Slapton Sands (7 page)

The aerial pictures were of very good quality. They had needed to be, taken as they were for the purpose of precise geographic reference and plotting. They began to get grainy only when magnified to a point where the features they showed became so large they were abstract anyway, unreadable out of the context of landscape. They showed a beach and hinterland heavily cratered with shells. Even three winters after the end of the war, one of those winters very harsh, the violence done to the shore and the gravel lagoon beyond it was shockingly obvious. If men had been there when the shells responsible for this damage had exploded, she didn't see how they could have survived the barrage. Is that what had happened? Had an American cruiser bombarded American infantry on the beach during a live-fire exercise? Had the dead infantry been blown to pieces by their own fire power unleashed by their own navy? The pictures she was looking at meant that Alice Bourne could not dismiss this as a possible explanation of the casualties. But the Colorado veteran had made no mention of the carnage she was projecting from the epidiascope on to the wall. He'd mentioned sentries, strung out along the shore after the catastrophe, and he'd talked about the rain and how subdued the sea had been on that hungover April day. But he'd said nothing about the beach having been shelled. Before coming to England, she'd travelled back to his bar with her notebook and interviewed him at length. She would have to read the notes again, but recalling them now she was sure he had said nothing to her about the shelling of Slapton Sands.

It seemed impossible. If more than a thousand men had been blown to pieces there, he'd have seen body parts on the sand. He'd have seen dropped packs and water bottles and discarded rifles. There'd have been shattered landing craft at the edge of the sea and more listing, sinking in the water. But he'd seen, or mentioned, none of these things.

One of the Ordnance Survey pictures showed the hull of a Higgins boat hauled up on to the sand. Rust ran down to the sea from its corroded metal fittings in a trough behind the craft. It was submitting with ferocious speed to corruption, its hastily bolted-together panels crumbling and dissolving under the assault of wind and salt. Alice felt deflated looking at the wreck, felt for the first time that Champion might be right and that her trip to Slapton was nothing more than conceit and folly. What could she hope to find? What secrets could an English beach hope to surrender after thirty-two years of ravaging weather?

It was hot in the library, hotter over the epidiascope, with its little electric motor and its electric lamp and the faint smell of burn that always arose from machines that have been left to grow dusty, when someone switched them on and they started to hum and get hot. She got up out of her chair and went over to one of the large windows set in the south façade of the building, overlooking Canterbury. She was on the library's fourth floor, and from the campus hill the view over the city and the Kent countryside was panoramic, the projection of an epic film. But nothing much was happening on the screen. In the centre distance,
the cathedral rippled, spires and fancies lost to dissipating heat. Trees heavy with defeated leaves endured the sun. The Stour twinkled in a narrow strand whenever banks and bridges allowed a sight of the diminishing river. It was not hard to imagine Spitfires cartwheeling through the sky, barrage balloons strewn across it, smudges of smoke from wing-mounted cannon oily against the blue vastness.

She'd read that three million American servicemen had been based in England at various times between January of 1942 and December of 1945. American airmen had flown missions over Germany from US bases in East Anglia. An army of invasion had been trained in secret for the assault on Berlin through France. They'd come here from Maryland and Nebraska, from the Bowery and the Bronx and the patrician districts of old Boston and the race-hating, rancorous stew of the old South. The 29th Infantry Division had been in the South-West of England for more than a year and a half before finally leaving its shores for Omaha Beach.

She could do what Professor Champion wished and add her ten cents' worth to the dead debate about the causes of the Peterloo Massacre or the reason why President Nixon had escaped impeachment. Or she could travel to Devon to try to discover how more than a thousand American men brave enough to come halfway across the world to fight for freedom had died instead on one calamitous day on a stretch of the English coast.

‘Their story deserves to be told,' she said to herself, with
her head on the thick glass of the window through which she looked. ‘If nothing else, they deserve its telling.'

