Island Madness (38 page)

Fourteen

A
lbert runs up the graveyard cradling the small scrap of paper on which is written the message. It is creased and thumbed and the writing is smudged but it is the most sacred object he has ever held. He has shown it to everyone he has met, even those who barely know him.
Dearest Dad, Am in the best of health. Thinking of you always. Keep smiling. Kitty
.

For a while, fifteen, twenty minutes on the journey to the graveyard, he dropped his guard and shared his joy with whoever was at hand, showing them the folded letter with the printed lines and Kitty’s childish hand, running his trembling fingers under the words, asking, as if he meant it, whether they had heard from any of their own. Without realizing it he has returned the island to its old ways, revisiting the discarded laws of easy familiarity and friendship.

‘Am in the best of health’ he had read with a pride that momentarily had quite overwhelmed his entrenched distaste, and there was no one who did not admire the note and wish him and his daughter well, those on better acquaintance vouchsafing that Rose would have been pleased too. “That’s where I’m off to now,” he told them, bringing his fingers up to his beret as he hurried off.

“Am in the best of health, Rose,” he repeats. “Our own dear Kitty is in the best of health, thinking of us always.” He looks out across the graveyard, recalling all the folk he has known, friends, neigh-bours, a few enemies. He tells them too. “She is safe,” he announces, “as is my other little gift to the world.”

He is proud of his gift, proud how he engineered it, a length of cast-iron drainpipe dragged from its Hautville mooring, sawn to a manageable length and primed on that long mahogany table. It is irrevocably marked, that table, the ancient depth of its gloss scuffed and scratched, smeared with rust and iron filings and the fingers of a fanatic, for although Mrs H. does not realize it, that is what he has become. Mrs H. had protested at first at Albert’s determined vandalism, explaining the history of it, the lines of nobility that had dined, quaffed and wenched across its burnished length, but he had brushed aside her complaints, telling her that these unexpected indentations too would find their way into guide books, how future generations would shuffle through the house to marvel at these historie scars, the cuts where he had sliced through the electric wire, the scratched circles where the drainpipe had been stood up on its end, the chip on the side where the claw-hammer had missed its mark. He did not tell her that there would be no such visitors, that the table and all the other contents of this house would be destroyed along with the rest of the island. All he had told her was King and Country and a war brought to a quick and righteous close. And she had believed him.

He has constructed this device in the same fashion that he used to make all his bombs, the only difference being that this one was bigger. They used to have such fun making them, him and his brother and young Ned, chucking them in, waiting for the earth to thud and bleeding rabbits dragging themselves out of the smoke-billowing holes. He has not been able to gauge the extent of this bomb’s power, this mixture of sugar and weedkiller, these bags of six-inch nails and rusting bolts, clinking lumps all packed into jagged cans that once contained tinned peas and sweetened carrots, but it will make a mess of them, no doubting that.

How had it come to him, this plan which will bring about the finale of his world? Lidichy, Lidichy, that was the start of it, that haunting name. He had often wondered what it must have been like, this village that has been handed around the drawing room like a game of pass the parcel, perhaps like one of the hamlets here, a little street, a few farm buildings, a church, a close-knit huddle for a few hundred souls. Before all the kerfuffle, when the Major was still in charge, they used to have this argument regularly about Lidichy and the bigwig that the partisans had killed nearby, blown up or shot, he could never quite work out which, though he took a week to die, he knew that. Whatever, the day he died they had surrounded this village, this Lidichy, sealed it off from the rest of the world and wiped it and those who lived there clean off the face of the earth. Didn’t matter that the poor sods had nothing to do with it, it was like, “Sorry, chum, you’ve got to go.” The Major used to get in a terrific bate about it, the crime of Lidichy he called it. The others had got fed up with him rabbiting on. The name had stuck in his own mind, Lidichy, and thinking of it, this Lidichy which used to exist in flesh and stone and now did not, he began to dweil on its demise, brought about not through military design or an accidental misfortune of war but for example. Leaning out of the Captain’s window one morning, flapping his bedclothes against the brickwork, it came to him that this was what Guernsey deserved to become, an example. Wasn’t that what the Germans had planned for it anyway, that the Channel Islands should be a model Occupa-tion? That’s what this kid-glove stuff was all about, and see what a model it had become, the shame his countryman had brought upon his home: married women lying abed with the enemy while their menfolk perished on the high seas; young girls strutting down the High Street, poxed or pregnant, it was all the same to them; men tipping their caps to them, queuing up to do their dirty work. Everyone had turned rotten. He can feel the start of it even in himself, softening his moral backbone, turning his stubborn will to sap. The island needs grubbing out, like he would a bed of diseased fruit canes. Husbandry they used to call it, dig the lot out and burn the earth; the spirit of Lidichy. He had put his hands on the window sill and looking out had seen, stretching out over the back lawn, a vision of Guernsey emerging out of the mist, a Guernsey overgrown, a Guernsey denuded, water swilling in and out of a harbour of abandoned moorless boats, the town deserted, packs of dogs scavenging among the rubble, whole streets blown apart, farmhouses burnt, a forbidden island with nothing but wild flowers and gorse enveloping the ruins. Then the mist had cleared and in the solitude of the sea below he imagined a rowing boat and cloaked men in black raising their oars as the craft glided in to shore—a new generation hoping to start afresh. He saw his Kitty standing in the prow, Kitty beside her man, Kitty with his grand-children in her arms.

