Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  Alice didn’t say anything. She knew all this.

  Emerson said: ‘Which begs the question: why did you come?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. My doctoral thesis concerns an event that took place here in England. Kent University has a strong history department and a number of distinguished specialists in American history. I couldn’t have done it three thousand miles away, not thoroughly, the way the subject deserves to be examined.’

  ‘When do you leave for Slapton Sands?’

  ‘In two days’ time. What do you think is happening?’

  Emerson looked out of the window. It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning. The sky was blue and the light already brilliant, intense. The ice-cream parlour’s door was open, and the warm, ozone smell of the sea mingled with the pink sweetness of candyfloss and buttery popcorn oil. A transistor radio sat on the counter between the window and the soft ice-cream machine. Elton John was beseeching Kiki Dee not to go breaking his heart. A piercing treble characterized the sound coming out of the little radio. The table between the two women was fissured in its plastic marbling with countless tiny cracks, mapped by age and grime. Alice could see fine, tiny hairs on the policewoman’s chin under a thin coating of foundation. The make-up had been hastily applied and was uneven over her skin. It occurred to her again that this was not a country equipped for the relentless exposure of detail obliged by this summer’s unearthly weather. England was a country that suited shadows and flat, diminished light. Exposed like this, it looked shabby and somehow amateurish. It looked fraudulent, not really up to the job of being what it represented to the world. Or to itself.

  Emerson had astonishing eyes. In this light, grey and yellow particles of colour flecked the green. Those eyes focused on Alice now, unblinking. ‘Student radicalism is usually confrontational,’ she said. ‘They’d sooner shake a fist or wave a banner in your face and scream slogans at you. Exhibitionism is a strong part of it. Subterfuge for them wouldn’t be stealing into your room insinuating subtle messages in the night. It would be setting fire to the contents of your pigeonhole with a cigarette lighter. It would be daubing graffiti on your locker door, dropping a dead mouse in there after forcing the padlock.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘We can dismiss Long John Silver, as you call him. He’s apolitical. His record collection alone pretty much rules him out as a sex pest. And he has a leg in plaster.’

  ‘Sex pests don’t listen to Genesis?’

  ‘No,’ Emerson said. She sipped her coffee. ‘Not as a rule.’

  ‘What do they listen to?’

  Emerson appeared to consider this. ‘Hawkwind,’ she said.

  Alice put her hands on the tabletop and half-rose to leave but sat down again when Emerson said: ‘The obvious suspect of course, is David Lucas.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing happened until you met him. The first incident occurred only after you had met him and he’d discovered you lived in Whitstable. He fitted the locks that failed to prevent the second intrusion. He finds you desirable, but sexually reticent. Maybe if he makes you feel vulnerable and grateful enough, he can get you into bed that way. You’re predisposed to thinking of him as the shining knight. Maybe he’s intelligent enough to be aware of that and callous enough to exploit the fact.’

  ‘I don’t believe any of that,’ Alice said.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Emerson said. ‘Except perhaps for the last bit.’

  ‘So I’ll ask you again,’ Alice said. ‘What do you think is happening?’

  Something softened in the policewoman’s posture, or expression, or perhaps in her tone. It was no one thing Alice could have identified, even in the bright shrillness of the ice-cream parlour and fully alert. But it was there, unmistakable, a sympathy when the woman spoke. ‘What I think is that you are alienated and homesick. I think there is some deferred grief from the deaths of the two people you loved most. The subject of your thesis is American dead in a foreign war, a theme bound to make you think of your brother. Your father died in violent circumstances, only relatively recently. Subconsciously, I think you are looking for a reason to go home. And you are providing it for yourself. There was no intruder, Alice. Not unless it was someone capable of walking through walls.’

  Alice didn’t say anything. She looked down at her hands resting on the tabletop. A skin was forming across the surface of the coffee in her cup. They put milk in it without waiting to ask whether you wanted milk in your coffee or not. They did it every damned time.

