Unexploded (2 page)

She bowed her head to hide the heat of her face. The tea towel in her lap was stained. Blood among its cabbage roses. She checked her hands and nails, panicking, as if it were her blood and not drippings from the chops. She was no good with all this. She felt queasy whenever she crossed the threshold of Hatchett’s, the sweet stink of suet and blood catching at the back of her throat; the flies stranded and buzzing on strips of sticky paper by the overhead light; rabbits, pigeons and guinea fowl suspended on hooks like charms on a ghastly bracelet. Her mother was right. She’d make a mess of things in the kitchen. She hadn’t been raised for the kitchen. At her finishing school, she’d been lectured on the importance of overlarge centrepieces and
l’art de recevoir
, not in how to joint a bird or gut a rabbit. She wouldn’t cope without Tillie, but Tillie could hardly cope with her own family now that she was on her own. Evelyn was lucky. Everyone said so. Geoffrey wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Reserved occupation’. Until now, she had been lucky. Ashamed of her good fortune. But lucky.

Through Mrs Dalrymple’s open window next door, the BBC’s afternoon organ music boomed out suddenly, ludicrously. An acrid sharpness bit the air. Burning. Something was burning.

She pushed back her chair, walked slowly across the room to the range, and lifted the smoking pot off the heat. ‘That’s it, then.’ She’d forgotten the water. She’d forgotten to add water to the pot. How stupid. Her prize onions were a black mulch.

He was on his feet, opening the back door. ‘Evvie, never mind it now. Let’s just get some air.’

‘No … Really. It’s fine. It will clear in a moment.’ She couldn’t move from where she stood. ‘I’ll bring you a brandy for your tooth. Why don’t you relax in the sitting room?’

But he held the door, waiting.

Outside, the perfection of the day – a flat, Gilbert & Sullivan sky of endless blue – irritated her. In the Park, two rows of Girl Guides were being led through a frenzy of jumping-jacks by smiling older girls. Where had they come from? Why was everyone exercising German-fashion these days? Didn’t young women read furtively any more or smoke or fall in love with unsuitable men? Had there ever been a time when everyone wasn’t so cheerfully public-spirited, when privacy hadn’t been selfish? (
Make a note of the thoughts you get. Test them. Are they honest? Unselfish? Neighbourly? Clean? If not, what can you do about it?
)

What had happened to all the reprobates in town? Where were the malingerers, the mobsters and the pimps in their camel-hair coats and glacé shoes? What had happened to the artists in their run-down digs and the happy adulterers dancing in the open air on the Aquarium’s deck? Where were the pretty boys and the men who walked the
prom, their white socks flashing their code beneath the hems of their trousers? Had even the peep-show girls and the dandies joined the war effort? Had Fear made good citizens of everyone?

Not that she didn’t want to be steady and decent and true, to follow Geoffrey’s lead. She’d married him for his intelligent kindness, for his sense of fairness, for his loyalty to people. On Tillie’s envelope each week, he’d never failed to write, ‘With our very sincere gratitude’, and he meant it. He didn’t regard one’s servants as a different class of human. She’d married him because he was a banker who had little regard for the trappings of wealth or class; because he’d been, in this respect, so entirely different from her parents, with their reverence for ‘old money’.

The year before, he’d defied even her dowager mother. ‘But some boys,’ her mother had exclaimed, ‘are sent away to board as young as the age of four! Philip is
seven
. Think of the opportunities already lost, Geoffrey. Think of Philip, of my grandson, not of yourselves.’ The local Grammar would do, he had told her. He wanted Philip to grow up as he himself had, on the coast with the sea air in his lungs. He wanted the boy to understand that life was not one large, eternal club. Whatever advantages his son had been born to, he would not grow up with the sense of entitlement Geoffrey had witnessed among so many of his peers at Oxford. Her mother had turned to her then. ‘Careful, darling,’ she’d warned with her vinegary smile, ‘or you’ll be acquiring doilies and an aspidistra next.’

Her parents had disapproved of Geoffrey within minutes of meeting him, and while the force of her mother’s feeling had dulled with the years and with the death of Evelyn’s father, it had never disappeared, for Geoffrey was everything they were not: reasonable, thoughtful, fair.

