Island Madness (22 page)

“Oh?”

“This is my nephew, miss. Ned Luscombe? Inspector Luscombe.”

“Oh!”

Ned got to his feet. She walked across the tiles on low heels that clicked. She was wearing a smart grey cape clasped at the top and a little blue hat perched at an angle. She held out a hand; dark red fingernails, the colour of spent blood; a ring with a diamond sparkle; perfume on the wrist. He took it in his grasp. It was a white hand, long and cold and strangely erotic, even at eleven o’clock in the morning.

“Molly Langmead,” she said.

“Miss Molly was here yesterday morning, weren’t you, miss?” Albert said without looking up. “When Miss van Dielen came by to see how we were doing.”

“Mmm.” She looked around. “Matches, Albert, I need some matches. I’ve quite misplaced my lighter, the one the Captain gave me.”

Albert crossed over to the dresser and pulled open a drawer.

“We got a two-legged magpie somewhere in this house,” he grumbled, “the number of things that go missing. Here.”

He handed her the box. Molly took out a packet of cigarettes and tapped one into her hand. “Ah,” she said, lighting it up. “The joys of Graven A.”

“That’s a rare brand these days,” Ned observed.

“One and six each on the black market, so I’m told,” she said insolently, holding the packet out. “Do you smoke?”

“Only what I can afford,” Ned told her. He took out his notebook. “You saw Isobel too, then?”

She looked down, amused at his hands, patting his pockets for his pen.

“Me and Veronica, yes.”

“Veronica Vaudin?”

“Is there another Veronica in St Peter Port?”

“I wouldn’t know. What was she doing here?”

“What we were all doing. Preparing for the party.”

“She was a regular too, was she?”

Molly blew smoke into the air and threw the box back to Albert. Sitting back on one of the chairs she undid the clasp and let the cape fall open. Ned fought to keep his eyes on her face. She watched him closely, to see when he would succumb.

“No, this was her first time. I thought she might enliven the proceedings. It can get a bit stale, the same people day in, day out. There were a couple of men who’d shown interest in her.”

“In Veronica?”

“Well, don’t sound so surprised. Of course Veronica.”

“Who, exactly?”

“I thought you wanted to know about Isobel? All right, all right.” She looked up to the ceiling. “Our own dear Bohde, for a start. Apparently he’d been to her about his feet and came back smitten. God, what a thought. Bohde’s feet!”

Ned was worried about his own. He had to tread carefully here.

“The Major told me that Bohde doesn’t approve of English girls.”

“Not approving of them and wanting to sleep with them are two quite separate marters.”

Albert pulled the plug in the sink violently. Molly turned.

“I’m sorry, Albert, I know how this kind of talk upsets you, but it’s true. Bohde couldn’t take his eyes off her all evening. Isn’t that right?”

“Not for me to say, miss.”

She leant over and flicked ash into the gurgling water. Ned let his eyes fall. When they returned Molly was looking at him with amused satisfaction.

“Your uncle is the very soul of discretion,” she said, holding the cigarette over her shoulder, daring him to take another look. “But it’s my belief every night he scurries up to his room and writes down all our misdemeanours in some horrid little exercise book of his. Where do you keep it Albert, this tittle-tattle which will undo us all? Under the mattress? Up the chimney?”

She turned and looked at him. Albert stood there, fixed. He had been caught out, Ned was sure of it! Molly laughed and leaning across, stubbed the cigarette out in Ned’s saucer. She had heavy, smoker’s breath.

“Teil him not to worry. His secret is safe with me.”

Albert gathered Ned’s cup and saucer from the table and ran them under the cold tap. The crockery rattled in anger.

“You’re a close friend of Captain Zepernick, I believe?” Ned asked her. She smiled sweetly.

“What a very polite young man you are.”

“And he was there all the time, for the party?”

“Inspector, when it comes to parties, the Captain is always the first to arrive and the last to leave. This was his party. He organized it, not Isobel. He invited the men, I brought the girls.”

“Except the nurses from Bremen.”

“Well informed, too. Yes. Without wanting to sound at all snobby, they were there for the lower ranks, the Wedels of this world.”

“For Bohde too, I believe.”

“Isn’t that a hoot! I suppose it’s the only way Bohde can get anyone to oblige—to bare her all for the nation state. That’s the real reason they were there that night. No English girl would submit to that, though he’d asked most of us at one time or another. Apart from the nurses, who the good Doctor Mueller organized, Zep and I were in charge. It’s a talent we have. Making whoopee.”

