Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  ‘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.’

  Alice Bourne didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what a Commando comic was

  ‘I suppose he must have read diving manuals,’ David said. ‘Credit where credit’s due.’

  ‘Will your summer job involve diving?’

  ‘It’s all diving,’ he said. ‘But it’s paid work. It’s not groping through kelp and plankton on the sixty-year-old wreck of a scuttled German warship in a freezing current at Scapa Flow.’

  ‘You’ve done that?’

  He smiled. ‘I’ll get us another drink.’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ she said. She stood but, gathering her not-quite-empty glass, looked crestfallen.

  ‘You should try Pils,’ David said.

  ‘What? And end up like your friend the Apache?’

  ‘Holsten Pils. It’s a new beer that comes in bottles. They might have some on the cold shelf. It isn’t American, which is greatly to its advantage. But it might be closer to what you remember from home.’

  They talked and drank until the pub closed. Then they walked back along the sea wall to her flat. Alice took David’s arm and with her free hand played with the key to her new lock, turning it over and over in her fingers until it grew slippery with the sweat that heat and tension had slicked across the pads of her fingers and palm. The Pils had made her mouth dry without it providing the Dutch courage she had hoped for. The sea and the town were quiet. The tide was out. A few lights burned on Sheppey, and a beacon warned of sandbanks, from a buoy flashing in the channel. But the buoy did not bob, and the beacon was static on still water. To their left the small houses were dark. You could see down into their back yards from the sea wall, and some of the houses had small boats leaned prow upwards on their rear walls and nets set out to dry on hooks and over fences. There were blocks and tackles in these yards, bits of rigging, oars and rolled sails and pots for catching lobster and crayfish and crab. There was the mingled smell of tar and creosote, cooling in the night after the burning day.

  When first she’d arrived here, there had seemed a bogus, theme-park quality to Whitstable. Excepting the small and shabby co-op supermarket branch, every store on its narrow high street was a business independent of a chain. There were scrolled proprietorial names on scrupulous antique frontages. There were hand-painted pub signs batted back and forth by the wind in their proud gibbets. It had all seemed too self-consciously picturesque, too Dickensian, the way Dickens might be done by Disneyland. Then someone had told her that Dickens had lived in Chatham and known intimately this part of the Kent coast as a child. And over weeks she had seen the shabbiness under what had appeared to her indiscriminate tourist’s eye merely to be picturesque. And she had realized that Whitstable had endured rather than been re-created. The town had depended on the oyster trade and was actually dying. Established by the Romans, it had dwindled through centuries until the Victorian appetite for oysters had funded its final, short-lived pomp. But culinary fashions had changed, and it was a town dying now, subsidizing its demise by student rents and odd foreign visitors on the way to somewhere else.

  When Alice had arrived, they’d been showing The Towering Inferno at the Oxford, Whitstable’s decrepit cinema. A month later, by the time One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest opened at the Oxford, she’d grown to love the town.

  That had been until the intrusion at her flat. Now she didn’t think Whitstable charming at all, but sinister. It was astonishing the difference in a person’s emotions that forty-eight hours could bring about. Now she couldn’t wait to escape the still, picture
sque days and night stillness of Whitstable. If David Lucas made the pass at her she assumed he inevitably would, she’d send him away with as much tact as she could summon. But she knew the night to come would be an ordeal after his departure.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘About English girls. About how promiscuous they are.’

  He appeared to take this in. He nodded, as she pretended not to be looking at him.

  ‘Bit of a generalization.’

  He didn’t sound so drunk as she felt. He was capable of a polysyllabic word, pronounced without slurring. They were on the sea wall, seated, feet dangling seawards. It was late. She didn’t want to go back to the flat.

  ‘What happened to the Apache, after Champion’s lawn party?’

  ‘Went home to bed, eventually. Managed to undress himself. There was a minor drama concerning one of his Doc Martens, which he couldn’t remove. After his frenzied struggle with the laces, which functioned as a sort of tourniquet, I managed to get it off him.’

  ‘He was carrying enough amphetamine to kill a horse.’

  ‘Lost it. He has a way of losing his drugs. It must be a survival mechanism.’

