Unexploded (5 page)

In a moment, they would push through the wide doors and cross the parquet dance floor. She would point to her cousin, alone now, she hoped, on the balcony, and they’d smile their brief goodbyes, shrugging and apparently helpless as the fervour of the crowd and the volume of the ten-man band separated them without the need for formalities.

But as they stepped into the crashing light of the ballroom where the band were playing out the final dizzying throes of a jazz number, the last blast of the night, the crowd surged, and a pair of dancers, ecstatically entwined, backed into her. Geoffrey reached out; Evelyn felt his hand, light on the small of her back, and, in that instant, a charge ran up her spine.

They spent the first night of their honeymoon in an elegant but precarious hotel on Ile St-Louis. The seventeenth-century mansion was slowly subsiding into the Seine and one day, their host had informed them with a Gallic shrug, it would be
de luxe
accommodation for ‘the feeshes’. The smell of drains wafted in through the window. Geoffrey’s feet hung off the edge of the mattress. Evelyn traced with her
toes the cracks that grew like rangy sunflowers up the walls. ‘Perhaps I should say …’

He propped himself up on an elbow.

‘That I’m not …’

‘That you’re not …?’

‘Reluctant.’

‘Ah.’

‘You thought I was going to say I wasn’t a –’

‘Indeed. I was already composing the note I would pin to your chest when I returned you, Cost, Insurance and Freight, to your mother.’

She plucked a hair from his chest and, half laughing, half wincing, he drew her to him.

After three years of marriage and as many miscarriages, Evelyn’s fourth pregnancy felt like a reprieve.

At three months pregnant, they celebrated with a picnic in the Park to which they invited her widow mother and his widower father. She didn’t look well with it, her mother declared, and the conversation had dwindled painfully to talk of the diseased branch of the beech tree overhead, bare of leaves in June, and whether or not it should be cut off. By the end of her sixth month, she could no longer walk even as far as the Park. By the seventh, she was confined to her bed. But no matter, Dr Moore, the Beaumonts’ old family doctor, assured her brusquely. If she did as she was told, she would carry to full term.

She did, yet what followed in the twenty-four hours of Philip’s birth was like nothing she had imagined. She had expected the extremis of the labour. She had expected exhaustion and exaltation. Instead, she’d haemorrhaged. There had been only the sense of her
life and her child’s life slipping together from the world on a tide of blood.

When it had finally stopped, Dr Moore had taken Geoffrey to one side. The baby’s shoulder had been badly lodged, but they’d managed to free it without breaking the arm or collarbone. He was a large baby for so small a woman. She’d lost a great deal of blood and she’d been ‘on a very dangerous brink indeed’. Her uterus had almost certainly been compromised. Indeed it was highly unlikely she would carry another child. Even if he were wrong, she would not, he believed, survive another labour, and – here his old watery eyes narrowed beneath their wild Scottish eyebrows – it was Geoffrey’s duty to ensure his wife did not fall pregnant again.
Don’t be a beast
, those eyes said, and Geoffrey felt a fist punch through to his heart.

As she came to, he pressed his lips softly to her left eyelid, then to the right, and, as she opened her eyes, she smelled something new in his hair, on his jacket – the sweetness of a cigar he’d smoked with a neighbour in the Park outside. In spite of her every intention to brighten, she felt a thorny envy for his ease in the world; for the way the well-worn ritual of a cigar with another man seemed enough to persuade him that all was well that ended well. She was fine, he murmured. The baby was fine.

She nodded because she couldn’t trust herself to speak; to say, didn’t he know, she’d had to fight not to go under as Dr Moore had barked at her, as though from the top of a well. And she hadn’t, she hadn’t gone under. She’d been awake through the horror of the haemorrhage even though she’d been unable to open her eyes. She’d heard them telling Geoffrey very firmly to ‘leave her now’, and she’d wondered to herself,
Is this what dying is?

‘You’re on the mend,’ he told her. ‘And he’s already too big for his booties.’

Who was this new, small person in the cradle beside her bed if not the stone that had been tied to her ankle as she fell?

