Unexploded
Page 22
The Bishop offered to find child models from the parish.
He fled the place.
Later that same November day, summoned to the Camp’s HQ, he found, not the Superintendent and his disapproval, but the Bishop alone at a salt-smeared window, taking in the view. ‘Is it a fear of heights?’ he asked, without turning. ‘The dimensions are for you to say. It is for you to decide how to use that space. If not the Lady Chapel, something less large scale.’
If he knew, Otto thought, he wouldn’t let me anywhere near his church.
‘Perhaps it’s the location? A church? I assumed you were a secular Jew, but if I have offended –’
He shook his head. ‘It really isn’t a matter to concern –’
‘Then it can only be the theme.’ Bell turned. ‘I chose it for the Lady Chapel because St Wilfred’s is a parish with many young families. It is the moment of course when Christ says to the Apostles that the children gathered must be allowed to go to him; that they mustn’t be kept away. No doubt you know the story. But you must name your subject.’
How could he say that there was nothing more he could actually say? He thanked the Bishop again and turned to go.
‘Mr Gottlieb, please. I need an artist, and I believe you need not to be smashing limestone over a long winter. I ask you to put whatever reservations you have aside. You owe me absolutely nothing but –’ Here, Bell produced an envelope, a single sheet of notepaper and a yellowed newspaper cutting from his pocket. He laid all three on the desk. ‘But I believe the author of this letter took considerable risks – considerable personal risks – to send it; to ensure, not only that you would live, but that you would paint. The letter was opened, Mr Gottlieb, and resealed before it left Germany, which is troubling of course.’ He looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I feel we must both persist for her. I feel you must accept this commission for her.’
Klara.
And again he was at the table in the courtyard at 142 Auguststrasse, the sun on his face and her aged, girlish laughter sweet in his ears. He wanted to rail at her for mixing her fate up in his. He wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss it.
‘There must be a subject, Otto – if I may? Some Old Testament story you would like to reinterpret, to make your own. I’m only a churchman, not an artist, but I refuse to believe there isn’t something you wouldn’t like to paint. She’ – and he tapped the letter on the desk – ‘she refuses to believe there isn’t something.’
And he saw her once more: the Superintendent’s wife at the standpipe.
She hadn’t been well that hot August day. She’d only just discovered the tailor’s deathbed. The heat had been stifling. Her voice had grown fainter. They had been talking through the screen when he heard her, retching suddenly on the other side. She’d run, stumbling from the infirmary, and he’d managed to heave himself from his bed.
When he looked down the slope at the back of the hut, he saw her, rinsing her mouth at a tap and spitting, over and over again. The infirmary was isolated, at the far end of the Camp. There was only the ocean behind her, and he was, as far as she knew, in his bed, behind a screen. Water pooled over her shoes. He heard her swear. Then she unbuttoned her blouse hurriedly, cast it to the ground, and pulled her slip down as far as the band of her skirt.
He watched her splash water over her throat and chest. Her back was vulnerably pale in the afternoon light. He could see the labour of her ribs; the curve of her neck as she lifted her hair; the small of her back; her breasts, delicate as blossom. She bent low to the tap and let the water run down her face, and finally, he made himself turn away.
When she returned, he was where she expected him to be. She sounded fragile but better. ‘Please, you’re quite welcome,’ he called, ‘to pull your chair to this side!’ He’d tried to sound offhand, carefree, but he’d felt his eyes screw up tight with hope. His heart ticked. Would she stay? He almost thanked God, a god, some god, when he heard her chair scrape across the lino – though she would come no closer than the other side of that miserable screen.
He hadn’t seen her since that afternoon, not unless he counted the glimpses of her at the concert over a month ago – in their grandstand box, craning forward to see, and later, on its high white roof with her husband under October’s full moon. It had run him through.
Now, in the Superintendent’s dingy office, he met the Bishop’s eye. ‘The choice is mine, you say …?’
‘Entirely,’ said George Bell, ‘though if you could rule out the story of Sodom and Gomorrah or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I’d be most grateful.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll need to approve the sketches, but that is all.’
