Tim Binding: Island Madness

“I heard there was a run-in between some artillery men and a couple of the foreigns, and,” he said, “someone got thrown out a window.”

“A gunner?”

“No. Just a foreign.”

Ned dismissed it from his mind.

“Not a dicky-bird this end.” He patted the bag.

“About twenty this week, I reckon,” Bernie ventured out loud. “Should be stood up against a wall and shot, the lot of them.”

Ned walked Bernie back down the stairs. Outside two young girls in white socks and raincoats, hats jammed firmly on their heads, were coming up the road pushing a heavy battered pram. Every day there’d be a bunch of them hanging around the State food stores, darting in and out between the horses’ hoofs and the cartwheels, picking the loose potatoes or turnips that had rolled down into the gutter. Bernie held his cap out as they went by.

“Come on, missy,” he teased, bending low. “Just one measly spud.”

The girls giggled past, the pram bouncing precariously on the cobbles. Bernie turned to leave.

“Fancy a pint later on?” he asked. “I’ll be at the Britannia.”

One of the oldest pubs on the island, it was one of the few out of bounds for the soldiers. A session in there and you catne away feeling almost normal. Most did, anyway. Since his unwanted appointment no one seetned to want to talk to Ned any more. Except Bernie. Ned shook his head.

“Better not. I’ve got a late shift on tonight.”

Bernie, cap back on his head, stuck his hands in his pockets and left, whistling. Back in the office it was time to go through the mail. Though Ned kept his office to himself, when it came to going through the anonymous letters they all took a look. Ned called them up. Peter came first then Tommy, his hands black with grease.

“The Peril still not going?” Ned asked.

Tommy shook his head.

“Perhaps Bernie should take a look,” Ned suggested.

Tommy had his pride. “There’s no need for that. I can fix it.”

“That’s what you said last week.”

The sack was still damp from its journey along the seafront. Ned untied the knot and gave the sack a shake.

“About twenty, I reckon,” he ventured out loud.

“How do they do it?” Peter asked, stroking the down on his ginger lip. Last year Ned had seen him playing hopscotch with his younger sisters on the sands at Vazon Bay. Now his outsize adolescent feet lay squeezed into a pair of second-hand boots that had once been the property of one of the policemen currently serving two years’ hard labour in Caen prison.

“Jealousy and fear,” he told him, “that’s how. Plus a few old scores to settle.”

“But how do the Post Office tell them from real letters?” Peter persisted.

Tommy pulled ostentatiously at the corners of his whiskers, as if the thickness of his own beard was evidence of how much such a baby-faced novice had to learn.

“They’re not that difficult to spot,” he said, warming his backside on the stove. “They’re nearly always written in capitals—to disguise the handwriting—and they’re all addressed to the Feldkommandantur.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Ned added. “There’s a meanness that marks them. That’s the thing they can’t disguise. When you see them, lying there amidst real letters, love letters, bills, notes of condolence, they stick out a mile.”

He tipped the bundle out onto the table. They were, as Tommy had predicted, all addressed to the Feldkommandantur, scrawled in furtive capital letters, sloping across the surface as if trying to evade the shame of their intent, envelopes, lined notepaper, pages torn out of a child’s scrapbook, folded and stuck down and sent with malice in the heart, most with no stamp. But today Tommy was proved wrong. As Ned stirred the pile with his fingers he uncovered an envelope addressed to him, in handwriting he recognized only too well. How many other notes had she written to him, smuggled out from the fierce protection of her father’s house, left in the crack in the wall by the drinking fountain or under the whitewashed stone on his parents’ front path? Why, he even recognized the way she underlined his name, three straight lines underneath one another, each shorter than the last.

“Good God,” he said. “I’d never have thought it.”

“What?”

“This is from Isobel, Isobel van Dielen.”

He tore open the envelope. There was no signature, but it didn’t need one.

“She wants to meet me, that’s all.”

Tommy looked over his shoulder. “That’s all? You jammy so and so.”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Ned told him, but his heart was hammering otherwise. Yes, it could be like that. It could be.

They had met on the quayside waiting to embark, her wide-brimmed hat blown from her head and he catching it in the air as it rose to sail over into the dark waters of the harbour. She was nineteen, he twenty-seven—she on her way back from finishing school and he back on leave after his first tour as a CID officer in the Southampton police force. Though younger than him, she was the more at ease and, liking his short erop of crisp, curly hair and the bend of his mouth, unashamedly took the lead and asked him, in light of his catch, if he was a cricketer.

“A policeman,” he had replied hesitantly, fancying his chances but unsure whether it was wise to tell her the truth so early on.

“A policeman!” She had laughed.

“Yes. You find that funny?”

“No.” She threw back her head and laughed again. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do. A policeman!”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a policeman, is there?”

“No. But surely not on Guernsey?”

“As a matter of fact, no. But why not?”

“No reason.” She laughed again. It was a laugh that was used to hearing itself, natural and confident, part of her speech. “Have you ever talked to any of the policemen there? They’re not the brightest of fellows, you have to agree.”

Ned felt obliged to defend his compatriots.

“There’s not much call for Bulldog Drummonds on our side of the water,” he answered.

“So you came to England.”

“That’s right. Lots of thieving and murder to keep me busy here.”

“Murder!” She gave a little shiver, although she was neither cold nor frightened. It pleased her to move in such a way, a kind of parade of what he was to her and what she might be to him. She had restless good looks, with light coloured hair, a wide mouth and eyes that darted this way and that. Though she spoke as if she was English, her skin was of a foreign colour. There was heat and distance to it, a touch of leather to the texture. She was nearly as tall as he was and stood close to him, closer than a young woman should, squaring up to him almost like a man. She fixed him with her blue eyes and shook the set of her bobbed-cut hair, intent on discomfiting him further.

“Have you ever…?” She wrapped her arms under her breasts and shivered again. She was captivating. She smiled at a passer-by.

“Only one.” Her theatricality irritated him, so he added, quite truthfolly, “Killed by a horse.”

“A horse!”

“Struck him on the head. With his hoof.”

“Probably being mistreated, poor thing. I hope you didn’t arrest him.”

She put her hand in front of her mouth, laughing at her own joke. His mother used to tell him that girls who put their hands in front of their mouths were not only common but most probably deceitful as well, but the manner in which she pressed her fingers to her pursed lips did not seem to indicate either of these character flaws. It was sitnply shamelessly seductive. Assuming that she was a tourist, and anticipating the possibility that his leave might be brightened by this unexpected opportunity, he turned the hat in his hand.