Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [102]
The Germans never came, as we know.
After the war, a decent effort was made to clear all this stuff away. It proved more difficult, and more hazardous, than putting it there. Maps and charts had gone missing. Navy minesweepers recovered fewer sea mines than they should have done; some had broken free of their mooring chains and drifted off. Tides and wild weather had reshaped the beach. In the winter of 1944, a large chunk of cliff had toppled down onto the minefield, bringing a pillbox with it.
It was four years (during which time one ROC man was killed, and two others maimed, by land mines) before Hazeborough beach was considered safe enough to be reopened to the public. And even then, in 1950, the farthermost reaches of the beach remained fenced off and marked with warning signs — a skull and crossbones inside a red triangle. In time, the mesh fences were slumped by windblown sand, and the signs were disfigured by boys with catapults. Even so, Hazeborough was regarded with suspicion. (Ruth was one of many who believed that you’d get blown up as soon as you set foot on the sand. She’d have had a purple fit if she’d known that Clem had gone there, even if his motives had been pure.) The place remained unprosperous and unpopular.
He leaned the bike against one of the rust-flaked uprights of the railings behind the shuttered clapboard café. He watched the sea lazily heave itself onto the shingly sand and retreat, sighing. The weather was on their side, at least. The wind up here could slice you to the bone if it wanted to, but today it was resting, or waiting. Above the horizon, a swath of sky was striped like the skin of a blue mackerel.
She wouldn’t come.
No, don’t think that.
The world could end now. The sky could convulse, turn sideways, become a tower of fire. He could be sucked into oblivion at any second, waiting in bloody Hazeborough to lose his virginity.
Don’t think that, neither.
A man with a muzzled greyhound walked by and gave him a good looking at.
Clem lit a cigarette and smoked it, then popped a Polo mint into his mouth for his breath.
She wouldn’t come. She hadn’t got out of going to church. She was sitting on a pew, her tears reflecting stained glass.
A tinny chirrup of a bicycle bell, and there she was. Coming toward him, waving. She was wearing a skirt and a tight white sweater under her coat. Glimpses of stocking top and thigh flickered at him, and his heart went ballistic.
The Reverend Hugh Underwood, white-surpliced, stood at the porch of Saint Nicholas’s Church, bidding farewell to his flock. It didn’t take long, but even so it was tedious. The business was nearly over when two of his departed congregation returned: the spinster twins, the Misses Fiske, clearly in a state of excitement. After a good deal of mutual nudging and urging, one of them said, “If yer’ve got a minute, Vicar, there’s somethun in the square you oughter see.”
Underwood considered this unlikely.
“Really? And what might that be, pray, Miss Fiske?”
The ladies couldn’t muster a reply between them. Instead, they blushed, made matching beckoning gestures, and scuttled off. Sighing, in need of a cup of tea and a cigarette, Underwood followed.
Borstead’s square was, in fact, roughly rectangular. Toward its slightly wider end stood an ancient stone cross, stump armed and covered in elaborate carvings blurred by time. It was, tradition had it, more than a thousand years old, placed there on the orders of Saint Dunstan himself, when Borstead was a nameless pagan crossroads. Next to it, for reasons no one could remember, an ancient fire engine was parked. It was an eighteenth-century horse-drawn cart, a lead-lined water tank and hand pump set into a red-painted wooden frame on iron-rimmed wheels. On market days, when the square was lined with stalls, the cross and the fire engine were an irritation to traffic; at other times they were largely ignored, on account of their familiarity. On this Sunday morning, however, they were the center