“What do you think, lads?”
His precise, insinuating delivery suggested horrors that Turner could not immediately grasp. Now was his last chance to act. As he looked around for the corporals, there was a roar from close by, like the bellowing of a speared bull. The crowd swayed and stumbled as Mace barged through them into the circle. With a wild hollering yodeling sound, like Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, he picked up the clerk from behind in a bear hug, lifting him eighteen inches clear of the ground, and shook the terrified creature from side to side. There were cheers and whistles, foot-stamping and Wild West whoops.
“I know what I want to do with him,” Mace boomed. “I want to drown him in the bloody sea!”
In response, there rose another storm of hooting and stamping. Nettle was suddenly at Turner’s side and they exchanged a look. They guessed what Mace was about and they began to move toward the door, knowing they would have to be quick. Not everyone was in favor of the drowning idea. Even in the frenzy of the moment, some could still recall that the tide line was a mile away across the sands. The Welshman in particular felt cheated. He was holding up his webbing and shouting. There were catcalls and boos as well as cheers. Still holding his victim in his arms, Mace rushed for the door. Turner and Nettle were ahead of him, making a path through the crowd. When they reached the entrance—usefully, a single, not a double, door—they let Mace through, then they blocked the way, shoulder to shoulder, though they appeared not to, for they were shouting and shaking their fists like the rest. They felt against their backs a colossal and excited human weight which they could only resist for a matter of seconds. This was long enough for Mace to run, not toward the sea, but sharp left, and left again, up a narrow street that curved behind the shops and bars, away from the front. The exultant crowd exploded from the bar like champagne, hurling Turner and Nettle aside. Someone thought he saw Mace down on the sands, and for half a minute the crowd went that way. By the time the mistake was realized and the crowd began to turn back, there was no sign of Mace and his man. Turner and Nettle had melted away too. The vast beach, the thousands waiting on it, and the sea empty of boats returned the Tommies to their predicament. They emerged from a dream. Away to the east where the night was rising, the perimeter line was under heavy artillery fire. The enemy was closing in and England was a long way off. In the failing light not much time remained to find somewhere to bed down. A cold wind was coming in off the Channel, and the greatcoats lay on the roadsides far inland. The crowd began to break up. The RAF man was forgotten.
It seemed to Turner that he and Nettle had set out to look for Mace, and then forgot about him. They must have wandered the streets for a while, wanting to congratulate him on the rescue and share the joke of it. Turner did not know how he and Nettle came to be here, in this particular narrow street. He remembered no intervening time, no sore feet—but here he was, addressing in the politest terms an old lady who stood in the doorway of a flat-fronted terraced house. When he mentioned water, she looked at him suspiciously, as though she knew he wanted more than water. She was rather handsome, with dark skin, a proud look and a long straight nose, and a floral scarf was tied across her silver hair. He understood immediately she was a gypsy who was not fooled by his speaking French. She looked right into him and saw his faults, and knew he’d been in prison. Then she glanced with distaste at Nettle, and at last pointed along the street to where a pig was nosing around in the gutter.
“Bring her back,” she said, “and I’ll see what I have for you.”
“Fuck that,” Nettle said once Turner had translated. “We’re only asking for a cup of bloody water. We’ll go in and take it.”
But Turner, feeling a familiar unreality taking hold, could not discount the possibility that the woman was possessed of certain powers. In the poor light the space above her head was pulsing to the rhythm of his own heart. He steadied himself against Nettle’s shoulder. She was setting him a test he was too experienced, too wary, to refuse. He was an old hand. So close to home, he was not falling for any traps. Best to be cautious.
“We’ll get the pig,” he said to Nettle. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Nettle was long used to following Turner’s suggestions, for they were generally sound, but as they went up the street the corporal was muttering, “There’s something not right with you, guv’nor.”
Their blisters made them slow. The sow was young and quick and fond of her freedom. And Nettle was frightened of her. When they had it cornered in a shop doorway, she ran at him and he leaped aside with a scream that was not all self-mockery. Turner went back to the lady for a length of rope, but no one came to the door and he wasn’t certain that he had the right house. However, he was certain now that if they did not capture the pig, they would never get home. He was running a temperature again, he knew, but that did not make him wrong. The pig equaled success. As a child, Turner had once tried to persuade himself that preventing his mother’s sudden death by avoiding the pavement cracks outside his school playground was a nonsense. But he had never trodden on them and she had not died. As they advanced up the street, the pig remained just beyond their reach.
“Fuck it,” Nettle said. “We can’t be doing with this.”
But there was no choice. By a fallen telegraph pole Turner cut off a length of cable and made a noose. They were pursuing the sow along a road on the edge of the resort where bungalows were fronted by small patches of gardens surrounded by fences. They went along opening every front gate on both sides of the street. Then they took a detour down a side road in order to get round the pig and chase it back the way it had come. Sure enough, it soon stepped into a garden and began rooting it up. Turner closed the gate and, leaning over the fence, dropped the noose over the pig’s head. It took all their remaining strength to drag the squealing sow back home. Fortunately, Nettle knew where it lived. When it was finally secure in the tiny sty in her back garden, the old woman brought out two stone flagons of water. Watched by her they stood in bliss in her little yard by the kitchen door and drank. Even when their bellies seemed about to burst, their mouths craved more and they drank on. Then the woman brought them soap, flannels and two enamel bowls to wash in. Turner’s hot face changed the water to rusty brown. Scabs of dried blood molded to his upper lip came away satisfyingly whole. When he was done he felt a pleasing lightness in the air around him which slipped silkily over his skin and through his nostrils. They tipped the dirty water away onto the base of a clump of snapdragons which, Nettle said, made him homesick for his parents’ back garden. The gypsy filled their canteens and brought them each a liter of red wine with the corks half pulled and a saucisson which they stowed in their haversacks. When they were about to take their leave she had another thought and went back inside. She returned with two small paper bags, each containing half a dozen sugared almonds. Solemnly, they shook hands.
“For the rest of our lives we will remember your kindness,” Turner said. She nodded, and he thought she said, “My pig will always remind me of you.” The severity of her expression did not alter, and there was no telling whether there was insult or humor or a hidden message in her remark. Did she think they were not worthy of her kindness? He backed away awkwardly, and then they were walking down the street and he was translating her words for Nettle. The corporal had no doubts.