Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  ‘My friend.’

  ‘You mean, your housekeeper’s son? Tell him to go home. He’s bloody well going to get us caught in here.’

  Philip had never heard Orson swear before. He waved urgent arms at Tubby while Orson struggled with the bolts. ‘Tubby!’ he whispered at last down to the street. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You didn’t come to ours for your tea. My mum says she’s worried witless. She sent Frank off towards the Grammar to look for you, and I said I’d run to your house fast, in case you were on your tod on the front step. When you weren’t, I thought you might be here but I didn’t know which house so I had to whistle.’

  ‘Why am I having tea at yours?’

  ‘My mum said your mum said. She left you a note. We’re having bread and scrape, liver but no onions.’ Tubby hugged himself, as if he were standing in the rain.

  ‘What did you say his name is?’ Orson slammed the window shut.

  Philip hesitated. ‘Norman.’

  ‘That’s curious …’ Orson studied Tubby as if he were something flat on a glass slide.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘He looks like a Jew.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Bony. In need of a good wash.’ Orson pressed his face and specs to the pane. Then he fixed the bolts, closed the shutters, and returned to the crate.

  He was putting Hal’s things away.

  ‘Tubby – I mean, Norman – is a Roman.’

  Orson didn’t turn. ‘I didn’t say he was a Jew. I said he looked like a Jew.’

  ‘How do you know what Jews look like?’

  Orson forced the crate back into the wardrobe, pushed the door shut, and leaned against it. ‘Hal told me, of course.’

  17

  She’d done her evening duty by her absent neighbours. She’d checked their houses. It was an odd sensation, she thought, walking through other people’s private lives; disturbing their ghosts; bumping into corners one didn’t expect.

  She hooked the three sets of keys into place on the key board.

  ‘All clear?’ Geoffrey asked with a perfunctory smile.

  She nodded and dropped into her chair. He reached for his cigarette. The wireless buzzed to life. Philip pressed his cheek to the broadloom. Beside him lay his crumpled visions of Hawker Demon bombers and his pencil.

  He yawned. On Friday evenings, his father sometimes carried him upstairs to bed. He considered his mother’s legs, crossed at the ankles. One of her slip-ons had slipped off. In the dim light she read her Mrs Woolf. When she looked up over her page, he closed his eyes quickly.

  He heard his father inquire about his mother’s day. His mother inquired about his father’s. His mother said she’d learned how to take out a man’s eye. His father sat down, leaned his head back, and exhaled smoke, dragon-like, from his nostrils.

  On the other side of the shutters, a thrush sat speckle-breasted on a chimney pot, rehearsing a single phrase. Bats flitted and dived over the hood of a street lamp. There was the rot of the swill-bin and the whiff of a backed-up drain, and over it all lay the green luxury of June, every leaf etched and bright.

  A bicycle bell chimed twice and receded up the street. In the shadow of the Salvation Army’s ramparts, two boys bounced a tennis ball at the brick wall. To the west of the Crescent, on the slow-climbing crest that was Ditchling Road, summer lay rapt beneath a snowfall of hawthorn blossom, cow parsley, elderflower and daisies, while to the east, on the Lewes Road, a lone army truck rumbled past on a loose suspension.

  The moon rose gravely above the horizon.

  Tick tock tick tock tick tock. ‘This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the Nine O’Clock News.’ No one could reassure the nation as assuredly as Alvar Liddell, dressed in his BBC announcer’s dinner jacket. All was seemingly shuttered calm. Evelyn turned another page of The Years and found Eleanor musing again: ‘There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair exasperated.’ Evelyn could hear her. Her voice was like Mrs Woolf ’s, resolute but uninsistent; old and young at the same time. ‘There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.’

  Geoffrey rose to adjust the dial, Philip muttered in his sleep, and Eleanor was evaporating into black marks on the page when, as if from another dimension, Evelyn had a sudden, final glimpse; an impression of white hair and tanned cheeks.

  How strange it all was. Was she imagining Eleanor or was Eleanor, the ‘queer old bird’, imagining her?

