Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  Was this man one of the Nazi naval prisoners who had, it was rumoured, been promoted to guard duties in this place? It was hard to say. Everyone – whether enemy alien or prisoner of war – wore the grey boiler suits donated by the local munitions factory, for most of the interns had arrived with only the clothes on their backs – dinner jackets, rumpled shirts, pyjamas. Those who’d been picked up at home had been informed there was no need to pack a case; they would be home again in a day or two after their papers and tribunal records were checked. Otto had known better. Three years before, he’d been given the same assurances before he was placed in the van that drove him away from Berlin for the last time.

  He was thirty-five and yet a part of him wanted to sob like a child – though why now? He had suffered far worse than this, and here, once more, he was learning how not to feel. Already he was becoming less than human. Already he stank – of stale sweat, salt water and piss. And worse than this wretchedness, worse even than the sheet-soaking terrors of his dreams, was the knowledge he’d woken to that morning.

  He was not dead after all.

  They’d hauled him from the sea. Pumped his chest. Stopped the bleeding.

  His mother’s prayer had worked, it seemed. His soul – damned and degenerate – had been restored to his body despite him.

  10

  Tubby Dunn’s mother was Tillie, who had been, until that May, the Beaumonts’ housekeeper. The Dunns lived just streets away from the Crescent – streets and a world away, in a tall, pinched house on Magdalene Street in the great shadow of St Joseph’s Church. The Dunns, Philip knew, were Romans, and Romans, he’d been told, were Romans because they didn’t have a picture of the King in their church. Tubby’s real name was Norman, after his uncle who had died in the Great War, but at home he was known as Tubby because however much he ate, his shoulder blades stuck out like bent coat hangers, his eyes were big in the bone of their sockets, and because the Dunn brothers liked a joke.

  Learning didn’t come easily to Tubby. Alf, his brother, told Philip it was because when Tubby was a baby, he slept in the bottom of a chest of drawers and that, one day, their Auntie Vi’s husband shut the drawer without thinking, and Tubby nearly suffocated in his sleep before their mother realized.

  Alf was thirteen and Frank, the eldest of the Dunn boys, was fif-teen. Plus there was Peg, their little sister who was always crying. Tubby’s father, Mr Dunn, worked as a street-lamp fitter until the blackout came and the Corporation turned off all the lights. He was a hunched man with black eyebrows and deep grooves like tramlines in his forehead. For a time, he had work painting all the bulbs in train carriages blue; then his papers came, and Tubby heard his mother crying in the lav at the end of the garden.

  Washday for Tillie didn’t end on Mondays now that she took laundry in. The windows of the house were always misted up, the kitchen was tropical, and sometimes when Philip watched her bending over the heaps of ironing, the pure smell of the starch and the hiss of the iron made him feel like she was caught in a battle she would never win. The pile of laundry was always as high as before.

  He’d smile hopefully at her over his piece of bread and scrape, and she’d smile back, brushing steam and long strands of red hair from her cheeks, and in those moments, her face seemed to shine just for him, and he loved her as much as his own mother. She was different, of course; different because she was always the same, always just herself, and that meant he could be just himself too when he sat in her kitchen, and he didn’t worry about not being enough for his mother who only had him to love.

  On Saturday mornings, he never minded walking with Tubby from shop to shop to collect enough cardboard and rubbish for Tillie to burn in her copper all week. Afterwards, they doubled up on Philip’s bike for the weekly ride to Billet’s for sweets or they goose-stepped their way to Dowley’s to share a fourpenny piece of fish and a penn’orth of chips. But that Saturday, Tubby was distracted. ‘I’ll be going now, Phil. Frank said I ’ave to meet him and Alf.’

  Philip wished Tubby could give him even just one brother. ‘Can’t I come?’

  The Palace Pier was quiet for a sunny Saturday in June. The rides were empty, and the penny arcade didn’t jingle and ring. Old people snoozed on benches. Children hung their heads over the white railings, grinning as if they were about to set sail. Couples ambled to the end for the view, imagining it – the ships materializing on the horizon, the glamorous flash of cannon-fire – for don’t our fears also conceal our wishes?

