A Line to Kill

‘I just think maybe you should relax.’ How could he be so reasonable and so irritating at the same time?

I got up as soon as I could and walked away, leaving him to his own devices. As I went past the next table, I caught Kathryn Harris’s eye and smiled at her. ‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes. It’s lovely here and I’m so excited to be helping. We’ve got the big party tonight. Have you seen Charles le Mesurier’s house?’

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s amazing.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to be a hot one. I’d love to get out and explore the island. But I’m going to be busy most of the day getting things ready.’ She glanced over at the far table. ‘Marc’s putting together quite a feast.’

She seemed completely unaffected by what had happened the evening before, both her argument with Marc Bellamy and her encounter with Charles le Mesurier at The Divers Inn. It made me think that I might have read too much into them. She was much younger than me. Perhaps she saw things differently.

Alderney is a lovely place. I had managed to rent a bicycle and spent the rest of the morning exploring the island, captivated by the sense of anachronism, the cobbled streets, the Jane Austen architecture, all the defences – the forts, the barracks, the German pillboxes, the batteries and the bunkers – that had been constructed with almost insane extravagance but never actually used. I cycled all the way from Fort Clonque, a nineteenth-century fortress sitting on its own rocky outcrop at the western end of the island, to The Odeon, a brutalist naval range-finding tower perched on a hillside at the far east. I stopped at Gannet Rock and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking vertiginously down to the churning, crashing sea. In front of me, two rocks of biblical proportions rose out of the water, covered with thousands of brilliant white birds. It was a breeding ground for gannets and one of the wildest and most isolated places I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as the day before when it seemed I’d been the only writer to miss George Elkin’s presentation, so just before one o’clock I was back at the Alderney cinema in time to catch the last twenty minutes of Maïssa’s performance. The cinema was not a huge place. From the outside it looked more like a shop or perhaps a solicitor’s office and once you were in there, there were only about a dozen rows of bucket seats, upholstered in the red plush of another age. Even so, Maïssa had signally failed to fill it. Only thirty people had come to hear her and they weren’t having a good time.

Maïssa’s delivery was dreadful. She hadn’t even learned her own work by heart and she stood behind a dais, reading it out with a sort of carelessness as if she just wanted to get it over with. She introduced her poems in broken English and didn’t seem to understand fully what she was saying. The poems themselves, in Cauchois, were indecipherable and the translations – which were being projected onto the screen behind her – weren’t actually much help. As I came in and took my place at the very back, she was in the middle of a poem about Joan of Arc, but I’m afraid, to my ears, it came over as little more than a collection of random words.

She finished and there was a smattering of the sort of applause that always sounds embarrassing in a half-empty room. Maïssa smiled briefly. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said and she too did not sound enthusiastic. ‘I will end, please, with a haiku. I write it for my boyfriend after we split up. It is my thought for him and it is short, so I can translate.’

She paused, turned the page and began to speak.

‘I look to the light

But a dark shape pursues me.

Your shadow or mine?’

She bowed her head for a moment. I joined in the applause but at the same time there was something that puzzled me. I’d read that poem before. I was sure of it. But how could that be possible when I’d never heard of Maïssa Lamar before I’d been invited to Alderney?

I was still thinking about it as I came out of the cinema and it was while I was standing there on the pavement that I saw him: the fair-haired man from the airport. He had taken off the leather jacket and wore a polo shirt that clung to him, showing off the muscles in his chest and arms. There was a gold chain around his neck.

On an impulse, I went up to him. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Are you here for the festival?’

He looked at me blankly.

‘I think I saw you at the airport. You were talking to Maïssa.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re making a mistake.’ He turned round and walked away from me but I’d learned two things from the exchange. He was definitely French. And he hadn’t wanted to be recognised.

I watched him disappear, then crossed the road.