Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  ‘It’s the last week of term,’ David said. ‘It’s a question of priorities, Alice. In twenty-four hours, you’ll be gone.’

  They went up to the university, where Alice sorted the post from her pigeonhole and left a note with the college porter with the telephone number and address of where she would be staying in Strete. Then they were off on the straight, pale road to London, heat ripple and patches of spilled oil the only thing to break the monotony, the road flat and flanked by banks of scrubby yellow grass and the occasional defeated tree. Heat was starting to liberate smells in the car that must have lain discouraged and dormant during its stay in the car park beneath Elliot College. Even with the windows open, the back of the car smelled funky, slightly ripe.

  ‘I know. A forensic scientist would have a ball back there,’ David said, putting a cassette into the tape player, guessing her thoughts.

  ‘Somebody’s already had a ball back there,’ Alice said.

  The tape was Van Morrison. Mention of forensics made her think of Sally Emerson. There had been a note from DS Emerson in her pigeonhole, asking for a contact number where she could be reached when she got to south Devon. That had surprised Alice. For reasons different from his, she shared Professor Champion’s view that there was no point in continuing to investigate what had happened at her flat in Whitstable. Nobody was going to be caught or punished for what had occurred. Nobody but herself would ever be held to account.

  Traffic was light on the London road, and even with the windows open and the faulty exhaust the music sounded great through the cassette player’s shrill little speakers. The song was ‘Domino’.

  ‘Van Morrison. Safe ground.’

  ‘More like hallowed ground.’ David laughed. He sounded happy. ‘Have you any idea how unusual it is to wake up every day in this country to weather like this?’

  She couldn’t believe it. They were going to have a weather conversation. She had read that it was chief among those subjects about which the British conversed most passionately. In fact, no conversation was considered complete, she’d been led to believe before her arrival, without a ritual mention of meteorology. She laughed herself, feeling their speed, the sun, the rhythmic thrill of the music they were listening to. She sensed already that this day would be one she would remember vividly, perfectly, for the rest of whatever time remained of her life.

  They drove through New Cross and Lewisham and Camberwell to get to Kennington and the Imperial War Museum. It was the first time Alice had seen these areas of inner London. She saw half-cleared terraces of slums and burned-out cars and violent, skinhead graffiti daubed on the walls of blocks of flats and public buildings. She saw poor people for the first time in any concentration since she had been in England. They gathered in clusters outside pubs and betting shops. They queued outside a post office, outside telephone kiosks and at bus stops. Gaudy displays of public art in painted friezes on lending library façades and gable ends portrayed a happy utopia grotesquely at odds with the general picture of decay, the mood of sullen animosity. Dub reggae thumped from the open maws of second-hand record shops. Shabby cars crawled in thick traffic under the heat. They had their names scrolled in rust-mottled chrome on their boots. Capri, Granada, Cortina. What did English car designers have against Italy and Spain? The architecture through which they passed was an alienating mix of late-Victorian decrepitude and 1960s brutalism.

  ‘You think this is bad, you should see the Elephant,’ David said.

  Alice nodded. She thought of her Will Hay film, of its cosy certainties and sleepy, monochrome charms. She thought of the ice-cream parlour in Tankerton, with its tabletops of marbled Formica and knickerbocker glory glasses so scratched by the edges of searching spoons that they had become opaque, as though their glass were frosted. She thought of the jukebox anchored in its cosy berth in a corner of the Neptune. England, she was beginning to think, was less a place than a series of assumptions. Its reality was so diverse and contradictory that you could gain no measure of the place. Looking at it in detail was like holding something too close to your eye, the way a child will when subjecting it to scrutiny. The object becomes blurred, abstract. You lose any sense of the size or nature of the thing. No wonder the Americans during the war were kept isolated from this country, kept safely away from its inconsistencies, its paradoxes and dismaying contradictions.

  ‘Is this part of London as dangerous as it looks?’

  David shrugged. ‘I’m not a native. But Peckham isn’t exactly the Bronx. Nobody has guns here.’

