Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  She wasn’t expecting him.

  Evelyn stood once more at the mouth of the tunnelled entry. At least she and the young sentry had grown accustomed to one another. They exchanged a few words, then she followed him up the corridor of wire while a fighter plane chugged overhead. ‘No books today?’ he asked without waiting for her reply. He turned his raw, boyish face to the sky, squinting at the vapour trail through the criss-crossings of wire. ‘Ours,’ he said. ‘Not to worry, Mrs Beaumont.’

  ‘I just need to collect a few of my things from my husband’s office.’

  She followed him up the hill and out the tunnel’s other end, where he quickly assessed the grounds for her benefit – ‘All right from here, Mrs Beaumont?’ – and returned down the hill to his post.

  The first of the two keys turned cooperatively in the lock, and the relief was immense. How easily she was in, through the stable-style door of his office. In the previous life of the racecourse, this room had actually been the VIP cloakroom. She had a vague memory of passing her fur across it to a smiling attendant one cool spring evening and asking Geoffrey to keep the ticket safe in a pocket. ‘Don’t dare lose it, will you now, duck,’ the woman had said to her as she admired the fur, ‘or I’ll be looking the business mesself next Saturday night.’

  Evelyn eased the door shut behind her, seated herself in her husband’s chair, and allowed herself simply to breathe. She considered the room. The HQ. The Superintendent’s office. The rows of coat rails were long gone of course but, even given its functional history, the room was a place of comparative privilege. The furniture, firstly, wasn’t nailed to the floor. On the far wall, the King looked out in stern endorsement from a huge framed photograph. The walls had been freshly painted in a creamy white, and there were two windows, each of which, she could see, opened perfectly well. One window presented a view of the sea; the other overlooked what had been, in another lifetime, the square of the racecourse. The light bulb had a proper shade and was not dimmed with offensive orange paint. There was a washbasin on the far wall, a bar of Imperial Leather soap, and a clean hand towel, where presumably, each Monday evening, before leaving, her husband washed his hands of it all.

  If she were a man in Geoffrey’s position, would she be any different?

  She didn’t know.

  The desk was bare save for a plumbing invoice on a steel spike and a stack of manila files in an ‘out’ tray. She shuffled through them: Brandt, Frankel, Ganz, Montefiore, Oster, Pirazzini. There he was, his name in green ink, while at the bottom, in a mimeographed box, someone had rubber-stamped the file ‘Closed’. Inside, clipped together, lay her old friend’s passport, his Identity Card, and the record of his brief appearance before the Enemy Alien Tribunal Board the year before. The paperwork was minimal. The less said. On the final page, two neat sentences in black ink stared back at her: ‘Death by natural causes. No reparations due from War Damages Commission.’

  The man she shared a bed with had written one sentence after the other, tidy as sums on a balance sheet. If she felt a jolt of contempt for him, she felt only slightly less for herself. She should have insisted that Mr Pirazzini be moved to hospital. That would have been a far more valuable show of friendship than her determined efforts to read to him. Otto Gottlieb, conman or not, had been right to laugh at her.

  She rattled one of the deep steel drawers – locked. As was the next. And the third. The second key on her loop of twine opened nothing. Her hunch had been wrong. The gamble of the journey had been pointless. Outside the pot-brush head of the Head of Patrol passed the window, and she sank low in the chair. The ridiculous truth was that she had no idea what she’d imagined she’d find.

  Geoffrey knocked a second time, and a cow-eyed girl of about sixteen opened the door, peeping over her duster as if it were a feather fan and she a showgirl. ‘Are you inquiring about a vacancy, sir?’

  She yelped as he brushed past her and sprinted up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Leah, it’s only me,’ he said, speaking through her door.

  There was a long, sickening pause.

  ‘I am with someone.’ Her voice was low and heavy.

  It was early, just past midday. Yet – someone. Like a kick to the groin.

  But if he was here, why not another? His mind skidded.

  He had started back towards the staircase when he heard the key turn on the other side of the door. Christ.

