Two

It had been warm that day, the first for weeks, but now the wind was getting up again, coming in from the north, with a chili in its heart that only an island feels. Inspector Ned Luscombe was waiting for the post when he heard George Poidevin heaving himself up to the office with another tale of woe weighing down his lumbering frame.

The police station had expanded in the last few years but it was still primitive compared with what he had been used to. On the ground floor stood the cramped reception area, with its counter and one long bench opposite and a picture of the old king hanging crookedly on the wall. Behind it was the Sergeant’s room and adjoining it, with a door leading to the washroom and the yard, an even smaller room where the police doctor used to examine the drunks. There was no cell. The prison was only forty yards away. Privacy was at a premium too. Before the war, whenever anybody was arrested, a crowd used to gather on the pavement outside to listen to what was being said. It was a foolish man who confessed his sins in Guernsey’s sole police station.

There were two other floors, reached only by the outside steps that ran up from the yard. The top floor was let out to the Guernsey Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society. Below that was Ned’s own office, as big as the rest of the station put together. Though he’d put down an old carpet to dampen the sound of the men playing cards down in the back room, if he’d been sensible he would have hauled it above his head and nailed it to the ceiling. They were a keen bunch upstairs and practised regularly. Babes in the Wood, Private Lives, Full House: Ned knew them all off by heart. In the middle of the room stood a large table with a long drawer underneath one side, the only article of furniture in the entire building which possessed both a lock and a key. In the far corner stood a coal stove, its cracked lagged pipe leaking a continual thin spiral of smoke. Two chairs, a filing cabinet and a torn map of the island held together with glue and brown paper were the only other furnishings. One telephone upstairs, one telephone down-stairs, a spare bicycle and the Yellow Peril pressed into spasmodic service after their brand-new five-seater had been requisitioned by the Geheimnis Polizei. That was it.

George Poidevin, foreman for one of the island’s leading con�struction firms, was a pasty man and indignation quivered on him like cooked fat on the bone. He lived above a small grocery shop which his wife ran, close to St Sampson’s harbour. Recognizing his malevolent wheeze Ned had hastily checked his desk to ensure that nothing of any note lay for George’s greedy eyes to devour.

“George,” Ned said gaily. “What brings you here? Come to turn yourself in?”

George wheezed his way over, put his hands on Ned’s desk and panted across the stained woodwork. His breath smelt of strong sausage. The man had been eating meat!

“Do you know?” he said, blinking hard. “Do you know what they’ve just told the wife?”

Ned shook his head, hoping that George’s weight might prove too much for the table’s tired frame. lts legs were splayed out like a dog caught on an iced pond. When it feil apart he intended to chop it up for firewood.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t know. What have they told her? Something interesting? Eva Braun’s favourite recipe?”

George leaned further across, resting his weight on his ten fat fingers. The table creaked. The right far leg slipped further out. Ned prayed. A little further, a little further.

“They’ve only issued instructions that they be put on heavy workers’ rations, that’s all. Can you believe it! The bloody nerve!”

Ned wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

“They, George? Who’s ‘they’?”

“Them whores! Them bloody whores. There’s my femme work-ing all the hours God sends her and Elspeth wearing her pins to a frazzle counting out their useless money and does either of them get heavy rations? Does they buggery. But it’s all right for these French mamselles, flat on their backs all day.”

It was all Ned could do to stop himself from laughing out loud. Another brothel had opened in January. There was the officers’ one over at St Martin’s, a spacious affair set in its own grounds, filled, it was said, with cancan girls from Paris; the one for the Todt officials halfway up George Street; and now a couple for the troops over at St Sampson’s. In the afternoons you could see the men standing patiently in an orderly queue stretching halfway round the little harbour, smoking treasured cigarettes or exchanging the odd rueful joke, hands in pockets, buffeted by the winds, just like the rest of the population waiting for the bread shop to open. It always made him smile. Even the Germans had to queue for something. Now that the weather was getting better, when they weren’t working the girls would start sunning themselves out on the roof, gazing out to where their homeland lay. Last year George had marched to the Feldkommandantur and complained that his wife could see them through their bedroom window.