  Of course she wasn’t. She was tired, that was all, and lonely. The Pargiters’ lives had become more solid than her own.

  Geoffrey glanced across to her, and together, falling into habit, feigning marriage, they smiled, weakly, fleetingly, at the sight of their sleepy son, while somewhere on the Crescent, a front door shut, a passing dog yapped, and – thwack – the ball bounced off the wall again.

  When Geoffrey had arrived home, he’d asked, not unkindly, why she hadn’t prepared the evening meal. ‘There’s only us,’ she’d said, as if that explained the departure from routine. ‘Philip is at Tillie’s.’

  He didn’t ask why, and to ensure he didn’t, she rose immediately from her chair to make him a sandwich.

  Now, beneath the glassy calm of the evening, the secrets of the day gathered. While domestic rituals unfolded up and down the Crescent behind windowpanes burnished gold in the setting sun, as Alvar Lid-dell read the news in crisp, clipped consonants that sedated a nation, it was as if every armchair, picture frame and side table in the Beaumont home drained of colour, slid into shadow, and became something other. A blast wave of the unsaid moved through the four walls, permeating every dovetail joint, every knot of wood, and every bubble and warp of the windowpanes.

  Philip had slid guiltily through the front door an hour before. He said yes, Tillie was well, and yes, the liver was good. He did not say that, just that afternoon, he had held a stocking filled with broken glass; that Hal’s belt was even better and he’d longed to pop the spikes himself, but then Tubby had turned up outside whistling, and Orson had put Hal’s things away, and now he’d probably never have the chance to pop the belt again.

  He did not confess that he had not returned home to find his mother’s note on the kitchen table; that he had not left Orson’s when he should have; that Tubby and Frank had been sent by their mother to find him, and the three of them had only just got in the door when the sirens went. Nor did he say that Tillie had slapped his leg and hugged him so hard that his lungs had hurt.

  Although she had assumed she would, Evelyn did not, in the end, tell Geoffrey that she had attended Mrs Woolf ’s lecture. She did not mention Mr Hatchett or describe Mrs Woolf with her handkerchief and her sandals and her lips that were ink-stained – stained as if she’d been feeding herself on words.

  After the lecture, as the sirens went, Evelyn retreated to the shelter beneath The Level. There, in the stink of creosote and urine, she’d checked her notepad and murmured the words to herself: ‘Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly …’

  The woman seated on the bench across from her, corpse-like in the blue light, had mistaken it for ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and had elbowed her husband to bow his head.

  She did not tell Geoffrey that, these days, she was full of fear, but that the contempt she had come to feel for him frightened her most of all.

  He reached for another cigarette and snapped the case shut. For his part, he had no intention of telling Evelyn, or anyone for that matter, that he had stopped at the Open Market on the way back from the Bank that afternoon. He could still see the herbalist’s face – the brief lifting of her lips, the pinched-off smile – as the word ‘fertilizer’ came out of his mouth.

  The wireless was hissing static. He surfaced only to realize that Evelyn was speaking to him. She had put down her book, the news was over, and she was saying,
‘So I’ve decided.’

  He turned dutifully in his chair.

  ‘The hospital.’

  ‘The hospital?’

  ‘I’ll volunteer.’

  ‘Ah.’ He was still at the herbalist’s stall, cringing.

  ‘I’ll make a few inquiries. About reading. I think it might be restorative for some. Why, just the other day on the BBC, they were saying –’

  ‘At the hospital?’

  ‘I’ve just said.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Clearly I think so,’ she said with a determined brightness, ‘or I wouldn’t have mentioned it.’ Let us discover how to read and to write, how to preserve and how to create. Words made worlds, new worlds.

  In the spume of his dreams, Philip sat on the seafront with Hitler, Mosley and Orson. From their deckchairs, they watched the waves and sucked on sticks of Brighton rock. They had taken off their shoes and socks, and Mosley was wriggling his toes. The sun was warm. Hitler frowned at the incoming tide and chewed his moustache. The stick of rock was delicious. When Philip looked at its middle, he saw the same lightning bolt in the circle of blue that he’d seen on Hal’s armband. ‘Look!’ he said, and Orson nodded. Hal, he said, was in the shooting gallery on the Pier, winning every prize. ‘Listen,’ he said.