“But Captain Zepernick left the party with Miss Vaudin, is that not right?” Ned decided to call him by his formal name. With her connections Molly could make life difficult for him, and they both knew it.

“No, that is not right.” Her voice had lost its sense of play. She got up and fastened the clasp. “He did not ‘leave’ the party at all. He was called away when they found her. Of course we didn’t know then that it was Isobel. He gave Veronica a lift home. She lives in one of those dingy fisherman’s cottages by Cobo Bay. With her mother and father. Very cosy.”

Ned refused to rise to the bait.

“And he was there in the club all the time before that, and during the party.”

“Absolutely. We got changed here at about seven and left for the club about half past. Isn’t that right Albert?”

Albert nodded.

“Zep dropped me off at Underwood’s. Veronica had decided to get changed in her consulting room. Her father’s a bit of an old stick-in-the-mud. He wouldn’t have approved of her dress at all. No back and precious little front. Even I thought she was in danger of- how shall I put it—over-egging the puddings.” She laughed at her little joke. “We had a quick drink in one of the hotel bars along the way and arrived at the Casino around eight, coming back here at around eleven. And from then on, until the Captain left, all of us were here all the time. Albert can vouch for that.”

“You know where Isobel was found?”

“The Captain told me, yes.”

“Have you ever been in one of those bunkers? Has the Captain ever taken you there?”

“No. Why on earth should he? They’re out of bounds.”

“Seeing as you’re a favoured guest, I was wondering if you’d been given a special tour. If you had been there, you might have told someone else about it.”

“Why on earth should I want to see round a hole in the ground?” She looked at her small gold-chained watch. Another present from the Captain? “Look, can we do this some other time? I have an appointment which I really shouldn’t miss.”

She put her hand inside her cape and pressed it flat against her stomach, wincing slightly as she felt its swell.

“The doctor!” he exclaimed. “You should have said.”

“No.” She sounded light, airy, full of brimming confidence. “Underwood’s. I’m having a new dress made up. My first fitting.”

“Been saving the coupons, then?”

Molly smiled. “Something like that.”

“Something special, is it?”

“A party.” She looked around the kitchen. “I just love parties, don’t I, Albert?”

Walking down the drive Ned saw the Captain’s car coming up the drive. He stepped on the grass to let it pass. The car slowed down, the engine running. The roof was open and the Captain held his hat between his legs. He stared forward and waited. Ned bit his lip and saluted.

“Captain.”

Zepernick leant across and waved an envelope at him.

“I was going to have Wedel deliver this today. Take it now.”

“What is it? A special pass?”

“Special pass! No! It is to do with your dress.”

“My dress? I don’t understand, Captain.”

The Captain looked out to where Molly stood in the doorway. He looked at his watch and waved.

“Your uniforms,” he said. “You and your cadets.”

“Constables.”

“You need to be smarter. The island does not look good with such costumes. Read.”

Zepernick gunned the car up the drive. Ned tore the envelope open. Inside was a letter headed with the Feldkommandantur stamp. Two letters addressed to him in two days, almost a record. The first paragraph was some piffle about sloppy attire; ties not straight, boots not polished, buttons hanging off the jacket. And then this:

Consequently, beginning this Wednesday, the entire police force will present itself to Underwood’s the tailors where provision has been made for measurements and fittings to be taken for a complete set of new uniforms. New uniforms will be issued the following month on April 15
th
. They will be made in strict accordance to the specifications of British Policemen. The cost will be met from existing police funds. Any policemen found to be wearing their old uniforms after that date will be fined five shillings and suspended without pay for one week. The maintenance of these new uniforms will be solely the owners’ responsibility.

Signed, Captain R. Zepernick.

“Underwood’s again,” Ned said out loud, screwing the letter into a ball. “I’m in the wrong bloody business.”

Seven

A
lbert stands by the granite grave in the churchyard. In his hand he holds a bunch of wild primroses. They have come early this year and he is glad, for he would not have liked to have left without seeing the first flowers of spring peeking through one more time. It will, he reckons, be what he will miss the most, the flowers and the way they cover the island in such sudden profusion.

It is a bare, ungainly grave with a square cut of gravel on which stands a small vase. The inscription reads:

Rose Luscombe, Wife to Albert, Mother to Kitty, Mum to Both
.

