Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

It hardly mattered that the reviewer went on to praise his work for its invention and technical bravura. It was only a matter of time before the Culture Chamber took a devastating interest in his work.

  So it was that, just two days after his exhibition opened, his Yiddish women, his dancers and nudes were slashed free of their frames. He was provided with a receipt for his work, though no value was assigned to any of the three dozen paintings. He was informed he would hear more in due course. Later that day, when he found his studio ransacked and his paints and remaining canvases removed, he knew, before opening the chest of drawers, that his passport, too, was gone.

  He did hear more. All of Germany heard more, as Klara had unwittingly predicted. The Entartete Kunst – or Degenerate Art – Exhibition featured the work of more than a hundred artists denounced as Jewish-Bolshevist in their work, whether Jewish by birth or not. Over five thousand paintings, including Otto’s, were seized in the first of the raids. They were hung without frames by fraying cords. A commentary, daubed on the walls in crude letters, accompanied each painting. Otto’s Yiddish women were ‘An Insult to German Womanhood’. His Ballhaus dancers demonstrated how ‘Madness becomes Method’. His nude actresses illustrated the Jewish artist’s attraction to ‘Cretins and Whores’.

  The exhibition toured twelve German cities for over four months and attracted more than two million visitors. Its popularity ended only when the Berlin Fire Brigade was enlisted to burn the majority of the works.

  Watching the bonfire from a second-storey schoolroom, a twelve-year-old boy called Theo would be the last person to contemplate Otto’s Yiddish women before they and the great golden dome of their synagogue collapsed into the flames.

  His passport was returned eventually, bearing the new, oversized stamp of ‘Degenerate’, a designation that made escape to Switzerland impossible. And like all degenerate artists, he was forbidden to paint.

  For nearly a year, Klara travelled in secret to a small, little-known art shop on the west side of the city and bought him supplies in discreet quantities. The journey required four tram rides each way and took the better part of a day, but she would not be dissuaded by Otto from her mission. In time, however, even her determination was thwarted. The following spring, when the windows of their building were once more opened wide on to the courtyard, their neighbours smelled the odour of the oils, and a small delegation from Number 142 Auguststrasse presented itself to the local branch of the SS.

  The Black Maria arrived later that day. As Harman trudged up the broad flight of stairs, and as the women on the sixth storey argued once more about Passover food and dishes, Klara sat in silence at her table, her back to the courtyard, her face covered in tears.

  28

  Moments before locking her husband’s office door, Evelyn tried to formulate a plan. She would scribble a secret note on the Agatha Christie’s title page. ‘Dear Mr Otto Gottlieb, Please rest assured that your paintings are safe. Yours sincerely, Mrs Evelyn Beaumont.’ But even that posed too great a risk. She would shake his hand and murmur her thanks for his work. The rest would have to be understood.

  In the distance, she could see a mirage of boiler suits. Was he among them? She squinted into the day. The men were working in teams, hauling oversized sandbags, sledge-hammering stone to dust, and stirring huge vats with long spades and shovels. Cement. Always more.

  As she skirted the edges of the parade square, her head held high in a pose that belied her nerves, she passed the windows of the main barracks and slowed her pace, marvelling. Into their blue paint, graf-fiti had been faintly scratched. On the first was a doodle of a naked woman. Further along: names and words, some in other languages. Then, a drawing, like a child’s, of a ship foundering at sea.

  She walked, clutching her stage prop, the novel. Another sketch – a lover’s arrowed heart – appeared at the next window. Her own knocked at her ribs. Which guard would she encounter at the barracks door? Her performance had to convince. And how had life been reduced to this? Otto Gottlieb wasn’t a conman. Her husband was.

  Even that morning she wouldn’t have believed him capable of blackening another man’s name. And for what? To keep her away from this place, from its grim truths at the edge of the town.

  A Government White Paper had been published at long last in the wake of all the controversy surrounding the camps. She’d seen it reported in a remote column of The Times. If a prisoner could demonstrate his ‘usefulness’ to the war effort, citing skills in one of eighteen categories, he could make a case for his release to the Camp Superintendent. Artists, writers and musicians were excluded from consideration, apparently because of their inherent uselessness.

