Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  Tom took Sylvia’s hand in his. ‘It’s true. My wife has informed me she’s having her hair waved for the invasion.’

  Sylvia adopted a sober air. ‘First impressions and all that.’

  Geoffrey nodded thoughtfully. ‘I knew you’d never let the side down, Sylvia.’

  ‘You see, Tom? Geoffrey appreciates the effort. And it’s either that or walk about with the new Unity Mitford look.’

  ‘Which is what exactly, darling?’

  ‘Why, the turban, naturellement.’

  Geoffrey, Tom and Evelyn stared blankly.

  ‘So she can hide the shot wound, of course! Silly girl. Mind you, it is frightfully bad luck to put a gun to your own head and to, more or less, miss … No wonder her beloved Hitler shipped her back to England forthwith. I don’t expect she’s looking much like the perfect Aryan woman now. That’s the drawback of brain damage, I’m told. The vacant stare. Most men only appreciate it in the bedroom. ’

  Tom fished for his handkerchief and made a show of gagging his wife with it. ‘My darling, have we told you we really mustn’t let you drink?’

  She waved him off. ‘Evvie, tell him. Tell him you don’t mind me. Not very much, anyway.’

  Evelyn reached for her hand. ‘Mind you? Tonight wouldn’t have been the same without you. Thank God someone still has a sense of humour these days. If I have to read even one more Government Information Leaflet, all that endlessly dreary advice, I might just have to gas myself and save the Germans the trouble!’

  ‘Precisely. And if only the Government, with all its advice, would bloody well advise the Jews in our part of town how to behave. Did I tell you how –’

  ‘Now, now, darling. This is a ball, not a Council meeting.’ Tom’s smile tensed. ‘Besides, it suddenly occurs to me that I’d like to dance with my wife.’

  ‘But, Tom, you know as well as I do that they’re a public nuisance. Lord knows Unity, mad thing that she is, went over the top by declaring herself – what was it? – “a Jew-hater”, but anyone with eyes to see knows they do push their way to the front of any queue, and they most certainly hoard food. You wait and see. I don’t approve of them being hounded out of their own countries – that’s not right of course and it’s unlucky to land where you’re not wanted – but they’ll be living the high life off the black market over here when the rest of us are eating our ration books.’

  ‘Evelyn’ – Tom had an instinct for damage limitation – ‘would you care to dance?’

  But Sylvia would not be deterred. ‘Evvie, you must find the same thing here in Brighton, surely?’

  Evelyn looked to Geoffrey for help, then back at Sylvia. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever met a Jew in Brighton.’

  ‘If only we could all say the same’ – a thought crossed Sylvia’s face – ‘although I suppose we could say it was a Wandering Jew – or at least an uninvited one – who brought you two darlings together. That’s right, isn’t it, Tom? Am I remembering correctly? We are in fact unexpectedly indebted to the Jewish race for the great good fortune that is Geoffrey-and-Evelyn.’

  Evvie smiled through her confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You have a Jew to thank, darling girl, for Geoffrey here. Well, indirectly you do. Tom said as much before I met you the first time. I have got the story straight, haven’t I, Snookums?’

  Tom took the glass out of her hand and shrugged his apology to Geoffrey.

  Geoffrey summoned a smile. ‘You’re absolutely right, Sylvia. I’d almost forgotten.’ He turned to Evelyn. ‘Leo Hamilton turned up that night with a Jewish chap from north London.’

  ‘The night we met?’

  ‘Yes.’ He patted his breast pocket for his cigarette case. ‘He was a bit of a troublemaker. A well-heeled troublemaker, but trouble all the same. That’s what Sylvia is referring to.

  ‘You mean, the man with the monocle …?’

  ‘I say,’ declared Tom, ‘you have a remarkable memory, Evelyn. I think he was wearing a monocle.’

  ‘Was he?’ Geoffrey offered Tom and Sylvia a cigarette, then lit his own and drew deeply on it. ‘Leo and I fell out on account of his friend’s politics. At first, the chap had seemed to be a man of few words. Not a bad sort. However, as the evening wore on, we discovered he held some rather repugnant views. Regrettably Jewish views. He reverted to type quite quickly, I’m afraid, so, finally, rather than stand there like a hypocrite, I challenged him. Leo wasn’t too amused. His friend certainly wasn’t. I had no choice but to have it out, so to speak.’