Yet who was he today? When had he ever taken a major decision
without consulting her? She turned to him, studying his face as if reading his lips, as though he were speaking to her through a thick pane of glass. He was pointing to a patch of earth. ‘Just there,’ he was saying. He hadn’t coaxed her on to the terrace simply for fresh air. There was something else. That’s what he was telling her as he pointed to a spot beneath the lilac bush.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ she said. Tears, real tears, not onion tears, pricked at her eyes. He was going to leave them. They had never been apart as a family, not even for a night, yet now he was capable of abandoning them.

From the branches of the old beech tree, rooks lifted into the sky, drifting like blown ash. Over the red-brick walls of the private park, a tram scooted by on Union Road while, from the high hill of Elm Grove, came the wail of an ambulance.

‘I’ve buried it. Not too far down …’

‘I don’t understand …’ She had to shake herself.

‘Two hundred pounds –’

‘
Money? ’

‘A precaution.’ Each syllable was a labour. ‘Two hundred pounds and …’

A girl in a bright cardboard crown ran past them on the park path at the bottom of the terrace steps, her brown plaits flying.

‘Geoffrey …?’

He looked away. ‘A keepsake … That photo you liked of the three of us on the Pier last summer.’

2

She gave up on sleep and slipped out of bed, reaching for Geoffrey’s cardigan on the bedstead and pulling it over her slip. In the kitchen, she felt for the torch on the shelf and shoved her feet into the pair of old plimsolls by the door. When she turned the key and opened the door, it was to a vast moon, full-faced and bright, and the suddenness of it, the promiscuity of it in the blackout, made her pause, unnerved by its light and the beat of blood in her neck.

She eased the door shut, walked across their terrace and down the steps on to the Park’s perimeter path. There was no need of the torch after all, and she abandoned it to the bottom step.

In the silvered darkness, the laurel gleamed. The beeches tossed flickering shadows on to the lawn. She had never been in the Park so late, and it wasn’t as if she could have explained to anyone – to Geoffrey, say – what she was doing out there.

Perhaps she had wanted to see, to smell, the night flowers once more. Was that it? Along the winding path, the fairy lilies were out, and the white campion. Moonflowers trailed their sweetness. Was it too early for the towers of white phlox and their honeyed scent? Night flowers served no purpose. They were unwarranted gifts – small, delicate triumphs that exceeded purpose, that sang of useless variety. A late frost could wither them, and in even the mildest of
years, they were more ephemeral than the moths that hovered over them, yearning for nectar. What were flowers to a war? What was anything?

At the end of the summer, seeds and shoots would be gathered, the bulbs and tubers lifted, the beds turned, and the lawns of the private Regency park ploughed into vegetable plots. Even the moat at the Tower of London had been given over to root veg and greens. Soon, everyone said, common garden flowers would be a luxury, and as she walked into the leafy tunnel along the Park’s winding path, the night air left her dizzy and haunted, as if its scent were already a memory; as though she were already a former, bygone self; a woman who, regarded with hindsight by an older, more knowing self, seemed an innocent, a dreamer, a fool.

At the boundary wall, near the gardener’s hut, the night rumbled faintly – a car edging its way along Union Road. Its lidded visors reduced the headlamps to two cautious shafts of light, and she darted away like a trespasser, or, worse, a mad woman in her underclothes trawling the night for meaning.

Let them land on the beach
, she thought.
Anything, anything other than this waiting.
Everything had changed that week. The Home for Crippled Children was to be moved deep into the countryside. Hitler, it was rumoured, did not approve of crippled children. On the Crescent, three more families had left for America. The synagogue on Middle Street had taken down its sign. Her grocer no longer seemed able to add up in his head. At St Peter’s, the vicar urged his congregation – in the words of Timothy, Chapter 6, Verse 12 – to ‘Fight the good fight of faith’ and ‘lay hold on eternal life’, but she’d seen his eyes glaze over strangely.

More pragmatically, the BBC had started issuing daily guidance
for those suffering from ‘faintness of heart’, a convenient catch-all of a phrase that seemed to address breathing difficulties in the unseasonable heat as well as inadmissible feelings of panic and cowardice.

The night was cut by a tang of earth – fresh topsoil somewhere ahead – and the thought of all the new green life, of its blind need to push up, made her inexpressibly sad.
Sleep, sleep
, she wanted to say.
Not now, not yet
.

