Island Madness (28 page)

“Oh, Veronica. What are we going to do with you?”

Frightened of being overwhelmed, she broke away and wiped the tears with the length of her arm.

“Come to the play, why don’t you,” she said, sniffing.

“I don’t know, V.”

“I’ll blow you a kiss.”

Ned had smiled in the dark. “All right.”

“Ned?”

“Yes.”

“Night-night.”

“Night-night, V.”

“Ned?”

“What?”

“Dream of me sometimes.”

Bernie and Ned arrived at the church at twelve, though it took ten minutes to reach the little gate and the slight uphill path to the church entrance. Outside the hearse and the crowd waited, the horses in their harness stamping their feet, impatient, like the townsfolk pressed against the stone walls, for the slow three-quarters of a mile march up to the sloping cemetery and the eternal view of the sea. Funerals were one of the few occasions when the civilian population was allowed to congregate in any number. Half the town had turned out, umbrellas at the ready. Though it looked fine, the weather would not hold for long. They were islanders. They knew the signs. Up ahead, all branches of the Occupation stood at the ready, the artillery, the Luftwaffe, even the Kriegsmar-ine. At the front stood the uniformed men of the Organisation Todt, their hoisted spades gleaming in the cold spring air. Ernst walked up and down banging his little stick. Ned felt drunk and in need of a piss.

“It’s not right,” Bernie whispered, “the old girl all alone.”

“She wouldn’t have no one else,” Ned answered. “Albert will see she’s all right.”

The sound of the church organ starting up again broke the unchallenged calm. The crowd straightened up off the walls, the troops gathered themselves together. Ernst slapped his stick quickly in three successive beats. For Ned, in a moment’s sudden glazed look, the squiffy reason of why he was here evaded him. Isobel. That was it. Isobel was dead! He tried to think straight, to get everything in order, but he could not. He looked about him, lost, a blur of faces sweeping by in a pool of painful light, but no one paid him any attention. It was as if he wasn’t there.

Turning once again, he caught sight of Albert standing by the church door and a desperate hope surged within him. He would understand! He raised his hand in greeting, but halfway through had to steady himself. He wiped his mouth and burped into his sleeve. The man next to him moved away.

The door opened and as the bell in the round tower began its low, hesitant toll, the pallbearers brought her out. There was a moment, as they hitched their shoulders and settled into the task of carrying her wooded weight down the drive, when it appeared that no one would follow, that the church had been empry, and not even her aunt had cared to kneel before her in her death, but then Mrs Hallivand stepped out into the light. Framed in the hollow of that stone archway, her tiny boned hands clutching a bunch of violets, deriving strength from the deeply inhaled scent as she might from a bottle of smelling salts, she stood as if under sentence, as if expecting the church to crumble and fall on top of her and bury her underneath the weight of its heartless faith. Albert took her arm. She patted his gratefully.

The coffin was loaded, the sun went out, the clouds grew closer. Watching as the hearse creaked down the drive Ned couldn’t help but notice that the wheels were squeaking like the spare bicycle back at the station, like the Yellow Peril’s blown suspension, like the garden gate back home. That’s what’s happening, he thought. The island is seizing up. Butter is the only grease available to lubricate this island, black-market butter at thirty shillings a pound. Was it any wonder that so many succumbed, when they inhabited a world where a man was entitled to only four ounces of meat a week, three of sugar, one of coffee (and that a substitute of ground acorns)? How were they supposed to get by on that? The black market, that was how. There was money to be made there all right, and money to be spent, and by a breed of men who had never imagined that such a prospect might one day lie within their grasp. Tea got spooned into the pot at five pounds a quarter, a tot of whisky came from a bottle costing ten pounds and if you wanted to blow genuine smoke rings in the air you did it from leaf which cost seven pounds an ounce.

As the orders rang out and the syncopated rhythm of a hundred boots stamped down on the macadam road, the wind began to stir; a spot of rain, a strenger breeze, a sudden drop in temperature. The crowd followed, their black umbrellas unfolded in anticipation of the downpour, the clouds’ black coat-tails clearly visible, sweeping in from the north. His bladder bursting, Ned waited until they had left before relieving himself behind a flying buttress, hoping no one would notice the blasphemous steam rising from this consecrated ground.

