Island Madness (33 page)

Lentsch looked out across the dark rolling water. The clouds had lifted and the island lay anchored under the barrage of stars. He could see the watchtowers, two of them, rising out of the gloom and he knew that inside them, talking, smoking, watching, were men who could not see him at all. They could see nothing! They were facing the wrong way! They had built concrete walls and watchtowers and gun emplacements but they could see nothing! They had not captured this island or made it safe. Guernsey was not an impregnable fortress! The island was strong, alive, waiting for its time. It soaked up strength from the sea like a sponge; it took its breath from the air, like a great forest might. It was not an island. It was part of the world! It was part of the world, the world that gave life and death and grew warm under the sun. One day the concrete would be covered, its lines blurred, its grey white smeared with rust and speckled with green, transformed not simply by man’s neglect (though that would come) but by nature’s immu-table force. One day men would clamber over these curiosities, as they did the tombs of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, except here they would not marvel at their primitive expertise, rather wonder how men, at such a late time in history, could deceive themselves so fally. Deceived and betrayed. And was he part of them? Had he deceived and betrayed? Had he truly loved Isobel, or simply taken advantage of his position and her father’s hasty acquiescence? Was this really love he had felt for her, or was it the other thing, an older man flattered at a young girl’s interest? A uniform. A manner. A holiday romance.

“We should not be here, you know,” he said.

“You’ve picked a fine time to tell me, Major.”

“Not here. I meant in Guernsey. We should not be here.”

“There’s nothing you or I can do about that.”

“No.” He dipped his paddie in the water, and turned the canoe round. “Let us go home, Ned. I have seen enough.”

Eleven

Veronica closed the door to her consulting room (which is what now she calls her single room, thanks to an article she read in an old copy of
The Lady
) and proceeded down the narrow and dingy staircase, nodding to Mr Underwood who stood, as he always stood, behind the glass front door which bore his funereal name, a tribute to a success and longevity which Veronica herself would like to emulate, just as she wished that Mr Underwood, so particular concerning the appearance of his own premises, would do some-thing about the peeling paint flaking off the stairwell walls, put a bit of carpet down perhaps, but that afternoon, as she adjusted her flamboyant blue felt hat festooned with bunches of different colour-ed grapes, she had no time for more than a passing pleasantry which she mouthed and which he pretended not to notice, puiling his blind down firmly as she repeated the phrase. “Turned out nicely,” she said as she pulled at her skirt through the thick cloth of her second-hand overcoat, thinking it was true. She was turned out nicely and as a matter of fact it was beginning to turn out very nicely altogether.

Zepernick was waiting in the car. She had sat in her waiting room on the bare chair staring out of the window, looking down on the shoppers for an hour, fearing the Captain might not come, and when she had seen the car park ostentatiously up on the pavement and had breathed an audible sigh of relief it had come to her that whatever happened to her now she could never join her fellow islanders ever again. It wasn’t so much that she had chosen sides. It was more to do with the fact that she had widened her horizons. It was what she had been looking for all along. It could have been with Gerald. It might have been with Ned. But it had happened finally with Captain Zepernick, Zeppy as he encouraged her to call him, hastened by the need to deal with the complexity of the world, to embrace its fearful multiplicity, to step into the unknown. All those shoppers below wanted to do was to return to the world as it had been. She did not. That was what she had been trying to escape from, and with a bit of peaked cap fortune, she had broken through.

He had been calling for her these past three weeks now, like Tommy Ie Coeur used to, only the Captain had better taste. At first he had simply taken her for a drive, with a hamper bouncing on the back seat. It was a simple transaction. The Captain would wait patiently while she ate her fill, but the moment she wiped her mouth and threw the napkin aside he was on top of her. It was as if someone had blown him a whistle. She had toyed with the idea of taking her time, to see how long it would take for signs of his suppressed impatience to surface, but the truth was that she found it impossible to drink champagne slowly and the food, real bread, real cheese, real ham, had proved equally irresistible, though she had made certain that there was enough left over for when she got home. It was a good job the Captain didn’t know for why. It was against the law to fraternize with the foreigns, and though Zep was all for flouting the law himself, he took a different view of those who broke it without his permission. Those men for instance that he’d found smuggling, he’d had them crying like children, he had boasted, shoving photographs of their sweethearts in their broken faces, telling them to take a good look, they’d not be seeing them again. Nothing like these for them any more, he had chuckled, unplucking her buttons. Not for a long time. Such pleasure in other’s discomfort, she had discovered, provoked his stamina.

