Slapton Sands (12 page)

Abruptly, David stood. ‘Let's get some air,' he said to her.

‘Don't mind us,' Oliver said.

They could hear the giggles explode against the door as David closed it behind her and they walked together out along the corridor.

‘What's his problem with Naugahyde?' Tan Naugahyde had covered her father's recliner, his comfortable, television-watching chair. The Naugahyde chair had been sold along with the rest of the house contents prior to the selling of the house itself. Alice had been told to go home. The truth was she had no home to go to. She didn't think she would ever live in Pennsylvania again. It would be home in the future only ever in her memory.

‘Do you know in America they make the bags for bagpipes out of Naugahyde?'

Alice pretended to consider this. ‘That's practically sacrilegious,' she said.

She had no home to go to. She'd had a home from home, but that lay violated now.

David said: ‘I don't think Ollie has ever actually been confronted by Naugahyde. Not personally. It's more a point of principle. I think he just feels really sorry for all those innocent naugas, slaughtered for their pelts.'

They walked out of the main entrance of the college and turned left down the concrete steps and left again through parked cars on to the scorched grass of the university grounds and the slope that led gently to the city spread under the sun beneath and beyond them. Students as still as corpses sunbathed in places on the grass on towels beside transistor radios. Alice lifted her hand to shield her eyes from
the glare of unrelenting light. Saplings, sycamores mostly, wilted strapped to posts in an infant forest all down the slope. If they survived the summer, they would grow over the years into mature trees that would conceal the cathedral entirely from view.

In a little over two hours she was due to present herself at Professor Champion's supper party. She would be expected to swap precise, research-based anecdotes with Champion's careful pick of nimble-minded fellow guests. A supper party. And Whitstable afterwards, her room there dank, dream-fractured, its privacy breached. She wondered if she wasn't losing her mind. Was madness like this?

She turned to David Lucas. He stood watching her with an expression on his handsome face she couldn't read. ‘Are you busy just now?'

‘No,' he said.

‘I'd like to go back to your house,' she said. ‘I'd like to lie beside you in your bed and just talk. Not do anything, just talk. Do you think, David, that you'd be OK with that?'

‘Of course,' he said.

‘Good.' She smiled at him.

So they went back to his house. And they undressed in the heat and the light and went to bed. And, of course, they did everything.

Alice quite enjoyed the supper party. The three principals from the history department attended, or rather presided, and all three displayed the endearing, almost touching
ineptitude of clever, closeted people forced to confront the hazards of social interaction. It reminded Alice a bit of a programme she had watched on British television. In it, volunteers representing their towns were forced to compete at activities requiring levels of strength and coordination a trained athlete would struggle to produce. She couldn't recall the name of the series, something to do with knockout, but towards the finale it always descended into a gladiatorial slapstick, mostly memorable for the way in which its sadistic compere openly guffawed at the willing inadequacies of the competitors.

Sadism wasn't in Alice Bourne's nature. She had never taken pleasure in others' pain or social ineptitude. She felt relieved rather than happy about how uncomfortable the academic staff appeared at Professor Champion's party. If the stars of the occasion were incapable of small talk, it took attention and pressure, she felt, away from her. She still felt she was under scrutiny and a degree of approbation. She wasn't at the university under sufferance. On the contrary, they'd courted her. But they had courted her credentials, her achievements in her own short but bright-burning academic career. The stubbornly insisted-on subject of her doctoral thesis was an immense, anticlimactic disappointment to the department, she knew. Her professor, she now believed, took it as a personal affront.

‘You look different,' Champion said. He had drifted alongside her with a vol-au-vent and a lighted cigarette caged elegantly in the same high-perched hand. In her
peripheral vision, the head of American Studies shoulder-charged a doorframe, drunk or incredibly clumsy, in a hooped purple and saffron dress. The female academics there were a kaleidoscope of clashing fabrics and clunky wooden jewellery of the Scandinavian sort. The room smelled of Alliage and Tabac and those thin, ornamental Sobranie Russian cigarettes. Through the window of Champion's sitting room, only a detail of the cathedral was visible. The ancient building was fantastically close to where he lived. His flat flanked the Cathedral Gate. Either the university owned the building he lived in or he was affluent beyond the reach of his salary.

