Slapton Sands by Francis Cottam

‘It’s next to the sea. Is damp so unusual –’ she nodded at the window ‘– so close to all that water?’
    â€˜It smells foggy,’ David said. He was frowning. ‘What do I know?’
    She couldn’t sleep after his departure. She wished he hadn’t said what he’d said about the cold and the damp. It was merely the power of suggestion, she knew, but it did feel chilly, and there was an odour in the room – that corruptsmell a tide leaves when it recedes across an area of soft sand or marshland. She’d smelled it further up the coast, on a walk at Swalecliffe. She’d walked without thought, lulled by the featureless nature of the flats, until the ground betrayed her feet and she was sucked into stinking mire up to her shins.
    Alice lay without sleep and thought about her father. To reminisce in this way was something she didn’t allow herself to do very often. She found such great comfort in the warm memory of him that afterwards his absence from her adult life seemed all the crueller and more bewildering. She’d lost her mother to cancer at the age of two. Her father had reared her. He’d done a great job, in her opinion, which was the only opinion on the matter she thought anyone had a right to.
    Being the daughter of a cop had got harder as she had gotten older. When she was very young, she had only the social stuff to contend with. But because she was a bright child, as she got older she tended to share her classrooms with children from far more moneyed backgrounds. Their fathers were publishers, bankers, high-flying members of the legal establishment, physicians, dentists; professional people, they were fond of pointing out to her. To her classmates, cops were corner automatons who smoothed the winter traffic flow in rain slickers and white gloves. Cops were little more than street furniture in the ongoing, epic unfolding of their own lives.
    When she came into contact with campus radicalism,cops represented something far worse. State policemen like her dad were tarred by the same dirty establishment brush as the trigger-happy National Guards at Kent State, or the municipal cops who’d attacked delegates with batons and teargas at the Democratic primaries in Chicago in 1968 at the bidding of city boss Mayor Daley. The uniform, the badge, the vehicle and the gun; all symbolized something the vast majority of her college contemporaries found ideologically unacceptable. To them, she believed, her dad was probably no better than the sinister prison guard in the reflective shades who’d shot Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke just because Luke had refused to call him ‘boss’. No better and fundamentally no different. But she never lied about what her dad did for a living. She never hid him. She’d never have begun to apologize for him. Her contemporaries, in the full flush of their bright and unfeeling radicalism, might have smirked behind their hands at his Sears & Roebuck suit and heavily polished Floresheim shoes and brutally brush-cut hair when he attended her graduation ceremony. But she was as proud of her father as he was of his daughter. They hadn’t held his hand like she had at his side when they lowered her brother into the earth draped under the flag at Arlington. They hadn’t felt the grief and strength alternate in currents of competing force through her father’s shuddering grip.
    Lying in bed, she remembered the first time someone in England had asked her about her family. The question had been posed by a girl whose own father was a veterinarysurgeon. For some inexplicable reason, being a veterinarian seemed a particularly prestigious job just then in England. When the question was asked, Alice was still suffering the culture shock of her first exposure, the previous night, to the full awfulness of British television, with its three miserable, choice-free channels.
    â€˜Did your father carry a gun?’