Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  There was a silence. No one from within the room filled it. Then Oliver spoke again.

  ‘Charlie Brown. Eval fucking Kneival. And all that metal they wear on their teeth. “If You Leave Me Now”. Fucking … Neil Diamond.’

  ‘Neil Diamond doesn’t sing “If You Leave Me Now”.’ David’s voice.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘You know what he means.’ A third voice, one she didn’t recognize.

  ‘And she doesn’t wear braces on her teeth.’

  ‘Those self-supporting socks that Jimmy Connors prances about in. Naugahyde furniture. Wonderwoman.’

  ‘You can’t knock Wonderwoman.’ David’s voice again.

  ‘You can’t. No one would want to argue the point about Jimmy Connors and his unnatural socks,’ the stranger said. ‘But you can’t knock Wonderwoman.’

  ‘Those electric shaver adverts with that cretin with the silver hair.’

  ‘Remington,’ the stranger said.

  ‘No,’ Oliver said. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s not called Remington.’

  ‘Victor Kiam,’ David said.

  ‘Him,’ Oliver said. ‘Fucking Victor Kiam.’

  She could smell the thick fug of a joint drifting under the door. Hall and Oates were playing on a record player she could picture without having to see. They were playing Abandoned Luncheonette. There would be Wharfdale speakers on the tabletop opposite the narrow bed, to either side of a Garrard turntable. Albums in a flat stack on one of the speakers. An album on Oliver’s lap, littered with Rizla papers and tobacco fragments and burned-down matches.

  ‘He’s a bastard, that Victor Kiam.’

  It was tedious and disappointing. She was disappointed with herself for being there. If she possessed more of a gift for friendship, she wouldn’t be in this situation. Maybe it was more a question of effort than talent. She didn’t put the work into developing friendships. Perhaps she deserved her isolation. But believing that didn’t make the isolation any easier to tolerate at times like this. Her hand was still raised to rap her knuckles on the door. She let it drop to her side instead and turned to go. Oh well. In the library and the projection room at least, the day had been a sort of a success. Hall and Oates were singing, ‘She’s Gone’. They were almost right. She was certainly going. David’s voice stopped her.

  ‘You know, smoking that stuff isn’t really giving what passes for your minds a fighting chance, boys. Don’t get me wrong. Paranoia and prejudice can work as the basis for a belief system. But you still need a mechanism for some independent thought processes.’

  A silence followed this remark.

  ‘At least we’re not punch-drunk,’ Oliver said.

  ‘I’m talking about basic stuff. You know. Perambulation. Respiratory function. Toilet training.’

  ‘Do you find you’ve started having trouble remembering telephone numbers?’ This from the stranger.

  There was another silence.

  ‘When you leave home,’ Oliver said, ‘do you have to have your address with you, written down?’

  Alice knocked on the door.

  The one she hadn’t met was an Eng. Lit. student called Larry. He was on a continuous assessment course, and he’d received his latest assessment that afternoon, sweating the verdict before a three-man panel while she had chuckled over Will Hay’s grainy comic antics. It was his room. He considered he’d done well. The dope was partly reward, mostly their prelude to a long evening of boozy, narcotic celebration. They were undergraduates. The sun was shining. They were celebrating the last, shiftless days of their final term before the long vacation. Clifford Lee had given her the college name and room number, but not the name of its occupant.

  ‘Great believer in fate, Clifford,’ Larry said, patting a spot on the bed where he sat next to Oliver. Larry looked like he dressed out of one of Canterbury’s charity shops. His teeth signalled years of neglect. His watch showed base metal through chipped chrome plating on the case and was fastened to his wrist by a nylon strap striped like a scrap of seaside deck chair. He was probably the heir to an estate somewhere, she thought. But his invitation was an uninviting one. To Alice, the bed looked already over-crowded. The beckoning to sit was best ignored. ‘A Thomas Hardy man, our Clifford,’ Larry said. ‘Believes it will all end in tears.’

  ‘It usually does. For his opponents,’ Oliver said.

