Slapton Sands (15 page)

Johnny Compton pressed for a place name. He was a punctilious soldier and had by now learned pretty much by heart the map of the island he was on, because that was what a soldier surely did. Start Bay, he was told in an urgent whisper by the indiscreet major from Kentucky. The South Hams. Pack your bucket and spade, boy. We're going to a place called Slapton Sands.

She awoke alone in David's bed. The next day she was supposed to take the train from Paddington to Totnes. Where was he? She eased across the bed to doze in the warmth his body had left and felt the first wallowing shudders of the cormorant dream coming to claim her before the disturbance of David's return saved her from sleep.

‘Where did you go?'

‘Roadwork.'

She blinked. He was wearing a towel around his waist and drying his wet hair with another. The bathroom was pretty gross. She figured he must have a stash of laundry hidden where his housemates couldn't find it. ‘Excuse me?'

‘Roadwork.' He sat on the bed. The skin of his stomach was taut over muscle, even when he sat. There was one tiny ridge of creased skin above his navel. She felt an urge to pinch it, gently. To roll it between forefinger and thumb. She resisted the temptation.

‘You mean running.'

‘I mean roadwork.'

‘But it's running, isn't it? I mean, that's what it amounts to, fundamentally.'

‘It's called roadwork. That's what we call it.'

‘Right,' she said, nodding. She was glad she had not dreamed the cormorant dream. She hated it, dreaded the way it could lurch into areas of gruesome new detail, hated the helpless fatalism that afflicted her on each nightmare voyage. She had today and tonight with David before her departure. The cormorant dream always left her shaken, struggling to mask the assaulting shock it inflicted. If it followed her to Slapton, she would deal with it there. But she was glad it wasn't going to spoil today.

‘I thought we could drive up to London,' David said. ‘Splash out on a place to stay tonight. Have dinner, some drinks somewhere. Maybe go up early this afternoon and see a couple of the sights first. Have you done the galleries?'

‘Ollie won't mind you taking his car?'

‘Not if I fill it with petrol and put some air in the tyres. Ollie gets garage paranoia.'

‘Garage paranoia,' Alice said. She was naked under the bedclothes. Acutely conscious, now, of the fact. ‘Don't tell me, it's a public school thing.'

‘I think it's more of a drug thing. He can't cope with forecourts and pumps. He says the men in the little glass kiosks who take your money look at him in a funny way. The long and the short of it is, he'll lend us the car.'

The long and the short of it. That was an old army saying,
wasn't it? The long and the short and the tall. She could go to the Imperial War Museum. It wasn't far from some of the other sights, from the river, from Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament and the Abbey. ‘Haven't you got lectures? Seminars?'

‘I have. And I've got a couple of dives to try to get in, too, if I'm going to come over as anything other than a total novice when I get to Bembridge and the fort.'

‘I thought you were an experienced diver.'

‘I am. Just not recently. You have to go through the drills, the procedures. I need at least a couple of dives.'

His gear was in a large canvas holdall in the hallway of the house. She'd seen the rubber strap of a flipper or a face mask protruding from it when they came through the front door after the drive from Whitstable the night before. It had been black and salt-rimed against the teeth of the bag's heavy metal zipper. She felt very uneasy at the thought of David working under water. There was no particular reason for this. She supposed it had to do with how recent, if brief, had been the visitation of her dream.

‘It's the last week of term,' David said. ‘It's a question of priorities, Alice. In twenty-four hours, you'll be gone.'

They went up to the university, where Alice sorted the post from her pigeonhole and left a note with the college porter with the telephone number and address of where she would be staying in Strete. Then they were off on the straight, pale road to London, heat ripple and patches of spilled oil the only thing to break the monotony, the road
flat and flanked by banks of scrubby yellow grass and the occasional defeated tree. Heat was starting to liberate smells in the car that must have lain discouraged and dormant during its stay in the car park beneath Elliot College. Even with the windows open, the back of the car smelled funky, slightly ripe.

‘I know. A forensic scientist would have a ball back there,' David said, putting a cassette into the tape player, guessing her thoughts.