“And so she could,” Ned had once told Bernie, laughing, “but only if she stood on a chair.” Ned rubbed his chin hard, trying to prevent a repeat performance.

“Well, it’s hard work,” he told George cheerfully. “There’s what, fifteen girls next to your place? Another fifteen down the road. With seventeen thousand troops to cater for that’s a lot of jiggery pokery called for. If you work on the principle that the average soldier expects to drop his trousers at least once a fortnight, that means that those girls have to accommodate eight thousand five hundred every week. Which means,” he did a quick sum on a sheet of paper, “two hundred and eighty-three each a week or forty-seven a day. Forty if they work Sundays.”

George Poidevin was not amused. “It’s a disgrace,” he fumed.

“‘You know what I said to them?’ I said, ‘Put it in writing and see what the States say. I’m not having my wife doling out heavy workers’ rations to French tarts without the proper papers.’”

Rumour had it that George Poidevin had once tried to slip the girls an extra loaf in return for a weekly you-know-what, and every one of them had refused. Ever since then he had been their implacable enemy.

“They won’t put it in writing, not an order like that,” Ned told him. “But they’ll make you do it just the same. Let’s face it, we’d all like extra rations, whatever we do. If those girls can wangle it, good luck to them. They don’t last long, you know. Not with the wear and tear they have to put up with.”

George had more to tell.

“And that’s not all. You know what Monty Freeman’s been told? Only to keep the bank open an extra hour on Fridays so that those trollops can waltz in and deposit their money without causing offence to us locals. That’s where my Elspeth works. Least she’s no Jerrybag. When I think of some of our girls…” He stopped short.

“Thanks, George.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“Let’s forget it, shall we. Is that all you have to tell me or is there a purpose to your visit?”

“I wondered if you’d had any news about the break-in.”

Van Dielen’s yard had been broken into the night before. Sergeant Tommy Ie Coeur had found the fence smashed in. Nothing much stolen. A couple of containers broken into, the little office ransacked of its precious supply of tea and sugar. Papers strewn everywhere. Ned regarded him with reproach.

“George, I reported it to the Feldkommandantur. Take it up with them. The foreigns are no concern of mine. My advice is to forget it. Nothing’ll come of it. If you want to stop it happening again, put a dog in there. Something big and hungry that’ll bite the bastards.”

Ned shooed him away before Bernie came with his usual bag of treats. The less people knew about that little enterprise the better.

Bernie brought them over once every two days or so, under cover of a normal delivery. Since his garage business had slumped, Bernie had landed a job as part-time postman. It suited his lanky frame. It used to be said that Bernie was the only mechanic on the island who could lie underneath a car with his head poking out at one end and his feet at the other. There weren’t many tall men on Guernsey. Not until they came. Bernie followed fast in George’s footsteps.

“How’s business?” he asked, slumping the oily bag on the table.

“A few break-ins over at the Vale. A fight outside the Brighton. The only bit of excitement was when old Mrs Rowe stopped Tommy in the High Street the other day and asked him if he could show her the way to the black market.”

Bernie smiled. It was a nice story, even if it wasn’t true. Taking off his cap he scratched his head. His spiky hair was more suited to a lad of fourteen than a grown man nearing his thirtieth year.

“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 Feldkom-mandantur.”

“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 bundie 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.

“So this is yours?”

“It was on my head, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s a man’s hat.”

“You think I stole it? It’s my father’s. Was my father’s. I persuaded him to let me wear it.” She took it from him and set it at an angle on her head. “Looks better on me, don’t you think?”

“That depends. I’ve never seen your father, have I? I don’t even know his name.”

“No?” She took the hat off and turned it over and pointed to the marking on the label.

“His initials, see? You know what they stand for.”

Ned peered and blushed violently. He hardly knew where to look. The girl smiled victoriously. She’d enjoyed the joke many times before.

“Van Dielen,” she said, laughing at him again. “Nothing else.”

“Van Dielen?” He could not keep the note of surprise out of his voice.

“That’s right. Why? Has he broken the law?”

