Island Madness (35 page)

“I just told you. He spends most of his time out in the garden, gazing up at the stars.” Veronica paused. “He looks lonely, unhappy.”

“The Major does not understand the meaning of this war. He would like to see it finished.”

“Wouldn’t we all?” she questioned.

“No. Some of us would like to see it won. For him it is an unfortunate interlude which he hopes will not interfere too much with his comfort. So, he has the best bedroom, the study is for his own private use, though he does nothing in there except write letters home.”

“I thought that was what studies were for.”

The Captain ignored her. “He always takes the first helpings of food, the first hot water for the bath, the first to have his tunic pressed, his boots polished, the first to have the use of Wedel.”

“Well, he doesn’t have the first use of me,” she joked.

Zepernick turned on her with venom.

“No? But that was of his choosing, was it not, not yours? You offered yourself up like a bar of Swiss chocolate.”

Veronica felt her face flare. She tried to deflect the blow.

“Anyway, what do you expect, he’s your superior,” she reminded him.

“Under one roof we should be comrades. But the Major does not see this. It is not only that be thinks himself better than me, but he believes that he is more cultured, that only he can appreciate the finer things. The wine in the cellar, for instance,
he
has to swirl around in his glass and pronounce good or bad, while I am expected to swallow it back in one gulp. The servant, Albert, thinks the same. And Mrs Hallivand? She can hardly bear to be in the same room as me. She tries to hide it but she is glad Isobel is dead. She has the Major all to herself now. In the afternoon the two of them sit in the drawing room like Adam and Eve overlooking some ruined garden of Eden. Ah, the Major! This island!” and he said it with a bitterness which Veronica had heard reverberating in her own inner voice, the times she had spent holding her tongue in front of Gerald, not daring to betray her life and her language, the look his mother had given her the one time she had been taken there to tea, looking askance at her shameless figure and her ruby red mouth, thinking, I know how you entrapped my poor innocent boy, you young hussy, and she, looking back defiant, had plucked at the swollen lapel of her blouse, as if to say, well, yes, that’s how we do it, one way or another, even a withered old prune like you, remembering too the revulsion on Lentsch’s face when she had bent down and placed herself loose in his hand, realizing that she too had not forgiven him for insulting her, for pushing her away in disgust. So she had taken Zep’s hand and pressed it hard against her, as if to say that’s what I want you to be, that’s what I want, a man who will be as heartless in love as he must be in war, who will offer me nothing but the time he is with me, understanding that that too may have its needling edge.

In the hallway the Captain propelled her to the stairs. The climb was always erotic, whoever went first. They kissed on the first landing, his mouth rough against hers, before breaking off. Up at the top the light was brilliant. The sun shone from the west down upon the steep-stepped red and ochre roofs and the hooting harbour, and to the left, tumbling down to the aquamarine sea, was the dark olive mystery of the wooded cliffs. It was an eagle’s nest there were in, and they the monarchs of the sky. He had brought two bottles of German wine, white and fruity. He stood them on one of the glass cases and strode to the window, turning to her, pulling her in front of him, pressing his hardened sex up against her buttocks, kissing her neck. He put his hands round and clasped her breasts.

“Careful.”

“Great things are happening to this island,” he said, swaying into her. “Great things. I used to think here was nothing, a backwater. But see?”

His arm swept over the panorama. She did not see. She rubbed herself against him from side to side.

“I feel like drinking,” he said. “What a day!”

As was their custom now, they moved the chaise longue from the back of the wall, up to the glass window. Veronica sat on one end. The Captain put his head in her lap and swung his feet up. Veronica slipped her hand inside his shirt. The bottle stood on the floor.

“I am thinking of moving out of the Villa altogether,” he told her. “The Major has come completely undone. He is to be arrested.”

Veronica pulled her hand out.

“Arrested?”

The Captain leant over and gulped down another glass.

“I cannot tell you everything. You understand this, you are not like Molly, whose mouth is almost as wide as her—” He checked himself in time, but Veronica didn’t mind what he said about Molly, so long as it was uncomplimentary. “I have a story to tell. Listen.