  What choice did he have but to recede back up the corridor and allow her guest to beat his retreat down the stairs? Who wanted to see another man here? To imagine. He disappeared around a corner and sank back into its shadows, willing the moment to pass. The carpet smelled of mildew. A plate with bread crusts sat outside one door; a stained teacup outside another. The walls were crammed with faded pastoral scenes of happy shepherds and shepherdesses. He shouldn’t have come.

  Unbearable minutes passed. She didn’t call to him. When he finally risked a return, he merely found the door open.

  He hovered in the doorway, noting the cheap flowers that stood stiff in a vase on the dressing table. Were they red? He could distinguish neither reds, pinks nor greens, but it hardly mattered.

  The dress she’d worn earlier in the day, at the Bank, hung on a wire hanger from the curtain rail. Now she wore only her dressing gown and her leather mules. She was spraying the room with its mist of scent. The smell, as always, was clean and crisp; lemon and cedar-wood. Evelyn had never worn scent, and the discovery of it on Leah – on her neck, at her cleavage, her collarbone, behind her earlobes – had, in itself, been enough at first.

  What was this thing that had happened to him?

  The Experiment, as he had once laughingly described it to her, had been short-lived. The ‘cure’ had been quick and decisive. Whatever it was that had followed – love, lust or some wordless fascination – whatever it was, it had taken possession of him quickly. He had expected to feel queasy, remote, those first few times, there with a stranger whom he would pay within the hour. This wasn’t the 43 Club, after all, and he wasn’t twenty-one and numb with whisky. There was Evelyn; there was Philip. Yet the startling revelation had been, not how mechanical the experience had felt, but how intimate.

  Had he deluded himself? He lingered now at her threshold, painfully aware of the reason for the scent; of her back to him; of her silent displeasure and her interrupted appointment; also, of the picture on the shelf of her husband or lover, once again not turned to the wall. Why had he come? Why hadn’t he caught his train? The sight of her with that shiny silver atomizer revolted him. A gift, a gift, but from whom? Across the room, the window was open, as ever and, as the curtains lifted in the breeze, the dress on the rail rose too, revealing what she’d assumed she had managed to hide: her son, curled small on the windowsill, clutching a yo-yo.

  I am with someone.

  If the boy recognized him from that morning, he gave no sign.

  On Geoffrey’s office wall, George VI gazed down at her from his vast loneliness. It is time for you to go, my dear, he seemed to say. The midday sun had passed overhead, and the room had started to grow dim. She stared ahead, trying to determine in her mind the moment to leave, the moment when she might cross the grounds and draw as little attention as possible. What had she supposedly come to collect? How foolish of her not to have planned her subterfuge better.

  Even as she reproved herself, her mind was idly wondering how Geoffrey, a man impatient with shoddy workmanship, could tolerate the crack that ran up the far wall of his cloakroom-cum-office right beneath the picture of the King. It was unlike him not to insist that the wall be replastered.

  She stood and walked slowly across the room.

  She reached up and removed the King from the wall.

  The crack wasn’t a crack but a groove.

  Of course.

  The wall wasn’t a wall but a door. Nailed to it was an engraved plate. VALUABLES. At eye level, a brass key-cover glinted.

  He removed his hat and, from his awkward seat on the edge of
her bed, watched her wander over to the dressing table and pour water into a pot. The kettle on the gas ring was whistling a fury. ‘Why come? Is not your time.’

  Her directness, so entirely un-English, embarrassed him. He felt his throat tighten, his mouth dry. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, but he didn’t offer to leave.

  He’d been trying to make light of his unscheduled visit, smiling at her son; teaching him, as he’d taught Philip, how to ‘walk the dog’ and how to put the yo-yo ‘to sleep’. But the boy had only scowled and refused to tell him his name. Nor did Leah insist.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said flatly. ‘His English, not good. And he is too young for such tricks. Also, if you row with wife, you cannot stay here. Is against rule.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream –’

  ‘Tea?’ she said, looking past him.

  ‘If it’s no trouble.’

  She rolled her eyes, then reached for two cups from the shelf, and poured, before the tea had had time to steep. She passed him his cup and seated herself on the bed beside him, where they sipped in silence. Her beauty mark, he noticed, was missing from her left cheek. Her back was poker straight. The boy had retreated again to the window-sill, and now she spoke gently to him in their own language.