  Philip looked longingly at the sea, but no one had said anything about swimming. Instead Frank marched them on to the damp shingle beneath the Pier. They stared up through the shadows to its rusty iron girders. Feet drummed overhead. Someone’s lemon ice dripped through the slats of the deck like wee. A pigeon lay rotting a few feet away. Alf said to Frank, ‘You first, then.’

  ‘You.’

  ‘You’re older.’

  ‘You’re milky.’

  ‘No,’ said Alf. ‘You got the bigger bellows.’

  ‘Bigger goolies, you mean.’

  Alf went for Frank’s groin. ‘That’s what the totsies say an’ all.’

  Frank wrestled him to the ground. ‘You callin’ Lorraine a totsie?’

  Tubby looked on, mesmerized. Philip wished he hadn’t come. Then Frank released Alf from the headlock, opened his mouth, and let out a powerful hum. Alf and Tubby started to vibrate too, in key, and before Philip could ask, the Dunn brothers exploded into song. Alf did the melody, Frank the low notes, and Tubby the harmonies, with Frank waving a hand at Philip, meaning, Sing, why don’t you?

  It was gloomy as a crypt under the Pier, no matter how jaunty the tune. Philip didn’t know the song. He knew only the national anthems from the BBC at night and the hymns from church. He smiled at the brothers, blushing at his failure. He wished he was a Dunn brother with a barbershop voice.

  It was a tuppence piece that first hit him in the head. Shillings followed, some bright, some grimy green. Revelation rained down through the planks. The Dunn brothers had wooed the audience overhead.

  Philip felt that, in the hunt for their wages, he could redeem himself. He was the fastest and had the best eyes in the murk, and all four boys were still clambering on their hands and knees when they heard the sound of the single engine.

  Frank popped his head into the sunshine. ‘’Ere, Alf,’ he said, his voice going funny. ‘Lamp this.’

  Alf got to his feet. Tubby followed Alf. Philip followed Tubby.

  A seaplane was skittering down in the shallows of Brighton beach. Somewhere, on the deck overhead, a woman screamed.

  ‘Christ,’ breathed Alf. ‘This is it.’

  ‘Fuck,’ muttered Frank.

  The boys gawped from the shadows.

  ‘An’ here come the bogies.’

  Police from the King’s Road pounded towards the surf. Over the boys’ heads, on the deck of the Pier, feet thundered for the exit. Ten yards from shore, the hatch of the seaplane shuddered open. Frank took a step back. ‘You can get over a hundred geezers in those things.’

  Philip wished he had remembered his gas mask. Tubby cowered behind Frank. Philip cowered behind Tubby. At the hatch, a single man appeared.

  ‘Is it Hitler?’ Philip’s stomach jumped and flopped.

  ‘I need the bog,’ whispered Tubby.

  ‘You two,’ ordered Frank, ‘shut your clappers.’

  The invader was dressed in a sober suit. His dark hair lay, freshly combed and flattened, across the high white dome of his head. For a moment, he seemed to contemplate his audience on the beach, as if they were the spectacle and not he. Then he removed his shoes and socks, rolled his trousers up, and slid into the choppy sea.

  People from a tea dance at the Old Ship came out and clung to the railings on the prom, the women pressing their hands against their legs to stop their dresses from blowing high. The German negotiated the waves, carrying his shoes at chest height. On the beach, four bobbies clutched their batons. The seaplane lift
ed off, its floats skimming the waves.

  The onlookers – stray sunbathers, children, old couples and arcade attendants in their jackets and epaulettes – stood transfixed at the green railings of the King’s Road, watching the lone enemy struggle against the surf to the shallows and hop painfully over the stones. When he arrived on the beach, his jacket and trousers were streaming. He had to bend double to breathe. Nobody moved. Then he straightened, raised one long arm and reached, tentatively, for something in his breast pocket.

  ‘He’s got a pistol,’ said Alf.

  ‘A grenade more like,’ said Frank.

  A bobby shouted, fierce as a Legionnaire.

  ‘Get down, you three!’ said Frank. ‘Now!’

  The bobbies charged.

  Wee streamed down Tubby’s leg.

  Something small and white fluttered in the invader’s hand.

