‘How did you find me?’
‘Rachel Vine.’
Carnegie let out a long breath between clenched teeth. He looked at Alice again. His eyes were an astonishing colour, almost turquoise, like the Iroquois jewellery Joni Mitchell and the like wore when their brief bouts of social conscience forced the real, Tiffany’s stuff from off their wrists, from around their gilded throats.
‘You know,’ Carnegie said, ‘you look a little bit like that singer.’ He unfolded his arms and lifted a hand, flicking the fingers close to his cheek, thoughtful.
‘You remember Rachel Vine?’
‘Not so bonnie as you are,’ Carnegie said, still in apparent thought. ‘Though I doubt a more seductive creature ever drew breath.’
‘Can we talk?’
He stood. He was burly, but fat hung nowhere on him. He extended his hand. ‘Rory Carnegie.’
Alice shook hands with him. His palm felt like heavy wood roughed with sandpaper. ‘Alice Bourne.’
‘We’ll go somewhere quiet. My house is in walking distance, or there’s a hotel with secluded space in its lobby, if you’d prefer. I’ve been waiting for this encounter for thirty-two years. Though I have to say I’d have bet on its being with a man.’
Alice allowed him to lead her to his house. He was a primary source, after all. She could not gain and might well lose from insisting on neutral ground. It wasn’t why she was here, to be timid and cautious. She knew from shaking hands with him that his fingers, strong enough still to crush bone, had only dabbed at the formality of gripping hers in introduction. Rachel Vine had described Carnegie to her as a remorseful man, a man who had learned his lesson in the careless fishing tragedy for which he’d been responsible, before the war, off the Scottish coast. And she trusted Rachel’s judgement. There was no warmth, admittedly, in Carnegie’s eyes, but she was looking for truth, not consolation.
‘How is Rachel?’
Carnegie’s house was not what she’d expected. Alice had half-anticipated some nautical mausoleum, a place full of brass and mahogany Jack Tar souvenirs. She’d expected the Scotsman’s home to look a bit like the interior of the Neptune pub. But it didn’t. It was devoid of clutter, empty of artefacts. There was nothing here to suggest a shipborne past. Nothing, except the man. The walls were stripped and painted and the furniture low-slung, Scandinavian. He had a reel-to-reel tape machine and floor-standing Wharfdale loudspeakers. The texture and tonality of the room were tasteful and entirely masculine. There was no woman sharing Carnegie’s life. A turned wooden bowl of fruit on a tabletop was his sole concession to softness. But the plums and apples and grapes in the bowl were polished spheres remote from bruising or rot.
‘The rod is a prop,’ he said to her, returning from the kitchen with drinks. ‘As you rightly surmised. Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
The room was cool and shaded. It gave no indication of the tormenting heat outside, the wincing brightness. It might even have been air-conditioned, though there was no hum. Rory Carnegie had not yet sat. He coughed. ‘This is harder than I thought,’ he said. He seemed to waver, then, physically, between two directions, and Alice feared he was about to change his mind, keep his long-claimed secret, show her the door with the ice still clinking in her untouched glass on its coaster on the table. Instead, he dropped to his haunches and opened a drawer in the table and took out a rack of pipes. He began to fill a pipe from a tobacco pouch taken from the drawer.
‘The rod is so I won’t be taken for a child pervert. It gives me an excuse to sit and ponder with a blameless view of the harbour. And of the sea.’
His pipes all had those twin metal stems that were supposed to cool the tobacco and at the same time channel spit away from the mouthpiece and bowl. Alice was always seeing advertisements for them in the Sunday supplements. They were a clue to his character, like the Grundig reel-to-reel and the Rotel amplifier on the shelf underneath it. Like the Rolex on his wrist and the radio sets he’d had his ocean-going boats fitted with all those years ago out of apparent remorse after some salty tragedy in the waters off the Scottish coast. He was a man attracted by precision. If he’d been at all interested in sea angling, he’d have had a better rod to fish with. A more complicated reel. He’d have had a bait box full of cunning lures and binoculars and all sorts of other shit. Sonar, probably. Sonar for the sharks.
