Island Madness

by Tim Binding

  “This is the shaft where she was found,” Zepernick said, “For escaping.” He seemed ashamed to admit that they might need such a device. Ned bent down and looked in. There was a sizeable tunnel running back, about eight feet long and three feet high, with a rung-laddered shaft at the far end. Zepernick joined him, pointing in.

  “There should be two steel…” he searched for the word… “planks?”

  “Girders,” Ned suggested.

  Zepernick nodded. “Two steel girders and a brick wall in there, all of which can be removed quickly.”

  “So that people can’t get in?”

  Zepernick shook his head. “Blast protection.” He lifted his hand and made a dropping motion. “From the grenades.”

  “So why aren’t they there now?”

  Captain Zepernick snorted, a mixture of laughter and impatience.

  “Soldiers! They love to break the rules. In an emergency they want to get out as quickly as possible.”

  “So it’s kept empty?”

  “No. They keep wood for the stove. Enough for every night. Then they don’t have to go so much to the storeroom. Yesterday, however, they had cleaned it out. They knew there was to be an inspection. It was quite empty.”

  Ned put head in and looked around. Though the walls were of concrete, the flooring was metal. He banged it with his hand. It reverberated like an echo chamber. Re-emerging he said, “Surely they would have heard something?”

  Zepernick shook his head. “Yesterday evening they had a long practice. Setting targets with the new range-finding tower. Loading and firing drills. For night attack. Perhaps you heard? Until eleven o’clock. And afterwards the cleaning.”

  “And this lieutenant, he wasn’t here for this practice?”

  “He stayed until the last. A few tninutes before nine, I understand.”

  “And none of them came into this room?”

  “Only to make coffee, and cook.”

  “And the lieutenant?”

  “Schade? I do not know? You will have to ask him.”

  “Schade?”

  “Yes. You know of him?”

  “No, no. Just want to make sure I get the name right. So when did they find her?”

  “At half-past one. She was dead already.”

  “And when did they last look into the hatch?”

  “At eight approximately.”

  Ned stood up and dusted his knees.

  “And when did you arrive?”

  “Soon after.” He took out his notebook again and made a great show of turning the pages. “I arrived at ten minutes past two o’clock exactly. After taking Miss Vaudin to her home.”

  Ned looked at him. It couldn’t have taken him longer than five minutes to get here from Veronica’s. He had been with her a good thirty minutes. Ned ignored his smug triumphalism.

  “Before we came in, Major, you said, “They have killed Isobel.” What did you mean? The gunners here?”

  The Major dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand.

  “I should have thought that was obvious,” he said. “One of you, one of the islanders must have killed her. For her…”

  “Yes?”

  “You call it collaboration.”

  “People called it a lot worse than that, Major.” He paused. “But if she was found in here surely that points to one of your men?”

  Lentsch stared down at the floor. Captain Zepernick broke in.

  “If she was killed by a soldier, do you think they would have left her here?” he said. “Do you not think they would have thrown her over the cliff, or taken her somewhere not so embarrassing?”

  “But civilians would have to know of the escape shaft’s existence. This area has been out of bounds to us for over eighteen months. How do you explain that?”

  Captain Zepernick shrugged his shoulders.

  “What about the Todt workers,” Ned persisted, “the foreigns? We all know you can’t keep them under control.”

  The Captain was growing impatient.

  “It is not the Zwangsarbeiters or our men that should concern you. There is something else.”

  He ducked out of the door and into the corridor. Ned hesitated. He did not want this. He had told Isobel the truth when they had first met. He had seen only one body and that an accidental death, not one silenced by malice.

  “In here,” Zepernick announced. “The ammunition room.”

  Ned followed him into a chamber running off to the right. Painted on the walls leapt a fresco of firs and ferns and glades of stolen light. Brown bears peeped out of clumps of trees, deer drank from ponds and through the branches flew woodpeckers and ducks.

  “It is beautiful, is it not?” Lentsch spoke softly behind him. Ned turned, startled. “The men miss their homeland,” he explained, both proud and apologetic. “Go to any German barracks and you will find the same. It would not be so in England, I think. In Sandhurst or Aldershot.”

