Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Do you want to get beaten up? We’re going,’ said Giles in a savage undertone. Without looking at Simon again he stood up, pushed the table aside and shouldered his way through the crowd towards the door. Behind him, the mass of bodies closed up again. It must be market day, there were so many. He was sweating.

  He stood in the cold, wet dark and waited for Simon to emerge. His heart was still thumping with anger. He wanted to get in the car, slam the door, reverse it over the muddy verge and turn for London. Put his foot down and let the black night stream by, faster and faster. Let Simon walk back to Cambridge. That would cool him down. Who did he think he was?

  It was probably only five minutes before Simon came out.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Talking about the price of turnips.’

  ‘What the hell do you know about the price of turnips?’

  ‘Enough to hold a conversation.’

  Giles eased the car off the verge. He felt cold now, and tired. Simon’s narrow room wasn’t amusing any more. Giles wanted to be back in London, among people who knew how things were done.

  ‘Christ knows how you’ll cope with National Service,’ he said as he swung the car round a corner – too fast, but he knew what he was doing.

  ‘I’m taking a three-year short-service commission in the RAF,’ said Simon. He was angry with himself as well as Giles. He wished like hell that he hadn’t slid the letter he’d written into Giles’s overcoat pocket.

  ‘When was that decided?’ demanded Giles.

  Simon didn’t reply. His head slipped sideways. He was asleep.

  Giles drove on. It wasn’t raining any more, but there was mud on the narrow roads. It would be the easiest thing in the world to take a corner too fast and slide into a ditch. Or lose control altogether and smash into a tree. Then there would be nothing. One moment of huge exploding silence and then he’d know everything there was to be known.

  Simon’s head slid further, and sank on to his shoulder. Giles drove slowly now, carefully, as the weight and heat of Simon came through to him. His anger was gone. He was calm now and melancholy, heavy with a burden that could never be discharged. This was what Simon had wanted in the pub. All that he’d wanted; Giles knew it now. Their two bodies touching.

  And then there was that evening in Giles’s club. When was it? Months later, it must have been. The plane trees in the square were putting out their leaves.

  ‘The trouble with you, Giles,’ said Simon, ‘is that you like feeling you’re part of a secret society.’

  Giles’s pupils contracted. He was shocked and Simon knew it.

  ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

  ‘You like going straight from here’ – he made a gesture that included the hushed tables and the elderly waiters trundling babyish puddings around the room – ‘to Bobbie’s.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No reason. I’m not criticising you, it’s just an observation.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  Simon looked at the white damask cloth, considering. ‘It’s necessary, I understand that. But I don’t like it. I like things simple.’

  ‘How the hell you are going to get through three years in the RAF, I don’t know.’

  ‘Drinking in the mess.’

  ‘There is that.’

  Simon smiled. He sat quietly smoking as Giles ordered his pudding. Each table sat in its own small weak pool of light, so you didn’t have to think about any of the others. Sometimes another member would have a word as he went past, but usually they were left alone. Quite why Giles wanted to bring Simon to his club, it was hard to determine. But Simon thought it was part of the same thing. He liked the sense that within this cocoon there was a small, flickering touch of risk. He liked to think about what the club members who spoke to him so affably would say if they knew that he and Simon had been in bed together not an hour before.

  But probably, thought Simon, they all had their own secrets. You keep your secrets, and I’ll keep mine. That was the way things worked. If he reached out, though, and touched Giles’s hand – if he kissed him on the lips—

  It was a game; that was what it was. Giles would have a word with a tottering old waiter, then, if Simon wasn’t available, he’d be off to pick up boys at Bobbie’s or the Nightshade. It had all seemed so different from Stopstone at first, but it was the same. He was cold with weariness.

  ‘Do you want cheese?’ asked Giles. Simon shook his head. ‘You don’t seem very hungry tonight.’

  ‘I’m not. Listen, Giles, I’m sorry, I’m not coming on to Bobbie’s. If I go now I can catch the last train back to Cambridge. I’ve got to see my tutor in the morning.’ He stood up as he spoke. Suddenly tiredness swept through him, as strong as sexual desire. He stretched and yawned as if he were alone in his room, and Giles watched the inside of his mouth as it opened.

