Slapton Sands (17 page)

‘Thanks,' he said.

‘Let's go to bed,' she said to him.

When finally they drifted off, she dreamed the cormorant dream. Her belly in the dream was bilious with cider. She was positioned near the rear of the craft, and when it dipped into the yaw of a swell she recognized its shape, made sense of it, realized with a ragged intake of salt breath that, of course, she was aboard a Higgins boat. A wave slapped foam over her, and she wriggled her toes in her boots to distract her mind from the clutch of nausea. A training run over the dunes in full kit had left blisters on three of her toes. The flare of pain, wriggling them now, gave her the discipline to swallow back the bile her mouth was secreting. She would not puke. No sir. Bile burned her throat. The boat pitched and shuddered. Her swollen toes pushed against ridges of roan leather. She didn't puke. Then a shadow descended and talons, leathery and horned, gripped the gunwale as the great bird settled a few inches from her face.

They got to Paddington Station about ten minutes before the scheduled departure of her train. London was stained and austere in the crawl through heat from Bloomsbury along the Euston Road. The heatwave had enervated working London, its brassy light all wrong-seeming for buildings mournful with age and decay. Marylebone was a
pretty, picturesque interlude of well-tended flower boxes and fishmongers' and grocers' shops florid with fruit and vegetable displays and quaint booksellers and almost-rustic pubs. Then they were in Paddington, a place made mean, dispirited, by decades of transience, of washed-up, perished hopes. After Marylebone, Paddington seemed almost furtive with squalor. At a set of traffic lights, Alice looked out of the window up the side of a white-tiled tenement. Age gave the building a decayed and tainted look. Rust-coloured pipes ran about it in varicose bunches. By one high window, torn net over panes opaque with filth, water gushed and dribbled in arterial spurts that had spread a reddish stain all the way down to the pavement. She jumped suddenly, and the lights changed from red; David stalled and a horn honked behind the Apache's car.

‘What's wrong?'

‘That horn. Must've startled me.'

The car with the impatient driver was level with them now, Bob Marley singing ‘No Woman, No Cry' on the radio audible through its wound-down windows.

‘He honked because I stalled. I stalled because you nearly leaped out of your skin. Which is covered in goose bumps, by the way. Try again, Alice.'

‘I thought I saw a face back there, at an upper window in that white-tiled building on the corner. It startled me.'

David adjusted his driver's mirror and squinted at the receding view. ‘White is an exaggeration,' he said. ‘And the building looks derelict to me.'

She'd seen what she'd seen. David was looking at her, now, in the driver's mirror. ‘A squatter,' he said. And Alice nodded.

She took her single case and her bookbag out of the back of the car and carried them on to the concourse, refusing David's offer of help with the bag with a smile and a shake of her head. She caught sight of her own reflection in the glass of the booth where she collected her pre-paid ticket and was shocked at how pale she looked. David went off to fetch her coffee. She put her bookbag over her shoulder to give herself a free hand. There were announcements over the Tannoy, made indecipherable by the age of the equipment and the way the sound reverberated around the stone station walls and floor. She looked up. The station roof was a high, shallow arch of glass, supported by a framework of iron. The glass was opaque with pigeonshit and rust stains. Some of the panes were cracked and others missing. The roof did not look to Alice especially safe.

She had read that all the major London stations had been bombed in the Blitz. But Paddington didn't look restored; it looked authentic. It was amazing how much of its Victorian architecture had survived the bombing. There would have been tea wagons staffed by volunteers on the concourse. Child refugees in overcoats carrying gas masks. Soldiers in patient, marshalled lines awaiting troop trains to take them to the spaces of the West of England. The air would have been pungent with cigarette smoke and tense in the anticipation of an air-raid siren.

Now, David returned, carrying her coffee in a brown plastic cup that looked as though it was burning his fingers. They were really crappy, these English plastic cups. Either you were scalded or you doubled up on the cup and dribbled the drink down your chin. You had to take the good with the bad, she thought. The English had not discovered styrofoam. But they didn't have McDonald's here, either.