  ‘Except in The Sweeney.’

  ‘West London, mostly, The Sweeney,’ he said. ‘That’s according to Ollie, who’s from Wimbledon and claims to know.’ He smiled at her. ‘Wait until you get to the War Museum. In a previous life, it used to be a lunatic asylum. It was called Bedlam. Thus the origin of the term.’

  ‘Great,’ she said. She looked at her wristwatch. It was a quarter to twelve. They’d had only toast and coffee for breakfast, and the hot, fried food smells of south London’s street takeaways, through the open car windows, were making her hungry now.

  They stopped outside a café called Perdoni’s on Kennington Road. The café had a double frontage and bench seats and photographs of the fathers or grandfathers of the present proprietors posed outside the premises in an earlier part of the century. The pictures looked like they had been taken in the decades prior to the Second World War. While David studied a menu card, Alice went over and looked at one of them. A date had been inked into a corner of the border surrounding the print. It read 1929.

  They ate spaghetti bolognese with thick slices of crusty bread and drank carbonated mineral water that was cold and slightly salty and delicious after the hot, fume-filled crawl through south London. After, they ordered cherry pie and cream. Most of the other customers were cab drivers, coming in with their brass badges on loops of leather around their necks, adjusting paunches to the familiar, fixed gap between bench padding and table edge, their black cabs glossy with coach paint in sunshine in a static convoy at the kerb. After her food, Alice savoured the best cup of coffee she had drunk since arriving in England.

  The sun was at its apex, but there was a shallow awning over the frontage of Perdoni’s, so they could look at the burnished street, at the black cabs and passing traffic, at Kennington’s mix of hot pedestrians, from the relative cool of the café interior.

  ‘What happened to London’s Italians in the war?’

  ‘Interned,’ David said.

  ‘That must have been tough.’

  ‘Very, I would have thought. They were sent to Scotland. To internment camps. So there are a lot of Italians in Glasgow and Edinburgh.’

  Alice looked around the café. It was almost one o’clock. There was a queue now at the counter, where they sold sandwiches to take away. And the booths were filling up. There was a large, ugly, 1960s police station on the other side of the road more or less opposite the café. Policemen on their break sunned themselves in plastic chairs on a balcony running the length of an upper floor. Alice could hear policemen in the queue at the sandwich counter. They were not in uniform. But cop banter seemed to be recognizable in any language.

  ‘The Perdonis came back,’ she said.

  ‘The Perdonis had something to come back to,’ David said, nodding at the photographs on the wall.

  They paid the waitress and got up and walked out of the café into the bright day. They turned right and walked past a newsagent’s and a barber’s and a shop selling fruit and vegetables. Alice thought the precinct around the Imperial War Museum a very suburban setting for a building with such a grand title. But London was arbitrary like that, weirdly juxtaposed, a city that seemed to have made itself up as it went along rather than to have been planned. Also, the building they were headed for had once been Bedlam, a home to lunatics, a place of dubious entertainment for the wealthy in the days when mental illness was considered a spectator sport. And then the War Museum became visible, behind tall trees in parkla
nd bound by spiked iron railings.

  After their museum visit they walked back along Kennington Road and then turned on to Westminster Bridge Road and progressed until they arrived at the river. Alice looked down at the lapping water over the embankment wall. She looked down on to the great lions’ heads set into the stone of the river bank with mooring rings in their mouths. The bronze lions’ heads were tarnished green, and a high tide lapped at the rings in their mouths. On the radio bulletins and the television news, there was endless talk of water rationing and drought. In the newspapers there were pictures almost daily of the cracked beds of empty reservoirs. But the Thames today was high, the water close enough almost to stretch down and touch, its surface glittering with fabulous light in the sun, under the blue sky.

