Unexploded (16 page)

Boom, boom.

When she straightened at last and managed to turn, the moth lay half dead on the side table beneath the lamp. A common ghost moth. A singed wing. She could smell it. And for one heady, careless moment, uncluttered by any moral imperative, she knew what it was to loathe the world; to feel a flagrant disgust for it and for everything in it, not least her own frailty and longing.

The night exploded again. Boom, boom – boom. On the seafront, they were blowing up the piers.

It was the end, she thought, the end of pleasure.

18

Two weeks later, as husband and wife passed each other on Elm Grove, on opposite sides of the broad, tree-lined street, neither felt any peripheral tug of awareness. She was going uphill, and he, down. He didn’t glimpse the curve of a familiar brimmed hat or the particular tilt of a chin; she didn’t recognize a certain loping stride. Neither turned suddenly to stare or to call. ‘Evvie! Wherever are you going?’ ‘Geoffrey! Goodness! What on earth …?’ Each walked on, in a tangle of private thought.

Less than halfway up the rise, she’d felt her face start to burn in spite of her hat. Her underclothes stuck to her. Her feet blistered. On the steep climb, the July sun hammered the pavement, and pigeons sat still as decoys in the trees.

The racecourse was no longer the destination it had been. ‘Closed for the war’ meant no buses and no trams, while most cabs now ran on black-market petrol. She wasn’t necessarily averse – wasn’t everyone simply trying to make a living? – but it would not have been seemly for the wife of a bank manager.

As she neared the top, she was grateful for the sharp, cleansing whiff of sea air – it couldn’t be far now – and she navigated her way by the scattered cottages of Bevendean to the east and the streets of Whitehawk to the west. Where had the Gypsy camp gone?

Such heat, such stifling heat even in late afternoon. When the
town had receded far enough behind her and not a soul was in sight, she allowed herself at last to stop, unclip her stockings and peel them off. She slipped off her shoes, too, and set her blisters free. The grass was cool, blissful. The sky felt so close. A sparrowhawk swooped.

Only when the tiers of the grandstand appeared, blazing white, did she wipe her face, retuck her blouse, and ease her feet painfully back into her shoes. She had a plan, a good one, and that drew her on. Or rather it did until the palisade came into view.

The wall of razor wire was scrawled like an obscenity against the slope of Race Hill. At the mean opening, she stared up at a guard who couldn’t have been more than sixteen; a spotty boy playing at war. No wonder the Gypsies had fled.

She was there to see the Superintendent. Mr Beaumont. ‘My husband,’ she added, resenting the need to account for herself. Geoffrey should simply have agreed her plan when she’d put it to him. She shouldn’t have to rely on the element of surprise.

The boy wore the requisite Local Defence Volunteer armband and carried a rifle with a fixed bayonet – an old, outmoded weapon but deadly enough, no doubt. The tip of his bayonet glinted in the day’s expansive light. How mad everything was. A boy with a bayonet was leading her to the racecourse through a corridor of barbed wire. Her book bag knocked at her shins.

It was after four, but the day hadn’t cooled, and the trees that lined the street stooped under their own weight. Geoffrey hardly knew this part of town, a warren of streets and tilting houses that clung to its western slope in the hot shadow of the railway terminus.

The area seemed strangely empty for a summer’s afternoon. No children drew with chalk on the pavement. Women didn’t whisper their troubles over cups of tea and front steps. Delivery boys weren’t
knocking on doors. It was less a community than, literally, the end of the line for the town’s transients. Newspapers and chip wrappers gathered in the drains. Strange cooking smells wafted from open windows and doors. A round-shouldered young man with a battered suitcase passed him, and Geoffrey looked away, pretending to check the address against the note he’d made. Rosa, their Spanish char, lived up this way, but he had no idea where. An older woman crossed the street in his direction, observing him openly. She wore a bright handkerchief on her head and a cheap summer jacket. A refugee, he assumed, and he dipped his head as she passed, embarrassed by the sight of her bare brown feet. Would she look back to see which house he entered?

Number 39 was an unpromising Victorian semi set back from the street: dark, austere, with a peeling front door and a few faded carnations that only drew attention to the riot of weeds. Overhead, above the loose guttering, the roofline rose in concrete crenellations. They looked less like an ornamental feature than teeth, broken and bared. He rolled his sleeves down, slipped on his jacket and buttoned it at the middle, imagining himself climbing the steps to the door, a clean-shaven misfit in a good jacket and tie.

