Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  Philip sighed and slipped out from beneath the headset they shared, an earphone apiece. They’d already listened for almost two hours but Lord Haw-Haw had said nothing, not a single word more, about Brighton.

  ‘I have to go now, Orson …’ Outside, the sky above The Level had bunched into a fist of dark cloud. Lightning flashed like faulty electrics.

  ‘Not yet.’ Orson reached for Philip’s satchel and pulled out the cornet of sweets. ‘Because today our subject is “Hitler at the Royal Pavilion”.’ He popped a bull’s-eye into his mouth.

  The air was sticky. It needed to rain. ‘No, really. I’m off.’

  ‘I’ll begin.’ On a shelf above the bed, a German helmet gleamed. Hal had brought it home for him, Orson said; his trophy of war. Now, he lowered it on to his head and seemed to meditate on the line of his school tie against the roll of his belly. In the corridor outside, Orson’s mother crept past. The thought of her out there made Philip nervous and he sat down again.

  Orson adjusted the helmet’s chinstrap. ‘After Hitler does all his work at his Pavilion HQ, he likes to take a break and paint outdoors. He carries an easel into the garden and sticks his thumb in the air and makes his eyes into slits. Sometimes he puts on a smock and a beret.’

  Philip reached for a humbug in the cornet and sucked ruefully. ‘What does he paint? Flowers?’

  ‘Not flowers.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘He never paints people, you donkey. He’s not interested in people. He paints the Pavilion because that’s what he can see, and because he has liked it ever since he saw it on a postcard.’

  ‘Who in Brighton sent him a postcard?’

  ‘Oswald Mosley, of course.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hitler’s friend in England, and Lord Haw-Haw’s too. Hal has a phonograph of his speeches. On the postcard, it says: “Heil-o Hitler, Fine rally. Good turnout. Brighton is the business.” ’ He passed Philip the helmet. ‘Your turn.’

  Philip excavated a clot of humbug from his back tooth and put the helmet on. ‘Hitler likes to go to the Pavilion Tea Room on sunny days. He likes England better than anywhere now because he has discovered warm scones with clotted cream and jam. Except he has to be careful to wipe his moustache when he’s finished or people will laugh and he will have to lose his temper and kill a few to set an example. As he eats, he smiles to himself because the other people at the tables have no idea that they’re sitting next to Hitler.’

  ‘Why not? He’s on all the newsreels. You have to at least make it believable, Beaumont.’

  Beyond the room, the wind took hold of the elms.

  8

  The weekly Camp inspection, Geoffrey now understood, would never fail to be anything other than grim. Each Monday, he signed off the misery of men bewildered by circumstance and imprisoned out of view on top of a coastal cliff. The Camp had opened in early May, claiming the town’s racecourse, and although it was already his fifth inspection, he’d never grow accustomed.

  In the old stables, new arrivals were housed like livestock, while those who had arrived in the early weeks were crammed into hot, airless barracks, the windows of which were painted over and covered in grilles. Buckets served for toilets, and standpipes for the ablutions of hundreds. The mission was cement. Day in, day out, under the tireless eyes of their guards, the prisoners produced cement. The dust of smashed limestone got everywhere – in their hair, their nostrils, their teeth, their food. No one was exempt from labour, except those ill enough to be confined to the flimsy hut that passed for an infirmary.

  The Army ran the show, but the Home Department had required someone well regarded in the area to put his name to it all, to turn a blind eye, and Geoffrey had won the dubious honour. He could hardly speak of it, not to his colleagues at the Bank, not to Evelyn – least of all to Evelyn once he discovered the newest arrival.

  ‘Mr Beaumont!’

  That afternoon, he’d flinched at the sight of his old tailor hunched on a metal bed in the regulation boiler suit. He’d wanted to turn, to run, to pretend he hadn’t heard his own name. His brain was reeling, but the old man had smiled, and he had no choice but to pause in his progress through the barracks. ‘Now, tell me, how is Mrs Beaumont?’

  To hear him, Geoffrey could almost imagine they were simply passing the time at the bottom of Trafalgar Street. He couldn’t meet Mr Pirazzini’s eye. He felt too tall, too … well. Blood pounded in his ears and, as if from a distance, he heard himself reply. ‘Yes, she’s very well … Thank you.’ What a sickening charade.

