Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  Mr Hatchett’s skin was pulled tight over the bone of his skull, as if to advertise the fact that there was no excess, no waste, in his business. ‘No mutton breast today, Mrs Beaumont,’ he pronounced flatly, with a nod to the cabinet. ‘Or tomorrow. Or any day in the foreseeable.’ His eyes were slate grey, almost lidless. They followed her every step as she walked up and down, assessing the trays of meat, at a loss to determine which piece of flesh she could bear to handle. A rabbit dangled from a steel hook behind his shoulder, staring at her glassily, and the pressure of their collective gaze made her point at last and without confidence to the shiny slab of calf ’s liver.

  Mr Hatchett did not reach for the tray but stood, instead, pulling on the scrawn of an earlobe, and a vision swam up in her mind – an image of him pulling at his scrotum instead of his earlobe – and she had to wince it away. Had she ever cooked calf ’s liver before? he inquired. It required a degree of skill. If she overcooked it, she might as well serve Mr Beaumont the soles of his shoes this evening. Undercooking posed even greater risks. Could he recommend the beef brain? Two brains would serve a small family. She had only to remove the membrane from each, along with any blood clots she could see on the surface.

  He pressed his thin, narrow palms together, resting his chin on his fingers, as if he were Confucius in a red-and-white striped apron. Did Mr Hatchett, she wondered, expect her to prove her worth before she was permitted to buy the liver? She wasn’t worthy. She knew it as well as he. But they had to eat. She had to learn to manage. So she lifted her chin, looking past him, and repeated her request. ‘The liver, please. If you could parcel it up.’ Her words, her tone of voice, her sudden attitude of indifference came together in an apparently off-hand display of rank and class, for which she immediately loathed herself.

  She couldn’t face lunch. She returned home, got the liver into the Frigidaire, closed the door on it, and set out early for the WI. There, in the stifling hall, she struggled through the weekly self-defence class in which women of all ages learned how to box ears with their hands cupped to burst eardrums; to shatter ankles with the help of a good heel; and, in desperate times, to suffocate the enemy with a blow to the windpipe; or – here the group protested – to gouge out his eye successfully with the thumb. Yet even during her embarrassed attack upon a shop mannequin’s windpipe, she was distracted by the other cutting she had slipped into her pocket before leaving the house.

  Friday, 28th June: Mrs Virginia Woolf will lecture on The Modern English Novel for the Workers’ Education Association at five o’clock. The Municipal Technical College, Richmond Terrace, Brighton.

  She had snipped the notice out of the Evening Argus weeks before and knew it, absurdly, by heart. She couldn’t attend – she was neither a worker nor a technical student – but she’d kept the cutting, pressed like a souvenir ticket stub between the pages of her copy of The Years, and that day, the 28th of June, she’d dropped it in her pocket as if it were a paper fortune.

  Mornings these days were difficult. She’d wake, only to remember the sirens and the dreamlike sprint to Philip’s bed; the pulling of clothes over his warm, floppy limbs; the three of them negotiating the stairs down to the basement before stumbling through the scull-ery and out of its door into the uncanniness of the night.

  The coal cellar lay opposite, a dank cupboard beneath the street itself. The crumbling brick walls dripped, and animal droppings lay underfoot. The night before, she’d gathered Philip to her, stroking his hair and singing him back to sleep, while, at street level, the searchlights had slashed the sky, and Geoffrey had run up the external stairs to pound on Mrs Dalrymple’s front door.

  The old lady had appeared briefly at an upstairs window – ‘Would you kindly bugger off, whoever you are!’ – and disappeared again. Beneath a full moon, traitorously bright, Geoffrey went on trying to talk her down. A bomber – German – throbbed overhead, while far below, in a stagnant darkness, Evelyn sat perched on top of the sloping coal store with Philip pressed so close to her he must have heard in his dreams the pitching of her heart.

  At the hour of his birth, she and Philip had nearly slipped from life together, and perhaps she had never lost the fear or foreboding that she might fail to keep him, not merely safe, but alive. With the drone of the aeroplanes – lower than ever, it seemed – the two of them had huddled, alone and small, like one body again.

