Sandlands Page 11

  Poor Dad. Poor all of them. Mum was still young, not yet sixty, when she died last year – too young to be felled by emphysema, and then the double strike of cerebral thrombosis. It was a close-run thing, but in the end she couldn’t quite hang on long enough to see her granddaughter born.

  ‘But you think it was true? You think she really had this boyfriend in the RAF?’

  ‘Maybe. But she’d never mentioned it before, not to Dad, not to anyone. She never even told us she’d worked at the base, let alone met anyone there. And as you say, she was really just a kid.’

  Just seventeen – a whole ten years before she met Dad. It was all such a very long time ago, and maybe the truth of it didn’t matter, not now that Mum was gone. Gone to graveyards, every one. Rosa gave an involuntary shudder, so that Poppy’s pale blue eyes flung wide in consternation. Long time passing. Bending over her child, she was caught quite unawares by the springing dew of tears.

  * * *

  The boy from the museum lingered to watch as Poppy took her photographs of Silene conica and unrolled the fluorescent tape to cordon off the site.

  ‘Is that it, then?’ he said as she stood back, returning her camera to the rucksack.

  ‘Pretty much. I’ll need to log it, of course. For local and national records.’

  He nodded, the tawny eyebrows gathered in a slight frown, as if he was trying to think of something suitable to say. And then he apparently abandoned the attempt. ‘So, d’you want to come and see the Cold War Museum?’

  It seemed a reasonable exchange.

  What detained her, however, was not the battle cabin with its airlock and decontamination shower, nor the signboards chronicling the history of the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing, but something almost incidental, a relic of an older war. A small wall cabinet in the entrance way displayed a black-and-white photograph and beneath it a card of explanatory text. It was actually the background of the photograph, blurred a little by the enlargement, which caught her attention first: something about the configuration of grass and tarmac, of Nissen huts and perimeter wire. It was surely taken where she had been just now, out there beside the runway. In the foreground were a series of disjointed, jagged shapes, which she took to be the lumped and broken pieces of an aeroplane; scored across the width of the photograph was a great dark furrow, gouged through the soft sand by the blade of a wing, like a grotesque parody of the plough. Swords into ploughshares, she thought.

  Moving closer, she read the short, close-typed notice. An Avro Lancaster bomber of No. 64 Squadron, returning from the Ruhr, had attempted a landing in heavy fog on just two of her four engines, and crashed beside the main runway on 19th December 1944, killing her captain, Pilot Officer Joseph Woodhall, and all six crew.

  It must have been the crash site they’d been excavating, in the place where the sand catchfly had appeared: the plane whose debris they were digging for.

  Seven young men, and all of them somebody’s loved one. Seven young men and an early grave.

  * * *

  A year on, and the war was over. Those who were coming home were back now, or would very soon be on their way. Lilian took one flower stalk from the handful she had gathered and threaded it carefully through the mesh of the wire; then she did the same with another, and another. She had found them growing back there, there where it had happened, six months ago today. It wasn’t a flower she remembered ever noticing before, not one of the ones that Joe had picked for her, his cranesbills and his chamomiles, and the others whose names were fading already from her memory. She was attracted by its starry pink flowers, and the funny striped seedpods like the domes of a sultan’s palace.

  Those who were coming home were back, but Joe’s body had been laid to rest in the cemetery at Market Drayton by a family she’d never meet, while C for Charlie was buried where it fell, in the sand beside the runway.

  Lilian turned away. As she walked back to the gate where her bike was propped, a slight breeze rose, thrumming the wires of the perimeter fence and vibrating the seed heads of the sand catchfly, splitting open one fat, ripe pod and sending puffs of gossamer seeds to trace their dance steps on the sunlit air.

  Whispers

  Dr Theodore Whybrow stepped out through the college gate, tightened his scarf, set his sights on the tower of the University Library and contemplated his failings.

