Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  ‘Then we can begin.’

  ‘My parents don’t know I’m here.’

  ‘Excellent.’ He peered out from behind Hal’s chair. ‘That was me speaking, incidentally, not Hal. Now it’s Hal.’

  He cleared his throat and deepened his voice. ‘It is a sunny day when I’m decorated for bravery on the Pavilion lawns under the big bandstand. Hitler pins the medal to my chest. Then he pounds me on my back, and all the people clap, and I am wheeled inside the Pavilion. There are musicians and servants and drinks trays and flowers everywhere. Oswald Mosley is there already and Lord Haw-Haw. Everyone shakes my hand, then we drink Pimm’s and stuff ourselves with cucumber sandwiches and –’

  ‘Orson.’

  ‘Hal.’

  ‘No, Orson.’

  Orson’s head appeared. ‘What?’

  ‘Hal’s eyes are leaking again.’

  Orson crawled out from the desk space and looked into his brother’s face. ‘Hello, old egg. Everything all right?’

  But things weren’t all right and they never would be again. Hal was moaning and beating the arms of his chair.

  ‘Does that mean he’s hungry or that he needs the loo?’ whispered Philip.

  ‘Hal, quiet now … Ssshhh …’ Orson murmured gently, more gently than Philip would ever have thought possible. ‘It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here, Hal. Me. Orson.’

  Hal’s starfish legs started to kick and spasm, and if Orson’s face had ever had any natural colour in it, it left him now.

  ‘What is it, Hal? What is it?’

  But Hal was in the grip of something dreadful, an arm-to-arm, leg-to-leg combat with an invisible enemy.

  ‘His lips are turning blue,’ breathed Philip. ‘I’ll call your mother.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Orson said in a steely voice. ‘She’ll just cry. That’s all she does. He goes like this sometimes. Almost never. But sometimes.’ He swallowed hard, got hold of one of Hal’s shaking, man-sized hands and pressed it tightly between his own. For long, shuddering minutes, he held tight to his brother’s hand until Hal’s tremors subsided. When he finally let go, he went on trembling for a moment himself, as if caught by the tail end of Hal’s storm.

  ‘Would he like a glass of water?’ whispered Philip.

  ‘We have to make Hal happy,’ Orson said, and his voice went queer again, as if he were speaking from inside a dream. ‘We really do.’

  Philip pushed his fists deep into his pockets. A sadness like he’d never known was inching up inside him, little by little, like water in one of Houdini’s tanks. He felt for Hal. It was terrible to be somebody who only made your mother cry. He thought he understood, and that paralysed him even more.

  ‘You have to help, Beaumont.’

  He wanted to help. ‘Let’s push his chair to the window. Let’s get him some air.’

  But Orson didn’t release the handbrake. ‘He doesn’t want air. Hal is a Second Lieutenant. He saved an entire rifle section of men in France. He doesn’t just want air.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘Want?’ Orson turned the word over in his mouth. ‘Why, Hal wants a Jew, of course.’

  The sadness was filling him up. ‘Don’t be daft.’

  But the spell of Orson’s voice wouldn’t stop: ‘That’s what he wants … We have to get Hal a Jew.’

  ‘A Jew for what? I don’t know what you mean and, besides, I have to go home now.’

  Orson was wiping Hal’s face with his hankie. ‘If it weren’t for the Jews, there wouldn’t be a war, and if there weren’t a war, Hal wouldn’t be … this way.’ He turned slowly back to Philip. He was crying now, from inside his dream. Snotty tears were streaming down his face. ‘Tell Hal you’ll help.’

  ‘Get one how?’

  ‘You have to tell him.’ Orson wiped away his tears and turned to his brother.

  ‘But I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Will you help or won’t you?’

  The helmet sat jauntily on Hal’s crooked head. The secret belt and the stocking lay at Philip’s feet. He looked at the ceiling, then at the door, then at Orson. His heart was balled up like an old sock in his throat.

  He looked into Hal’s fixed blue eye and nodded.

  30

  Across Brighton, the raids had quietened and, by late August, life seemed almost languid again. Men played patient rounds of cricket on The Level, couples lounged on the Pavilion lawns, and a weekend parade of elephants marched up Grand Parade led by waving, sequinned girls.

