Slapton Sands (19 page)

‘The trick is to get it while it's cold,' the man who was fifth in line confided from behind her. ‘They don't have a cold shelf on the train.'

‘Hi, steward,' she said, when it came to her turn. He was
from Liverpool and his name was Jimmy. He didn't dwell on the misapprehension. She didn't draw his attention to the pun.

The first picker-up was a squaddie, a teenager sharing his small features with so much acne that it was impossible for her to concentrate on any one area of his face without fear of causing offence. He kept talking about some assault course and asking her to punch him in the abdomen.

The second suitor only displaced the squaddie because the squaddie assumed they were a couple. Such was the Bengal Lancer's air of assumed intimacy that the squaddie actually apologized to him. And he had the smooth presence of mind to accept. The stripes on his shirt were of a lavish, almost plenipotentiary width. The slopes of its collar rose steeply from the lapels of his chalk-stripe suit. It was hot on the train, probably hotter than it was outside, except in the heat of the burning fields. But he wore his tie knot garrotte-tight around his shaven neck. He talked about the weather, the stock market and America—once having heard her accent. He had been to the Everglades on holiday and had seen Sinatra perform in Vegas. He was urbane and witty and incredibly boring. Alice would not have lain naked with him for all the stock on Wall Street. Behind him, squinting, the squaddie hovered in easy sniping range. Her tea was long finished. She decided it was time to make her way back down the shifting aisle through the long, connecting carriages to her seat.

When she got there, she saw that her bookbag had gone.
She had placed it on the table between the bank of four seats on her side of the aisle. She'd had the four seats to herself. Nobody, at least at Paddington, had got on and sat down in the seats. They were empty still. Fighting panic, she looked quickly along the parallel luggage racks on either side of her compartment. Her bookbag wasn't there. There was luggage space between some of the seat backs, she remembered. David had briefed her on British Rail luggage culture, doing so in the event of a full train. But the spaces were empty.

What the fuck: what the fuck. Everything was in that bookbag. All her text sources, her notes, her photocopies, outline—everything. Warned to go home, she'd defied the warning. And then she had acted with criminal carelessness. Her work had been thrown from a train window as she endured unwanted sexual approaches in the beige purgatory of an InterCity buffet bar. It was singeing, now, on some burning embankment.

She looked at the sign at the end of the carriage for the lavatory. The sign said VACANT. She opened the lavatory door expecting to see her work torn up, dumped in its waterlogged pan. It wasn't there. It wasn't in the lavatory opposite, either. Pale with panic now, she went back to her seat. Had she missed something? She forced herself to sit down. Images from the past days inventoried themselves in her mind.

Public art, painting lies across the Peckham badlands. The rings in the lions' mouths. The House of Commons,
undulant in heat. London, burnished in afternoon light from the heights of Hampstead. David's body, toiling in dawn light in a Bloomsbury bed. Doughboys on the march to Ypres, with the man from the cathedral. Rachel Vine, cigarette smoke roiling around her like incense in the pub with a pulpit bar.

She felt a tap on her shoulder. It was the ticket collector. He beamed hotly. He was a man with whom Will Hay's stationmaster could happily have bantered. They were cut from the same cloth. They were soul mates. And he had her bookbag in his hand.

‘Can't be too careful, miss,' he said. He waved the bag. He brandished it, more accurately. She could not believe it was real, intact and whole, swinging from his bright fist.

The cathedral man. The cathedral man?

‘Thank you,' she said.

Her father had taught her to do it. You've got the basics, he had told her. You've got better than twenty-twenty vision, alert hearing, the intelligence to discipline yourself into remembering only the significant. The meat and potatoes, her old man had called it. Forget the rest of the stuff. The salt and pepper, the relish, the ketchup and mustard are all fine and useful in their way. But the meat and potatoes is the meal. You don't have them, honey, you don't have no dinner.