  After the first arrests, most of the German and Austrian tailors’ shops on Trafalgar Street had been looted, but Pirazzini and his wife endured in their premises until that morning, when Mussolini declared war on Britain, and the police arrived.

  The tailor’s advanced age had guaranteed him a bed in the barracks at least, a bed no wider than he was, a bed that was screwed to the floor.

  ‘Please. Give her my best, will you?’

  Geoffrey nodded. Impossible, he thought.

  The old man had never failed to ask after Evelyn, not since the day nearly nine years ago when he’d spotted her, six months pregnant, carrying too many boxes and bags home from town. She had been a stranger to him then, but he’d insisted she come into the shop and take a seat with his wife before he went out again to find her a cab. He’d paid the driver before she realized, and the next day, through a mouthful of pins, he had refused Geoffrey’s efforts at repayment. ‘No, no,’ he’d muttered impatiently. ‘The wheel goes round. The wheel goes round.’ His mottled hands had sketched circles on the air, his left ring finger lost, presumably, to an accident with the shears or a sewing machine.

  Stooped behind the Singer, his wife had smiled, lifted her foot from the pedal and said, with an accent that was still heavily Italian, ‘Please, Mr Beaumont. My husband is he-goat, and life is short, no?’ Behind his back, she imitated Mr Pirazzini’s circling finger, but in a punning motion, beside her ear. Loco, that finger said, but her eyes were tender.

  She was probably on the Isle of Wight. In the women’s camp. No letters between spouses.

  He’d laughed that day all those years ago and had put away his wallet. ‘Well then, will I at least be able to persuade you to accept my custom?’

  Mrs Pirazzini returned to the sleeve beneath her needle. Mr Pirazzini spat the pins into his four-fingered hand. ‘Mr Beaumont, do you not know? A tailor, like an undertaker, always accepts the custom of a tall man.’

  So he invented something about a pair of new flannel trousers that needed cuffs. Mr Pirazzini shrugged obligingly. He’d had no idea then that the old man was booked weeks, even months, ahead; that he had clients who drove down from London.

  The wheel goes round, the wheel goes round. Now, in the barracks, the old man waved the shiny stump of his finger over the endless row of beds. ‘Mr Beaumont, shall we agree on one thing? You will not pity me my accommodation, and I will not pity you the drape of that jacket.’

  Enemy aliens. It was necessary, said Churchill, to ‘collar the lot’.

  A dirty pall of smoke hung over the Crescent. On the pavement below, in the middle of their quiet street, she watched men in face-shields and asbestos gloves huddled over tools and generators. Then a stocky man raised a gloved hand, a fury of sparks erupted into the street, and a section of the wrought-iron spears of her fence collapsed, ringing out as it hit the pavement. It was the same all over Brighton that June. The metal drive. What more could they take? (Either you sacrifice your selfishness for the nation – or you sacrifice the nation to your selfishness.)

  Inside, the house was as close, as airless, as a forcing jar. Two large flies flung themselves at the hot glass panes. She lowered herself on to the bed in the spare room to wait until the queasiness passed. When it didn’t she turned the eiderdown back and pressed her face to the cool sheets. And she saw them again in her mind’s eye: the two bright green capsules buried in her terrace garden like toxic seeds. Almost three we
eks had passed, and, still, she couldn’t stop seeing them.

  For eight years they had rearranged their lives around the threat of any possible pregnancy. She’d never so much as asked Dr Moore about another child because that small mark still stained the ceiling in the sitting room like a blood blister beneath the skin. Wasn’t it her body that had let them down? After Philip’s birth, their great openness had given way to solicitude and caution. She’d learned to feign pleasure and he’d learned to believe; they separated nervously afterwards, and quickly, as Dr Moore’s prophylactics leaflet had advised. Middle age had descended upon them too early – a delicacy, a self-consciousness better suited to late or second marriages. But now, he had done the unthinkable. He had resigned himself to the loss of her.