  Philip was eating a plum at the table on the terrace. His father was at a meeting at the Camp. His mother sat beside him, with her cup and saucer, her book, and his name tag to stitch to his new school blazer. Plum juice dribbled pleasurably down his chin. The sky over the Park was a ribbon of blue and, at first, it was only as if pins had pricked the fabric of the day. Tiny marks. He shielded his eyes to stare. Then a column of planes burst out of the sky.

  He stumbled to his feet, knocking his mother’s cup to the terrace where it smashed, but his mother was stuck to her chair, her astonished face turned to the sky. Plane after plane after plane. A swarm of fighters and bombers. The roar of their blaze filled the world.

  Why wasn’t she moving? They needed to run down the terrace stairs, through the scullery door and out the other side to the coal cupboard beneath the street. But his mother only stared as the enemy planes sawed the air overhead, splitting the sky so fiercely in their flight it was as if Heaven and all of its dead would come falling through.

  She pulled him close to her. Her cheek was wet against his. ‘Poor London,’ she murmured, and he looked up too, marvelling, trembling and willing all at once. Yes, keep going, keep going, get London, not us.

  Day after day, twilight came, the gulls went mad and, within minutes, the planes appeared, roaring over the cliffs of Sussex like grievous angels.

  Life was a long, clenched vigil; a shuddering climax endlessly delayed. In The Times, Anthony Eden warned that the threat of an invasion by sea was ‘acute’. In Germany, Radio Bremen reported that ‘Hitler may at any hour give orders for the invasion to begin.’ On the six o’clock news, Churchill himself reported that invasion plans were moving steadily forward. There were rumours of an invasion attempt withstood at sea, though Geoffrey’s own sources couldn’t agree the location or the number of ships involved. The following week, it seemed they were spared again; the invaders, they were told, had turned back for the coast of France after encountering high winds in the Channel.

  The beaches were only as ready as they would ever be. Army wagons rumbled up and down the Lewes Road, day and night. Geoffrey had his military travel pass and papers on him at all times, for any day now, at any moment, he might be required to leave. A packed suitcase waited under his desk at the Camp; another sat behind the door of his office at the Bank; a third in the under-stairs cupboard at the house. He and his small team at the Bank had rehearsed their departure each Tuesday for months, and he had long ago resigned himself to that dreadful day – to the slow tolling of the church bells and the agony of departure, to the panic on the streets as he made his way to the station. But now, little by little, in one form or another, Evelyn was leaving him. He had prepared for every eventuality but that.

  What was worse, he had no idea what to do or how to bring her back. And so, in spite of every plan, he could no more contemplate leaving her than he could erase his memory of the first time he saw her, under that paper lantern, her eyes brighter than he’d known eyes could be.

  Of course she was no longer that girl. He was no longer that unhappy young man who’d felt redeemed by her arrival that summer’s night. A single moment couldn’t ultimately matter. What was it compared to the span of a marriage and its undoing? Yet there in the dark of his office, on the grim edge of a camp dedicated to the manufacture of gun emplacements, with the sickening drone of the first planes of the night already in his ears, that thin, fleeting, first moment overwhelmed him again. He’d risked too much to be with Lea
h, more than he’d dared imagine. But in the moment he’d given her up, the knowledge of what he stood to lose had suddenly loomed. If he lost Evelyn, he’d lose his world.

  AUTUMN

  31

  In those weeks, bombs dropped like the leaves of autumn. Edward Street was hit. The Lewes Road. The streets of Whitehawk.

  Yet, after the nightly pounding of London, these attacks were afterthoughts only. Leftover bombs were surplus weight to be tipped by enemy pilots before the long journey home.

  For those on the ground, week after week, sleep was fitful and the days were drowsy. Then, on a golden afternoon in mid-September, the Odeon Cinema took a hit in the broad light of day. The town staggered.

  From every side of Brighton – north, south, east, west – people gathered on The Level to hear the reports. Tins rattled for donations. The muffin men called. A man with a sunburned face declaimed from the Book of Revelation. Gypsies read palms by the public loos. It was a morbid, confused carnival, and the tattered news of the day blew in like litter across the green.