‘Bathsheba,’ he said to the Bishop. ‘Bathsheba, David and Uriah.’
George Bell picked up Klara’s letter off the desk and passed it to him. His features softened. ‘I believe she approves.’
David, King of Israel, arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of his house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and inquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
It was all there between those lines, Otto realized. Bathsheba’s beauty had seduced King David, he would seduce her, and life would never be easy again.
The fresco would be monumental but intimate. Familiar but dreamlike. Of the moment but – could he do it? – timeless.
And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.
He could still see Bathsheba at Her Bath on the wall of the Louvre. King David’s letter lay in her lap. In Rembrandt’s story, it has travelled first to her. He has altered the story in this one aspect. So too did his countryman Govert Flinck in his version. She contemplates the letter as she bathes, and in this way, is implicated. Half guilty. She loves her husband but, week after week, he will not go to their bed. He sleeps among servants rather than go to her. She loves him but now, she also loves the King, whose child she carries.
She does as the King asks. She seals the letter and passes it to Uriah to pass to Joab. Unwittingly, Uriah will deliver his own death warrant. In her heart, full and heavy, Bathsheba wills him leave her. She wills him to war.
In this century, Otto told himself, Bathsheba’s bath is a rough standpipe on a mean slope. It can only be a rough standpipe on a mean slope. She is beautiful but small, slim – ‘rationed’ rather than full-figured. A half-nude in profile. He can see the composition fully, blazingly, in his mind’s eye. On the central wall, Bathsheba has pulled her slip down as far as her skirt. Her skin is pearly, lustrous. In the sky overhead, fine vapour trails loop madly with razor wire. To her left, on the adjacent wall, David, the King of Israel, is a Jewish prisoner. He is wounded. His king’s cape is a regulation blanket clutched across emaciated shoulders.
The war has never stopped, Otto told himself. It is only our parts that change without reason or warning.
On the third wall, to the right of Bathsheba, Uriah, her husband, stands tall in a linen suit on the roof of the grandstand – for the high roof belongs to him and not to David in this century. The letter of war peeks out over his breast pocket. In the lower foreground, small groups of his prisoners smash limestone. He watches a dogfight in the sky overhead through binoculars, but he is looking in the wrong direction. He does not see his wife washing at the standpipe. He does not see the man who watches her.
Each of their three faces is turned from view or obscured.
Only the light off the Channel, he thought, forgives them.
35
Sylvia’s mother-in-law’s house was tucked away in a secluded valley in the North Downs. ‘Come!’ Sylvia had insisted. ‘We’ll have the run of the place. Martha is doolally and with us in town these days, but Tom still can’t bear to part with the old hea
p. I expect that when London is lost, he’ll insist we maroon ourselves out here.’ She raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘I’ll kill myself, of course.’
It was dark so early these days. How long, Evelyn wondered, had the two of them been sitting there in what Sylvia called ‘the nook’? The teapot was cold, the spiky heads of the teasels in the vase on the hearth seemed to be blackening with the heat, and little by little, the fire and the spectacle of each log’s collapse was overcoming her like a drug.
‘You do still love him, Evvie …’
She couldn’t be sure if Sylvia was asking her or assuring her, and for a fraction of a moment, a moment that arrived like an illicit gift, she felt the relief of simply giving up. Love whom?
When she looked up, Sylvia was beating back her mother-in-law’s Pekingese with the fat roll of The Times. The dog would neither stop begging nor yapping, yet she felt strangely, pleasantly detached. She watched as Sylvia bent down and surrendered to the thing an entire plate of biscuits. ‘Fortnum & Mason’s,’ Sylvia declared. ‘That should shut it up.’
‘She’ll be sick.’
‘Well, it’s either that or ring that nice man the taxidermist.’ Sylvia gave a nod to the stag’s head on the wall, threw another log on the fire, and sank back in her chair. ‘Do you still love him, Evvie?’