  ‘You can’t go now,’ he said. ‘You’ll have missed the train.’

  ‘I’ll thumb a lift.’

  There Simon stood, faintly smiling, with the distance of a traveller whose train is about to depart. And I shan’t fucking run after him, thought Giles, and he nodded and looked down at his plate as Simon loped away, a hundred times younger than anything else in the room.

  Giles’s pudding sat sloppily in its puddle of custard, and he chucked his linen napkin on top of it. It was a quick, grand gesture, and he almost stood up to leave. But suddenly he wanted that pudding. He hadn’t even touched it. Under the napkin he knew that the pudding was a pale golden brown, spotted with currants. The custard was soaking into it. Giles glanced quickly around the room. No one had noticed. Airily, he flipped up the napkin and crumpled it beside his plate. He picked up his spoon and broke the surface of the pudding. There was just the right density of currants. He took the first mouthful. Perfect, luscious, vanilla-sweet custard, just as he liked it. Not too thick, and not so thin that it ran off his spoon. The pudding was thick, warm and lemony in his mouth. He took another spoonful, then another. He was eating fast now, shovel-ling it in, the custard, the currants, the suety, sugary flesh of the pudding itself.

  It was over. A fine sweat had broken out all over his face. He picked up the napkin, folded it so that the stained part was hidden, and wiped his forehead. He sat back, pushing away his pudding plate. As he did so he caught the eye of the man at the next table. A gross fellow: Giles couldn’t remember his name. Red-faced. What was it? Crickling? Stickling? A silly sort of name. But all the same, a fellow club member, to be encountered over and over again for years, so Giles said loudly, ‘Frightfully good spotted dick.’

  ‘You were tucking in all right,’ said the gross fellow, and Giles knew he’d seen it all. Simon’s departure, the throwing down of the napkin, the subsequent guzzling of pudding and custard. The fellow was grinning conspiratorially, as if they were two greedy schoolboys. His plate, too, was smeared. ‘Nothing like good old spotted dick.’

  ‘No,’ said Giles. He thought of Simon, at the side of a dark road, arm stretched out, thumb up. He thought of Simon folding his body into another man’s car. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Nothing.’

  9

  You Are in England Now

  It’s one of the days when Lily doesn’t teach. Bridgie insisted on walking to school with her brother and sister, like a big girl, and off they went, Bridgie’s hand in Sally’s, Paul walking ahead, determined not to arrive at school holding hands with his little sister. At once, as shockingly as if a machine has been turned off, the house is quiet.

  Lily goes into the kitchen. Everything looks grubby. She will give the whole of the downstairs a thorough clean, she decides, and then she will feel better. Everything seems disturbed and out of place. Simon had woken her in the early hours, sliding into bed, his feet icy against her. He must have got up in the night. She muttered, protesting.

  ‘Lil?’ he said. ‘Lily? Are you awake?’

  Sleep pulled her down like a tide. Her mouth and eyes were full of it. She knew she should answer
but she couldn’t – not now. She thought he said ‘Lil’ again as she sank away from him.

  She could hardly wake him at seven-thirty. Downstairs the children were squabbling over the hamster. Was he ill, or simply, as Sally thought, not very frisky this morning? Paul held him under the standard lamp to examine his ears, but Sally thought that was cruel … And then, at breakfast, Bridgie spat on the last piece of toast just as Paul was reaching for it.

  ‘I’m the only one who can eat it now, because it’s got my spit on it,’ she was fool enough to say. Paul lunged at her as Lily lifted the child from her chair.

  ‘Go and put your coat and shoes on, Bridget. You are not having that toast, and I am going to make a fresh slice for Paul.’

  How Bridgie roared. It was the rain, and the wind. Children were always like this when the wind blew. And here was Simon, standing by the table, gulping tea while his egg and toast cooled.

  ‘Don’t you want your breakfast?’

  ‘Sorry, Lil, I’m late.’

  She would have the egg for her lunch, with the rest of the soup.

