Slapton Sands Read online

  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.

  The aerial pictures were of very good quality. They had needed to be, taken as they were for the purpose of precise geographic reference and plotting. They began to get grainy only when magnified to a point where the features they showed became so large they were abstract anyway, unreadable out of the context of landscape. They showed a beach and hinterland heavily cratered with shells. Even three winters after the end of the war, one of those winters very harsh, the violence done to the shore and the gravel lagoon beyond it was shockingly obvious. If men had been there when the shells responsible for this damage had exploded, she didn’t see how they could have survived the barrage. Is that what had happened? Had an American cruiser bombarded American infantry on the beach during a live-fire exercise? Had the dead infantry been blown to pieces by their own fire power unleashed by their own navy? The pictures she was looking at meant that Alice Bourne could not dismiss this as a possible explanation of the casualties. But the Colorado veteran had made no mention of the carnage she was projecting from the epidiascope on to the wall. He’d mentioned sentries, strung out along the shore after the catastrophe, and he’d talked about the rain and how subdued the sea had been on that hungover April day. But he’d said nothing about the beach having been shelled. Before coming to England, she’d travelled back to his bar with her notebook and interviewed him at length. She would have to read the notes again, but recalling them now she was sure he had said nothing to her about the shelling of Slapton Sands.

  It seemed impossible. If more than a thousand men had been blown to pieces there, he’d have seen body parts on the sand. He’d have seen dropped packs and water bottles and discarded rifles. There’d have been shattered landing craft at the edge of the sea and more listing, sinking in the water. But he’d seen, or mentioned, none of these things.

  One of the Ordnance Survey pictures showed the hull of a Higgins boat hauled up on to the sand. Rust ran down to the sea from its corroded metal fittings in a trough behind the craft. It was submitting with ferocious speed to corruption, its hastily bolted-together panels crumbling and dissolving under the assault of wind and salt. Alice felt deflated looking at the wreck, felt for the first time that Champion might be right and that her trip to Slapton was nothing more than conceit and folly. What could she hope to find? What secrets could an English beach hope to surrender after thirty-two years of ravaging weather?

  It was hot in the library, hotter over the epidiascope, with its little electric motor and its electric lamp and the faint smell of burn that always arose from machines that have been left to grow dusty, when someone switched them on and they started to hum and get hot. She got up out of her chair and went over to one of the large windows set in the south façade of the building, overlooking Canterbury. She was on the library’s fourth floor, and from the campus hill the view over the city and the Kent countryside was panoramic, the projection of an epic film. But nothing much was happening on the screen. In the centre distance, the cathedral rippled, spires and fancies lost to dissipating heat. Trees heavy with defeated leaves endured the sun. The Stour twinkled in a narrow strand whenever banks and bridges allowed a sight of the diminishing river. It was not hard to imagine Spitfires cartwheeling through the sky, barrage balloons strewn across it, smudges of smoke from wing-mounted cannon oily against the blue vastness.

  She’d read that three million American servicemen had been based in England at various times between January of 1942 and December of 1945. American airmen had flown missions over Germany from US bases in East Anglia. An army of invasion had been trained in secret for the assault on Berlin through France. They’d come here from Maryland and Nebraska, from the Bowery and the Bronx and the patrician districts of old Boston and the race-hating, rancorous stew of the old South. The 29th Infantry Division had been in the South-West of England for more than a year and a half before finally leaving its shores for Omaha Beach.

  She could do what Professor Champion wished and add her ten cents’ worth to the dead debate about the causes of the Peterloo Massacre or the reason why President Nixon had escaped impeachment. Or she could travel to Devon to try to discover how more than a thousand American men brave enough to come halfway across the world to fight for freedom had died instead on one calamitous day on a stretch of the English coast.

  ‘Their story deserves to be told,’ she said to herself, with her head on the thick glass of the window through which she looked. ‘If nothing else, they deserve its telling.’

  She turned away from the view. Across by a bank of carrels, two English girls were looking at her curiously. Probably think I’m bitching to myself about the lack of air-conditioning, she thought. Which in a building less than ten years old I’d have a perfect right to do. She went over and switched off the epidiascope and went to put the survey photographs carefully back in the map drawers where she had located them.

