Unexploded (3 page)

She didn’t want two hundred pounds. She didn’t want precautions. She wanted him to go back to being the person he was.

For years they had strolled into the Park each night after Philip had got off to sleep. Sometimes they chatted with wandering neighbours
but they spoke little to one another. It was enough to feel the pressure of the other’s arm, to be held in the Crescent’s charmed half-moon of a space and slip into its steady Regency calm. They’d pause to look up at the lion and lioness on their plinths on either side of the Park’s gates, their stone heads eternally turned in opposite directions. The male looked outward over Union Road and across The Level, towards the line of blue sea a mile to the south, while the lioness gazed back over the Park’s lawns and the gabled slate rooftops of the houses. But now, suddenly, after twelve years of marriage, he’d broken their bond. He’d told her he would abandon them.
He
had become the unpredictable, the unknown dangerous quantity, and here she was, wandering alone in a garden once more, wanting, with the bleak passion of a child, for life to simply return to itself.

She picked her way through the abandoned hoops of a croquet game, crossed the north lawn and seated herself wearily on a bench. At the edge of the Park an owl, white-faced and impassive, lurched out of nowhere into flight, and her heart stammered in her chest. A barn owl, she was sure. It flew in the direction of The Level, its pale undersides flashing, its blunt, unlikely body ploughing a seam in the dark.

Night birds and foxes, creatures of the countryside, were coming into the town and discovering, in its alleyways and parks, in its bins and allotments, the shelter of the blackout. In the meantime, household pets and even the donkeys from the seafront lay in stiff, rotting heaps at the back of Brighton’s veterinary surgeries; animals were too difficult to control in air raids, apparently. The world was back to front, helter-skelter – absurd. The Queen took lessons with a revolver after her morning tea.
The Times
urged golfers to keep a rifle in their golf bags. Old women were stockpiling garden forks and shears. At Devil’s Dyke, a German fighter plane had come down in
a churchyard, its fuselage riddled with bullet holes, its wings folded back like a wounded bird’s. Sunday ramblers had picnicked proudly beside it.

She’d laugh if she weren’t so uneasy, if she had anything like the composure she’d once credited herself with. Only recently had she come to accept that her former sense of calm, of well-being, was little more than the ruse of privilege; the straight back of deportment lessons.

Men were still arriving, broken, in Brighton. The trains at the station heaved with the injured, the dazed and the defeated. Everything was coming too close.

The night before last she and Geoffrey had lain awake together, rigid as they listened to the massive, stuttering drone of the first German bombers circling the skies of the town. Zoom-za zoom-za zoom-za. (
Do
not
run away from the plane. If you have to run, run
towards
the plane, not
from
it.
) They came in low over Lewes Road, then banked above the Park before rising and flying north in the direction of the station. ‘Getting their bearings,’ Geoffrey had murmured. And she thought,
I’ll hold my hands up. I’ll do whatever I’m told. I’ll let them at me. I’ll be a disgrace
.

She’d been putting it off, but now she’d do it: a rucksack for each of them; a pair of boots; a change of clothes; extra socks; waterproofs; a comb each; toothbrushes; compressed food; brandy; gas-burn oint-ment; plasters; ration books; the bank book; ID cards; gas masks.

But where would they go? Towards London? (
If you run away, you will be machine-gunned from the air as civilians were in Holland and Belgium.
) Towards Ditchling and into the Downs?

Everyone said it was unimaginable, but she could imagine it: flint-eyed soldiers lining the London Road; officers, impeccable in their dress uniforms, in the boxes at the Theatre Royal; their elegant
wives taking tea at Boots, amused by the quaintness of the ritual; loudspeakers at street corners; Jews – had she ever known a Jew? – writers, artists and intellectuals disappearing in the night; public executions at the Town Hall; neighbours denouncing one another; at Brighton Grammar, a rank of new teachers. Philip would bring home a fresh history textbook, and she would forbid herself to say anything as she turned its crisp, deceitful pages. There would be fitness regimes and biological assessments and betrayals and humiliations. Would she, Geoffrey and Philip be able to
be
one thing and behave as another? And where, never mind who, would Geoffrey be?

She crossed the Park, arrived at their terrace, and was bending for the torch on the bottom stair when the thought returned to her. He had hesitated when telling her the contents of the tin.

