“Am in the best of health, Rose,” he repeats. “Our own dear Kitty is in the best of health, thinking of us always.” He looks out across the graveyard, recalling all the folk he has known, friends, neighbours, a few enemies. He tells them too. “She is safe,” he announces, “as is my other little gift to the world.”
He is proud of his gift, proud how he engineered it, a length of cast-iron drainpipe dragged from its Hautville mooring, sawn to a manageable length and primed on that long mahogany table. It is irrevocably marked, that table, the ancient depth of its gloss scuffed and scratched, smeared with rust and iron filings and the fingers of a fanatic, for although Mrs H. does not realize it, that is what he has become. Mrs H. had protested at first at Albert’s determined vandalism, explaining the history of it, the lines of nobility that had dined, quaffed and wenched across its burnished length, but he had brushed aside her complaints, telling her that these unexpected indentations too would find their way into guide books, how future generations would shuffle through the house to marvel at these historie scars, the cuts where he had sliced through the electric wire, the scratched circles where the drainpipe had been stood up on its end, the chip on the side where the claw-hammer had missed its mark. He did not tell her that there would be no such visitors, that the table and all the other contents of this house would be destroyed along with the rest of the island. All he had told her was King and Country and a war brought to a quick and righteous close. And she had believed him.
He has constructed this device in the same fashion that he used to make all his bombs, the only difference being that this one was bigger. They used to have such fun making them, him and his brother and young Ned, chucking them in, waiting for the earth to thud and bleeding rabbits dragging themselves out of the smoke-billowing holes. He has not been able to gauge the extent of this bomb’s power, this mixture of sugar and weedkiller, these bags of six-inch nails and rusting bolts, clinking lumps all packed into jagged cans that once contained tinned peas and sweetened carrots, but it will make a mess of them, no doubting that.
How had it come to him, this plan which will bring about the finale of his world? Lidichy, Lidichy, that was the start of it, that haunting name. He had often wondered what it must have been like, this village that has been handed around the drawing room like a game of pass the parcel, perhaps like one of the hamlets here, a little street, a few farm buildings, a church, a close-knit huddle for a few hundred souls. Before all the kerfuffle, when the Major was still in charge, they used to have this argument regularly about Lidichy and the bigwig that the partisans had killed nearby, blown up or shot, he could never quite work out which, though he took a week to die, he knew that. Whatever, the day he died they had surrounded this village, this Lidichy, sealed it off from the rest of the world and wiped it and those who lived there clean off the face of the earth. Didn’t matter that the poor sods had nothing to do with it, it was like, “Sorry, chum, you’ve got to go.” The Major used to get in a terrific bate about it, the crime of Lidichy he called it. The others had got fed up with him rabbiting on. The name had stuck in his own mind, Lidichy, and thinking of it, this Lidichy which used to exist in flesh and stone and now did not, he began to dweil on its demise, brought about not through military design or an accidental misfortune of war but for example. Leaning out of the Captain’s window one morning, flapping his bedclothes against the brickwork, it came to him that this was what Guernsey deserved to become, an example. Wasn’t that what the Germans had planned for it anyway, that the Channel Islands should be a model Occupation? That’s what this kid-glove stuff was all about, and see what a model it had become, the shame his countryman had brought upon his home: married women lying abed with the enemy while their menfolk perished on the high seas; young girls strutting down the High Street, poxed or pregnant, it was all the same to them; men tipping their caps to them, queuing up to do their dirty work. Everyone had turned rotten. He can feel the start of it even in himself, softening his moral backbone, turning his stubborn will to sap. The island needs grubbing out, like he would a bed of diseased fruit canes. Husbandry they used to call it, dig the lot out and burn the earth; the spirit of Lidichy. He had put his hands on the window sill and looking out had seen, stretching out over the back lawn, a vision of Guernsey emerging out of the mist, a Guernsey overgrown, a Guernsey denuded, water swilling in and out of a harbour of abandoned moorless boats, the town deserted, packs of dogs scavenging among the rubble, whole streets blown apart, farmhouses burnt, a forbidden island with nothing but wild flowers and gorse enveloping the ruins. Then the mist had cleared and in the solitude of the sea below he imagined a rowing boat and cloaked men in black raising their oars as the craft glided in to shore—a new generation hoping to start afresh. He saw his Kitty standing in the prow, Kitty beside her man, Kitty with his grand-children in her arms.
During those weeks of the Major’s absence, the Captain had thrown caution to the wind. All-night poker games, drinking sprees, lewd pyjama parties, Molly ensconced there permanent, young men smelling of hair oil and posing for Bohde’s camera in buiging leather pouches. Ernst had invited himself over, putting his feet up on the drawing room fireguard, holding forth as if he’d just bought the place. He and the Captain had seemed rather hugger-mugger too, talking for hours in the Major’s study behind a firmly shut door, glasses of Mr Hallivand’s special brandy to hand.
Lidichy, Lidichy, Arrivaderchi Lidichy. It would be too much to ask. Then one morning Molly came skipping down the stairs singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and demanding breakfast in bed for her and the Captain. Half-naked she was, with those pimples that passed for breasts poking out underneath for all to see. There was something about that part of her body that he found almost obscene, as if she was not a proper woman at all, and the thought of a man enjoying her, touching those boyish things, kissing them, exciting them, had always disgusted him. Why she couldn’t wear a dressing gown like everyone else he didn’t know, except of course he did; to cause him maximum embarrassment that’s why, to flaunt in his face the fact that she was the new mistress of the house and that he’d better remember it.
“We had the most wonderful evening last night, Albert,” she had said, starting up the careless humming again, and didn’t he know it, his bloody boxroom rattling like he was strapped to a tramline half the night. “Your birthday, is it, miss?” he had said, knowing full well it weren’t, and she had stood on her toes and yawned, “Oh no, not mine,” smirking at him like she’d just won the pools. “Well, whose, then?” he had asked, irritated, not really listening to the answer, and she had come up close, closer than a woman should in that state, and tapped him on the nose. “Never you mind, Mr Albert Nosey Parker. You’ll find out soon enough.”
He knew all their birthdays, the Major’s, the Captain’s, Molly’s, Isobel’s. They all needed their little parties and their little birthday cakes, didn’t they? Molly’s twenty-seventh had been in June, a fancy-dress extravaganza down on the beach, with the lookout guards on the cliff opposite removed for the night so that they couldn’t tell their mates the fan and games that went on, Albert standing by the French windows with cups of hot chocolate as they fell in at three o’clock in the morning, drunk as lords and twice as randy. So whose birthday, then? Some special toff from France no doubt, with more raids slated for the Villa’s cellar. He’d thought no more about it, but later that morning, on his way to the barbers, he had passed by Hendy’s the stationers and there in the window was this dirty great painting of Hitler himself, sitting on a horse with a lance stuck in his mitt, dressed up like some knight in shining armour and underneath Mein Kampf in magazine form. In English. To celebrate the Führer’s coming birthday they were giving away ten complete sets. All you had to do was to fill in your name and address and wait for the draw. He had stopped and looked at the picture and the book beneath and thought again of Molly singing and smirking and Ernst’s and the Captain’s little huddles, one the man in charge of fortifications, the other in charge of security. If he was coming, that’s what he’d be doing, wouldn’t it, inspecting fortifications? He had walked into the shop and picked up the form.