  ‘So to speak?’

  Tom plucked at his collar. ‘If you hadn’t, Geoff, I might have. Leo, I’m afraid, always did have a bit of the Bolshevik in him. As for his friend, Geoff could have run rings in that debate, that was clear, but people were beginning to look –’

  ‘They rowed?’

  ‘Tempers were running a little high. In the end, Evvie, it hardly amounted to more than a scuffle.’

  Tom was covering. She turned to Geoffrey. ‘You picked a fight?’

  ‘I’d had a bit too much whisky. That’s all. You know I’m no good with drink.’

  ‘I thought it best if Geoff stepped outside long enough to cool his head and for Leo to tend to his friend. The Jew chap sulked. I thought it rather telling that, having caused a rift between two old friends, he suddenly had remarkably little to say.’

  ‘By the end of the night, we’d mostly made things up – Leo and I, that is.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Tom.

  Evelyn’s hand tightened on the balustrade. ‘You said you didn’t remember. Why?’

  He flashed an apologetic smile at Tom and Sylvia. ‘What did I say I didn’t remember?’

  ‘The man with the monocle.’

  ‘I’m not sure I did.’

  ‘We even saw him the following summer – at the theatre. I asked you then.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘You always said you didn’t remember.’

  ‘He was a small man with dark hair. I’m sorry but I didn’t recall any monocle. He certainly wasn’t wearing the thing when –’ He cast his cigarette into the night.

  ‘When you hit him? No, I don’t expect he was.’

  ‘I believe,’ Tom said, ‘he’d slipped the monocle into his breast pocket prior to –’

  ‘Your punch.’ She stared at her husband.

  She was back there, at the Pavilion again, on that night, walking up the stone stairs towards the ballroom. Geoffrey was escorting her back. He had merely been polite, she’d concluded; obliged not to walk away from a young woman who found herself alone outside without an escort or chaperone. Suddenly her embarrassment was acute. She’d wanted only to find James and to be gone. Not far from the door, a group of young men clutched their capes and canes, ready to depart. She could see them still. Tom was there, the same dear old Tom with his bright wedge of a face, and his former full head of auburn hair. Fitz was the portly one with the curly beard. Leo was fair, handsome, with a shy, endearing squint. Clearly they were waiting for Geoffrey to return so they could take their leave. He’d gone outside for a cigarette – to cool his head, as Tom put it just now – but he’d been away nearly half an hour, distracted by her of course. When he appeared at last, she was close behind. His friends were arguing loudly, drunkenly no doubt, about the General Strike. She remembered that. Four of them greeted Geoffrey as he passed, and he returned a few words in passing. Tom noticed her – a new girl with his good friend – and nodded warmly. But Leo’s friend, the man with the monocle and the intelligent face, turned and glowered at Geoffrey, who appeared not to notice and carried on. It was only good manners, she told herself then. The man looked at her too as she passed but without seeing, for behind the black-rimmed coin of glass, behind that lens with its hairline crack, a blaze still lit his eye, like the heat of noon through a magnifying glass.

  ‘He had high cheekbones.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘And deep-set eyes.’

  ‘Helpful if you’re
the monocle-wearing sort.’

  ‘Why don’t you remember him? You “scuffled”, Tom says. You resented the fact you had a Jew in your party, so you rowed with him and then you hit him.’

  He sighed. ‘I do remember him, as I’ve just said, but not clearly.’

  ‘But Tom says we met because of him.’

  ‘We met because you came to ask me the time.’

  ‘You were in a mood. You were smoking in that way of yours. That’s why you were on your own. I can see that now. You’d lost your temper.’ And suddenly it came to her. ‘The seam of your jacket was split! Under the arm.’

  ‘I didn’t like the man’s views. I’d had too much to drink. But this is hardly the place. Tom, Sylvia, forgive us.’

  She felt her face flush. ‘Since when have you needed to approve everyone’s views, Geoffrey? Since when has a difference of opinion meant you fight with a man at a ball?’

  He struggled not to raise his voice. ‘What is it, Evelyn, that you object to, precisely? The unpleasant fact that I found myself in a row the hour before I met you, or that I take issue with Jewish interference in this country’s affairs?’

  ‘Listen to yourself!’

