like the ragged end of a dying man’s last thought. The Italian ice-cream man sat on the kerb next to his three-wheeled bicycle reading his paper, no doubt hoping against hope that Mussolini would not enter the war. Further down the prom, a fishwife hollered ‘Winkles! Sixpence a pint!’ to no one.
The King’s Road was bright, still, and as empty as a place of contagion. Not so much as a chip carton blew down the prom. No summer holidaymakers raced against the breeze on bicycles or laughed behind the wheels of sporty motors. The excursion boats no longer ferried pleasure-seekers from the end of the Palace Pier to Dieppe. Hotel porters and bellboys, jellied-eel and cockle sellers, shopkeepers and carriage drivers seemed suspended in the heavy translucence of aspic.
But on the beach itself, one could still imagine that nothing had changed. The tide was in, and the surf dragged the shingle in a perpetually casual show of force. An old man in a beach slip bobbed in the waves ahead like a white-headed seal. A mother and three children in newspaper sailors’ caps played in the shallows, the youngest screaming at the crashing arrival of each new wave. A stray mongrel sprinted back and forth, tussling with a dead cuttlefish in its mouth. Three teenaged girls in beach pyjamas planted their tuppenny deck-chairs on the pebbles.
The fishermen were already tipping out the second catch of the day, and their children hopped between boats or clambered outfrom below them. Earlier that week, these same men, men of the old fishing families – the Gunns and the Rolfs, the Leaches and the Howells – had been hauling the desperate and the wounded into their boats while bullets strafed the sea around them like skipping stones. Men who had never ventured further than the Isle of Wight had steered their way to Dunkirk by the glow of fire on the horizon.
Now they were at their dees again, as if all the smoke of France had been only a brutal trick of the light, as if the beach weren’t soon to close. The children helped out before school each day, with the older boys spearing twenty or thirty herring on a stick before laying them out in gleaming rows, ready to be smoked.
An ancient man, wearing a blue woollen cap even in the day’s heat, looked up from the net he was mending to spit cord from his mouth. ‘On your way,’ he called to the children, ‘or the Schoolboard Man will be here to lock up the lot of you!’ They scattered like pigeons at gunfire, chasing each other across the beach, the boys threatening the girls with scale-smeared hands.
Two women sunbathed on vast white hotel towels. One looked up dreamily, vaguely irritated by the children’s noise. On spotting Geoffrey, she adjusted the knot of her haltered swimming costume and turned her face.
It was a curious sort of freedom to be divested of his pinstripes. For this rare quarter-hour, he was not one of the town’s leading bankers. He did not approve, decline and seal fates. He had not agreed to serve as Superintendent at the new internment Camp, nor did he head the town’s Invasion Committee. The man who entered the sea was not that reliable citizen, and, for a few moments more, he imagined himself walking free of his identity, unpeeling his responsibilities and abandoning them like clothing at the water’s edge.
He had not told his wife of twelve years he might abandon her and their son if the worst came to pass. She had not looked up at him this morning, her eyes narrowing with mistrust.
When the first wave hit, he felt as if he’d been cut in two. His lungs snapped. His bones ached to the marrow. The heat of the day was misleading. It was only the end of May, after all, and this, the open Channel. Yet it was the stranglehold of the cold water, its overwhelming of all thought, that drove him deeper.
He flung himself below an oncoming wave and his heart kicked in his chest. The cold punched his ears. His forehead throbbed. Something brushed his leg and was gone.
The King’s Road was bright, still, and as empty as a place of contagion. Not so much as a chip carton blew down the prom. No summer holidaymakers raced against the breeze on bicycles or laughed behind the wheels of sporty motors. The excursion boats no longer ferried pleasure-seekers from the end of the Palace Pier to Dieppe. Hotel porters and bellboys, jellied-eel and cockle sellers, shopkeepers and carriage drivers seemed suspended in the heavy translucence of aspic.
But on the beach itself, one could still imagine that nothing had changed. The tide was in, and the surf dragged the shingle in a perpetually casual show of force. An old man in a beach slip bobbed in the waves ahead like a white-headed seal. A mother and three children in newspaper sailors’ caps played in the shallows, the youngest screaming at the crashing arrival of each new wave. A stray mongrel sprinted back and forth, tussling with a dead cuttlefish in its mouth. Three teenaged girls in beach pyjamas planted their tuppenny deck-chairs on the pebbles.
The fishermen were already tipping out the second catch of the day, and their children hopped between boats or clambered outfrom below them. Earlier that week, these same men, men of the old fishing families – the Gunns and the Rolfs, the Leaches and the Howells – had been hauling the desperate and the wounded into their boats while bullets strafed the sea around them like skipping stones. Men who had never ventured further than the Isle of Wight had steered their way to Dunkirk by the glow of fire on the horizon.
Now they were at their dees again, as if all the smoke of France had been only a brutal trick of the light, as if the beach weren’t soon to close. The children helped out before school each day, with the older boys spearing twenty or thirty herring on a stick before laying them out in gleaming rows, ready to be smoked.
An ancient man, wearing a blue woollen cap even in the day’s heat, looked up from the net he was mending to spit cord from his mouth. ‘On your way,’ he called to the children, ‘or the Schoolboard Man will be here to lock up the lot of you!’ They scattered like pigeons at gunfire, chasing each other across the beach, the boys threatening the girls with scale-smeared hands.
Two women sunbathed on vast white hotel towels. One looked up dreamily, vaguely irritated by the children’s noise. On spotting Geoffrey, she adjusted the knot of her haltered swimming costume and turned her face.
It was a curious sort of freedom to be divested of his pinstripes. For this rare quarter-hour, he was not one of the town’s leading bankers. He did not approve, decline and seal fates. He had not agreed to serve as Superintendent at the new internment Camp, nor did he head the town’s Invasion Committee. The man who entered the sea was not that reliable citizen, and, for a few moments more, he imagined himself walking free of his identity, unpeeling his responsibilities and abandoning them like clothing at the water’s edge.
He had not told his wife of twelve years he might abandon her and their son if the worst came to pass. She had not looked up at him this morning, her eyes narrowing with mistrust.
When the first wave hit, he felt as if he’d been cut in two. His lungs snapped. His bones ached to the marrow. The heat of the day was misleading. It was only the end of May, after all, and this, the open Channel. Yet it was the stranglehold of the cold water, its overwhelming of all thought, that drove him deeper.
He flung himself below an oncoming wave and his heart kicked in his chest. The cold punched his ears. His forehead throbbed. Something brushed his leg and was gone.
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