She turned away from the view. Across by a bank of carrels, two English girls were looking at her curiously. Probably think I'm bitching to myself about the lack of air-conditioning, she thought. Which in a building less than ten years old I'd have a perfect right to do. She went over and switched off the epidiascope and went to put the survey photographs carefully back in the map drawers where she had located them.

She had arranged to meet David Lucas after his early evening training session at the university gym. The session took place between five-thirty and seven o'clock. Alice was reaching the point at which any more of Champion's salient facts would come only with her imminent trip to Slapton. By six-fifteen she'd done as much as she honestly could in the library.

A walkway ran across the top of the gym building's interior. It was intended as a short cut to reach the upper floors of adjacent buildings. But it made an ideal viewing gallery, particularly if you didn't wish to be observed doing your viewing. She had arranged to meet David at seven-fifteen, after he'd had time to shower and change. Instead she drank a cup of coffee from a machine and got to the gym walkway fifteen minutes prior to the time when the boxing training was scheduled to finish. He was in the practice ring, sparring with a West Indian boy with dreadlocks like those worn by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.
He had on a sparring helmet. The sparring looked pretty lively to her unschooled eyes. The two boxers were trading punches under the vigilant supervision of a well-built, grey-haired man in a tracksuit who had one hand gripping a stopwatch and the other clenched in a fist around the top rope of the ring. Both boys were glossy with sweat, and David Lucas had red weals on his paler skin where he had been caught by the laces on his opponent's gloves when they closed and clinched before the man with the stopwatch shouted ‘Break!'

She watched three rounds of sparring before their coach finally ended the session. Then the boxers touched gloves and patted each other on the head. The dreadlocked boy spat his gumshield into the palm of a glove and said something that made David Lucas laugh and take out his own mouth guard and reply. They walked in these little anti-clockwise circles in opposing corners of the ring, cooling down, she supposed, all the time talking. Alice thought they seemed pretty friendly, considering what they'd just been doing to one another. Then David pulled off a glove and unbuckled his helmet. He peeled the thing off and handed it to the coach and looked up, blinking into the roof lights, at the gantry. His eyebrows and cheekbones and the bridge of his nose were streaked with Vaseline. The grease blurred his features in the flat glare of electric light. One nostril showed a thin trickle of blood. And his hair had been cut, cut off, sheared to within an inch or so of his skull. She recoiled slightly in surprise, and he grinned at her.

Once he had showered, they went back to Elliot College. He had bought a deadbolt for her door and window locks to fit at the flat in Whitstable. He'd borrowed tools for the job sourced by the college porters' office. He picked the stuff up from his locker, and she checked her pigeonhole for fresh correspondence. There was a bill for books from Foyles in London, where she had opened an account. There was a note from Professor Champion, too. She recognized his handwriting on the buff envelope.

‘You don't quite see eye to eye, do you?' David said as they walked the lane to the bus stop on the Whitstable road. He'd seen the handwriting on the envelope before she put it into her bag.

‘He has a problem, I think, with Americans.'

David nodded. ‘Stems probably from the problem he has with America.'

‘Who was the black boy you were boxing with?'

‘Cliff. Clifford Lee. Why?'

‘He's good.'

‘He's bloody good. He'll probably box in the Olympics.'

‘Where's he from?'

‘St Paul's.'

‘Is that like St Kitts, or St Lucia?'

David laughed. ‘No. It's in Bristol. Good job you're not doing your doctorate in geography.'

Her bedroom still smelled faintly of smoke. She thought it might be her imagination. But she saw David wrinkle his nose in something more than a show of sympathy. He went
over and picked the cigarette end out of the ashtray and held it up to the late light coming through the window. ‘No lipstick.'

‘It was a man.'

‘Yeah, you said.' He put the stub back.

‘It's a man's brand.'

‘It's weird, is what it is,' David said. ‘Really weird.' He put the canvas bag of tools he'd been given on the floor and took out a drill and started to look for a power point for its plug.

‘I could do that myself,' Alice said. ‘I'm perfectly capable.'