  ‘Listen to what, exactly?’

  ‘I may not understand the full political argument, Geoffrey, but I recognize something ugly when I hear it.’

  ‘Are you quite finished?’

  Her hand clenched the stem of her glass, and she lowered her voice to a fierce, intimate whisper. ‘To think our life together began’ – the stars staggered overhead – ‘to think it only began because you couldn’t stop yourself from baiting a man.’

  She saw Tom and Sylvia slide through the French doors into the ballroom. Her husband’s face was a mask of grim forbearance.

  She looked into the night and back again.

  SUMMER

  14

  A hundred yards from the Palace Pier, Geoffrey let himself loiter under the canopy of a derelict oyster stand. The day was overcast, the sea the colour of gunmetal, and the beach abandoned. CLOSED FOR THE WAR BY ORDER OF THE CORPORATION. The signs had been hammered to the railings down the length of the prom.

  He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. On the Pier, the rides stood quiet. Only a few defiant anglers tried their luck from the end of the deck. In the tide, mines bobbed at the surface, horned and deadly. Every fishing boat had vanished, as if by some ill-fated sleight of hand.

  He tried to focus on the survey for the Committee, on the report he would need to compose to confirm that all was in place for Churchill’s visit. He’d been avoiding the task all week.

  He cupped the flame of his lighter against the breeze and drew hard on his cigarette. Every beach chalet, including his own, had been strategically manoeuvred and filled with stones. Up and down the shingle, anti-landing-craft spikes lay in heaps, ready to be dug in. Vast coils of razor wire blotted the views east and west, while concrete tank-traps stood five feet high, colonizing the shore. Across the King’s Road, the elegant rooftops of the Grand Hotel and the Metropole had been upstaged by the guns on the new naval station.

  Without the boats, without the herring dees and the winkle-pickers, the shingle was a bleak vista darkened by the apparatus of war and the rank of oil drums that stretched endlessly towards Hove. Each drum squatted beneath the prom, ready to be rolled down the beach, past the ghosts of erstwhile paddlers, children and old people, into the sea. Each bore ten thousand gallons of petrol, and, for a moment, looking out, he saw it, the impossible: a sea on fire.

  Even as he walked the beach, white sheets and pristine table linen were hanging from every window on the Channel Islands. That was the morning’s news.

  Any day. It could be any day.

  That afternoon, there was nothing for it. What choice did he have? He walked back through town in the direction of the Crescent, but at The Level, he crossed the road instead and found the stall almost too easily among the jostle of the Open Market.

  The woman looked unexpectedly sensible in a white cambric shirt and a pair of man’s corduroy plus fours. Tillie had often told him over breakfast what a marvel she was; how she had cured her son Frank when, at eighteen months, his throat had nearly closed up with strep. Apparently, she had delivered onion poultices three times a day and saved the boy when Dr Baldwin from the London Road, for all he charged, did nothing except wait in readiness to cut a hole in his infant throat. Tillie had sworn by the woman ever since.

  From the back of the queue, Geoffrey watched her bend over her scales, add another paper parcel to the balance, and remove a brass weight. She appeared matter-of-fact, unshockable, though she possessed the sort of fair, ruddy complexion that would betray any blush. Her eyes were a pale, sharp blue with exceptionally white whites; her face was unlined; her hands were chapped from a life lived outside. She had the sturdiness, the gravitas, of late-middle age, though whether she was thirty or fifty he couldn’t have said. What a sight he must have made, he thought, with his fedora and his attaché case in the queue of pregnant women and miscellaneous others with lice-ridden heads, scabied limbs, and teeth in need of pulling.

  The week before, when he had inquired at the surgery in Hove, Dr Moore had tersely mumbled something about two varieties of dysfunction before turning to the window and advising showers over baths. Then, on his Wednesday trip to London, with only minutes until his train home departed, he’d suddenly turned from Victoria and loped back up Buckingham Palace Road and through Green Park to Piccadilly. He turned left into Berkeley Street and on to Bru-ton, where he slowed his pace. He tried to gather himself but in no time – too soon – he found himself on New Bond Street. He felt sweat prickle beneath his collar. Henrietta Place, Wimpole, Wig-more and, finally – could he do it? – Harley. He hesitated outside a black Regency door with a fantail window, then pressed the bell.