That morning Bohde had come tiptoeing in with Major Ernst. The two of them were carrying three pictures which Bohde had decided to hang in the hall. Portraits. One of the Air Marshal of France—” an ugly looking bloke, “ Zep conceded, one of Albert Speer, and most importantly of all—he gulped the epithet—in celebration of His forthcoming birthday. The Commander-in Chiefs eyes, Ernst had pointed out, were like two bullets flashing from the muzzle of a gun. They decided to hang them in the corridor, where everyone might see them, on the bare wall facing the doors to the main rooms. They got a chair and some nails and after much banging and hammering and standing back, hung all three up, Speer on one side, the Air Marshal of France on the other and…in the middle. Zepernick smiled. He found the next part of his tale amusing. He took Veronica’s hand and placed it back beneath his shirt. With her other hand she unbuckled his belt. He moved once, raising his hips, then resumed his story.

As Ernst and Bohde stood back, admiring their handiwork, they suddenly realized that on the opposite wall, facing the three portraits, were two of Mrs Hallivand’s favourite paintings, which Lentsch had moved from the drawing room when first they arrived, pictures which were quite unfit to be placed opposite Albert Speer or the Air Marshal of France, let alone the leader of the German nation. Both of them featured girls of oriental disposition, with dark skin and slanting eyes, flaunting their nakedness by some Arabian watering hole. So Bohde called for Wedel and told him to take them down. Wedel was hesitant. More than his life was worth, he said. The Major was very particular about where those went. Whereupon Ernst flew into an almighty rage, Bohde dancing up and down the stairs egging him on. “Do you think that it is right that our leader should look upon these degenerate deformities?” he cried, and wrenched one of them off the wall, cracking the frame and the glass in the process. Bohde, rather chastened, told him to calm down and lifted the other off its hook. Together they carried them out into the coal shed. An hour later Lentsch returned for lunch, stomping through the French windows. Though he said he’d been out swimming his breath smelt as if he’d been drinking.

“This is a bad thing to do…” and here the Captain hesitated. “Things are happening here which need the utmost attention and discretion.” So he marched in and sat down to lunch. Bohde sidled into his chair, Ernst next to him. Not a word was spoken. Halfway through his soup the Major noticed the picture of Albert Speer staring at him through the open door. “Who put that up?” he demanded, and when Bohde told him that it was a gift from Major Ernst he threw down his napkin and said, “Well, I’m damned if I’m going to have his boss spying on me while I’m having dinner,” and got up to close the door, when he saw the other two. He stepped into the hall.

“Where are the Russell Flints?” he cries.

“The Flints?” Bohde tries to look innocent.

“The pictures!”

Zepernick waves his hands in the air. “He is screaming now.”

“I had them taken down,” Ernst tells him calmly. “They are not suitable.”

“Not suitable! Not suitable! Not suitable for that—“ and with that he marches back into the hall, takes each one off the wall and smashes them one by one against the wall. The Air Marshal, Albert Speer and lastly…” The Captain shook his head, hardly daring to give voice to the blasphemy. Veronica didn’t see the problem.

“Bit over the top, I grant you, but they’re only pictures.”

The Captain touched her cheek, saying, “You must understand, Veronica, that this picture is more valuable, more sacred than everything in this house. It would be the same if one day Mrs Hallivand came to church and found the vicar with a boy on the altar. Ernst was on the phone immediately. It is very bad for the Major, considering the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

The Captain ignored her question. He straightened up and poured himself another glass.

“So Ernst will move in soon, Bohde hanging on to his coat-tails. I will find a smaller place, of my own perhaps. However, before I go…” He looked at her closely. “I thought tonight you might like to accompany me to the Casino.”

“The Casino.” She felt her heart race.

“Yes, and afterwards, if things have quietened down, perhaps you would like to come back to the Villa. For a late supper and a nightcap.”

