Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  Once Simon had left the RAF and he and Lily were living in London, Elsa said, ‘You can come for the day, Lily.’

  Bus and Tube, train from Victoria, bus again. Sally in the pushchair and Paul trotting alongside. Heaving the pushchair on and off trains and buses. The potty, the changes of clothes, the carrier bag with sandwiches and fruit.

  ‘Take them down to the sea front for an hour, Lily, so that they can run about. Children need exercise.’

  ‘Why don’t you come up to London, Mama, and spend the day with me? The children have all their toys at home, and the garden. It’s so much easier. They can play, and we’ll have time to talk.’

  ‘Surely Simon could look after them for one day, so that you can come and visit me on your own?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s ever looked after them on his own for a day.’

  A sudden volte-face from her mother. ‘Well, he is at work all week. Men need time for themselves.’

  They most certainly do, thought Lily. Fifteen years in Morocco, for example, without once seeing their daughter. Her mother seemed to think Lily should accept that, just as she should accept the fact that her mother would not come to London. How was it possible to feel such a pure, burning jet of dislike for someone who had done so much for you?

  There. The vacuum cleaner is running again. She’ll finish the hall, and then have a cup of coffee before she tackles the bedrooms. The air smells of dust. But who likes housework? At least it’s her own house, her own dust, her own children’s muddy marks on the strip of hall carpet. Lily kneels to tackle the area under the coats. They ought to get a proper shoe rack. She starts to sort out pairs from the heap of boots and shoes, and that’s when she sees the briefcase, tucked back against the wall. For a moment she thinks perhaps it’s an old case of Simon’s, from when he was at school, but of course it can’t be. She’d have seen it before. She pulls it out. It’s light, almost empty, but something rattles when she shakes it.

  She never looks at Simon’s letters. It’s a point of principle. She would never go inside a drawer or wallet that belonged to him, and nor, she knows, would he invade her handbag or the files where she keeps the certificates: their marriage, the children’s births, her own naturalisation papers. But this briefcase isn’t Simon’s. It’s old, but it’s expensive, so it must belong to someone. Perhaps Simon has brought it home by mistake. But she knows that’s not possible. He would have mentioned it to her: Simon is so open.

  Lily stands stock-still. Is he so very open, or is that just something she’s got used to taking on trust? In her mind she sees Simon coming in soaked through, late, on edge. Not saying anything to her. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was up to something.

  Already, her fingers are feeling for the lock on the briefcase. Now they are pressing in on both sides. There’s a click. It wasn’t locked. The catch unsnaps. The briefcase opens.

  And here she is, at the kitchen table, with the file in front of her. Top Secret. She knows immediately that it ought not to be here. Simon has never brought anything like this home. He rarely brings work home at all. Perhaps it’s got nothing to do with him, perhaps someone just—

  Crept into their hallway with a briefcase while her back was turned?

  The case can’t have been there long. The children barging about for boots and dropped gloves would have found it.

  For some time Lily sits there, looking down at the file. A blank, blind space surrounds her.

  She no longer speaks German. It has all disappeared. She speaks English, French, Italian. She cannot remember. Even her father’s face is a pale disc.

  ‘Surely you must remember Strandbad Wannsee, Lily! When you were three – four – five – you would pester me every day to go there. Of course that was when it was still permitted to us …’

  No. She can remember nothing. Not a twig, not a drop of lake water, not a grain of sand. Her mind fumbles, but it is all blank. Sometimes, now, her mother would like to speak German with Lily: ‘Surely you can’t have forgotten the language you spoke every day until you were nearly ten years old!’

  ‘You always said: Speak English. If I spoke in German you wouldn’t answer.’

  ‘There was a war on, Lily. How could I have you speaking German in the streets? Better that you forgot.’

  ‘I did forget.’

  Her hands reach out. She opens the file. On the front sheet there are three typed names, with initials handwritten against them. She recognises only one name: Julian Clowde. He has read this file. Here are his initials: JRC. She finds herself wondering what the ‘R’ stands for. Simon doesn’t like him.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked him once.

