Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  ‘I can never draw a Spitfire.’ He clutched his sketchbook to him.

  ‘They are tricky … I may be able to assist. But first, you must tell me your name.’

  ‘Philip,’ said Philip. He reached into his pocket and held out a boiled sweet. ‘Have it. I don’t mind.’

  And Otto saw again the small red lozenge stuck to Jakob’s clenched, dead palm.

  4 0

  The borders of Otto’s world were narrow, but he took a grim comfort in that. He travelled only between the Crescent – the back of it – and St Wilfred’s, with forays into town to look for work. Employment was the challenge, a greater one than he’d anticipated. The theatre that had once employed him to paint sets was shut for the war. The owner of the camouflage factory had regarded him warily. One of the painters working on the Pavilion, repairing the blast damage, knew that he’d been imprisoned at the Camp. Brighton was a small town. Small towns the world over were suspicious. Small towns awaiting invasion were hostile.

  He ate once a day at the soup kitchen. Most days passed in the wide loneliness of the church’s nave. Winter eased. Spring took delicate hold. He saw no one except for the boy, who arrived almost daily at the back door with his sketchbook.

  She appeared in April.

  He was returning after another failed effort at job-seeking and considered avoiding her – turning the corner or dashing across the road – for she seemed to emerge from another realm and the distance between their worlds was painful. How exotic her happiness seemed. How blind. Yet when she spotted him, there on a mundane street, below the brick face of the Technical College, he suddenly felt it was possible to die from the want of her – he who knew death as more than a lover’s convention; he who knew its terrible intimacy with life; its brute weight; the body carried from the Camp’s gallows.

  She wore her hair pinned back and rolled. A small ridiculous hat sat on her head at an unnatural angle, defying gravity. Her hat, her bag and shoes matched. She looked prettily, predictably bourgeois. Something had happened to her. This wasn’t a woman who would be seen carrying bags of books or walking up hills to labour camps or stripping off her stockings in the heat of the day. Yet however well she’d disguised herself, she couldn’t hide her pleasure at the sight of him.

  ‘Otto!’

  He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Mrs Beaumont.’

  ‘Evelyn!’

  ‘Of course.’ He nodded solemnly. He must have looked to her like a pauper.

  ‘How goes the fresco?’

  ‘Well,’ he nodded. ‘Yes. Thank you …’

  Her face was heavily powdered. Her lips were crimson. ‘I hope Geoffrey and I will be invited to the private view?’

  Was it irony? ‘I don’t think so … I mean, I don’t expect there will be one. A church … Wartime …’ He smiled at the pavement. ‘A Jew …’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ She blushed and turned her face to the sky. ‘Glorious weather.’

  ‘Yes.’ How long before he could take his leave?

  ‘Though the nights,’ she added, ‘are still very cool.’

  The weather. She spoke to him of the weather. Could the injury be any worse?

  ‘With winter past, no doubt we shall have to ready ourselves again.’

  ‘Shall we?’ He hoped that was a drop of rain.

  ‘For the invasion,’ she said. ‘The crossing …’

  ‘Of course.’ He kept a straight face. ‘Those Germans.’

  She caught her lip in her teeth and smiled. ‘I wonder if you can guess where I’m going.’

  ‘To read at someone?’

  She laughed, and he wished that he could pluck it from the air between them, the music of her.

  April blossom drifted at their feet. A tram went ringing and dinging past. The silence after it passed left him mournful.

  At length, she looked up, as if a decision had been made; a gamble, calculated. ‘Tell me, Otto. May I borrow you for an hour or so?’

  Inside the lecture theatre, the omnipresent porter motioned them down the steps. The rows of neat heads descended in tiers. The oversized chart of the Periodic Table was as certain as ever, and their host, once more, presided gloomily.

  Mr Hatchett sat midway along. She nodded to him as they passed. ‘My butcher,’ she said to Otto, and she felt herself thrill to the ease of those words and also, to the presence of Otto beside her – Otto who, like her, had loved The Waves. She felt slightly giddy at the thought that Mrs Woolf was about to arrive. ‘Back by popular demand,’ she whispered to him, ‘though I don’t imagine she gives two hoots for “popular” anything. I’m quite sure she’s above all that.’

