Slapton Sands (26 page)

Carnegie spoke for about forty-five minutes. He looked tired when he stopped, emptied out, sitting with his hands redundant between his knees on his sofa, his backside perched on its panels of bachelor hide. Real hide, Carnegie's, Alice thought to herself. No call for the fake stuff there, in his otherwise fraudulent life. The sea had been good to him, and he was a man who had spent with fastidious greed the profits of its benefice. Perhaps he was grateful it hadn't killed him as well over the course of its many capricious opportunities. For whatever reason, he payed homage to it daily, there on his harbour bench, with his ornamental fishing rod between his legs.

‘What will you do with this information?'

‘I think there's more,' Alice said. ‘I think this is only the half of it.'

‘It was enough for me,' Carnegie said.

‘I should go.'

‘Aye.'

‘Thank you.'

A grunt from the sofa. Alice stood. It felt like a midnight full of stormy imposition. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon. Standing, she said: ‘Your fruit looks very fine in that bowl, Mr Carnegie.' She nodded towards it. ‘It must be very fresh.'

‘It'll always look fine,' Carnegie said, rising. ‘And it will
never be fresh. My fruit's made of wax. Here, I'll see you to the door.'

His house was on the corner of a terrace on one side of a narrow street. It was more of an alley, really, and when he opened his front door the sun reflected with full force off the whitewashed wall of the building opposite. The light was dazzling, vertiginous, and Alice felt momentarily snow-blind. She recovered and looked at Carnegie. It affected him less. He'd spent much of his working life staring at stretches of ocean, waiting for the telltale stippling on the surface of a populous shoal beneath. He still watched the sea every day. His eyes must long have learned to accommodate all manner and density of light.

With her hand shading her eyes, Alice said: ‘You called Rachel Vine the most seductive creature you've ever encountered. Did you fall for her charms?'

Carnegie smiled. ‘That's a delicate way for the daughter of a cop to put it. But you've no right to ask the question.'

‘I'm sorry,' Alice said. She turned to go.

‘The answer is that we did sleep together, Miss Bourne.' Alice turned back to look at him. ‘Rachel was having an affair with a colonel based at Slapton Sands. He was killed on Omaha Beach. She took it hard. I tried to comfort her. We ended up in bed, as people tended to then.'

Alice nodded.

‘They were peculiar times. War is—' he hesitated. ‘Well,' he smiled. She could not see his eyes in the black shadow cast across his face by the light. ‘War is war, isn't it?'

Alice Bourne nodded and made to leave. What she heard next, she heard with her back to the exiled fisherman.

‘They'd have gone anyway, you know. Didn't matter how many of them died in the preparation. That was the point of the preparation, to get the execution right. That was the reason for all those live-fire exercises. They expected seventy per cent casualties when they got there, Miss Bourne.'

She turned around. She didn't know what had made him so loquacious, now, at their parting.

‘Nothing was going to stop them, Miss Bourne,' Carnegie said. ‘And if you read your history books, you'll know that nothing did.'

She'd been delivered to Dartmouth by the Fly. The ride had been good-enough value. But he'd averaged speeds of around eighty on roads where SLOW was cautioned in white paint in high letters every few hundred yards. And the volume at which he played his music had left her tolerance for Status Quo, never high, at breaking point. She'd catch a bus that followed the coast on a route south and stop in Strete. She was in no particular hurry to get back, flat now with the feeling of anticlimax where anticipation and the thrill of possibility had been before.