No, he had not broken the law, but as soon as she mentioned the name he knew that despite the island’s size she was lost to him. So he wished her a pleasant summer and walked away, watching her later as she presented her first-class ticket for her private cabin, while he, an old hand, walked briskly to the wooden seats around the tunnel, and sat, with his greatcoat over his knees, waiting for the hour of midnight to strike, when the hooter would sound and the sea would churn. He could have chosen to go inside, to have a few drinks and a rolling kip on one of the hard slatted seats, but he preferred it out on deck, where he could sit, nursing his thoughts, travelling through the windy dark to the dawn outline of his home town.

Ned knew of the van Dielens. The whole island knew of the van Dielens and to whom they were related. Mr van Dielen, half English, half Dutch, had made his money first from construction work in the Middle East, and latterly in the great road-building programme snaking its way across Europe. Returning to England, hoping to capitalize on his expertise, he had found that he no longer cared for his abandoned homeland, not because it was strange to him, but because it was revealed as all too familiar. His life abroad had been lived as an outcast stuck in an outpost, out of sorts with his surroundings, forcing changes on a sleeping land�scape, but England seemed unable to wake to his and others’ futuristic call. Coming back with an attractive wife and a marriage-able daughter he discovered that all that was required of him was that he should settle in and build bungalows and mock-Tudor suburbs with perhaps a new ladies’ room for a country railway station thrown in for good measure. There was nothing in England’s architectural plans that loomed large and impossible and wondrous to behold, nothing that sliced through the earth changing its people for ever; and as for the dinners and the young men he was expected to entertain on behalf of his daughter’s matrimonial expectations, it was difficult to fathom which he detested the more, the stuffed game he forced into his mouth or the stuffed shirts who produced barking buckshot out of theirs. So he settled on Guernsey, which was of England but not English, where the policemen acted under English law but the climate did not, where the signs were in English but where the natives, bred to bear a naturally taciturn disposition, spoke a language he could choose not to understand; above all a place where his wife and daughter could use the moneyed high life as a springboard to all the other social ports of call and from where the rich pickings of his Continental business beckoned.

And so, being an engineer, he built a house to suit both his temperament and his purpose, combining in its design his intense desire for solitude with a showman’s desire to display his architec-tural talents to the full. Ned knew the building well, for his father had been one of the carpenters contracted in to lay the floor. It stood, not on one of the grander roads leading out of St Peter Port, nor in the quieter more expensive reaches to the south, but on a dusty back road wedged in a dip between two hills, cramped for space and overlooking a row of undistinguished bungalows, sur�rounded by a riotous, unruly garden, with plants pushed into the earth to let do as they please; rot, run riot, fill the air with maddening seed, it did not matter to him, as long as they formed some impenetrable barrier between him and the road beyond. Through this fairy-tale tangle could be seen the front of the house, buiging out like an unwanted pregnancy, awkward and eye-catching, with plate-glass windows running from floor to ceiling. “Wouldn’t catch me living in it, not even if you paid me,” his father used to say. “A shit in a showroom would be more private.” The van Dielens moved in three months after completion, in May ‘38, surrounded by pink walls and tubular furniture, with rugs instead of carpets, something hooded, straight out of a blacksmith’s, in the middle of drawing room instead of a proper fireplace and, most peculiar at all, no curtains. Suspended above the grey metal window-frames hung reels of grey slatted metal blinds which, when lowered, shook and rattled at the slightest provocation and were only brought into use when decency demanded. Certainly Mr van Dielen didn’t care to use them, propped up at the curved cocktail bar he had built, sitting there alone surrounded by dancing semi-quavers and empty high stools. In the evening those who walked past would see him swirling something thick and cloudy in a strangely shaped glass, thinking about his dead wife, who lay in the cemetery half a mile away, drowned not two months after their arrival and his daughter, whom he hardly knew, packed off to finishing school. But, it was supposed, the house had done its job, and worked, like its owner, on some unfathomable law of incon-gruity: the long balconies and wide windows protected not by locks and curtains but by brambles and palm trees and rash-inducing rhododendron bushes; a house closed to all, yet with the owner perpetually on view; a man who talked to no one, but who himself was a constant talking point.