  ‘You’ve taken too much on,’ she heard the policewoman say.

  ‘Are you going to charge me with wasting police time?’

  Emerson laughed. It wasn’t unkind laughter. ‘I’m going to pay for a minicab and give you a lift up to the university, if that’s where you’re going.’ She closed her cigarette packet and unhooked her bag from the back of her chair and put her cigarettes and lighter away. She put the bag over her shoulder. Alice sat with her head bowed and her eyes fixed on the cracks and fissures of the tabletop.

  Emerson reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘Go home, love,’ she said. ‘Go home. The mystery of Slapton Sands will wait a while longer to be solved, you know.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Alice said, ‘I saw you shiver. A summer morning during what they keep telling us is the hottest summer in England for five hundred years, and I see you shiver in the room where I sleep. And I believe you smelled the smell, too. Dank and dead, like spilled fish guts from something that feeds on the bed of the sea.’

  *

  When she reached the university, Alice tried for as long as her concentration would allow to read about south Devon in the library. The pre-war economy there had depended heavily on agriculture and fishing. Both were little more than subsistence industries. They provided a few large-scale farmers and one or two fleet captains with a decent enough income, but Devon was neither a breadbasket for the British economy nor, obviously, the industrial powerhouse of the nation. Its prettiness was often enough remarked on, but tourist income was a scant, negligible consideration beyond those coastal towns equipped with promenades and piers. The residents of south Devon occupied villages and eked out modest livings. And its population growth had been catastrophically stunted by the casualties sustained among its young male population during the Great War. It had been a place in the early 1940s disproportionately high in its demographic ratio of elderly men, ageing widows and bereft mothers reaching pensionable age. Many of its dwellings had at that time still been without electric light. Indoor lavatories were a scarcity. The roads were ill lit, narrow, poorly maintained and with the signs removed and maps deliberately falsified to confound invading Germans, difficult to navigate. The railways were better. The trains had been primitive in terms of passenger comforts by American standards, but the rail network was comprehensive and left largely intact by enemy bombing raids. The trains ran frequently, if not strictly to timetable and always, at night, in the imposed gloom of blackout conditions.

  Entertainment was confined to the church hall and the pub. Religion and drink tended to exist as opposing cultural forces in America, but here they seemed to coexist quite happily. Perhaps this was because they didn’t compete. The church espoused the traditional values of community and nuclear family and faith. The pub was strictly a place for men. It represented a threat to family economy if a man spent all his time and wages there, but it wasn’t a place to which he strayed in search of adulterous adventure. Not in rural Devon, it wasn’t. The pub seemed to function there as a place of warmth and refuge as much as beer; a forum for debate and the exchange of information and opinion. Alice had long held the view that men were much more inclined to gossip than were women. The character of the English pub, its enduring popularity and unchanging nature, supported her in this belief.

  Much had remained the same, she thought, about England. But she thought south Devon in the early 1940s would have seemed a terribly alien and isolated place to the young men arriving there in uni
form from the States. This would be equally true whether they came from the wheatfields of Idaho or from the tenements of Little Italy. It was a place with a settled and unchanging population, where tradition meant much and any shift in the routine imposed by the cycle of the seasons would be interpreted as an unwelcome threat. The Americans were not there to protect the people of Devon from invasion. To the people of Devon, they were invaders. And this would have been particularly true for those forced at short notice to abandon their homes.

