Island Madness (23 page)

“Thank God for that, ma’am,” he said. “No disrespect regarding your niece intended.”

“And none taken, Albert. None taken.”

She climbs the steps now and unlocks the heavy front door. Closing it firmly behind her, she pauses in the hallway and feels the silence fall upon her, something which the island itself once possessed, but which now she finds only within these walls. It is a curious thing, this weight of absolute security. In the early days, when she had discovered her dreadful mistake, she would throw open the windows at the Villa, and lean out, cursing this peace, as if, willing it, she might hear the old noises of city she loved, the hum of the hub, as her father had called it, winging over the water. Now, standing in its last refuge, she wishes the island’s long quiet would return. It has become part of her, but though she misses it such a realization does not please her.

Though her first port of call is usually the study, from where she works her way down, today she makes straight for the Red Drawing Room, a dark, heavy room, weighted down with oak rurniture. The lock turns easily and skirting round the edge she moves quickly to the window to open the centre section of shutters. Light falls in, bisecting the room, illuminating beams of dust. Through the shadows the magnificence of the room takes form, a fire screen worked by Mme de Pompadour and four gilt figures taken from the Doge’s palace, the silk tapestries covering the wall and ceiling. In the centre stands the great table belonging to Charles II. In former times a pair of archbishop’s candlesticks stood at either end, but these have been set down on the floor, and in their place lies a humdrum collection of bags and containers: a pickling jar full of six-inch nails, a dried milk tin packed with bolts; a closed shoebox with a scattering of sugar rounds its base, a carrier bag buiging with the same substance with the name Underwood written on the side, another, altogether more elegant, which announces that Voisin & Co. of King St, Jersey is
the
Shopping Centre of the Channel Islands; a clock; a pair of pliers; batteries from a torch. Placing the basket on the table Mrs Hallivand sets aside the tins and other cleaning paraphernalia and lifting the embroidered cloth which is tucked in all the way round uncovers a pound bag of sugar and the last packet of weedkiller left in the Lodge’s outhouse. She picks up the tin and, holding it in front of her as if it were dynamite or something which might give her an electric shock, lifts the lid of the shoebox.

“I very much doubt,” she says to the self-portrait hanging above the fireplace as she pours it in, “whether you or I have ever seen so much sugar before, even in peace time. Three ounces a week is all we get now.” She pauses and then decides. “I don’t suppose it would do any harm. And I have such a sweet tooth.”

She moves quickly to the little kitchen at the back, where in earlier times the caretaker would brew up a cup during visiting hours. There is a kettle there and a small paraffin ring and beside them stands the tea caddy with the Swiss maid and Matterhorn motif and in which lies a dwindling amount of real leaf tea. On a shelf directly above the kettle stands a sizeable brown teapot, good for four thirsty people, with a cracked lid and a spout which pours in an indifferent are. Mrs Hallivand turns the tap and as the water is slightly discoloured Iets it run for a full minute before she fills the kettle through its forred-up spout.

While waiting for the kettle to boil she walks back into the room, to the window and the view of the besieged harbour and the glittering sea beyond. The room is beginning to smell of this strange assortment of packages, a damp sweetness clinging to the silk, an odd sourness too, like stale sweat. In previous times it would have smelt of cigar smoke and port. She talks, not to her husband, nor her dead niece, nor her dead sister (none of whom she misses), but to the man whose spirit had captured her heart all those years ago but who in the last eighteen months had been supplanted by another. If only she had been younger! If only the Major had been older! It was easy to see why he had found Isobel attractive, less easy to fathom his affection. Mrs Hallivand had flirted with a hundred different Lentsches in her time. If she’d been her niece’s age, Isobel wouldn’t have lasted more than a week. As it was, with barely any competition in sight, she’d had an uninter-rupted run, and where there might have been doubts, the language had saved her. Like any foreign man equipped with an English that was both precise and elegantly correct, when faced with a willing young woman with good looks and passable manners, the Major had taken any display of weakness in Isobel’s character as simply an example of his own inadequate hold on her native tongue. And there were so many reasons why she deserved him and her niece did not. Their love of literature, their understanding of art, the intelligent delight they both took in those flirtatious conversations that only lovers can sustain. She was still good-looking, she still had sparkle and, if she chose to wake it, there still lay within her that hard, unforgiving sexuality to which so many young men had once been drawn. But the Major had chosen Isobel, and Isobel was gone and now she has returned to the man who understood her best. The Major’s appeal was not only transitory, but misplaced. He meant nothing to her now.