  The year before, on a shopping trip to London with her mother, she’d made some excuse and found her way to the East End, the Whitechapel Gallery and the vast canvas of Picasso’s Guernica. The small notice in The Times had said the suggested donation was a pair of boots for the Republican cause in Spain but she’d forgotten and had given them instead, with her apologies, a pair of brogues she’d bought for Geoffrey that day. Then she’d walked back and forth, trying to fathom the riotous, monumental geometry of severed limbs and wild faces. One detail above all had stayed with her: the woman at the left of the canvas. Her face was fierce, feral – wolf-like with grief for her child, limp in her arms.

  And again, the thought of the two pills flashed.

  The large clock on the wall of the WI hall told her she still – just – had time to return home, change her clothing, and go to the lecture. If the details of the lecture were in the paper, surely she had a right to attend, to listen, to escape her own thoughts?

  The realization made a small breach in the black dam within her, and the world trickled through. Outside the window, a green finch flashed past, a vivid blur of colour. Afternoon light poured in, golden, voluptuous. It warmed her cheek. It rippled in the loose hair of the young woman in the row in front of her as they practised their kicks.

  She assured herself she had only to run to Magdalene Street, ask Tillie if she’d have Philip for dinner, pass her the parcel of liver as a small offering, and thank her sincerely. She could leave a note for Philip on the kitchen table, which he’d find upon his return from Orson’s.

  She had no illusions. She would find herself out of her depth. She tried to keep up with the new literature, but she read these days largely to convince herself that she still had a private life. In reality, she managed only a few pages at a time. Her concentration was hit-and-miss, and she assumed that the curiosity she’d long prided herself on was, after all, only the slim pretension of youth; a jeu d’esprit; the ‘precociousness’ that her parents had, at best, tolerated.

  After all, when it came to it, when life had finally released her ‘fin-ished’ from the school in Auteuil, when there had been at last a glimpse of freedom, where had her curiosity been? She’d fallen in love with the first man who’d touched her.

  As for her cleverness, it was, she suspected, a sham. Good play-acting. A talent for references. A show of sophistication that Geoffrey had been obliged to applaud over the years in order that she might feel different, better, more discerning, than him; better, too, than the women at the WI with their uncomplicated love for the novels of John Galsworthy. Her problem hadn’t been, as she’d always told herself, the denial of the university education she’d once craved; the enforced spell at Auteuil instead of entrance into Newnham. Her problem was a quiet sense of superiority that had never been earned or tested; a superiority that had masked her failure to live in all but the most conventional of ways while quietly disdaining convention.

  Only at Auteuil had she risked anything. That year, at the age of seventeen, she discovered the knack of truancy and had often travelled the four miles into Paris on the decorous Ligne d’Auteuil.

  Initially, her mission had simply been to find a bookshop or library that stocked English novels, for she was homesick and longed for good company, real or fictional. Lost more often than not, she discovered instead backstreet galleries and an art that was nothing like the masterpieces the girls at the school studied in their History of Art. At first, she’d thought modern art ugly and base. On its canvases, reality elongated, multiplied and bent. Where was its purity?

  But little by little, she learned how
to see all over again. The pure needed the impure. Truth was bigger than the laws of perspective. It wasn’t fixed. It couldn’t be had off the peg. Truth had to be imagined.

  At La Galerie B. Weill on rue Victor Massé, the owner, Fräulein Berthe Weill, told Evelyn that, some twenty years before, she had used her dowry to pay for the gallery even though her family had promptly disowned her for it. Her hair was combed back very tightly on her scalp and her spectacles were severe on the bridge of her nose, yet her eyes were bright and her gaze direct. Whatever she saw, she saw. Her gallery, she said, waving a tiny hand, had been the unrivalled ‘Place aux Jeunes’ when her artists were still jeune and unknown: Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Modigliani, Vlaminck, Valadon …

  Evelyn nodded. She did not admit, in her schoolgirl French, that she knew none of those names; that her studies in the History of Art would end that term on nineteenth-century society portraiture.