  Geoffrey listened and watched, feeling a foreigner’s sense of exclusion. The boy nodded with a gravitas that was disconcerting, almost unpleasant, in so young a child. Above them, the man in the photo watched from the shelf, disapproving and severe, and in that headlong moment, Geoffrey understood what it was that had impelled him past the station and up the soot-stained hill of Terminus Road to her door. After seeing her in the Bank, after watching her smooth out those notes so painstakingly on the counter – after imagining their source – he’d needed to lay claim to her again. To make her his own. It was a sort of fever. He knew it was. But the truth was, there on the edge of her bed, no matter how casual he endeavoured to seem, he felt like a gun about to go off.

  He reached across the gap between them and, out of view of the child, gingerly stroked the side of her thigh.

  She set down her tea, rose, and moved to the window. ‘He like trains, don’t you, Misha? He watch that bridge on and on. Some time he forget to eat! Me, I no want trains. I want sea, ocean. I come to Brighton for sea, as when I am small child. A window by the sea. But trains, trains, trains! And now, beach closed!’ She ruffled her son’s hair. ‘But he happy, and I thank God. And now, we sleep only to noise of trains at night. If no noise, if too quiet, we wake, eh, Misha?’

  She scooped him into her lap, perched herself on the edge of the sill, and spoke to the window. ‘Out there, trains and aeroplanes are toys … Everything, simple. This is why I come here. So he have simple. Me, when child, not simple. I am born in Odessa. On Black Sea. A resort. Like Brighton but more, much more beautiful. In Odessa we all think, ah, I am in Italy. You should see our buildings. And everybody is in Odessa. Is port. How you say? Free port. Turks, Russians, French, Germans, Armenians, Tatars, Jewishes, Polishes. They come, they stay. Yes? My father is Jewish, my mother is Russian Orthodox. In Odessa, this is nothing. No … is good. They meet in orchestra of Odessa Opera Theatre. Very famous the-atre. My mother, on violin. My father, piano. He is from old family in Odessa. Important family. He study at Conservatoire with Witold Maliszewski – yes?’ She turned.

  Geoffrey smiled weakly. ‘I am a philistine. You must excuse me.’

  ‘I am five years old when Revolution come. Is very bad for my father. His family, too old, too much money. He is a …? How you say?’ She took aim with her finger.

  ‘Target.’

  ‘Yes. His brothers are shooted into holes they must dig first for their own bodies. Go, go, go, everybody say to my father. So he go then, fast, to Poland. I am too young. Four years my mother wait in Odessa. Is terrible. When I am nine years old, at last we travel with Maliszewski himself to Warsaw. On train, in compartment, I ask him why we must go, I do not want to go, Warsaw has no sea, and he tell me that Red Army men not like music and better we go where people like. My mother tells me Ssh, ssh, Leah, but Maliszewski smiles into his old, yellow beard and commands for me hot chocolate. Funny, yes, I remember? Then, when I am twelve years old, I study with him, like my father before me, only now at his Chopin Music School in Warsaw. When I am fifteen, he make big konkurencja. Many students. Many countries.’

  ‘Competition.’

  ‘Yes. Competition. I am good. Not best. But good.’

  And he thought again of her long fingers, of the unexpected elegance of her hands, of their expressiveness – their touch.

  He shifted on the soft edge of the bed and looked again at the face of the man in her photo. ‘You haven’t mentioned your brother.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No brother. No sister,’ as if she had forgotten entirely the import of the question and her previous lie.

  She set Misha on the floor and reached for her tea. ‘Then, all change again. You understand me? Suddenly, am I Jew? Am I not Jew? In Warsaw, quickly they want to know. Like you here first time. Why this question? For me, for people from city like Odessa, this is like game, as if you demand: are you more or less than five feet five inches in your height? As if everyone pretend, with hard faces, but soon they will say, Ha ha, joke, of course joke! What! You believed us? You were frighted?

  ‘My father dies one month before Misha is born. Is terrible to bury father and have baby in such days. My mother, as I say, is Russian Orthodox. I tell her, good, bravo, I am Russian Orthodox, and if I am, Misha too. But my father is known in Warsaw for many years. My mother say, Leah, if there is any question, there is no question. You, Misha, you are Jewishes.

