Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  ‘I would simply like to read to the other man in the infirmary. His name, I believe, is Otto.’ She knew it was. ‘I realize of course that the barracks, when he returns to them, won’t be appropriate but surely there is somewhere –’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ He rose from his chair. A shaft of evening light shone broad and mellow on the trunk of the old beech tree. He had to shake himself, focus. ‘Otto Gottlieb isn’t entitled to privileges.’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve discovered he likes to read.

  He likes books.’ He could hear something more in her voice. The man, his plight, had touched her in some way.

  ‘Choose anyone else.’

  She blinked and smiled falsely. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Otto Gottlieb is a Category A.’

  ‘Goodness. He’s too thin to do anyone any harm – except himself of course, as we know already. Do you feed them up there, Geoffrey?’

  And still the man’s voice was in his ear: I daresay it’s also rare to meet a Superintendent who takes so great an interest in his prisoners.

  ‘He came to us from a camp in Germany. He’s no stranger to trouble. He’s not worthy of your efforts, Evvie.’

  ‘An hour or so, perhaps once or twice a week. What’s the harm?’

  I am being accurate, not insolent, Superintendent.

  ‘We searched his bed in the barracks yesterday.’ He heard the words leave his mouth and he marvelled at his own speed of thought. He’d never been a liar.

  ‘Why? He’s still in the infirmary.’ Then she realized. That was the point.

  ‘The Head of Patrol had no choice but to confiscate what he found.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake. He’s a man who tried to kill himself. Surely, with all those hundreds of prisoners, there are more urgent matters?’

  ‘It was contraband, Evvie.’

  She batted at a wasp. ‘Cigarettes? A bottle? I hardly think it’s –’

  ‘He arrived in this country with cash, all of it counterfeit. Nevertheless, the authorities accepted his story and granted him asylum, subject to a tribunal. The tribunal designated him Category A but he was granted the right to stay. He drifted from London to Brighton, for no clear reason. He has no family here; no contacts, or at least none he would name. That said, his sponsor was the Bishop of Chich-ester. He’s here, in other words, on Christian charity and British goodwill. Yet when the internment arrests were made – all Category A, B and C aliens – the police found more forged notes in his lodgings. He was living off the stuff. Now’ – he rubbed the bridge of his nose – ‘we’ve discovered still more of it stuffed in his mattress. It beggars belief.’

  Somewhere in the Park, a child was wailing. All’s lost, she thought. All’s lost.

  For Philip’s eighth birthday, Geoffrey had taken their son to see how sterling was made at the Royal Mint. A man’s wage packet, a person’s bank book, a country’s currency – all represented something fundamental to Geoffrey. If he had a deep faith of any kind, it was in a work ethic. The sight of unemployed men, men thrown from the path of their lives, as if by some dark, ungovernable horse, haunted him.

  He glanced back at her. She was still brooding on it. She hadn’t given up the idea. ‘There’s more, I’m afraid.’ He gripped the terrace’s low balustrade.

  ‘More money?’

  ‘More reason not to cater to him: black-market activity among the interns.’ He bowed his head. ‘We strongly suspect he’s behind it.’

  She sat up, blinking. ‘Of course he’s not –’

  ‘Evvie, I don’t think I need to convince you how low and despicable a thing it is to profit from desperate men.’

  She felt winded, dizzy. She would have put her head between her knees were it not for a fear of looking overly affected by the fate of a Category A prisoner. ‘Have you reported him to the police?’

  He turned, finally. His pulse twitched at the corner of his eye. ‘I’m Camp Superintendent.’

  Yes, he was saying. Of course I have. Counterfeit cash, for Geoffrey, was not merely a crime, it was a profanity.

  A part of her brain still worked in its habitual way: how had he gone an entire day with his shirt misbuttoned? The other part reeled. Was Otto Gottlieb a conman?

  The fact that he enjoyed books was neither here nor there. Even conmen might read – and paint. He’d said he was a painter. Even conmen might be sensitive, thoughtful, aware. No one was one thing. After all, she was, she knew, a snob, a regrettable product of her class. She both clung to and despised most of the things it stood for. And Geoffrey – Geoffrey was a man respected for his sense of fair play, for his decency and good sense, yet he harboured an irrational contempt for an entire race of people. Casual hatred required neither examination nor confession. Many of the best people hated casually enough.

