by Tim Binding
There was nowhere to hide; a long wall loomed up above him while opposite ran a line of tall spiked railings. He wasn’t going to ruin a pair of perfectly good trousers in an undignified scramble trying to get over. Anyway it was too late, for now the car came sweeping up, opening the narrow road with a reckless stream of light. This was no black-market run. To be bold was one thing, to be brazen was quite another. Ned stood motionless, hoping it might pass. He could see the dark pennant fluttering at the head of the bonnet. The car drew level and pulled up a few yards ahead. The front passenger window rolled down.
“Pass,” a voice demanded.
Ned rumbled in his pocket. Crossing the road he walked up to the window and held out his curfew permit. A torch went on in the interior of the car, wavered over the card and then came up, shining ruil in his face.
“Out of uniform?” he heard. Ned knew better than ask the interrogator’s identity.
“No,” he said. “If you look at the bottom. I’m not required.”
There was a stifled giggle in the back. Ned looked down. A pair of legs could be seen, stretched out on the back seat. Nice legs. Bet they didn’t have a pass either.
“And no salute,” came the voice. “Did not the Feldkommandantur order all policemen to salute German officers when they see them. It is a rule, is it not?”
Quite why he had not saluted Ned did not know. Perhaps it was out of habit. They all tried to avoid giving the Germans the satisfaction of seeing British policemen perform this humiliating obeisance. It had become a game as well as a point of honour, a petty way of subverting a petty rule. Whenever they saw an officer approaching they would turn to study a shop window, or suddenly discover that their bootlaces had come undone.
“I didn’t know you were an officer,” Ned said. He was tired and he still had the best part of two miles to go. “It’s dark. Or rather, it’s meant to be.”
The man ignored the rebuke.
“And who else would be in a car at one o’clock in the morning, except an officer?” he asked.
Ned could not help but correct him.
“Half one,” he said.
“Half one, half two, that is not the question.”
“No.”
“Report to the Feldkommandantur in the morning.”
“What?”
“At nine. I will see that the staff sergeant is expecting you.”
“Oh, let him off, Zep. He always was the difficult one,” came the other voice, giggling again. The legs swung down. A head leant forward. The red hair was unmistakable.
“Veronica? Is that you?” Ned looked in. She was propped up in the corner, a military greatcoat thrown over her shoulders. She drew the collar around her and shivered.
“It’s me all right. And this is Captain Zepernick, Zeppy to his friends. I’m surprised your paths haven’t crossed already, him being a policeman like you.”
The Captain looked at him coldly.
“We have not met,” he said.
Standing in her presence Ned felt emboldened. He had hardly seen her these last two years except when he met her on the way to a rehearsal, halfway up the stairs. She moved in different circles now, and their old easy friendship had gone. When he saw her hamming it up, bending forward over the very lip of the stage, him at the back, holding the knowledge of her within him, he saw the reason why he abandoned her. Too eager to please, that was Veronica all over, too eager to please, too quick to suggestion, too willing to open her mouth and swallow whatever morsel was dangled in front of her. It made him angry, this disregard of her own worth. But now, despite himself, he felt his old childhood friendship surfacing. She had been a good sort, W.
“I don’t suppose you have a pass, Veronica.”
“Right first time,” she laughed. The man in front turned and put his hand in the air. She stopped immediately.
“She has no need of one,” he told Ned, watching him, studying his eyes, following his every movement. Ned leant his hand on the roof of the car. There was an opening here Ned felt obliged to employ.
“Everyone needs a pass after curfew. Even guests of the Wehrmacht.”
Captain Zepernick smiled. It pleased him when others were prepared to play their games.
“Ah, but she is not a guest,” he countered. “She is on official business.” He reached out and opened the coat to reveal Veronica’s night attire. “See? I have been questioning her. We pulled her out of bed.”
“Pushed me more like,” Veronica complained, pulling the coat back together again. “Still don’t know why he bundled me out like that. Was it something I said?”
Captain Zepernick looked back and forth, as if unsure whose conversation to augment.
“He is not content,” he said to Veronica, and turning to Ned, added, “And you, why are you on foot? You have your own car, no?”
“No. Dead as a dodo.”