The kettle starts to sing. Mrs Hallivand makes the tea, and using the milk from the stone bottle pours herself a cup. Bringing the cup back into the room she bends down and with her hand scoops up a palmful of crystals. It is an obscene amount to hold, to let run free. Raising her hand she Iets it flow through her fingers. She thinks of all the islanders queuing in the buffeting winds, waiting for their pitiful gram of this and their pitiful gram of that. The sugar sparkles fresh and light, a radiant white in this brown and solemn room, fairy dust from an angel’s wand caught in a beam from a distant star. She thinks of the long glittering evenings of her reckless youth; the murmur of voices in the ballroom below: the starched dress shirt and how it had glowed in the dark as she pressed her breasts, oh her lovely breasts, against it, reaching for one more illicit embrace. The white drifts down, to the floor and around her shoes. The light hurts her eyes. She could be skiing on the slopes above Wengen or walking barefoot on Deauville sand. She could be seventeen again, standing by the bay windows, watching the snow drift over the Parisian rooftops, waiting for her Peter Pan to lead her astray. She looks out, potion in hand, waiting for the sweet dreams of the liquid to cool.

A figure appears in the doorway. She turns.

“You’re early,” she says. “There’s some tea in the pot if you want.”

“Well?” he says. “How did it go?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

Albert grunts and walks to the table.

“Got you something.” He hands her a large tin.

“Custard! Where how on earth did you come by that?”

“Never you mind. Take it. Got something else too.” He digs into his pockets again. “Razor blades. Fifty of them.” He pulls out a little box and shakes the contents into the pickling jar. He holds it to the light. “This’ll take the wind out of his sails.”

Mrs Hallivand holds her cup tightly.

“I’m frightened, Albert,” she says. “Isobel has made it much more dangerous. I don’t know if I can go on.”

Albert steps up and shakes her hard.

“Do as you’re told, you silly woman. We’ve not long now.”

Eight

F
ive o’clock in the evening and Tommy Ie Coeur came back to the station in a bad mood. Van Dielen had still not returned and his feet were frozen. He showed Ned the holes in his boots.

“A lot to carry, these pins,” he said. “No warmth to this coat either. Be the death of me, this job.”

“Your problems are soon to be at an end, Tommy,” Ned replied, handing over the Captain’s note. “In a couple of weeks’ time they could run you at Ascot.”

He made Tommy a mug of tea before walking down to the Royal Hotel, now Feldkommandantur Headquarters, to tell Lentsch of the day’s developments. Not that there was much. Her neck had been broken, grabbed and twisted round hard, like a gamekeeper might a bird or rabbit, that’s what the police doctor had pro-nounced. She was still alive probably when the cement had been pressed into her mouth and up her nose, but limp and helpless, like a rag doll. Death by suffocation or dislocation? Dr Meecham hummed and hawed. He was out of his depth. Seeing as the one the Home Office usually sent was unavailable, perhaps Lentsch could send for a pathologist from France?

Outside the Royal, Wedel was polishing the bonnet of Bernie’s car. Though the ‘Royal’ had been taken down and a German notice hung in its place Ned was pleased to see that the old AA sign still hung below the little wooden balcony. A couple of workmen stood underneath, painting the window frames. Although he recognized them, as he approached they looked to their work, ashamed for all three of them. Wedel lifted his hand in acknowledgement. Ned nodded.

“I thought you were going on leave?” he said.

Wedel winced. “
Kaput
,” he said, looking up to the first floor.

“That’s a uniform for you.”

More men were working inside, ladders and buckets of white-wash blocking the corridor. A guard showed him up to Lentsch’s office on the first floor. Despite the desk and two flags guarding the other trappings of authority, the dagger, the candlesticks and the ornate silver inkstand, the room, with its faded flowered wallpaper and obligatory chipped washstand tucked away in the far corner, still looked like a mid-priced bedroom with a faulty tap and a partial view of the sea. Above the mantelpiece hung the inevitable portrait, garlanded by a profusion of dark ferns woven round the frame as if he was peeking out through the gloom of a Silesian glade. Ned tried to imagine who would spend the morning fashioning such an absurd decoration. That was the difference between their two nations. Both held their leader in awe, depended on his strength and vision to carry them through, but while the British trusted Churchill, even admired him, they didn’t worship him. No one would bedeck a picture of his ugly flab with bits of leaf and twig.

Lentsch appeared in the doorway, his eyes red.

“I see you are admiring Wedel’s handiwork,” he said, fighting to keep his voice under control.

“What?”

“The decoration. It is our leader’s birthday. April 20th. All Germans celebrate.”

Ned smiled. “He’ll be pleased, then, to know you’ve gone to so much trouble. Smartening the place up, too.”

“Yes. The soldiers also.”

“You’re not the only ones.” Ned showed him the Captain’s letter. Lentsch read it quickly.

“I did not know this.”

“Well, he wouldn’t want to bother you I expect, considering.”