  How sheltered she’d been. Perhaps conmen were more, not less, sensitive than most. Had Otto really kept vigil over Mr Pirazzini’s body or had he simply told her he had? A confidence trickster had to … gain one’s confidence. And he had. Clearly her ability to read people, to read situations, had failed her. She’d lost her bearings.

  Damn Geoffrey, damn him. And damn herself.

  Their evening passed in its ritual tranquillity. Dinner unfolded without Philip, a novelty which made the meal both easier to bear and more awkward. Then came the washing-up; the Evening Argus for Geoffrey; Evelyn’s dutiful check on the vacant houses of neighbours; the hanging of the keys; the closing of the shutters; the buzz of the wireless. Finally, it was the book in her lap and the start of an hour’s uncomfortable silence while they waited for the news.

  When the knock at the door went, just after eight, ‘I’ll go,’ he said. It had to be Philip, back from Tubby’s – early. It hadn’t yet gone dark.

  When Geoffrey didn’t reappear, she opened a shutter. A bobby stood on the doorstep, his face downcast and his helmet in his hands. Geoffrey was nodding, his features sombre and heavy. She could hear the low rumble of their voices but not the words they spoke. When he stepped inside again, it was only to ask if she would dash upstairs for his suit jacket and tie.

  ‘Is it about the Category A man?’ She brushed down his jacket, miming wifely duty.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said.

  The point, he told himself grimly, was to spare her the facts: Philip, roaming the town with the Dunn boys again, and now frightened out of his wits in the lock-up like some little ruffian.

  It was a collateral stroke of luck that Evelyn had assumed the Constable had come to the door to follow up on the case of Otto Gottlieb.

  ‘Can’t it wait until Monday?’ She made herself say that much. Whatever the man had done, he was still recovering from surgery, although the image that flashed through her mind was, not of his shoulder, but of the scarred landscape of his back.

  Geoffrey resolved he would add nothing to his lies if he could help it. He ignored the question and checked his wristwatch, holding it up to his ear, as if it, like him, were losing time. ‘As I’m out, I might as well return via Tillie’s and collect Philip.’ He sounded off-hand enough.

  ‘Geoffrey?’

  He hovered at the threshold. His jaw flexed softly, like a well-oiled trigger.

  Who are you? she wanted to ask. Who are you now? Somewhere within her, the words were pushing, pushing.

  ‘Shan’t be long,’ he said. Then he kissed the top of her head and shut the front door, too hard, too quickly.

  Bang.

  24

  Summer was ending, Tubby was forbidden, and Orson, it seemed, was nowhere. Philip pulled hard on the bell at Hanover Crescent.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Stewart-Forbes. I thought you would be Ivy.’

  ‘I am not usually Ivy, Philip.’

  ‘Could Ivy please call Orson down for me?’

  ‘Ivy is not with us today.’ Mr Stewart-Forbes always spoke slowly, as if each word had to be released from a stone paperweight.

  ‘That’s all right. I can go up and knock on his door myself.
’ ‘Orson is not at home.’ Beneath Mr Stewart-Forbes’s cardigan, the aged slump of his shoulders straightened.

  ‘I haven’t seen him all summer. Is he sick?’

  ‘He’s in Steyning, at his grandmother’s house.’ Mr Stewart-Forbes’s eyes were clouded and rheumy. ‘I will tell him you called.’ Then he nodded into the distance – ‘On your way now’ – squinted briefly into the sunshine, hoisted his trousers, and closed the door.

  Only Clarence remained. When Philip spotted Mrs Dalrymple at her window that overlooked the Park, he ran across their terrace at Number 7, into the Park, and up the stairs to her terrace at Number 6.

  But: ‘No, I’m afraid Clarence cannot come out to play, Philip Beaumont,’ she declaimed from her window. ‘He is unhappy. He is hiding somewhere – out there!’ She gestured with her gnarled, bejewelled hand. Even as they spoke, the Park’s lawns were being turned and tilled by a team of volunteer intruders. ‘The war effort, the bloody war effort,’ she railed. ‘It’s the new religion!’