  A matinee. Dozens dead. Fifty dead. Hundreds dead. Many more injured. Children. Their parents. Gone. All before Saturday teatime.

  The projectionist had been blinded by flying glass.

  It had taken an eternity for anyone to find the lights.

  The screams, they said, were heard as far as the seafront.

  St George’s Road, Lavender Street, Essex Street, all along to Bedford Street – wrecked.

  Philip and Orson were meandering through the crowd, marvelling at calamity, when Philip’s heart jumped.

  ‘Frank!’ He couldn’t help himself. ‘Frank! Frank, it’s me, Philip!’ He sprinted away, running after a tall, lanky figure in the crowd. Orson squinted after.

  At the boating pond, Frank Dunn stopped at last, but his eyes couldn’t seem to focus.

  ‘Frank, it’s me, Philip.’

  ‘Phil?’ he said, blinking.

  Should he say …? ‘You have blood on your jacket, Frank.’

  ‘Tubby’s mate?’

  He nodded, braced for Frank’s anger because he’d left Tubby without a good friend in the world. But Frank didn’t look angry. He looked busy. He kept reaching for something in his pocket over and over again.

  ‘Are you bleeding, Frank?’ he tried again. ‘I thought you might be bleeding.’

  Orson came up from behind, grinding a blackjack between his jaws. ‘Orson Stewart-Forbes,’ he said, offering the cornet of sweets.

  Frank stared over their heads, searching the crowd.

  ‘This is Frank,’ Philip said to Orson. ‘Frank Dunn. Tubby’s – Norman’s – brother.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Orson. ‘Yes, I remember …’ He looked at the state of Frank’s shirt. ‘A jolly good thing your mother is a laundress.’

  Frank had dark rings under his eyes and his skin was grey like ash. ‘We ran out of room, Phil.’

  ‘Ran out of room where, Frank? Have a sweet. The pear drops are nice.’

  ‘Sister said we had to take ’em out by trolley, tip ’em on to a stretcher in the mort, then plant ’em in the barrow out back in the yard. But the barrow was filling up and the ambulance wasn’t coming, and that first one, bloody hell, she was heavier than she looked. ’Cos I’ve only ever carried the sick, haven’t I? Not the stone dead.’ He started turning his pockets out.

  ‘I had the legs end and me mate, ’e had her head, but the blanket kept slipping. “Don’t look down,”’e said, like you tell someone when they’re standing on a ledge. ’Cos her legs, she had no stockings on, and they were pale. All pasty coloured. I never seen a colour like that.’

  ‘Frank works as a porter at the Royal Sussex,’ Philip added for Orson’s benefit.

  ‘The back part of her left leg was shattered at the knee. It was –’

  ‘Horrid,’ said Orson.

  ‘Meat,’ said Frank. ‘Just meat. Then we nipped back inside, stuffed some corpses closer together on the floor and cleared up to make room for the others that were coming in. But nobody comes for a while, not after the first rush, and a sort of disappointment hits us. We’re pacing up and down in the yard, getting hot and bothered, and the more bothered I get, the more I think about Lorraine, my girl, and wonder where she is, ’cos her ol’ gran lives that way, on Lavender Street, doesn’t she, and I’m wondering if she, Lorraine I mean, is okay. Except the truth is, I’m not worrying ’bout her, Phil, not like I should be, I’m imagining her looking like those people, like Lorraine, but like Lorraine as meat, and Phil – Phil? – be a good lad and go pinch us a gasper.’

  Philip and Orson stared. Frank’s hands were trembling like someone had them on strings.

  Orson made a sharp movement with his head, which meant, Leave him now.

  ‘I have to go, Frank. But would you say hello to Tubby for me?’

  ‘Tubby’s in hospital.’

  The bottom fell out of Philip’s stomach. ‘Right now?’

  Frank nodded and looked away, and it all came rushing in. Tubby had no one. Tubby had had to go to a matinee on a Saturday instead of stopping out to play. If it hadn’t been for the Pier that evening, thought Philip, and the lock-up and his father forbidding him from seeing Tubby, and him agreeing because he didn’t want his father to tell his mother, Tubby would never have been at the Odeon, watching that film. They would have been out together, like every Saturday before.

  ‘He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?’ He waited for the answer like a fist to his face.