Sometimes, on calm days or still nights, the huge sash-window frames of the house shook unexpectedly – depth-charges in the Channel, Geoffrey said – while on the beach, oil from destroyed ships was washing in with the tide and clotting like blood between the pebbles. Neither of them could speak of it. Bright-eyed young men, beautiful, foolish and frightened young men, were being blown to pieces – literally, she thought,
to pieces
– as she sat in her Wednesday-morning knitting circle making socks for feet that would be lost to amputations, and mittens for hands that would never cup a waist or a breast again.

And every day, closer. An amphibious landing. A physical invasion.

There had been occasional hours that week when she’d managed to escape her thoughts. You could fill yourself up with fear. You could clasp it to you – out of a sense of concern, duty, preparedness – but, as the day passed, you somehow forgot to hold on, or you tired of holding on, and, guiltily perhaps, privately, you let the fear go, as if dropping the baton in an interminable relay race.

So fear was overtaken simply by the ringing of the telephone, or by Philip shouting he’d found a bicycle tyre at the scrapyard, or by her own voice automatically reminding him he wasn’t to play at the scrapyard with Tubby Dunn. Fear yielded to the starching of Geoffrey’s collars and cuffs; to the pleasure of May blossom and the horse
chestnuts, plump and lustrous again with spring. Fear was forgotten over a book or a weak cup of tea at the Pavilion Tea Room; over the address labels she stitched to each item of Philip’s clothing in case, in the chaos to come, the unthinkable happened and they were separated. It was lost to sterile dressings and antiseptic in her First Aid class. It dissolved in sleep but gathered once more into a grim ballast as she opened her eyes to each new day.

That ballast had first settled in the pit of her in her girlhood days when, behind the Regency bow-front and the Corinthian columns of Brunswick Square, her father’s mood would, routinely but without warning, turn from impatience or irritation to cold fury. Sometimes she’d watch his entire face change, as if his physical form were suddenly inhabited by another man, a stranger, while his eyes, wildly flaring, seemed hardly able to recognize her.

Her mother had had little choice but to swiftly dismiss the servants for the day and to send her out into the gardens with books her governess left her to discover in the attic nursery. Behind the gate, in the lee of a box-hedge, she read to herself from
Tales from Shakespeare
,
Aesop’s Fables
or Kipling’s
Just So Stories
, murmuring each story aloud as if the words on the page were antidotes against those being uttered behind the bow-front of her home. Later, she would work her way, indiscriminately, through much of nineteenth-century literature, from Sir Walter Scott to Walter Pater to Mrs Gaskell to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, relying on the lending library in Hove because her mother assured her that book-buying was an affectation of the middle classes. Only the Lawrence Family Bible and
Burke’s Peerage
were allowed to reside permanently at Brunswick Square.

To imagine wasn’t to escape but to go deeper; to see through to the secret life of the world. Alone in the gardens, her hands went numb in winter and her face burned in the summer, but better that
exile than having to listen to her mother’s efforts at appeasement; to the way she parroted her husband’s every view in order to calm him. Together, they happily despised communists, liberals, pacifists, agitators, suffragettes, servants, Jews, Catholics, the Americans and the French, the ‘great unwashed’ and the Corporation. But while her mother’s compliance occasionally defused his temper, she could never quieten him for long.

The tumours succeeded where she had not. The doctors blamed a lifetime’s dedication to chewing tobacco, but her parents disagreed even after her father’s throat had closed up with the growths. He had three months waiting to die in rigid silence, unable to do much more than chew and spit into the brass spittoon that sat permanently by his chair and, finally, by his bed.

With her marriage to Geoffrey, Evelyn had escaped Brunswick Square, and by the time of her father’s death two years after, the panic of those domestic disturbances had settled into the dark sediment of memory. If anything, she could take pleasure in the knowledge that her marriage was nothing like her parents’ union. From the beginning, she’d loved Geoffrey for his steadiness, for the evenness of his temperament, for the calm of his touch and his wide, cool hands. She had, in every sense, got away.

Only now, the war, the world itself, all of it was tipping into the unpredictable, and Geoffrey seemed neither steady nor even. What had he told her only that afternoon about the tin? If she and Philip had to leave without him – leave to go
where
? – he had said she was to find the tin and stitch the notes into the lining of a skirt or coat.