Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  The King’s Road pub, when they got there, was hot and chaotic. Alice had endured an awful lot of what the natives happily described as pub rock since her arrival in England. Pub bands aped Bad Company, Thin Lizzie, Led Zeppelin, of course, and sometimes American offenders like Lynryd Skynryd and the Allman Brothers. Amplification substituted for talent, dry ice for stage presence. It was appallingly depressing and disappointing, given that the Brits had fashioned the rock template. But she’d heard alarmed rumours of something original and new coming out of west London.

  Alice didn’t think that rock’n’roll was going to save the world. She had no time at all for distant millionaires performing before vast audiences, regardless of how badly they trashed their equipment on stage, or how introspective their lyrics could sound. She loved the English word, ‘wanker’. And she thought it wonderfully applicable to someone like Pete Townsend of the Who, smashing a Gibson guitar worth hundreds of pounds into a stack of Marshal amps before an audience of paying customers who earned less than the guitar was worth in a year. She thought it equally descriptive of Bob Dylan, whose appetite for protest songs had not stopped him indulging his wife’s architecture hobby to the tune of two million dollars over some domed garden folly. Or maybe it was doomed garden folly, because his wife had divorced him anyway.

  Alice held opinions about music not popular in the student world, where people like the Apache believed Jim Morrison the closest thing to a deity since Jesus Christ. Morrison had actually died masturbating in the bathtub. If that didn’t make you a wanker … She was in a country in which well-educated teenagers sprayed graffiti slogans claiming Clapton is God, apparently believing it. No wonder the object of their adoration had turned to heroin. She lived in a century in which it was very hard to believe at all in the possibility of God. If there was one, he wasn’t a white blues guitarist from the home counties. Clapton wasn’t a wanker. On the other hand, though, neither was he J.J. Cale. Music wasn’t significant, to Alice. She believed that anyone who claimed it was in print was self-serving, Professor Champion included.

  But she did like to be entertained. A twenty-three-year-old in a foreign country, she wanted a bit of musical exhilaration. There was an atmosphere in this pub, that night, suggesting she might get it. This was London, after all. This was London.

  ‘There’s a bloke in trews over there,’ David said.

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Tartan trousers. What the Scots Highlanders dress up in when they have the misfortune not to be in kilts.’

  Alice looked. There were about half a dozen of them, with short, spiked hair dyed orange, or bleached. The girls wore black mascara and bright lipstick. One of them was wearing a baggy, shiny black top that reminded Alice a bit of a brief fashion she remembered from her adolescence, when she’d started reading glossy magazines. It had been called the Wet Look.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ David said. ‘There’s a girl over there wearing a bin bag.’

  The girl in the trash sack and her friends were ignoring the band, a threesome with a singer in a white flared suit and a shirt striped like a deck chair. Then the band went off and there was a brief commotion as a glass was thrown at the stage and someone from behind the bar came out and wagged a finger at the small bin bag and trews contingent. Although small, their number was growing. A boy came in and joined them; he had a little brass padlock securing a chain around his neck. The girl with him wore a leather jacket, its sleeves fringed with dozens and dozens of what looked to Alice like diaper pins. They all seemed to know one another. Plump girls in fishnets, skinny boys with acned, amphetamine skin. Then, with a squall of guitar static, there was a band on the stage, four black-haired, emaciated boys in tight drainpipe trousers and torn slogan T-shirts. The noise they made was immediate, unbearably loud with accelerating beat and no discernible rhythm. It was a song, in the sense that the one band member with no instrument to play was bawling words into a microphone. But it wasn’t a tune. It was a gathering avalanche of noise. The bin bag contingent rushed towards the small stage and started leaping up and down.