  Cathedral of the fens. It was various East Anglian parish churches which usually laid claim to this contested title: the church of Walpole St Peter in Norfolk; St Mary Magdalene church at Gedney, Lincs; not to mention the ‘cathedral of the marshes’ at Blythburgh in his own native Suffolk. Yet somehow the phrase always connected itself in Dr Whybrow’s mind with the imperious outline of the University Library. Awareness of the true, prosaic purpose of that tower – for it was in reality no more than a vast bookstack, a repository of copyrighted materials of infrequent interest, encased in a column of brick – did nothing to lessen its power to cow. Perhaps, indeed, the thought of all that weight of learning was part of its oppressive moral authority. ‘Who are you, little man?’ it seemed to be saying to him. Little man: as insignificant beside those great scholars whose works were housed about its feet as any medieval worshipper before the company of saints and angels. What were the spires and pinnacles of churches and cathedrals, after all? Symbols of the hand of man, reaching towards the heavens for grace? Or, in reality, watchtowers, set over a weak and wayward population – visible reminders of their frailties to the frail.

  Twenty-two years ago, fresh from a brilliant PhD, he had been the outstanding young academic in his particular field of literary biography, the emergent expert on his man: William Colstone, the Regency soldier-poet, essayist and dreamer. From his doctoral thesis had sprung a flurry of articles, published in the leading periodicals to universal acclaim, winning him his Fellowship, a university teaching post and national recognition. The next step, naturally, had to be the book. The Whybrow biography was to break the mould, to reset the ground rules for Colstone scholarship; for him personally, it was to be the magnum opus, the masterwork to secure his Chair and a permanent place in the canon.

  That was then. Now, he carefully fixed his eyes and mind upon the immediate foreground. The library tower reared up above the line of trees which divided Queens’ Road from the green of the Backs. It split opinion, that tower. Whybrow himself, however, had a sneaking admiration for the style he thought of as ‘monumental fascist’ when encountered in Milan, and as ‘red-brick God’ at Guildford. There was a sense of something cleansing about a spot of unabashed modernism, especially in this city so absorbed by its own past, a place so smugly not red-brick. But the sense was, he feared, illusory. The University Library could intimidate its congregation as effectively as far more ancient hallowed halls. It was a pure conceit, of course, to imbue a building with the animus of its past users, but one with a persistent hold on the popular imagination and to which Whybrow was not immune. And if the vaulted spaces of a church could murmur with the prayerfulness of generations – or their disapproving judgment – then why not also a library?

  The short walk from his college rooms to Gilbert Scott’s controversial edifice was the one he had undertaken every weekday morning at 8.45 am throughout the Long Vacation, this summer as for the twenty-one preceding summers: every working day in fact, since the last examination script had been marked, moderated and put to bed in June. Nor, this year, had his routine been interrupted by the onset of Michaelmas term, because Dr Whybrow was on sabbatical leave.

  ‘Enjoy your freedom.’ That was the greeting tossed his way by the head porter, Ernie, this and every morning since term began, after he’d picked up the mail from his pigeonhole. But it certainly didn’t feel much like freedom. He had lingered as long over Weetabix and the Today programme as he could allow himself on a working day without the creepings of guilt. His email, disappointingly light in anything requiring a response, he had dealt with before leaving his rooms, carefully avoiding the recriminating gaze of the icon tha
t crouched in the corner of the computer screen as soon as he booted up. The Book. It must be three weeks since he had even opened the file, though he was intent upon not counting. Much easier to shut down the computer, arm himself with old-fashioned paper and pen, lock up his rooms with the wretched thing inside and head for relative safety beneath the library tower. There, at least, lay the promise of surrounding calm – even if not inner tranquillity.