Buttoning his flies, he moved quickly up the lane, chasing the solemn beat of the band. It was the first time he had been among a crowd, and jostling amongst them, acknowledging a greeting here, stealing a glance at an old-remembered face there, for the first time he saw them as they really were. Oh, he had waited in queues with them, seen them in their ones and twos as they walked down the Pollet, shared a bench with them on one of the bus carts, but seeing them on the move, their faces anxious to devour the coming occasion, he looked at them afresh. We’re starving, Ned thought, astonished. Every one of us. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a week or a month’s time, but give it a year, maybe two, and half of us will be dead. He could see how the sentence had already been passed on those who lived closest to life’s precarious edge, the old and the very young; how like old men the children appeared, hunched and slow, and how like children, helplessly innocent and in need of a guiding hand, seemed the old. He could see it too on the idle hands of men not yet forty, with their ragged boots tied with lengths of string and their scarves wrapped to muffle their fifty-year-old coughs and sixty-year-old wheezes. He could catch it in the worried stoop of mothers, lost in the empty hang of their dresses which their breasts once filled. He could trace it on every image he conjured up; on his mother’s face as she shivered in her fleshless nightdress; in the pale determination of those two ankle-socked girls hurrying home with their potato perambulator; in the fat fingers of George Poidevin’s pasty paw as he jabbed them up and down his desk. He could see it most clearly in those who stood now by the open grave, the new aristocracy of this unjust fiefdom; Major Lentsch, Captain Zepernick and Molly. He remembered the car and the luxurious spread of Veronica’s willing limbs, satiated in the wrap of her Occupational furs.

As the squall grew in its strength, the crowd instinctively huddled together. Molly looked superb, black feathers and a small black veil with matching stockings and dress; a dish to be devoured. Albert reached out, holding Mrs Hallivand back as if he were worried she might be washed into the hole; the girls leant into their uniformed protection. Only Molly remained unchanged, stand�ing coatless alongside the Captain, the rain beating against her body, flattening her fine and flaunting dress against the wet of her calves and the turn of her hips and the low swell of her stomach. The rain streamed down and still she did not move. The wind caught her veil and blew it up over her head and as she lifted her face, her black gloved hands held stiffly by her side, she licked the wet from her face and held herself out as proud and defiant and as paintedly beautiful as a ship’s figurehead glorifying in the furious rage of the sea. She drew strength from this. It lifted her spirits, not because she enjoyed the spectacle, but because she
was
the spectacle. The crowd could hardly take their eyes off her.

The storm ended as suddenly as it began. The sky cleared, but on the horizon another one could be seen to be on its way. The parish priest in robes of white and blue stepped forward to perform the burial. A firing party followed and aimed its guns in the air. As they fired, nesting crows rose from the trees and broke into a chorus of protest.

“Hit some of them buggers and we could all have a decent pie,” a voice from the back called. A nervous laugh rippled through the crowd.

The guns fired again, the crows rose once more. Lentsch looked down to where muddy water was already collecting between the coffin and the sides of the grave. He mouthed some words. In English? In German? Words of love? Words of remorse? Ned could not tell. As the escort party turned and began to march away Molly placed her hand on Zep’s arm and moved to follow in their wake.

“Look at that bitch,” Ned heard someone in the crowd mutter. “We’ll get our own back when the time comes.”

Molly paled while the Captain looked in vain for the culprit, but the crowd closed its mouth to his gaze. They would not give him up. Molly tried to pull her veil down, but it stuck to her face. She took off her hat and held it in front of her.

“Jerrybag!” another shouted.

A clod of earth flew in her direction. It caught a gravestone in front and scattered in the air.

“God Save the King!”

“In future,” the Captain said to Molly, in a tone designed to be overheard, “if people can’t behave themselves, we shall have to insist that such events be conducted after curfew.”

Ned stepped forward.

“All right,” he shouted. “That’s enough of that. Get off home before you land us all in trouble.” He turned and opened his hands.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said. “This is not the place to voice such feelings.”

“And another would be?” snapped the Captain.

Ned watched as Molly and the Captain hurried to their car.

“Perhaps we should not have been here at all,” the Major said. “Perhaps something simpler would have been more appropriate. But…” he directed his gaze to where Ernst was preparing to march off his men, “we had no choice. That is the trouble in war. Sometimes there is no choice but to do the wrong thing.”