“Poor Ned,” Veronica mocked, “going walkabout at this time of night. And in those shoes. Couldn’t we give him a lift, Zep?”
The Captain looked at his watch.
“No. I am late already.” He handed back Ned’s curfew pass. “And the salute. This time there is no need to report. This time, understand? Gute nacht.”
The car sped off. Ned continued with his journey home. Soon he had left St Peter Port and was out into the country. To the east he could see the dim outline of Saumarez Park, to the west the fresh sprawl of artillery barracks and fuel depots. In former times he would have taken a short cut through the fields, but it was not wise to do so now. This part of the island was laced with treachery, landmines and booby traps underneath the sand, razor wire along the shoreline, and inland, set in the middle of every quiet walled meadow of family farmland, a French three-hundred-pounder with a wheel-spoke of wires stretching out from the brightly painted detonator to a series of posts, nine foot high, set around the perimeter of the field. Spider bombs, they were called, ready to ensnare any unfortunate paratrooper into their deadly embrace. The cobwebs of war.
Somewhere in the dark he could hear the stamp of feet where sentries stood guard. Hugging the grass verge, careful to make no sound, Ned walked on.
Veronica looked up to the mirror. The Captain had barely taken his eyes off her since they had resumed their journey. In further defiance of lighting regulations he reached back and switched on the interior light so that she might be better illuminated. It would have been easy to move out of the range of his vision, but knowing what was expected from her, and deciding with a thumping heart to give it her best shot, she positioned herself firmly in the centre of the seat, arms stretched out. At the outset she had speculated on the likely reward she might obtain if the Captain should tnake such an attempt, which was why she had chosen the back, for what she required was for the action to impart a desire from which it might be possible to extract a long-term unambiguous intent.
She started to hum that tune the Major had played her. The Captain tapped his hands on the wheel.
“You should have given him a lift,” she said, trying not to slur her words as he pulled up a little way past the narrow gate that led to the small row of cottages and her house at the end. “He lives just round the corner.”
“No,” he said, and slamming his door behind him, pulled hers open.
“Shh,” she scolded him. “Not so loud. You’ll wake everyone.” She tried to raise herself up but he pushed her back down.
“Be quiet, then,” he said, and began to pull at her pyjama trousers. “This is why you were dancing for the Major, no?”
“Not exactly.” She raised her bottom obligingly.
She knew this would happen, though it came to her, thinking of other things, that had not the Captain wasted time in stopping for Ned, he might have chosen somewhere more comfortable or simply have let her off with a curt goodnight and a request to meet her some other time. It was the act of arresting movement, of playing with a man’s liberty, that had goaded him finally. If anything she was surprised that he waited until he got h
er home.
The party had been a disaster. Veronica still did not know what she had done to upset Lentsch. Why had he suddenly found her so repellent?
“Go,” he had declared, slumping back on the sofa, snagging his hand on her pyjama top, sending one of the few fastened buttons skittering across the floor. Captain Zepernick had bent down and let it roll into his hand. She knew, the moment he held it out for her, his eyes never leaving her face, what his intentions were. So did everyone else.
“If it is not too far out of my way…” he had said softly, knowing such an inconvenience to be beyond the island’s capabilities, and with Molly splashing out another large brandy, the Major’s eyes closed to everything but his own misery and Bohde looking at her as if he would like to skin her alive and describe her discomfort throughout his printed domain, she had downed her drink and accepted without even blushing.