  An information leaflet had been prepared and distributed to all internees. Out of more than three hundred men still interned on Race Hill, her husband had released just six. The need for cement was, he’d explained to her, acute. In Brighton, there were few priorities greater than gun emplacements and public shelters. How could he justify the loss of labour at such a time?

  She looked up at the windows of the barracks again. What was it like to have to scratch crudely towards the light? She stopped to squint, to wonder, for at the next window some kind of mathematical equation emerged strangely from a rectangle of blue while, on the final pane in the row, someone had scratched bar after delicate bar of music. A composition in a labour camp. And she saw again in her mind’s eye the instruments Geoffrey had locked away in his secret room: a cello, violins, an accordion, each confiscation recorded in a file in his own hand. ‘Contraband’.

  How dare he?

  Unfortunately, the guard at the barracks door was less daunted by her arrival than she’d hoped. ‘If he doesn’t want the book, Private, he may cut it up for cigarette paper if he chooses. But I promised the man a book and, trifling though it is, I am duty-bound. If you would summon him, I would be most grateful.’ She heard her mother’s icy tones.

  ‘With respect, Mrs Beaumont, we don’t have an allowance for books, and even if we did, Gottlieb’s not here.’

  ‘He’s been released?’ But how could that be? His operation had been on Friday. Today was only Wednesday.

  ‘Back to the infirmary. That bullet op of his didn’t go too well. Blood poisoning now. Could be curtains.’ He paused and smiled shyly. ‘I dessay you’ll think I’m fishing, Mrs Beaumont, but I’m partial mesself to a good Agatha Christie …’

  Did she even reply? She remembered only breaking into a run – down Race Hill, through the corridor of wire, past the empty Gypsy camp, down Elm Grove and towards the square towers of the Crescent that rose up from the town like beacons of a certainty she would never reach.

  Home, he thought, as he turned the key in the door, home, and the familiar overwhelmed him like a gift. The floorboards creaked re-assuringly beneath his feet. Even the sight of his own sitting room felt like a reprieve after the hours spent hidden in the pub between its sweating walls. He could breathe once more. Evelyn’s cardigan trailed over her chair, and he caught it in his fingers. The noise of the trains no longer rumbled in his bones. He laid his hat on the banister knob. Next door, through the common wall, he could hear Mrs Dal-rymple’s wireless and the booming of the BBC’s programme of organ music. How lucky he was. How lucky. ‘Evvie?’ he called, dropping his case, slipping off his jacket. ‘Philip?’

  He found her in the kitchen, reaching for a jar on a high shelf, and on impulse, he bent low, circling her waist with his arms, holding on even as she flinched, as if to say to her, I will not let you go. He’d made up his mind. When he sacrificed Leah, he’d made up his mind. He’d given up Leah, though he loved her, because he loved his wife more. Evelyn. Because he loved Evelyn more. He knew it now. He would never not know it again.

  She turned to him, her face cold, waxen.

  ‘Evvie?’

  She shrugged herself free of his arms. ‘I can smell her on you, Geoffrey. I can smell her.’

  It was like a punch to his lungs.

  The atomizer, Leah�
��s scent. It had survived the smoke and stink of that pub. The possibility had never occurred to him. Her lipstick, yes. The sweat of them, yes. He’d always washed quickly at her basin. But not that, not her scent. Say something, he ordered himself. Say something. ‘What on earth do you –?’

  ‘Go back to London, Geoffrey. Go back to her.’

  ‘Evvie …’

  She refused to look at him.

  I’ve given her up! he wanted to yell. I’ve given her up for you!

  ‘There is no woman in London,’ he said coldly.

  Seated on the highest stair, Philip felt the reverberations of his parents’ row rise through his tailbone. He clutched Clarence on his lap. Mrs Dalrymple had given him permission to tortoise-sit during her late-afternoon nap, and, as his father’s voice boomed in the kitchen below, Philip wished he too could retract his head into some dark, sheltered place.

  When the doorbell rang, he didn’t move. The knocker started up, knocking inside his head. It was Mrs Dalrymple come to shout at them about the shouting. His parents had woken her from her nap. He descended the staircase unsteadily. He pressed Clarence to his chest, as if to make of his friend a living shield. But when he’d braced himself and heaved the door open, it wasn’t Mrs Dalrymple in her nightdress and foxtail. It was a shorter, fatter figure.