She blinked, shaking out her hair, as if she’d been caught in a sudden shower. ‘I must … Or I will again.’ And she meant it. Since the concert in the Camp and his small displays of tenderness, something – a warmth of some kind, or the memory of it – had been restored. She no longer seemed to recoil at his touch, and not only because she was too weary to sustain any pitch of feeling. No one belonged only to themselves, after all. Compromise made life possible.
So why then at night did her thoughts bolt? It is too hard between us, Geoffrey. You don’t love me. Not truly. Roll up the razor wire. Roll back the oil drums. Let them land on the beach. Give every invader a stick of Brighton rock and a souvenir postcard. Get the orchestra back on the West Pier. Muster up a fanfare and go. Go off to your war … Because it’s time. Surely for the two of us, it’s time.
Over the ruins of their tea, Sylvia lit a cigarette and chattered on. She and Tom had been at the Café de Paris the night before. Vivien and Larry were out and married at last – no longer a scandal. ‘So that was dull. But Vivien had the appetite of a wolfhound. Who would think to look at her? She ate oysters by the plateful and then an entire Steak Diane. When the waiters flambéed the thing at their table, you’d have thought it was Atlanta burning all over again. Why, I’ve never seen such shameless over-acting.’ Sylvia tapped ash into a cut-glass vase. ‘Someone had to upstage her.’
Evelyn smiled. She felt herself coming to. ‘You are incorrigible.’
‘Me? I simply danced a dance with a beautiful woman in a dinner jacket, and it seems that no man there, including Olivier, could take his eyes off us.’
‘Tom included?’
‘No man except Tom of course. He removed himself to the Gents, where he read his daily stack of memoranda, I expect. He loves and deplores the bohemian in me in equal measure. But he always forgives me, because that is what we do, isn’t it, darling girl?’ She drew hard on her cigarette. ‘Now tell me, who was Geoffrey’s woman?’
‘I don’t have the faintest,’ she said. Her own voice sounded strange to her. ‘Someone in London.’
‘No.’ Sylvia stabbed at the fire with the poker. ‘Tom would have said. He and Geoffrey have their drink every Wednesday at the Traveller’s Club, on The Mall, then Geoffrey goes direct to the station.’
‘Tom wants to spare me, I imagine.’
‘Possibly, but he wouldn’t spare me. There wasn’t a woman in London, not unless Geoffrey was suddenly taking a later train home. There wouldn’t have been the time, not between the Traveller’s and his arrival back to you.’
‘Well there was a woman. He confessed as much.’ Brighton then. She had to shut her eyes, force the images back – and the smell of that scent.
‘Evvie, darling’ – Sylvia pushed the tea things out of the way with one sweep of an elegant arm – ‘these things mean nothing, you know.’ She leaned across the table. ‘I mean, they mean nothing to them.’
She felt the line of her mouth harden. ‘Of course not.’ It wouldn’t do to sound like a child.
‘So you’ve forgiven him?’
She forced a laugh. Then suddenly, overwhelmingly, she understood. For all of Sylvia’s displays of nonchalance and uncon-ventionality, she was on a mission. She had commiserated. She had displayed indignation and sympathy. Now she was telling her, in the tone of her voice, in the blue-grey slate of her gaze, that it was time to accept. To behave. To toe the line. That was why it had had to be a weekend visit. In the country. With neither escape nor diversion. ‘Do you think Sylvia might have a word?’ Geoffrey would have said to Tom. ‘Darling’ – Tom to Sylvia – ‘would you mind speaking with Evelyn when the time is right?’
‘Have you, Evvie? Forgiven him.’
‘I haven’t sued for divorce yet, if that’s what you mean!’
Sylvia eased herself back in her chair, removed a book from the bookcase, and withdrew a slim bottle of gin. ‘Sweetie, you know very well that’s not what I asked.’
The Unit had had to burn out all vegetation and roots before digging the shafts down. Now, only the white wooden marker of the UXB cross remained, ghostly among the blackened stumps of the trees and hedges.