During those weeks of the Major’s absence, the Captain had thrown caution to the wind. All-night poker games, drinking sprees, lewd pyjama parties, Molly ensconced there permanent, young men smelling of hair oil and posing for Bohde’s camera in buiging leather pouches. Ernst had invited himself over, putting his feet up on the drawing room fireguard, holding forth as if he’d just bought the place. He and the Captain had seemed rather hugger-mugger too, talking for hours in the Major’s study behind a firmly shut door, glasses of Mr Hallivand’s special brandy to hand.

Lidichy, Lidichy, Arrivaderchi Lidichy. It would be too much to ask. Then one morning Molly came skipping down the stairs singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and demanding breakfast in bed for her and the Captain. Half-naked she was, with those pimples that passed for breasts poking out underneath for all to see. There was something about that part of her body that he found almost obscene, as if she was not a proper woman at all, and the thought of a man enjoying her, touching those boyish things, kissing them, exciting them, had always disgusted him. Why she couldn’t wear a dressing gown like everyone else he didn’t know, except of course he did; to cause him maximum embarrassment that’s why, to flaunt in his face the fact that she was the new mistress of the house and that he’d better remember it.

“We had the most wonderful evening last night, Albert,” she had said, starting up the careless humming again, and didn’t he know it, his bloody boxroom rattling like he was strapped to a tramline half the night. “Your birthday, is it, miss?” he had said, knowing full well it weren’t, and she had stood on her toes and yawned, “Oh no, not
mine
,” smirking at him like she’d just won the pools. “Well, whose, then?” he had asked, irritated, not really listening to the answer, and she had come up close, closer than a woman should in that state, and tapped him on the nose. “Never you mind, Mr Albert Nosey Parker. You’ll find out soon enough.”

He knew all their birthdays, the Major’s, the Captain’s, Molly’s, Isobel’s. They all needed their little parties and their little birthday cakes, didn’t they? Molly’s twenty-seventh had been in June, a fancy-dress extravaganza down on the beach, with the lookout guards on the cliff opposite removed for the night so that they couldn’t tell their mates the fan and games that went on, Albert standing by the French windows with cups of hot chocolate as they feil in at three o’clock in the morning, drunk as lords and twice as randy. So whose birthday, then? Some special toff from France no doubt, with more raids slated for the Villa’s cellar. He’d thought no more about it, but later that morning, on his way to the barbers, he had passed by Hendy’s the stationers and there in the window was this dirty great painting of Hitler himself, sitting on a horse with a lance stuck in his mitt, dressed up like some knight in shining armour and underneath
Mein Kampf
in magazine form. In English. To celebrate the Führer’s coming birthday they were giving away ten complete sets. All you had to do was to fill in your name and address and wait for the draw. He had stopped and looked at the picture and the book beneath and thought again of Molly singing and smirking and Ernst’s and the Captain’s little huddles, one the man in charge of fortifications, the other in charge of security. If he was coming, that’s what he’d be doing, wouldn’t it, inspecting fortifications? He had walked into the shop and picked up the form.

“Never thought you’d be interested,” Mr Hendy had sneered.

“Aye well, might as well find out what the bugger’s on about,” he had replied. “When’s the draw, then?”