The flowers are fresh as always, for Albert comes here every other day to replace the old with the new. Sometimes he brings cultivated flowers from the greenhouse, sometimes ones picked from the garden, and, when he can, wild flowers from the verges and hedgerows, gathered with an eye to their composition as he walks the two miles to where she is buried. There are tears in his eyes, as constant an accompaniment as the flowers in his hands, a mark of an irredeemable sorrow he carries within and which grows more acute at each visit. Alone, up at the House, looking after these strangely attractive men, his brother gone too, he feels her loss more than ever, for the island has become a contemptuous territory, both familiar and utterly foreign. It is not the wail of the siren nor the pulse of marching feet that has set his mind against his homeland, but the cries of those he has known all his life, now choking before his very eyes in a sea of greed and suspicion. Let them go under! Let them drown! He will not help them! He talks to her now, talking as he did when she was alive, for contrary to folklore it was always Albert who would return with the gossip he had gathered from the Hallivands’ floor or supped down at the Britannia, while it was Rose, crippled with arthritis, who would sit in her chair and sniff, but unlike former times he takes no pleasure in his tales. He talks to her now, of the island’s perfidy, of its moral loss, mentioning names that were once their everyday companions, all the time looking out to the sea, wondering where their daughter is. He knows that he will never see her again, that she is lost to him, gone for ever. He has not heard from her since she left that Tuesday before the invasion, him pushing her off, feeling the tears in the back of his throat, wanting to take her in his arms and hug the very essence of her into him, dying to tell her, as he pretended to be so unconcerned, so cheerful, that he would always love her, always miss her, fearing the very worst. As he says out loud to his dead wife lying but four feet below him, it’s the not knowing where she is that’s the worry. London, Birmingham, Coventry, there had been some terrible bombings over there, whole areas ablaze, and though he did not believe the ninety per cent of lies that passed for news on the front pages of the
Star
, the ten per cent of truth would be enough to blow their Kitty to smithereens. It makes him angry to think that it should have come to this, makes him want to curse, but being where he is he bites his lip. Kitty would have been safer here, he tells her, blaming himself yet again for marching their daughter down to the quayside, with a bundie of clothes in a borrowed suitcase, a set of tulip bulbs wrapped in secret in her nightgown that she might grow in memory of him, and a letter of introduction from Mrs Hallivand to the hostel at Weymouth, hoping that she might find work there. But then who knows, she might have taken up with them, like so many other girls of her age. It isn’t their class or lack of upbringing that has turned their heads, Albert is convinced, it is their age. All their young life they’ve been told what to do, what to say, how to behave, their future set out like their mothers’ and grandmothers’ before them, and suddenly the plan has been torn up, and they’ve been handed a licence to do as they please—and fresh male company to do it with besides. And what can their elders do? The young hold the power now, and by God they know how to use it. He has never seen women of such little worth wield such authority; a father betrayed after forbidding his daughter to stay out late; lipsticked bevies of them walking arm in arm down the Pollet, lording it over the ration queues; whole families in thrall to the eighteen-year-old who just might get her father work if they let her shame their name. There is nothing these girls can’t do, except jump on a boat and leave, and the younger they are, the more shameless and ungodly their behaviour. Only this afternoon he’d seen a couple of brazen little beasts—troop carriers (it shamed him even as he spoke their epithet)—strutting past, holding their swollen stomachs out as proudly if they’d had the Iron Cross pinned upon them. “Couldn’t have looked happier if they’d been…” he draws in a deep breath, knowing his wife’s antipathy to such talk, “by——himself.”

