He moved to her once more but she pushed him away. She knew what she had to do. This would be her one chance. She could feed him this morsel in the same manner as she fed him her flesh. It would be the seal of her success, the stamp in her passport, the key to the Villa’s door.
“A jacket,” she said, “what sort of jacket?” knowing full well what the description would be, recognizing it the moment he had spoken the words, seeing it hung up over the back of the kitchen chair, seeing the smudged label underneath the worn collar, seeing—a woman’s jacket yes, with the darts on the front and cuts in the side, a woman’s jacket with leather elbow patches and a pretty collar and small wooden buttons.
“You know,” Zepernick said, “her corduroy jacket. She wore it all the time, riding, walking, probably…” he reached out and sucked on her again, “…in it too,” and Veronica, regaining her composure, remembered that indeed Zep was right, she had seen it on her any number of times, up at the rehearsal rooms, slung over her shoulders or left half trailing on the floor in that careless wealthy manner she had found so irritating, an expensive coat that only the rich would treat so casually, remembering how Isobel would piek it up and hurry into it, on her way to some other social gathering to which she, Veronica, would not be invited. An unexpected surge of resentment flooded over her. She wanted to join with this man and put paid to all the years they had been excluded, denied the things for which they had striven so hard and which still evaded them, and without hesitation, knowing that she could bring it off, she prised his lips away and bent down, kissing his chest and his stomach, and told him quickly, glorying in her ability to deflect his hands and his curiosity from the warm certainty of her body. Why, she had seen just such a jacket on a boy, this very morning. “Today! On a boy! Where? What’s his name? Do you know his family?” Zepernick raised her up, firing his questions rapidly, assuming that it is a native boy she was describing, one of those miscreants who fired catapults from behind drystone walls, of all the inhabitants the most insistent in their insolence, and she, a shiver of excitement running through her, said, “No, not one of ours, Zep, one of yours, a foreign,” the cold intelligente suddenly flickering behind his eyes, like the flare of a lighted match. “A foreign?” he repeated, and she nodded. “You know, one of the Todt workers,” conscious of her nakedness and the leeway it afforded her, making up the story as easily as instilling freshness into those tired words of lust. She could picture it in her mind’s eye, see the Pollet below her and the foreigns marching past, remove the boy far from her own home and place him in their midst with his red pantaloons and his white shock of hair and the strangely cut jacket that hung down on his slender frame, describing how he had clambered into the waiting lorry parked at the end, marvelling how it was all working out in her favour, how the Captain sat up, alert, his hands pressed together as he asked, “Did you notice the lorry number, or a name on the side?” and she shook her head, knowing instinctively that this would be an observation too far, but seeing a way out, wanting to convert her invention into something more tangible, she leant back and said, “Funnily enough I do know where he goes, or rather where he went,” knowing full well that he was still there, was there right now as she talked, “for I was up by St Andrew last week seeing a patient and saw him with the other foreigns up there, at the hospital tunnel at La Vassalerie Road.” As she said it, the pang hit her, wishing that the Captain had never mentioned the jacket and that her mouth had travelled the full distance and become so full with him that she would have been unable to speak of the boy at all. “The hospital?” he said, and she, fearful for a second that she had betrayed her own complicity, that that was something she shouldn’t know, added quickly, “Perhaps he had nothing to do with it, I don’t want any trouble,” and laughing he assured her, “Don’t you worry, Veronica, he’ll not harm you,” but though she shook her head, saying no she didn’t mean that, the Captain wasn’t listening, he had forgotten her, even as he kissed her and pulled on his shirt and told her not to worry, that he’d come by soon and make it up to her, running his hands up and down her trembling front, hurrying her down the stairs as she pulled on her coat before bundling her out of the door. And as she stood there and watched as he ran to his car, as she heard the engine scream down the hill, she realized that there would be no Casino that night and no Villa, and that far from coming closer to him she had set herself apart from him again, drawn another Occupational line in the sand. She stood out of breath, alone, and looking down the hill and the little town below she suddenly saw what she had done and understood the awfol ease by which one achieves betrayal.