Geoffrey took her hand and stroked her fingers, as if any greater display of feeling might overwhelm them both. Once, he’d imagined that time must suspend itself for life’s great transitions; that it must give way, in those seismic shifts, to some fuller apprehension of reality. Yet in the twenty-three hours of Evelyn’s labour, time was not overcome. It had turned to mortar. He’d felt himself, everything he was, stiffen at the sounds of his wife’s agony, and he’d longed to bolt from the house; to drive through the December night, blasted with cold air. Life had brought him up short. He could neither go up the stairs nor leave the house. It was all he could do to straighten himself for the moment when the midwife would come to him, her face ashen, and lay her hand on his sleeve.

The room still smelled of disinfectant. All that blood.

He rose to open the window. In the watery sunshine of a December morning, as the ordinary sounds of the new day reached them, he pressed his wife’s cold, pale palm to his cheek, and she smiled faintly at the odd sensation of his two-day beard. He thought,
Her face has changed; she is someone different today
, and he felt her eyes search his for the answers to her confusion and pain.

He wouldn’t understand. It wouldn’t even have crossed his mind yet. Suddenly she’d turned into a fragile thing in their bed, a bone-china cup of a woman, a woman who wouldn’t mend. Not properly. He would never crush her against him again. The fiercity would go out of his love. He would never be able to forget the sight of the blood-soaked sheets piled high in the scullery sink, and their mattress, wrapped in a tarp and carried away.

She smoothed her bed jacket. He moved to the hearth and stoked the coal in the grate. In that moment, each felt a loneliness so profound they had to battle inwardly not to resent one another.

They recovered, slowly. They named Philip for Geoffrey’s father, who had died just months before the birth of his first grandson. They loved one another again, and their love grew, something neither of them, privately, had expected following the trauma of her labour.

Sometimes, in entirely random moments, Evelyn would see her son and have to blink back the memories of the red storm of his delivery. She never forgot, though other women had assured her she would, and occasionally, in those long gazes, something seemed to pass between Philip and her: a flickering of mutual confusion, guilt and apology. Even as an infant, hungry for a feed, he’d struggled to latch on, and she’d wondered, without any hope of knowing, whether the blind panic of his birth had created some unsteadiness, not just in her, but within him too. He was physically robust like his father, but there was something else – a worry, a need, a vulnerability in him – that she could never put right, perhaps because she had put it there herself.

Once, in those early days, she’d asked Geoffrey if she seemed to him naturally maternal. ‘Of course!’ he’d exclaimed, but Geoffrey was no judge of these things. He’d grown up on painful visits to a mother he hardly knew.
Naturally
she seemed maternal to him. Any woman at home with her children seemed maternal to him. By his standards, even her own mother, remote and lofty on Brunswick Square, was motherly.

Whatever the truth of it, of her, Dr Moore’s judgement had ruled out any other pregnancy. For a time, a part of her had wanted to prove the old doctor wrong, and to have with Geoffrey the large family they’d always assumed was their future. Another part of her
was relieved to have been officially dismissed from duty. Geoffrey had said there was no question. He wouldn’t risk it.

So they switched off the bedside lamp. They grew accustomed to nightwear. They’d learned to heed Dr Moore’s advice, relying on rubbers, withdrawals and wordless apologies.

The mark was still there, of course, the small patch on the ceiling in the sitting room, brown beneath a coat of ivory paint, where the blood had spilled to the bedroom floor and seeped through a crack in the floorboards. Sometimes Evelyn would watch her husband in his wingback chair after dinner, his head on the antimacassar, his face tipped up as he blew ribbons of smoke over their heads, his gaze seemingly trained on that guilty spot. Or was it her nerves making something of nothing? ‘Be careful, darling,’ her mother had once said to her not long after Philip’s birth, ‘or we’ll be packing you off to the Nerve Doctor.’ The Nerve Doctor had long been the bogey of her mother’s cautionary tales. Composure and restraint were not merely required, but assumed.

The first day she’d been able to sit up in bed, a week before Christmas 1931, Geoffrey had arrived home from the Bank, smiling unsteadily, with something hidden beneath his snowy overcoat. ‘Guess,’ he said. He looked so hearty and well, he seemed to her then like another variety of human.

‘Flowers,’ she said, trying to brighten.

‘Guess again.’

‘A partridge in a pear tree.’

‘What about one slightly out-of-tune canary?’ He pulled his overcoat back to reveal a small gilt cage. ‘I was rather taken with this chap,’ he said. A bird blinked back at her.

