“Who?”
“Fritz Kreisler. He’s a violinist. Jazz. Quite the rage on the Continent. The Major’s got all his records. He was going to lend me some for my routine. I’m getting quite popular these days.”
“On the stage, you mean.”
“Yes, Ned, on the stage. I got three encores the last time I sang Nanki Poo.”
Ned felt his displeasure rising. He’d always distrusted the exhibitionist in her.
“Don’t get me wrong, but it’s a very captive audience you’re playing to.”
“Ha ha very funny I don’t think.”
“Teil me about Bohde. He left the Casino early, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t keeping an eye on him, the little creep. But he was at the Villa when we arrived.”
“And how did he seem?”
Veronica shuddered. “Horrible. He doesn’t like us English girls. He was giving me filthy looks all evening.”
“Lots of men give you filthy looks, V.”
“I don’t mean like that. I can handle those. No, this was like I shouldn’t be there, like I shouldn’t be alive. I put it to the back of my mind, but thinking about it now, and what happened…” She started to cry. Ned made no attempt to comfort her. It was his way of punishing her.
“And then this Captain Zepernick took you home.”
The cold formality of his question shocked her. She blew her nose and stood up.
“As well you know.”
“And how was the handsome devil?” He’d lost it now. He laid down his pencil and closed the notebook.
“He drives too fast.”
“You should have walked home with me.”
“I didn’t have a pass, remember.” She looked out of the window. “But I didn’t need one then, did I?”
Ned riffled a penny over the back of his fingers. It was a trick he’d learnt lying on his bunk in the section house. He looked up at her, swinging her bag back and forth. It hardly seemed possible that she was the same Veronica he had known before. She held herself differently, wore a different expression on her face. There was no peace to her.
“You’d better go,” he said.
The penny slipped from his fingers and rolled onto the floor. Her voice came cold and scornful.
“Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt, V, that’s all,” he said, bending underneath his desk. “They’re not what they seem.”
“Neither were you. Neither was Tommy. So what’s new.” Her voice seemed far away. He got up slowly, careful not to bang his head. But she had gone.
One foot on the stairs and Mr Underwood came running out.
“You have a visitor,” he warned her. “I had to unlock the door myself.”
Captain Zepernick was sitting in her chair with his boots on her desk, writing a message on the back of an envelope.
“Captain!” She looked back, afraid that Ned might have followed her. She hated it when he thought badly of her. “Is this official? Something to do with your feet?”
“With my feet, no.” The Captain swung his legs down onto the floor. “Tomorrow afternoon. I was hoping you might come for a drive.”
“A drive? What, just you and me?”
“Yes. That is not to your liking?”
“No, no, it’s just…what about Molly?”
He did not reply but reaching out ran his hand slowly up the back of her leg. It seemed to take a good quarter of an hour to reach its destination, stopping on the way, retracing its cruelly deliberate journey. His breath came quietly, intently. She did not move.
“You didn’t expect me again?” he asked.
“I didn’t know.”
“Good. I like that.” He stood up, his hand lifting her slightly. “I liked very much the other night. Very much.”
“Did you?”
“Very much? And you too, I think?”
“Yes.” A He and a truth in one word.
“It is unusual so early on. The way you…”
“Yes.”
“I will be here at four. If you sit by the window you will see when I arrive.”
“Will I?”
He stretched out a finger and traced the tremble of her lips.
“The mouth too next time, I think.”
“Really?”
“Yes. In my car perhaps, or a house I know. Maybe here.”
“There’s no telling, is there.”
She kissed him. Captain Zepernick stepped back and smiled.
“Till tomorrow, then.”
She felt was lost and afraid, the penny rolling over Ned’s cold hand. Her heart was leaden, her arms heavy by her side. She stood in dread of herself, of what she had become. She didn’t want to say yes. She couldn’t say no. She opened the door for him.
“Till tomorrow, then.”