And they all talked about him, there was no doubt about that; what he was like to work for (firm but fair), his trips abroad, his determined, lonely life. He had bought out three concerns on Guernsey by then, a builder’s yard, a brick works and a contracting firm, and within six months had put two more out of business. He was a small man, small and intense, with a stooped back and dark eyebrows and a clipped moustache which worked up and down. He walked, said Ned’s father, like a clockwork toy, as if someone had just wound him up, oblivious to his surroundings. You half expected him to topple over, or stumble up against some unopened door, legs still whirring. He was always in a hurry, no time for idle chatter, just an awkward muttered greeting, head back down, and the sound of his breath rushing past. When he was here he could be seen in his green Norfolk jacket, marching his wicker basket down to the market to place a spider crab or small live lobster on top of the rest of his meagre shopping before pushing his charge back up Victoria Road and home. That was another conundrum that was brought to his account. A builder of roads and bridges, he owned no vehicle and had no garage built for one. Ned’s old school friend Bernie Ie Cocq had tried to interest in him in one of his machines with a free bicycle thrown in for his daughter, but he would have none of it, telling Bernie in a curt letter that as he had his legs and his daughter, when she was here, had her horse, he would be grateful if he kept his suggestions to himself, a letter which Bernie had placed in the little office above his garage, next to his postcard of a fleshy French girl dressed in fat suspenders. So he had his legs and Isobel her horse—which is how Ned met her the second time, as he hurtled down on the butcher’s bike he had won years back in a raffle, shaking down the steep dry rut of water lanes, his legs splayed out, his eyes closed, gathering glorieus speed remembering those summer rides with Bernie and Veronica Vaudin, until he heard the scream and opened his eyes to see a horse, a bloody horse, standing stock-still with a girl upon it, up in the stirrups, crying out in fear that he might harm them both. He wrenched his hands sharply to the right and ended up capsized upon the fern-thick bank with his legs in the air, his spine jarred and a bicycle wheel humming in his ear. Only when the horse moved closer, prancing nervously on the stony ground, did he realize who the rider was.

“Why don’t you look where you’re going,” she shouted, adding in a quieter aside, “Oh, it’s you,” from which Ned could tell, even from this undignified position, that she was not utterly displeased to see him again.

“You had your eyes closed,” she continued. “I watched you coming down. I thought, surely he’ll see me, surely he’ll open his eyes.”

“I was going swimming,” he said, as if this was going to excuse him.

She turned in her saddle and looked down towards the bay. “The tide’s out.” She paused, weighing the propriety of her next remark. “Is it safe out there? I ought to try for a swim some day.”

Ned, who knew of the circumstance of her mother’s death, stood up awkwardly before her.

“She was one of those people who thought life would never harm her,” she said. She glanced down at his legs. “Are you a good swimmer?”

“Fair. Canoeing’s my speciality.”

“Canoeing?”

“Yes. In a canoe.”

“Can you, you know, do that thing where you roll under?”

“That’s easy. The thing is to keep calm. Not be afraid.”

“I was never afraid of the sea, until now. Would you take me swimming one day? I could hire a bike.”

They had met two days later. Ned had bought a new pair of swimming trunks, to replace the ones he had worn since he was fifteen, woollen things a mother would buy, woollen things a mother had bought, and though he had never seen cause to replace them before, he saw he was a fully fledged man now, and would have to appear as such before her. He had gone down to the Pollet and the men’s clothing store. Mr Underwood’s stock was narrow, a choice of three; red, black or red with a daring white stripe down the side.

“I don’t see what the fuss is about,” the proprietor had argued, as Ned held each one up to the light. “No one’s going to see them once you’re in the water.”

He chose the striped pair and put them on underneath his trousers to minimize the embarrassment of changing in front of her. She turned up in a pair of loose cord trousers and a hacking jacket, London-bought, or from one of the classier shops over in St Heiier. Acutely aware of their differing circumstance, he threw off his collarless shirt and worn flannels before she’d even crossed the beach. While she undressed he stood by the water’s edge, skimming stones with an exaggerated intensity until she skipped past and walked in up to her waist. Her costume was blue. Her legs were white.