  They waited. The rows of heads waited. Otto’s arm rested next to hers on the armrest, and she studied, eyes aslant, the dark hairs that escaped his white shirt cuff. He didn’t cede the armrest to her, nor did she move her arm from it and fold her hands in her lap. The pressure of his arm was somehow delicious. He smelled of French cigarettes and carbolic soap. His nails, rimmed in cobalt blue, needed a trim. From the corner of her eyes, she could see fine white streaks of plaster in his hair. She uncrossed her ankles and crossed one leg over the other, gently swinging a foot. Did his eye follow the line of her leg?

  Their host, ever gloomier, waited. She turned to Otto, caught his eye, and nodded at the man’s misanthropic face. He returned the joke of her smile. The back of his hand brushed hers. She made small talk. He nodded and smiled.

  After a full three-quarters of an hour, the porter delivered a note to their host, who approached the lectern and stated the obvious. ‘Mrs Woolf has not arrived. Would you please make your way to the exit.’

  No apology, no explanation. ‘I can’t understand it,’ she said as they joined the departing crowd. ‘Perhaps it’s the trains. Trouble on the line from Lewes. I am so sorry. I’ve delayed you for no reason.’

  They moved down the steps and into the brightness of afternoon. The air smelled of fresh rain and wet earth. ‘No,’ he smiled, ‘no apology needed. I’m grateful in fact. You’ve reminded me I must read her work for myself.’

  ‘Yes! You must borrow my copy of her latest book. I’ve made a bit of a mess of it, underlining favourite passages and so on, but … No “but”. I shall drop it through your letter box.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  It was the first time that day that either had referred to his residency at Number 5; to the fact that he was still in hiding on her street. All over Brighton, large homes sat empty, and the Corporation had declared war on the ‘undesirables’ who were finding their way in. On posters nailed to trees, pub doors and public shelters, neighbours were encouraged to report any sightings to the police.

  As they walked together across The Level, towards the Crescent, Evelyn tore a poster from an elm, stuffed it in her coat pocket, and nodded at a bench. ‘Shall we get a bit of sun? I don’t think I’ve ever known a lovelier April.’

  He brushed rainwater from the bench and spread out his jacket. She demurred – was it his only jacket? – then sat and made room for him on it. A current hummed in the narrow gap between their bodies. Their shoulders nudged. She turned her face to the sun. He studied the homeless men under the elms. In that moment, she felt to him like a charm against that fate.

  Her questions came, one after another, as if her previous restraint had been nothing more than thin ice on a puddle. Why, she wanted to know, had he tried to drown himself? Why had he been so rude at first? Why did his passport read ‘Degenerate’? Why had he been in a prison camp in Germany? Did he have a wife? A family? Had he ever been a conman or a spy? Which painters did he admire? Had he truly liked The Waves? Had he found other work yet in Brighton? How then was he living?

  ‘You, Mrs Superintendent, are worse than any tribunal.’

  Her face fell. ‘Please don’t call me that.’

  ‘Three final questions,’ he said.

  Did he despise her? she wondered. She closed her eyes like a seaside mind-reader and the questions she most wanted to ask cam
e. Who did that to your back? How did it happen? But it was a curiosity too far.

  ‘How did you come by the counterfeit money?’

  He stiffened. He resented the need to explain, and yet he wanted her to understand; to know that he was not ‘undesirable’. ‘As I said to your husband, they had – they still have, I imagine – a counterfeiting operation at Sachsenhausen. The plan, at least at that time, was to weaken the British economy by dropping counterfeit notes from planes. When they do, the hope is that those who find it will be greedy enough to use it.’

  ‘Like you were.’ She turned to him.

  ‘Yes.’ He met her eyes. ‘They stuffed me with notes when I left Berlin. It amused them greatly. When I arrived in England, I was desperate. I couldn’t find work. I had nowhere to live. For a long while, no one would agree to contact the Bishop for me. I was terrified of being locked up again. I used the forgeries as sparingly as I could – out of fear of being caught, I should add, not out of virtue.’