‘Somebody's already had a ball back there,' Alice said.

The tape was Van Morrison. Mention of forensics made her think of Sally Emerson. There had been a note from DS Emerson in her pigeonhole, asking for a contact number where she could be reached when she got to south Devon. That had surprised Alice. For reasons different from his, she shared Professor Champion's view that there was no point in continuing to investigate what had happened at her flat in Whitstable. Nobody was going to be caught or punished for what had occurred. Nobody but herself would ever be held to account.

Traffic was light on the London road, and even with the windows open and the faulty exhaust the music sounded great through the cassette player's shrill little speakers. The song was ‘Domino'.

‘Van Morrison. Safe ground.'

‘More like hallowed ground.' David laughed. He sounded happy. ‘Have you any idea how unusual it is to wake up every day in this country to weather like this?'

She couldn't believe it. They were going to have a weather conversation. She had read that it was chief among those subjects about which the British conversed most passionately. In fact, no conversation was considered complete, she'd been led to believe before her arrival, without a ritual mention of meteorology. She laughed herself, feeling their speed, the sun, the rhythmic thrill of the music they were listening to. She sensed already that this day would be one she would remember vividly, perfectly, for the rest of whatever time remained of her life.

They drove through New Cross and Lewisham and Camberwell to get to Kennington and the Imperial War Museum. It was the first time Alice had seen these areas of inner London. She saw half-cleared terraces of slums and burned-out cars and violent, skinhead graffiti daubed on the walls of blocks of flats and public buildings. She saw poor people for the first time in any concentration since she had been in England. They gathered in clusters outside pubs and betting shops. They queued outside a post office, outside telephone kiosks and at bus stops. Gaudy displays of public art in painted friezes on lending library façades and gable ends portrayed a happy utopia grotesquely at odds with the general picture of decay, the mood of sullen animosity. Dub reggae thumped from the open maws of second-hand record shops. Shabby cars crawled in thick traffic under the heat. They had their names scrolled in rust-mottled chrome on their boots. Capri, Granada, Cortina. What did English car designers have against Italy and Spain?
The architecture through which they passed was an alienating mix of late-Victorian decrepitude and 1960s brutalism.

‘You think this is bad, you should see the Elephant,' David said.

Alice nodded. She thought of her Will Hay film, of its cosy certainties and sleepy, monochrome charms. She thought of the ice-cream parlour in Tankerton, with its tabletops of marbled Formica and knickerbocker glory glasses so scratched by the edges of searching spoons that they had become opaque, as though their glass were frosted. She thought of the jukebox anchored in its cosy berth in a corner of the Neptune. England, she was beginning to think, was less a place than a series of assumptions. Its reality was so diverse and contradictory that you could gain no measure of the place. Looking at it in detail was like holding something too close to your eye, the way a child will when subjecting it to scrutiny. The object becomes blurred, abstract. You lose any sense of the size or nature of the thing. No wonder the Americans during the war were kept isolated from this country, kept safely away from its inconsistencies, its paradoxes and dismaying contradictions.

‘Is this part of London as dangerous as it looks?'

David shrugged. ‘I'm not a native. But Peckham isn't exactly the Bronx. Nobody has guns here.'

‘Except in
The Sweeney
.'

‘West London, mostly,
The Sweeney
,' he said. ‘That's according to Ollie, who's from Wimbledon and claims to
know.' He smiled at her. ‘Wait until you get to the War Museum. In a previous life, it used to be a lunatic asylum. It was called Bedlam. Thus the origin of the term.'

‘Great,' she said. She looked at her wristwatch. It was a quarter to twelve. They'd had only toast and coffee for breakfast, and the hot, fried food smells of south London's street takeaways, through the open car windows, were making her hungry now.

They stopped outside a café called Perdoni's on Kennington Road. The café had a double frontage and bench seats and photographs of the fathers or grandfathers of the present proprietors posed outside the premises in an earlier part of the century. The pictures looked like they had been taken in the decades prior to the Second World War. While David studied a menu card, Alice went over and looked at one of them. A date had been inked into a corner of the border surrounding the print. It read 1929.