  ‘We’re Church of England, Mrs Dalrymple,’ he offered feebly.

  The gold in her teeth flashed. ‘Vegetables! Victory! It’s claptrap and rot. Clarence has been off colour ever since this lot marched in like evangelists ready to dig for Jesus – or Churchill, or whoever’s leading the charge this time. In six months, you watch, they’ll be digging just as zealously for Hitler.’

  ‘Do you think Hitler will come to Brighton, Mrs Dalrymple?’

  ‘Who can say? He isn’t one to leave a calling card, is he?’ She put a withered hand to her mouth and cooed over the Park. ‘Clarence … Clarence … Come home, sweet boy!’ Then she dabbed at her eyes with the tip of the foxtail she wore, even in summer, over her nightdress.

  Philip cooed too.

  25

  Could she do it?

  She had seen the police constable outside their front door. She’d heard the low, urgent tones, but still it didn’t make sense. A man who is about to kill himself does not wheel and deal on any black market. A man who wants to end his life does not bother to hoard cash.

  Wednesday was Geoffrey’s half-day at the Bank and his weekly trip to London.

  She could hear him upstairs, shaving, dressing. In a moment or two, he’d come dashing down the stairs, the bloodied specks of tissue on his face a testament to his impatience to be gone.

  She reached up to the key board, took down his set, and prised the two shiniest keys from the fob.

  It was the child he saw first, or rather the child’s hoop, just visible from his office door. He remembered it suddenly, sticking out from beneath Leah’s bed. Yellow, if his sense of colour could be trusted. Now, here it was, out of place, like a sickly detail from a dream.

  The boy, who could only have been three or four, stood very still in the Bank’s panelled hush. He was dressed in grey woollen shorts, a matching school blazer and tie – cast-offs that had been hastily tacked up to fit a boy too young for school. When he discovered Geoffrey studying him – a tall man, a wooden pillar among the Bank’s wooden pillars – he stared back intently, with the eyes of the man in the photo.

  Why was Leah here of all places? She should have been at her window, on the sill, lifting her face to any breeze; turning languor-ously as he entered the room; stubbing her cigarette out in the Eiffel Tower. She was in his Bank, not that she had any notion that it was his Bank or even that he was a banker. From his office doorway, he could hear her smoky voice and halting English, though she herself stood just out of view.

  He risked it. He let himself be drawn. From a few feet away he noticed, with a barb of both concern and embarrassment, that her arms were bare. The marble white of her flesh glowed too obviously in the Bank’s half-light. He could see the scar from the gas ring on her forearm. Her dress was simple and dignified but it was obvious even to him that it had been made at home. She had neglected to wear not only a summer jacket, but also a hat and gloves, and from behind, he could see that the heels of her court shoes were worn down to their shafts.

  She was explaining to his clerk that she would like to open an account; yes, she was a legal alien; here were her papers to prove it, and her Identity Card; no, she had not realized three signed references were required. She could assure him she had funds for the account.

  She remained composed as always, but he could hear the suspicion rising in her voice, and no doubt Matthews could hear it too. It wasn’t difficult to understand. She feared the paperwork was a ruse to keep foreigners out, and in truth it was.

  She glanced over her shoulder to check on the boy, looking without seeing anything other than his obedient grip on the hoop. He stared solemnly at his mother’s back, and in the discreet gloom, amid the restrained queues and the penumbra of the counter lamps, Geoffrey drew closer, close enough to see, in the pool of lamplight, that the notes she presented to Matthews were large.

  The question cut through him. Paid to her by whom?

  From a few feet behind, over the wooden slats of the grille, Geoffrey caught the clerk’s eye and nodded his sanction. A benign gesture, Matthews would have assumed. An official pardon for non-Englishness. Then he smiled tersely at one or two clients in the queue, appeared to check his wristwatch against the clock on the wall, and withdrew to his office, his heart banging like a bull at the gate of his chest.