  The muffin men were shouting. Up ahead, a woman was sobbing. Philip opened his eyes at last and saw Frank’s eyes trained on an old gent who was lighting up a few feet away. Frank spoke too slowly. ‘Should think so, Phil. After he’s scrubbed down … Caught it in the shelter, the quack says. Scabies.’

  Orson leaned in close, so close Philip could feel his breath against his ear. ‘See?’ he said. ‘What did I tell you? Dirty, dirty.’ In his eyes, the blue gaslight flared.

  32

  The nights were drawing in. It had taken an age to come. October the 16th. Now, at last, over three hundred men gathered in the stands. Most of them hadn’t seen moonlight in months, except through painted windows, but that evening, the full moon over the Camp seemed bigger than the blackout. He’d timed it right.

  I’ll give you the grandstand, he’d said to her once, and tonight he needed his plan to work, more than he’d ever needed a plan to work before. He escorted her from his office at the last possible moment. ‘Is it bad news?’ she asked him. ‘Has something terrible happened?’ She hated the place. She’d refused at first to go. ‘Why? What is it? What aren’t you telling me? Has another man died up there, Geoffrey?’

  Earlier that day, he’d thought they’d never get the Steinway up the hill but somehow it had been accomplished. A few of the men had knocked together a rough stage. A piano-tuner had appeared. New turf was laid over the finishing straight in front of the grandstand. There was no rain in the forecast. Even in mid-October, summer hadn’t released them from its hot grip.

  They took their seats. A gull let out a long, plaintive cry overhead.

  When the first notes from the piano spilled into the atmosphere, her eyes still hadn’t adjusted, and she couldn’t see the source. She turned to him, helpless, bereft, at the adagio’s slow lament, as if he, Geoffrey, were taunting her in some way; as if it could only be a trick, a phonograph, a bone to a dog.

  Then the marbled clouds drew back to reveal the moon, and the piano itself seemed to rise, like a black, white-capped wave. A refugee called Eli played tenderly, in spite of a hand damaged by frostbite. In the wide night, there was only the full moon, the grave piano and, minutes later, the reprieve of the violins. Two prisoners from Italy bowed the darkness.

  In the stands behind them, the prisoners went still.

  Evelyn gasped, craning forward. Nor did she flinch as he reached for her hand, and he felt he might have wept.

  All the while, far below, the sea hypnotized the stony shore and, in
the rear of the benches, Otto Gottlieb – returned from hospital and from death a second time – let his eyes linger on the sight of her.

  Her arms were bare and, leaning forward as she listened, she stroked her forearms and idly touched her own cheeks and lips in the way women often do at the theatre, lost to the world around them even as they draw the attention of it. Her hair was pinned up. The nape of her neck was white and fine in the moonlight. He heard again her reading to him through that screen, the beautiful resonance of her voice … How rare, though, were glimpses of her face.

  He’d seen her properly on her first visit in July, as she’d stood at the end of Mr Pirazzini’s bed, though the sight of her there, that day, had irritated him, and he had deliberately looked away. Later during her visit, she’d pivoted on her chair, apparently affronted by his smile, and the indignation of her face had been, he’d convinced himself at the time, unattractive.

  At the standpipe, on the day of Mr Pirazzini’s death, he’d been granted her profile only, a glimpse stolen. Literally, stolen … Otherwise that day, he could only curse the screen that concealed her.

  Turn, turn, he willed her now. But she didn’t turn, nor did she at any point that evening. Of course she didn’t.

  He saw the Superintendent reach for her hand, and closed his eyes, breathing as if music were air.

  To every man and woman listening that night, nothing had ever sounded sweeter or more stark. It hollowed them out. It recast them. As the nightly procession of planes stormed in off the Channel, Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ climbed high into the atmosphere over Race Hill.

  Only much later, as the men filed back to their barracks, did Geoffrey lead her up, up, up through the stands to a narrow side staircase and from there, through a hatch on to the grandstand’s roof.

  Its expanse lay incandescent beneath the moon. A breeze stirred the night. The music still conjured their senses. On top of that grandstand, on top of a sea-lit cliff, it was as if they floated peacefully in a phosphorescent tide, he in his pale linen suit and she in a light summer dress she hadn’t yet packed away for autumn.