  It was funny how they stuck for the duration with the friends they made in their freshers’ weeks. At home, the like-minded were funnelled through societies and sororities and frat houses into homogeneous groups. Seamlessly compatible cliques dominated student life. Here, they stuck stubbornly to the haphazard and unlikely friends they made in ther first chaotic weeks at college, usually while half-drunk. Compatibility had nothing to do with it. It was endearing in a way. It was fiercely loyal. But it was mad.

  She sipped some of the Nescafé David had made her. Larry had the Christ image of Che Guevara Blu-Tacked to his wall. It shared .space with a poster for a production of Waiting for Godot staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. There was a picture of Samuel Beckett, stony-eyed as a bird, in some austere Paris café with rain-daubed glass. Trinity College had been one of the many that had offered her a postgraduate place. She wondered if Ireland laboured under the same relentless summer heat as England did this June. She wondered if the Irish were as irritating and incomprehensible as the English seemed to be.

  ‘He must like you,’ Oliver said to her. ‘Clifford, I mean. He isn’t usually so forthcoming with information.’

  ‘Maybe I’m likeable.’

  ‘No,’ Oliver said. ‘You’re not. You’re extremely easy on the eye. But you aren’t likeable.’

  Nobody in the room contradicted him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Oliver said.

  Alice turned to David. ‘Why is Clifford sweating off weight?’

  ‘He can’t get into his jeans,’ Oliver said.

  ‘He needs to scale a hundred and seventy-five pounds,’ David said. ‘He’s on the scales tomorrow morning for a match made at that weight.’

  Larry said: ‘What’s that in kilos?’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ David said.

  ‘Kilos are the future,’ Larry said. ‘Kilos, litres, kilometres. I reckon he weighs about eighty kilos. Alice?’

  ‘Search me,’ Alice said. ‘I’m an American.’

  ‘Get away,’ Oliver said.

  ‘American,’ Larry said. ‘So you’d be far more familiar, of course, with the imperial scale of measurement.’

  Larry and Oliver were doing that dope thing of not daring to look at one another.

  ‘Where’d you get your clothes, Larry?’ she said. ‘A landfill site?’

  She wanted to get out of the room. She wanted David to come with her. He wasn’t indulging in the smoking ritual, but he seemed very settled, very comfortable there. She couldn’t really drag him away from his friends without appearing to do exactly that. But she’d had enough of Hall and Oates and the skanky smell and claustrophobia of a dormitory space on a stifling day. She’d had enough already of Apache Oliver and Metric Larry. She wanted to sit under the shade of a tree on the slope behind the college down to the city and tell David about the note on her wall and the Canterbury detective.

  Abruptly, David stood. ‘Let’s get some air,’ he said to her.

  ‘Don’t mind us,’ Oliver said.

  They could hear the giggles explode against the door as David closed it behind her and they walked together out along the corridor.

  ‘What’s his problem with Naugahyde?’ Tan Naugahyde had covered her father’s recliner, his comfortable, television-watching chair. The Naugahyde chair had been sold along with the rest of the house contents prior to the selling of the house itself. Alice had been told to go home. The truth was she had no home to go to. She didn’t think she would ever live in Pennsylvania again. It would be home in the future only ever in her memory.

  ‘Do you know in America they make the bags for bagpipes out of N
augahyde?’

  Alice pretended to consider this. ‘That’s practically sacrilegious,’ she said.

  She had no home to go to. She’d had a home from home, but that lay violated now.

  David said: ‘I don’t think Ollie has ever actually been confronted by Naugahyde. Not personally. It’s more a point of principle. I think he just feels really sorry for all those innocent naugas, slaughtered for their pelts.’

  They walked out of the main entrance of the college and turned left down the concrete steps and left again through parked cars on to the scorched grass of the university grounds and the slope that led gently to the city spread under the sun beneath and beyond them. Students as still as corpses sunbathed in places on the grass on towels beside transistor radios. Alice lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of unrelenting light. Saplings, sycamores mostly, wilted strapped to posts in an infant forest all down the slope. If they survived the summer, they would grow over the years into mature trees that would conceal the cathedral entirely from view.