  ‘Orson!’

  Orson had never visited his house; he, Philip, had always gone to Orson’s. But here, now, after an entirely Orson-less summer, stood Orson. Except his eyelids were puffy. His nose looked red and raw. Even when bullied at school, Orson had never cried. The most upset he’d ever been was the time Mr Stewart-Forbes had told him that the Stewart-Forbeses were not distantly related to royalty after all. Orson had taken the news badly.

  ‘I thought you’d never come home from your grandmother’s.’

  Orson stared, his eyes pale and watery in the bouncing light of August. The blue blaze of them had gone out.

  ‘My parents are having a row,’ Philip added, to fill up the silence between them.

  Orson’s face was hard like old putty. ‘You have to come,’ he said.

  29

  ‘Say hello,’ said Orson.

  ‘Hello,’ Philip whispered. Whenever Orson bossed him about, he felt a strange kind of obedience come over him.

  ‘Hal’s a hero,’ Orson continued in his queer voice. ‘Shake his hand.’ On the other side of the room, Orson was lowering the needle on the Oswald Mosley phonograph.

  Philip approached Hal’s chair and tried to look him in the eye – but which eye? His right was fixed and dead, and the left rolled in an orbit of its own.

  ‘Hal’s home on leave,’ Orson said, even though it was clear for anyone to see that Hal, the real Hal, would never come home again.

  As if he’d overheard Philip’s thoughts, Hal’s mouth started to flap like a fish on a line.

  Philip turned, eyes wide. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Orson said. ‘It’s just what he does sometimes. Here, Hal, listen to this. Here’s our man in Worthing.’ Orson ran back and seated himself on the edge of the bed, grinning as the cheers from the crowd went up and Mosley’s euphonious tones filled the room. ‘He likes this bit’ – but Philip couldn’t see that Hal liked anything at all.

  ‘How do your parents get him into his chair?’

  ‘They pay a man to come twice a day. He’s very strong and he has a dog called Dirk. It was easier at my grandmother’s cottage, because the staircase wasn’t high, but my mother said we couldn’t carry on living on top of one another like that. On weekends the man comes more often. Then we wheel Hal about the lawns out back or sometimes as far as the Pavilion. When Hal’s hungry or thirsty, he moans a bit. When he needs the loo, he bangs the arm of his chair and we run for the bedpan.’

  Philip blushed for Hal. ‘What happens if there’s an alert?’

  ‘He has to stay up here and take his chances because there’s no getting him down without the man to help my father. My grandmother, who’s entirely batty now, said a direct hit would be a blessing, and that’s when my mother started to cry and said we were moving back to Brighton.’

  Orson jumped up just as suddenly as he had sat down, dashed to Hal’s desk and started to rummage. Now that the secret of Hal was out, he seemed as giddy as a girl. It was as if he were showing Hal off, like an exotic pet from the Wonder Book of Exotic Creatures. Hal was a capuchin monkey sitting up in a chair, or a ghost-faced lemur who had travelled in a cage from Madagascar.

  He started waving a photo in Hal’s face. ‘Here’s Jane, Hal. Remember Tarzan’s Jane? You like her, don’t you, Hal? Look, isn’t she nice? And here’s your Troubadour’s Cup. “Half a league, half a league,/Half a league onward,/All in the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred!” ’

  ‘He’s starting to cry, Orson.’

  ‘No, he just needs his drops. The doctor told us his tear ducts aren’t right because the bullet went right through the bridge of his nose. Lucky for him he can still see well enough through one eye. They had to leave the bullet in his brain because it was too dangerous to take out after all, but at least his hair’s grown all the way back, hasn’t it, Hal?’ He leaned towards his brother’s ear and shouted. ‘I say, Hal, your hair’s grown all the way back!’

  Philip wasn’t sure how he preferred Orson: quiet and sad, as when he’d appeared at the door, or oddly cheerful as now. ‘Don’t you think he’s tired, Orson? He looks tired to me. I should go.’

