Have I really been here a year? I’m so out of touch with England that I can hardly remember when I last sent a postcard to you. It’s been a year of the most wonderful theatre, of parts I would once never have dreamed of playing, and of audiences so loyal that I can hardly bear the thought of leaving them. The hotels are full now, and we play to a packed house every night. There’s so much to do here, and everyone is so fulfilled, that I rarely find the time to think of Richard. I very much wish you were here, with Charles and the children — but you probably are, at one of the thousand hotels along the beach. The mails are so erratic, I sometimes think that all my cards to you have never been delivered, but lie unsorted with a million others in the vaults of the shabby post office behind the hotel. Love to all of you. Diana.
‘Do you realize that we’re looking down at Utah Beach?’
As he took off his boots and weather cape, David Ogden pointed through the window at the sea wall. Fifty yards from the villa the flat sand ran along the Normandy coast like an abandoned highway, its right shoulder washed by the sea. Every half-mile a blockhouse of black concrete presented its shell-pocked profile to the calm Channel.
Small waves flicked at the empty beach, as if waiting for something to happen.
‘I walked down to the war memorial,’ Ogden explained. ‘There’s a Sherman there — an American tank — some field guns and a commemorative plaque. This is where the US First Army came ashore on D-Day.
Angela… Ogden turned from the window, expecting his wife to comment on his discovery. She and Richard Foster, the pilot who had flown them over to Cherbourg for a week at this rented villa, sat at either end of the velvet settee, watching Ogden with a curious absence of expression. Dressed in their immaculate holiday wear, brandy glasses motionless in their hands as they listened politely, they reminded him of two mannequins in a department store tableau.
‘Utah Beach…’ Angela gazed in a critical way at the deserted sand, as if expecting a military exercise to materialize for her and fill it with landing craft and assault troops. ‘I’d forgotten about the war. Dick, do you remember D-Day?’
‘I was two.’ Foster stood up and strolled to the window, partly blocking Ogden’s view. ‘My military career began a little later than yours, David.’ Glancing down at Ogden, who was now staring at a blockhouse six hundred yards away, he said, ‘Utah Beach — well, you wanted some good shooting. Are you sure this isn’t Omaha, or one of the others Juno, Gold, what were they called?’
Without any intended rudeness, Ogden ignored the younger man. His face was still numb from the sea air, and he was intent on his communion with the empty sand and the blockhouses. Walking along the beach, he had been surprised by the size of these concrete monsters. He had expected a chain of subterranean pill-boxes hiding within the sea wall, but many of them were massive fortresses three storeys high, larger than the parish churches in the nearby towns. The presence of the blockhouses, like the shells of the steel pontoons embedded in the wet sand, had pulled an unsuspected trigger in his mind. Like all examples of cryptic architecture, in which form no longer revealed function — Mayan palaces, catacombs, Viet Cong sanctuaries, the bauxite mines at Les Baux where Cocteau had filmed Le Testament d’Orphe — these World War II blockhouses seemed to transcend time, complex ciphers with a powerful latent identity.
‘Omaha is further east along the coast,’ he told Foster matter-of-factly. ‘Utah Beach was the closest of the landing grounds to Sainte-Mere-Eglise, where the 82nd Airborne came down. The marshes we shoot across held them up for a while.’
Foster nodded sagely, his eyes running up and down Ogden’s slim but hyperactive figure for what seemed the hundredth time that day. Throughout their visit Foster appeared to be sympathetically itemizing a catalogue of his defects, without in any way being insolent. Staring back at him, Ogden reflected in turn that for all the hours Foster had logged as a salesman of executive jets his sallow face remained remarkably pallid as if he were plagued by some deep malaise, some unresolvable contradiction. By noon a dark stain seemed to leak from his mouth on to his heavy chin, a shadow that Foster had once described to Angela as a blue tan from spending too much time in bars.
As if separating the two men like a referee, Angela came to the window. ‘For someone who’s newer been in the army or heard a shot fired in anger, David’s remarkably well-informed about military matters.’
‘Isn’t he — for a non-combatant,’ Foster agreed. ‘And I don’t mean that in any critical spirit, David. I spent five years in the army and no one ever told me who won the battle of Waterloo.’
‘Weren’t you a helicopter pilot?’ Ogden asked. ‘Actually, I’m not all that interested in military history..