Albert shakes his head, bewildered at the improbability of it all. “If you were alive,” he tells her, “if you were alive…” But he can go no further. Instead he starts again with his other tale, the one he has held as tightly to himself these two miles as the bunch of primroses now standing in the cloudy vase, smoothing the gravel with his hand, forming shapes and patterns as he works. He has big hands, red and ruthless, hands used to the shotgun and the snare, hands used to the fork and the spade, hardened by frost and stone and the snag of summer thorn, tough hands, always purposeful but as delicate with the rabbit’s neck as they are with the greenhouse seedling. There are no weeds today, no stray leaves for him to clear, nothing to interrupt his foss, but in his agitation it is he who is disrurbing the symmetry of the ground, making little heaps of stones with his hands, fashioning the square and diagonals of the English flag, marking out the single word
LIDICHY
before obliterating it with his hand. He has not read of this foreign place in the newspaper (which is why he spells it incorrectly) nor has he heard of it from the lips of Lord Haw-Haw or the outlawed Alva Lidell, but in recent months it has reverberated round the walls of Mrs Hallivand’s drawing room, first in hushed whispers, and lately in more acerbic tones. Usually it is the Major who introduces the word, waving a requisitioned fork in the air, or filling his balloon with another swirl of Mr Hallivand’s brandy, only for it to be shrugged offby a show of indifference by the Captain or dismissed as malicieus tittle-tattle by the loganberry thief.
LIDICHY
. He writes it again and underneath adds the phrase
CERTAIN DEATH
. Almost immediately he smoothes the gravel free once more, fearrul lest someone might be watching him, or that he might leave without remembering to erase the confession, but it is too cold, too windy and too late in the afternoon for inquisitive meddlers to be around, and besides, who would intrude on an old man visiting his wife’s recent grave? He fashions the words again, speaking them to his Rose lying so close, tracing the letters he has formed as if by writing them she will absorb what he has to tell her.
LIDICHY
he writes,
CERTAIN DEATH
and then, underneath, the word
DUTY
. He stares at this bleak litany for a moment, silent and then rubs out
LIDICHY
and replaces it with
GUERNSEY
.
GUERNSEY
,
CERTAIN DEATH
and
DUTY
. He looks at his list and, conscious of the flawed logic he has imposed, shuffles his hand across the pebbles for the third time in order to place the words in their correct order. Now it appears for the last time.
GUERNSEY
, it reads.
GUERNSEY
,
DUTY
and
CERTAIN DEATH
. “Duty and Certain Death,” he says calmly. He turns and speaks it into the wind. “Duty and Certain Death.” He shouts it loudly so that his words are lifted into the wind and carried out over the water to where his daughter could be standing, in Weymouth or Southampton, planting those tulip bulbs perhaps, thinking of her old dad and the soil she has left behind. She cannot hear him, he knows, and he can never tell her what he has never told her, but perhaps, God willing, in years to come, his spirit will find her and whisper that he did love her and that he missed her and he died with the thought of her in his eyes and in his arms.

In the late morning Mrs Hallivand walks up the hill. It is for the most part a humble street, and with her frame bent by both the steep incline and the weakness of her undernourished frame she is struck, as always, by how the route to Guernsey’s most famous house takes her past some of the island’s most unprepossessing quarters, battered damp dwellings, built haphazardly, huddled and crumbling, punctuated by dank alleyways and dim cobbled court-yards, the smell of rot and drains and last night’s urine drifting through a hum of upstairs cries. It was somewhere here, despite his initial denials, that her husband Maurice had leaned their ledger girl up against the wall, too busy inhaling the scent of his own desires to notice the stench rising from round their ankles. Was that what all her good works had been for, so that she could book Elspeth Poidevin into the Weymouth Hostel for Wayward Girls without too many questions being asked and have the baby whisked away (to a good home, she promised blithely) as soon as it dropped out of the little trollop and into the midwife’s arms? Whenever she went into the bank and had the misfortune to see her grinning insolently from behind the counter an uneasy wave of guilt swept over her, for the child she had foisted on some unsuspecting couple and the mother she had denied. Not that Elspeth showed any signs of the loss, cocking her head at any man who came through the door. No one could describe Elspeth as pretty, a dumpy thing, stupid and cruel like her parents, but there was no denying that there was something overwhelmingly tempting about her, perched up on her stool, licking her fingers as she counted out the banknotes, on show and out of reach, like a flaky pastry fat with cream set out in a baker’s window. At least she had kept her mouth shut. For that reason alone the fifty pounds had been money well spent. Twenty-five pounds and a job in the office for life, that’s what she asked for in the drawing room that afternoon, lowering her eyes, her hands clasped over the all too apparent bulge. Fifty pounds, two months in the hostel and a job anywhere but with us, that’s how she countered and Elspeth took it on the spot, knowing the strings the Hallivands could pull, the embarrassed standard-bearer of the family name pushing his hair back in the library, grooming himself for the onslaught to come.

