Lentsch looked out across the dark rolling water. The clouds had lifted and the island lay anchored under the barrage of stars. He could see the watchtowers, two of them, rising out of the gloom and he knew that inside them, talking, smoking, watching, were men who could not see him at all. They could see nothing! They were facing the wrong way! They had built concrete walls and watchtowers and gun emplacements but they could see nothing! They had not captured this island or made it safe. Guernsey was not an impregnable fortress! The island was strong, alive, waiting for its time. It soaked up strength from the sea like a sponge; it took its breath from the air, like a great forest might. It was not an island. It was part of the world! It was part of the world, the world that gave life and death and grew warm under the sun. One day the concrete would be covered, its lines blurred, its grey white smeared with rust and speckled with green, transformed not simply by man’s neglect (though that would come) but by nature’s immutable force. One day men would clamber over these curiosities, as they did the tombs of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, except here they would not marvel at their primitive expertise, rather wonder how men, at such a late time in history, could deceive themselves so fally. Deceived and betrayed. And was he part of them? Had he deceived and betrayed? Had he truly loved Isobel, or simply taken advantage of his position and her father’s hasty acquiescence? Was this really love he had felt for her, or was it the other thing, an older man flattered at a young girl’s interest? A uniform. A manner. A holiday romance.
“We should not be here, you know,” he said.
“You’ve picked a fine time to tell me, Major.”
“Not here. I meant in Guernsey. We should not be here.”
“There’s nothing you or I can do about that.”
“No.” He dipped his paddie in the water, and turned the canoe round. “Let us go home, Ned. I have seen enough.”
Eleven
Veronica closed the door to her consulting room (which is what now she calls her single room, thanks to an article she read in an old copy of The Lady) and proceeded down the narrow and dingy staircase, nodding to Mr Underwood who stood, as he always stood, behind the glass front door which bore his funereal name, a tribute to a success and longevity which Veronica herself would like to emulate, just as she wished that Mr Underwood, so particular concerning the appearance of his own premises, would do something about the peeling paint flaking off the stairwell walls, put a bit of carpet down perhaps, but that afternoon, as she adjusted her flamboyant blue felt hat festooned with bunches of different coloured grapes, she had no time for more than a passing pleasantry which she mouthed and which he pretended not to notice, puiling his blind down firmly as she repeated the phrase. “Turned out nicely,” she said as she pulled at her skirt through the thick cloth of her second-hand overcoat, thinking it was true. She was turned out nicely and as a matter of fact it was beginning to turn out very nicely altogether.
Zepernick was waiting in the car. She had sat in her waiting room on the bare chair staring out of the window, looking down on the shoppers for an hour, fearing the Captain might not come, and when she had seen the car park ostentatiously up on the pavement and had breathed an audible sigh of relief it had come to her that whatever happened to her now she could never join her fellow islanders ever again. It wasn’t so much that she had chosen sides. It was more to do with the fact that she had widened her horizons. It was what she had been looking for all along. It could have been with Gerald. It might have been with Ned. But it had happened finally with Captain Zepernick, Zeppy as he encouraged her to call him, hastened by the need to deal with the complexity of the world, to embrace its fearful multiplicity, to step into the unknown. All those shoppers below wanted to do was to return to the world as it had been. She did not. That was what she had been trying to escape from, and with a bit of peaked cap fortune, she had broken through.
He had been calling for her these past three weeks now, like Tommy Ie Coeur used to, only the Captain had better taste. At first he had simply taken her for a drive, with a hamper bouncing on the back seat. It was a simple transaction. The Captain would wait patiently while she ate her fill, but the moment she wiped her mouth and threw the napkin aside he was on top of her. It was as if someone had blown him a whistle. She had toyed with the idea of taking her time, to see how long it would take for signs of his suppressed impatience to surface, but the truth was that she found it impossible to drink champagne slowly and the food, real bread, real cheese, real ham, had proved equally irresistible, though she had made certain that there was enough left over for when she got home. It was a good job the Captain didn’t know for why. It was against the law to fraternize with the foreigns, and though Zep was all for flouting the law himself, he took a different view of those who broke it without his permission. Those men for instance that he’d found smuggling, he’d had them crying like children, he had boasted, shoving photographs of their sweethearts in their broken faces, telling them to take a good look, they’d not be seeing them again. Nothing like these for them any more, he had chuckled, unplucking her buttons. Not for a long time. Such pleasure in other’s discomfort, she had discovered, provoked his stamina.
The Captain greeted her with an unsettling and businesslike smile before gunning the car up the hill. As she hung on to the strap she began to worry that he might be starting to lose interest, for despite her undoubted willingness and the regular availability of her charms, however hard she responded to his insistent and methodical embrace, it was difficult for her to emulate the same nervous excitement that had coursed through her body that first time in the shed. Even if she could have arranged for the boy to be hiding nearby every time it wouldn’t be the same. The element of terror would be absent, and terror, though the Captain did not fully appreciate this himself, was a quality which stimulated all his senses. The boy was now as regular in his appearances as was the Captain, slipping in round the back door at around eleven o’clock, making sure he did not bump into Ned’s new visitor again. The meal would be waiting for him on the starched chequered tablecloth; a glass of milk and whatever food she had managed to cobble together. If she had time she would try and piek a few flowers and place them in the centre, in an old-fashioned drinking glass, thick, with bubbles caught up its sides. To begin with he used to push this decoration aside and stolidly chew, but he had come to expect them now, settling his nose into their haphazard midst before eating, lifting out a single stem, stroking his cheek with the tapering petals once his plate was empty. For the first time in her life she had begun to enjoy cooking. Before she went to bed she would take Da’s paper and cut out that evening’s recipe or cooking hint—vegetable rissoles, Guernsey Gache, frying-pan scones. She had quite a number of them now, tucked in the back of her appointment book, and when she wasn’t leafing through it, or sat by the window looking out across Lower Pollet and the eternal barber’s queue, wondering what the Captain might be doing and if he intended to see Molly that night, she would deal out the scraps of newspaper like a deck of cards, thinking about the ‘white waif as Da called him and the slow, reluctant manner in which he ate, as if the food’s texture and taste were of such an incomprehensible nature that he needed to savour each mouthful in order to come to some elementary understanding of its configuration. “Pity we had to be starving before you bothered to learn how to cook,” her da had grumbled, but it was said with paternal admiration rather than displeasure, in recognition of the feminine and thus devious manner of her undoubted duplicity. Once home from her time with the Captain she would take out his leftovers, lay them on the table, add to them, reshape them, and have them waiting for this pale and wild creature who in turn stuffed the remnants (and like she, he always ensured that there were remnants, conscience overcoming desire) into those deep and curiously preserved pockets before bounding out into the night and the misunderstood dimensions of his billet.