“Don’t let me go out of my depth,” she called out, gasping as she settled in and Ned called out that she was not to worry, that it was shallow for a good long distance, and that the sea was still and the tide weak and that he was beside her, which in a moment he was, looking at her strong shoulders and her auburn hair, noting that she was not a swimmer of Veronica Vaudin’s capability, but a competent one. He led her out slowly, feeling the pull of the waves as they washed in. Looking back he saw the wide expanse of sand and the steep wooded hill behind, and at the top, in front of the long green lawn that hung over the lip of the hill like a green tongue, the Villa Pascal.

“That my aunt’s house, isn’t it?” she asked, following his gaze. “I’ve never seen it from this angle before.”

He waved his arm.

“See that man up there, pushing a barrow. That’d be my uncle. Worked for them twenty years now.”

“Your uncle!” She turned in the water. “Marvellous!”

They were a long way out now and the water was cool and glittered a still light blue.

“Daddy doesn’t know I’m doing this,” she called out, floating on her back, “and when I get back I shall have to take a bath and wash my hair to keep it from him. He wouldn’t like it if he found out.”

“Why? You’re not doing anything wrong,” Ned said.

“Oh, but I am. I’m in the sea for one thing, and I’m with you for another,”

“Well, I won’t tell. And you’re much too smart to get caught, I’ll be bound.”

“He’s a watchful man,” she replied. “He notices things without you realizing it. He is a surveyor, after all.” She kicked her legs in a plume of water.

“Try standing,” he said, and, realizing what he had done, feeling nothing but a current of cold water puiling at her feet, she struck out for the beach, arms flailing, eyes tight. Once near the shore she walked out quickly, shaking the water from her hair. Ned followed. They towelled in silence.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “It’s not like getting back after falling off a horse. She drowned.”

She gestured to him with her hand and he turned to face the sea, which had brought them together and now, like the immutable tide, was puiling them apart. He listened to the hurried sounds she made as she changed, the squeak of her costume as she pulled it down, her quick, strong breath as she rubbed herself dry, the noise of the sand as she lifted her feet into her clothes. He wrapped his towel around him and wriggled out of his trunks, conscious of drying himself between his legs.

“You can turn round now,” he heard her say. Her hair was wet and fuzzy and the dark hairs on her arms stood out.

“What about tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I won’t let it happen again,” he promised.

“You’d better not,” she replied and together they walked back up the steep hill in silence.

“In the afternoon, then,” he said when they reached the top. “When the tide’s coming in.”

“Perhaps. As long as Daddy doesn’t catch me out.”

But catch her out he did, a week later, her hair stifffrom the salt water, a damp bathing towel tied to the rack above the rear mudguard and the architect of her treachery riding alongside. Her father stepped out from behind the gate and pulled her off, his dark eyebrows and dark moustache joined together by lines of antici-pated anger. He held her by the arm, squeezing it hard. His voice was agitated and clipped, with a curious self-questioning cadence to it.

“You’ve no sense, girl. Isn’t your mother’s grave enough that you should want to follow in her footsteps? And where did you get this?” He picked up the bike up from the road.

“I borrowed it.”

“Borrowed it, you say? One horse is not enough for you, then? Never mind what it costs to feed and house a horse and have its feet shorn. You have to have a bicycle as well.”

“No, Daddy, it was just…”

“And where did you keep it all the while? Did you hide it from me? Hide it from your own father. Your only parent.”

“No, Daddy, I…”

“Borrowed it. Yes, I heard. Borrowed it. Well, well.” He turned on Ned. “And for every borrower there has to be a lender, does there not, a lender prepared to lend. I presume I have you to thank for lending my daughter this, this, bicycle.” He turned the handle-bars to and fro, as if testing the steering.