  He must have sat, one long leg crossed over the other, in the high-ceilinged surgery. Through the window behind him, he would have been able to see the swathe of Hove Park and the lawns where he had run as a boy. Dr Moore would have folded his hands benignly against the maroon leather of his desk. Perhaps Geoffrey had avoided his old doctor’s gaze, but little by little, in the course of that clipped conversation, they would have navigated past the hard edges of the unspeakable.

  Two cyanide pills. The only responsible thing.

  And what had she done? Had she run up the stairs last night, clenching them in her palm, and shaken him from sleep? Had she accused him over breakfast and washed the vile things down the sink?

  No. She had tucked the flap of the Lloyds envelope back into place as if it were an RSVP for a dull party to which she had resigned herself. She’d laid the envelope flat at the bottom of the tin and covered it with the sheaf of twenty-pound notes. She’d pushed the tin back into its hollow, piled the earth into place, and flattened the surface with the back of the spade. Then she’d brushed herself down, returned the spade to the soil, stepped back into the kitchen and turned the key.

  The kitchen was strange, its edges moonlit and exaggerated, its surfaces bulging as if under some internal pressure of their own. The cutlery had flashed like spilled mercury in the tray on the sideboard. The coal in the scuttle had gleamed. She’d wiped her feet and slipped off her damp plimsolls.

  In their room Geoffrey slept deeply, on his back. She hooked his cardigan over the bed knob and eased herself back into bed. The raw smell of earth was on her hands; washing at the sink would have set the pipes of the house groaning. She clutched one goose-pimpled arm in the other and listened to the steadiness of her husband’s breath. As she lay, eyes open to the dark, she grew conscious of a wider, looser scent. Next to him – next to his smell of heat and hair oil and Imperial Leather – she smelled of the outdoors, of the night air. Hadn’t she taken something of the night, of its feral silence, inside with her? It was hers now, even more than it was his: the secret of that tin.

  Because she hadn’t been able to crush the things under the heel of her shoe. Because she couldn’t be sure that, some fearful day, she wouldn’t not be grateful for them.

  The world seemed to twist into a less physical, less solid, version of itself, as if any of its elements – the moon, the Park, the sturdy arc of the Crescent – could suddenly slip from its position, like a flimsy bit of scenery in a Sunday School tableau. If she slipped – and she was already slipping – if her grip on life was anything less than firm, how would she trust herself? And if Geoffrey were to leave, how could she be trusted to keep Philip safe? (Do you show your children that you are calm and undisturbed? It isn’t enough to pretend to be calm – you must actually be so.)

  In her mind’s eye, she could see the white, uneven grin of his teeth and the red of his lips. His ears were pink, translucent, and the tiny hairs on his lobes caught the light. She could almost feel his childish hands in her own, the ink-stained fingers, the dimpled knuckles. She saw again the curving fringe of his lashes as he slept and the soft brown V of hair at the nape of his neck. His cheek was velvet against her palm; the sleepy warm smell of him delicious. Sometimes, as he nodded off, she traced the delicate blue veins at his temples. All of this I made, she thought. Yet would she swallow death one day? Would she feed it to her child on a spoon piled high with jam?

  She’d be no good, no good at all. Her brain always seized up; when she panicked, she froze. Who was she to stand up to any enemy person? Even her father’s rants and taunts used to strike her dumb. He’d never hit her or her mother, but the threat of violence had pervaded the atmosphere of her childhood, and in her girlhood room, as the syllables of his rage burbled up through the air vents in the floor, she used to pray before sleep that it would stop, that everything would just stop.

  She doubted she was either canny or tough enough to manage on her own – the civilian reports out of Holland and Belgium had been so desperate – and again, the memory of those capsules flashed like foul treasure in her mind.

  In the spare room, she lay stiffly at the very edge of the bed.

  The flies continued to cast themselves at the hot pane.

  It was not within her power not to love Geoffrey, but for this – this fear of herself that was now hers to carry – she could not forgive him.

  9

  For the first time, he could not say the old words. After everything he’d known and seen, he gave up the habit here of all places, in the tranquillized quiet of a makeshift infirmary on the remote edge of a seaside town.

