‘I hope it isn’t Hitler,’ said Nancy tiredly. ‘I don’t think I could face Hitler at this time of night.’
It was deeply dark but they navigated the steep, curling lane towards the coastal village, foot by foot, guided by the tight slits in the cowls masking the car headlights. They stopped in front of the inn, got out and Cotton knocked. An anxious answer came through the letter-box.
‘It’s us,’ Nancy called back. Bolts were drawn and Brenda’s pale, tight face showed.
‘He’s gone,’ she whispered as she let them in. The windows were heavily curtained and a single oil lamp burned behind the bar. ‘He asked for cider.’
Patiently they sat. Cotton placed his big torch on the table. ‘Frightened the life out of me, I can tell you,’ she went on. She could see they were unconvinced.
Cotton leaned forward and patted her. ‘Maybe it was just a tramp,’ he said.
‘With a German accent,’ she said. ‘Well, a foreign accent.’ Blinking timidly she sat opposite them.
‘Tell me what happened – slowly,’ said Cotton.
‘It was just on closing time. Everybody had gone, even Bert who helps out. He’d just gone up the lane, home. I was locking up when this face appeared at the door. Frightened me stiff. He had a five-pound note and asked me for cider. He looked in a poor way. He smelt like he’d been in the sea, salty, and his eyes were all sore and sticking out. I slammed the door and pushed the bolts and shouted that it was after ten.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘Towards the church, I think. I watched through the window but it’s so dark out there. I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was a tramp. We still get them. I’ll pour you a drink.’
She measured out a Scotch from the bottle behind the bar and Cotton took a drink. ‘Shouldn’t, on duty,’ he said. With a sense of embarrassment he drew his large revolver from its holster beneath his jacket, then said: ‘I’ll pop over to the church.’ As if trying to help Brenda silently handed him his torch.
It was only three hundred yards. He went through the dark, rustling churchyard without turning on the torch. A bat flew out from behind the roof of a family tomb and startled him.
In the church porch he stood and listened. Someone was playing the organ. ‘Christ,’ said Cotton to himself.
He touched the ancient door and shone the torch on the iron ring handle. He turned it and the door creaked open. There were no further organ notes. He drew his revolver.
The lancet windows of the church were uncovered, letting in a faint light. The pews stood hunched and black. He could discern the bulk of the raised pulpit, and there was the touch of a glow from the brass eagle on the lectern.
Carefully he advanced down the aisle. His shoes squeaked. He was almost at the chancel steps when a shape rose from the organ loft. Cotton almost fell backwards.
‘Goodnight to you,’ said the man.
Cotton shone his torch with one hand and raised the revolver with the other. The intruder was bulky but bedraggled. He was encased in a waterproof coat and was eating something.
‘What are you doing in here?’ demanded Cotton.
‘Eating this sausage,’ replied the man holding it up.
‘I am armed,’ said Cotton.
‘Me also,’ returned the man still munching at the sausage. ‘Also drunk. I found a bottle of wine here in the church.’ His words were succinct with an edge of accent. ‘I will pay.’
‘Throw your firearms to the floor,’ ordered Cotton. A heavy pistol clumped and bounced on the aisle carpet. The man in the organ loft finished the sausage as if he thought it might be confiscated. Then he held his arms above his head.
It was his fifth cup of coffee, lukewarm by now, and it was four thirty in the morning. Birds were beginning to stir outside the window of Dover police station. Two military police captains with a driver and an escort had arrived two hours before and after them two men in important civilian clothes. They had gone down to the cells where the prisoner was being held.
Sergeant Wallace, the duty officer, came into the room. ‘All this,’ he grumbled. ‘As if we didn’t have enough trouble with this war, Frank, let alone spies. They been in there with ’im for hours.’ He dropped a newspaper on the table. ‘Thought you might like a read, if you can keep your eyes open. I’ll put another kettle on soon.’