  ‘They’ve started …’ said Geoffrey. ‘They had to clear the entire seafront, as a precaution.’

  Together they turned to the shuttered windows and listened to the glass rattle in its frames.

  ‘As I say, I’ll make a few inquiries.’

  ‘It’s just that you’re not particularly good with blood. Your last WI visit to the hospital left you quite upset.’

  ‘Will it go on all night?’

  ‘For much of it, I daresay.’

  ‘The Camp then.’

  He looked up. ‘The Camp?’

  ‘I’ll read to the prisoners. Surely you’re not letting them bleed too much?’ She folded her hands in her lap.

  ‘It would be awkward.’

  ‘Perhaps they will have requests – their own favourite poems or novels. On the BBC they said that to be read to was –’

  ‘It’s a kind thought.’ He waited for the next dull boom to fade.

  Philip smiled faintly in his sleep. Boom, boom, boom. Hal was winning every prize.

  ‘But I’m afraid it wouldn’t be permitted.’

  Anger burst within her; a small, hot shell. ‘Why ever not?’ She smiled quizzically. ‘Who would not permit it?’

  ‘The Camp is strictly “men only”, Evvie. The regulations don’t even allow me to employ female cooks or laundresses. Only the rare visitor is permitted, usually Army or Corporation personnel. Never female, charitable or otherwise. Regulation aside, it wouldn’t be safe. It’s simply not the place.’ He checked his wristwatch, then heaved himself to his feet and gathered Philip from the floor. ‘Good lad,’ he murmured, cradling their son’s sleeping head against his chest.

  She had to look away. Sometimes, it was still an effort: to hate him so she would not love him. He’d always been such a good father.

  Less than a mile away – another explosion.

  ‘I’ll see you upstairs,’ he said.

  She fanned herself with her book. ‘I’ll bathe first. Don’t wait up.’

  ‘Sure?’

  She lifted her chin and smiled again.

  At the sound of his footfall on the upstairs landing, she rose, clicked the lamp’s switch with her foot, closed the door soundlessly, and stood alone, stooping as if winded. Something gripped the hollow of her stomach – she’d forgotten to eat since that morning – and she felt, too, a pressure under her ribcage, the hot insistence of her clamouring heart.

  She walked to the far wall and lay her forehead against its cool plaster, its blank vertical, as if only its solid geometry could keep her standing. In the darkness, a moth flapped its desire in the hot lamp it madly mistook for the moon. She and it. She and it. She and it. On and on it crashed and struggled, as she pressed her cheek and mouth to the cool of the wall. How to cease to feel? That was the trick of living.

  Something replied.

  Boom, boom.

  When she straightened at last and managed to turn, the moth lay half dead on the side table beneath the lamp. A common ghost moth. A singed wing. She could smell it. And for one heady, careless moment, uncluttered by any moral imperative, she knew what it was to loathe the world; to feel a flagrant disgust for it and for everything in it, not least her own frailty and longing.

  The night exploded again. Boom, boom – boom. On the seafront, they were blowing up the piers.

  It was the end, she thought, the end of pleasure.

  18

  Two weeks later, as husband and wife passed each other on Elm Grove, on opposite sides of the broad, tree-lined street, neither felt any peripheral tug of awareness. She was going uphill, and he, down. He didn’t glimpse the curve of a familiar brimmed hat or the particular tilt of a chin; she didn’t recognize a certain loping stride. Neither turned suddenly to stare or to call. ‘Evvie! Wherever are you going?’ ‘Geoffrey! Goodness! What on earth …?’ Each walked on, in a tangle of private thought.

  Less than halfway up the rise, she’d felt her face start to burn in spite of her hat. Her underclothes stuck to her. Her feet blistered. On the steep climb, the July sun hammered the pavement, and pigeons sat still as decoys in the trees.