Outside the sudden air made her giddy. She feared she might pass out or worse, throw up, but as they descended into town, bumping along the High Street, up by the bank, outside whose premises she had accepted the pass that had led her to waste three years of her life, her head began to clear from the tart whip of the wind. Then out on Rohais the Captain swore and stamped on the brake and she felt the car swoon from the violence of the act. For a moment she panicked, thinking that he had decided to demonstrate his ruthless desire on the cold ground of some abandoned playing field, but then she saw him looking back, not at her, but at a figure walking up towards them from across the road. She knew who it was the moment he took his hands out of his pockets, sinking back in relief as, in response to the Captain’s clipped demand, she heard that slow, lazy voice that had been the accompanying cadence to so much of her early life. She had always liked Ned and when they were growing up together she had thought it likely that one day the two of them might make a go of it. Indeed both families had encouraged their easy friendship, leastwise her parents and his dad. Ned’s mother was a different story. She’d been nice enough when Veronica had been a child, but come sixteen she’d wrinkled up her nose and stared at her as if she thought Veronica spent her evenings walking up and down the Pollet with her lips painted bright scarlet. But by the time her nineteenth birthday had come around even she had seemed resigned to their unspoken engagement. Veronica was taking her chiropody exams (a rudimentary affair, conducted by post) while Ned, tired of odd jobs, was looking round for something permanent. They’d had a great time in those early years, her and Ned, then suddenly, twelve months back, it all changed. Ned became older, irritable, churlish at the island’s meagre expectations, turning down the job his uncle had promised him working for the Hallivands in their greenhouse business, finding fault with every-thing around him. She remembered how they had fallen out, over a kiss. It was a reward, a trophy for a victory throw of the darts, a kiss laced with gin-and-black, pressed on the lips of an older man who had held her close in leery, beery gratitude, his audience cheering them on. It was only given in jest, a stab at grabbing the limelight before her time was no longer her own, but Ned had stomped off without so much as a flying fist. It was that abandon-ment which had propelled her more permanently into the arms of Tommy Ie Coeur not three months later, despite the tales of his drinking and womanizing that lay like well-run tramlines up and down the streets of St Peter Port. A big man, immovable like the trunk of a tree, with a punchbowl of a stomach and a crow’s nest of a beard, it was hard to understand the reasons for his success and yet, tipping his heimet at her one empty afternoon as she came out of the bank on the corner of the Pollet, it was only a matter of an afternoon in the back room of the Brighton before the two of them had their respective uniforms strewn all around her little examin-ation room above Underwood’s and not a carbuncle or a pickpocket in sight, the two of them laughing at the noise they were making for Mr Underwood’s customers below as she bounced up and down on his great white belly.
Zep was on top of her now, fumbling with his buttons. She could hear his boots trying to gain purchase on the road. She raised her hips but it didn’t seem to help. This was no good at all.
“It’s bloody draughty in here,” she complained.
“Where, then?”
She pushed him off and stood up. He pressed her against the car and put his hand inside the greatcoat. She flinched. His hands were freezing.
“No,” she said. “This way.”
She took his hand and led him round to the end house. Down the path stood her father’s shed. The lock had been broken so many times they hadn’t bothered to replace it any more. At the back was a small window with a workbench running off to one side. The moonlight feil upon the pitted surface and a row of chisels above. Zep stood in the doorway, looking in, as if he were a guest being shown round a hotel.
“There is no room to lie down,” he said. She sat up on the bench, put her bag to one side and leant back against the wall.
“Pretend you’re on parade, then,” she said. “Stand to attention,” and she pulled him towards her. It was an awkward posture, where movement was dictated by the needs of balance rather than desire, hanging on the side with one hand, looking over his shoulder, hoping that they weren’t making too much noise, wondering whether this was a good idea. It was why she had gone to the party, wasn’t it, to bag a decent Jerry? Moving back to step out of his trousers the Captain banged his head on something hanging down from the rafters.
“Careful,” she said and reaching up took it down from its hook.
“What is it?”
She held it out at arm’s length. “A carving,” she said, “nothing much.” She cast it to one side. “You can come back now. It’s quite safe.”
He moved up again and undid her few remaining buttons, examining what he found.
“Beautiful,” he said, meaning it.
She kissed him gratefully.
“You should have seen them when I had a bit of weight on me. Your rations have half done for our figures.”