‘You’re gay, aren’t you, Mr Carnegie?’
He was puffing on his over-engineered pipe. Her dad had been an occasional pipe smoker. Carnegie’s pipe didn’t look like it delivered very much of what the Sunday adverts promised.
‘That was why you left Aberdeen. You were indiscreet there. There was some scandal or something. You were ostracized, and you brought your boats south.’
‘I wasn’t ostracized, girl. I was driven out.’
‘You bought those radio sets off the guy in Liverpool because you like high-end stuff. You think it’s neat.’
‘Neat?’
‘You get a buzz out of technology. When it works.’
‘Oh it worked all right. It worked too bloody well,’ Carnegie said. ‘And that makes me queer?’
‘No wife. No kids. Being queer gives you the time and money to indulge your interest.’
‘You’re very perceptive.’
‘My dad was a cop.’
‘Nevertheless. You’re very perceptive.’
She felt sorry for him. It had been better for Rory Carnegie, more acceptable, for deadly negligence rather than sexual inclination to have driven him from his home to seek work elsewhere. And so he’d invented the lie Rachel Vine still propagated. Even now, presumably because he was a single, childless man, he had needed to invent a hapless excuse just to sit and enjoy a vista of the sea. Worse, this pantomime was obliged to be acted out in a town the man had called home for better than thirty years.
‘It’s why I prefer the term “queer” to “gay”,’ Carnegie said. ‘Yes, Alice Bourne, I can read some of your thoughts.’ She nodded.
Puffing at his pipe, he sat down. Whatever barrier had existed had been broken between them now. He coughed again, to clear his throat. ‘We should talk about Slapton Sands. More accurately, we should talk about an incident that occurred on the way to Slapton Sands. Have you heard of Operation Tiger?’
Alice shook her head. Her heart was beating with a hard insistence. This was the moment at which truth was delivered into history. She was witnessing history’s birth. Better, she was herself delivering it.
Carnegie spoke for about forty-five minutes. He looked tired when he stopped, emptied out, sitting with his hands redundant between his knees on his sofa, his backside perched on its panels of bachelor hide. Real hide, Carnegie’s, Alice thought to herself. No call for the fake stuff there, in his otherwise fraudulent life. The sea had been good to him, and he was a man who had spent with fastidious greed the profits of its benefice. Perhaps he was grateful it hadn’t killed him as well over the course of its many capricious opportunities. For whatever reason, he payed homage to it daily, there on his harbour bench, with his ornamental fishing rod between his legs.
‘What will you do with this information?’
‘I think there’s more,’ Alice said. ‘I think this is only the half of it.’
‘It was enough for me,’ Carnegie said.
‘I should go.’
‘Aye.’
‘Thank you.’
A grunt from the sofa. Alice stood. It felt like a midnight full of stormy imposition. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon. Standing, she said: ‘Your fruit looks very fine in that bowl, Mr Carnegie.’ She nodded towards it. ‘It must be very fresh.’
‘It’ll always look fine,’ Carnegie said, rising. ‘And it will never be fresh. My fruit’s made of wax. Here, I’ll see you to the door.’
His house was on the corner of a terrace on one side of a narrow street. It was more of an alley, really, and when he opened his front door the sun reflected with full force off the whitewashed wall of the buildi
ng opposite. The light was dazzling, vertiginous, and Alice felt momentarily snow-blind. She recovered and looked at Carnegie. It affected him less. He’d spent much of his working life staring at stretches of ocean, waiting for the telltale stippling on the surface of a populous shoal beneath. He still watched the sea every day. His eyes must long have learned to accommodate all manner and density of light.
With her hand shading her eyes, Alice said: ‘You called Rachel Vine the most seductive creature you’ve ever encountered. Did you fall for her charms?’
Carnegie smiled. ‘That’s a delicate way for the daughter of a cop to put it. But you’ve no right to ask the question.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said. She turned to go.
‘The answer is that we did sleep together, Miss Bourne.’ Alice turned back to look at him. ‘Rachel was having an affair with a colonel based at Slapton Sands. He was killed on Omaha Beach. She took it hard. I tried to comfort her. We ended up in bed, as people tended to then.’
