Slapton Sands (2 page)

‘You looked like you had eyes only for yourself.'

His smile widened. ‘The mirror is more an aid to technique than a tool of vanity. I know how it looks. But it works.'

‘Are you a good boxer?'

‘Not bad. Are you any good at tennis?'

‘Not bad. We could hit, if you'd like.'

She hadn't meant to say this. She surprised herself.

‘I'd need some practice first,' he said. ‘When an American says they're not bad, they're usually pretty good.'

‘Oh? And when a British person says it?'

He pulled a face. ‘It means they're not terrible. But usually they are.'

He said ‘thee' for ‘they'. The vowels in his speech were flat and short. It was an accent she had not heard before, she thought from the north.

‘I'm Alice Bourne,' she said.

‘I know. Professor Champion told me. David Lucas.'

He extended his hand, which surprised her, because shaking hands was something almost nobody she had met
in England seemed to do. It was endearing, in a way that the stud in the ear and the curls were not. She didn't believe him about the mirror.

‘What did Champion say about me?'

‘That it would be hard to make you smile. He was right.'

‘Anything else?'

‘That you want to waste time and considerable intellect lavishing an entire thesis on some obscure wartime accident out of nothing more than misplaced patriotism. I'm paraphrasing.'

She nodded and considered. ‘You seem quite bright.'

‘Thank you.'

‘For a boxer.'

His dishevelled friend came over then. David introduced him as his flatmate and coursemate, Oliver Deane. Oliver wore a white shirt she reckoned had sat in the machine, neglected perhaps for days, following its most recent wash. Fatally wrinkled, it had then been ironed into a latticework of tiny creases. Oliver, drunk, did not shake hands with Alice Bourne. Instead he dipped his head slightly as was the fashion, like a reluctant horse testing bit and bridle, Alice thought. He began to speak, his voice slurry and public schooled, but Alice didn't really listen to what it was Oliver said. Her eyes were on Champion, flirting in the middle distance with a pretty girl in a pretty dress with a tightly ruched bodice. It was hard to concentrate in the heat. In the cormorant dream, her clothes were stiff and constricting and weighed heavily on her, she remembered then. And her
mouth tasted tarry and sweet. It was odd, this ability to taste and smell in a dream.

‘Are you OK?' It was David Lucas. ‘You look pale.'

‘I'm fine. Really, I'm fine.' ‘Hotel California' was playing on the portable record player. She wondered if Champion would go home with the girl in the pretty dress. She thought about the weary walk up the lane to the bus stop and the toiling bus ride back to her digs in Whitstable and endured a sudden and intense stab of homesickness then.

‘I'm going to go,' she said to David, offering Oliver, his drunken friend, an obligatory nod, turning to fetch her bag from where she'd left it in a pocket of shade under a tree on the slope. She'd taken the time and trouble to come to the party on the grass outside the college less to meet people than to try to win Champion over.

But Champion had other things on his mind. And her professor didn't honestly seem the winning-over sort. That discovery was the small accomplishment she would take away with her.

She thought about the northern boy with the curls on the bus ride back. He'd said he wasn't a bad boxer. According to his own reasoning, that should mean he was terrible. She didn't think he would be, though. She thought it an odd pastime for someone with any claim to intelligence. But boxing hadn't yet inflicted any damage to his face.

Jocks and nerds were separate species in American collegiate life. But the dichotomy she was so familiar with
from home didn't seem anything like so clear cut or prevalent in England. She'd encountered really stupid sportsmen here, of course, brawny and privileged, doing courses with titles like land economy and agrarian science. She'd come across the rugby crowd, half-naked and bellowing lewd songs as they thumped out their drinking games in college bars. But almost everyone at Kent seemed to participate in some sort of sport. They played scratch soccer matches on the yellow grass of the campus. They flew kites. They played tag. They threw frisbies. There were incomprehensible games of cricket. Racing bikes were ridden along the undulating roads. A number of people drove to Broadstairs or Pegwell Bay to swim. Alice wondered why it was she found all this so strange. She swam most days herself off Whitstable beach, despite being pretty sure that amid the queasy panic of the cormorant dream she was quite unable to swim. It was strange because she'd thought the English sedate, stifled by a sort of class- and history-driven decorum. But the English played all the time. They frolicked under the sun.