  In a little over two hours she was due to present herself at Professor Champion’s supper party. She would be expected to swap precise, research-based anecdotes with Champion’s careful pick of nimble-minded fellow guests. A supper party. And Whitstable afterwards, her room there dank, dream-fractured, its privacy breached. She wondered if she wasn’t losing her mind. Was madness like this?

  She turned to David Lucas. He stood watching her with an expression on his handsome face she couldn’t read. ‘Are you busy just now?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to go back to your house,’ she said. ‘I’d like to lie beside you in your bed and just talk. Not do anything, just talk. Do you think, David, that you’d be OK with that?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’ She smiled at him.

  So they went back to his house. And they undressed in the heat and the light and went to bed. And, of course, they did everything.

  Alice quite enjoyed the supper party. The three principals from the history department attended, or rather presided, and all three displayed the endearing, almost touching ineptitude of clever, closeted people forced to confront the hazards of social interaction. It reminded Alice a bit of a programme she had watched on British television. In it, volunteers representing their towns were forced to compete at activities requiring levels of strength and coordination a trained athlete would struggle to produce. She couldn’t recall the name of the series, something to do with knockout, but towards the finale it always descended into a gladiatorial slapstick, mostly memorable for the way in which its sadistic compere openly guffawed at the willing inadequacies of the competitors.

  Sadism wasn’t in Alice Bourne’s nature. She had never taken pleasure in others’ pain or social ineptitude. She felt relieved rather than happy about how uncomfortable the academic staff appeared at Professor Champion’s party. If the stars of the occasion were incapable of small talk, it took attention and pressure, she felt, away from her. She still felt she was under scrutiny and a degree of approbation. She wasn’t at the university under sufferance. On the contrary, they’d courted her. But they had courted her credentials, her achievements in her own short but bright-burning academic career. The stubbornly insisted-on subject of her doctoral thesis was an immense, anticlimactic disappointment to the department, she knew. Her professor, she now believed, took it as a personal affront.

  ‘You look different,’ Champion said. He had drifted alongside her with a vol-au-vent and a lighted cigarette caged elegantly in the same high-perched hand. In her peripheral vision, the head of American Studies shoulder-charged a doorframe, drunk or incredibly clumsy, in a hooped purple and saffron dress. The female academics there were a kaleidoscope of clashing fabrics and clunky wooden jewellery of the Scandinavian sort. The room smelled of Alliage and Tabac and those thin, ornamental Sobranie Russian cigarettes. Through the window of Champion’s sitting room, only a detail of the cathedral was visible. The ancient building was fantastically close to where he lived. His flat flanked the Cathedral Gate. Either the university owned the building he lived in or he was affluent beyond the reach of his salary.

  ‘I don’t wish to speak out of turn—’

  ‘Don’t, then.’

  ‘But you do look different,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said. ‘I didn’t mean to be abrupt.’ She sipped more wine. It tasted cold and seductive. She wasn’t used to wine. It wasn’t the time or the place to tell him of her encounter with the Kent constabulary. But she told him anyway, blurted out an abbreviated version of the morning’s strange, remembered events.

  ‘Let’s find a quiet spot where we can sit,’ he said, guiding her, finding places on tables on the way to dump his baked morsel, his half-smoked cigarette. They were in his bedroom. It was austere, cathedral masonry surreally close through the small, polished panes of a single window sunk into ancient stone.

  ‘Sit down,’ Champion said.

  A part of Alice Bourne thought, then, that it was always coming to this. But her professor did not have on the seductive face he’d worn at his party on the grass.

  ‘How did you find Sally Emerson?’

  ‘Sympathetic. Incredulous. Both of those, maybe not in that order. I don’t know. A bit febrile. Clever?’ She hadn’t told Champion the detective’s first name.