  She had arranged to meet David Lucas after his early evening training session at the university gym. The session took place between five-thirty and seven o’clock. Alice was reaching the point at which any more of Champion’s salient facts would come only with her imminent trip to Slapton. By six-fifteen she’d done as much as she honestly could in the library.

  A walkway ran across the top of the gym building’s interior. It was intended as a short cut to reach the upper floors of adjacent buildings. But it made an ideal viewing gallery, particularly if you didn’t wish to be observed doing your viewing. She had arranged to meet David at seven-fifteen, after he’d had time to shower and change. Instead she drank a cup of coffee from a machine and got to the gym walkway fifteen minutes prior to the time when the boxing training was scheduled to finish. He was in the practice ring, sparring with a West Indian boy with dreadlocks like those worn by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. He had on a sparring helmet. The sparring looked pretty lively to her unschooled eyes. The two boxers were trading punches under the vigilant supervision of a well-built, grey-haired man in a tracksuit who had one hand gripping a stopwatch and the other clenched in a fist around the top rope of the ring. Both boys were glossy with sweat, and David Lucas had red weals on his paler skin where he had been caught by the laces on his opponent’s gloves when they closed and clinched before the man with the stopwatch shouted ‘Break!’

  She watched three rounds of sparring before their coach finally ended the session. Then the boxers touched gloves and patted each other on the head. The dreadlocked boy spat his gumshield into the palm of a glove and said something that made David Lucas laugh and take out his own mouth guard and reply. They walked in these little anti-clockwise circles in opposing corners of the ring, cooling down, she supposed, all the time talking. Alice thought they seemed pretty friendly, considering what they’d just been doing to one another. Then David pulled off a glove and unbuckled his helmet. He peeled the thing off and handed it to the coach and looked up, blinking into the roof lights, at the gantry. His eyebrows and cheekbones and the bridge of his nose were streaked with Vaseline. The grease blurred his features in the flat glare of electric light. One nostril showed a thin trickle of blood. And his hair had been cut, cut off, sheared to within an inch or so of his skull. She recoiled slightly in surprise, and he grinned at her.

  Once he had showered, they went back to Elliot College. He had bought a deadbolt for her door and window locks to fit at the flat in Whitstable. He’d borrowed tools for the job sourced by the
college porters’ office. He picked the stuff up from his locker, and she checked her pigeonhole for fresh correspondence. There was a bill for books from Foyles in London, where she had opened an account. There was a note from Professor Champion, too. She recognized his handwriting on the buff envelope.

  ‘You don’t quite see eye to eye, do you?’ David said as they walked the lane to the bus stop on the Whitstable road. He’d seen the handwriting on the envelope before she put it into her bag.

  ‘He has a problem, I think, with Americans.’

  David nodded. ‘Stems probably from the problem he has with America.’

  ‘Who was the black boy you were boxing with?’

  ‘Cliff. Clifford Lee. Why?’

  ‘He’s good.’

  ‘He’s bloody good. He’ll probably box in the Olympics.’

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘St Paul’s.’

  ‘Is that like St Kitts, or St Lucia?’

  David laughed. ‘No. It’s in Bristol. Good job you’re not doing your doctorate in geography.’

  Her bedroom still smelled faintly of smoke. She thought it might be her imagination. But she saw David wrinkle his nose in something more than a show of sympathy. He went over and picked the cigarette end out of the ashtray and held it up to the late light coming through the window. ‘No lipstick.’

  ‘It was a man.’

  ‘Yeah, you said.’ He put the stub back.

  ‘It’s a man’s brand.’

  ‘It’s weird, is what it is,’ David said. ‘Really weird.’ He put the canvas bag of tools he’d been given on the floor and took out a drill and started to look for a power point for its plug.

  ‘I could do that myself,’ Alice said. ‘I’m perfectly capable.’

  David was screwing a bit into the head of the drill. ‘We’ll do it together,’ he said. ‘It’ll be quicker. And then, if you’d like, we’ll go for a drink, maybe a bite to eat.’