  Dr James Lawrence insisted he was delighted by the surprise visit from his favourite cousin’s husband. Until that moment, he quipped, he never would have credited a banker with spontaneity, and it was jolly good to be surprised because he had, of course, desperately few things to be surprised by these days, unless you counted the enemy raiders overhead, though even they had become disappointingly predictable. To his mind, the smallest deviations in life’s flight path were to be celebrated these days. Wasn’t that the middling nature of middle age?

  ‘Evelyn fine?’ he asked briskly. ‘Philip still at the Grammar?’ Geoffrey nodded and reciprocated. They shared a joke about Mrs Lawrence, Geoffrey’s formidable mother-in-law and James’s aunt. They murmured a glum lament for the British Expeditionary Force, then rallied and exchanged hopes for the cricket season. They noted the excellence of the weather, or, as James expressed it, ‘the rising sap and all that’, at which point Geoffrey sallied forth into what already felt like a battle he was losing against himself.

  He lowered his voice, conspiratorially, as they walked through to James’s office, and made himself say it: ‘Out of curiosity, tell me, how do you medical sorts advise a chap when the sap isn’t rising?’ He grinned too hard. It was a clumsy transition – but at least, at last, he’d found the words. Or if not the words, words.

  His wife’s cousin studied him through a fixed but good-humoured smile. The telephone on his desk rang but he didn’t answer it. Instead, he clasped his chin and ran his hand ruminatively over his throat. ‘When it “isn’t rising”, you say?’ Geoffrey nodded curtly.

  Without word or warning, Dr James Lawrence dropped into his chair, clapped his palms together and laughed with gusto. ‘Well, naturally, I advise glandular treatment!’ He shook his head and laughed again, then sprang to his feet, still grinning, reached for his pipe and pipe-cleaner, closed the blackout, slid a heavy gold pen into his breast pocket, and pushed in his chair. ‘I say, what chap in his right mind would turn down a bit of monkey testicle? I myself look forward to the day when I can afford a bit of chimpanzee scrotum or, better still, a baboon bollock or two. Olivia – dear, patient woman that
she is – will be relieved to no longer have to check in with me to confirm, very tenderly, whether I’ve ‘quite finished’. Then there’s the rather less patient prostitute in Whitechapel who always insists on asking a colleague of mine’ – he summoned his best cockney voice – ‘“Ave you slimed yet, sir?” ’ He sighed comically. ‘Now, Geoff, what do you say? A malt? My club’s only around the corner.’

  The herbalist’s stall was less of an ordeal, but his resolve flagged as he stood in the queue. He felt obliged to let every person who arrived after him go before him, insisting with an easy and benign smile that their needs were greater than his. In his own neighbour-hood, just over the road from Park Crescent, he couldn’t risk being overheard.

  Years before, an old gentleman in the saloon of a seafront pub had confessed he swore by a compound of pulverized roots. Geoffrey had laughed genially at the time. He’d even listened with polite interest to the old man’s renewed interest in peep shows, and had been careful to disguise the expression on his face, which said, Poor bastard. But the old gent had declared himself a new man.

  As he waited and watched, Geoffrey rehearsed his words. It was a case for pragmatism. If only he could remember the name of the root. It hardly mattered that she was a woman. In any case, and most conveniently, she didn’t look much like a woman. But the moment he opened his mouth to speak, the words abandoned him.

  ‘No, no,’ he’d assured her, ‘wrong stall, I now realize. Apologies.’ She raised her eyebrows. He felt obliged – foolishly obliged – to explain. His eyes scanned the bottles of herbs on the shelf behind her, and he slipped into the tone of forced jollity one used with servants. ‘My mistake! The end of a long day, I’m afraid.’ In fact, he announced too loudly, he’d only been looking for – he strained to think – ‘fertilizer’.

  His cheeks blazed at the accident of a word as the sirens sounded.

  15

  She walked up the London Road with her ration book and a new recipe folded in her pocket, like an insurance policy against failure. As she crossed Mr Hatchett’s threshold, the stink of raw meat caught her by the throat. The recipe, she explained, was for ‘Ragout of Mutton’. In the cold-cabinet lay brains, trotters, tripe, faggots, meat pies, ox-tails and a single calf ’s liver. She needed a pound of breast of mutton.