Alice Bourne occupied a room in a large house at the Seasalter end of the shoreline. She lived on the ground floor. She could always hear the water breaking in waves on the steep slope of shingle beyond the sea wall outside her window. The house had wooden floors, and sometimes she could hear the scrape of a crutch from above. The physics postgrad living up there had broken a leg in a motorbike crash, and the rubber ferrules on the tips of his crutches
squeaked on the floorboards with his agitated movement. The crash had been a bad one, the break severe. He couldn't get down the stairs very easily and was almost always up there, pissed off, fidgety. She could usually hear King Crimson or Genesis playing loudly on his reel-to-reel. Long John Silver's crutch music.

But Alice liked Whitstable. She liked the ice-cream parlour in Tankerton with its knickerbocker glory glasses and chipped marbling on old tabletops. She liked the taut slap in the wind of rope against the mast that held the harbour flag. Rigging thrummed in the harbour, beating a homely tattoo. She liked the painted-wood Victorian houses on Wavecrest. The reclusive actor Peter Cushing was rumoured to live in one of them, when he wasn't elsewhere making horror films. There was a market near the railway station where the cheese was always processed and they sold confectionery that had a suspicion of fire damage about it. But the market was friendly, and the local fruit was good and cheap. Once she'd got used to their frankly weird opening and closing rituals, she'd come to feel comfortable in the Whitstable pubs. She'd eat half a pint of prawns in the Pearson's Arms or sit on the breakwater outside the Neptune and watch the water, oily at sunset, stretching towards Sheppey as the sun descended, seeing out the day, sipping a glass of tepid Kentish beer.

She did this now, noticing milky jellyfish on the placid surface of the sea, hundreds of them, brought here, she supposed, by the unfamiliar heat, the slow, relentless raising
of the water's temperature through this unprecedented summer to something almost tropical. The sea was new to her, an elemental novelty still, as it must have been to many of the men whose fate thirty-odd years ago she intended to explore despite the reluctance of her professor fully to sanction the project. Patriotic drum-banging. Mere military history. Jesus! She hadn't come over three thousand miles to explore blind alleys.

The lights were coming on now on the Isle of Sheppey. There were lights strung along a late fishing boat, and the flat shape of a dredger was outlined in electric lamps on the horizon as darkness deepened the sky. The sea at south Devon would not be like Whitstable, she knew, with its shingle and groynes and snug little harbour. The sea where she was going was capricious and exposing, its swell powered in tumbling waves along a vast wilderness of shore.

She sat on the breakwater outside the Neptune and wondered if anything ever washed up on Slapton Sands. Were badge caps and buttons and rifle bolts lightened by rust and corrosion on the sea bottom ever cast back on to the land? Was there a beachcomber living in the bay nursing a careful hoard of clues about the catastrophe? Alice Bourne was a historian, not a marine archaeologist. But when she arrived, knowing nothing after the struggle just to go, it would be interesting to see some tangible relic of the men who were rumoured to have perished there.

She'd sat in Champion's campus office and waited to plead
her case while he'd taken an important telephone call that interrupted their meeting almost at its outset. The blind over the single window was drawn against heat and glare. A spindly electric fan failed to create much of a breeze, noisily, on his desk. A collection of precise brass rubbings hung on one wall, long medieval faces in thin, gold leaf frames. It was hard for Alice to imagine such features ever having belonged to the living. Titles Champion had authored were given pride of place in his bookcase. They consumed almost a full shelf. He sat leafing through her proposal as he spoke into the phone, a habit she hated, regarded as dismissive, cavalier. She noticed that his moustache was stained with nicotine at its centre. He finished his call and lit a cigarette from the flame of a heavy desk lighter shaped out of onyx.

‘Why have I never heard about this event?'

‘Because it was covered up?'

Champion smoked and considered. He held the cigarette between the fingers of his right hand so that when he spoke and gesticulated smoke rose in a ragged column in blinkered sunlight through the blinds. ‘So how did you hear about it?'