Her father was an indifferent grammarian, but an excellent cop and a patient and diligent teacher. On top of which, his daughter was an alpha-plus student keen to
impress him with her cleverness in a way he would finally, fully appreciate. So she learned afresh from him a skill that she already thought she possessed. She learned to look and to remember, to break down a situation into its component parts to gather disciplined and accurate detail. Significant detail. Or, as he always impressed on her, every significant detail. Alice distinguished herself in this study. After the course was completed, she always got her meat and potatoes. It became ingrained, like instinct, to do it. She was good at it, too. She'd never gone unfed.

The War Museum picture had been posed, as all photographs had needed to be back then because of the limitations of relatively primitive camera and film technology. It had been a sunny summer's day, so the light had been good. That had helped clarify the resulting image, of course. A superior lens and the slow shutter speed had given the picture a surprising depth of field. The photographer had used a tripod. She could tell this not just from the absence of camera shake but also from the angle relative to height from which the picture had been taken. The subjects had tried for a look of jolly spontaneity, probably at the coaxing of the photographer. It would have been a pooled picture, Alice assumed, taken for the American dailies. They had then, they still had now, no national newspapers in America. The photograph would have appeared on an agreed date in the
New York Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Kansas City Star.
It was a propaganda picture in essence, a morale-booster. There would have been a bullish
caption printed underneath along the lines of ‘Our Brave Boys in Good Cheer on the Way to Join the Fight'. It would have been read with sardonic smiles in barbershops and on shoeshine thrones by men equally cheery they weren't joining the fight.

One person had not remained obediently still for the full length of the exposure. The platoon sergeant had shifted, his movement probably compulsive rather than some militant gesture of non-cooperation. The resemblance was partially in that captured elusiveness. He'd hidden his hands, curled them into his tunic cuffs. Most of his features had been hidden in the picture by the flat brim of his hat and the shadow cast by that brim. But the thin mouth and lantern jaw were familiar to her. So was the cold reproach of the one seen eye. Mostly, though, and ironically, it was the reluctance of that thin, angular body to remain still, scrutinized, that cemented the link.

The sergeant leading his doughboy company in one of Bedlam's warren of Great War picture galleries was as close in appearance to the cathedral man as would have been a twin. And the man at the cathedral had been watching her. He hadn't been a tourist at all. She'd known it at the time, really. She definitely knew it now. She thought about this for a moment. Then Alice took a deep breath of air. The air aboard her train smelled of stale upholstery and burning fields. Was she going mad? No, she thought. Her bookbag, intact, sat on the table in front of her. No. She didn't think she was going mad at all.

*

‘I saw a Will Hay film,' she'd said to Rachel Vine.

Rachel Vine had blinked and stared at her. ‘Don't they have laws in America to protect juveniles from that sort of thing?'

‘I saw it a couple of days ago. Here. Is that what you used to watch? George Formby? Gracie Fields?'

‘You're forgetting Old Mother Riley,' Rachel Vine said. ‘And Arthur Askey. Musn't forget Big-Hearted Arthur.'

Alice nodded. Champion had mentioned Old Mother Riley. But he hadn't mentioned Askey. Perhaps her professor was unfamiliar with the Askey oeuvre.

‘Personally, I preferred Frank Sinatra to George Formby,' Rachel Vine said. ‘Truth be told, I never really warmed to the ukulele. Athough it was all downhill for Sinatra—wasn't it?—once he parted company with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra.'

Alice sat back against her seat. ‘You're not quite who you pretend to be, are you, Mrs Vine?'

The woman opposite turned her Zippo lighter between nimble, nicotined fingers with her wrist cocked on the pub table between them. When she spoke, she'd dropped the cod cockney altogether. ‘I was born in Kennington. My father was a Member of Parliament and bought a house in Walcot Square. It's within the sound of the Division Bell.'

Alice nodded. She knew about the Division Bell.

‘I really was a land girl, too. I've still got the callouses. Based near Totnes, also true. I did encounter the GIs. I was
there the night in a Totnes pub when a seriously pissed ranger became so incensed by our licensing laws that he offered to buy the entire liquor stock at closing time just so he could carry on drinking. When that ploy failed, he got together with three buddies at the bar and made a bid for the pub. The offer was accepted. They woke up on the floor the following day, in an eighteenth-century coach-house to which they now owned the deeds.'