Mrs Hallivand carries with her a large oval basket in which lies a stone bottle, a square of squashed carrot cake, a duster, a chamois leather, a tin of floor polish, a packet of fly-papers, a mousetrap and a hefty clutch of keys: a rusting iron one, heavy like the front door for which it is fashioned, and a host of smaller ones, each tied with a small white handwritten label bearing the name of its locked location: the Billiard Room, the Tapestry Room, the Smoking Room, the Library, the Blue Drawing Room, the Red Drawing Room, and so on, up to the Eyrie. She has carried this basket for twelve years, ever since her late father proposed to the Parisian authorities who own the property that she become their designated trustee. The States were willing to appoint a housekeeper for the weekly chores, but Mrs Hallivand offered to perform these functions herself, not because she liked cleaning (she had rarely lifted a duster or squeezed a mop in her life) but because she realized that such an unchaperoned opportunity would afford her an intimacy with the house’s former occupier denied to anybody else. Maurice might spend business afternoons on the mainland enjoying one of his golf club wives on the second floor of the Norfolk Hotel, Bournemouth (boasting a Cocktail Bar, the Richmonde Lounge and the Norfolk Hotel Broadcasting Orchestra); she on the other hand took her pleasure alone, high in Victor’s eagle nest, surrounded by memen-toes of his life and work. And what a life! It thrilled her to think of that great bearded giant looking down on the town where she now stood, washing his naked torso for all to see, the apparatus of his prodigious sexual appetite on display; servant girls, married women from the town, visiting aristocratie amours, not to mention the mistress up the road, he served them all. He did not try and hide it. He recommended sexual intercourse to his friends as a cure for headaches, depression, even constipation, urging them to act with�out delay, with whomsoever was available. Regular intercourse was a physical necessity; the smooth running of the body demanded it.

From where came the means was not the point. Sex on such a grand, lordly scale had nothing to do with infidelity or betrayal, far removed from Maurice’s clumsy affairs with their candlelit dinners and false promises of love. Victor’s needs were simple; an uncompli-cated coupling taken when the need came upon him, like a cup of strong coffee or a brisk walk, enjoyable, invigorating, and paradox-ically, however exotic the company, a profoundly solitary exercise: a prelude to the real business of the day—work. And what work! Here amongst these rooms she could finger his lines of thought, delve into the mystery of the man. Over the years, suspended in rêverie in that floating room of light, she had come to believe that only she had the capacity to embrace and receive his monumental fertility. Every week she would take one of his notebooks home and place it on her bedside table. Let Maurice return from his expeditions to fall asleep in his adjoining bed, she would sit in hers and become, if not satiated, then hungrily content. She did not reproach her husband for his excesses, but not because she excused them, for she did not, but because she wanted as little to do with him as he did with her. What she had not told anyone since her arrival seventeen years ago was that once the flurry of moving to Guernsey had died down, once she had settled into the island’s ways, she had opened her eyes one morning and came to the conclusion that she had made a terrible and irreversible mistake. All her life she had fought to be allied to a certain kind of uncharted freedom, a man of spirit, and now, looking up from the comfort of their then double bed, watching Maurice mouth the minutes of the golf club’s last meeting, it was plain to see she had handcuffed herself to a dullard and sentenced her own free will to a life of imprisonment. Maurice was small-minded. Guernsey was small-minded. The forty thousand souls living alongside them had similar visions. Their horizons stretched no further than the rock on which they stood, a self-satisfied triangle, six by seven by nine, an immovable wedge of granite, stuck fast and impervious to change. Where was the glitter, the intrigue, where were the stakes to be played, the bolts from the blue? It was all so dull! The clubs with their empty protocol and pointless committees, the endless cocktail circuit, the spring and winter balls, all, in their proud pomposity, heartbreaking reminders of the glittering society she had left behind. When her sister had turned up she had hoped that she might be able to take Isobel under her wing, so that she could live once again a life of wit and nerve, but Isobel, wilfully indifferent to her schemes and confident in her own inherent abilities, had paid her little attention. Then there’d been that trouble over Ned Luscombe. Albert had come running to her about that the moment he found out. How could it be, he said, waving a pair of hedge-clippers in his hands, that his nephew would dare walk out with Mrs Hallivand’s niece? What if it went further, what if the worst thing in the world happened and they had to get married? They were headstrong those two, from stubborn stock, Albert had pronounced, ever the gardener, adding, “I could never be related to you, Mrs H., not even if the King himself commanded it.” She had laughed, the spell of her own horror at the story broken, for she saw at once that Isobel would never contemplate such an unlikely and unflattering alliance either. She had seen the look of incredulous pity pass over her niece’s face when Isobel had first been introduced to Maurice, the celebrated stories she had been told of her aunt’s glittering past transformed into insolent mockery. Ned hadn’t seduced her. Isobel had seduced him, and Mrs Hallivand knew why. To get back at her. To tell her to mind her own business, that she needed no lessons from such an abject failure as her. So she told Albert not to worry, that by next spring he would be able to tip his beret and wish her good morning with an easy heart.