  It was on rue d’Astorg that she first saw work by Picasso and was charmed by another gallery owner, another German art dealer in Paris. Herr Kahnweiler flattered her with cups of Earl Grey tea, spontaneous lectures on the paintings that hung on his walls, and invitations to gallery soirées she could never attend. At his encouragement, she even dared present herself on rue de Grenelle at the new Bureau of Surrealist Inquiries where she was interviewed about her dreams in the night and her chance encounters of that day. She mentioned a handsome young ticket collector on the Ligne d’Auteuil who’d asked her to speak to him in English although he couldn’t understand a word. He had just wanted to hear it. He’d listened very carefully to words that meant nothing to him. Then, ‘You are someone different in English,’ he’d said.

  ‘No, I am someone different in French!’

  But he’d smiled and shaken his head.

  Her adventures in Paris lasted for less than a year. In the end, the Headmistress threatened to have her sent back to England ‘unfin-ished’ and in shame. Did she want to forego the Season? Did she want to spend her life as the daughter of the house, looking after her parents as they grew old?

  She gave up the pleasures of the Ligne d’Auteuil. She never saw Fräulein Weill or Herr Kahnweiler again. She fell in with convention and made her peace with the extravagant absurdities of etiquette. Until her row with Geoffrey on the Pavilion balcony, she had never so much as demurred publicly with anyone’s views, let alone her husband’s, all of which meant – she glanced at the clock on the wall again – that she was infinitely less entitled to attend a WEA lecture than the bank clerk or bricklayer who risked the contempt of his family or workmates or friends to do so. What risk, she asked herself, what actual risk, had she ever taken?

  In The Years, North seemed to think her thoughts before she could. ‘We’re all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what? Of criticism; of laughter; of people who think differently …’ It was as if she were receiving his words direct from another place and time. ‘ “That’s what separates us; fear …” ’

  Even in the day’s heat, the wide, polished corridors of the Technical College seemed as cool, as forbidding, as a glacial crevasse. Her footsteps rang out as she walked, shoulders back, head high, as if the building itself observed her. In fact, she had no idea where she was going. She’d taken a wrong turn and had lost count of how many flights of stairs she’d climbed. Somewhere a pipe groaned. A horned creature in a plaster coat of arms bared its teeth. She peered through a window slot, anticipating the lean backs of young men bent over machines, but found only shadowy rows of draughtsmen’s desks. She must have misheard the porter at Reception. Up ahead, a single door was open – light seeped over the threshold – but when she reached it, she discovered only a collection of drills and vices, their cables trailing across the floor. The clock on the wall read six minutes past five.

  She ran to the end of the corridor, pushed on a door and raced down the staircase like an errant schoolgirl. Her hair started to unroll, arcs of damp spread beneath her arms, and as she descended, she became aware of someone else ascending the flight of steps.

  The top of a head, a sunburned scalp through thinning grey hair, came into view in the gaps between the steps. It seemed impossible: Mr Hatchett. Like her, he was in a hurry.

  At the entrance to the fourth floor, they each stopped short. ‘I believe it’s this way,’ he said, his face determinedly neutral.

  They walked the long corridor in a silence that was broken only by the staccato of their footsteps. She wished she’d worn a hat; she longed now for its brim, for its cover. After several long minutes, he stopped abruptly at a set of double doors, squinted through the slot, and held the door open.

  The lecture theatre must have seated at least a hundred. Rows of brilliantined heads gleamed in descending tiers, amphitheatre style, to the front where, unbelievably, the author herself sat in a straight-backed chair in front of a vast chart of the Periodic Table. Together, she and Mrs Woolf were two of no more than four or five women in the room.

  Evelyn stared from the entry door high above. Mrs Woolf ’s face was just visible beneath a wide-brimmed blue felt hat, a hat to which someone had attached a wide white chin-loop of dressmaker’s elastic. She wore a red-and-blue plaid blouse with a large bow at the neck, a silver corduroy fitted jacket, and a long navy skirt with white stockings and broad, Roman-style beach sandals. Her feet were crossed at the ankles, there was a sheaf of foolscap on her lap, and she inclined her head slightly as she listened, smiling quizzically at the man who introduced her from the lectern.

