Tim Binding - Island Madness

“It’s not right,” Bernie whispered, “the old girl all alone.”

“She wouldn’t have no one else,” Ned answered. “Albert will see she’s all right.”

The sound of the church organ starting up again broke the unchallenged calm. The crowd straightened up off the walls, the troops gathered themselves together. Ernst slapped his stick quickly in three successive beats. For Ned, in a moment’s sudden glazed look, the squiffy reason of why he was here evaded him. Isobel. That was it. Isobel was dead! He tried to think straight, to get everything in order, but he could not. He looked about him, lost, a blur of faces sweeping by in a pool of painful light, but no one paid him any attention. It was as if he wasn’t there.

Turning once again, he caught sight of Albert standing by the church door and a desperate hope surged within him. He would understand! He raised his hand in greeting, but halfway through had to steady himself. He wiped his mouth and burped into his sleeve. The man next to him moved away.

The door opened and as the bell in the round tower began its low, hesitant toll, the pallbearers brought her out. There was a moment, as they hitched their shoulders and settled into the task of carrying her wooded weight down the drive, when it appeared that no one would follow, that the church had been empry, and not even her aunt had cared to kneel before her in her death, but then Mrs Hallivand stepped out into the light. Framed in the hollow of that stone archway, her tiny boned hands clutching a bunch of violets, deriving strength from the deeply inhaled scent as she might from a bottle of smelling salts, she stood as if under sentence, as if expecting the church to crumble and fall on top of her and bury her underneath the weight of its heartless faith. Albert took her arm. She patted his gratefully.

The coffin was loaded, the sun went out, the clouds grew closer. Watching as the hearse creaked down the drive Ned couldn’t help but notice that the wheels were squeaking like the spare bicycle back at the station, like the Yellow Peril’s blown suspension, like the garden gate back home. That’s what’s happening, he thought. The island is seizing up. Butter is the only grease available to lubricate this island, black-market butter at thirty shillings a pound. Was it any wonder that so many succumbed, when they inhabited a world where a man was entitled to only four ounces of meat a week, three of sugar, one of coffee (and that a substitute of ground acorns)? How were they supposed to get by on that? The black market, that was how. There was money to be made there all right, and money to be spent, and by a breed of men who had never imagined that such a prospect might one day lie within their grasp. Tea got spooned into the pot at five pounds a quarter, a tot of whisky came from a bottle costing ten pounds and if you wanted to blow genuine smoke rings in the air you did it from leaf which cost seven pounds an ounce.

As the orders rang out and the syncopated rhythm of a hundred boots stamped down on the macadam road, the wind began to stir; a spot of rain, a strenger breeze, a sudden drop in temperature. The crowd followed, their black umbrellas unfolded in anticipation of the downpour, the clouds’ black coat-tails clearly visible, sweeping in from the north. His bladder bursting, Ned waited until they had left before relieving himself behind a flying buttress, hoping no one would notice the blasphemous steam rising from this consecrated ground.

Buttoning his flies, he moved quickly up the lane, chasing the solemn beat of the band. It was the first time he had been among a crowd, and jostling amongst them, acknowledging a greeting here, stealing a glance at an old-remembered face there, for the first time he saw them as they really were. Oh, he had waited in queues with them, seen them in their ones and twos as they walked down the Pollet, shared a bench with them on one of the bus carts, but seeing them on the move, their faces anxious to devour the coming occasion, he looked at them afresh. We’re starving, Ned thought, astonished. Every one of us. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a week or a month’s time, but give it a year, maybe two, and half of us will be dead. He could see how the sentence had already been passed on those who lived closest to life’s precarious edge, the old and the very young; how like old men the children appeared, hunched and slow, and how like children, helplessly innocent and in need of a guiding hand, seemed the old. He could see it too on the idle hands of men not yet forty, with their ragged boots tied with lengths of string and their scarves wrapped to muffle their fifty-year-old coughs and sixty-year-old wheezes. He could catch it in the worried stoop of mothers, lost in the empty hang of their dresses which their breasts once filled. He could trace it on every image he conjured up; on his mother’s face as she shivered in her fleshless nightdress; in the pale determination of those two ankle-socked girls hurrying home with their potato perambulator; in the fat fingers of George Poidevin’s pasty paw as he jabbed them up and down his desk. He could see it most clearly in those who stood now by the open grave, the new aristocracy of this unjust fiefdom; Major Lentsch, Captain Zepernick and Molly. He remembered the car and the luxurious spread of Veronica’s willing limbs, satiated in the wrap of her Occupational furs.

As the squall grew in its strength, the crowd instinctively huddled together. Molly looked superb, black feathers and a small black veil with matching stockings and dress; a dish to be devoured. Albert reached out, holding Mrs Hallivand back as if he were worried she might be washed into the hole; the girls leant into their uniformed protection. Only Molly remained unchanged, standing coatless alongside the Captain, the rain beating against her body, flattening her fine and flaunting dress against the wet of her calves and the turn of her hips and the low swell of her stomach. The rain streamed down and still she did not move. The wind caught her veil and blew it up over her head and as she lifted her face, her black gloved hands held stiffly by her side, she licked the wet from her face and held herself out as proud and defiant and as paintedly beautiful as a ship’s figurehead glorifying in the furious rage of the sea. She drew strength from this. It lifted her spirits, not because she enjoyed the spectacle, but because she was the spectacle. The crowd could hardly take their eyes off her.

The storm ended as suddenly as it began. The sky cleared, but on the horizon another one could be seen to be on its way. The parish priest in robes of white and blue stepped forward to perform the burial. A firing party followed and aimed its guns in the air. As they fired, nesting crows rose from the trees and broke into a chorus of protest.

“Hit some of them buggers and we could all have a decent pie,” a voice from the back called. A nervous laugh rippled through the crowd.

The guns fired again, the crows rose once more. Lentsch looked down to where muddy water was already collecting between the coffin and the sides of the grave. He mouthed some words. In English? In German? Words of love? Words of remorse? Ned could not tell. As the escort party turned and began to march away Molly placed her hand on Zep’s arm and moved to follow in their wake.

“Look at that bitch,” Ned heard someone in the crowd mutter. “We’ll get our own back when the time comes.”

Molly paled while the Captain looked in vain for the culprit, but the crowd closed its mouth to his gaze. They would not give him up. Molly tried to pull her veil down, but it stuck to her face. She took off her hat and held it in front of her.

“Jerrybag!” another shouted.

A clod of earth flew in her direction. It caught a gravestone in front and scattered in the air.