Rory Carnegie was not a Status Quo man. She had looked at the row of reel-to-reel tape boxes on his shelves, filed alphabetically, their titles and artists' details hand-lettered in tiny script on their spines. He listened to Elgar
and Vaughan Williams and Britten. There was some Gershwin, some Aaron Copland. He had tapes of Scottish reels and English and Celtic sea shanties. But nothing so vulgar as popular music. She thought he was probably the most fastidious man she had ever met. He had thrived on the subterfuge of war, but its chaos and waste had appalled him. He'd been dishonest and dishonourable, strictly speaking, in his dogged pursuit of profit from the prevailing circumstances. But he had not done anything Alice could sincerely think of as bad. In the truest sense, he was an honest man. She believed absolutely his account of Operation Tiger, its catalogue of errors and its tragic and avoidable cost. She believed he'd heard what he'd heard and seen what he'd seen. There was no question that they were sights and sounds that lived with the man still. Rachel Vine hadn't been the only one of them in need of the warmth and forgetful pleasure of the one night he admitted they'd shared a bed. There'd probably been more than the one tryst. But contingent, fatally compromised, their affair had died of apathy, leaving only a begrudging fondness that had lingered down the years in each of their separate memories. Alice was good on other people's affairs, she thought, shrewd and intuitive. She considered it the gift given in compensation for being so completely useless at dealing with any romance of her own.

She pondered on her audience with Carnegie, on the sweltering bus ride returning her to Strete. The upright part of her seat was covered in some sort of textured plastic and
sweat stuck to it from her back through the white-cotton shirt she had chosen to wear for the encounter. The bus jounced on old springs, and the smell of smouldering fields was dense in the air. It was a single-decker. She always travelled on the top deck on double-decker buses, partially for the novelty, mostly to see what she could of England in the limited time she had in the country. The upper decks always stank of stale and more recent cigarette smoke, and their floors were always littered with cigarette ends. And smokers always closed all the windows, as if affronted by the hazard of an encounter with fresh air. But you saw more. On the single-decker to Strete, she saw mostly hedgerows, whatever burned, burning behind their dense and thorny veils.

It struck her as very British, this attitude towards the fire threatening to devour the whole of rural southern England. Either it was discretion or it was stoicism. Either way, it was very different from the way in which they behaved towards similar emergencies at home. There were nightly bulletins about the threatened conflagration on the TV news, excitable presenters standing in the foreground of some smouldering cornfield or wood, bellowing on about it into their microphones. Concern had reached critical levels, at least in the media. But absolutely nothing had been done. There was no provision to fight the fires because, as they said on the news, there was no precedent: ‘The last time we had a comparable dry spell, five hundred years ago, we don't know what they did.' The reservoirs were dry. There was no
evacuation, no cordoning off, no pre-emptive burning to create firebreaks. Maybe this is what they were like in the war, she thought. Maybe this is what we got so antsy and pissed off about. We'd shipped three million men to Britain and Northern Ireland to prepare for the invasion of Europe, and the domestic population were bumbling along like characters in a Will Hay movie with the view that everything would turn out all right in the end.

On the night she had been subjected to his Lou Reed records, Alice had also been treated, by the Apache, to his Jim Morrison conspiracy theory. The CIA had assassinated Morrison in his bath.

‘Nothing to do with morbid obesity and his colossal intake of drugs, then?'

‘Coincidence.'

He'd started on about the Salem witch trials. Hadn't gone nearly far enough with their burnings and hangings, according to the Apache. The witch covens of America were still obviously very productive.

Alice asked him why it was that if the Americans were such wankers, all the English rock stars sang in American accents. His stoned expression had given way to a fit of paranoid blinking. Then he'd looked smug. ‘Bowie doesn't,' he said.

‘Most of them do.'

‘Marc Bolan sings in English.'

‘The Moody Blues sound American.'

‘They're wankers.'

‘Rod Stewart?'

‘A wanker.'

‘Elton John?'

Silence. Elton didn't even merit a retort.

‘Mick Jagger,' Alice said. ‘“Love in Vain”.'

‘She's got a point, Ollie,' David said. ‘You honestly calling Mick a wanker?'

The Apache had blinked for what had seemed like several minutes. Then he said: ‘You really want to know what happened here in the war, Alice? Don't bother with your trip to the seaside. Watch an episode of
Dad's Army
.'

So she had. And she had seen straight away that the humour in the show was based on human nature and therefore in truth. But
Dad's Army
were not the commandos trained in Scotland on Lord Lovat's estate for missions that were always murderous, if they weren't suicidal.
Dad's Army
weren't the British paratroopers sent into Arnhem aboard balsawood gliders, believing they could win against impossible odds.