Alice nodded.
‘They were peculiar times. War is—’ he hesitated. ‘Well,’ he smiled. She could not see his eyes in the black shadow cast across his face by the light. ‘War is war, isn’t it?’
Alice Bourne nodded and made to leave. What she heard next, she heard with her back to the exiled fisherman.
‘They’d have gone anyway, you know. Didn’t matter how many of them died in the preparation. That was the point of the preparation, to get the execution right. That was the reason for all those live-fire exercises. They expected seventy per cent casualties when they got there, Miss Bourne.’
She turned around. She didn’t know what had made him so loquacious, now, at their parting.
‘Nothing was going to stop them, Miss Bourne,’ Carnegie said. ‘And if you read your history books, you’ll know that nothing did.’
She’d been delivered to Dartmouth by the Fly. The ride had been good-enough value. But he’d averaged speeds of around eighty on roads where SLOW was cautioned in white paint in high letters every few hundred yards. And the volume at which he played his music had left her tolerance for Status Quo, never high, at breaking point. She’d catch a bus that followed the coast on a route south and stop in Strete. She was in no particular hurry to get back, flat now with the feeling of anticlimax where anticipation and the thrill of possibility had been before.
Rory Carnegie was not a Status Quo man. She had looked at the row of reel-to-reel tape boxes on his shelves, filed alphabetically, their titles and artists’ details hand-lettered in tiny script on their spines. He listened to Elgar and Vaughan Williams and Britten. There was some Gershwin, some Aaron Copland. He had tapes of Scottish reels and English and Celtic sea shanties. But nothing so vulgar as popular music. She thought he was probably the most fastidious man she had ever met. He had thrived on the subterfuge of war, but its chaos and waste had appalled him. He’d been dishonest and dishonourable, strictly speaking, in his dogged pursuit of profit from the prevailing circumstances. But he had not done anything Alice could sincerely think of as bad. In the truest sense, he was an honest man. She believed absolutely his account of Operation Tiger, its catalogue of errors and its tragic and avoidable cost. She believed he’d heard what he’d heard and seen what he’d seen. There was no question that they were sights and sounds that lived with the man still. Rachel Vine hadn’t been the only one of them in need of the warmth and forgetful pleasure of the one night he admitted they’d shared a bed. There’d probably been more than the one tryst. But contingent, fatally compromised, their affair had died of apathy, leaving only a begrudging fondness that had lingered down the years in each of their separate memories. Alice was good on other people’s affairs, she thought, shrewd and intuitive. She considered it the gift given in compensation for being so completely useless at dealing with any romance of her own.
She pondered on her audience with Carnegie, on the sweltering bus ride returning her to Strete. The upright part of her seat was covered in some sort of textured plastic and sweat stuck to it from her back through the white-cotton shirt she had chosen to wear for the encounter. The bus jounced on old springs, and the smell of smouldering fields was dense in the air. It was a single-decker. She always travelled on the top deck on double-decker buses, partially for the novelty, mostly to see what she could of England in the limited time she had in the country. The upper decks always stank of stale and more recent cigarette smoke, and their floors were always littered with cigarette ends. And smokers always closed all the windows, as if affronted by the hazard of an encounter with fresh air. But you saw more. On the single-decker to Strete, she saw mostly hedgerows, whatever burned, burning behind their dense and thorny veils.
It struck her as very British, this attitude towards the fire threatening to devour the whole of rural southern England. Either it was discretion or it was stoicism. Either way, it was very different from the way in which they behaved towards similar emergencies at home. There were nightly bulletins about the threatened conflagration on the TV news, excitable presenters standing in the foreground of some smouldering cornfield or wood, bellowing on about it into their microphones. Concern had reached critical levels, at least in the media. But absolutely nothing had been done. There was no provision to fight the fires because, as they said on the news, there was no precedent: ‘The last time we had a comparable dry spell, five hundred years ago, we don’t know what they did.’ The reservoirs were dry. There was no evacuation, no cordoning off, no pre-emptive burning to create firebreaks. Maybe this is what they were like in the war, she thought. Maybe this is what we got so antsy and pissed off about. We’d shipped three million men to Britain and Northern Ireland to prepare for the invasion of Europe, and the domestic population were bumbling along like characters in a Will Hay movie with the view that everything would turn out all right in the end.