David was screwing a bit into the head of the drill. ‘We'll do it together,' he said. ‘It'll be quicker. And then, if you'd like, we'll go for a drink, maybe a bite to eat.'

‘Fine,' she said. ‘So long as it's on me.'

He triggered the drill in his hand and it whined and gave off a hot, oily smell. She picked up the ashtray and its contents and walked past him to the door.

‘Where are you going with those?'

‘To a bin. Any bin so long as it isn't mine. There's a palladin bin a ways along the sea wall.'

‘It's evidence.'

‘Of what, exactly? My dad was a cop. I'm getting rid of it.'

They had a drink on the breakwater outside the Neptune. After, they walked along the top of the beach towards Tankerton. It was almost nine o'clock by now and still light. The seafront houses got smaller the further they
walked from Wavecrest. They were fishermen's cottages, narrow, roofed in weathered wood, no two the same. The cooling shingle on the beach smelled of heat and tar and salt crystals caught the light of the sun here and there, as though someone had slipped silver coins between clusters of stones. You couldn't help but look at those twinkles of brightness, Alice thought. It was a longing for treasure. It was the avaricious impulse of a child.

‘You like the sea, don't you, Alice?'

She breathed it in through her nose and nodded. ‘I'm still getting used to the sea. I was brought up a long way inland. It's one of the things that fascinates me about Slapton Sands. Many, probably most, of those soldiers were seeing salt water for the first time when they embarked for Europe. Slapton must have seemed very different to them from what they were used to.'

David didn't say anything for so long that she thought he wasn't going to respond at all. ‘They crossed the Atlantic,' he said finally. ‘Jesus. In convoys. Chased all the way by U-boats. They'd have docked where? Liverpool?'

Alice nodded. ‘Some of them via Ireland.'

David was thoughtful again. ‘There's the sea and there's the sea,' he said. ‘Slapton Sands will seem very different to you from this.'

They ate dinner in the basement bar of the Pearson's Arms, seated near the fishtank on the wall, with its lurking population of taped lobsters and crabs. Alice watched David Lucas eat, which he did methodically, without comment
about the quality of the meal. He had good enough table manners but ate like someone taking on fuel rather than enjoying the experience of food. He was probably very hungry. The skin of his knuckles was still reddened from the blows he'd landed on his sparring partner. He looked once at the fishtank beside them and shuddered. Alice asked him what it was he was thinking and he shook his head. So she persisted with the question.

‘Cannibalism,' he said, wiping his mouth with his paper napkin, pushing his plate away. ‘If their claws weren't taped, they'd try to eat each other.'

She nodded. ‘How are you spending your long vacation, David?'

‘Working,' he said, brightening. ‘They're renovating one of the old sea forts in the Solent. Do you know about them?'

‘Built to repel French invasion.'

‘Very good.'

‘You surprise me,' she said. ‘I'd have thought you'd be travelling.'

He smiled. He looked younger with his hair cut short. ‘Subsidized by what?'

What was he? A year younger than she was? Two? ‘That's a Rolex on your wrist,' she said. ‘I thought Mummy and Daddy might pay.'

He fingered the watch, a big diver's model on a steel bracelet, turning the bezel so that it clicked with the calibrations, ‘This is my dad's. He's a diver. He works for a
French company prospecting for oil in the North Sea, and they supply them all with these. He's separated from Mum. She asked him for a contribution towards my college costs, and this turned up in the post with a note saying I could swap it for three hundred quid or the equivalent in any city in the civilized world.'

‘You don't see him?'

‘Not since I was fifteen.'

‘That's tough.'

He didn't say anything. His eyes were focused on a triangle of buttered brown bread on a side plate amid the debris of the food on their table.

‘None of my business,' she said.

‘No.'

‘Do you dive?'

‘Not since he left. I didn't enjoy it. Too claustrophobic.'

‘Boxing. Diving. Your dad sounds like something out of Hemingway.'

‘Except that my dad never wrote a book. I don't think he's even read one, to be honest. Unless you count those little Commando comics.'