“Daddy, this is—”

“No matter that the brake pads are defective and it quite lacks a rear reflector. No matter that these lanes are steep and narrow and riddled with ruts and potholes, such that cause bicycles to buckle and riders to fall, and that unlike the rare times when she chooses to sit upon her horse, here she lacks any protective headgear at all, you thought—”

“It’s not his fault, Daddy.” Isobel broke in again. “I asked for his help, that’s all.”

“Asked his help! You might as well have asked him for a broken neck and had done with it.”

Ned stepped off his bike. “She’s been safe with me, I can promise you, Mr van Dielen.” He held out his hand. “Ned Luscombe, sir.”

Van Dielen gave him a long look. “Luscombe. I had a man who worked for me once with that name.”

Ned felt relieved. “My father, sir. He was one of the chippies working here. Laid the floor, I believe. He’s not working much now. Lung trouble.”

Van Dielen nodded. “I thought I recognized the name. Well, Mr Luscombe, let me inform you that from now on your family’s name is of only interest to me in that I never want to hear of it again. Particularly when it has the misfortune to have the Christian name Ned placed in front of it. Do I make myself clear? If I catch you near my daughter again I’ll put the police on you and have you arrested.”

Tempted though he was, Ned did not confront him with the obvious retort. Isobel put her hand to her mouth, as she had on the boat coming over, and flashing him a quick look of guarded humour, turned away. Ned busied himself with the discarded bicycle to prevent himself from further stoking the man’s ire. Two days later she sent him the first of those hurried notes of exhorta-tion, dropped through the letter box, instructing him that he was to be on the beach at six thirty the next day, and because of what had passed they broke into laughter the moment they met and then almost immediately feil silent, because she was where her father had forbidden her to be, with the man he had forbidden her to see, the sound of the swimming sea reminding them of their former conspiracy. They moved towards each other quickly and kissed, and with time running out became lovers without hesitation and without caution, on the soft belly of a damp cave.

“Your father does not like me,” he said, shaking the sand from his clothes.

“He doesn’t like anyone much,” she told him lightly, as if it were a small idiosyncrasy, like not eating meat or fearing mice. “We don’t do as we’re told.”

“We?”

“Humans. We don’t always run to plan.”

“Neither do roads and bridges all the time, I suppose.”

“Yes, but you can mend a road, pull down a bridge. He can work it all out on paper beforehand. We don’t obey such laws. We’re not predictable that way.”

“Oh, no?” Ned said and pulled her close again.

“Well, some things are,” she agreed. “Why do you think I wrote you the note? Just to go swimming again?”

For the remainder of his leave the notes came whenever the opportunity to meet arose. There was no real need for them. It made their affair more their own, more fun, that was all. They would meet down by the water lanes or in the abandoned sema-phore station where watchers once stood, expecting Napoleon’s army, and occasionally, when she was at her most defiant, her most wilful, her most erotic, she would instruct him to present himself at the house, where he would be charged to seek and find her, in the soft clearing in the broad-leaved wild of the back garden, idly flicking through fashion magazines halfway up the stairs, or waiting in her own room, where to his constant agitation they would challenge the restless noise of the blinds with a restless rhythm of their own.

He tried to keep the romance quiet, but it was hard on an island Guernsey’s size. Though his dad thought it was simply holiday skirt he was chasing, Mum knew better. She could tell by the manner in which he parted his hair and walked out of the front door with a clean handkerchief in his pocket every morning that this wasn’t a two-week excursion, that this could be for all seasons. She kept quiet, ironing his shirts, brushing down his only jacket with a damp sponge, watching him set off down the lane through the kitchen window, hoping that his heart wouldn’t break, hoping that she was worth it. Uncle Albert was the only one who found out. He came across the two of them early one evening. They had their arms locked around each other, hardly able to take one step forward without the propulsion of another blind embrace. Albert was carrying an unwieldy bunch of delphiniums, destined for his wife’s grave, and was masked from view until it was too late to hide.

“You sure you can manage that?” Ned called out, embarrassed that his uncle should have caught him out, and Albert, recognizing his employer’s niece, wiped his hand on the side of his trousers and gave him a look which asked the same question.