  It was an irony not lost on Dr Whybrow that his personal bolthole – in that deplorable contemporary phrase, his ‘happy place’ – should, like the University Library, also be a tower, and also built of brick. The land certificate recorded him as registered proprietor since only the end of May, but it was many years since he had first become accustomed to think of it as ‘his’ tower. Since early one morning of the Easter holidays in fact, when he was eleven or twelve, back home in Suffolk from the purgatory of boarding school and reclaiming the pleasures of solitude and unmarked hours. Home on leave, was how he came to think of it: each school term a fresh tour of duty, a posting into hostile terrain, and each homecoming shot through with relief at having survived.

  It must have been Easter because it was too mild for Christmas and too damp for July or August. The mist as he recalled it was no light summer sea fret but a tenacious spring fog, lying low over cold earth saturated from the night’s rain. It was early, too: the sun, just visible through the veiling cloud, was low and bloated, bleeding a mauvy-pink. He wouldn’t have been up and out at an hour to watch the sun rise if it had been the summer holidays. He was on his bike, he remembered – or rather, he had his bike with him, because out there across the muddy fields and the wetlands which lay beyond there were few places where tyres would not be soon bogged down. There were stiles to be hoisted over, too, and through the salt marshes the wooden duckboards were frequently so narrow that to wheel a pedal cycle became a precarious operation, promising at any moment a skinned ankle or a foot submerged sock-deep in foetid black silt. But it had been a present, that bike, a reward from his father for passing the school entrance exam, and he was too young, or too stubborn, for the double edge of this to dent his pride in the machine.

  He was going fishing, an activity he understood for other boys was a means to congregate but which Whybrow did to be on his own. None of them caught anything, either way. They had no rods or tackle apart from a stick or a garden cane, perhaps some bait wheedled from an older brother and such pieces of line as could be found snagged in brambles or bulrushes along the path. Today he had not even that. The dewed strands festooning the reeded banks had all been cobwebs, not knotted nylon. He had stripped himself a likely willow switch some way back along the river but abandoned it again while tugging and hauling his bicycle through a place where vegetation had invaded the footpath from both sides so as to make it almost impassable. He had been heading for the curve of the estuary, where the ebbing tide left spits and banks of gravel which were almost like a proper beach, and where the pretence of fishing could be dropped in favour of skimming stones across the water. But the mist and the fight with the brambles must have disorientated him. He had missed his way and come too far right, but instead of turning back had trudged doggedly on while the path bent round to the south and east, towards the marram dunes and the sea.

  That’s when he had first seen it: his tower. Not loomingly tall, at least until you came close, but solid, squat and low, it resolved itself from out of the backlit brume and stood sombre against the skyline. At more or less the same time he became aware of the sound of the sea effervescing on the shingle. His tread quickened as he walked towards the apparition. Perspective clarified and he could see that it was a round fort, flat-topped and unbattlemented, emerging from below the embanked pathway on the beachward side and reaching above it by some twenty or thirty feet. Its brick walls, the colour of damp sand and slick with moisture, were unrelieved by any doors or windows visible from this aspect. It was the Dark Fortress; it was Minas Morgul; it was Cair Paravel. It was his and his alone.

  In the farthest corner of the University Library Reading Room sat Dr Whybrow, at the stretch of table that was his habitual hiding place.

  The library had a quality like no other place, a paradoxical power to make the reader feel himself subsumed into the greater body of collective intellectual endeavour and at the same time secluded, walled off from the world. Once, not so very long ago, he’d been able to bury himself in its studious embrace and focus only upon the quiet hours between himself and the time of its closure. The thing about scholarship – in his youth a frustration and then, for many years, a comfort – was that there was always more to be read. Reading became its own end: a self-justifying virtue. Here in the sheltering silence there was no need to think of the days, the weeks and months going by, nor to measure any larger progress – or the absence of it. No need to acknowledge that his reading had become an alibi, a substitute for writing: the work of others a defence against his own. But in this last year even reading had lost its power to quell the demons which whispered against him. The stone clerestory and panelled oak ceiling of the Reading Room, even the long rows of desks, were a-hum with their denunciation; censure purred through the central heating, and every soft step on the deadening blue carpet was a new indictment: of his shortcomings as a scholar and the deficiency of his output.