  ‘He’s a cold fish. But I don’t have much to do with him these days.’

  ‘He’s too important now, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not just that.’

  ‘I thought he was a friend of Giles?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon shortly, and the subject was closed.

  She has made a mark on the cover of the file, because her hands are dirty from emptying the vacuum cleaner. They will notice it. What is this file doing here? Julian Clowde signed his initials, after the other two men whose names she doesn’t recognise. And then, for some reason, the file was passed to Simon. He brought it home in a briefcase which isn’t his, and tucked it away behind the children’s boots. Never, not once, has Simon brought home any file like this. She feels again the coldness of his body as he slid into bed beside her, in the early hours.

  Lily turns to the back of the file, and then forward through the pages. Statistics, diagrams, tables, acronyms. A swarm of words and figures that mean nothing to her. And then, at the front, a page written in plain English. A briefing document. Words jab out at her. What they describe are underwater surveillance and detection techniques. The diagrams and graphs are illustrations to the text. ‘Ref. Fig. 1, acoustic field sweep. Ref. Fig. 2, sonar directional plotting range. Ref. Fig. 3, bearing and feed calculation.’

  At the foot of the briefing document is written: ‘Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment’.

  England is an island, Lili. That is why we will be safe there. England is surrounded by the sea, and armies cannot march across water.

  It had made her feel very safe. Hitler will not get his boots wet, her mother said, when Lili was most frightened. The sea is England’s strongest weapon.

  This file. This file in her hands. This is a weapon. Simon ate nothing this morning. He wanted to talk to her when he came in last night, but she fell away from him into sleep. In the morning it was too late. They looked at each other over the children’s heads, and he was gone.

  No one but Simon can have brought this file into the house.

  Lily sits with the file in front of her and her thoughts drumming. She will put it back behind the boots. She will wait until the children are in bed and then she’ll bring it out and say to Simon, ‘What’s this?’

  A train whistles, and the sound goes through Lily’s bones. Don’t be frightened, Lily. You are in England now.

  She is in England because her mother would not wait, not even for Lily’s father.

  She must hurry.

  Lily gets up, puts the file back inside the briefcase, and clicks it shut. It’s no good just getting rid of the file. The whole thing must completely disappear. No one must know that it ever came into the house.

  Lily empties the sack of kindling that they keep in the cupboard under the stairs, places the briefcase in it and knots the sacking. She dresses herself in raincoat, hood, wellington boots, and goes to the back door. She looks all round, carefully. The garden is very private, but there are back windows, and now that the leaves are off the trees there might be someone looking out – No. All is quiet. She walks briskly down the crazy-paving path beside the lawn. Beyond the rose-trellis, there is her vegetable patch, the apple and pear trees, the gooseberry patch, and beyond it the wild, overgrown part of the garden that leads to the copse. No man’s land. She puts down t
he sack, and fetches the spade and fork from the shed. Here, by the compost heap, the soil is soft and there is garden rubbish piled up, waiting to be burned when everything is no longer sodden with the autumn rain. She shoves the rubbish aside with her spade, and begins to dig.

  Digging a hole deep enough for a briefcase to be buried is harder than she thought. God knows what it would be like to dig a hole deep enough to bury a man. The topsoil is soft, fed with ash from years of bonfires, but below it there’s clay. She sweats inside her raincoat even as the rain falls harder. Rain is good. It keeps people indoors, not looking over their garden fences.

  The spade hits something hard, and won’t go deeper. Lily gets the fork and levers out a chunk of concrete. Brambles whip at her and she shoves them aside. She’ll pull them forward afterwards, to hide where she’s dug. She chops at roots with the edge of the spade and hacks her way deeper.

  At last, she thinks the hole will do. She stands, easing her back. The sacking is dark with rain. She drops the case in the bottom of the hole, and treads it down, crushing it into the dirt, before she begins to fill in. Every so often she tramples the soil down again. At last it’s level with the rest of the earth. She fetches the garden fork and pulls rubbish and undergrowth over the grave of the briefcase. When she’s finished, she walks backwards, smoothing away the marks of her boots. By the shed, she stops and looks back. There’s nothing to see. No one would know.