She could not believe it. He was asking her back to the Villa. She did not know what to do, whether to fling her arms around his neck or to appear calm and indifferent. She wanted to do both. She wanted to be calm and indifferent but she wanted to kiss him too! The Villa! Unable to resist, she leant across and kissed him, opening up the sweet tang of wine that ran loose in his mouth, pushing herself on top of him, struggling out of her blouse and brassiere, his lips travelling greedily down, sucking in great swollen mouthfuls of her as the boy intruded suddenly on her thoughts, irritating her, he has no right, this boy, to interfere with her in this way, why should she think of him when she had the Captain lapping hungrily at her breast. She had tried to persuade him to have a wash the other day, had lit the gas to her father’s fury and boiled kettle after kettle, dragging the tin bath close to the fire, rigging up the little curtain that she sheltered behind when Da was around, but when she had showed him he had recoiled, not from the prospect of soap and warm water but for the danger it could bring him. “The guards,” he said, pointing a finger to nis head, indicating thought, and then of course she understood. A clean boy would be noticed, a clean boy would be singled out and strung over the rafter he had told her about, where others have been beaten, the blood running down onto the floor until sometimes…he dropped his head. Did he mean pass out or die? It was unimaginable. It annoyed her sometimes the way he exaggerated his stories in order to gain sympathy, yet only the day she’d seen a foreign being kicked all in a heap by one of the Todt officials before being slung in the back of a lorry and left there all day. Horrible, simply horrible, but there were bound to be one or two sadists like that in every army, and there’s no knowing of course what the foreign might have done, and pushing over the loaf for the boy to cut it himself she began to question the wisdom of even feeding him, for there was colour coming back to his cheeks there was no doubt of it. Wouldn’t they notice that and wonder why? Beat the truth out of him. When he had gone she had stripped off herself and sat in the tepid water, scraping the sliver of soap under her arms, thinking how it would feel to wash the dirt from him, feeling the transformation as his rough patchy skin grew soft and glowing, the stink of his imprisonment replaced by the scent of perfumed soap, his clothes, shirt, trousers, jacket discarded and in their stead Victor Hugo’s silken dressing gown the Captain liked to wear.

She pulled Zepernick’s head away.

“You’ve picked a fine night to ask me, I must say,” she murmured, banishing the boy back to his hut. Oh, the Villa!

“Why, what is wrong?”

She digs him in the ribs.

“Tomorrow, Zep! The first day of the show. You haven’t forgotten, have you? You promised.”

“Ah, yes. I forgot.” He approached the subject cautiously. “Molly will be there, remember.” Veronica stiffened.

“No, no. You are not to worry. I have spoken to her. She will be with Major Ernst that evening.”

“Ernst?”

“Yes. It is all arranged. She belongs to Ernst now. He has made it plain. If I wish to continue here…”

“What does Molly think?”

“It does not matter what Molly thinks. If she hadn’t been so…visible.” He pulled her close. “And you, you must not do this, not show your beauty to everyone all the time. Otherwise I might lose you too.” He stroked her hair. “It is you now for me. Does that please you? And perhaps, if Molly is very upset, I could meet her secretly, like I see you now.”

“Thanks very much!”

“It was a joke, Veronica! Don’t be jealous. It is not good to be jealous in such circumstances.”

He sat up and started to take off his shirt.

“The Casino will be fun tonight. I have told them I am going to try and drink the boot again. No one has tried twice and succeeded. But I will. Now come and give me a good fuck, there’s a good girl—”

“The boot?”

“It’s a drinking tradition. It looks easy but it is not. It also makes you quite drunk. The last fellow, Schade, feil down and cracked his head open.” He caught her look of concern. “He was a fooi, anyway. He was the one who was involved in the black market, with Herr Poidevin and his daughter.”

“Poor Elspeth, yes.”

“You know her?”

“Everyone knows Elspeth.”

“She was lucky, her and her father. If I had my way they’d be up in Fort George. They know more than they say. Not only about the smuggling. This matter over Isobel and her father. It does not fit right. Any other time and I would not mind. But with certain other events and the Major acting so strangely, it worries me. I fear they might all be connected. The cement in her mouth. Her dress. The jacket and hat missing. She wore them that afternoon and yet they have vanished. What happened to them? Is someone wearing them now?”

He moved to her once more but she pushed him away. She knew what she had to do. This would be her one chance. She could feed him this morsel in the same manner as she fed him her flesh. It would be the seal of her success, the stamp in her passport, the key to the Villa’s door.