‘Thanks,' she said.

He looked at her.

‘What?'

‘You talked in your sleep last night.'

She laughed, without mirth. ‘I hope I was literate, at least. In Bloomsbury.'

‘You sounded scared.'

She sipped her coffee. She blew at a stray strand of hair from the corner of her mouth, but it didn't shift. Her eyes avoided his. He brushed the errant strand away from her face, behind her ear, and cupped the side of her head in his hand.

‘I'm worried about you.'

‘That's romantic.'

‘I am, though.'

‘Watch out for yourself in the Solent, David. There's sharks in English waters now, with this weather. There were sharks swimming under Brighton Pier last week. I saw the picture in a newspaper.'

He just looked at her. ‘Sharks,' he said.

‘Well,' she said. ‘I've a train to catch.'

He took his hand away from her face and it dropped to his side. She saw him wince as he tried to frown and the stitches stretched across his wounded eye. He'd been spat at and he'd punched the spitter out. There'd been no hesitation at all between the act and his retaliation. She remembered what his black friend Clifford Lee had said about him. David was mean, Clifford had said, his expression rueful.

Alice said: ‘Were you hit as a child, David? Did your father used to hit you?'

He smiled, the smile as constrained as the earlier frown had been by the neat line of suture mending his face. ‘I'll watch out for the sharks, Alice Bourne. I promise,' he said. He kissed her. Then he turned and walked back across the concourse and out of the station.

On her train, she brooded on the events at the War Museum of the previous afternoon. She'd left David to look at the picture gallery there to see an exhibition they had staged for the summer, celebrating the Western Front poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. While he did that, she took a tour. It was immediately obvious to her that the Great War was the martial event that dominated the museum. Fifty-eight years since its conclusion, the conflict was being re-fought here in display cases full of decommissioned ordnance, tunics heavy with the ribbon and braid distinction of rank, models of dreadnoughts and German
battlecruisers and everywhere in the sad, battered human paraphernalia of the struggle in the trenches. Alice didn't have to read the faded letters on display to sense the epic sadness of this war. It was there in a wind-up Vitriola gramophone player and the pile of shellac recordings next to it. In someone's neatly cared-for little sewing and mending kit. In one of the wooden football rattles the pickets had carried to warn the huddled men in the line of a mustard gas attack.

It was understandable that a museum concerning itself with the subject of imperial war should feature most prominently the war in which the British Empire chiefly and most expensively fought. Museum staff, exclusively male, stole about the place in blazers and regimental ties, all of them of an age suggesting that they could personally reminisce about the period 1914 to 1918 should a visitor so require. If the Great War was your subject, it was a fabulous place. It was a fantastic resource. They had maps and charts and battle stratagems. They had artefacts from the assassination in Sarajevo and the service revolver belonging to General Haig. A case full of weapons improvised for trench raids was testimony to the spiteful ingenuity of the Canadians on the Ypres salient. That, or their gleeful wish to render the conflict medieval.

Looking at glass cases full of lovingly crafted knuckledusters and home-made fighting knives made war seem like madness on a domestic scale. It reminded Alice that the gloomy corridors and dark halls she walked had once
been home to lunatics, manacled to the walls of public wards.

But the museum didn't have the air of an asylum. It didn't possess the energy. It wasn't a place of learning, either, at its heart. It seemed to Alice mostly to function as an eloquent commemoration of courage and loss and sacrifice. Bronze soldiers and sailors cast by the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger stood here and there in stoic tribute to the fallen. Principally, this building was a memorial and not a museum at all. Its custodians, the ones not made of bronze, patrolled the place with a sort of ghostly dignity, the expressions on their faces those of men privileged, or condemned, to remember daily what to most of the living was something unimaginable.

