“Not the canoe. Veronica’s cooking.” She got up. “Teil you what. I’ve got something that will fill you up before you go. I was saving it for the next time the Major came round to tea.”
They listened as she fussed in the kitchen. She was humming to herself as if she was almost happy. She had a son who loved her, a son with a girlfriend, a son who was escaping to safety. And she was making him tea.
Veronica returned carrying a buiging string bag.
“One potato and onion pie,” she said proudly, “some oatmeal biscuits and three slices of carrot cake.” She nodded to the kitchen. “Your mum’s doing you proud too. Where did she get it from?”
“Get what?” asked Ned.
His mother called them in. She’d laid the little table with her best tablecloth, and on it stood her four best bowls, the ones with pictures of Westminster Abbey round the rim. There was a sweet scent to the air, a smell of childhood and warm spoons. His mother pointed to the steaming bowls.
“That’s real custard in there,” she said. “Stewed apple and real custard.” She lifted the tin high in the air. “Bet you’ve see nothing like that in years. Bird’s custard powder. You’ve got your uncle to thank for that.”
Sixteen
It’s hard to believe that all these towers and gun emplacements and miles of tunnel have been built, not by fit young men with state-approved muscles and healthy assuaged appetites, but by men weakened by dysentery, who eat one bowl of cabbage soup a day, who sleep on planks of wood, who dress in discarded cement bags, who never wash, who shit in communal buckets, who are beaten with whips and chair legs, and who work twelve hours a day nonstop whatever their state of health. They have built this. They have.
He clambers down the rocky surface to where the machine lies, housed in a brick house, one storey high, long like a boat, unattractive like a urinal. It is a simple machine; a huge grey rectangular funnel at the top, into which are tipped the stones and granite, a long clanging chute, down which they fall, and at the bottom a row of great stone wheels, through which these stones are minced: Guernsey rock for Guernsey sand; Guernsey sand for Guernsey cement. There are two machines of this design on the island and through them Guernsey is producing the means of its own incarceration; eating its own tail. It is like one of those children’s stories that his wife used to sing, yes, he remembers that, how she used to recite those English nursery rhymes on those long foreign nights, sitting under the mosquito net, looking out over the hot night air; Jack and Jill going up a hill; the man who looked like an egg; Old King Cole; the house that Jack built. That was her favourite, the house that Jack built, for Daddy was a builder, long ago, when he had a daughter to listen to such tales. Had he one? It was so hard to know, such an improbable possibility that he had a daughter and a wife and a construction called a family, with all the constituent parts that such a complicated entity would involve. No, he cannot imagine it, for he waved the boy goodbye, did he not, sent him ranning home before he began this journey to his. But whether he ever possessed one or not is of no consequence, for he is of the island now and this is where he must return.
It is not difficult to climb up the small service ladder and stare down into the heart of the machine. There is the loose tumble of rock churning above the slow grinding wheels, a whirlpool of granite and flint out of which flow grains of eternity. This is what he desires, to become an infinite speek of sand, to be swept along into the body of the island, to have the sea pounding him, pressing him. To be a rock! A stone! To have the sea and the sky and the wind calling you! He is a rock! He is a stone! He jumps into the grinding pool, one leg bent sideways, one foot immediately caught, the ankle taken down and squeezed so hard he cannot imagine it, his knee first cracked then flattened, and as his hands rise up and he is taken down, his soft body following, gut squirting through his mouth, he Iets forth an unbearable scream. No man can hear him, not his fellow slave workers, unloading the next wagonload, not the overseers idling their hours in the cabin of their battered lorry, not the Spanish Republican engine driver leaning out of the cab of his dirty belching engine, not even Major Ernst, one hundred yards away, tracing plans with his stick. There is the grim crushing of the machine, there is the hissing smoke from the train’s boiler, there is the rhythm of the labourers’ spades and the wheeling call of gulls, but there is no van Dielen. Van Dielen is dead now, crunched and mixed and turned to wet, dusty powder. Van Dielen is dead but not buried. He will lie in a heap for a year or more, tufts of couch grass growing atop him. The wind will come and blow him over the pebbles and onto the sweeping sand. In later years he will be run upon by bare feet and shovelled into proud buckets. He will be hurled against curving walls upon which he once walked; luminescent specks of him will sparkle in the wet sheen of the seaweed; a bone in a shrimping net; grit in a sunbather’s eye. Others will come and others will go but van Dielen will never leave. He washes in and out, in and out, lapping around the huge circumference of his family’s grave.
Seventeen
Ned walked up the drive. Wedel was up at the top polishing Bernie’s car. He looked up and grinned.
“Inspector Luscombe. You still have no auto?”
“I’m waiting for the matching suit.”
Wedel looked back at the house. “If you have come for the Major he is not here. In fact, I do not think you will be able to see him again.”
“That’s all right. It’s my uncle I’m after.” He showed him his warrant card. “It’s official.”
He walked down the tiled corridor, putting his head round each door. All neat and tidy, except for the slight hole by the drawing room door. The dining room table was set for dinner, the drawing room redolent of cigars and hair cream. Beyond, through the French windows, he could see men and wheelbarrows and a great trench of freshly dug earth at the far end of the lawn. A couple of trees lay on their sides. At least they’d have fuel for the next winter. Above him he could hear an odd muttering, like a bad-tempered soliloquy. He climbed the stairs towards it. He recognized the voice now. On the second floor the door to one of the bedrooms lay wide open. Albert was on his knees going through the small drawer by the bedside.
“Uncle?”
Albert looked up. He held something in his hand.
“Spoons,” he said. “Teaspoons, dessertspoons, and here, tucked in his fancy underwear, the fish knives that were stolen six months ago. He’s been helping himself, the thieving bastard.”
“Who?”
“Bohde. This is Bohde’s room. What are you doing here? If you want the Major…”
Ned held up his hand and looked around. Through the window smoke was coming out of the lodge’s chimney. One law for the rich, he thought.
“Have you heard? The Major’s leaving,” he said.
Albert put the spoons back in their place and pushed back the drawer.
“I know. Only himself to blame. Should have kept his mouth shut, whatever he felt. Bad enough at the best of times, but now.”
“Now?”
“The birthday boy.” He raised himself from the floor. “They’re very sensitive about Hitler’s birthday. Don’t like anyone to spoil the fun.” There was a sparkle to his eyes.
“You know, don’t you, Uncle?”
“Know what?”
“Know that he’s coming here.”
Ned took the tin of custard from under his jacket and put it on the dresser.
“Now tell me it wasn’t you. Teil me it wasn’t you who tipped Isobel down that shaft.”
Albert said nothing.
“I haven’t quite worked it out, Uncle, which bit fits where, but then I’m not a very good policeman. You part of this smuggling ring, too? And how did it get mixed up in all this other business?”