She'd been on a collegiate skiing trip to Colorado. It was January and shudderingly cold. She'd walked towards the close of the day with her friends into a bar that was really nothing more than a shack, freezing, tugging gloves from clumsy fingers and stamping snow in melting clumps from their boots, inhaling woodsmoke, feeling the radiant creep of heat from an iron stove. At the back of the bar she'd seen
a photograph of a man who looked like the bar owner's son, in uniform, outside a whitewashed house at the wheel of a Jeep. Only it wasn't his son. It was the bar owner in another life. Beside the Jeep, blinking into the sunlight, were two women in britches carrying hoes. She'd asked about the photograph.

‘Where was that taken?'

He still wore his hair in the crew cut he'd probably worn under his field cap then. It was grey and soft, like ermine, now. It would have bristled, salt and pepper, then. ‘You tell me,' he said.

Alice Bourne considered the picture. ‘The architecture looks like rural Ireland. But they're land girls, aren't they, in the photograph with you? So it must be England.'

‘Very good. It's England all right. It's Devon. And it was taken in 1944.'

The bar proprietor had talked about his war service overseas. He'd talked cautiously at first, with some self-consciousness. But he'd recollected more easily when he realized how well informed his listener was about the period in which he'd most intensely lived his life. And as her friends sipped buttered rum and nibbled at potato chips, thawing out, this veteran had mentioned Slapton Sands to her. And she'd absorbed from him, in his words, the whole incomplete, horrifying mystery.

‘It's an anecdote,' Champion said now. ‘In context, I mean. It was a training accident. Logistically, I suppose they were unavoidable. Their scale reflected the scale of the
enterprise. You want a cover-up, you should look at Watergate. That's a cover-up. And that, my dear, is real history.'

A sergeant called Delroy Boone had taken the photograph in the bar. Boone had been killed in Normandy, cut to pieces by machine-gun fire like hundreds of his comrades on Omaha Beach. The fact could be used to illustrate Champion's point. To illustrate but not to prove it, Alice Bourne thought.

‘And the old boy in the bar was probably exaggerating,' Champion said. ‘I'd embroider a tale in front of an audience as comely as you undoubtedly looked, snugly wrapped in ski clothes. It's only human nature. Probably his way of flirting.' He ground out his cigarette. After a short silence between the two of them, he took another from the packet on his desk and lit it. There was more silence. It wasn't really silence, with the odd call or cry of laughter carrying from the student world outside, behind the shuttered blind over the one window, but it seemed like silence to Alice in the smoky seclusion in which they sat. When Champion spoke again, he spoke softly. ‘We're talking here about your doctoral thesis. You've an original mind. I won't stop you writing about whatever did or did not happen at Slapton Sands. But I would sincerely recommend you look for a subject more suited to your undoubted gifts.'

She said nothing. She looked at her linked fingers in her lap, waiting the moment out.

‘Military history,' he said. ‘It's like writing up a game of dominoes.'

‘The military say it didn't happen.'

‘Watergate happened.'

‘Watergate is still happening,' Alice said. ‘I'm an historian, not a journalist.'

‘That's that, then,' Champion said, dismissing her.

He'd been ushering her out of the door when he mentioned the tutorial party taking place the following week. An opportunity for her to meet people, he said. Can't live your life in a scholarly vacuum of reading and research. She briefly pictured jugs of Pimm's and cricket sweaters. Dappled, sunny aphorisms. Leather and oiled willow. But her departing smile was forced.

Water lapped against the breakwater outside the Neptune, everything dappled and flushed in the water's reflection under the descending sun. Alice lifted her glass and sipped beer. It tasted warm and hoppy. The sky was empty, apart from a few torn threads of vapour trail, remote, almost at that reach where the sky became space. She thought a boat slipping out of the harbour must have caused the brief agitation of the water. Otherwise the stillness was complete. She felt remote from everything, without purpose and more isolated than she could ever remember having felt. In a few days she would travel to Slapton Sands, brave a journey west across the smouldering country to discover what she could about what had
really happened there over a few days in April in 1944.