The Captain greeted her with an unsettling and businesslike smile before gunning the car up the hill. As she hung on to the strap she began to worry that he might be starting to lose interest, for despite her undoubted willingness and the regular availability of her charms, however hard she responded to his insistent and methodical embrace, it was difficult for her to emulate the same nervous excitement that had coursed through her body that first time in the shed. Even if she could have arranged for the boy to be hiding nearby every time it wouldn’t be the same. The element of terror would be absent, and terror, though the Captain did not fully appreciate this himself, was a quality which stimulated all his senses. The boy was now as regular in his appearances as was the Captain, slipping in round the back door at around eleven o’clock, making sure he did not bump into Ned’s new visitor again. The meal would be waiting for him on the starched chequered tablecloth; a glass of milk and whatever food she had managed to cobble together. If she had time she would try and piek a few flowers and place them in the centre, in an old-fashioned drinking glass, thick, with bubbles caught up its sides. To begin with he used to push this decoration aside and stolidly chew, but he had come to expect them now, settling his nose into their haphazard midst before eating, lifting out a single stem, stroking his cheek with the tapering petals once his plate was empty. For the first time in her life she had begun to enjoy cooking. Before she went to bed she would take Da’s paper and cut out that evening’s recipe or cooking hint—vegetable rissoles, Guernsey Gache, frying-pan scones. She had quite a number of them now, tucked in the back of her appointment book, and when she wasn’t leafing through it, or sat by the window looking out across Lower Pollet and the eternal barber’s queue, wondering what the Captain might be doing and if he intended to see Molly that night, she would deal out the scraps of newspaper like a deck of cards, thinking about the ‘white waif as Da called him and the slow, reluctant manner in which he ate, as if the food’s texture and taste were of such an incomprehensible nature that he needed to savour each mouthful in order to come to some elementary under-standing of its configuration. “Pity we had to be starving before you bothered to learn how to cook,” her da had grumbled, but it was said with paternal admiration rather than displeasure, in recognition of the feminine and thus devious manner of her undoubted duplic-ity. Once home from her time with the Captain she would take out his leftovers, lay them on the table, add to them, reshape them, and have them waiting for this pale and wild creature who in turn stuffed the remnants (and like she, he always ensured that there were remnants, conscience overcoming desire) into those deep and curiously preserved pockets before bounding out into the night and the misunderstood dimensions of his billet.

They had managed to converse by now, the boy and she, though neither understood the other’s language. Gestures, mimes, single words, pictures drawn upon a sheet of paper, these were their means. She would watch him as he described his church burning, his journey to Wuppertal in the freezing cattle wagons, the shape of which he had drawn on the steamed kitchen window, the temperature of which he had indicated by the rubbing of his arms. She had hunched her shoulders as he described the building of the great tunnel, its doomed height, its vanishing length, its impenetrable darkness; the carts he had to push, the pickaxe he must wield, the ache to be found in his limbs and then, cringing in expectation, she would watch as he put his fingers in his ears and threw himself backwards, mimicking the explosions, the disfigure-ment, the death that came rushing out of its mouth. He drew crude crayon sketches of his living quarters too, the number of his shed, the number of bunks to be found stacked inside, the length of wood on which each man was required to lie, and she, comprehend-ing the confinement but not the squalor, had added in her mind’s eye a mattress, a blanket, even a pillow to that bare picture, for it was not within her remit to envisage a place to sleep without such comforts. They taught each other words, ‘bread’, ‘milk’, ‘mother’, ‘father’. “Mother?” she had asked and he had drawn the church again and the fire raging without. “Father?” she had questioned and he had pointed his arm down and had shot at the floor. She had feared to ask any other familial questions. Despite this setback they found their language entertaining as well as informative. She had begun to make him laugh. The other day she had been miming her occupation, wielding a kitchen pair of scissors, cutting imaginary toenails, holding her nose in imaginary disgust, and he had opened his mouth and laughed, not merely smiled but laughed out loud, his lips drawn back over his brown and broken teeth, his gums bleeding still from the cuts of bread crust and baked-potato skin, laughing not solely at her acting ability but at the very impossibility of her profession. It had gathered momentum, enveloping his throat and concave chest, invading his sunken belly, seizing his whole body in a lung-bursting lock. Soon he was doubled up, unable to stop, stamping his feet on the floor, banging his ribcage, clouds of cement puffing from his half-bent body, like dust rising from a worn-out carpet beaten on a line. He was swallowing laughter as a parched desert refugee might gulp down fresh water, choking on the very thing that, taken in moderation, might restore his dehy-drated life. And yet it was not laughter as she knew it. It wasn’t true what someone once said, that laughter is the same the whole world over. This had sounded different, more guttural, more animal:
foreign
: not hugely dissimilar to the Captain’s, though his was clipped by the order of his profession and the arrogance of his age. She had picked the boy up by the hinge of his stomach and sat him on her knee on the armchair by the stove. He had quietened in calming gasps, resting his head on the same breast that the Captain had so eagerly uncovered hours before, his spittle-flecked lips wetting the patterned cloth in the same aureoled spot which the Captain’s lips had marked, his hand resting underneath the swell where the Captain’s hand had rested. But unlike the Captain he lay quiet, touching not her body but the humanity within it, and she had placed the palm of her hand on his white encrusted head and with her breast flowering to the wet warmth, felt herself swoon with the sudden bloom of love and loss. So she went from laughter to laughter, from secret life to secret life, from the Captain’s athletic and addictive attentions in the late afternoon to the boy’s eloquent and exiled embrace in the late evening, two lives buried in her folds, both there by reason of capricious war, both nurturing her own needs. And thus practised in deception and dependence she began to want for armour.