It would sing to the baby, he said, and it was so ridiculous, so bird-brained, one couldn’t help but laugh at the little thing. He sat
down carefully on the edge of their bed, awkward next to her, conscious suddenly of his own bulk.

The canary started to sing from his perch. Philip cooed dreamily in his cradle and sneezed. ‘Do you like him?’ Geoffrey asked.

Hot tears came into her eyes.

She named him Dickie.

Sometimes, they would leave the cage door open so Dickie could fly about the kitchen and stretch his wings, often with Philip, as he grew, stumbling after him. But one day, one of the many cats that prowled the Park stole into the house and gobbled up poor Dickie, leaving behind only telltale yellow feathers at the bottom of his cage. They’d had to tell Philip that his friend had flown away through an open window and that ‘any time now’ (Geoffrey had consulted his wristwatch) Dickie would be arriving in New York.

‘But what will Dickie
do
in Noowook?’ asked Philip from behind his bib, blancmange trembling on his lip.

‘What will he
do
?!’ boomed Geoffrey merrily.

Philip nodded, his eyes huge and grave. Geoffrey glanced at Evelyn. He had only just arrived home. ‘Why, see the sights, of course!’ he said, gathering his son into his arms and lifting him towards the ceiling. ‘That Dickie will be living the high life in no time, you mark my words. He’ll miss you. Lord knows, it will be hard for him without a good friend like you.’ He pressed Philip against his chest and stroked his head. ‘But don’t you think New York is a better place for Dickie than that old cage?’

Philip buried his gooey face in his father’s tweed. ‘
I
don’t know …’ Tears were imminent. Geoffrey looked across the table to Evelyn.

‘Dickie will
love
New York,’ she declared. ‘He’ll visit the top of the Empire State Building, and he’ll perch on the head of the Statue
of Liberty. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if dear old Dickie finds himself dining with the Rockefellers themselves tonight.’

Geoffrey turned to her. ‘
Not
the Rockefellers,’ he said under his breath. Then he passed Philip into her arms as their son started to howl.

She’d forgotten. Jewish banking dynasties, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds of the world, were, he’d explained, the scourge of international finance. On this point he had agreed with her father, an accord that had unsettled her, but then, many of the women at the WI espoused the same view. When she’d laughed at ‘that man’ Oswald Mosley rallying his amateur, well-bred army of ‘blackshirts’, Geoffrey had pointed out that many of the best people in Sussex were giving their sons to Mosley.

‘Who are these “best people”, darling?’

He’d glanced up over his paper. ‘People looking out for the national good, I suppose.’

‘Well, Mosley won’t have my son.’

‘Philip is three.’ He’d smiled his wry smile – ‘I don’t expect the shirt will fit.’ And she’d had to laugh.

5

The air that late-May morning was already scorched. At the corner of the Crescent, Geoffrey and Philip crossed Union Road and passed The Level, where the lawns were yellowing and the boating pond was reduced to sun-baked mud. Philip’s Hercules bike rattled between them, and Geoffrey was relieved by the noise that masked the mood he couldn’t shake.

Earlier that morning – after he’d fallen away from her – Evelyn had slipped to the lavatory without a word, without a laughing ‘oops’ between them. Neither had made eye contact yet, but they’d both felt it: unhappiness settling into their silence like a dirge.

He’d told her not to trouble with breakfast for him; if he and Philip got away a bit early, he’d manage a bathe in the sea before work and would grab something from the muffin man on the way to the Bank.

Now father and son crossed Ditchling Road and navigated the commotion of the new Open Market, where the Baker Street slum and the slaughterhouse had, until recently, clung like a stain. Geoffrey had led a small, influential group who had petitioned the Corporation to rehouse the inhabitants and transform the area, and Evvie, he knew, was fiercely proud, even though he’d told her that, ultimately, it was only selfishness on his part. He could no longer bear the glimpses of misery each morning: the glassless windows; the
women staring suspiciously from their dark thresholds; the babies, floppy in their mothers’ arms; and the children playing near open drains. Men without work idled against the slaughterhouse wall, the gutters running with blood, as the rag-and-bone men circled the streets, gripping the reins of their nags.