One Afternoon at Utah Beach
‘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..
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true, Ogden admitted to himself during lunch, though in fact he had not thought of the D-Day beaches when Angela first suggested the week in Normandy. Under the pretext of a demonstration flight in the twin Comanche, Foster had offered to fly them gratis, though his real reasons were hard to define. The whole trip was surrounded by ambiguities, motives hidden inside each other like puzzle boxes.
This curious threesome — the aircraft salesman, the provincial film critic in his late forties, and the young wife ten years his junior, a moderately successful painter of miniatures — sat in this well-appointed villa beside a longforgotten battleground as if unsure what had brought them here. Curious, not because of any confrontation that might occur, any crime of passion, but because three people so ill-assorted had formed such a stable relationship. At no time during the six months since their meeting at the San Sebastian festival had there been the slightest hint of tension, though Ogden was sure everyone took for granted that his wife and Richard Foster were well into an affair. However, for various reasons Ogden doubted this. For her own security Angela needed someone around her who had achieved a modest degree of failure.
His young wife… Ogden repeated the phrase to himself, realizing as he watched Angela’s sharper chin and more prominent jaw muscles, the angular shoulders inside the chiffon blouse, that she was not all that young any more. Soon she would be older than he had been when they first met.
‘I’m taking Angela into Sainte-Mre,’ Foster told him after lunch. ‘Do you want to come along, David? We can try the calvados.’
As usual, Ogden declined. The walk that morning had exhausted him. He stretched out in an armchair and watched the slack sea shrug itself against the beach. He was aware of the complex timetable of apparently arbitrary journeys that Foster and his wife embarked upon each day, but for the moment his attention was held by the blockhouse six hundred yards away. Despite the continuous sunlight the concrete was drenched in spray, gleaming like wet anthracite as if generating its own weather around itself.
An hour after his wife and Foster had gone, Ogden pulled on his boots. He had recovered from the lunch, and the silent villa with its formal furniture felt like the stage-set of a claustrophobic drama. The strong afternoon light had turned the beach into a brilliant mirror, a flare-path beckoning him to some unseen destination.
As he neared the blockhouse Ogden visualized himself defending this battered redoubt against the invading sea. An immense calm presided over the cool beach, as if nothing had happened in the intervening thirty years. The violence here, the scale of the conflict between the German armies and the allied armada, had pre-empted any further confrontation, assuaging his own unease about Foster and his wife.
Fifty yards from the blockhouse he climbed the scrub-covered dune that rose to its seaward flank. The sand was scattered with worn-out shoes, cycle tyres and fragments of wine bottles and vegetable crates. Generations of tramps had used these old forts as staging-posts on their journeys up and down the coast. The remains of small fires lay on the steps of the concrete staircase at the rear of the blockhouse, and pats of dried excrement covered the floor of the munitions store.
Ogden walked across the central gunnery platform of the blockhouse, a rectilinear vault large enough to house a railway locomotive. From here a heavy-calibre naval gun had lobbed its shells at the invasion fleet. A narrow stairway set into the solid wall climbed to the observation deck, and gave access to the barbette of a small-arms weapons platform below the roof. Ogden climbed the stairway, tripping twice in the darkness. The worn concrete was slick with moisture sweating from its black surface.