  Lily takes off her boots before going into the shed, so that she won’t leave muddy footprints. She finds a rag and with it carefully wipes the tines of the fork and the metal blade of the spade; then she replaces these on their hooks before shutting the door. Even now, she doesn’t put her boots back on, but walks in stockinged feet to the water butt, where she rinses off her boots carefully. At the back door she undoes her suspenders and strips off her stockings. She’ll wash them, and dry her raincoat on the clothes rack by the kitchen stove. With luck, her stockings won’t have laddered. Now, she must find another bag for the kindling.

  She looks back over the garden. Her feet have left no prints on the grass. The rain falls more gently now, in a mist that almost hides the copse. She’ll have that cup of coffee now, and afterwards she’ll vacuum the bedrooms. Everything is just as it was.

  10

  Sunday

  A rainy November afternoon, and cold with it, but deliciously so now that the curtains are drawn, the fire lit and the sitting room’s clutter basks in soft, yellow, flickering light. Paul and Sally kneel on the hearth rug, taking turns with the toasting fork. Bridget isn’t old enough to toast crumpets yet, but she has her doll’s tea set with real tea in it, and is content. They have been out all day. Paul and Simon went to King’s Cross, Sally on a trip to the zoo with her friend Katie (Sally is a child whom other families are always eager to invite), Bridget and Lily to Highgate Woods in macs and boots, with Erica, Thomas, the baby and Coco, the King Charles spaniel that Bridget craves.

  Erica let Bridget hold the lead, and Bridget took it reverently. Now, she was a girl with a dog. Anyone who saw them might think it was her own dog. The spaniel is appealing, although Lily has never taken to it. The glassiness of its eyes repels her.

  Bridget raced ahead: ‘Come on, Coco! Good girl, Coco!’

  ‘How are you, darling?’ asked Erica. ‘Christ! I wish this rain would stop.’

  ‘Oh, you know. Fine.’

  ‘You look a bit down. Time for the convalescent home?’

  This had been Erica’s fantasy, when Thomas was little. Thomas, although a lovely boy, as everyone quickly says, is not quite like other children. He is immature, perhaps. Slow to learn in most things, frighteningly quick in others. Although he is Sally’s age, he naturally plays with Bridget. As a baby, he slept perhaps six hours in the twenty-four. His temper, then as now, was explosive.

  Worn out by sleepless nights and hours of screaming, Erica would dream aloud of a convalescent home deep in the country, wide-lawned and wreathed in wisteria, staffed by kindly nurses in white-winged caps who would wheel the mothers’ beds into the sunlight, bring them tea and cups of soup, murmur soothingly, ‘Your children are perfectly happy in the nursery. Your job is to rest.’

  But even after all that, Erica had the courage to have another baby. Clare slept from seven to seven and cried only, it seemed, to remind her mother that she was a human child and not a particularly delightful doll.

  ‘You’re the one with the baby,’ pointed out Lily. ‘The rest of the children are quite civilised now.’

  ‘They look it,’ said Erica, as Thomas snatched the dog’s lead and Bridget roared and flailed at him with her fists.

  ‘I mean, they use the lavatory and eat at the table. Bridget, stop that now.’

  ‘Give me the lead, Thomas. If you two can’t behave nicely, then you can’t have Coco.’

  Sullen, united, the two children slunk behind the adults.

  ‘But there is something, isn’t there? Or perhaps you don’t want to talk about it,’ added Erica hastily, for she had a horror of intrusiveness and the gossip of the playground.

  ‘I can’t, really.’ Erica was so quick: she always knew when things were wrong. Lily would have liked to confide in her, but it was impossible. And Erica would not press her.

  ‘Never mind, darling,’ said Erica. ‘Let’s go to the kiosk and buy ourselves a huge bar of fruit and nut.’ She raised her voice and glanced behind her. ‘The children will just have to watch us eating it.’