  A patrol car delivered them back to Coptic Street at about two a.m. It felt later than that to Alice, or maybe she meant earlier. It looked like dawn was intruding in a corner of the sky above a dark terrace of Georgian houses. Bloomsbury, she thought. Katherine Mansfield puffing away in a café window seat. Eliot in a charcoal three-piece, tall in the saddle. Getting out of the back seat, it occurred to Alice that she had not intended to become anything like this well acquainted with the British police. It was the second time she had been ferried about in a Ford Escort belonging to the force. On this occasion, they’d been much less polite.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ David said, as the car pulled away from the kerb.

  ‘So you say. You shouldn’t have hit him, though.’

  ‘Fucker shouldn’t have spat at me.’

  ‘You’ve got a thing about spitting, haven’t you?’

  ‘He gobbed in my face, Alice.’

  ‘He was aiming at the band.’ She laughed. ‘You were a civilian casualty. The victim of a stray shot.’

  ‘It’s not funny. He could have a disease.’

  ‘Spit, cannibal lobsters. You’re way too fastidious, Davey Boy. You need to lighten up.’

  There was a deep cut above David’s eye. He’d decked the spitter with a punch so fast she hadn’t really seen it and then tried successfully to dodge a pint mug thrown by one of the spitter’s friends. A hail of pub glassware had followed the first missile, though, and a heavy ashtray had caught him above the eye, splitting the eyebrow, opening a deep cut he’d had stitched in the casualty department at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital while the police questioned him and decided, reluctantly Alice thought, not to charge him with assault. The spitter had revived in an observation ward in the same hospital, chipper according to the staff nurse who relieved them with the news that he wasn’t dead, feeling no wish to press charges.

  On the pavement, Alice looked at her watch. Her ears were still raw, her head thick with the volume of the band in the Chelsea pub. She hadn’t enjoyed the music. Had anyone? It wasn’t there to be enjoyed. Enjoyment hadn’t seemed to her to be the point of it at all. She wouldn’t be looking out for singles or an album by the band. But she had enjoyed the experience of seeing them, of being briefly part of something alien and new. She touched the wounded place above David’s eye and he winced. She kissed her fingers and touched the wound again, this time very tenderly.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said to him.

  When finally they drifted off, she dreamed the cormorant dream. Her belly in the dream was bilious with cider. She was positioned near the rear of the craft, and when it dipped into the yaw of a swell she recognized its shape, made sense of it, realized with a ragged intake of salt breath that, of course, she was aboard a Higgins boat. A wave slapped foam over her, and she wriggled her toes in her boots to distract her mind from the clutch of nausea. A training run over the dunes in full kit had left blisters on three of her toes. The flare of pain, wriggling them now, gave her the discipline to swallow back the bile her mouth was secreting. She would not puke. No sir. Bile burned her throat. The boat pitched and shuddered. Her swollen toes pushed against ridges of roan leather. She didn’t puke. Then a shadow descended and talons, leathery and horned, gripped the gunwale as the great bird settled a few inches from her face.

  They got to Paddington Station about ten minutes before the scheduled departure of her train. London was stained and austere in the crawl through heat from Bloomsbury along the Euston Road. The heatwave had enervated working London, its brassy light all wrong-seeming for buildings mournful with age and decay. Marylebone was a pretty, picturesque interlude of well-tended flower boxes and fishmongers’ and grocers’ shops florid with fruit and vegetable displays and quaint booksellers and almost-rustic pubs. Then they were in Paddington, a place made mean, dispirited, by decades of transience, of washed-up, perishe
d hopes. After Marylebone, Paddington seemed almost furtive with squalor. At a set of traffic lights, Alice looked out of the window up the side of a white-tiled tenement. Age gave the building a decayed and tainted look. Rust-coloured pipes ran about it in varicose bunches. By one high window, torn net over panes opaque with filth, water gushed and dribbled in arterial spurts that had spread a reddish stain all the way down to the pavement. She jumped suddenly, and the lights changed from red; David stalled and a horn honked behind the Apache’s car.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘That horn. Must’ve startled me.’

  The car with the impatient driver was level with them now, Bob Marley singing ‘No Woman, No Cry’ on the radio audible through its wound-down windows.