  He pulled the journal he was reading closer towards him, running a finger along the fold to press it flat. More than once he had found that his eyes had run over a paragraph without anything registering upon his mind at all. It was as if some functional connection had worked loose in his brain, so that the words upon the page no longer linked to their corresponding mental images. Reading was what he did; it was his life. For a moment he entertained a fantasy that the relevant synapse might break apart completely and print become mere patterns of ink, no longer decipherable into ideas. He would be left adrift: his pathway to this world, his only world, irreparably severed. Dad, after all, had been little older than Whybrow himself was now when his neurons had first begun to misfire, taking him away from his son. Out of reach, the way William Colstone seemed beyond his reach these days, too. There, but not there.

  If it happened to me... He would have to retire, and go and live in his tower by the sea.

  It was nonsense, of course; his faculties were perfectly sound. He glanced down at the pad of A4 narrow feint at his right hand. Apart from a heading, carefully inscribed with a wiggly underlining at 9.05 am, the page was a blank. Dragging his eyes back to the text, he tried to force his mind to follow, but its meaning slipped and slithered past the edges of his consciousness.

  Perversely, when interruption came it was still unwelcome.

  ‘Dr Whybrow.’

  Above almost all else, he abominated the library whisper. Quieter than its stage cousin, it nevertheless shared with it an irritating overstated quality – as well as containing a sibilance that made him want to swat at the whisperer like a buzzing fly. The culprit in this case was someone who should have known better. Someone in fact whom, in the usual run of things, Whybrow was inclined to view with favour, and even a modicum of personal affection: his former doctoral student and now a Research Fellow of his college, Dr Jenny Lassiter.

  He raised his head at her salutation and offered a suppressed smile which he hoped conveyed the discouragement of further conversation.

  Evidently not. ‘How’s it going?’ hissed Jenny.

  He rearranged the smile into a frown. Disapproval did not prevent him, however, from sliding a guilty sleeve across his empty page of notes.

  With a waggle of her own notepad, she turned to continue her progress towards the inquiry desk. But not before jangling his nerve-ends with a parting whisper.

  ‘Enjoy your freedom.’

  It had felt like fate when it came on the market. Not that Whybrow had any truck with such a superstitious concept, but even hard science could allow for patterns, for balances and synergies, for things falling into place. He saw the photograph in the est
ate agent’s window in Saxmundham and recognised it instantly, although the angle – from the seaward side – was unfamiliar. Opportunity to own a piece of history. And that felt strange, as well: as if a person might own a slice of the sea or the sky.

  The price was not prohibitive. Two decades of living rent-free or almost so in college rooms had facilitated the accumulation of a sizeable nest egg, even after allowing until recently for care home costs, and even on his modest academic stipend – not a professorial stipend either, as he required no reminding. And it was after all just a derelict shell, for all its historical interest, and lacked vehicular access into the bargain. Even the agent had not had the gall to describe it as ‘ripe for development’. It was itself, and unapologetically so: his tower.

  The printed details relayed facts and figures which the academic in him filed away for reference but which seemed remote from the living image he carried in his mind. The most northerly of twenty-nine Martello towers erected along the east coast by the Board of Ordnance between 1808 and 1812 to defend England from the threat of invasion by the forces of Napoleon. The towers’ design was inspired by the round fortress at Mortella Point in Corsica, unsuccessfully bombarded by British warships in 1794. Most, like his own tower, were cylindrical in shape, the flat roof concealing a single interior dome – in contrast with the grander specimen at nearby Aldeburgh, which formed a distinctive quatrefoil, its four great towers now tastefully partitioned and rented out to holidaymakers. The Martellos were built to withstand cannon fire; a million bricks, it was said, went into the construction of each.