3. In The Beach Cafe

THE SANDS OF TIME Part 3

Just off Quigstone Beach there was a refreshment bar with a few tables in the open where passers by could relax and refresh themselves under the sun, with the sound of waves crashing not so far away.

Desmond Boniface liked sitting there. Since he’d moved to live near the quaint coastal town of Oceaneye he popped in maybe three times a week. Only in his seventies, he was beginning to feel the approaching limitations of old age, and walking the few hundred yards from his home was about all he could manage without needing a break.

He had been a great deal fitter once upon a time, when he had joined the police force and worked his way up the ladder to end up as Detective Superintendent. Even at retirement he had managed the walk along to the nearby town of Oceaneye, a walk of around three miles, in almost no time at all. But that had been approaching twenty years ago. At seventy six he could no more of dream of walking to Oceaneye than he could of leaping to the moon!

The old man had brought a lot back to him. He remembered him, all right. Thrasher Pottle is what he had been called at school and thrasher had been what he’d been, and universally hated for it. Desmond had been haunted by dreams in which a grotesque arm wielding that stick had thrashed down and broken fingers endless on delicate hands. At least, that was the dream and it did nothing to minimise the brutality of the history teacher.

And there he was, all these years after. Walking on the same beach as him and talking aloud of death.

The b*****d must be old, though. At least ninety. And still alive when he deserved to be long dead and a pile of dust in a cheap coffin resting in a forgotten graveyard.

Desmond sighed to himself. He’d dedicated his life to pursuing men who were not so vile as was old Thrasher because he took whatever demons were pursuing him out of young boys whilst the scum he’d usually dealt with merely thieved from old ladies. As a uniformed policeman and, later as a detective, he’d apprehended some vile men, but to his mind none were as vile as Thrasher had been.

“And he’d been in charge of young lads,” he sighed, “boys who struggled to understand the crap he tried to make them understand, as if the history of our entire nation revolved round the families of long dead kings! As far as he was concerned nobody was as important on the entire planet as English royalty. They defined all of time if you looked at history the way Thrasher had shoe-horned it into young minds.”

And here he was, coming up to the table where he was sitting! Not asking if I mind him joining me, just taking a seat opposite me, and smiling as if we were buddies!

Desmond looked at him and scowled.

“I’ve arrested better men than you, and had them locked up,” he growled, not looking into the other’s eyes.

“Pardon?” asked Gavin Pottle, frowning as if trying to bring a past moment to mind. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

“You know, you b*****d,” growled Desmond. “You beat the living daylights out of us boys, and for no reason. Oh, you had good discipline all right. Nobody dared breathe in your classes!”

“But you’re not a boy any more,” offered Gavin, “your childhood was a long time ago and I’m prepared to bet you’ve done well from what you learned at school.”

“Not from history, though,” Desmond told him, “not from the rubbish you taught us! How great our rulers are! How they’re chosen by a deity you pretended to believe in, your God’s representatives on Earth! So off with your head they screeched at anyone who dared to oppose them. Like you: hold out your hand, boy! Punishment. Punishment … or death.”

“I was in the war, you know.” Gavin Pottle shook his head. “I saw history in the making. I watched as men died, good men, all because a self-appointed dictator said they should!”

“So that’s how you saw yourself, was it? A supreme dictator in the class room. You saw men killed on the battle field, so small boys should be mutilated, should they? Should spend their nights not dreaming of fair maidens with breasts you could die for, but watching the shadows of your bloody cane crashing down on their young fingers?”

“You did well enough.”

“Yes, but I hated history. I hated the past. They say as a species we should learn from mistakes of the past, but how can we when the past is such an ogre?”

“I think I’ll find another table.”

“Yes, squire, you do that, but first, before you do tell me one thing. What happened to your wife?”

Gavin stiffened. “I don’t have a wife!” he almost shouted, making the serving staff look his way and frown.

“So I’ve touched a sore spot, have I?” grinned Desmond, “but I know you did have one because once, a long time ago, as a young copper I was tasked with finding her.”

“I’m a single man!”

“With a marriage behind you. What did, what was her name, let me see, can I remember? Ah, I have it: what did Glenda do? Where did she go? Is she walking on sone foreign shore, maybe a beach like this one, having spent a good long life happily as far from you as she could get?”

“She died!” The words escaped unbidden, and Desmond could have kicked himself into an early grave letting it.

“Did she?”

Desmond looked around him, searching for a way out. Then: “of course she did! I’m ninety one and she was older than me! She might have died half a century ago!”

“Like the Reverend David Hobson did?”

That was a blow too low. He loved David, didn’t he? There was only one dear person on this benighted globe worth thinking about, and that was David.

“He went away,” he muttered.

The retired police superintendent knew when he’d landed a blow.

“Yes,” he murmured, “he went to Brumpton Borough Cemetery where he’s lived this past thirty years without a stone to mark his resting place. But his bed beneath the turves is on a list, and I’ve seen it.”

“He went to Spain!” Doesn’t everyone who wants to get away from the trials of this life go to Spain in search of sea, sunshine and freedom?

“Brumpton graveyard’s a long way from Spain,” murmured Desmond Boniface, “you see, sir, I’m retired now but I looked, I did, through your life. And I found David where he rested with a fractured skull. I had him exhumed, I did, got the pathologist to give him a good looking over and, yes, he had a fractured skull all right, and that probably killed him. But I never found your wife Glenda. A beautiful woman, they say she was, but nobody knows where that beauty shines now.”

“She was a b***h!”

“Now now, Mr Pottle, that’s no way to talk of the dead … if that’s what she is. If she’s dead.”

“I told you: she was old.”

“A month or two older than you. So will you die in the next month or two to give the equation balance? Is that the way things are, how lives are measured by the gods of time? Or did she die a long time ago and does she rest, unremarked and unloved, beneath some forgotten soil somewhere?”

“I’m going home. I don’t have to listen to your nonsense.”

“Of course you don’t, but it’s worth remembering, isn’t it? Once upon a time I was a boy in your history class and for no reason you decided I could be beaten every time you had a whim to beat somebody. So you did. Now I’m at the other end of my life…”

“So what?”

“And I’m going to beat you, sir. Metaphorically, of course. But I’ll beat you, you old bully, before you die. And I’ll enjoy every blasted moment of it. Now to save time, where did you hide Glenda?”

© Peter Rogerson 09.03.22

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