They ate spaghetti bolognese with thick slices of crusty bread and drank carbonated mineral water that was cold and slightly salty and delicious after the hot, fume-filled crawl through south London. After, they ordered cherry pie and cream. Most of the other customers were cab drivers, coming in with their brass badges on loops of leather around their necks, adjusting paunches to the familiar, fixed gap between bench padding and table edge, their black cabs glossy with coach paint in sunshine in a static convoy at the kerb. After her food, Alice savoured the
best cup of coffee she had drunk since arriving in England.

The sun was at its apex, but there was a shallow awning over the frontage of Perdoni's, so they could look at the burnished street, at the black cabs and passing traffic, at Kennington's mix of hot pedestrians, from the relative cool of the café interior.

‘What happened to London's Italians in the war?'

‘Interned,' David said.

‘That must have been tough.'

‘Very, I would have thought. They were sent to Scotland. To internment camps. So there are a lot of Italians in Glasgow and Edinburgh.'

Alice looked around the café. It was almost one o'clock. There was a queue now at the counter, where they sold sandwiches to take away. And the booths were filling up. There was a large, ugly, 1960s police station on the other side of the road more or less opposite the café. Policemen on their break sunned themselves in plastic chairs on a balcony running the length of an upper floor. Alice could hear policemen in the queue at the sandwich counter. They were not in uniform. But cop banter seemed to be recognizable in any language.

‘The Perdonis came back,' she said.

‘The Perdonis had something to come back to,' David said, nodding at the photographs on the wall.

They paid the waitress and got up and walked out of the café into the bright day. They turned right and walked past a newsagent's and a barber's and a shop selling fruit and
vegetables. Alice thought the precinct around the Imperial War Museum a very suburban setting for a building with such a grand title. But London was arbitrary like that, weirdly juxtaposed, a city that seemed to have made itself up as it went along rather than to have been planned. Also, the building they were headed for had once been Bedlam, a home to lunatics, a place of dubious entertainment for the wealthy in the days when mental illness was considered a spectator sport. And then the War Museum became visible, behind tall trees in parkland bound by spiked iron railings.

After their museum visit they walked back along Kennington Road and then turned on to Westminster Bridge Road and progressed until they arrived at the river. Alice looked down at the lapping water over the embankment wall. She looked down on to the great lions' heads set into the stone of the river bank with mooring rings in their mouths. The bronze lions' heads were tarnished green, and a high tide lapped at the rings in their mouths. On the radio bulletins and the television news, there was endless talk of water rationing and drought. In the newspapers there were pictures almost daily of the cracked beds of empty reservoirs. But the Thames today was high, the water close enough almost to stretch down and touch, its surface glittering with fabulous light in the sun, under the blue sky.

Alice looked over at Westminster Bridge, with its bus traffic a vivid procession of painted toys, and, beyond it, through heat ripple, the Houses of Parliament. Soot and exhaust pollution had coated the building in layers of
grime. Dark stains streaked the Gothic complications of its masonry. You could only guess at the original colour of the stone as you watched the building undulate and distort like a mirage. It was like that. It was like a mirage. Fabulously strange and strangely familiar in the heat and the light.

They walked past County Hall in the direction of Blackfriars. They crossed Waterloo Bridge and walked along the north side of the river and crossed again over Blackfriars Bridge to head back towards Kennington Road and the car. Crossing Blackfriars Bridge, businessmen in dark suits and hats carrying briefcases and furled umbrellas passed them singly and in twos staring resolutely ahead. Most of them seemed pale despite the summer. Many of them wore three-piece suits in spite of the heat. Alice felt some of their affectations absurd; the watch chains arranged in fine gold links across tight waistcoats, the bowlers and trilbies, the absurdly redundant brollies. She felt a flicker of attention when they got level with her, or sensed it when a head snapped around after they got past. But she was used to this. Men had always looked at her. It had started before it properly should have. She had been thirteen when she had first become aware of the uninvited attention of men.