  ‘And then you were.’

  ‘And then I was …?’

  ‘Caught. Locked up again. By my husband.’

  ‘Yes.’ He rubbed paint from his fingers. ‘So to speak.’

  ‘Why did you paint Mr Pirazzini?’

  He shrugged. ‘No death should go unmarked. Countless do.’

  ‘And why did you paint the stump of his finger?’

  ‘Is that your third and final question?’

  She smiled. ‘It is a sub-point of my second question.’

  ‘Was it wrong of me?’

  ‘On the contrary …’ She held his gaze. Then, ‘He was a tailor. Did you know that? Highly skilled. But I suppose it only takes one careless moment and …’

  He laughed. His old rancorous laugh again.

  She bristled. ‘I only mean, Otto, that no one deliberately puts their finger in a pair of shears.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘others do it for you.’

  She turned, her eyes wide.

  ‘Mussolini’s men stormed his shop in Pisa in ’27.’

  She bowed her head.

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘do you think he and his wife came to Britain?’

  Why, she wondered, did she always understand everything too late?

  He stood. ‘I must go.’ The sight of her walking away from him would be too much. She’d smile, of course. She might turn to wave. But even as they’d sat speaking more frankly than they ever had, he blamed her, inwardly and fiercely, for the devastation of his heart, for her blindness to it.

  ‘Yes! Forgive me,’ she said, rising, her thoughts reeling. ‘I’ve kept you too long.’

  He pretended to assess the sky. ‘I’ll get a little work done before I lose the light in the church.’

  She touched his arm. ‘Final question?’

  He winced, hardly able to bear it, her touch. Her lipstick had worn off. Her silly hat was askew, or even more askew. Her hair was unrolling in the April breeze and she patted at it anxiously as she felt his eyes taking her in. La petite bourgeoise. But she looked – she was – achingly lovely. Of course, as chance would have it, she was also the Superintendent’s wife, and he was too many things: a Jew, a refugee, an enemy alien, a degenerate and an undesirable. One didn’t want to be many things. One was meant to be singular and pure. Any fantasy he might have entertained about her was as banal as it was tormenting. Life, after all, was simply to be endured.

  She had only taken a kind interest in his ‘case’. She had touched his sleeve and smiled compassionately. But even as he schooled himself in the facts of the matter, a pair of sparrowhawks appeared overhead, and in that moment, as she looked up too, her face alight, he felt the force of their lives tangle.

  ‘Look!’ Her hat was sliding off. ‘I used to see them over Race Hill on my way to the infirmary.’

  The male was roller-coasting on the thermals.

  ‘We have these birds in Berlin too. They’re sacred in German myth. They live in the grove of the gods. I used to watch them as a boy. They’re the only birds of prey I know of that hunt in the city. He’s trying to win the female.’

  Fantasy talk, more fantasy. Why did he do it to himself?

  ‘Third question …’ She picked up his jacket from the bench and shook out its creases. ‘What is the subject of your fresco? You never said.’

  He looked past her coolly. The old yearning was overwhelming him again. He had to repel her, to undo the force of her. ‘Bathsheba.’ He tossed the word carelessly into the breeze. ‘The adulteress. Quite the subject for a little working-class Church of England parish, don’t you think?’

  He heard her start to speak, to utter something bland and courteous, but he wouldn’t have it. Blood rushed to his head; the old ringing in his ears returned; his shirt clung to him. How pointless everything was. The April sky was crashing in, blue and too bright, and he had to interrupt, to speak over whatever it was she was so decorously uttering. ‘Indeed it is astonishing,’ he said with determined indifference, ‘that the Bishop ever agreed to the idea. You see, Mrs Beaumont, it is not for nothing that my passport is stamped “Degenerate”. I have a knack of falling foul of good society. I wasn’t made for it. I have no interest in it. As an artist I am drawn to actresses, dancers and whores – the hatless women of this world – and their themes. Women, in other words, who are alive.’ He flicked something, a fly or a bee, from his sleeve. ‘Thank you for the diversion. As we’re nearly at the Crescent, forgive me, but I shan’t see you home.’