“New uniforms!” Lentsch walked to the window again. “I look out here and see the same Guernsey I saw three weeks ago—and yet it is not the same. It is without Isobel. Do you realize this, that she is no longer here? The tides come in and out, the harbour unloads, birds build their nests for the spring, and yet she is not here. How can this be?” He turned back. “It is my fault that she is dead. You believe this too, I think?”

“No, Major, I don’t think that.”

He folded the Captain’s letter back into his pocket, wedging it up against Isobel’s. Of course it’s your fault, he thought, and who knows, maybe more directly than you would have me believe. Why couldn’t Isobel have gone to Lentsch? Because of the Major’s involvement in something?

“There is nothing for me here now,” Lentsch continued flatly. “I hoped that when the war was over I would return here, become one of you, watch the boats and the seasons and be content.”

“It takes a long time to become one of us, Major,” Ned told him. “I’m not sure that I’m one of us yet. My father never thought I was.”

A silence feil.

“I would not have wanted this for the world,” the Major exclaimed, pressing his hands against the glass, “and yet I cannot say that I wish I had not been here. I cannot say that.” He moved across to the desk and turning the picture frame over in his hands, handed it to Ned. “See how happy she looks,” he implored. “See how happy I made her. Teil me I did wrong.”

Ned studied the photograph. It had been taken somewhere along the water lanes, near where he used to meet her. Three perfectly pressed uniformed officers walking along the narrow lane, Zeper-nick, a shorter man Ned did not recognize and the Major. Captain Zepernick, gloves in his hands, was in the midst of telling a joke, the shorter man was taking a cigarette from his mouth, and on the far side Lentsch was turning to his companions, smiling at what was being said. In between him and the smoker, dressed in a short-sleeved white top and perfectly creased jodhpurs, marched Isobel, riding erop held across her breasts in a rising diagonal from right to the left. She too was turning to Zepernick, she too was smiling, but though it was the Captain’s story that darted in and out between them, it was she who was the centre of their attention. Her hair was brushed back, her body brimming with a confident and irrepressible health. She strode amongst them like a circus trainer surrounded by her favourite lions. How she loved these intelligent and handsome creatures. What tricks they would perform for her! She was not afraid to run with them, to put her head into their mouths, let them prowl and parade in her unprotected company. All she had to do was to crack the whip and they competed for her sport! And in their immense power and beauty they had turned and with one careless swipe had killed her. He felt his stomach wince from a stab of empty pity, though whether for Isobel or himself he could not determine.

“Who took the photograph?” he asked, placing it back on the desk.

“Bohde,” the Major replied. “So. Van Dielen. He made a ruil statement?”

“Mr van Dielen has not yet returned.”

“But it is nearly eighteen hundred already! Six!”

“I know. Still, if wants to be by himself. There’s no law against it.”

He left the Major telephoning Captain Zepernick. The cobbled lanes in the Pollet were cold and empty. If only he had gone to her that night, as soon as he had read the letter! If only the note had been more forthcoming! His feet set a rhythm on the stones. Lentsch, Lentsch, she could not tell Lentsch. If not directly involving Lentsch, then something she dare not tell him? Something to do with an islander, something that would get whoever it was into deep trouble with the Germans. Someone close to her, perhaps. Her father? Her aunt? Molly?

The Britannia was empty save for Albert, sitting in the corner. He beckoned him over.

“Thought you might be in need of some company,” he said.

Ned pulled a chair out. “Trust you to think right, Uncle.”

Albert waved his glass in the air. “We’ll have a couple more here,” he called out, “if you’re not too busy.”

Ned sat down. “Heard from Kitty?” he asked, anxious to keep clear of Isobel.

Albert shook his head.

“Went to the post office yesterday. No joy. I’ll try again Monday. Something might have come in over the weekend.”

Ned tried to reassure him. “It’s just a matter of getting through. She’ll have written, all right.”

“Oh, yes. She’ll have written, all right. Don’t help me none, though, do it?”

He waited while the barman laid the glasses on the table, then leant forward.

“I’ve been thinking, Ned. Did you ever think, you know, to make a run for it?”

“To England, you mean?”

“Why not? Steal a boat one night. You could make it.”

“Don’t know about that. Anyway, what about Mum?”

“I can look after your mother.”

Ned took a sip and looked at him.

“Anyone would think you want to get rid of me.”

“Dead right, I want to get rid of you. This business of Isobel. Could just be the start, to my way of thinking.”

“Start of what?”

Albert lowered his voice. “Vigilantes. A warning to the rest of us. She may not be the last. I mean there’s a lot of cement in one bag.”

“You know about that, then?”

“Wedel,” Albert said, as if the word tasted bad. “More gobble than a turkey, his tongue.”

“Well, I hope you’re wrong,” Ned told him. “Any more trouble like that and we’ll all be in hot water.”