  ‘Do you think the children need their wellingtons?’ she asked him.

  ‘It’s not as wet as that.’

  They were all barging into one another in the narrow hallway, arguing again, tugging coats and scarves off their pegs. Already, Simon was in the doorway. Tall and clean – distinguished, she thought suddenly, although how could that be? Distinguished in sharp outline against the grey morning and scuds of rain. Suddenly she longed to hold him, be held by him, smell his smell, taste him for a second before he was lost to the day. If only she’d woken up properly last night. But she couldn’t get to him through the children.

  ‘Simon!’ she said, and for a second he held her eyes and half smiled.

  Lily thinks of her mother as she drags out the ash-grey vacuum cleaner. It snuffles along the skirting board, spitting out as much dirt as it sucks into its belly. There’s something wrong with it again. Suddenly the sound changes to a high, skirling whine, and there’s a stink of burning rubber. The vacuum cleaner has swallowed something too big for it to digest. Lily unplugs it, takes off the front of the cylinder and pulls out a mangled sock.

  Her mother dreamed of other things for Lily: scholarships, university education, a profession. Elsa had learned English from books and conversation classes, before she came to know England’s dirty floors and crusted lavatories. She arrived in England with Lili, in the winter of 1937, to work as live-in help for a family in Finchley. It was a condition of the guarantee under which they had been allowed to emigrate. Lili knew all about that. They shared an attic room, with Lili on a bed that the lady called ‘truckle’. Lili repeated the word. Truckle. Who knew which words would be useful? That was the way to learn, her mother said. Don’t be afraid of the words. No, Lili, I am not going to speak German to you, even when we are alone. You have to think in English. You are going to school and if you don’t speak English well they will think you are stupid and put you into the bottom class. For dunces. From the way her mother brought out that word, Lili knew what it meant without being told.

  ‘And when you go to school, tell them that your name is Lily. L-i-l-y. This is how you spell your name now, in England.’

  It wasn’t a grand house. There were six bedrooms, three children and endless work. A charwoman called Mrs Brennan came in twice a week to ‘do the rough’, but otherwise Lily’s mother did everything. The first winter, she had chilblains so badly that her hands swelled up, cracked and bled. She was frightened, in case she couldn’t work. Mrs Brennan made her tea from hawthorn berries. ‘That’ll get the blood moving in you,’ she said. Lily’s mother drank off the tea, and pulled a face.

  ‘Is it working?’ Lily asked.

  ‘It was very kind of her.’ Elsa took her daughter’s hands, turned them over. ‘You have my hands.’

  Her mother became ill when she was forty-seven, before Lily’s children were born. Lily was already engaged to Simon. The two women were drinking coffee when her mother said, ‘These days, when I’m walking up the street, I am more like a shadow than a person who makes a shadow.’

  Lily protested.

  ‘It’s not a bad thing. I suppose that when you are young, you believe that all the things in the world have been put there for you. The sunlight, the shops. The whole fabric of it. It’s all there for you and you are equal to it. But then, later on, you see it differently. The post office or the library – this coffee shop – will exist for much longer than me, let alone those trees. Even a piece of paper in the gutter may be here for longer.’

  ‘You’re only forty-seven.’ And this is England, she wanted to add. Nothing bad will happen to you here. But there was no point in saying such things. Her mother, she knew, didn’t believe them. Belief was not part of the picture for her. She had no interest in religion. As long as people could be brought to behave with decency to one another, what more could you ask? Lily’s father had not, perhaps, behaved well, but there were extenuating circumstances.

  He had almost stayed in Berlin too long. He had been too confident. He had only one Jewish grandparent, and had divorced Elsa. The divorce was agreed between them. It was the only way, her father said, that they could protect their property. Mischling of the second degree as he was, he would be counted as legally Jewish if he remained married to a Jew.

  Why should he give up the apartment, his elderly parents, the business, everything that belonged to him?