It was one of those November days, Geoffrey thought, when the sun was destined never to appear. A staff sergeant stood solemnly at the opening to the main shaft, intent on his listening equipment. Geoffrey, an official observer, stood at the edge of the blighted field as the Lieutenant updated him. It was day three. They’d located the thing at last. The sterilizer was on standby. A block and tackle had been slung over the joist of a neighbouring house. They had their removal lorry at the ready – a cattle truck the Army had commandeered. Early that morning, as they’d driven it through the town, the men on the squad had poked their heads through its bars and mooed at the Saturday shoppers. Now, in the gloom of Shaft 3, forty feet underground, two of them were trying to fit a clock-stopper to the belly of a bomb.
It wasn’t only a matter of extracting a ticking fuse, which was hellish enough, said Lowell. Now the fuses themselves were booby-trapped with wire-sprung switches. Even if their clocks were stopped, they could still blow if moved. In one test, a pencil tap on the bomb case had set the thing off.
Every house and shop within a radius of eight hundred feet had been cleared. Traffic had been stopped. The depth of a bomb, Lowell mumbled, depended on the soil. Clay offered greater resistance to the bomb but it also made ‘the dig’ more difficult. If the disposal crew weren’t blown sky-high, they could still be buried alive.
The Army was low on timber for shoring up the shafts. They’d had to forage in bombed-out houses for floorboards and doors. Worse still, the war effort couldn’t spare trained sappers. Lowell had to make do with retired soldiers, young men deemed unfit for ordinary duties, a watchmaker and a pair of gravediggers. They worked in relays of two for twenty minutes apiece to minimize the risk. Remarkable men, Lowell said.
The month before, he’d lost ten in one blow. Bomb Disposal Section 28. He went to check the time on his right arm, then remembered it wasn’t there. His sleeve dangled uselessly. ‘Almost dark and not yet half past three.’
Those who waited their turn to go into the shaft seemed neither white-faced with nerves nor grim with resignation. Geoffrey watched them. They didn’t appear to be gathering up memories of a first kiss or their father’s hands or a child’s sleeping face. They looked bright-eyed; their pupils were wide, their cheeks ruddy, like men in love. Like men on the edge of something.
He envied them that. In their company, he felt inert and unformed, a cipher, while they moved through the November gloom and across the wasted field with a strange grace, like men half made of light.
*
Philip scooped charcoal out of the Park’s bonfire pit. Orson arrived with a mortar and pestle and the two packets he’d lied for at the chemist’s: flowers of sulphur (for his brother’s boils) and salt-petre (so his mother could cure a side of pork). Philip fetched his father’s box of matches from the mantel. Orson produced the special ingredient: cordite strips extracted from bullets and sold for tuppence a piece behind the bicycle shed at the Grammar.
The case was a sardine tin. Orson had soaked the fuse in saltpetre overnight.
The day was overcast and grim. The Park was empty. No one was about. Clarence was asleep in his annual hibernation.
Orson examined him. ‘His shell is as good as a bunker. Besides, all his bits are tucked in.’
Philip agreed that they were. The idea was to measure Clarence’s flight-path.
It was louder and brighter than they’d expected. The horseshoe shrubbery exploded, and it seemed like a dream. Then Clarence was in pieces, Philip was crying, and Orson told him there wasn’t time for that. Nothing made sense. Orson started to run. Philip had never seen him run before. When he returned, it was with the box that had been Clarence’s bed. It always sat next to Mrs Dalrymple’s scullery wall.
Orson started to dig in the ground with his hands.
Philip shivered. ‘That’s the turnip plot.’
‘So?’
‘So people will dig for turnips.’
Back on the Beaumonts’ terrace, Orson pointed to the spade that was stuck upright in the soil. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Deep enough so your parents won’t find it.’ But Philip didn’t move – he couldn’t make himself – so Orson sighed and reached for the spade himself. When the spade hit metal, his eyes popped behind his glasses.
MCDOUGALLS SELF-RAISING FLOUR. FOR PASTRIES, CAKES, SCONES, PANCAKES & BOILED PUDDINGS.
Philip took it from him. ‘It’s not yours.’