  11

  On the terrace the sun was already strong. Seed pods exploded in the heat. Dragonflies hovered. Geoffrey glanced at the grainy picture in the Sunday Times in which a middle-aged man hovered in the surf, his hand a blur of white. ‘Poor devil.’

  Evelyn looked up briefly, quizzically, then returned to the Ladies’ Page. He read on. The bobbies on the beach had taken Eelco van Kleffens for a German spy, and had assumed his arrival in Brighton was a bungled affair. They had been ready to arrest him on charges of illegal entry when they found themselves obliged instead to find, between them, the Dutch Foreign Minister’s train fare to London.

  Philip ate his egg. He did not tell his father he had seen the man and the handkerchief with his own eyes. He knew better than to admit to ‘roaming’ Brighton with Tubby, Alf and Frank.

  Gulls wheeled over the Park. Geoffrey reached for a piece of toast and a grilled kipper. The impossible had happened. There was even a photo on the front page. Paris had fallen in just four days, Paris, yet here they were, eating Sunday breakfast on the terrace under yet another untroubled blue sky. He fished a midge from his tea, Evelyn buttered a piece of toast, Philip swung his legs idly from his chair, and next door, Mrs Dalrymple cooed to her tortoise.

  He tried not to think about the Camp, about the weekly inspection tomorrow. He’d had a call. A Category A alien had tried to take his own life. He’d have to interview the man. The Home Dept. would require a report. He’d have to be sure the man wasn’t trouble.

  He lowered his paper and reached for the teapot. From underneath the brim of her hat Evelyn raised her face, but only briefly. Would they ever meet each other’s eyes unselfconsciously again?

  It had been difficult again that morning – earlier. If he had once imagined that she somehow brought him into being each new day, she now had the power, it seemed, to turn him to stone. Neither of them had the words. Below him in their bed, she’d maintained an attitude of willingness, but there was something new etched in her features: a pinched virtue, a shadow of disdain. ‘Shhh,’ he’d accidentally whispered aloud, ‘shhh’ – as if to ward off her unhappy thoughts. But it was no good. They had gathered around the bed like a silent jury.

  Across the table, she nodded, without expression, at the front-page story. ‘They’re coming, then.’

  He refilled her cup but did not look up. ‘It would seem so.’

  France had fallen and yet, madly, the Ladies’ Page was still dispensing French fashion advice. This week, it was ‘L’Air Militaire’ – as if the French had epaulettes and brass buttons on their minds now. She thought about poor, beautiful Paris and the easy days of their honeymoon there, and, for no reason, she remembered how, in 1928, respectable French women, like English women, had worn gloves by day but by evening had abandoned them provocatively. As a bride of twenty, she had thrilled to the sight of bare, elegant arms and glowing skin in the nightclubs and restaurants.

  At the bottom of the page, a Ministry of Information notice warned the Sunday Times’s female readership: ‘Do you know that if you fail to carry your Identity Card you may be fined anything up to £50 and sent to prison?’ Suspicion paraded as national security. She almost said to Geoffrey, Prison. It’s ludicrous. But she stopped herself. The morning’s freedom from conversation was a small, fleeting luxury, for each of them, she imagined. In any case, Geoffrey would no doubt see the sense of such precautions; these days, he saw the sense of every precaution, and she could hardly bear much more good sense. His own sensible precautions, those two pills, waited in the earth just a few feet away, like two gleaming eyes fixed on a future she didn’t want to know.

  That morning, in the dim light of their room, he had moved again across the sheets towards her. She’d watched his eyes train themselves on a spot somewhere above the headboard. On and on. She’d glanced at the nightstand, at the clock, at the heads of lilac drooping in the stagnant water. ‘Shhh,’ he’d whispered, ‘shhh.’ His forearms had trembled, and ‘Shhh’ he insisted – sharp, half-audible reproaches, though she hadn’t made a sound. Then, ‘Sorry,’ he breathed, smiling weakly as if only just remembering her below him. Sweat lay clammy on his forehead. ‘Talking to myself. Mad. Sorry.’ He kissed the top of her head and pulled away, his neck blushing as he slipped off the redundant rubber. They seemed neither able to right themselves nor to speak of it.