He thought of Evelyn, and a dull ache spread across his chest. The first time she hadn’t returned his kiss was weeks ago now. Afterwards, in the refuge of the bath, he’d suffered like a schoolboy, his face pushed into his knees. But there was of course nothing to be said. It was only a kiss not returned. We are broken, he now understood, by everything we cannot say.

Life would hobble on. Indeed, perhaps it was only by accepting the inevitable failures of intimacy that one’s married life moved forward and passed into the muted successes upon which anniversary parties, retirement dinners and obituaries ultimately depended.

At the front of Number 39, in a tall, narrow window criss-crossed with blast tape, a handwritten sign had been posted.
GENTLEMEN LODGERS ONLY. NO REFUGEES
. He thought of Mrs Merrick all those years ago, presiding over the girls of the 43 Club. He recalled his one night of sweetness with Constance – lovely Connie with the lazy eye – and he wondered what had become of her.

He hovered on the top step, contemplating retreat, yet even as he did, he couldn’t shake a growing awareness of something within his chest, an electric crackle of possibility, a clarifying jolt to his senses. An odd sort of hopefulness where he had expected shame and queasiness. Some new dynamic had propelled him that afternoon down Race Hill, down Elm Grove, through the town and uphill again past the station. After weeks of deliberation and prevarication, here he stood at Number 39.

The lobby of the Metropole and the women there had been out of the question. Too public, too chandelier-bright.

It was an experiment, he told himself. Would he find himself ‘capable’ here?

He counted the notes in his wallet, and, as he did so, the memory of his confrontation last month, with the Category A prisoner, returned. He saw again the man’s black, sardonic eyes and the faint line of mockery on his lips. The truth was, Geoffrey wouldn’t have disciplined his men had they neglected to haul this particular prisoner out of the sea. He was a common cheat who’d arrived in the country with forged bank notes; who’d been living in Brighton on a stash he hadn’t turned over to the authorities. He was a drifter without regard for the daily imperatives under which most people laboured; a coward who had bungled even his own suicide. A homosexual, possibly. A Jew, certainly. He called himself an artist, though the art establishment in Berlin had disagreed. The Home
Department had deemed him Category A: a would-be agitator, a subversive.

He pulled hard on the bell.

As Evelyn stepped from the barbed mouth of the tunnel on to what had been, only two months before, the course’s pristine finishing line, her bag slid to the ground. Beyond the grandstand itself, the green turf had disappeared beneath a blight of weather-boarded barracks.

Mistaking her shock for admiration, the young sentry drew her attention to the Camp’s key features, spread out over more than a mile: a squat cookhouse, a canteen, a fuel store, a laundry, latrines and, in the area that was once, as she recalled, the winners’ enclosure, rows of accommodation that housed the permanent patrol unit.

They walked on, passing a row of stable blocks – housing for the new arrivals, he explained. Men in grey boiler suits aired straw mattresses on a patch of grass. Others laboured over vats of cement. ‘Gun emplacements,’ he said. ‘We’re the biggest local supplier.’ As she passed, their guard shouted something in fierce gutturals, and the men lowered their eyes.

‘See the tote building over there?’ her escort prattled. ‘That’s where they used to take the bets, through the slots at the bottom of those little windows. But it’s a detention block now, ’cos the windows are
that
small a man would be lucky to get more than a square of toilet paper through – pardon my French. It’s as good as airless in there, so if a troublemaker finds himself locked up, he starts behaving, or he does if he wants to breathe again.’

She felt sick, as if she were about to be motioned to the door and asked to cut a blue ribbon. ‘Where is the infirmary? Are there patients today?’

He pointed with his bayonet. ‘The furthest hut. You can just see the tin roof from here, in the old parade ring. We got one chap – tried to top himself last month.’

He offered to carry her bag. She shook her head. ‘He’s dying?’

‘Should be dead but our lads saved the daft beggar. From what I hear, he’s tuppence off the pound.’

‘And the others?’

‘Just one, ’s far as I know. Old geezer. On his way out. And over there, behind the latrines, is our new ablutions block. We had a pipe burst again last week, so it was a right ol’ mess, as you can imagine.’ He showed her to her husband’s ‘HQ’. ‘Now you make sure you have someone to show you out of here, Mrs Beaumont. Pardon my French, but I wouldn’t put anything past this lot. If you ask me, some of ’em need extra bromide in their bread. The I-talians especially.’

