Slapton Sands Read Free Page A

project. Patriotic drum-banging. Mere military history. Jesus! She hadn’t come over three thousand miles to explore blind alleys.
    The lights were coming on now on the Isle of Sheppey. There were lights strung along a late fishing boat, and the flat shape of a dredger was outlined in electric lamps on the horizon as darkness deepened the sky. The sea at south Devon would not be like Whitstable, she knew, with its shingle and groynes and snug little harbour. The sea where she was going was capricious and exposing, its swell powered in tumbling waves along a vast wilderness of shore.
    She sat on the breakwater outside the Neptune and wondered if anything ever washed up on Slapton Sands. Were badge caps and buttons and rifle bolts lightened by rust and corrosion on the sea bottom ever cast back on to the land? Was there a beachcomber living in the bay nursing a careful hoard of clues about the catastrophe? Alice Bourne was a historian, not a marine archaeologist. But when she arrived, knowing nothing after the struggle just to go, it would be interesting to see some tangible relic of the men who were rumoured to have perished there.
    She’d sat in Champion’s campus office and waited to pleadher case while he’d taken an important telephone call that interrupted their meeting almost at its outset. The blind over the single window was drawn against heat and glare. A spindly electric fan failed to create much of a breeze, noisily, on his desk. A collection of precise brass rubbings hung on one wall, long medieval faces in thin, gold leaf frames. It was hard for Alice to imagine such features ever having belonged to the living. Titles Champion had authored were given pride of place in his bookcase. They consumed almost a full shelf. He sat leafing through her proposal as he spoke into the phone, a habit she hated, regarded as dismissive, cavalier. She noticed that his moustache was stained with nicotine at its centre. He finished his call and lit a cigarette from the flame of a heavy desk lighter shaped out of onyx.
    â€˜Why have I never heard about this event?’
    â€˜Because it was covered up?’
    Champion smoked and considered. He held the cigarette between the fingers of his right hand so that when he spoke and gesticulated smoke rose in a ragged column in blinkered sunlight through the blinds. ‘So how did you hear about it?’
    She’d been on a collegiate skiing trip to Colorado. It was January and shudderingly cold. She’d walked towards the close of the day with her friends into a bar that was really nothing more than a shack, freezing, tugging gloves from clumsy fingers and stamping snow in melting clumps from their boots, inhaling woodsmoke, feeling the radiant creep of heat from an iron stove. At the back of the bar she’d seena photograph of a man who looked like the bar owner’s son, in uniform, outside a whitewashed house at the wheel of a Jeep. Only it wasn’t his son. It was the bar owner in another life. Beside the Jeep, blinking into the sunlight, were two women in britches carrying hoes. She’d asked about the photograph.
    â€˜Where was that taken?’
    He still wore his hair in the crew cut he’d probably worn under his field cap then. It was grey and soft, like ermine, now. It would have bristled, salt and pepper, then. ‘You tell me,’ he said.
    Alice Bourne considered the picture. ‘The architecture looks like rural Ireland. But they’re land girls, aren’t they, in the photograph with you? So it must be England.’
    â€˜Very good. It’s England all right. It’s Devon. And it was taken in 1944.’
    The bar proprietor had talked about his war service overseas. He’d talked cautiously at first, with some self-consciousness. But he’d recollected more easily when he realized how well informed his listener was about the period in which he’d most intensely lived his life. And as her friends sipped