  ‘The trouble with your father was that he thought he was one step ahead of everyone. That is the weakness of clever men, Lily. They think that cleverness is everything. A little common sense and understanding of human nature would have been more to the point. A man called Strasser wanted the business. Your father refused, because the offer price was too low. Instead of raising his price, Strasser lodged a deposition that our divorce was a sham. We were trying to deprive the authorities of the assets of a Jewish business. So, your father should be considered Geltungsjude. You can understand how dangerous that was. The business would be taken. The Government would get its share, and Strasser would take the rest. At a low price, far lower than what he offered first. That’s how it went.’

  ‘Kanntest Du Herr Strasser, Mama?’

  ‘Speak English, Lily!’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Of course. He often came to our house. He had a little girl your age.’

  Lily’s father made his way to Spain in late 1938, and spent the war in Morocco. There, as Lily’s mother explained, he had ‘met someone’ during their long separation. One day, perhaps, Lily would go there and see her father.

  ‘I don’t want to go to Morocco,’ said Lily.

  ‘You don’t know what you are talking about,’ said her mother, but in spite of the sharp words Lily could see that she was consoled.

  ‘I want to always stay with you.’

  ‘You’re going to live for years and years,’ said Lily, that day over the coffee. ‘You’re only forty-seven.’

  How could she have said anything so stupid, Lily asks herself now. It’s true that she was very young, and probably quite immature. Taken up with her own world, with Simon, the future …

  Three months later, her mother had a stroke. It was completely unexpected, but fortunately, the doctors said, it wasn’t too serious. Not this time. With care, her mother would make a complete recovery, although she ought to give up work. By this time, Elsa was a solicitor’s receptionist, a job that she appeared to enjoy. Lily had done brilliantly in her Higher School Certificate, and now she had a good degree from UCL. Not a First, but … She was going to teach.

  Elsa had wanted her daughter to study law, or medicine. Even now she hadn’t given up hope. Teaching is all very well, Lily, but there are plenty of other things you could do with a good degree. But Lily had met Simon, and seemed to have lost her ambition. And now this stroke, and the tiredness that crept into every fibre of Elsa’s body. London was suddenly too big, too noisy, too shapeless. She was
afraid of crowds. She had to hold on to Lily’s arm when the swirl of the streets threatened to separate them. She tried not to cling to her – she must not frighten Lily—

  ‘I am going to live in Brighton, Lily.’

  ‘Brighton!’

  ‘Yes. You remember the Lowes? They have been living there for five years and are very happy. It’s a nice town. Cheap, too. I can buy a little flat there.’

  The stroke must have affected her mother’s mind more than the doctors had said, thought Lily. How did Elsa imagine that she could suddenly buy a flat?

  ‘Your father has sent money.’

  ‘Sent money!’

  ‘Please, Lily, do not repeat every word I say. Papa has a business in Fez, he has money, he sends some of it to me. Is that such a miracle?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ If only her mother wouldn’t say Papa like that, when neither of them had seen him for years. Lily could not remember his face.

  ‘It never happened before. And you are qualified now, Lily. You will get a job and a home of your own. You and Simon.’

  ‘You always say Sadie Lowe never stops talking. She’s like a parrot, you said, but there’s no cloth to put over the cage.’

  Her mother sighed impatiently. ‘Don’t be childish, Lily. Why should I care if Sadie chatters? The Lowes are old friends. Besides, the fresh air will be good for my health.’

  A little flat. A one-bedroom flat ten minutes from the sea front, close to the shops. A put-you-up bed in the sitting room for Lily’s visits. Lily was soon married and almost immediately she was pregnant with Paul. She could hardly lie down on the put-you-up bed.

  Even with the ferocious light that beat off the sea front, the flat was dark. Her mother filled it with furniture. There were little tables that toppled if you moved carelessly and a bureau with a photograph of Lily, Max and Elsa in 1934. In the photograph, Lily wore a coat with a fur collar, and the three of them were walking along a wide, tree-lined city street. Her parents held the child’s hands. So who took the photograph? Lily didn’t ask. She avoided the eyes and smiles of the photographed family on the pre-war street. They had nothing to do with her now. Her mother said she was thinking about acquiring a dog. A very small one, she said. There was enough room in the flat for a little dog.