“That’s what I mean. There’s no telling what will happen next, what madmen are stirring the pot. You should have gone with Kitty. Left us old ‘uns to it.”

“And left Mum to bury Dad?”

“I could have buried your father. It’s a brother’s duty just as much as a son’s. He wouldn’t have minded.”

“I’m not sure about that. I’d let him down, going over the water. If I’d buggered off just before his funeral, left Mum in the lurch…”

“Your mum’s known harder times than these,” Albert said. “But she got on with it. We knew how to live then, knew what’s what. All this island can do with a scrap of decency these days is funerals. And there’re plenty of them.”

“Well, there’s another one now.”

“Aye. Mrs H. will be in charge, so I’m told.”

“Oh? She didn’t seem that bothered to me.”

Albert swirled the beer at the bottom of his glass. “You got a lot to learn, Ned. That’s just the way she were brought up. Inside’s a different story. How’s he taking it, her father?”

“He hasn’t been seen all day. Left the house this morning and vanished in a puff of smoke. The Major’s going potty.”

Albert finished his beer.

“Don’t you worry about van Dielen,” he said, signalling for another. “He’ll come back.”

But he had not come back, that strange little man. It was days later, when the hue and cry had been taken up not simply by Ned’s ill-dressed cohorts, but by the whole trembling island, that tales of his sightings were delivered piece by piece to Ned’s office or, when he was not there, to the station below where Tommy bent over the counter like a schoolboy at his desk, placing his arm across the report sheet in a vain attempt to hide his near illegible hand. Many had seen him in his deerstalker hat and his Norfolk jacket, flapping at the sides, standing on the half-finished gun emplacements, climbing down the steep coastal paths, his small figure, dark and bent, as recognizable as that of the stick-twirling Hollywood tramp, gaining attention by his very avoidance of it, seen but not intruded upon; not by the soldiers scanning the horizon standing next to their Flak-30
s
as he paced the newly dug concrete fields testing their vulnerability with a prod of his gnarled stick, a present it was said from Dr Todt himself; not by the motorcycle patrols brewing up their lunchtime billycans while they watched his silhouette clambering over the lattice work of newly laid reinforcing rods; not by the weary clusters of labourers who leant over their spades, thankful for the brief respite, while he jumped down into the fresh-dug trenches and shored up excavations, inspecting the depth and quality of their exhaustive cultivation; not by the Spanish Republi-can engine driver, sweating behind his black-belching Henschel which pulled the crates bearing the van Dielen mark from St Sampson’s harbour to the western coast, who raised his cap when he had first seen him at early morning light, down at the docks, looking out to the entrance through which he and his family had first arrived; not by the islanders on their way to morning service, processions of the faithful and the converted, who caught sight of him hurrying down the lanes, and who heard the news walking up those consecrated paths, who took it inside and passed it along in the sideways shufïle of the pews, whispering the deed as they rose from their uncertain prayers, some even scribbling the dread message on the back page of a prayer book before holding it out to their neighbour’s troubled eyes. Murder? Aye, Murder, coughed behind handkerchiefs and sung tunelessly alongside Wesleyan rhymes; murder placed on the horsehair cassocks and proffered wafers and mouthed by silent lips in the hollow echoes of a sermon. Murder half-concealed and half-bred and brought half-awake blink�ing out into the morning light, to be passed from islander to islander, the word and the wind scattering their faith once more; murder of their own kind buttoned under their coats, murder a street away, hidden under their hats, murder of a young daughter stuffed under the benches of the horse-drawn bus and taken to town to be fed to the seagulls pecking along the promenade or tapped out by faltering fingers on the wrought-iron benches circling the empty bandstand in Candie Gardens, where the day before the band from the Luftwaffe had played tunes that Jack Hilton and Lilly Harvey had made famous all over the cracked continent. All that day did van Dielen trudge, hopping from place to place, as he might on any other normal working day, waving his pass with its picture and his honorary rank and letters of authorization slipped inside, examining pit props in the tunnels over at La Vassalerie, harassing a nervous and flustered George Poidevin in another examination of the yard, stamping along the wide northern bays, looking out to the forbidden coast beyond. He was solicitous to those he did meet, enquiring almost as a matter of politeness as to the set of the concrete or the camber in the excavations, for it was always the materials with which he was concerned, whether the cold or the heat or some other variable had compromised their quality, and when he questioned those responsible he asked them as a visiting doctor might question a patient’s relatives, interpreting their layman’s replies while forgiving them their foolish ignorance. Those he spoke to thought no more of it, for the news of his tragedy had not travelled then, though it seemed to follow him in his wake like the draw of a great ship, churning the settled ground of occupation for the scavengers to wheel about in heady excitement.