Island Madness

by Tim Binding

  As the orders rang out and the syncopated rhythm of a hundred boots stamped down on the macadam road, the wind began to stir; a spot of rain, a strenger breeze, a sudden drop in temperature. The crowd followed, their black umbrellas unfolded in anticipation of the downpour, the clouds’ black coat-tails clearly visible, sweeping in from the north. His bladder bursting, Ned waited until they had left before relieving himself behind a flying buttress, hoping no one would notice the blasphemous steam rising from this consecrated ground.

  Buttoning his flies, he moved quickly up the lane, chasing the solemn beat of the band. It was the first time he had been among a crowd, and jostling amongst them, acknowledging a greeting here, stealing a glance at an old-remembered face there, for the first time he saw them as they really were. Oh, he had waited in queues with them, seen them in their ones and twos as they walked down the Pollet, shared a bench with them on one of the bus carts, but seeing them on the move, their faces anxious to devour the coming occasion, he looked at them afresh. We’re starving, Ned thought, astonished. Every one of us. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a week or a month’s time, but give it a year, maybe two, and half of us will be dead. He could see how the sentence had already been passed on those who lived closest to life’s precarious edge, the old and the very young; how like old men the children appeared, hunched and slow, and how like children, helplessly innocent and in need of a guiding hand, seemed the old. He could see it too on the idle hands of men not yet forty, with their ragged boots tied with lengths of string and their scarves wrapped to muffle their fifty-year-old coughs and sixty-year-old wheezes. He could catch it in the worried stoop of mothers, lost in the empty hang of their dresses which their breasts once filled. He could trace it on every image he conjured up; on his mother’s face as she shivered in her fleshless nightdress; in the pale determination of those two ankle-socked girls hurrying home with their potato perambulator; in the fat fingers of George Poidevin’s pasty paw as he jabbed them up and down his desk. He could see it most clearly in those who stood now by the open grave, the new aristocracy of this unjust fiefdom; Major Lentsch, Captain Zepernick and Molly. He remembered the car and the luxurious spread of Veronica’s willing limbs, satiated in the wrap of her Occupational furs.

  As the squall grew in its strength, the crowd instinctively huddled together. Molly looked superb, black feathers and a small black veil with matching stockings and dress; a dish to be devoured. Albert reached out, holding Mrs Hallivand back as if he were worried she might be washed into the hole; the girls leant into their uniformed protection. Only Molly remained unchanged, standing coatless alongside the Captain, the rain beating against her body, flattening her fine and flaunting dress against the wet of her calves and the turn of her hips and the low swell of her stomach. The rain streamed down and still she did not move. The wind caught her veil and blew it up over her head and as she lifted her face, her black gloved hands held stiffly by her side, she licked the wet from her face and held herself out as proud and defiant and as paintedly beautiful as a ship’s figurehead glorifying in the furious rage of the sea. She drew strength from this. It lifted her spirits, not because she enjoyed the spectacle, but because she was the spectacle. The crowd could hardly take their eyes off her.

  The storm ended as suddenly as it began. The sky cleared, but on the horizon another one could be seen to be on its way. The parish priest in robes of white and blue stepped forward to perform the burial. A firing party followed and aimed its guns in the air. As they fired, nesting crows rose from the trees and broke into a chorus of protest.

  “Hit some of them buggers and we could all have a decent pie,” a voice from the back called. A nervous laugh rippled through the crowd.

  The guns fired again, the crows rose once more. Lentsch looked down to where muddy water was already collecting between the coffin and the sides of the grave. He mouthed some words. In English? In German? Words of love? Words of remorse? Ned could not tell. As the escort party turned and began to march away Molly placed her hand on Zep’s arm and moved to follow in their wake.

  “Look at that bitch,” Ned heard someone in the crowd mutter. “We’ll get our own back when the time comes.”

  Molly paled while the Captain looked in vain for the culprit, but the crowd closed its mouth to his gaze. They would not give him up. Molly tried to pull her veil down, but it stuck to her face. She took off her hat and held it in front of her.

  “Jerrybag!” another shouted.

  A clod of earth flew in her direction. It caught a gravestone in front and scattered in the air.

  “God Save the King!”

  “In future,” the Captain said to Molly, in a tone designed to be overheard, “if people can’t behave themselves, we shall have to insist that such events be conducted after curfew.”

  Ned stepped forward.

  “All right,” he shouted. “That’s enough of that. Get off home before you land us all in trouble.” He turned and opened his hands.

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said. “This is not the place to voice such feelings.”

  “And another would be?” snapped the Captain.

  Ned watched as Molly and the Captain hurried to their car.

  “Perhaps we should not have been here at all,” the Major said. “Perhaps something simpler would have been more appropriate. But…” he directed his gaze to where Ernst was preparing to march off his men, “we had no choice. That is the trouble in war. Sometimes there is no choice but to do the wrong thing.”

  “It’s not you they’re angry with,” Ned replied. “It’s their own kind they hate.”

  “I suppose I should be grateful, then. It makes my job easier if they hate the likes of Molly more than the likes of me. Come back to the Villa? Have a glass of something warm, after the chili here.”