‘I don't wish to speak out of turn—'

‘Don't, then.'

‘But you do look different,' he said.

‘I'm sorry,' Alice said. ‘I didn't mean to be abrupt.' She sipped more wine. It tasted cold and seductive. She wasn't used to wine. It wasn't the time or the place to tell him of her encounter with the Kent constabulary. But she told him anyway, blurted out an abbreviated version of the morning's strange, remembered events.

‘Let's find a quiet spot where we can sit,' he said, guiding her, finding places on tables on the way to dump his baked morsel, his half-smoked cigarette. They were in his bedroom. It was austere, cathedral masonry surreally close through the small, polished panes of a single window sunk into ancient stone.

‘Sit down,' Champion said.

A part of Alice Bourne thought, then, that it was always coming to this. But her professor did not have on the seductive face he'd worn at his party on the grass.

‘How did you find Sally Emerson?'

‘Sympathetic. Incredulous. Both of those, maybe not in that order. I don't know. A bit febrile. Clever?' She hadn't told Champion the detective's first name.

He nodded. ‘I taught her. She's clever, all right. Took history as the minor part of her degree. Majored in philosophy, which was a shame. Did a postgrad at the LSE and came there to the attention of the powers that be. In the period you're interested in discovering more about, she'd have been whisked off to Bletchley Park to crack Nazi codes. Or maybe she'd have been SOE material. Our intelligence people seemed to enjoy parachuting people like her into occupied France to get tortured and shot by the Gestapo. Outstanding girl. Local, obviously. Faversham.'

Alice nodded. She could hear party noises, but they were polite and dim. It was cool in Champion's bedroom, despite the ambient heat. They were insulated from the worst of it, she imagined, by the medieval thickness of his walls. She could still smell David Lucas on her skin, in her mouth and her hair. She had washed scrupulously in the tepid bathroom water at his shared house. But the smell was rich still in the heat of her mind and memory. She had lied to the English boy. Did she have a boyfriend? he had asked. No, she had said, shaking her head. It wasn't quite the truth. It hadn't felt at the time like a lie. Are you seeing anyone?
he'd asked. Jesus. They were naked together. They were in bed. Yes, she'd admitted. You, she'd said. And that had felt like the truth. Which it was, kind of.

Now, she cleared her throat. ‘You don't mind my having gone to the police?'

Champion coughed laughter. ‘Your grammar is wonderful, you know. For an American.'

Alice didn't say anything.

‘You summoned them and they came to you, apparently. We don't like the police force arriving uninvited on the campus. There's a libertarian issue. There's a clash of ideologies. There are too many drugs, frankly. It might surprise you to learn this, but the use of illegal substances is not entirely confined to the student body.'

Alice nodded. She wondered whether she was supposed to be impressed by this claim. She wondered if it were the reason why the head of American Studies was out there careening into fixtures and fittings.

‘But this was a domestic matter between you and them,' Champion said. ‘It won't make a paragraph in the less-than-vigilant pages of the
East Kent Gazette.
Even if it did—'

There was a knock then at the door. And her professor shrugged and gave Alice the sleepy-eyed look he'd worn when talking to the pert girl in the ruched dress at his party in the sunshine on the grass.

‘How far will DS Emerson go?'

Champion frowned, distracted. ‘With a spurious investigation? Nowhere. Obviously.'

‘I meant in her career.'

The knocker knocked again on the bedroom door. Champion shrugged, as though resigned to the interruption, to the distraction of the question. ‘The civil service do the wooing. There's all this talk of fast-tracking, as I believe it's called. Loathsome term. Do you know anything about the British police?'

The knocker knocked again.

‘Go away!' Champion said.

‘Nothing,' Alice said. ‘I've seen
The Sweeney
on television.'