Cotton picked up the Dover Express. Its reporting of the bombing and shelling that the town was suffering daily was so fogged by censorship that it might have been giving news of some distant foreign war. Even the name of Dover had to be omitted although its readers knew the location of every obliquely mentioned street. He turned the page. The rugby club had enjoyed its annual meeting at the Grand Hotel. Its pitch was covered with sharpened stakes to trap gliders. His eye went down the small advertisements: ‘Pram for sale.’ ‘Children’s books wanted.’ ‘Congratulations Grandad on your ninetieth birthday.’ ‘Puppy lost Thursday. Answers to Adolf.’ Cotton half-grinned.
The door opened and the two men in important suits came in, followed by the military police officers and Sergeant Wallace with a decent tray holding cups and a silver coffee pot which Cotton recognised as being an exhibit in a burglary case.
The men sat down wearily. ‘Can’t say I think much of the calibre of current German agents,’ said one of the suited men in a public-school voice. He addressed Cotton and then remembered that they had not been introduced. ‘Henry Liston-Smith,’ he said. They shook hands across the table and the other man said: ‘George Parry-Jones.’ The other officers simply nodded and Cotton nodded back.
Liston-Smith said: ‘He tried some cock-and-bull story that he was Dutch. I suggested he meant Deutsch and he nodded. He’s had enough. He came ashore from a small boat with another man who went over the side and vanished, apparently couldn’t swim because he was from the mountains.’
Liston-Smith grunted: ‘In Holland.’
‘It confounds me why they send these incompetents,’ said Parry-Jones. They drank the coffee gratefully. The military police officers sat bolt upright and as if feeling they had to add to the conversation one said: ‘We’ll be taking him in,’ and the other said: ‘Tonight.’
‘This morning,’ corrected the first officer and the other said: ‘Yes, this morning.’
Parry-Jones glanced at them with no affection and stated: ‘The Boche have sent half a dozen so-called agents over now, every one a joke. One got caught up a tree in Dorset and fell out almost on top of a chap from the Somerset Light Infantry.’
Liston-Smith said to Cotton: ‘This chappie just about speaks English. He and his pal got absolutely plastered on the way over. After the other man had vanished over the side this one got ashore and hid in some sort of cave until after dark when he came out and went to the pub for some cider. Cider! Christ, where do they get them?
‘His belongings included a Luger pistol, a German camera, a map of airfields in Wales – he landed a long way from them – and five hundred and fifty-seven quid in sterling notes.’
Parry-Jones said: ‘And the sausage. Well, the wrapper anyway.’
‘He ate the rest,’ confirmed Cotton.
‘Made in Frankfurt,’ Parry-Jones shrugged. ‘So the wrapping said.’
Liston-Smith said to Cotton: ‘I don’t think you need to hang about any more. We’ll need to come back to you, of course.’
‘What will happen to him now?’
It was Parry-Jones who answered: ‘Oh, there’ll be a trial. Quite a quick one, I imagine. In a couple of weeks. You’ll be required to give evidence.’
‘Then what?’
‘After that? Well, they’ll take him out and shoot him, I expect. They usually do.’
Cotton shook hands with them, left the police station and wearily climbed into his car. Could the Germans be that incompetent, that amateur?
He drove through the town, past the dawn silhouettes of the Hippodrome and the Plaza cinema, the streets with gaps where the houses had been destroyed.
Nancy heard the car and
came down to unbolt the door. Her hand went out to him. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘I’m full up with coffee,’ he said. ‘I just want to sleep.’
‘What did they do to him?’
‘Asked him a few questions.’
‘Poor man. Fancy sending someone like that as a spy.’
‘Apparently, they keep doing it. It’s probably a way of getting rid of their head cases.’ He began taking his clothes off, sitting heavily on the bed.
‘What will happen to him now?’ she asked.
He looked directly at her in the dimness of the room. ‘They’re going to shoot him,’ he said.
A solitary afternoon Heinkel, wandering almost idly above Dover, had dropped a bomb directly on the East Kent bus station, killing nine people. The attack had happened as office staff were going home to their tea. Men were still digging without hope through the rubble the next morning.
People walked with a resigned politeness around the warning barriers which now bordered the site. They shrugged as they walked; something which had been part of their lives, an ordinary place, was now levelled to wreckage. People paused, some whispered and passed on. By nine o’clock that morning the final silent blanket had been carried out while double-decker buses arrived and departed according to the usual timetable.