  He nodded. ‘I taught her. She’s clever, all right. Took history as the minor part of her degree. Majored in philosophy, which was a shame. Did a postgrad at the LSE and came there to the attention of the powers that be. In the period you’re interested in discovering more about, she’d have been whisked off to Bletchley Park to crack Nazi codes. Or maybe she’d have been SOE material. Our intelligence people seemed to enjoy parachuting people like her into occupied France to get tortured and shot by the Gestapo. Outstanding girl. Local, obviously. Faversham.’

  Alice nodded. She could hear party noises, but they were polite and dim. It was cool in Champion’s bedroom, despite the ambient heat. They were insulated from the worst of it, she imagined, by the medieval thickness of his walls. She could still smell David Lucas on her skin, in her mouth and her hair. She had washed scrupulously in the tepid bathroom water at his shared house. But the smell was rich still in the heat of her mind and memory. She had lied to the English boy. Did she have a boyfriend? he had asked. No, she had said, shaking her head. It wasn’t quite the truth. It hadn’t felt at the time like a lie. Are you seeing anyone? he’d asked. Jesus. They were naked together. They were in bed. Yes, she’d admitted. You, she’d said. And that had felt like the truth. Which it was, kind of.

  Now, she cleared her throat. ‘You don’t mind my having gone to the police?’

  Champion coughed laughter. ‘Your grammar is wonderful, you know. For an American.’

  Alice didn’t say anything.

  ‘You summoned them and they came to you, apparently. We don’t like the police force arriving uninvited on the campus. There’s a libertarian issue. There’s a clash of ideologies. There are too many drugs, frankly. It might surprise you to learn this, but the use of illegal substances is not entirely confined to the student body.’

  Alice nodded. She wondered whether she was supposed to be impressed by this claim. She wondered if it were the reason why the head of American Studies was out there careening into fixtures and fittings.

  ‘But this was a domestic matter between you and them,’ Champion said. ‘It won’t make a paragraph in the less-than-vigilant pages of the East Kent Gazette. Even if it did—’

  There was a knock then at the door. And her professor shrugged and gave Alice the sleepy-eyed look he’d worn when talking to the pert girl in the ruched dress at his party in the sunshine on the grass.

  ‘How far will DS Emerson go?’

  Champion frowned, distracted. ‘With a spurious investigation? Nowhere. Obviously.’

  ‘I meant in her career.’

  The knocker knocked again on the bedroom
door. Champion shrugged, as though resigned to the interruption, to the distraction of the question. ‘The civil service do the wooing. There’s all this talk of fast-tracking, as I believe it’s called. Loathsome term. Do you know anything about the British police?’

  The knocker knocked again.

  ‘Go away!’ Champion said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve seen The Sweeney on television.’

  ‘Well,’ Champion said. He chuckled. His laughter was full of tobacco. ‘She’ll earn a call soon enough from London. But she won’t exceed her present rank at Scotland Yard. Eventually she’ll become bored. She’ll meet a good-looking fellow officer and marry and have babies. Or she’ll leave the force to teach history at a secondary modern.’ He drank his wine. ‘And maths. They always make the graduates teach maths.’

  ‘Someone’s still outside, waiting,’ Alice said. ‘I can hear her breathing. I can sense her there.’

  Champion nodded. ‘What did Sally Emerson conclude?’

  ‘Just what you’ve surmised. The complaint was spurious.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind about Devon, Alice. You need Devon. The fields might be burning all across England. But you need to get there, if you can. You need a couple of weeks of study, in isolation and solitude. You’ve an intellect, I think, that’s always thrived on solitude.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘How do you know it’s a woman? Outside the door?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just do.’

  ‘The same way you knew your Whitstable intruder was a man?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘No?’ he said.

  She nodded. She was aware of the indignant weight of the woman on the other side of the door. She was aware, as they rose to leave the room, of how clever and influential was her professor.

  ‘You might solve the riddle of Slapton Sands,’ he said. ‘You might very well make something out of all this. I’ve changed my mind about that, too.’ He smiled, showing his teeth under the trimmed bristles of his moustache. ‘We’ve high expectations of you, Alice Bourne.’