Ilfracombe was fading fast. Whilst he thought the idea of the grand tour unlikely ever to be revived, something would surely come along to render the traditional English seaside holiday resort redundant. All it required was an open Continent and cheap petrol. Rod had assured him they’d not be going into the next election with petrol still rationed and who knew how long the restrictions on foreign exchange might last? Given the vagaries of the English summer—he had memories of years when summer simply failed to arrive, as though the turning planet had skipped a season—if an ordinary family could choose between the cosmopolitan delights of Paris and the sun, sand, and vino of the Amalfi Coast, why would anyone choose Blackpool, Broadstairs, or Ilfracombe? Even the names were enough to put you off. Siena, Firenze, San Gimignano?—they spun magic.
Troy thought Anna had probably been thinking prewar—a habit they would both find impossible to break, and in years to come would run a contest to see how many times each began a sentence with the phrase “before the war”—when she booked the Imperial. Perhaps the name alone had been evocative? Was there a seaside town in England without an “Imperial” any more than there was a suburban street south of the Trent without a “Dunroamin” or a “Monabri”?
During the war, the Royal Army Pay Corps had taken over this one-hundred-room anachronism—a battalion of clerks had spent four years here, all pink forms and inky fingers. It seemed to Troy that they could have left but minutes ago, the dreariness of clerkery miasmic in the air.
When he told Anna as much, she said, “You hammer the English for their class obsession and their snobbery and then you come out with lines like that. There are times, Troy, when I think it’s easier to get a handle on that mad bugger I married than it is on you.”
But by then they were well on their way out of town, stepping westward, the morning sun behind them, knapsacks on their backs, stout walking shoes upon their feet. Anna had chosen to walk in culottes, a chance, as the enlisted man was wont to say, and as she did, “To get me knees brown.” And a chance for Troy to gaze on said knees. He hadn’t seen them in a while. Anna had been an early convert to Christian Dior’s “new look” the previous autumn—coupons saved and coupons blown on way-below-the-knee skirts and rustling petticoats. If it caught on, and it had been slow to dent the moral authority of short skirts in a time of clothes rationing, Troy doubted he would ever see a seductive pair of calves again.
“I’ve hit on a super way to cut down on the hump and carry,” she said. “I’ve posted clean knickers and socks to each of the hotels we’re booked into. Every morning I shall get up to clean knickers and dry socks and know that whatever the day holds I can be run down in the street with no embarrassments in the ambulance.”
“You might have shared this plan when you knew we’d be leaving the car back there.”
“Never thought men gave a toss. Angus leaves the same sock on his tin leg from one year’s end to the next. He’ll tell me tin doesn’t sweat of course, but it’s the principle of the thing. Mens sana . . . wotsit . . . wotsit. If you end up in crusty pants because you haven’t planned ahead, will you actually mind?”
Troy had never seen the coast of North Devon before, a saw blade of bays, and promontories, and rock formations that left him wishing he knew the first thing about geology. Pottering about Lyme Bay as a boy he had returned home with a shoe box full of fossils, determined to identify them all and learn enough geology to place each in its eon. He never had.
They had passed Baggy Point and were not far short of their first day’s destination at Croyde, when a large, flat-topped rock just within the tide caught his imagination.
“Do you remember that Peter Wimsey novel that came out just before the war? Can’t remember the title but Harriet’s walking and discovers a body on a rock—a rock very like that. Surely it’s the same rock?”
“Busman’s Honeymoon? Or was it Have His Carcase? And he turns out to be some sort of haemophiliac Russian prince, doesn’t he?”
“That’s the one. And of course she sends for Wimsey.”
“Well,” said Anna, slipping an arm affectionately through his, “I don’t have to send for a detective. You’re already here.”
It was the most demonstrative gesture she’d made in a while. She had kissed him but once, as he lay prone and passive in a hospital bed in 1944, and in the same breath had called him a fool. But Troy’s mind was already wandering from her touch—the one thing leading to the other, the flat-topped tidal rock to a Dorothy L. Sayers plot, to the Russian body, to the bleeding prince of the house of Romanov, to a missing Russian prince of the house of Astrov whose likely name his mother had unhelpfully jumbled with yet another novel. Oblonskaya, Oblonsky. He wished she’d got it right. Then the next thing he knew, Anna had kissed him again, the lightest of pecks upon the cheek, and strolled on ahead, saying as she did so, “Of course, it’s not the same rock; she made it up. That’s what novels are for.”
Her blouse was white and the tails flapped loose and occasionally the whole blouse caught the wind and billowed out full sail. Her culottes were of a shade that might be described as army surplus, except that Troy could not imagine that the army had ever manufactured or issued culottes for there to be any surplus three years after the war. Craving colour, he wondered what colour the knickers in all those envelopes might be. He knew they’d be white, but he could imagine red. A poppy in a cornfield by Van Gogh or Monet. He could imagine that.
“Troy, you’re dawdling. And you’re daydreaming. Do get a move on!”