Nine
He is not hot but he feels the heat of the sun. He is not thirsty but he imagines the pitiless depth of the desert on his cracked lips. He wants to embrace the world but his hands have lost all sense of touch; he wants to look out onto visions of grace but there is only a lumpen grey mass moving before him. He never loved anything as much as his constructions, never felt for his flesh and blood the way he did for his bricks and mortar. He could fashion those latter materials, mould them, break them in his hands. He could lean over his desk at night and see them outlined on the transparent paper; he could walk in loam and clay and watch the ground give birth to their skeletal form. He had not bothered with buildings to house mortal men. His were monuments to power, to organization, orchestrating the ceaseless trudge of humanity. It was movement he had craved, movement and design, and this island had seen some of his greatest creations. He had shaped the white Observation Towers in one of which he now sits; he had welded the eagles’ nest gun emplacements onto the granite grip of rock; he had let loose the great swim of concrete upon the land. How he had loved those grains, the powdered weight of it lying in the sack, the thick slop of it churning in the mixer, pouring out grey and glutinous into wet, waiting moulds. What a revolutionary mixture it was, what deceptive strength lay in those unassuming seeds, how soft they seemed, how easily they hardened, what creations they spawned. And like all living things it could only spring to life after water’s hydrogen kiss. In his youth he had worked on a packet steamer and had stood once on its creaking deck watching the ice world of Greenland gliding past and he knows that concrete possesses the same treacherous beauty. Like the rush of an avalanche it can cover the landscape in one swoop, obliterating dip and hollow, inventing new worlds of flattened beauty. It is hard and impenetrable but is able to bend its shape. It possesses both depth and resonance, and though he has seen instances of decorated concrete, most notably in the concrete house of Norfolk, Home Place, where the surface is studded with flint and clay tiles and local brown stone, he prefers his concrete unmasked, with only the pattern of the wooden board marking its austere exterior. Concrete should be naked, unashamed. It should stand in defiance of the elements. It is the product of a new age, a powdered miracle. Man will be dwarfed by its power, its dormant energy. They will wander among its pillars and frescos and marvel at its unremitting strength. They will stand in awe listening to the echoes of their own tiny footsteps vanish in its great booming hollows. There will be cities of concrete, he knows it, cities with stadiums and railway stations and vast temples to new religions; there will be housing complexes, ranged over the ground like the spokes of a wheel, long rows of rectangular flat dwellings, two, possibly three storeys high, each equipped with a window box and a little balcony from which mothers can watch their children pushing scooters on the concrete paths below. Planes will land on concrete, ships will doek alongside concrete. The land will be crisscrossed by great ribbons of it, on which hundreds, nay thousands, of black blunt-nosed cars will run; free movement, free power and thus freed desire. Thought as action. Action as design. It is just the beginning. In a drawer under his draughtsman’s desk there lies a plan of the islands and the mainland and, joining them, two concrete bridges rising high above the sea, one from Cap de Carteret to Jersey, the other, further up the coast, from Flamanville to Guernsey, for when the war is over, those who have carried out His instructions will need to take themselves, their fiancées, their families, to a place of recreation and rest, where they may walk and tumble and gather strength. What better haven than these small islands, where everything can be tuned to their needs, Jersey for officers and high government officials, Guernsey for the other ranks? He had shown Dr Todt his design late one evening, and before the doctor could raise the obvious objection, had admitted that by its very nature the project would consume a high percentage of the labour force needed. “But think of it,” he had declared, “the longest bridge in the world built solely that the good and industrious might be rewarded.” Todt had warmed to the idea, reminding him of that other discussion they had taken part in, during his official visit to England in ‘37, and their meeting with the Minister of Transport. There had been talk of a bridge across the Channel then, and, ever the visionary, Todt had suggested that the enterprise should be seen not simply as a matter for England and France but as a European concern. The Minister had been polite but evasive, and later van Dielen realized that he should have taken this false enthusiasm as a warning against the British and their myopic view of the world. He should never have attached himself to England, he had reflected, he should have moved straight back to Europe. When they were discussing the coming weeks that night over dinner, with Ernst holding his glass in their air as if he could see the future whirling in the sparkling liquid, in a moment of rare frankness, he had shared his notion with Ernst, hoping that he might pass it on to Speer, whom he knew only slightly, but Major Ernst had looked at him strangely and said, “What makes you think that the traffic will be from the Continent? From England I think, and not for a holiday.” He did not understand then, and he chooses not to understand now.