  ‘And so, England. In London, I try for teatime orchestra in this Boots and that Boots. But no job. I try pubs, too many pubs, but no one want me for piano. They say, my English not good. True, I say, but music speaks, not me. Yes, they say, but no one need Chopin in England when war come. The Red Cross in London has too many peoples. So we get train, to Brighton, the sea’ – she turned back to the room – ‘to here.

  ‘Bad, you think. Yes, bad. Of course, bad. Every day I hate it. I miss my mother. And my piano. But is not for ever.’ She searched his face. ‘Understand me, there is worse. There is very much worse.’ She gathered Misha to her.

  He nodded but, suddenly, her gaze oppressed him, like some dimly remembered hot towel thrown over his head in a childhood illness. Her gaze, her voice, the detail – it was all too much. The more she revealed, the more he felt trapped in that small room with the weary rhythms of her voice and the misfortunes of her history. It was shameful but undeniable, and in spite of himself, in spite of his efforts to blink the image away, he saw her once more, pressing and smoothing those large notes on the counter at the till.

  On the window seat, Misha was cupping his mother’s ear and whispering something to her, in Polish, Geoffrey presumed. She smiled quizzically, first at her son, then at him. ‘What mean this?’ she asked, her face as unguarded, as trusting as she was confused. ‘Misha say you live in the dark house. Today, in this morning, he call bank “the dark house”.’ She bounced Misha on her knee and smiled. ‘I don’t understand.’

  26

  Did it make it better or worse that he emptied his wallet on her dressing table before fleeing Number 39? The entire episode was his fault. He knew it. He couldn’t help but know it. Wasn’t this the time-honoured way in which men betrayed women? He imagined it was. At the moment a man finally gained a woman’s trust, he ran. He felt smothered. He discovered the bounder within himself. And if he did manage to stay, he forever reserved the right to show her his complacency or disdain.

  For years, Evelyn had been the exception. He had wanted her truly; had needed her truly. Then the war had come and that weight of need had shifted between them. He’d outgrown her, against his every expectation – it was a relief, it was a bereavement – and, in a way that they both seemed powerless to stop or explain, she’d grown smaller, angrier and more anxious. They moved these da
ys in their own spheres. Because what could either say?

  And Leah? She was a remarkable person. If he had sensed that before, he knew it, clearly, today. He even suspected he loved her and that he would miss her dreadfully. She had simply said too much; she had revealed too much. How ironic that her first real words to him were the proof of feeling he had secretly craved from her for all these weeks. Yet once they had come –

  He glanced back to see her, poised and inscrutable at her window.

  Obviously the boy had remembered him, at the Bank. But it was utterly unthinkable that Leah might come to know a single detail more of his real life. He couldn’t expose Evelyn and Philip to that kind of embarrassment or risk. There wasn’t a decision to make. He walked briskly on.

  His train from London wouldn’t pull into Brighton for another four hours. At the usual time, he would join the shadow of his former self at the station’s exit, remember who he was, and turn left on to Trafalgar Street, just as he did every Wednesday afternoon. He’d recover his equilibrium as he fell in with the other commuters. However, until he did, he felt exposed and sick with himself. What’s more, he couldn’t be seen, at a loose end, about town.

  On Terminus Road, the public bar of the Waterloo Arms was hushed and dank. He knew better of course than to ask if there was a saloon, while to inquire about a snug would have been tantamount to asking to be taken out back and beaten till his brain bled. The pub-lican stared. The men at the bar stared. They’d been eating from a tray of winkles, prising the creatures from their shells with pins and catching them fast between their teeth. At the sight of Geoffrey at the threshold, the oldest, a man with a silver-and-black widow’s peak, sighed, pushed the tray to one side, and slid a misshapen parcel beneath his jacket.

  It was a stagey gesture. They were on ‘Brighton business’, and they wanted him to know it. What other kind of men were without work in the middle of a summer’s afternoon with a war on? Since the closure of the racecourse, most of the betting, the loan-sharking and the black-marketeering had moved into pubs of this kind, off the beaten track. Only last month, a determined police sergeant had taken a punch, immediately below the chin – the cleanest way to snap a man’s spine.