“When it says.” Mr Hendy was sniffy. “April 19
th
. Winners to be announced in the
Star
, though I wouldn’t like to find my name on that little list.”

“Many takers?” he had asked.

“Strangely enough you’re the first,” and folding his arms Mr Hendy had moved away to the back of the shop, where he glowered at him with displeasure. Albert had filled in the form and stuck it in the empty box.

Watching had been part of his livelihood, gamekeeper, gardener, gossip, they all needed sharp eyes and sharper ears, and since he has become their caretaker he watches all the time, keeping his face as natural as his masked duplicity allows. It does not do to be too stony-faced, for granite imposes a wariness on those in its presence, and above all he wants them to relax, to feel at home, to let their guard down. In that way the diary he has kept is an accurate portrayal of what they have done and what they have said, and such is the plasticity of his demeanour they rarely try to hide anything from him these days. He is wallpaper, he is furniture, he is part of the Villa’s bricks and mortar. Molly had guessed right that morning when Ned had been round, for before the bomb he had thought it important that someone should record these treach-erous cavorting years. When the house feil quiet he would go to his room and describe as best he could the arguments, the petty jealousies, the brazen lusts that he had witnessed the day, the night, the week before, and leafing through his record he has discovered how very predictable they have become, how easy it is to foretell their hourly inclinations, and how he has become the conductor of this deranged and deluded orchestra. By mastering the art of antici-pation he has acquired the ability to direct movement and though neither the Major, the Captain, nor Bohde (his most suspicious foe) realize it, it is he, their stubborn and trustworthy caretaker, who they keep up at all hours, who is forced to listen to their private worries, who bears their humorous entreaties of goodwill with a stok resistance which they can only admire, who runs this house, he who sets their rhythm and has them trotting up and down these stairs. He knows them all now, has learnt all their little secrets; alone in their rooms, dusting, shaking, sweeping, collecting their dirty washing, he has found them all out; the silver spoons and napkin rings that Bohde has tucked in amongst his underwear; the framed photograph the Captain has secreted underneath the lining of his sock drawer, of him in some vast American city, standing against a railing with skyscrapers in the background and a young woman leaning on his arm, confetti on them both and behind that photograph, a folded marriage certificate dated 1933 to one Marion Berger of Brooklyn Heights; finally there are the Major’s pencil sketches; Isobel lying naked on his bed, sitting with nothing but a shawl wrapped round her staring out of the bedroom window, and though he disapproves, his disapproval is nothing compared with what the Major’s superiors might think of the cartoons of their Führer and his leering cronies, drawings of what he takes to be the Major’s homeland with the dark shadow of the swastika racing over the landscape.

All these things he knew but until that moment when he returned to the Villa with an idea of who the birthday guest might be he had not gone on the offensive and that was what was needed, for a plan came into his head, a design of such diabolical ease it made him feel giddy, like he had just stepped off a boat. He stood stock-still in the drawing room, the name Lidichy ringing in his head, thinking how it could be done. Lidichy. Lidichy, the spirit of Lidichy. If that was what they did in memory of one of his favoured sons, what would they do to an island which tried to assassinate the man himself? Even if he did not succeed, even if he merely maimed him, or killed part of his entourage, what a cruel and merciless fury would be unleashed? But first confirmation was needed, confirmation that this was not the imagining of an enfee-bled old man. It came in drips and drabs, nothing definite; the Captain being fitted for a new uniform, Molly in an almost permanent state of sexual excitement, a sudden surge of activity down by the harbour. It was seeing the soldiers unloading a large foreign car, seeing the sweat and muscle of them, with the crane swinging, men shouting, that finally drove him to action of his own. Coming back to the Villa and realizing that Molly and the Captain had decided to take an afternoon bath, he stepped into the Captain’s room and lifted his diary from the top pocket of his jacket, the sound of water gently slapping, the low mutter of voices, nervous assurance. Leafing through February and March, the pages were so thin he feared he might tear one in his haste, but then there it was, April the 20th, studded with exclamation marks, with a time, 11.30; the confirmation of his dreams. That was all he needed. He replaced the notebook quickly, unable to remember which way up it had been, and was halfway down the stairs before he remembered that he had not rebuttoned the pocket, shutting his eyes and pulling himself back up, only to meet the Captain coming out of the bathroom door.