Romulus and Remus, that’s what Tommy used to call them, ‘each one a helmet’s worth’. That first afternoon had been typical Tommy, shrugging off his duties without a moment’s thought, sitting up at the bar, enjoying his steady consumption, heimet planted on the counter, her legs swinging back and forth. Whenever the connect-ing door opened, he would place the heimet solemnly over his glass, not because he was worried he might get caught (Tommy had been caught dozens of times—fined but never dismissed, for he was fearless when it came to fighting) but because it amused him to lift his hat of high office and feign astonishment at what lay underneath. There was a playfulness within Tommy that cut away his years, an irresponsibility that captured her utterly, though the news that Ned had upped and joined the English police and could be seen swanning about Dorchester High Street in a uniform one size too large for him had helped. So it was Tommy who she walked out with against her father’s wishes, Tommy with his unquenchable thirst and huge hands, Tommy with his delicate wood carvings and his roving eye. And for a while it worked. She thought that given enough solid sustenance ‘from her, she could wean him off his flights of fancy. She didn’t give him time for anyone else. By the time mother took ill and she was needed more at home it never occurred to her that he might return to his old ways, for it was Tommy who carved the Virgin Mary that her mother kept on her sickbed beside her, Tommy who carried her downstairs so that she might be near her garden, Tommy who pushed her along the Esplanade every Sunday, but despite all his kindness, stories came winging back of Tommy here and Tommy there, and did you see him walking out of the Normandie, one on each arm? She might have turned a blind eye had she not come across him, waiting for opening time, sitting on the stone wall carving a little lighthouse with ‘To Mary-Ellen: Guernsey Memories’ carved upon it. Though he promised to mend his ways, even as he was saying it his eye flicked across to a couple of trippers sauntering down the opposite road, skirts billowing in the wind. He winked at them. Just couldn’t help it. So she chucked him there and then, him and his ring, and spent her tim
e looking after Mum, cooking for Dad in the evenings and pruning leathery feet every morning from ten to twelve thirty and on Wednesday afternoons from half-past two to half-past four. She had some regular clients then, some of the island’s real toffs, even Mrs Hallivand. And then Molly had arrived, right after one of Mrs Hallivand’s imperial fortnightly visits. Veronica knew Molly slightly. “Ideas above her station,” her mother used to say. “With a figure like that she can afford them,” her da would reply. Molly had come about an ingrowing toenail, and they both stood by the window watching Mrs Hallivand sail down the street distributing nods and pleasantries to those who deserved them.
“I see you work under the royal warrant,” Molly observed and Veronica gave such a good impression of Her Majesty that Molly laughing added, “You should go on the stage. Come round to the Society one night. Up above the police station. We need some new blood. See if you like it. Only keep that one under your hat. Marjorie holds the purse strings.” And so she did. She was good. She had the mouth and the bottle for it. She could sing too. Every now and again she could hear Tommy’s laugh rise up through the floors. She still liked him. They started up again, unofficial. Nothing special. He’d been seen walking out with Elspeth Poidevin but had dropped her without warning. Rumour had it he was the father of her child, but it didn’t seem to bother either of them. When he was free he’d come round Tuesdays and Thursdays, just as was she was about to lock up and as often as not she’d turn the ‘closed’ sign, lock the door, pull down the blind and bounce that chuckle out of him again. She looked forward to it. Better he should be like this, hardly drunk, grateful and grinning, than stumbling into their marriage bed late at night with only the curse of failed expectation to embrace. The evenings were different. She’d started going out with a different set. Molly’s crowd. A bit more class than she was used to. She was earning a little money too, especially in the summer months. It was curious what people found under their socks when suddenly exposed to sunlight. She had a trickle of holiday-makers who came in the second or third day, their feet twitching on her carpet like flat misshapen creatures hauled up from the bottom of the ocean floor. And then she found another man. Son of a solicitor. A little dim but good-natured enough. Fancied himself as Guernsey’s answer to Noël Coward, all cravats and cigarette holders and tennis racquets. He taught her how to play croquet and mix Pimm’s No. 1. She learnt quickly. She began to read Country Life, Picture Post. She took the lead in plays by Agatha Christie. She acquired manners. Her voice changed, losing that slow insular edge she could hear in her parents and Tommy and all the others she had known. She could say wittier, nastier things. She saw people in the long term, what they could do, where they might be going, how she might be a part of it. She didn’t want the likes of Tommy any more. She was on her way to becoming a young lady now. She began to leave her surgery early, so that Tommy would arrive to find it locked and her gone. For three weeks it worked and then he caught her halfway up the police stairs on her way to a read-through of a new murder mystery. She was going to get strangled in her nightdress. She was looking forward to it.