  ‘He honked because I stalled. I stalled because you nearly leaped out of your skin. Which is covered in goose bumps, by the way. Try again, Alice.’

  ‘I thought I saw a face back there, at an upper window in that white-tiled building on the corner. It startled me.’

  David adjusted his driver’s mirror and squinted at the receding view. ‘White is an exaggeration,’ he said. ‘And the building looks derelict to me.’

  She’d seen what she’d seen. David was looking at her, now, in the driver’s mirror. ‘A squatter,’ he said. And Alice nodded.

  She took her single case and her bookbag out of the back of the car and carried them on to the concourse, refusing David’s offer of help with the bag with a smile and a shake of her head. She caught sight of her own reflection in the glass of the booth where she collected her pre-paid ticket and was shocked at how pale she looked. David went off to fetch her coffee. She put her bookbag over her shoulder to give herself a free hand. There were announcements over the Tannoy, made indecipherable by the age of the equipment and the way the sound reverberated around the stone station walls and floor. She looked up. The station roof was a high, shallow arch of glass, supported by a framework of iron. The glass was opaque with pigeonshit and rust stains. Some of the panes were cracked and others missing. The roof did not look to Alice especially safe.

  She had read that all the major London stations had been bombed in the Blitz. But Paddington didn’t look restored; it looked authentic. It was amazing how much of its Victorian architecture had survived the bombing. There would have been tea wagons staffed by volunteers on the concourse. Child refugees in overcoats carrying gas masks. Soldiers in patient, marshalled lines awaiting troop trains to take them to the spaces of the West of England. The air would have been pungent with cigarette smoke and tense in the anticipation of an air-raid siren.

  Now, David returned, carrying her coffee in a brown plastic cup that looked as though it was burning his fingers. They were really crappy, these English plastic cups. Either you were scalded or you doubled up on the cup and dribbled the drink down your chin. You had to take the good with the bad, she thought. The English had not discovered styrofoam. But they didn’t have McDonald’s here, either.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  He looked at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You talked in your sleep last night.’

  She laughed, without mirth. ‘I hope I was literate, at least. In Bloomsbury.’

  ‘You sounded scared.’

  She sipped her coffee. She blew at a stray strand of hair from the corner of her mouth, but it didn’t shift. Her eyes avoided his. He brushed the errant strand away from her face, behind her ear, and cupped the side of her head in his hand.

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘That’s romantic.’

  ‘I am, though.’

  ‘Watch out for yourself in the Solent, David. There’s sharks in English waters now, with this weather. There were sharks swimming under Brighton Pier last week. I saw the picture in a newspaper.’

  He just looked at her. ‘Sharks,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’ve a train to catch.’

  He took his hand away from her face and it dropped to his side. She saw him wince as he tried to frown and the stitches stretched across his wounded eye. He’d been spat at and he’d punched the spitter out. There’d been no hesitation at all between the act and his retaliation. She remembered what his black friend Clifford Lee had said about him. David was mean, Clifford had said, his expression rueful.

  Alice said: ‘Were you hit as a child, David? Did your father used to hit you?’

  He smiled, the smile as constrained as the earlier frown had been by the neat line of suture mending his face. ‘I’ll watch out for the sharks, Alice Bourne. I promise,’ he said. He kissed her. Then he turned and walked back across the concourse and out of the station.

  On her train, she brooded on the events at the War Museum of the previous afternoon. She’d left David to look at the picture gallery there to see an exhibition they had staged for the summer, celebrating the Western Front poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. While he did that, she took a tour. It was immediately obvious to her that the Great War was the martial event that dominated the museum. Fifty-eight years since its conclusion, the conflict was being re-fought here in display cases full of decommissioned ordnance, tunics heavy with the ribbon and braid distinction of rank, models of dreadnoughts and German battlecruisers and everywhere in the sad, battered human paraphernalia of the struggle in the trenches. Alice didn’t have to read the faded letters on display to sense the epic sadness of this war. It was there in a wind-up Vitriola gramophone player and the pile of shellac recordings next to it. In someone’s neatly cared-for little sewing and mending kit. In one of the wooden football rattles the pickets had carried to warn the huddled men in the line of a mustard gas attack.