The English let their country burn when heat and drought combined to prostrate the arid land. Their rock stars strutted the globe wearing borrowed voices. Their cities were baleful places in the grip of strikes and Irish Republican terrorist threats. There was talk of power cuts. People still moaned about the referendum two years earlier that had dumped them into Europe at the expense of their beloved Commonwealth. She'd eavesdropped on Kentish bus conversations in which older people talked about a
segregationist called Enoch Powell as though invoking the name of a prophet. The Apache boasted about landing an egg on the lapel of Powell's suit as students lobbied, shouting ‘Fascist', in a bid to stop the man from being publicly heard, outside an open meeting in Ramsgate.

Thirty-six years ago, by the autumn of 1940, the British had lost the war. Mainland Europe had fallen, and so had Scandinavia. The British army had been routed in France. The Germans occupied Jersey and Guernsey and London was defencelessly battered by day and night bombing raids. U-boats ruled the Atlantic. There was no fuel for the coming winter. What poor food there was was running out. Lack of fuel meant that the diminishing ration supplies were mostly eaten raw. By any sane assessment, Britain had been defeated. But it never seemed to have occurred to the British people that when you'd lost, you surrendered. As her bus ground and shuddered towards Strete, Alice knew that England was a country far beyond her capacity for understanding.

Her cosy attic room was rank with smoke. The windows had been closed and the curtains drawn. The room was still and goose-flesh cold. She crossed her arms, and her fingers bumped along raised flesh, like Braille. A pile of his smoked-down Luckies occupied an open oyster shell, previously pretty with mother-of-pearl, she'd salvaged from the beach. Something had been written on the dressing table mirror. She had applied lipstick that morning after brushing her
hair, wanting to look respectable, not student-like, in the event that she found Rory Carnegie. The words had been written in the lipstick, which she had left out in haste on the dressing table. The lipstick had been Chanel Red. Now the mirror wore it, all of it, in an angry smear. The cylinder sat upright with its contents sheared off, bright as a bullet casing. There would be fingerprints on the lipstick cylinder. They would belong to Johnny Compton, a dead American who had cut a prostitute in Paddington in 1944.

The dead odour of the sea was there, of course. But the cormorant dream had made her so inured to the smell that it no longer shocked or sickened her. What did was the thin, vindictive meanness of him. His malevolence lingered, as acrid and chilly as the smoke in the room. Absurdly, Peter Cushing came into her mind, the Hammer horror actor rumoured to live in Whitstable, the film star she'd never seen there. In her mind, Cushing was attired in the reassuring tweeds that signalled a Hammer gent. He was carrying a doctor's bag and telling a pale, soon-to-be vampire that the dead could rest only if they possessed a soul. Hammer theology. She couldn't put a name to the film containing the scene she'd recalled. But she could almost smile at that phrase, Hammer theology.

Johnny Compton didn't possess a soul. She shuddered. The cold and the dread were almost overwhelming. Her panic was what someone might feel waist-deep in quicksand, far out on a baleful shore, aware of an incoming tide.

Be brave, she told herself. Be brave like Bobby, her dead brother.

Be brave. Like her dad, killed by a carefully sited bullet, the barrel of his own pistol pressed against his head.

Opening the curtains meant walking to the window, which meant passing the dressing table mirror and the message she had not yet dared to read. Downstairs, she heard the front door slam emphatically shut. But that was her imagination. Come on, girl, she said to herself. Come on.

Every spool of film had been destroyed. She had shot five rolls in total. Four left on the dressing table had been stripped and exposed to the light. The fifth, three or four frames short of fully used, had been taken from the camera too. The ruined rolls had been strung across her bed. The camera, though, was intact. It sat innocent on the bedside table, where she had left it.

She saw something else in the room, then.

Rory Carnegie had put a cocktail stick with a sliver of skewered lemon in her glass when he had delivered her a drink. She had eaten the lemon, blunted and frayed the point of the stick, nervously chewing on it.

Now she saw the same type of stick, half-chewed, in the water glass on the table by her bed. It skewered a maggot, dead but lately swollen in its development, blue with the press against pupa of urgent legs.