The café opposite opened its doors and the woman there put on a big clean white apron. There were no windows left in the café. She went inside and brought out a wide tray of tea for the men who were digging. ‘Nothing to pay today,’ she called as she carried it to them.
Giselle, holding a brown paper bag, boarded the bus, went to the upper deck and looked through the window. She was glad when they began the journey. The conductor, a spotty boy, took her fare. He had a band of black material around his hat. ‘They never ’ad a chance,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know what ’it ’em.’
She was conscious of her fresh summery dress, brightly coloured silk with buttons down the front.
‘Due at work I was, ten minutes later,’ said the conductor and added, like an odd boast: ‘I was born lucky.’
The sunlight coming through the window lit her hair. ‘How long till it all ends?’ she said.
‘I ’ope not before I get in the army,’ said the spotty youth. ‘I want to kill them Jerries.’ He made as though plunging in a bayonet.
‘Of course,’ she replied.
The bus was heading out of the town, driving under the lee of Dover Castle, the union flag stretched out over its battlements.
The youth said: ‘Fancy coming to the pictures with me?’ It was as if turning the stony corner into a new scene had prompted him. ‘Wallace Beery’s on at the Granada.’
Giselle blushed. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I cannot. I have a boyfriend.’
The conductor said: ‘Well, you would. You’re foreign. Where you from?’
‘France.’ From her seat she could see the smudge of the French coast across the Channel. ‘Over there.’
‘We’ll get you back there before long,’ he promised extravagantly. They were out in the country now, on the climbing Kentish road, among the farms and fields. A dull explosion came from the distance behind them. The conductor looked out of the back window and Giselle’s eyes followed him. A ribbon of black smoke was rising from Dover.
‘’Ere we go again,’ said the conductor. ‘Just got out in time.’
Toby was waiting for her at the bus stop. He had two rustic bicycles, supporting one in each hand. She moved between the handlebars and they kissed. The conductor watched from his bus as it moved off.
‘The bus station was hit,’ she said. ‘There were people killed.’
‘I know.’ He paused. ‘I brought a bike for you.’
Giselle kissed him once more and he eased one of the bicycles towards her. He said thoughtfully: ‘It’s bloody disgraceful this war. I’ve seen enough of it this week.’
His face seemed to have aged in a few days. He was wearing his blue shirt and air-force trousers with grubby plimsolls. ‘You have been flying every day?’ she asked.
‘Every day would be easy,’ he said. They began to wheel the bicycles. ‘It’s been three times a day. One day it was four. I’m shagged out.’
‘How long have you got for leave today?’
‘It’s hardly leave. Six bloody hours.’ He grinned apologetically. ‘It’s not long, is it?’
‘Six bloody hours,’ she repeated.
‘They can’t spare us, any of us,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost three pilots, good chums. There’s replacements coming but they’re half-trained. They don’t know what they’re doing. I only got off this morning because I told the medical officer I was going mad.’
‘So you have six hours to get un-mad,’ she said. ‘Let us find a field with flowers.’
It was a gently climbing lane but he puffed. ‘Too much sitting on my bum,’ he said. ‘Thank God you don’t have to pedal a Spitfire.’ They stopped and looked about. There was a stile and a path rising into a buttercup meadow with a bramble hedge and a big tree at its summit. ‘A field with flowers,’ Toby smiled at her.
They kissed across the bicycles. Gently he put his hands against her dress. ‘We’d better hide the bikes in the ditch,’ he said. ‘People will pinch anything these days. One of our pilots had his flying boots stolen in a pub. While he was resting his feet. He got back in his socks and now the RAF wants him to pay for the boots.’ He sniffed: ‘It’s hardly worth dying for your country.’
They hauled the old bicycles over the stile and dropped them into the bordering ditch. The buzzing field was loaded with flowers and the scents of summer: nettles, cow parsley, overhanging elderberry. Hand in hand the two young people walked to the top. A hare made a sudden dash causing them to exclaim and stumble out of the way. They laughed and held on to each other. ‘Scared by a rabbit,’ he said.