  It was understandable that a museum concerning itself with the subject of imperial war should feature most prominently the war in which the British Empire chiefly and most expensively fought. Museum staff, exclusively male, stole about the place in blazers and regimental ties, all of them of an age suggesting that they could personally reminisce about the period 1914 to 1918 should a visitor so require. If the Great War was your subject, it was a fabulous place. It was a fantastic resource. They had maps and charts and battle stratagems. They had artefacts from the assassination in Sarajevo and the service revolver belonging to General Haig. A case full of weapons improvised for trench raids was testimony to the spiteful ingenuity of the Canadians on the Ypres salient. That, or their gleeful wish to render the conflict medieval.

  Looking at glass cases full of lovingly crafted knuckledusters and home-made fighting knives made war seem like madness on a domestic scale. It reminded Alice that the gloomy corridors and dark halls she walked had once been home to lunatics, manacled to the walls of public wards.

  But the museum didn’t have the air of an asylum. It didn’t possess the energy. It wasn’t a place of learning, either, at its heart. It seemed to Alice mostly to function as an eloquent commemoration of courage and loss and sacrifice. Bronze soldiers and sailors cast by the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger stood here and there in stoic tribute to the fallen. Principally, this building was a memorial and not a museum at all. Its custodians, the ones not made of bronze, patrolled the place with a sort of ghostly dignity, the expressions on their faces those of men privileged, or condemned, to remember daily what to most of the living was something unimaginable.

  She was leaving yet another gallery room devoted to photographs of the Western Front when a particular image arrested her eye. A company of American soldiers, doughboys, rested at the side of a cornfield in what the caption claimed was the summer of 1918. The war had another four months. It held the horrible surprise of the Hindenburg Offensive still to come the way of these men before its carnage would be complete. The Americans in the picture were easily identifiable by their flat-brimmed hats and britches worn with high puttees. They had discarded their packs and were eating at the roadside and smiling for the camera, standing easy. Only their sergeant, of the soldiers, didn’t look relaxed. He was a tall, spare man, half his head cast int
o shadow by the angle of the sun behind the flat brim of his hat. His jaw was visible in a clenched line as he stared into the camera lens.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ Alice said to herself. She went to tap the picture frame with an extended finger, but something stopped her doing it. She fancied she was being observed, and looked around, expecting one of the blazered buffers in a regimental tie to lift an eyebrow in benign disapproval. But there was no one there. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said to the tense, thin infantry sergeant squinting out from a picture taken fifty-eight years earlier to the month. ‘Now where could I have seen you?’

  It was there again, the feeling of not being alone in the gallery. The quiet there had suddenly become intimidating and Alice could feel the hair prickle on the nape of her neck. It was cold, damp almost. She looked once more at the photograph. At the summer corn caught in mid-ripple and the men gathered at its edge, smiling in a sane moment of wartime calm. Except for their scowling sergeant. ‘I know you,’ she said to his picture. She shivered and touched the back of her neck and walked out and on to the next room.

  They’d treated the Second World War as an afterthought. There were no displays concerning Blitzkrieg. There was nothing about the Holocaust. There was nothing about the Allied invasion of France or the battle for Berlin; only a few bits and pieces about rationing in England, the London Blitz, convoys, U-boats and the escape of the BEF from Dunkirk. It was almost as if the museum curators were embarrassed that the War to End Wars hadn’t done its promised job.

  There was nothing about America’s contribution to the war; no mention of lend-lease, the war in the Pacific, the three million Americans under arms who had lived and eaten and slept and trained in England in the period prior to the Normandy landings. They were a well-kept secret then, those men. But now? She felt indignant about the museum’s exclusion of the American effort in the war. It had been decisive, after all. To omit it entirely from the museum’s account of the war struck her not just as jingoistic but as a perverse distortion of history.