  Alice packed up and left her library carrel and bought a sandwich from the Elliot College shop. The sandwich comprised limp lettuce and sweating Cheddar cheese between slabs of white bread that had been dabbed at with margarine. Oh well. She ate it on the slope behind the college under the shade of a tree. It was one-thirty now. At two she had arranged the showing of a film in a small lecture room at the university’s Gulbenkian Theatre. One piece of begrudging advice offered by Professor Champion had been to look at the films of Will Hay and George Formby and Old Mother Riley if she really wanted to understand the England of the Slapton Sands era. But these films, though Formby’s were occasionally shown on television, were very difficult to view on demand. She had located and borrowed a copy of the Will Hay feature Oh, Mr Porter! through the college film society. Godard and Bergman being their usual fare, they’d been pretty sniffy about the request. They did agree to borrow it from an archive when she explained she wasn’t watching it in the hope of being entertained. But viewing the film still required a room, projector and technician to change the reels and balance the sound. She had to pay the technician an hourly rate to perform the task, adding some mysterious extra surcharge described to her as ‘ancilliaries’.

  Oh, Mr Porter! didn’t initially appear very promising. It was set in rural Ireland and had been directed by a Frenchman. But Champion said it was a good choice, a film that reflected the values of the 1930s in provincial Britain, poking subversive fun at such shibboleths as the Empire and the police. Not much changed between the 1930s and the 1940s, Champion told Alice. Not in south Devon it didn’t, anyway.

  Much to the obvious disgust of the technician, she found the film hilarious. She found herself wishing she’d bought popcorn along instead of a notebook. This version of England and its manners was sly and gentle and monochromatic and could have been set a hundred years ago. Men still took watches on chains from waistcoat pockets to tell themselves the time. Leisure clothing did not exist. Ceremony was stood upon by everyone at every possible opportunity. In its comic re-creation of a life its audience needed to recognize to find funny, the film revealed a quaint and primitive place low on clutter and amenities. The telephone was an object of terror and the wireless of wonder to its crafty, workshy inhabitants. Was this England? She left the theatre smiling, thankful to Champion, four pounds fifty lighter to the smirking technician as he let her out and spooled the feature back into its pile of tarnished silver cans.

  Will Hay was an old music-hall comedian who had starred in ten successful feature films between 1934 and 1941, each with the same two character actors in principal supporting roles. Hay apparently always played the pompous bungler. Graham Moffatt played the fat, pompous bungler. And Moore Marriott played the bungling, pompous codger. Alice recognized all three. They were not so much stereotypes as faithfully exaggerated portraits taken from English life.

  Had Devon been like Will Hay’s England? If it had, it must have seemed arcane and basic to its invading army of young Americans with their dollars and lust, their Jeeps and motorcycles, Hershey bars and bubble gum. The principal difference between then and now, she thought, having spent an hour and a half looking at the film, was that this was an England that had liked itself. It was its own idle, self-serving, pompously incompetent universe. It had charm, innocence and unsullied optimism. It filled you with nostalgia for something you had never experienced. Will Hay’s England had been comfortable with what it was and therefore inured to any urgency to change. Walking into the vaulting sunshine of the afternoon, momentarily blinded by it, she did not think that was anything like so true of the England to which she had come. She left the projection room very much looking forward to her first George Formby film.

  She wanted to see David Lucas. She wanted to see the chief suspect in the crime that the Canterbury detective was sure had been committed only inside her own troubled head. She didn’t believe she had done it herself, the grief-stricken somnambulist tapping out upper-case instructions to herself in the dark. Nor did she think David Lucas had anything to do with what she had awoken to find. She just wanted to see him. She didn’t even want to tell him about waking to the piece of paper gummed to her wall. She wanted company, that was all. And the company she most wanted, was his.

  David wasn’t in the gym, but Clifford Lee was there, hammering a malevolent tattoo in the heat on the heavy bag, his head rested on the cylinder of plumped leather as he shaped into a series of punishing hooks. Alice stood on the gantry above and watched him work. His punches spread staccato echoes around the gym. He worked with evident grace and a brutal economy with the delivery of his shots. But the grace was incidental. Anyone watching was watching violence, or at least a demonstration of violent capability. Eventually he stopped and raised his head. Sweat left an intimate smear on the bag where his brow had rested for the body work. He opened his mouth, gulping air, and looked up, grinning through his gumshield. Christ, she thought, he even does his bagwork wearing his gumshield, in this heat. Clifford Lee spat the guard on to the parquet floor and smiled at her.