A picture of them on the Pier. Why think twice? What did he want to spare her knowing? Had he buried a pistol with the notes and the picture? The Enfield revolver he kept in the safe in his office? She’d give it back. She didn’t want it. Is that what had been unsettling her all night?

She switched on the torch and ran its light over the terrace to the border opposite. The patch of turned earth was by the lilac bush. The garden spade stood upright in the soil, its handle glinting. Geoffrey had told her they must leave it there; it must remain a marker, obvious but nondescript.

He’d looked away. When he’d answered her, he’d looked away.

The ground was dry with the weeks of unseasonable heat, and the topsoil more unyielding than she would have expected. She had to cut at its surface with the edge of the spade until she hit the moister, looser earth beneath. Woodlice scuttled, surprised. She glanced up at the moon’s full, inscrutable face. What if Mrs Dalrymple from next door was walking about in the middle of the night, as she often did?

The old lady had informed the air-raid warden that she couldn’t abide the long, heavy shutters of the house; they made her feel like she was being closed into her grave. She relied on a candle, as she had in her childhood. But now, if Mrs Dalrymple spotted her in the moonlight, she’d possibly shout, as she often did, and wake the Crescent. She’d cornered Philip only last week. ‘Philip Beaumont, do not grow up. Men are execrable buggers!’ Then she gave him a handful of shillings, three aluminium pots for the scrap-metal drive, and permission to play with Clarence, her pet tortoise. Her blue language was the last trace left of her old East End voice. When the Beaumonts had first arrived, she had confided in Evelyn that, before she’d married ‘so disastrously well’, she had worked in a London garment factory making underwear for the ladies of the British Raj. ‘Lace knickers,’ she said with an air of genteel distraction, ‘so they could get the air on their fannies.’

Evelyn had liked her immediately.

A sudden metallic clunk made her forget Mrs Dalrymple. She raised the tin. McDougalls Self-Raising Flour. The lid was difficult to prise off. Had Geoffrey hammered it shut? Her nails couldn’t manage it, and the spade was too large. She slipped back into the shuttered gloom of the kitchen. The cutlery tray lay on the sideboard. A butter knife popped the lid.

Twenty ten-pound notes.

No revolver. And no photo either, unless it was tucked inside the Lloyds’ envelope.

She slid her nail under the flap and stared.

At the bottom, two small green capsules gleamed like bullets.

3

He woke and, before he could remember what the hot-water bottle was doing on the pillow next to his face, the thought intruded. Thursday, the 30th of May. A day that was meant simply to slip into Friday, into the ease of late spring, and be forgotten. Would it?

The bedspread and sheet lay snagged at the bottom of the bed, rejected by at least one of them in the mugginess of the night. In the dark of the room, he could just make out, next to the vase of lilac blossom on the bedside table, the glass of water Evelyn had poured for him before bed. She’d added a few drops of peroxide from Tillie’s brown bottle in the scullery, and had made him gargle with it before sleep. Then she’d passed him a paracetamol, wrapped a towel around the hot-water bottle and laid it against his throbbing face. The procedure seemed to have worked. The swelling in his cheek had gone down. The abscess must have burst in the night. A bit of penicillin, and he’d be human again.

Last night, the tooth had been their excuse to speak no more of it – of the Bank and his news. Now she slept on, her back to him, her right arm twisted awkwardly below her head. The last time she’d spent a night like that, she’d woken with an acute case of tennis elbow, and, day after day, he’d had to help bathe her and dress her in what had become a series of oddly tender rituals.

The memory did nothing to discourage the erection he’d woken
with. Nor did the whiff of peroxide from the glass or even the faint taste of pus in his mouth. He rose, toed his way blindly to the wash-stand, poured fresh water from the ewer into the basin, splashed his face and rinsed his mouth. The room was already hot for half past six. Soon, he would open the shutters and blast the room with sunshine. It seemed in the worst possible taste somehow, the weather for a summer fete at a time of mute, collective dread.

He unbuttoned his pyjama top and climbed back into bed, forcing himself to turn away from her, towards the clock, as if the steady progress of the luminescent minute hand would dispel this morning’s need, more urgent than usual. After their upset yesterday, he’d removed himself to the sitting room with a glass of brandy. His mind had clamoured suddenly for the deep escapism of sleep, but he’d dozed only fitfully, waking every few minutes to the bombardment of brass-band hymns from the Salvation Army citadel across the street.