Twelve
The Dutchman has been working for three and a half weeks now, first outside, on L’Ancresse Bay, pouring cement into the great swell of the gun emplacements, and once that had finished down here, in the tunnel alongside the boy. Though he understands only a few of the words the boy speaks—a broken mixture of English, German and what? Polish? Russian?—he has started to follow the boy, for it is he, rather than the older man (who does not have as much spare energy), who has been nursing him through these difficult days. So he stands behind this boy at mealtimes, sits opposite him in the bouncing lorry, leans his back against the same creosoted hut wall on their meagre day of rest, and now pushes the wagon that the boy has to fill with rocks and stones and clawing clumps of clay, before bringing back an empty one for him to load in return. Though the work is without pity and the tunnel without end, the boy seems to be gaining an unacknowledged authority over these excavations by the day. He takes pride in showing van Dielen the bewildering dimensions of this labyrinth, the endless series of domed rooms, the huge mysterieus length of it, the great reservoir dug for the water and near the connecting tunnel, on which he is now working, the tiny room disguised by the mud-caked sheet of metal behind which they sit and drink water from a stolen canteen. The old man and the young boy have taken it upon themselves to look after van Dielen, though he has uttered not one word of thanks, nor indeed made any sound at all, even when pushing the empty wagon back up to the tunnel’s head (a task which paradoxically is harder than pushing a full-laden truck down to the entrance). Indeed his lack of speech seems to endear him to them.
Perhaps they are tired of hearing their fellow prisoners’ constant complaints; perhaps his silence, his expressionless face, his slow methodical gait, are welcome changes. They clap him on the back on the few occasions he has seen fit to nod and they grasp his arm when he puckers his mouth or shrugs his shoulders in answer to a question. During the hut hours, when he remains motionless and unblinking, they sit on either side of him, patting food into his limp hand, handing him his tin of watered soup, and at night they lift his feet up onto the bed and draw the blanket close. It is not that he has difficulty in moving. Once set in motion, loping along four abreast, shovelling shingle, breaking lumps of granite in the flint-flashed dark, there is a rhythm to his life that he can run to, holding his own alongside the best of them, but when he stops he sees no reason for starting again. The motor within him has seized up. Take this morning for instance. The triangle had been rung at half-past five, and the boy had swung his legs down and shaken him awake before trotting off to the line of pails. Normally the old man would get him moving, leading him outside to the assembly point, but this time he had forgotten. Van Dielen knew the rules, he had seen it happen often enough, that the last one to stumble out into the frostbitten air got his backside warmed; knew too that the later the arrival the greater the heat, and he did not wish to be beaten, no, he wanted to dig, to lose his life again in the sweet darkness of the island’s heart, but he did not stir, could not; there was something about his plank of wood and the old coat that the boy had wrapped around his shoulders that night which prevented him from moving. He lay there, looking at his bandaged feet, hearing others coughing their guts out onto the sawdust floor, scraping handfuls of lice from their armpits, belching and farting and squirting excrement into the nearby bucket, before scrambling out to stand in shivering lines while the overseer marked them off: he heard it all and yet did not move. The coat was so warm, so familiar, the scent of it so heady, so dreamlike, not the immediate smell of sweat and tar and dank green water, but something else, deep within the lining and soaked into the collar. He pulled it up over his mouth and nose and inhaled. It was as if he was lying on an operating table, breathing in ether through a mask, lurid visions of lost worlds looming up as he feil into a gathering mist. There were faces floating past, eyes creased with the sun shielded by a straw hat, a head of hair in pigtails bouncing on a donkey, a woman in a white dress standing on a raised veranda, the dying sun setting her skin aflame; scènes too, bridges and towers and ribbons of road. He wanted to follow them but his feet were too far away, wrapped in lead, feet that had once walked deserts and crossed ravines, measured out metres and yards, lain in between those of a good woman, run races with a barefooted sprite. He thought he had forgotten most things but briefly he understood that he had not forgotten, simply viewed it all in a different perspective, one in which he played no part. No wife, no daughter, no name, no past. They knew him not when he was alive and he knows them not now that they are dead. His life is but a shadow, a dark irrelevance and one in which he will take no further part. But oh, those pigtails! That barefoot sprite! Then the coat was thrown aside and the blanket torn off and he was pulled to his feet and dragged out by the wrist, his left arm trailing on the floor like he was a monkey in his keeper’s grip, and stood underneath the beams where the two hooks were fixed. Behind him he heard others laugh and shout words of encouragement: ‘If this doesn’t get him talking, nothing will’, ‘Bet he faints after ten’, “Don’t worry, mate, it happens to all of us’—and out of the crowd the boy had stepped forward and pointing to him, had stuck his finger in his ear, making out that the explosions in the tunnel the previous day had made rendered the Dutchman temporarily deaf, and though it had not saved him completely, for by this time his arms had been raised and tied and the whip placed in the man’s hand, the overseer, after shoving the boy rudely aside, had struck him only five times, the flail of leather strands, oiled and supple and fixed to a wooden handle, breaking on his back like the splutter of Christmas crackers. After a final kick in the shins and a long intimidating bellow in his ear, he was cut down, where he stood shaking while the men dispersed, before the boy, the coat back on his shoulders, returned to lead him to the waiting lorry and the day’s work.