  He didn’t open his eyes. He could hardly bear to see the four walls of his failure. It was enough to smell the bleached lino again and the wood of the cheap hut baking in the heat of June. He reached to his back and ran his fingers over the bandaged lump where his left arm met his shoulder. The bullet was as long and wide as his little finger and burned as if someone were pressing a cigarette to his flesh.

  Years ago, of course, Otto had ceased to believe in the prayer’s potency, but he’d murmured it each morning anyway for its mundane comfort; for the memory of his mother beside him in his narrow bed, stroking his head as he slipped into sleep. Each night for weeks, she had taught him the strange words – the only Hebrew he would ever learn – and he’d fallen asleep to the scent of her hair on his pillow.

  ‘Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehechezarta bi nish-mahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha.’

  Now, his stomach lurched at the impossible coincidence of the words rising in the space of the infirmary. He managed to turn. The mumbled prayer belonged to the old man in the bed next to his, the only other wretch ill enough to be abandoned to that airless hut.

  For four days they had woken side by side on their metal camp beds in the overcrowded barracks without exchanging a word, for Otto had refused conversation, and it was assumed he spoke little English. Relative silence was the only permissible form of privacy. Today, once again, they were side by side, this time in the room that passed for an infirmary, and his neighbour’s ears, Otto realized, were far better than his lungs. The old man – a Jew, evidently – must have overheard his murmured recitation each morning and recognized it. ‘Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehechezarta bi nish-mahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha.’

  ‘I give thanks to God for restoring my soul to my body.’

  This morning, the old man was saying the words for him.

  He would have laughed mirthlessly were it not for the pain in his lungs. Didn’t his neighbour know? In places like this, small acts of kindness were cruel as razor wire. Nor did he need his pity. Yesterday had not, in fact, been a day of despair. The light had been extraordin-ary; the horizon opalescent where it met the sea; the open air a balm. After months in the barracks, he could hardly believe he now found himself standing on a beach on the very edge of England.

  He sucked at the stale air. His wound still burned. But at least all was finally still, apart from the buzzing and ringing in his right ear – the phantom whizz of the bullet. Stillness, of course, is not the same thing as peace. The quiet was strained, brittle, like that quarter of an hour each morning at Sachsenhausen, before the pretty nurse with
the doe eyes arrived with the injection. Who, who, they’d wonder, would it be this time?

  That sickbay had always been stuffed full with the infected, the tormented and the broken, while this room was strangely empty except for their two bodies, each pitiful beneath the cheap regulation blanket. From time to time, the old man’s bronchial gasping turned to a retching that echoed in the rafters above them, but otherwise: silence.

  At the door, a dull-eyed guard, a new face – new to Otto in any case – rubbed and scraped at the mud that caked his boots; perhaps one of the men who had been digging the latrine-and-shower block yesterday when the pipes burst. Otto watched him, fascinated by the comparative ordinariness of this man’s morning; by his frowning attention to the insult of the mud. Yet now more than ever, Otto wished he could turn off his artist’s habit of seeing in detail; of dividing every figure, every body, into its component geometry. The guard was all blunt lozenges, with a face that looked as if it had been flattened in the birth canal. His pale blue eyes protruded, oversized and glaucous. His hands were square mitts. Only his forehead was recognizably human: unexpectedly high, vulnerable, and smooth as a child’s.

  The man looked up and Otto closed his eyes. At Sachsenhausen, the mere affront of eye contact could mean that the nurse would arrive with her doe eyes and the injection. She’d stroke the soft underside of an arm for the vein – a woman’s touch, oh God, the tenderness – before the eyes of her patient rolled back and his body went limp.

  The guard raised his left boot and rested it on his right thigh. The hobbed soles winked in the dull light of the hut.

  Otto would never forget the orchestrated clatter of the hobnailed boots on the cobbled streets of Berlin. He’d never forget the torment of the forty kilometres he later marched and ran each day on the boot-testing track at Sachsenhausen. The memories still terrorized him each night in his dreams: the twenty-kilo pack; the sunstroke; the frostbite; the studded, broken ground; the boots always too large or too small; the crippled, bleeding feet in the communal baths; the men who dropped and were trampled, while others ran to the perimeter, to end their lives on the electric fence.