‘What were they like?'

‘Hideously hungover, I should imagine. Poorer, too.'

‘The GIs generally. What were they like?'

‘That's a question unworthy of you, dearie. And you don't look like Carly Simon, by the way.'

‘Why do you persist with this “dearie” shit, Rachel?'

‘It goes down very well with most of the punters at Bedlam. They like characters. And I like the job. Without it, I fear I'd gather dust, like the leaves on those potted plants over there.' She nodded.

Alice looked at the potted plants. The pots were brass. The plants were the sort you saw in the vicinity of christening fonts. ‘What were they like?'

‘Very randy, most of them. They were young men, deprived of the company of women, who had never been fitter in their lives. They may not have been as obsessed by sex as they were reputed to be, but they weren't far off it, in what free time they were given. They liked to drink. Not even the taste of English beer could dull their enthusiasm for alcohol. God, they were thirsty. They tended to be
courteous and cheerful. They were a terribly soft touch, most of them, around kids. Most of them weren't much more than kids themselves.'

‘They sound like the troops from Disneyland.'

Rachel Vine lit another cigarette. ‘All sweetness and light?' She exhaled at the ceiling. ‘Not entirely. The segregation was pretty shocking to us even back then. Separate but equal, I believe was the phrase. The blacks were paid the same and wore the same uniform, but they were kept apart. There were some really vile bigots, not all of them from the South. And there were a few out-and-out psychopaths. Every army has a few of those.'

Alice looked at her watch. They had been there half an hour. The pub might have an ecclesiastical feel, but the time passed a lot quicker here than she'd ever known it to in church.

‘What can you tell me about Slapton Sands?'

Rachel Vine squinted at her through smoke. Her eyes were quite small, feline and glittery in the thin beams of sunlight through the window. She'd been a head-turner in her time, Alice could tell. It was pretty obvious, removed as she now was from stacks of crockery and her cash register and cake display. Divested of her period pinny, her scarf. She'd been what David and his friends would call a stunner. Now she said: ‘The deaths occurred in April of 1944. No details ever reached the public domain. But corpses are difficult things to keep secret when they start washing up all along the coast. I've no proof to offer you concerning any
of this. All I can tell you is how I heard several hundred of those soldiers met their end.'

In the spring of 1944, Rachel Vine was twenty-seven. The man she was dating was a thirty-three-year-old American infantry colonel called Richard Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had a wife and two young children at home in Rhode Island. Rachel knew all about them. The colonel kept a family picture in his wallet. And she didn't particularly approve of what she was doing. Her previous boyfriend had been in the RAF. He'd flown a Blenheim until the night when it set out over the North Sea on a bombing mission to Germany from which the aircraft never returned. Rachel justified her affair with Pat by telling herself she was on the rebound. That was what she called him. Everyone called him Pat. He, in turn, justified his infidelity by saying that if he was going to be killed, he wanted to live until he died. Put to the pin of their collars, it was something similar to what all the adulterous Americans said.

Pat was training men at Slapton Sands. It was an open secret in the towns and villages of south Devon that the Yanks were training there for invasion. The big questions were where and when. Pat could make the same educated guess as anyone. But only the chiefs of staff really knew. The possibilities were so widespread that Field Marshal Rommel had been obliged to fortify the entire Atlantic coast of France. Wherever they landed, the assault would be
costly. The Germans were expert and well-equipped fighters. Everyone was aware of the casualties suffered by the Canadian commandos in the abortive raid on Dieppe. All the Americans could do was rehearse and rehearse again in the hope that they were as well prepared as possible when the real thing finally came.

Pat didn't discuss the detail much with Rachel. At first she put this down, cynically, to an adulterer's talent for discretion. Then she wondered if he wasn't trying to glorify the importance of what he did by pretending it was more secret than it was. There were plenty of braggarts in the pubs, cryptically claiming to do hush-hush work for this ministry or that. But after a few weeks of seeing him, Rachel realized that Pat was largely silent on the subject of what went on at Slapton Sands out of professionalism. ‘You have a saying here,' he told her with a smile. ‘“Careless talk costs lives.”'