  Ned looked at his watch.

  “I must go. Paperwork.”

  “Very well.” Lentsch was unnaturally formal. “There was one thing I should have told you. In the hue and cry it was overlooked. The lieutenant you wanted to interview. Lieutenant Schade.”

  “You haven’t found him yet?”

  “It appears that on that Saturday he got very drunk. First at the Casino, then later on in one of the…”

  “Houses?” Ned suggested helpfully.

  “Exactly. Over at St Sampson’s. He should not have been there. It is for enlisted men, but he was most persistent. There was a fight. Then it seems he went for more drinks, in the hotels along the promenade.”

  “Are you saying that he hasn’t sobered up yet?”

  “No, no. Early the next morning he was found in the foyer of the Soldatenheim. He told them he’d fallen down the steps and hurt his head. They thought he was just drunk you understand, a little shaky, his words all together…”

  “Slurred.”

  “Slurred. So they let him sleep. Sunday afternoon they tried to wake him. They could not. Coma. This morning he died.”

  Ned felt himself grow cold. The Major tried to reassure him.

  “I should have been told earlier. But with van Dielen’s disappearance, everyone forgot. This has nothing to do with Isobel, I am sure. The men involved in the fights will be disciplined but not charged. They were not serious. A blow to the face, a tooth loose. Brawling. The fall must have caused it. We do not wish to upset the family, so we will tell them that it was an accident.”

  The Major walked away. Ned scoured the crowd for a sight of Veronica, but couldn’t see her. Perhaps she hadn’t come after all. Down by the car his mother was talking to Albert. He had a hand on her shoulder and was trying to put something in the calico bag she was carrying. Two times she waved the bag aside but at the third he grabbed it and thrust in his hand. She stood up on tiptoe and gave him a kiss. Albert climbed in the driver’s seat. His mother waved, then gave a little curtsy to Mrs Hallivand as the car drove off.

  “What was all that about,” he said, coming up behind her.

  His mother patted her han
dbag. “It’s a surprise,” she said.

  He held her out at arm’s length.

  “You look nice, Mum.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “I’m not! You do.”

  He took her arm and walked her down the road. Halfway down the hill he stopped and wheeling her round kissed her on the cheek. His mother looked round, flustered. A couple of women walked past, grinning.

  “Ned Luscombe, what do you think you’re doing!”

  “I’m taking my mum in my arms, that’s what I’m doing.”

  “I never saw such a thing. Put me down at once.” She pulled herself back, straightening her coat. “What would your father have said?”

  “We’ll never know, will we.” He hugged her again. “And next time I see her I’m going to put my arms around Veronica.”

  “Oh, it’s Veronica again, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t, but sometimes I wish it was. She was right for me. I was right for her. I should have left it at that.”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “So I have. All morning, as a matter of fact.”

  “Drowning your sorrows, I don’t doubt. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a man feeling sorry for himself.”

  “It’s V I feel sorry for, letting her go like that.”

  “Yes, and look at her now.”

  “I helped put her there, Mum. She would have been safe if I’d done right by her.”

  “She’s a free woman.”

  “No one here’s free, Mum. Not you, not me, not V, not even Uncle Albert.”

  Ned walked back to the office. The whole affair had gone badly. The town had been out in force, their sympathy tainted by curiosity and loathing. Their true feelings regarding the Occupation, kept simmering for these two and three-quarter years under a lid fashioned from the base metals of obedience and opportunism, had broken out into the air like thick, sulphurous fumes bubbling up from some dark and murky pool. It was not simply bottled resentment which had fuelled their anger. In the shabby folds of their funeral clothes, mingling with the smell of mothballs and camphor sticks, hung the noxious fiimes of self-loathing. He had sniffed it wafting in and out of the gravestones like a sea mist rolling in and out of the rocks, ready to lead them all to grief. And when the sudden squall that the sky had promised finally descended, it washed into the very pores of their skin as quickly as the poison gas that everyone believed to be stored in Alderney. It was a dangerous and intoxicating chemical the islanders had inhaled that afternoon.

  He sat down and idly opened the drawer, remembering suddenly what was inside. Until Lentsch had spoken to him he had quite forgotten about the man. That’s how good a detective he was. And now he was dead, his head cracked open by the hands of a British policeman. A legitimate act of war or an act of criminality? He picked up the wallet, opened the fold and laid the money out on the table. More than a Lieutenant’s wages, unless he hadn’t spent any money for six months.

  He held open the rest of the wallet and shook out the contents. Identity card, driver’s pass, a Lloyd’s chequebook, tide tables, a letter from home, the postmark smudged and indecipherable. Inside three closely written pages, whether wife, mother, brother or father, Ned had no idea. There were photographs, too: one of a good-looking woman of about fifty, holding a white lapdog: another of a young man in a ill-fitting suit, a Homburg raised above his head, and the last, a skinny girl in a summer dress standing astride a bicycle, a sweetheart no doubt, in a sweetheart’s pose and a sweetheart’s hopeful smile on her face. Ned felt helpless in the face of such photographs. Did they know, this man, these women, that their beloved Schade was dead, that he had lost his life pushed down some pointless steps? What would they think about the war then, these people, so content, so happy? What use were pictures, except to wound and hurt? Photographs told you nothing except that you were for ever alone, for ever transient, for ever to be betrayed by those who had held you closest, for ever to betray in turn those who hold you most dear.