  ‘You saved his life.’

  David didn’t react to this claim.

  ‘His foot, leastways. You saved his foot.’

  ‘Do you give everyone a nickname?’

  ‘Survival mechanism,’ she said. Sir Lancelot. It didn’t suit him, not with the shorn hair. It never had. ‘They don’t last, the nicknames. Not if I get to know the people involved. I make snap judgements about people that always turn out to be wrong.’

  ‘It’s the pill, Alice. It’s the times in which we live. The pill and penicillin and feminism and the ratio of females to males at the college. To some extent it’s environmental. Isn’t it the same in America?’

  It took her a second to realize the talk had got back to sex. ‘Not really.’

  ‘With role models like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell?’

  ‘Joni Mitchell is a Canadian, which I’m frankly sick of telling people. And it’s only really like that on the West Coast. I don’t think America is as permissive as Europe is. Not sexually. Bertolucci wouldn’t have made a film called Last Tango in Washington.’

  ‘Woody Allen might,’ David said.

  ‘Nope,’ Alice said. ‘Woody Allen’s strictly New York.’

  ‘Anyway, you’re right,’ David said. ‘If you weren’t American, I’d have been reasonably optimistic about tonight.’

  ‘You’re quite conceited, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not particularly. I’m optimistic. Most people are at our age, you know.’ He got to his feet. ‘You can relax. I won’t try and grope you or anything. I’ll see you home, walk back to the phone box outside the Sally Army and ring for a minicab.’

  Alice stood and brushed sand from her skirt. She smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to come between you and Oliver anyway.’

  ‘He’d have been all right,’ David said. ‘He’s always got Ross Poldark.’

  The new key felt stiff in the new lock. But there appeared nothing different about the room from what they had left behind, hours earlier, when it was still light. There was a faint smell of raw wood from the door, from the drilling and chiselling done by David in fitting the new lock, from the waste-paper bin into which he’d dropped sawdust from the work, swept up with a dustpan and brush. And it was colder, more accurately cooler, than it had been then. But her duvet lay tautly stretched over the bed, and the sheet of typing paper rolled into her Olivetti portable still sat pristine and blank.

  Alice had evolved a theory concerning the visit to her room. She had come to believe that it had taken place prior to her return from the Neptune. Drowsy and preoccupied, she had not noticed the cigarette smoke or the Lucky Strike stub or the ashtray on her desk. She’d come back from a smoky pub, after all. Her landlord had a key and for some reason had visited, or had someone visit the property on his behalf. She didn’t have a telephone. He may have alerted her to the need for the visit by post, but mail deposited in college pigeonholes could easily go astray. He lived in Ashford, her landlord. She had met him only once. He was middle-aged, shy and obliging. Until she managed to catch him in, and she’d telephoned him twice now without success, she couldn’t confirm her theory. But it seemed to her more plausible than any other. It had occurred to her only today. Her dad, who had been a very good cop, would have been appalled at how long it had taken her to reach the obvious conclusion. In mitigation, she thought, she did have rather a lot on her mind at the moment.

  David Lucas was looking at the pictures Blu-Tacked to her walls. He seemed fascinated by the picture of the wounded Panzergrenadier. Then he studied the picture of the firefighter. He turned to Alice, who was standing with her backside resting on the edge of her desk and her arms folded under her breasts. ‘Do you think it’s cold in here?’

  ‘Colder than it is outside, obviously.’

  He frowned. ‘It feels damp to me. And it smells of the sea.’

  Alice laughed. ‘It’s next to the sea. Is damp so unusual –’ she nodded at the window ‘– so close to all that water?’

  ‘It smells foggy,’ David said. He was frowning. ‘What do I know?’

  She couldn’t sleep after his departure. She wished he hadn’t said what he’d said about the cold and the damp. It was merely the power of suggestion, she knew, but it did feel chilly, and there was an odour in the room – that corrupt smell a tide leaves when it recedes across an area of soft sand or marshland. She’d smelled it further up the coast, on a walk at Swalecliffe. She’d walked without thought, lulled by the featureless nature of the flats, until the ground betrayed her feet and she was sucked into stinking mire up to her shins.