In the stuffiness of the office, she stared at her husband’s steel desk. The Head of Patrol was no happier to see her than she was to see him. ‘I’m sorry to appear awkward, Sergeant, but I think you’ll find Mr Beaumont is
somewhere
. It is Monday, after all, and on Mondays, as we both know, he has his inspections.’

The woman smoothed her dress and stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Geoffrey surveyed the room.

An iron bed and washstand were pushed up against one wall. A gas ring and a kettle occupied a dressing table, under the leg of which someone had shoved a wedge of card. A packet of Player’s lay next to the kettle. On a painted shelf, a silver frame, the only thing of value in the room, was turned to the wall. He was curious but his eyes flicked past it. The floorboards were warped and bare save for a bright rag rug. The yellow edge of a child’s hoop stuck out from under the bed.

‘Fine, yes?’ She blotted her lips on a tissue.

He walked to the window and pushed aside the pale muslin curtains. The light of late afternoon tipped like syrup across the chimney pots, the wireless masts and the roof of Brighton Station. On the railway bridge, a train sped by, hissing steam, and the prisoner’s words returned to him unexpectedly, their tone amused, ironic, overly familiar.

I daresay it’s also rare to meet a Superintendent who takes so great an interest in his prisoners.

He followed the line of the train; felt the pounding of the tracks, the stoked heat of its engine. His hostess, he realized belatedly, was waving a hand, motioning to the room. ‘Clean. Yes?’

He blinked and turned, relieved she made no effort to smile in spite of the false cheer of her question. She was tall, in her late twenties or early thirties, with dark hair, slack lips and heavy, pendant breasts. She was not a pretty woman – her eyebrows were too heavy, her face too broad – but she had a full-bodied gravitas, a sombre sensuality, and a voice that did not repel him.

It was enough.

He flexed the tension from his hands. She passed him a matchbox and the pack of Player’s, taking one for herself. Then she opened a drawer and produced a bottle of vodka and two tumblers. ‘Sorry, Doctor. No tonic.’

‘I am not a doctor,’ he said, striking a match.

She shrugged, as if to say,
Suit yourself
, and held out her cigarette for a light.

He obliged, lit his own, and exhaled. On the ceiling, a yellowed strip was studded with flies. ‘May I ask your name?’

‘Leah.’

Her back was beautifully straight. He found it surprising in a
woman of her class, and the puzzle of it irked him briefly. ‘Where do you come from, Leah?’

‘Nowhere,’ she said, screwing the vodka lid back on. ‘Nowhere you know.’ He watched her tap ash into the Eiffel Tower. On her upper arm a livid mark flashed red.

‘You’ve had a bit of an accident.’ He nodded to it. It was recent, still blistering, and the shape, all too clear. He didn’t need to be a doctor to know that someone had forced her arm down on the gas ring. He looked for a moment too long, wondering at the intensities she had known.

‘I put something else on. You won’t see. Drink, drink. Is hot today, no? You walked far, I think. You sweat.’

He looked up.

‘A man must sweat!’ she said.

‘Are there other girls, other girls like you, who live here?’ He could hear nothing, no signs of life, but he imagined ears at the door.

‘Why “other girls”?’ Her lip jutted. ‘I told you. This’ – she nodded at the burn – ‘is nothing.’ She reached for the dressing gown on the hook of the door but hesitated, realizing the point was not to put more clothing on.

Was she up to this? he wondered. Was he? Or would he feel compelled to pay her out of pity and leave?

‘You are worried,’ she said. ‘Forget.’

‘Not worried,’ he said. ‘Curious.’ The Experiment.

He could smell the scent of her hair, loose and unpinned. She dropped the dressing gown on the bed next to him and walked to the window. In the light, the curve of her thighs showed through the thin cotton of her skirt, and he felt a sudden, overwhelming desire to take their flesh between his teeth.

He slipped off his jacket, folded it over the bedstead, and took a
seat on the edge of the bed. The vodka slid down his throat. He’d never looked twice at this shape of a woman before, but sitting here, studying her, he realized he liked the substantialness of her. She was heavily female. Only now did it occur to him: he had never been with a woman he hadn’t been half afraid of breaking.