“It’s not you they’re angry with,” Ned replied. “It’s their own kind they hate.”

“I suppose I should be grateful, then. It makes my job easier if they hate the likes of Molly more than the likes of me. Come back to the Villa? Have a glass of something warm, after the chili here.”

Ned looked at his watch.

“I must go. Paperwork.”

“Very well.” Lentsch was unnaturally formal. “There was one thing I should have told you. In the hue and cry it was overlooked. The lieutenant you wanted to interview. Lieutenant Schade.”

“You haven’t found him yet?”

“It appears that on that Saturday he got very drunk. First at the Casino, then later on in one of the…”

“Houses?” Ned suggested helpfully.

“Exactly. Over at St Sampson’s. He should not have been there. It is for enlisted men, but he was most persistent. There was a fight. Then it seems he went for more drinks, in the hotels along the promenade.”

“Are you saying that he hasn’t sobered up yet?”

“No, no. Early the next morning he was found in the foyer of the Soldatenheim. He told them he’d fallen down the steps and hurt his head. They thought he was just drunk you understand, a little shaky, his words all together…”

“Slurred.”

“Slurred. So they let him sleep. Sunday afternoon they tried to wake him. They could not. Coma. This morning he died.”

Ned felt himself grow cold. The Major tried to reassure him.

“I should have been told earlier. But with van Dielen’s disappear-ance, everyone forgot. This has nothing to do with Isobel, I am sure. The men involved in the fights will be disciplined but not charged. They were not serious. A blow to the face, a tooth loose. Brawling. The fall must have caused it. We do not wish to upset the family, so we will tell them that it was an accident.”

The Major walked away. Ned scoured the crowd for a sight of Veronica, but couldn’t see her. Perhaps she hadn’t come after all. Down by the car his mother was talking to Albert. He had a hand on her shoulder and was trying to put something in the calico bag she was carrying. Two times she waved the bag aside but at the third he grabbed it and thrust in his hand. She stood up on tiptoe and gave him a kiss. Albert climbed in the driver’s seat. His mother waved, then gave a little curtsy to Mrs Hallivand as the car drove off.

“What was all that about,” he said, coming up behind her.

His mother patted her handbag. “It’s a surprise,” she said.

He held her out at arm’s length.

“You look nice, Mum.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’m not! You do.”

He took her arm and walked her down the road. Halfway down the hill he stopped and wheeling her round kissed her on the cheek. His mother looked round, flustered. A couple of women walked past, grinning.

“Ned Luscombe, what do you think you’re doing!”

“I’m taking my mum in my arms, that’s what I’m doing.”

“I never saw such a thing. Put me down at once.” She pulled herself back, straightening her coat. “What would your father have said?”

“We’ll never know, will we.” He hugged her again. “And next time I see her I’m going to put my arms around Veronica.”

“Oh, it’s Veronica again, is it?”

“No, it isn’t, but sometimes I wish it was. She was right for me. I was right for her. I should have left it at that.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“So I have. All morning, as a matter of fact.”

“Drowning your sorrows, I don’t doubt. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a man feeling sorry for himself.”

“It’s V I feel sorry for, letting her go like that.”

“Yes, and look at her now.”

“I helped put her there, Mum. She would have been safe if I’d done right by her.”

“She’s a free woman.”

“No one here’s free, Mum. Not you, not me, not V, not even Uncle Albert.”

Ned walked back to the office. The whole affair had gone badly. The town had been out in force, their sympathy tainted by curiosity and loathing. Their true feelings regarding the Occupation, kept simmering for these two and three-quarter years under a lid fashioned from the base metals of obedience and opportunism, had broken out into the air like thick, sulphurous fumes bubbling up from some dark and murky pool. It was not simply bottled resentment which had fuelled their anger. In the shabby folds of their funeral clothes, mingling with the smell of mothballs and camphor sticks, hung the noxious fiimes of self-loathing. He had sniffed it wafting in and out of the gravestones like a sea mist rolling in and out of the rocks, ready to lead them all to grief. And when the sudden squall that the sky had promised finally descended, it washed into the very pores of their skin as quickly as the poison gas that everyone believed to be stored in Alderney. It was a dangerous and intoxicating chemical the islanders had inhaled that afternoon.