Tim Binding - Island Madness

She digs him in the ribs.

“Tomorrow, Zep! The first day of the show. You haven’t forgotten, have you? You promised.”

“Ah, yes. I forgot.” He approached the subject cautiously. “Molly will be there, remember.” Veronica stiffened.

“No, no. You are not to worry. I have spoken to her. She will be with Major Ernst that evening.”

“Ernst?”

“Yes. It is all arranged. She belongs to Ernst now. He has made it plain. If I wish to continue here…”

“What does Molly think?”

“It does not matter what Molly thinks. If she hadn’t been so…visible.” He pulled her close. “And you, you must not do this, not show your beauty to everyone all the time. Otherwise I might lose you too.” He stroked her hair. “It is you now for me. Does that please you? And perhaps, if Molly is very upset, I could meet her secretly, like I see you now.”

“Thanks very much!”

“It was a joke, Veronica! Don’t be jealous. It is not good to be jealous in such circumstances.”

He sat up and started to take off his shirt.

“The Casino will be fun tonight. I have told them I am going to try and drink the boot again. No one has tried twice and succeeded. But I will. Now come and give me a good fuck, there’s a good girl—”

“The boot?”

“It’s a drinking tradition. It looks easy but it is not. It also makes you quite drunk. The last fellow, Schade, feil down and cracked his head open.” He caught her look of concern. “He was a fooi, anyway. He was the one who was involved in the black market, with Herr Poidevin and his daughter.”

“Poor Elspeth, yes.”

“You know her?”

“Everyone knows Elspeth.”

“She was lucky, her and her father. If I had my way they’d be up in Fort George. They know more than they say. Not only about the smuggling. This matter over Isobel and her father. It does not fit right. Any other time and I would not mind. But with certain other events and the Major acting so strangely, it worries me. I fear they might all be connected. The cement in her mouth. Her dress. The jacket and hat missing. She wore them that afternoon and yet they have vanished. What happened to them? Is someone wearing them now?”

He moved to her once more but she pushed him away. She knew what she had to do. This would be her one chance. She could feed him this morsel in the same manner as she fed him her flesh. It would be the seal of her success, the stamp in her passport, the key to the Villa’s door.

“A jacket,” she said, “what sort of jacket?” knowing full well what the description would be, recognizing it the moment he had spoken the words, seeing it hung up over the back of the kitchen chair, seeing the smudged label underneath the worn collar, seeing—a woman’s jacket yes, with the darts on the front and cuts in the side, a woman’s jacket with leather elbow patches and a pretty collar and small wooden buttons.

“You know,” Zepernick said, “her corduroy jacket. She wore it all the time, riding, walking, probably…” he reached out and sucked on her again, “…in it too,” and Veronica, regaining her composure, remembered that indeed Zep was right, she had seen it on her any number of times, up at the rehearsal rooms, slung over her shoulders or left half trailing on the floor in that careless wealthy manner she had found so irritating, an expensive coat that only the rich would treat so casually, remembering how Isobel would piek it up and hurry into it, on her way to some other social gathering to which she, Veronica, would not be invited. An unexpected surge of resentment flooded over her. She wanted to join with this man and put paid to all the years they had been excluded, denied the things for which they had striven so hard and which still evaded them, and without hesitation, knowing that she could bring it off, she prised his lips away and bent down, kissing his chest and his stomach, and told him quickly, glorying in her ability to deflect his hands and his curiosity from the warm certainty of her body. Why, she had seen just such a jacket on a boy, this very morning. “Today! On a boy! Where? What’s his name? Do you know his family?” Zepernick raised her up, firing his questions rapidly, assuming that it is a native boy she was describing, one of those miscreants who fired catapults from behind drystone walls, of all the inhabitants the most insistent in their insolence, and she, a shiver of excitement running through her, said, “No, not one of ours, Zep, one of yours, a foreign ,” the cold intelligente suddenly flickering behind his eyes, like the flare of a lighted match. “A foreign?” he repeated, and she nodded. “You know, one of the Todt workers,” conscious of her nakedness and the leeway it afforded her, making up the story as easily as instilling freshness into those tired words of lust. She could picture it in her mind’s eye, see the Pollet below her and the foreigns marching past, remove the boy far from her own home and place him in their midst with his red pantaloons and his white shock of hair and the strangely cut jacket that hung down on his slender frame, describing how he had clambered into the waiting lorry parked at the end, marvelling how it was all working out in her favour, how the Captain sat up, alert, his hands pressed together as he asked, “Did you notice the lorry number, or a name on the side?” and she shook her head, knowing instinctively that this would be an observation too far, but seeing a way out, wanting to convert her invention into something more tangible, she leant back and said, “Funnily enough I do know where he goes, or rather where he went,” knowing full well that he was still there, was there right now as she talked, “for I was up by St Andrew last week seeing a patient and saw him with the other foreigns up there, at the hospital tunnel at La Vassalerie Road.” As she said it, the pang hit her, wishing that the Captain had never mentioned the jacket and that her mouth had travelled the full distance and become so full with him that she would have been unable to speak of the boy at all. “The hospital?” he said, and she, fearful for a second that she had betrayed her own complicity, that that was something she shouldn’t know, added quickly, “Perhaps he had nothing to do with it, I don’t want any trouble,” and laughing he assured her, “Don’t you worry, Veronica, he’ll not harm you,” but though she shook her head, saying no she didn’t mean that, the Captain wasn’t listening, he had forgotten her, even as he kissed her and pulled on his shirt and told her not to worry, that he’d come by soon and make it up to her, running his hands up and down her trembling front, hurrying her down the stairs as she pulled on her coat before bundling her out of the door. And as she stood there and watched as he ran to his car, as she heard the engine scream down the hill, she realized that there would be no Casino that night and no Villa, and that far from coming closer to him she had set herself apart from him again, drawn another Occupational line in the sand. She stood out of breath, alone, and looking down the hill and the little town below she suddenly saw what she had done and understood the awfol ease by which one achieves betrayal.

The Dutchman has been working for three and a half weeks now, first outside, on L’Ancresse Bay, pouring cement into the great swell of the gun emplacements, and once that had finished down here, in the tunnel alongside the boy. Though he understands only a few of the words the boy speaks—a broken mixture of English, German and what? Polish? Russian?—he has started to follow the boy, for it is he, rather than the older man (who does not have as much spare energy), who has been nursing him through these difficult days. So he stands behind this boy at mealtimes, sits opposite him in the bouncing lorry, leans his back against the same creosoted hut wall on their meagre day of rest, and now pushes the wagon that the boy has to fill with rocks and stones and clawing clumps of clay, before bringing back an empty one for him to load in return. Though the work is without pity and the tunnel without end, the boy seems to be gaining an unacknowledged authority over these excavations by the day. He takes pride in showing van Dielen the bewildering dimensions of this labyrinth, the endless series of domed rooms, the huge mysterieus length of it, the great reservoir dug for the water and near the connecting tunnel, on which he is now working, the tiny room disguised by the mud-caked sheet of metal behind which they sit and drink water from a stolen canteen. The old man and the young boy have taken it upon themselves to look after van Dielen, though he has uttered not one word of thanks, nor indeed made any sound at all, even when pushing the empty wagon back up to the tunnel’s head (a task which paradoxically is harder than pushing a full-laden truck down to the entrance). Indeed his lack of speech seems to endear him to them.