On the night she had been subjected to his Lou Reed records, Alice had also been treated, by the Apache, to his Jim Morrison conspiracy theory. The CIA had assassinated Morrison in his bath.
‘Nothing to do with morbid obesity and his colossal intake of drugs, then?’
‘Coincidence.’
He’d started on about the Salem witch trials. Hadn’t gone nearly far enough with their burnings and hangings, according to the Apache. The witch covens of America were still obviously very productive.
Alice asked him why it was that if the Americans were such wankers, all the English rock stars sang in American accents. His stoned expression had given way to a fit of paranoid blinking. Then he’d looked smug. ‘Bowie doesn’t,’ he said.
‘Most of them do.’
‘Marc Bolan sings in English.’
‘The Moody Blues sound American.’
‘They’re wankers.’
‘Rod Stewart?’
‘A wanker.’
‘Elton John?’
Silence. Elton didn’t even merit a retort.
‘Mick Jagger,’ Alice said. ‘“Love in Vain”.’
‘She’s got a point, Ollie,’ David said. ‘You honestly calling Mick a wanker?’
The Apache had blinked for what had seemed like several minutes. Then he said: ‘You really want to know what happened here in the war, Alice? Don’t bother with your trip to the seaside. Watch an episode of Dad’s Army.’
So she had. And she had seen straight away that the humour in the show was based on human nature and therefore in truth. But Dad’s Army were not the commandos trained in Scotland on Lord Lovat’s estate for missions that were always murderous, if they weren’t suicidal. Dad’s Army weren’t the British paratroopers sent into Arnhem aboard balsawood gliders, believing they could win against impossible odds.
The English let their country burn when heat and drought combined to prostrate the arid land. Their rock stars strutted the globe wearing borrowed voices. Their cities were baleful places in the grip of strikes and Irish Republican terrorist threats. There was talk of power cuts. People still moaned about the referendum two years earlier
that had dumped them into Europe at the expense of their beloved Commonwealth. She’d eavesdropped on Kentish bus conversations in which older people talked about a segregationist called Enoch Powell as though invoking the name of a prophet. The Apache boasted about landing an egg on the lapel of Powell’s suit as students lobbied, shouting ‘Fascist’, in a bid to stop the man from being publicly heard, outside an open meeting in Ramsgate.
Thirty-six years ago, by the autumn of 1940, the British had lost the war. Mainland Europe had fallen, and so had Scandinavia. The British army had been routed in France. The Germans occupied Jersey and Guernsey and London was defencelessly battered by day and night bombing raids. U-boats ruled the Atlantic. There was no fuel for the coming winter. What poor food there was was running out. Lack of fuel meant that the diminishing ration supplies were mostly eaten raw. By any sane assessment, Britain had been defeated. But it never seemed to have occurred to the British people that when you’d lost, you surrendered. As her bus ground and shuddered towards Strete, Alice knew that England was a country far beyond her capacity for understanding.
Her cosy attic room was rank with smoke. The windows had been closed and the curtains drawn. The room was still and goose-flesh cold. She crossed her arms, and her fingers bumped along raised flesh, like Braille. A pile of his smoked-down Luckies occupied an open oyster shell, previously pretty with mother-of-pearl, she’d salvaged from the beach. Something had been written on the dressing table mirror. She had applied lipstick that morning after brushing her hair, wanting to look respectable, not student-like, in the event that she found Rory Carnegie. The words had been written in the lipstick, which she had left out in haste on the dressing table. The lipstick had been Chanel Red. Now the mirror wore it, all of it, in an angry smear. The cylinder sat upright with its contents sheared off, bright as a bullet casing. There would be fingerprints on the lipstick cylinder. They would belong to Johnny Compton, a dead American who had cut a prostitute in Paddington in 1944.
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