  ‘Don’t be a clot, Beaumont. He always looks like that, and you’ve only just arrived. Besides, Hal doesn’t get many visitors.’ He ran to the card table, lifted the needle on Mosley, and threw open the wardrobe’s doors. ‘Here! Look. Hal says you’re allowed. You can pop the special belt. Remember?’

  He remembered. But when had Hal said he was allowed? Hal wasn’t saying anything now, and, as Orson dangled the belt, its leather gleaming, its buckle shining, Philip knew it was wrong to take it, with Hal propped up in his chair and his arms and legs all wrong like a starfish.

  ‘Go on,’ said Orson. ‘Have a go.’

  The steel of the buckle was cool in his hand. ‘I like your belt,’ Philip croaked, and as he pressed the button on the back, he felt the pleasure of the studs as they popped at his will.

  ‘Now, Beaumont. The belt is yours for today. And this is mine …’ He bounced the silk stocking with the foot full of crushed glass. ‘Hal gets this.’ He popped the old Luftwaffe helmet on to Hal’s tipsy head. ‘ Righty- ho.’

  ‘Righty-ho?’ said Philip.

  ‘Righty-ho,’ said Orson. ‘Hal gets to go first.’

  Geoffrey stood at the kitchen door, blowing smoke into the evening air. The long shadows of the trees in the Park were melting into twilight, and as he looked out, he could almost see it: innocence, the last of their innocence as a couple, slipping darkly, abjectly, out of the day. ‘I’ve ended it. I don’t know how many times I can say it.’

  ‘It’s not only what you’ve done … It’s what you won’t not stoop to do.’ She listened to herself. How impassioned she sounded. Yet it was only a line she had rehearsed in her head weeks ago. She didn’t care, she didn’t care. In truth she felt only a cool, hard resignation. ‘Are you sure the ambulance is on its way to the Camp?’

  ‘He will get hospital treatment tonight. Rest assured there will be no distinguishing Otto Gottlieb from one of the noble wounded. Now let that be an end to it.’

  His tone brought her round, sharp as smelling salts. ‘Good God. This war, this wretched war, has gone to your head.’

  ‘Perhaps you would rather I’d buried it in the sand.’

  ‘Everything has been taken from those men, and yet you lock away instruments and … and books! What end could that possibly serve?’

  He dropped his cigarette outside the door and turned to her. ‘It is a labour camp, Evvie. A labour camp. I am not proud of it. I dread the days I have to be there. But you know as well as I do that I don’t make the rules.’

  ‘No, you
only follow them, slavishly. What possible reason could there be to –?’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  She turned, aghast. ‘So inquires the man who keeps a mistress in London!’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘You’re ashamed!’ She could hear herself, acid and shrill.

  ‘Of course I’m ashamed! And Philip is upstairs.’ He slammed the back door and dropped into a chair.

  ‘I have to leave …’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Whatever are you talking about?’

  ‘Leave. I have to leave here.’ She spoke – or rather the words emerged from her – but inside she was dumb and reeling. Because it was with her still, that smell, the woman’s scent on his jacket, in his hair. And the pills … buried just outside. Foul treasure. The bodies, she’d heard, exuded the smell of bitter almonds.

  ‘I’ll sleep at Number 5 tonight. I have the key. It’s straightforward enough.’ Did the war taint everything finally, everything, even this little life?

  ‘Do I so repel you?’

  ‘I shan’t leave of course until Philip is in bed, and I’ll be back in the morning before he wakes. If the alert goes, I’ll come back for him immediately.’ Would she go? she wondered. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Nothing really mattered. That was the truth of it all. Everything these days was words, words. And lies.

  She looked up and called through the ceiling – ‘Philip!’ – for there was still the faint, almost illusory notion of dinner to see to; of hands to be washed; of his uniform to be tried for the new term – ‘Philip!’ Of this little life.

  Orson squeezed himself into the space beneath Hal’s desk. ‘Right,’ he ordered, ‘now push Hal’s chair in front of me so you can’t see me at all.’

  ‘I should go home …’ said Philip, wheeling Hal over to the desk.

  ‘Can you see me at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is the handbrake on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the helmet? Is the helmet still on Hal’s head?’

  ‘Yes.’