  The porter Evelyn had first met at Reception explained to her in a loud whisper that if she and her companion wished to be seated together, he was afraid he couldn’t oblige. There were no two seats together. Only three or four single seats remained. What would they like to do?

  She and Mr Hatchett nearly leaped apart at the question. She glanced at him for the first time, as if to agree which of them was obliged to clarify? He, the male, or she, the person of higher social rank? And in that singular moment, they each felt, briefly, naked.

  Mr Hatchett cracked his fingers. Evelyn shook her head in a single, embarrassed syllable as if to say, No, I am unaccompanied. She imagined the porter asking to see proof of her WEA membership, or informing her loudly that he would need to check her Identity Card, which she of course had not bothered to bring. She hadn’t even remembered to bring her gas mask, unlike Mr Hatchett, whose canister was slung dutifully over his shoulder. But the porter merely nodded and indicated with a finger a seat in the first row on the central aisle. She dashed down the side steps, face burning, and dropped into the heavy wooden chair.

  She couldn’t have explained why she then felt obliged to turn to locate Mr Hatchett several rows back. He too had taken his seat and now sat, folding his butcher’s apron on his lap. He must have felt her gaze upon him, his nerves no doubt sharpened by the tension of their meeting, for he looked up at that moment and his grey, lidless eyes met hers.

  She forced the corners of her mouth into a weak smile, a guilty smile – why, after all, had she turned to stare? – but she knew it didn’t convince. She saw him stiffen. His Adam’s apple rose in the wattle of his thin, shaved throat, and it was he who had the good grace to look away first.

  As Mrs Woolf stood to speak, she removed her hat, and, for a moment, appeared unsure whether to rest it in the lap of her host – who had taken the only chair – or on the only other available surface, the floor. Noting the gloom of her host’s face, she opted for the floor, but as she bent, she didn’t see the handkerchief, a large gentleman’s handkerchief, fall from her jacket pocket to the floor.

  In the hush of the room, Mrs Woolf looped her spectacles over her ears and began to arrange her papers, as if unaware of the audience that waited patiently, deferentially even. All the while, they used the opportunity to observe unobserved this woman who already seemed to them less a literary spectacle than a person they had collectively dreamed.

  Her silver hair matched, elegantly if accidentally, the silver cor
d of her jacket. The plaid bow at her neck was, at once, both spinsterish and lavish. Her eyes had the oversized, sunken but animated quality of the consumptive, while the fingers of her left hand, Evelyn noted from her vantage point in the front row, were, without exception, ink-stained. Even her lips were faintly marked with blue, as if she’d been pressing her fingers to her mouth, deep in thought as she scribbled on the train from Lewes to Brighton.

  Her voice, as it first emerged, was unexpectedly deep; perhaps any threat of female shrillness had been ‘elocuted’ out of her long ago. ‘My title today is “The Leaning Tower”. I must confess that it is, at present, but a miscellany of half-formed thoughts on the modern novel. Perhaps with your help I shall develop it into something more sensible.’ Evelyn unfastened her clutch and reached for a pen and paper. Mrs Woolf seemed as modest, as unassuming, as she was grand, and her words had their own rolling music.

  ‘Books,’ she began, ‘descend from books as families descend from families. They resemble their parents, as human children resemble their parents; yet they differ as children differ, and revolt as children revolt. Perhaps it will be easier to understand living writers as we take a quick look at some of their forebears.’ She looked up, almost solicitously, from her foolscap as if to assure herself that her audience was not averse to the proposal.

  ‘In 1815 England was at war, as England is now. And it is natural to ask, how did their war – the Napoleonic War – affect the writers of the day? The answer, if you’ll allow it, is a strange one. The Napoleonic wars did not affect the great majority of those writers at all. Their vision of human life was not disturbed or changed by war. Nor were they themselves. It is easy to see why that was so. Wars were then remote; wars were carried on by soldiers and sailors, not by private people. Compare that with our state today.