  Along the walls, against the delicately drawn grasses, stood racks of artillery shells, stacked lengthways like a woodcutter’s supply of winter logs. In the middle of this military glade lay a figure: Isobel, gaily clad in a calf-length tunic of fringed green, palms down by her side. Her skin, where it was visible, her arms her legs, the still divide of her breasts, was blue. Her mouth was strangely open, as if frozen in a cry or expectant of a lover’s kiss. He bent down and saw the reason why. It was held open by a quantity of what looked like pale butter. A horrid thought came into his mind and his eyes travelled to where the outline of her hips could be seen, before questioning the Captain with a look.

  “Just the mouth,” the Captain replied.

  Ned looked closer. It had been squeezed in. He could see the indentations of a man’s knuckles.

  “What is it?” Ned said, touching it gently. “Butter?”

  “Cement,” Captain Zepernick said, embarrassed. “And much sand. In her nostrils also.”

  Ned lifted her arm and placed it across her chest. It was the first time he had touched a dead person and though he trembled to touch her, not remembering her exactly, for there was no time for that, but recognizing the shape and stretch of her, he found it easier than he had imagined. She still felt like Isobel. Her skin was paler than Isobel’s, that was all. He put his hand gently on her belly. The cold seemed to radiate through the thin cloth. She looked frozen.

  “It’s the wrong time of year to be out wearing something like this,” he said, fingering the strap of her dress, straightening it back over her shoulder.

  “Peter Pan,” Lentsch said, standing behind him.

  “What?”

  “It is the tunic she wore when we first met,” the Major told him. “That is why she is wearing it.”

  “She was destined for the Major’s party,” the Captain explained.

  “What party?”

  “For my return,” the Major said. “It was a surprise.”

  Ned got to his feet. Suddenly from across the corridor a whirring noise started. The cuckoo clock sounded seven times. They stood still, arms behind their backs, heads bowed, as if the last post was sounding. As the echo died down Ned bent down again. There was a speek of something caught in the depths of her hair. He held it in the air.

  “Was halten Sie von diesem?” he said. The others stopped. He could hear them holding their breath in surprise. The Captain took the strand from his grasp.

  “From outside?” Zepernick suggested. “As they carried her up the cliffpath?”

  It was Ned’s turn to shake his head.

  “This isn’t grass,” he said. “This is straw. From a farm or a stable, perhaps. Had she been riding that day?” He looked at Lentsch.

  “Not that I am aware of,” he said.

  The three gunners who had found her, Kanoniers Rupp, Bauer, and Laurer, were country boys all, with country boy’s hands and country boy’s complexions. They had seen nothing, heard nothing. They had manned their gun like honest soldiers. That was all they understood, the rest was hopeful bewilderment
. Unlike the officers their grasp of English was slight. They looked at their boots, watching each other out of the corner of their eyes for signs of betrayal. Clustering round the little table like young birds in a crowded nest, opening their mouths in an anxious chorus of demanding innocence, it was impossible to hear their story straight, and Ned was sure that that was what it was, a story, but even when sent out of the room and brought back one by one, standing before the two men who could banish them to the Russian front, they managed to maintain their faltering innocence. But there was a tale they were not telling, this fearful little group, something which had taken place within this cramped and claustrophobic room, with its folded blankets and polished boots. He could catch it in the inadvertent looks to the absent Lieutenant’s low bunk, as if they expected the black field phone on the wall near his pillow to spring into accusatory life; he could follow it by the uneasy order that informed their rest room, the stubby chess pieces sitting neatly in their squares, the uncluttered, half-used mantelpiece, the bare space under each set of bunks. All barrack rooms display a certain scrubbed solitude, Ned knew from his own experience, but there was a degree of latitude allowed in such quarters which had not been prevailed upon here. It had been sterilized, wiped clean. Something had gone on here, though Ned was sure it was nothing to do with Isobel. But their fear, their theatrical outrage at her intrusion, puzzled him. It was as if her presence threatened to shed an unwelcome light on some other activity. Perhaps the iron air filter doubled up as an illegal still. Perhaps they’d uncovered a coven of pederasts. Perhaps the missing Schade, lying in a drunken stupor in the Soldatenheim, could enlighten them.