“This is my uncle Albert,” Ned warned her, moving her forward, “the one I told you about.”

She took his hand.

“It’s you who I have to thank for my tummy troubles, I believe,” she admonished, and when Albert looked nonplussed, added, “The loganberries! Up at the Villa!”

Albert smiled. “And I thought it was them pesky birds,” he said.

“No. Just me. Ned here will have to arrest me,” and she took hold of Ned’s arm and hugged herself against him.

“Looks like it’s you who’s got him under lock and key!” Albert told her. Ned blushed.

“I have that,” she boasted, adding, “You won’t tell them, will you?”

“Them, miss?”

“Our elders and betters.”

“Nothing to do with me, miss, what you do.”

“Then I shall call you Uncle Albert too,” she promised him, and picking out one long stem for herself, kissed him on the cheek.

“He’s a great man,” he told her, as they watched him walk slowly away. “We used to go rabbit bombing together.”

“Rabbit bombing, what’s that?”

“You never do that? Bit of old pipe, a cup of sugar, some weedkiller, shove it down the hole, and boom!”

She put her hand to her mouth. “That’s horrible! The poor rabbits.”

Her horror was genuine. Ned changed the subject. He had told her too much.

His leave was soon over. After he returned to the cramped CID office in Southampton the letters came first from St Peter Port and later from Zurich, where she went for the winter. A week before Christmas they arranged to meet in London, she on her way back home, he on his day off. He waited for her by Eros in clothes bought, like the swimsuit before, especially for the occasion, but the moment he saw her stepping out of a cab, he wished he had not come. His suit was cheap and awkward while her clothes feil about her as free and as light as a summer rain. They were neither sure enough in their affection nor experienced enough as lovers to take themselves to a London hotel and order up a room, but instead repaired to a tea house and sat with their love affair lying broken on the table before them. Theirs had been a holiday romance, nothing more, he the native, she the tourist, despite her claim to the contrary, and it was foolish to pretend or hope otherwise. To hide her discomfort she talked of how she’d just learnt to ski, what fun it was and how he must try it. He wondered whether she knew the gulf she was digging between them. They parted, promising to meet again in St Peter Port for the New Year, but December ended and the old year was washed out and they did not join hands to watch the new one surge in. He went over to Pleinmont with Bernie, and she? why, thanks to Mrs Hallivand’s introductions she had made something of a hit that winter, sprinkling her elusive charm over the season’s parties like a rare flurry of Guernsey snow.

Coming back from their celebrations, he and Bernie decided to take a New Year dip and hurried down to the bay. It was one of those frozen nights, clear and utterly still, and though they stood on the jetty and dived in, it was all they could do to turn and strike out for the shore before the cold seized their limbs and dragged them down into its liquid heart. As they rubbed themselves down, Bernie pulled out a half-pint of plum brandy and took a swig before passing it over. Up above were the lights of the Villa Pascal, as keen as any lighthouse. At that moment the doors were flung open and they could see, racing along the sloping lawn, four figures with flaming torches in their hands, running round the garden in crazy circles. Three men and a girl whooping and laughing, the men calling her name, imploring her to dance, to kiss them each in turn. “Come on, Isobel,” Ned heard. “Forfelt! Forfelt!” and laughing she broke free and ran back in. The men followed, the windows shut. The shrieks and laughter were banished in an instant.

“Someone’s looking to have a good New Year,” he said bitterly, and Bernie, watching for a moment, clapped him on the back.

“Us too, Ned. Us too,” and together they walked back to Bernie’s house. Ned left the island three days later thinking that he would probably never see her again, that she would marry soon and settle in London or wherever her husband’s profession took her, while her father remained a lonely and broken man. Six months later his dad had died. “Four days. That’s all I need,” he had told his superiors, and on the boat over, a small kit bag on his shoulder, he had directed a pair of unprepared holidaymakers to Bernie’s mother’s guest house. They and he were there still.

Ned put up the envelope in his pocket and picked up another handful.

“Well, now,” he said, speaking out loud. “Let’s see what other malicieus rumours are abroad this bright and lovely day.”