  As he replaced the letter he discovered an extra flap running the whole length of the wallet’s back, protected by a small lip of leather tucked into the right-hand side. He put his hand in. More photographs. He laid them out on the table.

  Though he understood what he saw, to begin with they were recognizable only as blurred mementoes of a soldier’s masturbatory life; women spread out to enliven the bored bunk hours or passed around the mess room to a chorus of obscene jokes and merry gestures. Then as he looked closer he realized that not all the photographs were of strangers. Some were of a woman he knew, and a place he knew too, though which he had recognized first, the low curved ceiling and the open iron door of the escape shaft or the fleshy arms and the shock of tumbling hair of its occupant he could not say. She was smiling at the camera, as naked as the night she had slipped into the summer sea with him and Bernie egging her on, but here her podgy arm was wrapped around Lieutenant Schade’s broad shoulders and the two of them were lying back on a bed of straw. That was how Isobel had come to have straw in her hair. Not from a farm vehicle, not from a stable, but from the tunnel itself.

  Ned crossed over the square and walked down Smith Street. There was a queue on the left-hand side, stretching down the hill and round into the Lower Pollet. In the bookshop window halfway down hung yet another huge portrait wreathed in yet another collection of ferns and daffodils. Scattered round the bottom were copies of Britain’s worst-selling sixpenny magazine, Mein Kampf an English translation available in eighteen weekly episodes. A hand-written sign informed him that in commemoration of the coming birthday there was going to be a free draw for the whole set.

  At the corner he walked up the steps and pushed open the double door. Inside the bank was cool and empty and smelt of floor polish. Monty Freeman sat in his office dictating a letter. His arms stuck out from his jacket sleeves like broomhandles on a scarecrow. A suit in search of a man, his mother used to call him. A girl at the back was writing figures in a long ledger. Ned could hear the scratch of her pen. Elspeth Poidevin sat behind the long teak counter in front of a little sign which bore her name, its lettering only slightly more elaborate than her clothes. She wore a pink blouse with a high collar and mother-of-pearl buttons and a little bow in the front, tied like a shoelace. It looked easy to pull too. She was counting slowly, licking her index finger and fluttering her eyelids at her uniformed customer. Though her pink lips formed the words silently Ned could hear every syllable: twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven. He walked across the echoing floor and waited behind the smartly belted tunic. Elspeth snapped a rubber band round the notes and pushed the bundle across. The notes were small and greasy, like all the Occupational currency. The officer put his hands on the counter and looked straight at her.

  “I made it twenty-nine,” he said.

  “Thirty,” Elspeth said. “But I’ll count it again if you want.”

  “If you please, miss.”

  “Oh, we aim to please. That’s what we’re here for.”

  She licked her finger again and brought the notes back. Each time her finger flicked a note the base of her thumb pushed up against her right breast. The bow started to wobble.

  “She was right the first time,” Ned said from behind. The man turned round.

  “I couldn’t help noticing,” Ned admitted. “It was thirty. She never gets things like that wrong, do you, Elspeth?”

  Flattery was always welcome where Elspeth was concerned, even when it interrupted performance. “I’ve got a head for figures,” she admitted. “There you are. Thirty. What did I tell you?”

  The officer took his money reluctantly, like a boy who’s only been allowed to fill his sweet bag half full.

  “Come again soon,” Elspeth called out, and adjusting her sign, turned her attention to her back to Ned. “Mr Luscombe,” she said brightly. “What can I do for you?”

  Ned smiled back. “How’s the trauma?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The
ladies of ill repute. Still offending your sensibilities?”

  She sniffed.

  “Mr Freeman deals with them after closing time. That way we don’t become…”

  “Contaminated?”

  “My dad told him he wouldn’t allow me to work here otherwise.”

  “What it is to have a father like yours. Anyway, to business.” He looked about. Monty Freeman was watching him through his office window. The girl at the back was blotting her columns. “About the bank?”

  “Yes. Come to open an account?” Elspeth suggested.

  Ned shook his head and turned back to where the officer was standing by the door, pulling at the creases of his tunic before stepping out. “I was wondering. Do many officers like him bank here?”

  “A few from the Feldkommandantur, and the Wehrmacht. The long-term residents. None of the enlisted men, of course.”

  “Of course. What about artillery officers?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure. They’re all customers to me.”

  He took out the wallet and laid it on the counter.

  “It’s this lieutenant, see. He’s lost his wallet. A lot of money in it, tucked inside one of your envelopes. Name of Schade.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Have a look at his picture. See if you recognize him.” He opened the identity card. She looked at the picture of the thickset man, grinning into the camera. An air of innocence wafted over the counter as sweet as the perrume rising from her pampered bosom.

  “No, I don’t think so. Jolly-looking soul, isn’t he?”