  Alice lay without sleep and thought about her father. To reminisce in this way was something she didn’t allow herself to do very often. She found such great comfort in the warm memory of him that afterwards his absence from her adult life seemed all the crueller and more bewildering. She’d lost her mother to cancer at the age of two. Her father had reared her. He’d done a great job, in her opinion, which was the only opinion on the matter she thought anyone had a right to.

  Being the daughter of a cop had got harder as she had gotten older. When she was very young, she had only the social stuff to contend with. But because she was a bright child, as she got older she tended to share her classrooms with children from far more moneyed backgrounds. Their fathers were publishers, bankers, high-flying members of the legal establishment, physicians, dentists; professional people, they were fond of pointing out to her. To her classmates, cops were corner automatons who smoothed the winter traffic flow in rain slickers and white gloves. Cops were little more than street furniture in the ongoing, epic unfolding of their own lives.

  When she came into contact with campus radicalism, cops represented something far worse. State policemen like her dad were tarred by the same dirty establishment brush as the trigger-happy National Guards at Kent State, or the municipal cops who’d attacked delegates with batons and teargas at the Democratic primaries in Chicago in 1968 at the bidding of city boss Mayor Daley. The uniform, the badge, the vehicle and the gun; all symbolized something the vast majority of her college contemporaries found ideologically unacceptable. To them, she believed, her dad was probably no better than the sinister prison guard in the reflective shades who’d shot Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke just because Luke had refused to call him ‘boss’. No better and fundamentally no different. But she never lied about what her dad did for a living. She never hid him. She’d never have begun to apologize for him. Her contemporaries, in the full flush of their bright and unfeeling radicalism, might have smirked behind their hands at his Sears & Roebuck suit and heavily polished Floresheim shoes and brutally brush-cut hair when he attended her graduation ceremony. But she was as proud of her father as he was of his daughter. They hadn’t held his hand like she had at his side when they lowered her brother into the earth d
raped under the flag at Arlington. They hadn’t felt the grief and strength alternate in currents of competing force through her father’s shuddering grip.

  Lying in bed, she remembered the first time someone in England had asked her about her family. The question had been posed by a girl whose own father was a veterinary surgeon. For some inexplicable reason, being a veterinarian seemed a particularly prestigious job just then in England. When the question was asked, Alice was still suffering the culture shock of her first exposure, the previous night, to the full awfulness of British television, with its three miserable, choice-free channels.

  ‘Did your father carry a gun?’ the girl had asked, her mouth twitching with horror. ‘Did he shoot it at people?’

  ‘Nah,’ Alice had replied. ‘My dad was more like those two cops on TV in The Sweeney. When the bad guys pulled their weapons, my old man just took them to a bar and drank them to death.’

  The veterinarian’s daughter hadn’t really seemed to get the joke.

  In truth, Sergeant Patrick Bourne had been well enough armed. There’d been a heavy-calibre revolver strapped to his hip. There’d been a pump-action twelve-gauge clipped under the dashboard of his car. Neither weapon had saved him on the night he was shot to death, forced to kneel on corn stubble, executed outside a derelict barn on the outskirts of Emmaus.

  Her collision with the vet’s daughter had been the first of the many culture clashes Alice had experienced in the relatively short time she’d been in England. Whether she had endured or provoked them was a matter for debate. She didn’t think of herself as being particularly confrontational. But a kind of low-level anti-Americanism seemed to pervade all aspects of English life. It felt after a while like one of those flu bugs they had here. It made you feel lousy without debilitating you to the point where you needed to consult a doctor and have antibiotics prescribed.

  In her first week, Professor Champion had invited her to sit in on a seminar. He ran a course of his own devising called the American Century. It was a very popular course. His American Century seminars were held one afternoon a week. Entering the room a couple of minutes late, Alice was almost felled by the heady, combined assault of Alliage and Tabac. Champion was chain-smoking, but doing so next to a window. Looking at the eight or so faces around the table, it was tempting to think that the professor cast his students for their looks more than for their brains. The subsequent discussion did nothing in her mind to challenge this view.