  Before driving to van Dielen’s house, Ned asked to be taken back home. He wanted to tell Mum the news before Albert arrived with it tucked under his arm. She hadn’t gone to bed. She was in the kitchen counting out the food stores, checking them off in the little pocketbook she kept in her apron. She did it every morning, and most afternoons too. She heard him come in but barely turned from the pantry door.

  “Only an ounce of butter left,” she fretted. “And no more coming till next week. And that tea your uncle brought round. It’s half gone already. It’s too much, really it is.”

  Ned led her out of the pantry door and standing by the porcelain sink told her as best he could. He hardly knew what to say. His mother had never met Isobel. She had never even talked about her. When he had been seeing her, he had been doing something that was not simply on his own but outside his mother’s understanding. They had seen his mother once, him and Isobel, walking up past Isobel’s house, taking Dad his tea when he was working overtime on some renovation work for the museum. She had been clothed as she was now, in an old shirt and a long faded blue skirt with sagging pockets at the front, her bare arms swinging her thick calico shopping bag, her large and ruddy face set to the task ahead. Her footsteps were solid, like her shoes, her strength harnessed to the necessity of work, so different from the demeanour of the young woman beside him. It was not simply a matter of age. The distinction between them would remain whatever their times in life, even if it were his mother who had been the girl and Isobel the older woman. Suddenly he had not wanted to belong to his mother or any of her kind. He wanted to lay claim only to Isobel and all the other Isobels of the world, young or old. He wanted to inherit their muscle, their skin, their light unsullied timbre. He stepped back behind a bush and pulled Isobel after him.

  “Shh,” he warned.

  “Someone you know?” she teased, and breaking out of his grip she stuck her head through the leaves. Ned pulled her back again, this time more sharply.

  “No one special,” he said, planting the lie on her warmth of her throat, and dragging her back against him. She stuck her feet out willingly as he hauled her back to the clearing. “An old busybody, that’s all,” he scoffed and laying her on the ground had stirred her stomach with his foot.

  “I know all about busybodies,” she grinned. “There’s my aunt for a start. God, my aunt. Tries to run my life.” She scrambled up on her hands and knees and, crawling over the grass, called out, “Ahoy there, Mrs Whoever-you-are! Someone here says you’re an old…”

  Ned covered her giggling mouth and turned her over.

  “Be quiet now,” he said, pinning her loose arms high above her head. “It’s my mother. All right?”

  “I know,” she boasted. She bounced her hips against him. “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Not now,” he said, untying the belt of her jacket, conscious of their desire.

  “Later, then.”

  “Why? I’ve got your father to steer clear of. Now you’ve my mother. We’re evens.”

  “Not really,” she told him, looking down at his insistent hands. “You couldn’t charm my father however hard you tried. But I could charm your mother as easy as pie.”

  Her jacket and blouse lay open. He was barely listening.

  “You could?”

  “Yes. Don’t you know? I can charm anybody I want to.”

  Now when he tried to form her name in front of his mother and place it alongside the other word filling his mouth, death, it was as if he were acknowledging for the first time the strength of his failed affection, the bitter ground that he had trodden upon.

  “Isobel. It’s Isobel, Mum. She’s dead,” he said, stumbling over her Christian name as if he had no right to use it. “Killed.” He felt himself blushing. It was almost as if he were admitting to the deed himself.

  “Isobel! Dead!” she said, echoing her son’s own exclamation. “But how!”

  “That’s what they want me to find out,” he replied, walking out into the front room, indicating the Major, who stood awkwardly in the light of the doorway. He turned and lowered his voice. “I just came back to let you know I’m all right. I’ll have a quick wash while I’m here. There’s no telling how long they’ll keep me.”

  Ned went upstairs. The Major, conscious of the silence and the requirements of his upbringing, took off his cap and advanced. Ned’s mother stepped into the room and faced him. In the kitchen the dog growled, and as she looked back, ready to draw attention to him as a means of conversation, she noticed the half ring of dirt on the flagstone. Ned had failed to put the basket back in its proper place. The circle of dust proclaimed their duplicity like the cheap sparkle on a brass wedding ring.

  “Stop that nonsense,” she scolded quickly and shut the door. “He still hasn’t got over this morning,” she explained, adding, “You gave us all a proper fright.”

  The Major bowed his stiff apology. “I did not mean to alarm you at such an hour.”