  She stood for long moments and watched him recede, his words scoring the air. She still held his jacket. He had abandoned it to spite. Why had she ever felt glad of his company? Who was he to her?

  41

  She had put their exchange from her mind. He was no one, she told herself, a stranger, and she, she had grown sensible at last, ‘sensible’ in the English sense of the word … She no longer dwelled. In fact, in recent months, she had succeeded in putting most sensitivities behind her, for what use finally was all that feeling in a war? Who did it help? What cause did it serve? Not hers certainly. She had never felt as low as she had in the past year.

  She was no longer the femme-enfant of days gone by. That was Sylvia’s term of endearment for her. But no more. How exhausting that person had been, for herself and for Geoffrey too. It was as Sylvia had said. Love, lasting love, was based on compromise. On sacrifice. Perhaps his mistress, wherever he kept her, had saved their marriage, not broken it. Sylvia said that was often the way. She had to trust in those things, and she did, or she almost did, as long as she didn’t dwell.

  In any case, she was enjoying her new sense of capability. At last she was at ease in the kitchen she had inherited from Tillie – her own kitchen. The WI classes had been a success. A whole chicken lay before her now, plucked and gutted. Her knife slid cleanly through the flesh and bone. She was jointing the bird like she’d been born to it. Even Mr Hatchett had come to trust her at last. He’d promised to set aside the next plump pheasant or duck. They had commiserated briefly over the cancelled lecture, but in truth, she had practically forgotten it already.

  Life was busy. She made sure it was. She, Mrs Chavasse and the other ladies of the WI visited the wounded in hospital three days a week, and at last she’d grown used to the blood and the smells and the ravings. She remained bright and cheery through it all. She let no one down. Being cheery for others cheered oneself up. Platitudes saw one through. Little by little, she was remaking herself.

  At home, there were also changes. She’d decided to redecorate, starting with the sitting room. There was a great deal to be said for keeping up appearances. Everything was only a matter of outlook. She’d already replaced Geoffrey’s wingback chair and its old-fashioned antimaccassar. She’d even bought one of those new coffee tables, though they never drank coffee, and she had had everything painted afresh.

  Not by Otto Gottlieb, however. She’d considered it; she’d even told Geoffrey she had. The man was in need of work. That’s what he’d told her, she explai
ned to Geoffrey, when she had bumped into him recently by the Technical College. She didn’t mention the lecture to Geoffrey – because, after all, there had been no lecture!

  She had, she said, considered offering him the work, but in truth, she felt it would be too awkward. He was moody. Some people just tended to make things worse for themselves, didn’t they?

  How relieved Geoffrey had looked. And how vulnerable. She could see that now. It had taken her by surprise but suddenly she saw it. Even now, he was frightened he might lose her; that she might have eyes for another man; for an artist, a radical, a man who seemed to share some of her own passions. He was afraid, too, that even if she did stay, she would never love him as she once had; that she had come to see too many of his failings.

  His face had looked like Philip’s when he woke in the night in the grip of a bad dream. Geoffrey had been on the edge of something, his own chalky precipice, and all he could think about – she knew, she could feel it in him – was the need to watch his step; to not put a foot wrong; to love her as much as she would tolerate. It touched some part of her. Surely, if love was love, it didn’t end – it could never be put entirely away – and she had loved him.

  She could feel it again. She was sure. Or a part of her could. So what followed was a harmless enough lie. And only a small betrayal of Otto Gottlieb. ‘If I’m honest, I do hope the commission at St Wilf ’s is completed soon. Perhaps you could help him find some bit of work? To keep him better occupied? I saw him hanging about the Salvation Army the other day. No doubt it was for the evening meal, but I fear he might also be a little taken with me.’

  It had worked. Geoffrey immediately said yes, yes, of course he would find him some sort of employment in town, shift work perhaps, a job that wouldn’t impede the progress of the Lord Bishop’s mural.

  If she had belittled Otto to Geoffrey with those comments, she had also looked after each of them as well as she was able. Geoffrey was reassured of her loyalty and soon, Otto Gottlieb would have paid work.