The Captain drove in silence, past the cinema with its German film, up the hill with its German signs, the iron railings of the great school flicking past, the building gaunt and empty, save for a few workmen with ladders outside. She remembered when they had marched en bloc, masters and boys, to the quay and embarkation to England and the mad chaos of those evacuation days, scènes of indecision and panic, farms abandoned, houses with their keys left hanging in the back door, cattle unmilked, roaring with pain, meals left half eaten, fathers burying the few valuables in the back garden or leading their pets to the vets (four thousand cats and dogs had been destroyed in those few days, pausing only for the lorries to take the carcasses away), radios playing to vacated rooms, a sheet left halfway through a mangle, children’s scooters lying in the street; whole streets without a sign of life, as if a plague of Pied Pipers had descended and danced a whole population away. She remembered going down to the harbour that last morning, when the last ship was due to sail, working her away amongst the bad-tempered queues jostling for their money from the bank and insurance offices, emerging customers waving their twenty-pound limit in disgust, threading her way to a quayside littered with empty carts, nervous horses snorting in their harness, men trying to sell their cars for a couple of extra pounds (she had nearly bought one herself, two pounds he had been asking and she had the money in her purse, but in the interim, thinking foolishly what would her father say and where would she keep it and how could she afford to run it, someone had taken advantage of her hesitation and closed the deal for two pounds and ten shillings), a fight over an abandoned motorbike. She had sat on a coil of tarred rope and watched the pushing of backs and the spilling of luggage and the agitated cries of the wheeling gulls, and through it heard, as they all had heard, that pattering chattering sound as the children came down the road, skipping and scuffling and plodding forward with songs or sobs in their throat, two abreast, dressed in jerseys and raincoats, shorts and skirts, clutching brown-paper parcels and teddy bears, their mums and dads close by, those going with their children marching quietly behind, carrying what belongings they had managed to snatch in pillowcases and feed sacks, and those not, running alongside, calling, cajoling, darting in for a farewell kiss, pulling them out to tie a shoelace or plonk a woollen cap upon an unruly head. They had held their breath then, all of them, as they looked into this grey muffled crocodile and realized it was true. The island was losing its soul, and at that the activity resumed, more frantic, to leave this place and place one’s faith on England’s foreign shore. Da had wanted her to go with Kitty Luscombe, but she couldn’t, not with Mum the way she was. She’d helped Kitty patch up her clothes the night before, her father fussing over her as if she were a schoolgirl still, making her check and double check whether she’d got Mrs H.’s letter safe, if her embarkation paper was in order, counting and recounting the little sum of money he’d managed to put aside. She’d seen the two of them by the gangway that day, but hadn’t intruded, Albert patting Kitty on the back, then swiftly kissing the back of her hand, pressing it to his lips and then his heart before he handed her the small case and walked away. What was Kitty doing now at this very minute? she wondered. Not riding around in a two-seater convertible about to have sex with a German officer, that’s for sure, though perhaps she might be having sex with someone. War and danger did that to a body, even to someone as level-headed as Albert Luscombe’s daughter. It tingled the nerves, made you feel reckless inside.

The Captain changed gear and raced along Grange Road and the great houses of authority that hid behind the evergreen hedges and wrought-iron gates, then turned left down Queen’s Road, sounding his horn at a weary troop of shuffling infantrymen who stood back against the stone wall as they flashed past, the Captain acknowledging their courtesy, Veronica staring ahead, pretending that she was invisible to their whistling barrack-room taunts. At the crossroads he plunged over, hardly bothering to look left or right, taking the dog-leg of Prince Albert’s Road with wheels squealing. Once through the bend he pushed back the hem of her dress high over her bare knee, accelerating into the straight. She closed her eyes. She knew where they were going. It was not the quickest way, but it allowed him speed. It fed his batteries, and if there was one thing the Captain liked, it was to be fully charged up. At the end of the road he swung the car quickly to the right. She leant into him hard and stayed pressed up against him, and they turned once more, into the steep narrow streel, where halfway down he parked the car in a overgrown siding off Val Fleury Close, safe from prying eyes. She unbuttoned the flap to his pocket and eased in her hand. The key lay at the bottom, long and cold. She took it out and held it up to the light. It surprised her. It was shiny and new.