‘Le lièvre,’ she corrected. ‘A hare.’
They sat on the thick grass at the rim of the outspread tree, then fell together and held each other close. He kissed her forehead. ‘I knew this week couldn’t be all bad,’ he said.
She smiled almost against his face and said: ‘I have brought some French wine.’ She lifted the bottle and the sun shone through it. ‘From the cellars of the Grand Hotel.’
‘You pinched it,’ he laughed. ‘Did you bring a corkscrew?’
‘Naturellement.’ He took the cool bottle from her and sitting up against the tree eased out the cork. ‘And glasses,’ she said taking them from the bag. ‘Also pinched.’ She poured the pale wine. ‘The wine and the glasses can go on the insurance claim. There has been a lot of damage.’
Sitting close, their bodies touching, they toasted each other and drank quietly.
‘Even six hours is something,’ he said. ‘Now, every time I go up in the sky I’m frightened. I used to love it. Not long ago.’
Her solemn face was light brown, her neck smoothly rising from the summer dress. Carefully she put her glass down, took his empty glass away, and pushed him easily back on to the springy grass. The profound and smothering feeling of summer was all around them: the thick air, bees and other creatures almost grunting in the flowers and long grass, birdsong sounding.
Giselle rolled above him and teased his face with a stalk of grass. They kissed, the grass trapped between their lips. Then a high sound came from the sky.
His body stiffened. She half-left him and looked up also. ‘Dogfight,’ he said flatly. ‘See the trails.’ They stared up from the meadow to the swollen clouds standing against the blue and picked out the tiny fighting planes. Echoes of machine guns filtered down to them, the planes rolled like insects. ‘One’s going down,’ he said. The fighter curled away and they could hear the engine screaming, smoke trailing as it turned and began to fall. ‘Jesus,’ he said flatly. ‘Oh, Jesus.’
Giselle moved on top of him again. ‘Do not look any longer,’ she whispered. ‘Forget about up there. Under my dress there is nothing.’
She straddled him a
nd hitched up her silken dress. She began to unbutton it beginning between her thighs. ‘One button,’ she smiled. ‘Two buttons . . .’
Toby reached up and caught her fingers. ‘I’ll do the rest,’ he said. ‘I can count.’
Firmly and gently she pushed his hand aside. ‘I am counting now,’ she said. ‘Three . . . four . . . five . . . and six.’
The final button opened and the dress slid away exposing her fawn breasts, the nipples full and pink. Impatiently wriggling she pushed the dress aside.
‘You’re lovely,’ he responded. ‘Such a lovely girl.’ He held on to her desperately.
Behind them, high in the sky the dogfight continued, the roars and the crackle of the gunfire sharply defined. The field murmured around them. When she bent to kiss him she saw he was crying. She pressed his face into her body and felt his tears on her skin. ‘What a fucking life,’ he sobbed.
Wing Commander Greville looked an old-fashioned figure, his face puffy, his hair, dark but fading, slightly greased. His manner was serious, like a doctor with bad news. He stood with his back against his desk, as if he needed its support. ‘We’re going to lose this battle,’ he confided to Hendry. ‘Or at least there’s a good chance we’ll lose it. Today or tomorrow, or next week. Believe me, we’re up against it.’
‘But we’re downing them left right and centre,’ said Hendry. ‘This bit of England is strewn with crashed German planes. You can hardly move for them.’
‘And a lot of ours,’ put in Greville. ‘Don’t believe all the figures, son.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘The fact is we’re losing pilots faster than we can replace them. Some dead, some wounded, some gone in their heads.’
‘I’ve noticed,’ said Hendry. ‘In the mess.’
‘Mess is the word,’ said the wing commander. ‘I wish Churchill could know the mess we’re in. It’s all very well his fine words, his speeches. “Never has so much been owed by so many to so few.” They probably keep the unpleasant facts from him. They’re giving bomber pilots, transport pilots, army people who fly little spotter planes at the best of times . . . they’re giving them crash courses in flying Spitfires, Hurricanes. Crash courses, that’s the right phrase. And there’s still a million civilians unemployed. Doesn’t seem credible, does it?’
Dover Beach Page 15