  Lily lies back in her chair by the fire, eyes half-closed. Today, more than ever, she has been glad to draw the curtains and shut out the world. But who is she kidding, as Simon would say. The world has battering rams if it wants to use them. She heard those words: dirty Jews. It took time for her to apply them to herself. At first those words wouldn’t connect from her ears to the place where she understood herself and knew what she was. Their apartment in Berlin was small: kitchen, living room, her parents’ bedroom and a room for Lili that was big enough for her bed and chest. She had to put her toys away into boxes that fitted under the bed, and her bookshelf was in the hall. But their apartment was in a very good area, her mother said, and that made up for everything.

  To go home was to be entirely safe. There was the thick outer door, the lobby, the entrance hall, the lift with its gates that folded up like concertinas, the row of letterboxes with their polished brass name-plates. Lili traced their own name with her finger before she could read. She was allowed to go down all by herself to fetch the post, and up again three floors in the wheezing hush of the lift. Their own front door was made of oak, her father said. There were three locks, one at the top, one in the middle, one at the bottom. One day, when Lili and her mother came home, Mama took out a key Lili had never seen her use before. She reached up and turned the key in the top lock, and then she bent down to the very bottom, almost on the floor, and turned that lock too. From that time, if Lili came home and one of her parents was already inside the apartment, she had to wait while all three locks were opened. Soon after that, when she was on her way home from school, she heard it for the first time: Dirty little Jew. She turned. But it was a nice lady in a summer dress with yellow and purple pansies on it. She looked straight at Lili. Had she said those words? She looked like one of Mama’s friends. In fact Lili was certain that she recognised the face. A neighbour perhaps. But the lady’s face was cold. She twitched her eyebrows and turned away. Her skirt swished from side to side as she walked off down the pavement in her high heels.

  Lili went home. She felt hot and ashamed, as if she’d wet herself and there was a patch on her skirt. When she rang the doorbell she waited for the sound of the three locks being turned, one by one. Once she was inside, she said nothing about the lady.

  The crumpets are ready now, piled on a plate by the fire to keep warm. Two each, and one left over. Paul and Sally have already eaten theirs and licked the butter off their fingers with cat-like neatness. Bridget’s voice badgers her gently: ‘Mum, do you want more tea, M
um?’

  ‘Lovely,’ she answers, without stirring from her own thoughts, and takes the minuscule cup with its dregs of cold tea.

  ‘Mum, you’re not drinking it.’

  ‘Yes, I am. Give Dad a cup too.’

  Paul looks up from his pile of Railway Magazines. ‘It says here, Dad, that derailments, broken rails, earth slips and engine failures are the most common mishaps that close the line. Do you think that the ten-thirty-six was diverted because of an earth slip?’

  He can see it in his mind, Lily knows. The drama of it: the train panting to a stop; the piled, quivering earth. She remembers reading The Railway Children aloud to them.

  ‘I should think it’s more likely to have been routine maintenance. They do most of that on Sundays. Does anyone else want that last crumpet?’

  ‘You have it,’ says Lily.

  He spreads the thinnest possible film of Gentleman’s Relish on to the crumpet, and bites into it. How young he looks, suddenly. Eager, and almost happy. He can’t have looked for the briefcase, or he’d have seen it was gone, and asked her about it. It can’t have been anything serious, not really. She won’t think about it any more. It is Sunday afternoon, and their door is closed on the world. Simon bites into his toast, and smiles at her. She’d never heard of Gentleman’s Relish until she met Simon. Those Callingtons. His mother and father and his brothers, all so full of themselves, knowing what is right. ‘It was a bit off,’ they’d say of someone’s conduct, and everybody was supposed to nod. None of them has Simon’s yellow-brown eyes.

  ‘What colour are your eyes?’ she asked him, not long after they first met.

  ‘Hazel,’ he said, but the word was too soft for their jewel-like brightness. They are not easy to look into. Bridget has exactly those eyes.