been forced. Nobody had climbed through her window. The physical evidence of trespass comprised the cigarette and the ashtray in which it had been extinguished. The ashtray was ageless, characterless, generic. The cigarette, though, was not.

  The English all seemed to smoke. Which wasn’t to discriminate against the Scots and the Irish, who seemed to Alice Bourne to smoke even more than the English did. They smoked brands here called Benson & Hedges and Rothmans and Peter Stuyvesant. Many of them smoked Marlboro, bought in stiff cardboard packs. But walking the tide line, Alice knew that the cigarette stubbed out in her room was none of these. She knew because her dad and his state trooper buddies had played cards once a week, the card school rotating around a route comprising each member’s home. So once every six weeks, four or five of her dad’s colleagues would descend on their dining room and fill it with poker hands and cop vernacular and beer drunk from the neck of the bottle and smoke. In the morning she would help her brother clear the room up after them. She’d seen enough to know that the discarded butt in her room in Whitstable belonged to a Lucky Strike.

  Professor Champion smoked Gitanes. She didn’t know why that fact came to her then, but it was a fact, and it did. A Lucky. The cigarette butt ground out in the ashtray in her room was American. As she stared out over the sea towards Sheppey, it seemed an incongruous detail. But it was nothing like so troubling as havi
ng had the man who’d smoked it in her room uninvited while she slept. And it had been a man, she was certain of that detail, too. He’d left his own smell, oily and masculine under the sour odour of smoke.

  Now, she took a deep breath and turned her eyes back towards the sleeping town. She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t, just now, entertain the idea. She’d had the presence of mind to bring her bag out with her. It contained her travelcard and her cash and her pass for the campus library. She’d go up there, wait for the library to open, sit at one of the blond wood carrels and work. Maybe if she was lucky she could scrounge a cup of morning coffee from one of the college kitchen staff. They brewed Kenco coffee in Kenco coffee machines. They brewed it with British indifference. It wasn’t great. But it wasn’t at all bad either, and it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

  The Apache said: ‘You don’t think Peter Cushing could in some way be involved?’

  ‘I highly doubt it,’ Alice said. Without enthusiasm, she sipped beer.

  ‘Exotic smokes,’ Oliver said, persisted. ‘They had to come from somewhere other than Whitstable. And nobody else living there is a film star.’

  ‘The Hammer Horrors are made at Borehamwood,’ David Lucas said. ‘Nothing exotic about Borehamwood.’

  ‘But he’s not at Borehamwood, is he?’ Oliver said. ‘Has somebody coughed?’

  ‘Nobody’s coughed,’ David said. ‘Where is he, then? If he isn’t at Borehamwood?’

  ‘My brother drinks with a lighting rigger who happens to be working on his new movie. It’s science fiction, this one. Nothing to do with vampires and werewolves. Cushing plays a top-ranking baddie, apparently, on this orbiting arsenal called the Death Star.’

  ‘And they sell ciggies on the Death Star, do they?’ David said.

  ‘Someone’s definitely coughed,’ Oliver said.

  ‘You’re double-bluffing, Ollie,’ David said. ‘On the coughing front.’

  Alice wasn’t following this any more. She looked at the Apache. ‘How would Peter Cushing get Lucky Strikes on the Death Star?’

  ‘The Death Star is an entire planet,’ Oliver said. ‘As such, it’s bound to have toilets, cafeterias and so on. Toilets and cafeterias generally have cigarette machines.’

  ‘Where is this Death Star?’ David asked.

  ‘Deep space,’ Oliver said.

  ‘OK. Where’s your brother’s drinking pal rigging his lights?’

  ‘Elstree,’ the Apache said. He looked deflated. ‘Embassy Number One territory, Elstree, I suppose.’

  ‘Even aboard the Death Star,’ David said.

  ‘I’m sure someone’s coughed,’ the Apache said. ‘I’m going to the loo. Sorry.’

  ‘What’s this coughing thing?’ Alice said to David when he’d gone. ‘Does he think there’s a tuberculosis epidemic or something?’

  ‘It’s a euphemism for farting,’ David said.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You know. Like letting one go. Squeezing one off. Pooping. Trumping.’

  ‘I get the general idea,’ she said. ‘Trumping?’

  ‘You don’t have trumping in America?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. We don’t find flatulence as endlessly funny as the British seem to.’

  David looked at her across their table. ‘Then you’re missing out.’ Alice smiled. The Apache returned and sat back down.

  What had happened didn’t seem remotely so bad, sitting here discussing it with these two. It didn’t somehow seem particularly odd.

  She’d spent the day at the library, sourcing every detail she could about the area of Devon she intended to visit. She had immersed herself so deeply in study that the day had passed without much thought of what she had awoken to that morning. Then, at about five, the information had started to run out and hunger had anyway broken her concentration. She’d got a drink of tepid water from the water fountain in the library basement and a gluey Mars bar from one of the vending machines there. She had punched and bound the photocopies she had made and notes she had written in the file she was compiling. Then she’d gone into the TV room in Elliot College just to be amid the safe anonymity of other people. In the darkness, a small sea of pale, earnest faces reflected Songs of Praise. Try as she might, she didn’t really get the appeal of its presenter, some fat guy called Harry Secombe. It was disconcerting, the way Harry Secombe kept bursting into religious song on clifftops. Then there’d been a documentary about Polar Bears that had been quite good, splicing modern natural history footage with blurry black and white film taken on one of Amundsen’s polar expeditions. The great explorer himself had shuffled in and out of shot on snow shoes, elusive as a ghost in grey fur and goggles against the grey landscape.

  *

  The pubs opened in Canterbury at seven on a Sunday evening, and she’d been thinking of walking down to the City Arms for a drink, when her two new friends from Champion’s summer party had wandered in. Well, not wandered, exactly. They’d walked into the television room with a real sense of purpose. Oliver had even looked at his wristwatch as they found chairs and sat.

  ‘Poldark,’ David Lucas said in the City Arms later, when she asked what had brought them up to the campus.

  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.’