  ‘Is he any good? Is he as good as you?’

  ‘Nah. He’s shit.’ Deadpan.

  ‘Really?’ She felt crestfallen, childish for feeling so.

  She had fetched tea for them from a vending machine in the entrance area of the gym. Clifford Lee was wrapped now in a tracksuit and towels. He was making weight, he’d told her. He blew on his tea as if to cool the brew. But he didn’t drink it. He just smelled it in gulps, gathered in the aroma under his nose.

  ‘Boxing’s more or less been outlawed now at the universities,’ he said. ‘There’s us. There’s Bath. There’s Oxbridge and there’s the army boys at Sandhurst. There’s Edinburgh in Scotland, Trinity over the water. That’s it.’

  ‘I don’t see your point.’

  ‘To get any competition, we have to go local. We have to go to the clubs in Dover and Folkestone and the like.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they take liberties with the college boys. Or they try to. Now, you take a liberty with Davey, and you pay.’

  Alice took this in. ‘So he is good?’

  Clifford Lee smelled his tea again. ‘Good isn’t quite the word I’d use. Bad is more accurate.’

  She nodded, not saying anything.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ Clifford Lee said. He inhaled steam off his tea. ‘Where will Ollie Deane be in five, ten years?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Alice said. She didn’t.

  Clifford smiled down at his feet, and his skin tightened over the bones in his face in a vision of premature age. ‘He’ll be an estate agent. Somewhere like Putney, Hampstead. He’ll sell posh properties in that public school drawl. He’ll have an occasionally unfaithful wife, attend London—Irish home games and buy his two-point-four kids a pedigree puppy.’

  ‘Breed?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know?’ He shrugged. ‘Jack Russell. Irish Wolfhound.’

  ‘Kids’ names?’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Come on, Clifford. You started this.’

  ‘Ben. Josh. Rory.’

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘God help them,’ Clifford said. ‘Celia. Sophie. Alice.’

  She laughed. ‘And David?’

  ‘Five years from now? I don’t know. A mercenary. A priest.’

  They were silent for a while. Alice wondered where Clifford Lee would find himself in five years from now. She supposed pretty much wherever he wanted.

  ‘He says your speciality is
the American occupation of Britain during the Second World War.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Invasion, my grandfather called it. That’s what it seemed like in the South-West of England, he said. He was a merchant seaman on the convoys. He said there were a lot of Yanks in Bristol.’

  ‘Are you interested in the war?’

  ‘Not particularly. You know how it is. When people get older, they like to reminisce. Very fit, the Yanks, he told me. Well fed, they were. Strong. He was invited to spar with their boxers sometimes. Fought the odd exhibition bout.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware inter-racial boxing was allowed.’

  ‘I don’t know that it was,’ Clifford Lee said. ‘My grandfather is white.’

  Universities were funny places, Alice thought. On the way to the gym she’d walked past the campus bookshop, where they did a brisk trade selling Arthur Rackham fairy posters to young adults toiling for competitive grades in pure sciences. From where she sat she could hear the faint chanting of the anti-apartheid protestors outside the campus branch of Barclays Bank. There were always at least three or four students picketing the bank, and since she’d been here she’d never seen a black face among them. When Clifford Lee shifted where he sat, muscles like lazy grapefruit ripened on his upper arms.

  ‘Aren’t you going to drink that tea?’

  ‘I’ll gain less weight just enjoying the aroma. Aren’t you going to ask me where he is?’

  She was about to knock on the door when she thought she heard her name spoken from within. Her hand hesitated. The voice had belonged to Oliver. It was Oliver’s posh, corrupted drawl.

  ‘And those men’s jeans they all wear that make their arses look like crisp bags. And Earth shoes. Make their feet look like they’ve been put on back to front, Earth shoes do.’