  It was, she thought, as if all the world were parched. The soil of Race Hill lay cracked and pale. Flies quivered over dried-out piles of dung but there were no sheep left, for there was almost nothing to graze. She strode higher, towards the course, watching her step as a matter of habit, on the lookout for the wild orchids and moon daisies of late summer, but only the rangy husks of toadflax clung on.

  (Is your journey really necessary? Think before travelling!)

  Occasionally the ground crumbled away as she walked; not even that seemed solid these days. Beneath the soles of her summer shoes, she could almost feel the chalky scarp rising through the turf, like a skeleton, bone-bright. The hill, that August, no longer knew bees in its wild thyme, or the blue flashes of butterflies, or skylarks lifting off from their nests. Everything was burned out. Yet the day was as muggy as a Turkish bath.

  She had submitted to the morning’s knitting circle and the endlessly patient clacking of all those needles. She had procrastinated, queuing for fresh plums and blackberries, only to leave the grocer’s with half a dozen bruised cooking apples for which she’d paid a fortune. She hadn’t believed she would actually go that afternoon until she started the climb up Elm Grove.

  It was Wednesday. Geoffrey was certainly on his train to London; there was no risk of discovery or of him telephoning her at home. Still she’d hesitated. How could she bear to return to the Camp? She wanted only to forget the sight of Otto Gottlieb’s ruined back, for what could she do, even had she any energy left to think about it? What’s more, there was Geoffrey’s warning of Otto’s criminal his-tory; a cautionary tale told for her benefit. Yet that didn’t render it untrue. In any case, it was impossible now to visit the man, whoever he really was, and she no longer had the desire. Desire for almost anything was leaching away. These days, her plans and hopes seemed only to point towards her own foolishness. Better to forget. Better not to want.

  Yet here, once again, she was climbing Race Hill, and as the white roof of the grandstand came into view, she stopped, panting for breath, and turned to look back over the town. She could change her mind. There was no requirement to carry on. Indeed it would be sensible to turn back.

  A heat haze had settled over the bowl of Brighton, a yellowy fug of smoke and steam that rose like a stale sigh of purpose from, she supposed, the station, the munitions factory and the ack-ack guns. She turned her face skyward. Above her, above the hill, a sparrow-hawk rose, its wings outspread as if in an act of will over gravity. She shielded her eyes and squinted.

  A lone female. She could see the bars on its breast.

  She fumbled for the two keys in her pocket – still there, jingling on the loop of t
wine she’d cut as soon as he’d left the house.

  She had come this far.

  *

  The humidity aside, it was good, he thought, to be out, good to have departed the Bank and its stately gloom. He took long strides, out-pacing most of the lunchtime wanderers on the Queen’s Road. His travel pass and Identity Card were safely stowed in his breast pocket, his attaché case was in one hand, and he clutched his newspaper gamely under his arm. The platform for London would be Number 4 as it was always Number 4. First Class would be empty at this hour, which meant that the journey would be time to gather his thoughts over a cigarette or two, and to clear his head of the morning’s visitation by Leah and her child. Why feel jangled? She had a right to go about her business; to shop; to post letters; to present herself at a bank.

  He picked up speed. Somewhere on the far side of the station, on the shimmering tracks ahead, whistles were blowing and a Klaxon sounded. He’d been warned there were delays. Up the line, hundreds of burst tins of jam were wreaking havoc following a hit to a freight container in the early hours. Still, delay or no delay, he would board a train as he did every Wednesday. He would watch the tawny fields of Sussex flicker past his window and, thirty minutes from Victoria, he would cast his eye over his weekly report for Head Office.

  Only he didn’t. At the end of Queen’s Road, he carried on walking, head bowed, past the station, making the steep climb up Terminus Road. He passed the camouflage factory where the girls spilled out for lunch, green-handed and green-faced; then the Waterloo Arms where sawdust for the floor was being delivered and spread for the day.

  There would still be time to make his train if he chose to, particularly given the delays. He had only to turn around and revert to type. There would then be no need for a telephone call to Seymour-Williams first thing tomorrow. No excuse to be made (the jam, the ridiculous jam). But when he looked up, blinking himself out of thought, he discovered he was already standing in the road where Number 39 stood back from the other houses, like a plain girl at a dance.