  Ned’s mother sniffed. It was not the time that mattered.

  “We’re all early risers here,” she told him, in a tone one might tell a stranger the nature of one’s religion.

  “He has told you the news?”

  “Yes. Dreadful.”

  “I need his help, Mrs Luscombe.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I must take him away again.”

  “To the house, yes.”

  “You know it?”

  “Dad helped build it before he passed away.” She saw the Major’s quickly masked look of incomprehension. “Ned’s father,” she explained.

  “Ah.” The Major looked relieved. “He died recently.”

  She nodded, wiping her hands on her dress.

  “It must be hard for you,” he continued, anxious to win the battle of apologies. “Your bereavement and then us here, the two things so close together.”

  “Well, you coming took my mind off Dad going, I must say.” She heard Ned moving about upstairs. “And he’d be back in England now, learning foreign ways. So I’ve got you to thank for that as well.”

  Lentsch opened his hands.

  “You see. Even the German army has its uses. But I must warn you. He is still learning foreign ways.” She smiled despite herself.

  Ned’s clattered down the stairs. They stepped back.

  “What?” Ned said, ducking in
to the conversation. His mother, fussing through her embarrassment, handed him his coat and shooed him out of the door.

  “Mind your manners,” she reminded him softly, but he was already out on the path. The Major bowed his head and followed. She stood in the doorway, still wary, shaking her head, remembering not the blank look of sorrow she had seen on her son’s face not five minutes earlier, but that former time, in the coming of the last New Year, when Isobel had given him up, that resolution week Ned had spent drinking, long and deep, behind the closed doors of the Britannia and the rogues’ bar halfway down Hauteville, the same ill-lit, damp back room where he had thrown Veronica over, the product of another imagined slight. She had seen the weakness of the male sex in him that week, for he had done the thing that a thwarted man does, treating the world as if he was its only deserving occupant. Though he had shown an indifferent face to his mates, what a spoilt complexion surfaced when only his mother and father were present! Even at the New Year’s Eve party over at Bernie’s house, it had been Ned’s private bitterness, uttered quickly in his father’s ear, that had soured their celebratory drink, rather than the rattle sounding in Dad’s chest. “Happy New Year, son,” Dad had offered, clinking his ruby glass, a gesture to a continuity he knew to be illusory, and Ned dismissed the attempt with an impatient snort, and, grabbing Bernie by the arm, had declared that the two of them were going out to wash the bastard past away, downing whatever was in his glass, not the muiled beer on offer, but something strong and vicious, in three savage gulps before escaping to a chorus of drunken cheers. He was too busy inhaling that spiteful strength from the room to notice how Dad had flinched, conscious of the gathering speed of his mortality and the burden it placed on them all. A carpenter all his life, clever with his hands, by then he could barely climb the stairs unaided, one of the many handicaps he had tried to keep from their son, not for fear of worrying him, but in an attempt to maintain his own fragile pride. The first full day of Ned’s visit, Dad had woken to bad lungs, hawking bloody lumps into his fisted handkerchief, and as she had helped to dress him, with him sitting on the edge of the bed, an unlit roll-up stuck on his lip, panting as she pulled his trousers over his legs, the bedroom door had swung open. Across the passageway Ned sat on his bed in a cruel parody of their hidden pantomime, and for a moment the two men looked at each other. What an unwelcome mirror they both saw. Then Dad had pushed the door shut, and with his temper let loose from the slam of it, shoved her down onto the floor. From then on, during Ned’s stay, sheer bloody-mindedness had willed his body to confront tasks that had been beyond him the six months previously; carrying potatoes in from the outhouse, gathering fallen logs in the garden, even working the wet sheets through the mangle out in the yard, both of them knowing that when Ned returned to the mainland this need for exertion would pass. And so it proved, but not simply passed, for this impetuous gesture had evaporated what small reserves of energy Dad had left, and with the damp weeks of January seeping in the cold and clammy bedroom walls he took to his bed again. Yes, she would mourn the passing of Isobel, not simply for the brutality of her death, but for what it might do to her son. He had abandoned both family and faith in his careless pursuit of her and with the news he had brought back now, she feared he would never recover. Isobel would be preserved for ever, the ghost of her figure ready to rise up between him and the life he had yet to live.