  Alice looked over at Westminster Bridge, with its bus traffic a vivid procession of painted toys, and, beyond it, through heat ripple, the Houses of Parliament. Soot and exhaust pollution had coated the building in layers of grime. Dark stains streaked the Gothic complications of its masonry. You could only guess at the original colour of the stone as you watched the building undulate and distort like a mirage. It was like that. It was like a mirage. Fabulously strange and strangely familiar in the heat and the light.

  They walked past County Hall in the direction of Blackfriars. They crossed Waterloo Bridge and walked along the north side of the river and crossed again over Blackfriars Bridge to head back towards Kennington Road and the car. Crossing Blackfriars Bridge, businessmen in dark suits and hats carrying briefcases and furled umbrellas passed them singly and in twos staring resolutely ahead. Most of them seemed pale despite the summer. Many of them wore three-piece suits in spite of the heat. Alice felt some of their affectations absurd; the watch chains arranged in fine gold links across tight waistcoats, the bowlers and trilbies, the absurdly redundant brollies. She felt a flicker of attention when they got level with her, or sensed it when a head snapped around after they got past. But she was used to this. Men had always looked at her. It had started before it properly should have. She had been thirteen when she had first become aware of the uninvited attention of men.

  She looked to her left, at the wharves lining the southerly side of the working stretch of the river, most of them seemingly derelict. Hooks hung on slack chains from cranes outside buildings marked with the neglect of abandonment. A few barges were still moored here and there. But they were rust-streaked, ragged tarpaulins taut over their empty cargo holds in a half-hearted gesture of proper upkeep.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  He had stopped and was leaning looking out over the bridge parapet. ‘About your boyfriend. Wondering what he does. Who he is. Whether the doubts are beginning to nag, three thousand-odd miles away.’

  The bank of the river beyond them described neglect. On the pavement and the road at their backs, all was energy and industry and urgent intent. ‘I’d imagine he’s pretty intuitive,’ Alice said. ‘It’s not a quality I’ve ever tested in him. Not until now, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘Really?’

  She took a deep breath. She shook her head.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Eighteen months.’

  David was quiet. Then he looked at her. ‘Poor bugger.’

  ‘He’ll survive.’

  ‘You’ll tell him?’

  ‘I’ll have to,’ Alice said. She took a step towards David. He reached a hand out for hers.

  They got the car and drove over Waterloo Bridge and along Kingsway and Southampton Row, north towards Euston.

  “Where are we staying tonight?’

  ‘Bloomsbury,’ he said.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Nothing special. A mansion block in Coptic Street. Grand once, I suppose. But the big rooms have all been partitioned off. It’s just upmarket bed-and-breakfast accommodation now. I stayed there for a week over the Easter vacation when I needed the British Museum.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have stayed with the Apache?’

  ‘Ollie’s parents barely tolerate him, let alone his mates. Besides, his claim that Wimbledon is the hub of the universe is only true for two weeks of the year.’

  ‘When it’s home to Jimmy Connors?’

  ‘Jimmy Connors. And his implausible socks.’

  They were headed for Hampstead Heath. Alice had requested a walk on the Heath, a look at the view. It was six o’clock by the time they got there and they climbed to the parched heights and she looked down on the city, through England’s haze of familiar heat, able to pick out Centre-Point, the Post Office Tower, St Paul’s.

  ‘It looks …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fabled,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘And we haven’t even had a drink. You should have maybe worn a hat in this sun, Alice.’

  They bought ice creams from a van parked on the Heath and sat on a bench and ate them. They heard and then saw Concorde on its steep descent to Heathrow. Alice thought about Pennsylvania, about Easton and Allentown and the little town of Emmaus, sitting on the edge of Amish country, where they had found her father at the side of a barn, bound by his own handcuffs and shot with his own gun through the side of his head.

  ‘Tell me about your dad.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘I was honest with you. I was, you know, on Blackfriars Bridge.’ They were more or less alone. They shared their high part of the Heath with only the odd dog walker. Alice was dry in the mouth from eating ice cream. She could feel ice cream and chocolate flake swelling in her stomach. Sugar had parched her tongue and made her teeth dry and squeaky against its tip.