She was leaving yet another gallery room devoted to photographs of the Western Front when a particular image arrested her eye. A company of American soldiers, doughboys, rested at the side of a cornfield in what the caption claimed was the summer of 1918. The war had another four months. It held the horrible surprise of the Hindenburg Offensive still to come the way of these men before its carnage would be complete. The Americans in the picture were easily identifiable by their flat-brimmed hats and britches worn with high puttees. They had discarded their packs and were eating at the roadside and smiling for the camera, standing easy. Only their sergeant, of the soldiers, didn't look relaxed. He was a tall, spare man, half his head cast into shadow by the angle of the sun behind the flat
brim of his hat. His jaw was visible in a clenched line as he stared into the camera lens.

‘I've seen you before,' Alice said to herself. She went to tap the picture frame with an extended finger, but something stopped her doing it. She fancied she was being observed, and looked around, expecting one of the blazered buffers in a regimental tie to lift an eyebrow in benign disapproval. But there was no one there. ‘I've seen you before,' she said to the tense, thin infantry sergeant squinting out from a picture taken fifty-eight years earlier to the month. ‘Now where could I have seen you?'

It was there again, the feeling of not being alone in the gallery. The quiet there had suddenly become intimidating and Alice could feel the hair prickle on the nape of her neck. It was cold, damp almost. She looked once more at the photograph. At the summer corn caught in mid-ripple and the men gathered at its edge, smiling in a sane moment of wartime calm. Except for their scowling sergeant. ‘I know you,' she said to his picture. She shivered and touched the back of her neck and walked out and on to the next room.

They'd treated the Second World War as an afterthought. There were no displays concerning Blitzkrieg. There was nothing about the Holocaust. There was nothing about the Allied invasion of France or the battle for Berlin; only a few bits and pieces about rationing in England, the London Blitz, convoys, U-boats and the escape of the BEF from Dunkirk. It was almost as if the museum curators were
embarrassed that the War to End Wars hadn't done its promised job.

There was nothing about America's contribution to the war; no mention of lend-lease, the war in the Pacific, the three million Americans under arms who had lived and eaten and slept and trained in England in the period prior to the Normandy landings. They were a well-kept secret then, those men. But now? She felt indignant about the museum's exclusion of the American effort in the war. It had been decisive, after all. To omit it entirely from the museum's account of the war struck her not just as jingoistic but as a perverse distortion of history.

Agitated by this, she followed enamel signs pointing the way to the museum tearoom to wait for David and to complain to him about it. The tearoom was cramped, but it had a nice view of yellow lawns and high trees through its single window. The trees were so full of foliage that the shaded areas underneath them still held the deep-green colour of undamaged grass. A ceiling fan turned slowly, agitating tearoom smells.

There was a large tea urn on the counter and behind it, to Alice's surprise, the spreadeagle wings of an Italian Gaggia machine. She ordered a cup of coffee from a woman behind the counter who looked like the kind of volunteer who could have been there at least since Chamberlain's reluctant martial response to the invasion of Poland. She smiled with the sweet smile of someone you could trust to keep the home fires burning.

Alice looked at her watch. London was David's treat. It was David's surprise. She could hardly castigate him for bad timekeeping. Anyway, he was only a couple of minutes late. English boys were subjected to Wilfred Owen in their adolescence, much in the way that Boston Catholics were subjected to the catechism at the age of six. The sweet melancholy of the verse never left them, much as the terror of hellfire never subsequently left the poor Catholic Boston boys. He'd be up there now, rereading ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth' and sniffling into Kleenex. Or since he was English, more likely into his shirtsleeve.

‘Hello, dear.'

Alice looked away from the window, startled. She'd been enjoying her spiteful little reverie, and the interruption had come as a shock. The tea lady slid a cup and saucer on to the tabletop and sat down in the chair Alice had been waiting for David to occupy.

‘I've come to cheer you up,' the tea lady said. She'd brought her bag with her to the table and rummaged in it now and put a packet of Players Navy Cut cigarettes and a Zippo lighter on the tabletop. She offered Alice the pack and then lit up, inhaling deeply and then blowing smoke in a dissipating jet towards the ceiling fan. She was slender, bottle blonde, her hair pulled back in a too-youthful ponytail. Her eyes were a startling green and they watched Alice slyly.