And so they had. Starting in that entombed bedroom, within the week they had laid their intermittent claim throughout nearly the whole house, aping the habits of an ill-remembered aristocracy, wandering from room to room arm in arm like some landed couple viewing their priceless heirlooms, drinking champagne out of Venetian cut glass, opening shutters, closing doors, visiting every room save one at the ground level which was permanently locked and no trace of the key to be found, but no matter, there was still the thrill of sex on cordoned chaises longues or wrapped up in fifteenth-century tapestries and best of all naked up in the Eyrie, looking down over the convict island and the captured sea. How quickly the afternoons had become a fixture of their lives, as regular as the island’s motorcycle patrols, transforming this dead mausoleum into a palace of their possession, to dispose of as they saw fit, their occupation metamorphosed overnight from a single to a perpetual act, stretching like elastic both back and forward in time, creating its own history, obliterating all precedents. Where routine is concerned, there is no other history; it has always been thus. And it was in these surroundings that she began to learn the nature of the Captain’s captivity too, not a declaration of hopeless love (eternal or otherwise would have been welcome), no, he did not deliver that wishful confession, but instead voiced the frustrating limits of his meagre authority, his petty ambition and his fitful jealousy of uniforms other than his own. He did not vouchsafe matters of state, secrets a seductive spy might have elicited from her carefolly chosen lover, nor did these revelations occur after their coupling, for after the sex (and he was relentless in that respect, like a machine, once, twice, even three times in rapid succession), like so many men, he was eager to return to the mechanics of his restrictive male life, but rather these revelations occurred beforehand, while they made themselves at home, as he tried to mask his tumescent need by trivial and domestic conversation, a deception embarked upon not in recognition of Veronica’s sensibilities, but aired to convince himself that though he required that which she carried within and without her body, it was, as the matters he began to describe, a light, inconsequential thing, of no more consequence than which tie he might choose for an afternoon’s petrol-defiant motoring. And so he spoke in idle earnest, hardly bothering to hear her reply, a nod, a squeeze of the hand, a murmur sufficed, as he followed his wandering thoughts as a travelier might follow one of the hidden water lanes, hypnotized by their babbling murmur and aimless direction, not appreciating where they might be leading, and to begin with, to be sure they had led nowhere but those ruthless yet renascent bouts of intercourse, from which she left tired yet triumphant. But as the afternoons passed, and the conversations resumed day after day, as compulsive as some serial in a woman’s weekly magazine, he absorbed those sighs and gestures of unspoken understanding and began to recognize a part of him in her, just as while listening she became aware of a part of her within him. And because he knew he must not and could not talk of the island and its military burdens, he guarded against such indiscretions by leading her up the gravel drive to the Villa and all the intrigues that ran within its walls, the various jealousies, the indiscretions, the foolish love affairs, the tempers on the stairs. She has learnt of the Villa’s habits and the inequality therein; his own cramped bedroom overlooking the concrete coal sheds, compared to the Major’s bow-windowed chamber and its splendid view of the sea. She has learnt of Bohde and his compulsive and unnecessary greed; his obsessive sunbathing on the roof with young men from the Kriegsmarine; the way he comes back from the newspaper office with printer’s ink on his hands, leaving the finger marks of his trade on armchairs and balustrades where they can be picked up by the more fastidious lodgers. She has learnt about Molly’s relentless determination, the most singular woman he has ever met, the Captain confessed, her rare beauty setting her apart from the rest of her race, but so desperate to become official that she has attached herself to his uniform as if she were its most coveted decoration, to be paraded up and down before the ranks of his peers. To begin with he enjoyed these public exhibitions as much as Molly, delighting as his fellow officers cursed his good fortune, but over the months he has come to realize that these performances incite nothing but envy, particularly amongst his superiors. There are many who would like to strip him of this lush award and pin it to their own libidinous chest, and to his horror he has beginning to understand that there are those here who have the power to engineer it. She has learnt of the Villa’s comfort and its claustrophobia, the nights of desultory conversation and depressive drinking, the petty disagreements, the endless quarrels over hot water, the thefts of spoons and cutlery and china figurines which he suspects Albert of carrying out on behalf of Mrs Hallivand, not such an upright woman as everyone supposed, he suggested. Veronica listens to it all with a fluttering heart. This is a sort of treason she is hearing and she loves the sound it makes and the shapes that dance before her. An intake of breath, the way she lifts arm or shifts her body forward, and the Captain feels emboldened, seeing in them signals of later uninhibited opportunities. There is anger in his heart when he talks, anger and jealousy, and he has kept them hidden for too long. Taking them out, displaying a nakedness before her which no one else has seen, he feels the fullness of their desire growing. There is so much to describe; the raging battle between the Major and Bohde, which a month ago the censor would not have dared to fight but now, with the Major holed and Ernst steaming to Bohde’s aid, a battle which could well sink him, for all the Major’s experience and the seeming greater range of his guns. Ernst’s men had already dug up the fruit garden, uprooting the loganberry bushes and raspberry canes one afternoon while the Major was out, burning the bushes, Captain Zepernick told her, astonished still at the naked malignancy of it, burning them in spite of Albert’s protestations, thereby further fuelling the Major’s towering rage, Ernst standing over the smouldering remains saying calmly, “We are soldiers, Major Lentsch, not gardeners.” Lentsch had exploded. “Soldiers! Soldiers! Your men have never been soldiers.”
“I wish you’d told me earlier,” Veronica admonished him, “you could have given some to me,” and the Captain, putting his finger to her Ups, told her that she was missing the point. Of course they could have been given away, of course they could have been saved. They could have been moved, for Heaven’s sake. The Major could have been consulted. But this had been both a declaration and an act of war, like the blitzkrieg, leaving the enemy reeling, with no cover, nothing to hang on to, sapping his will as well as attacking him without warning. And the choice of location! It was like the fall of France and the little railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne where the armistice of 1918 had been signed, a deliberate humiliation, choosing the very area in the garden where Bohde had been caught, literally red-handed, a year back. This was where they had chosen to strike! “You sound as if you approve,” Veronica said. “I do not approve,” the Captain admitted. “But as a military man I admire their tactics.” Then of course there had been the question of Isobel, whose morbid and misplaced presence in the Villa was felt at every turn. To Veronica’s delight she had discovered that far from appreciating Isobel, her grace and charm, her ability to bring a special lightness to the proceedings, Captain Zepernick thought very differently of her. Scheming had been the first word he used, and Veronica, her eyes wide, tried to look surprised that any woman could ever contemplate such an activity. That first meeting after the pantomime, for instance, that was no accident; it was stage managed, he had insisted, pleased with his English pun. Isobel had known very well who Major Lentsch was. She had been shadowing him about the town for a good six months before deciding to make her move, getting her aunt to make sure he went along that afternoon so that she could be pointed out. Isobel had left nothing to chance, dressing up in a costume as figure-hugging as the ski outfit at their earlier encounter, even as going so far as repeating the instructions she had given the Major while she advised a fallen Wendy how to fly. “Keep your knees bent,” she had ad-libbed. “Glide.”