Island Madness by Tim Binding Page B

the stewards, Veronica bounced across the floor if she was made out of India rubber. She was a compact young woman exuding a cheerful domestic good health, with strong, muscular shoulders and a luxuriant bosom. The Major wondered idly where she had been these past two years; working her way up the ranks, perhaps. She clearly wasn’t from any of the better families, she was too familiar, too forward, too…too obvious. Veronica, Molly told them, was a leading light in Guernsey’s theatrical community. Since the occupation, amateurs such as she had turned semi-professional, and now she was a regular performer at the Gaumont. Veronica held out a bare bangled arm and grinned up at his patiënt face.
    “You should come and see our next production,” she said lightly, brushing back her flaming red hair with a brightly painted finger. “ April Frolics , it’s called. Vocalism, dancing, nigger minstrels. Just the thing to ease your troubles.”
    Lentsch nodded politely. He remembered her well. Two Christ-mases ago, as a goodwill gesture, the Feldkommandantur had decided to fund the Christmas pantomime given by the Guernsey Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society. Lentsch had been the guest of honour. Marjorie Hallivand, in her capacity as treasurer, had sat next to him.
    “This play,” she had informed him, in a tone that reminded him of his mother, “is a particularly English affair, as much a part of our culture as the Just So Stories or Alice in Wonderland . But whereas Alice has to burrow underground, here the children fly across the rooftops.”
    Lentsch had nodded earnestly. He was familiar with those tales of perilous childhood, of boys and girls lost in forests, captured by witches, devoured by wolves.
    “To the moon?” he ventured.
    “To Neverland. Where Peter Pan lives.”
    “Ah, Pan. Half goat, half man.”
    “A boy,” she said reproachfully, “though he is always played by a girl. It’s a tradition of British theatre. You’ll see.”
    The opening scène had been set in a children’s bedroom with huge bay windows that looked out upon a scène of huddled rooftops. It was curiously reminiscent of his own childhood bed�room, his bed on one side, his sister’s on the other. Gazing out on to the badly hand-painted backcloth it seemed almost as real as the view he had grown up with, his grandfather’s army trunk by the window, the bricked stable yard below, the surround of fields, and beyond, in the patiënt distance, the hidden rustlings of the marsh-land, wet and secret and spiked with reeds, where he and his father and would lie waiting for bloody battle to rage; the baying dogs, the smoking guns, the flurried splashes of the thick green water, and at the end, the winged custodians of this elusive paradise laid out in blood-spotted ranks on the soft green bank of moss. But however far the two of them had paddled into the still waters of the marsh’s domain, however many birds they downed or wounded and watched spiralling out of sight, it was clear to him that they never managed to breach the marsh’s true sanctum nor exhaust the dazzling plumed legions that rose in chorus to protect it. Thus he had grown up believing that he lived close to a fairy land, a place possessed of both a magical past and a visionary foture, from where men blessed with supernatural powers would rise up through the mist to capture him and take him back to their watery redoubt, an impregnable, inviolable fortress, where some hard-won glory reigned in a state of permanent ecstasy. He lived with the possibility, nay the need, of transformation and recognized the demands that would be made by whoever had the will to wield such a transcen-dental sword. A leader! A visionary! A man blessed with powers that went far beyond those held by ordinary men. He existed, of that he was sure. He had always existed. In earlier times he had been called King Arthur, Siegfried, and come the future He would take on other names, hold other courts,