‘Well,' Champion said. He chuckled. His laughter was full of tobacco. ‘She'll earn a call soon enough from London. But she won't exceed her present rank at Scotland Yard. Eventually she'll become bored. She'll meet a good-looking fellow officer and marry and have babies. Or she'll leave the force to teach history at a secondary modern.' He drank his wine. ‘And maths. They always make the graduates teach maths.'

‘Someone's still outside, waiting,' Alice said. ‘I can hear her breathing. I can sense her there.'

Champion nodded. ‘What did Sally Emerson conclude?'

‘Just what you've surmised. The complaint was spurious.'

‘I've changed my mind about Devon, Alice. You need Devon. The fields might be burning all across England. But you need to get there, if you can. You need a couple of weeks of study, in isolation and solitude. You've an intellect, I think, that's always thrived on solitude.'

She said nothing.

‘How do you know it's a woman? Outside the door?'

‘I don't know. I just do.'

‘The same way you knew your Whitstable intruder was a man?'

She shrugged.

‘No?' he said.

She nodded. She was aware of the indignant weight of the woman on the other side of the door. She was aware, as they rose to leave the room, of how clever and influential was her professor.

‘You might solve the riddle of Slapton Sands,' he said. ‘You might very well make something out of all this. I've changed my mind about that, too.' He smiled, showing his teeth under the trimmed bristles of his moustache. ‘We've high expectations of you, Alice Bourne.'

She nodded again. High expectations. They made a welcome change from salient facts.

The door opened on the woman in the ruched dress from Champion's summer party. She wore jeans now and a white cotton smock top and an expression on her face of indiscriminate fury. Alice slipped past her and smiled to herself. It didn't matter, apparently, how clever or influential a man was. The temptation to crap on his own porch was sometimes an impulse impossible to resist.

She left her professor's flat at eight o'clock on an evening filled with light. She noticed late tourists in family clusters outside the Cathedral Gate and, in the courtyard, a bigger
contingent grouped listening intently to a guide. They looked alien to her, in their seersucker suits and trilbies of woven straw, carrying their Leicas and Nikons around their necks, triggering their little Super-8 home-movie cameras, aiming them like harmless handguns at historical and picturesque targets. These were Sally Emerson's welcome Americans, the free-spending ones who swelled the coffers of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce. It was funny, she had never really noticed them before, the men in their loud, alien accents and the women in their loud, alien clothes. Opposite the Cathedral Gate, students occupied tables outside the pub there, sipping pints of lager and halves of lager and lime or cider, hand-rolling cigarettes from pouches of Old Holborn and Golden Virginia. She looked from the students to the tourists and back again. They were oblivious to one another, these contrasting tribes, as though existing in parallel worlds.

In their Devon domain, the Americans had come thirty-odd years ago and literally created a world of their own. Theirs had been a more compelling agenda than mere sightseeing. They'd been preparing for a war that would claim many of their lives. Perhaps that justified the ruthlessness with which their secret invasion of a part of rural England was carried out. And their cause had been noble enough. No one was threatening to invade America's West Coast, after all, or threatening its eastern seaboard. The American war in the Pacific had been a war of revenge. But in Europe? The conflict in Europe was an ideological
struggle. The Americans dispatched to prepare for warfare in Devon might have been overpaid and oversexed, as the English had it at the time, but they were over here in the first place only because they were committed to a fight for freedom.

Outside the cathedral, the Americans were prosperous and middle-aged, gaudy in Crimplene and Foster Grants, loud with questions for their guide framed in the dialects of Missouri and Nevada and New York State. Probably they reclined at home on furniture covered in Naugahyde, listening to Neil Diamond on their stereos. Alice blinked in the sunshine and smiled at the thought. And she thought of the lean young Americans of three decades ago in their brush cuts and combat fatigues, with their Luckies and their straight-edged razors and their murderous ambition to fight battle-hardened German strike troops in the fields and hedgerows of occupied France.

She had asked her veteran about that. She had asked her Colorado veteran about the apprehension the soldiers must have suffered in the prolonged, uncertain secrecy of waiting for the fight. He'd turned his whisky glass on the bar between finger and thumb and then raised his head and grinned at her. And the grin had been cold enough for her to see his youthful ghost staring along the sights of an assault rifle.