  The racecourse was no longer the destination it had been. ‘Closed for the war’ meant no buses and no trams, while most cabs now ran on black-market petrol. She wasn’t necessarily averse – wasn’t everyone simply trying to make a living? – but it would not have been seemly for the wife of a bank manager.

  As she neared the top, she was grateful for the sharp, cleansing whiff of sea air – it couldn’t be far now – and she navigated her way by the scattered cottages of Bevendean to the east and the streets of Whitehawk to the west. Where had the Gypsy camp gone?

  Such heat, such stifling heat even in late afternoon. When the town had receded far enough behind her and not a soul was in sight, she allowed herself at last to stop, unclip her stockings and peel them off. She slipped off her shoes, too, and set her blisters free. The grass was cool, blissful. The sky felt so close. A sparrowhawk swooped.

  Only when the tiers of the grandstand appeared, blazing white, did she wipe her face, retuck her blouse, and ease her feet painfully back into her shoes. She had a plan, a good one, and that drew her on. Or rather it did until the palisade came into view.

  The wall of razor wire was scrawled like an obscenity against the slope of Race Hill. At the mean opening, she stared up at a guard who couldn’t have been more than sixteen; a spotty boy playing at war. No wonder the Gypsies had fled.

  She was there to see the Superintendent. Mr Beaumont. ‘My husband,’ she added, resenting the need to account for herself. Geoffrey should simply have agreed her plan when she’d put it to him. She shouldn’t have to rely on the element of surprise.

  The boy wore the requisite Local Defence Volunteer armband and carried a rifle with a fixed bayonet – an old, outmoded weapon but deadly enough, no doubt. The tip of his bayonet glinted in the day’s expansive light. How mad everything was. A boy with a bayonet was leading her to the racecourse through a corridor of barbed wire. Her book bag knocked at her shins.

  It was after four, but the day hadn’t cooled, and the trees that lined the street stooped under their own weight. Geoffrey hardly knew this part of town, a warren of streets and tilting houses that clung to its western slope in the hot shadow of the railway terminus.

  The area seemed strangely empty for a summer’s afternoon. No children drew with chalk on the pavement. Women didn’t whisper their troubles over cups of tea and front steps. Delivery boys weren’t knocking on doors. It was less a community than, literally, the end of the line for the town’s transients. Newspapers and chip wrappers gathered in the drains. Strange cooking smells wafted from open windows and doors. A round-shoulde
red young man with a battered suitcase passed him, and Geoffrey looked away, pretending to check the address against the note he’d made. Rosa, their Spanish char, lived up this way, but he had no idea where. An older woman crossed the street in his direction, observing him openly. She wore a bright handkerchief on her head and a cheap summer jacket. A refugee, he assumed, and he dipped his head as she passed, embarrassed by the sight of her bare brown feet. Would she look back to see which house he entered?

  Number 39 was an unpromising Victorian semi set back from the street: dark, austere, with a peeling front door and a few faded carnations that only drew attention to the riot of weeds. Overhead, above the loose guttering, the roofline rose in concrete crenellations. They looked less like an ornamental feature than teeth, broken and bared. He rolled his sleeves down, slipped on his jacket and buttoned it at the middle, imagining himself climbing the steps to the door, a clean-shaven misfit in a good jacket and tie.

  He thought of Evelyn, and a dull ache spread across his chest. The first time she hadn’t returned his kiss was weeks ago now. Afterwards, in the refuge of the bath, he’d suffered like a schoolboy, his face pushed into his knees. But there was of course nothing to be said. It was only a kiss not returned. We are broken, he now understood, by everything we cannot say.

  Life would hobble on. Indeed, perhaps it was only by accepting the inevitable failures of intimacy that one’s married life moved forward and passed into the muted successes upon which anniversary parties, retirement dinners and obituaries ultimately depended.

  At the front of Number 39, in a tall, narrow window criss-crossed with blast tape, a handwritten sign had been posted. GENTLEMEN LODGERS ONLY. NO REFUGEES. He thought of Mrs Merrick all those years ago, presiding over the girls of the 43 Club. He recalled his one night of sweetness with Constance – lovely Connie with the lazy eye – and he wondered what had become of her.