  They could still hear Concorde. The aircraft had begun its supersonic flights earlier in the year, its fanfare muted by all the noise-conscious nations which had banned it from their airports on the grounds of noise pollution. It was a beautiful aeroplane, Alice thought. It was also incredibly, preposterously loud. How had they thought they’d ever get away with it?

  Alice bent over and spat on the grass between her feet.

  ‘I don’t believe you did that.’

  ‘Come on. Give me a break.’

  ‘You’ve got the manners of a hillbilly.’

  Alice nodded. She felt like putting her head in his lap. She slid up the bench and did so. He stroked her hair.

  ‘We should go.’

  She wanted to go to Chelsea, to the King’s Road and a pub where they played live music. They left the Apache’s minivan parked outside their hotel in Coptic Street and walked to Russell Square underground station. Walking towards the tube along Southampton Row with David, Alice was aware of how much this area must have changed since the days of the literary Bloomsbury of preconception and myth.

  Myth was the problem. Time encouraged distortion. Now, litter flapped and idled in the gutters of the city, drinks cans and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers and cigarette ends left there by London’s apathetic, strike-happy street cleaners. If you read the newspapers, London was in the grip of uncertainty, the mood militant among its public-sector workers and uneasy among a police force still fearful of a metropolitan bombing campaign similar to that the IRA had so bloodily inflicted on Birmingham. The government was moribund, the culture bankrupt, only the weather a cause of constant, predictable surprise as the freakish heatwave and subsequent drought threatened economic catastrophe. In theory, London was the grim capital of a country on its knees. Maybe it was best viewed from a distance, from the dreamy, arcadian heights of Hampstead Heath.

  On the way to the underground, they diverted at David’s insistence to a pub called the Sun Tavern in Lamb’s Conduit Street. It was quaint. She hadn’t wanted quaint. Quaint she could get by the hatful in Canterbury. Quaint could be had by the country mile in Bleen, in Tankerton and around. But he’d asked her to try the cider in the Sun Tavern. The pub had high, decorated windows. Their glass was elaborately engraved. The images were stylized and pagan, to do with druids and the worship of the sun. Late light poured in refracted beams through t
he glass. The pub had bare floorboards, and the scrumpy was drawn from large hooped barrels behind the bar. There was no jukebox. But music was coming from somewhere. It was Fairport Convention, Liege and Lief, Sandy Denny singing ‘Tam Lin’. Singing about lust, woods, malevolent faeries and their spiteful spells.

  ‘Scrumpy,’ David said, handing her a half-pint glass. ‘You won’t get this in Pennsylvania.’

  It looked like horse piss and smelled like vomit to Alice. But it felt like a drink, after a couple of mouthfuls, when it got into her blood.

  ‘How would you sum up London?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ David said. ‘I’m not a native.’

  ‘Come on. You’re an Englishman.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘In what terms?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She could feel the scrumpy in the heat thrumming through her. The stuff was strong. ‘In boxing terms.’

  David thought for a moment. ‘A heavyweight having a bad round,’ he said. ‘A great heavyweight, shipping too much punishment.’ He winked at her. ‘But the fight’s only halfway through.’

  Cultured Italians and culture-starved Americans made up most of the pedestrian traffic Alice saw as they resumed their walk. The thing was she could easily see these streets rain-drenched, winter-sodden, a homesick Katherine Mansfield chain-smoking Woodbines in the window seat of a tearoom watching T.S. Eliot ride by on an old sit-up-and-beg in bicycle clips. And they had been only the bit-part players. The principals shifted like heavy ghosts behind windows opaque with grime and faded nets. Bloomsbury in 1976 was an incongruous movie set. It smelled of street trash and Aramis aftershave and contraband Monte Christos smoked by affluent tourists from Chicago and Milan. It should have smelled of horse leather and books and brilliantine. Wouldn’t you know, she thought. The scrumpy had made her imaginative. She thought she was probably drunk on the stuff.