Dinner was overcooked chops, green beans and day-old bread. The onion fiasco had spoiled her
Good Housekeeping
hopes. Philip had chattered, mercifully.
Tarzan Finds a Son
was playing at the Regent, and could he go? Orson’s big brother, Hal, had seen Tarzan when he’d dived off the board at the SS
Brighton
, which was
before
Johnny Weissmuller was Tarzan, but
after
he’d swum to fame at the Olympics. Now Hal was twenty years old and serving in France, but Orson said Hal said that Tarzan was still his hero because only the fittest survived in the jungle.

After dinner, Philip had played with his yo-yo in the Park while Evelyn did the washing-up. At half past eight, she called him in, got him washed and to bed. Geoffrey listened to her overhead, walking slowly from room to room, closing each set of shutters for the blackout, sealing the three of them off, as if theirs were suddenly a house of mourning. When she joined him again, the excuse of her novel
and the nightly, pre-news broadcast of the national anthems of all the Allied nations relieved them both, once more, of the pressure of conversation.

She disappeared before the end of the news, busying herself with the peroxide and hot-water bottle before running a late-night bath. She said she could still smell the scorched onions in her hair; that he should get himself to bed anyway; his bottle was ready. He nodded and said, ‘Yes, why not? You relax, it’s been a long day’ – even though neither could remember the last time they hadn’t retired for the night together. If he was honest with himself, wasn’t he relieved that she had decided to spare him her tears?

Now, irrationally perhaps, he longed to bridge the distance between them. Her slip had climbed up over her thighs in her sleep. He fingered the ends of her newly washed hair, a dark tangle that smelled of her DuBerry’s shampoo. He moved closer to the arc of her back, to her vertebrae, a Braille for his fingers. Yet to wake her would mean watching the new, painful memory of yesterday cross her face, and the prospect of it unsettled him as much as his longing impelled him.

He kissed the nape of her neck, slightly salty now after the warmth of the night and the heaviness of her hair upon it. Beneath his palm, the skin on her elbow was rough; the hair on her arm, fine and soft. He ran his hand over the curve of her hip, fuller in the last few years. His testicles ached pleasurably. ‘Evvie.’

‘Hmm …’

It was not entirely disingenuous. ‘Your arm. You’re sleeping on your arm again.’

‘It’s fine …’

‘Just shift a little …’ He drew her close, wrapping her feet in his. The muscles in his calves tightened. His heart drummed in his ear.

Why, he asked himself, from the deep comfort of their bed,
had
he agreed to the Bank’s request? He hadn’t admitted to her that no one at Head Office had exerted pressure. On the contrary, they’d suggested he take a bit of time, mull it over, but he’d told them no – of course – someone had to be prepared. He was the branch manager. It simply made sense.

Sometimes, privately, he felt unnerved by the depth of his feeling for her. It was at odds with the moderate person he usually was. He loved her too much – needed her too much – and perhaps he was never quite sure where one feeling ended and the other began.

Had he agreed so readily to Seymour-Williams’s request simply to prove to himself that he could? Had he wanted somehow to caut-erize his heart?

If so, he was making a kind of progress, not only in the guarantee he’d given at Head Office the day before, but also in the grim business of the pills. He’d cancelled the appointment twice, prevaricating, but, at last, he’d made the necessary arrangements with Dr Moore. He’d acted rationally. He hadn’t allowed any personal weakness to stop him from taking the difficult decision that other men had taken, discreetly, for their families.

After the unconventional unhappiness of his childhood home – the secrets, the dissembling, the mournful visits to his mother in her room at Graylingwell – he had never aspired to anything more than a conventional family life. He’d wanted only an affectionate home, a shared sense of purpose, and the respect and love of his wife and son. The simple things in life were actually rather extraordinary – he’d never believed otherwise – and if he provided the life, the four walls of it, Evelyn animated their home. She was the thinker, the natural wit, the discerning eye. Next to her, he was a primitive; a blunt mass;
straightforward, diligent, and clear in his judgements only because he lacked the patience for complication.