  Now she surveyed her terrace garden. Yellow oxalis, or ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as she’d known it as a child, was spreading everywhere, strangling the perennials. Without Tillie to help in the house, she no longer had the time to look after the garden, and in the early unsea-sonable heat the weeds were running riot. She reached down and yanked, then bent to take up the spade.

  Geoffrey was halfway out of his chair. ‘Evvie …?’

  The sight of her with the spade had spooked him. She straightened. She wanted to say, What were you thinking, planting death in our garden? But the words were like a code she was required to forget.

  She stuck the spade back in the earth, to mark the dread spot by the lilac bush. She collected their plates and ushered Philip upstairs to change.

  The day propelled them in and out of St Peter’s and through a luncheon for the Local Defence Volunteers. Then it was cricket in the Park for Geoffrey and Philip while she checked on neighbours’ houses; numbers 4, 5 and 8 stood empty, their owners having fled overseas. Cricket was followed by tea and stale crumpets at her mother’s and a joke from Philip. ‘What’s the full name of the crum-pet factory on Bennet Road?’

  His grandmother’s lips twitched sceptically but she played along. ‘The Sussex Crumpet Factory,’ she replied.

  ‘No,’ laughed Philip, ‘the crumpet crumpet factory! Do you know why?’ She said she truly didn’t. ‘Because so many girls work there!’ He rocked in his chair, revelling in the pun. The fact that the crumpet-like qualities of the opposite sex were lost on him at the age of eight and a half seemed immaterial. Mrs Lawrence glared at Evelyn and, later, suggested that it was time for Philip to ‘outgrow’ the Brothers Dunn.

  ‘Tillie’s boys, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, though, sadly, we don’t see much of Tillie now.’

  ‘How do you manage, darling?’

  ‘We miss her.’

  ‘I don’t blame you. Whatever must your guests think when you open the door to them?’

  Sunday dinner was cold ham and new potatoes followed by the evening buzz of the wireless. Evelyn’s book lay in her lap. Geoffrey’s head leaned wearily against the chair back. Philip drew aeroplanes at her feet. She would have said, Darling, tomorrow after school, why don’t you bring Orson to our house for a change? but Lord Haw-Haw was suddenly intoning.

  She looked up. Geoffrey was already blowing garlands of smoke at the ceiling, his gaze trained on the old mark, and an inertia overcame her. She did not leave the room for air or a stroll in the Park as she had intended. She did not send Philip off to his bath and bed. She merely sat with her book unopened on her lap: The Years by Mrs Woolf; Mrs Woolf who had a Jewish husband; a Jewish husband in the Sussex countryside, just beyond Brighton. Were they at this moment listening helplessly t
oo?

  Her mother was fond of saying that, if she were a Jew, she would have left for America ages ago. What her mother was actually saying was that all Jews, including those born in England, should do the decent thing and find a country that didn’t mind foreigners. Evelyn’s father, if still alive, wouldn’t have disguised his meaning. Hypocrisy was one of the few faults of which no one could accuse him.

  In the end, mercifully, the power of speech was denied him, and his illness drained him of the energy his numerous hatreds needed to sustain themselves. Eight years after his death, her mother madly claimed he’d caught the cancer, not from the toxins of fifty years of chewing tobacco, as the doctors had said, but rather from the germs bred in old wallpaper; in the ancient silk damask that covered the reception rooms at Brunswick Square. The wallpaper theory had been passed knowingly among her mother’s affluently uneducated lady friends, including Lady Sykes, who would condescend to be treated only on Harley Street. But what was the tumour in his mouth, Evelyn told herself, but the lump sum of so many vile words spoken?

  Years before, by the boat to Dieppe, as her parents saw her off for her stay in France, her father had not, even then, been able to wish her well. She’d been seventeen and looking forward to a new country and the school at Auteuil. ‘I shall have you checked,’ he’d said, ‘by my own physician when you return. Don’t think I won’t.’

  Her mother had pretended not to hear.

  It had been her misfortune, she’d concluded when still quite young, to be the only child of people for whom contempt was the natural alternative to worry or fear. In Evelyn’s most private self, Geoffrey’s balance and reason were the evidence she needed that she was altogether different from her parents; that their toxic beliefs had not clung to her like the fabled breath of the old wallpaper.