Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  ‘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.

  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-pou
nd 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.