Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  Years. It had been years since he’d been touched.

  As Geoffrey turned the knob of Number 5, he had the uncanny sensation of stepping into his own home. The layout was identical: the vestibule, the staircase to the right, the telephone on the side table, a sitting room to the left; a corridor stretching past the study to what had to be the kitchen. Where the floorboards dipped, he was grateful, briefly, for the upright of the banister. With or without the adrenalin, he was conscious he was still drunk. He turned one ear to listen … But nothing.

  At the entrance to the study, he picked up a brass doorstop and weighed it in his hand.

  Later, he wouldn’t remember it falling. He’d remember only the scent of lilac as he entered the kitchen; the unprovoked pleasure of it; the moment’s transport to their bedroom, where the heavy blooms spilled over the vase next to the clock.

  It would be a long, slurred moment before his eyes adjusted – to the heavy shadows and the flickering light, to the impression of bodies on the floor.

  Then the scene exploded: the white magnesium flash of her back and the sight of her body wrapped in another.

  He was hardly aware of the commotion of cries as they sprang from the mattress. His stare was fixed and dead. No words reached him but he registered dimly that her voice faltered – with tenderness, with pity. He couldn’t hear, think, focus. He could only stumble forward, one heavy arm absurdly raised, like a man playing Blind Man’s Bluff as his heart failed.

  From The Level, a siren blared, louder than their cries, and its moan seemed to stream from their gaping mouths. The two men locked, lurching into the fire, then separated before Geoffrey lunged again. The jug of blossom toppled. Water streamed. The fruit bowl smashed. The half-eaten stew on the plate flew across the floor. Cut-lery clattered from its tray. Glasses shattered. Otto’s head flew back against a wall and, only as Geoffrey slipped on the floor, did his hand release Otto’s neck.

  Each man gasped for breath.

  Evelyn couldn’t stop shaking; it was as if a current ran through her legs, and she felt herself sink to the floor.

  Otto pressed his shirt to his head. Blood trickled down his neck as Geoffrey vomited into the sink, then turned, slow and bewildered.

  He rubbed his coat sleeve over his mouth and began to cross the room again, bumping into corners, kicking at the wreckage on the floor. Thank God, she thought. He’s leaving … Thank God. Then, at the door through which he’d come, he scooped up the brass doorstop as if it were a cricket ball.

  In the grate, the embers of the fire collapsed into a pyre of ash. The two men drew close, magnetized. Each smelled the other’s sweat and hatred, and each pressed closer by degree, the brass gleaming, until Evelyn, wild-eyed and pale, forced herself between the two beloved bodies.

  Geoffrey wavered on the balls of his feet. He looked down at her, his face clammy and waxen, his eyelids heavy. She could smell the blood on his shirt; the vomit on his breath; the whisky, stale from his pores. The sirens wailed over the sky, the sea, the cliffs, but still she heard him.

  ‘ Jew- bitch.’

  46

  There is no invasion as fearful as love, no havoc like desire. Its fuse trembles in the human heart and runs through to the core of the world. What are our defences to it?

  The day broke through a heavy quilt of cloud. Geoffrey opened the shutters. A heavy frost obscured the pane as if to say, Don’t look, turn away, it is better not to see. He poured water from the ewer and gulped it down, suddenly profoundly thirsty. Blood crusted black around his nose and mouth. He could taste it. They were both still in their clothes. Neither had spoken. Neither had slept.

  Beneath the sheet, she was pulling her skirt down awkwardly over her hips. In the thin dawn light, her face was bone, sockets and shadow. Did he feel humbled or sickened? He didn’t know.

  ‘Evvie …’

  She lay her arm across her eyes.

  ‘It was the shock. The whisky. The sight of –’

  Her head nodded beneath her arm.

  ‘I never drink like that. It was the …’ Did he pity or hate her?

  She turned on to her side.

  ‘I have no idea why I …’

  He moved towards the bed once more. Was she asleep?

  ‘Do you still love me?’ he tried. The bedsprings creaked under his weight. ‘I only need to know that. Then I’ll leave you be.’

  She listened, eyes closed. Hail, huge pellets, was bouncing off the window. It was lashing the world. All that new blossom, she thought. It won’t last. It won’t survive the day.

  He came round to her side of the bed and crouched beside her. ‘Evvie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied flatly.

  Yes, I love you or yes, leave me be?

  ‘He intrigued you. He seduced you. You were still hurt by my relations with –’

  She didn’t open her eyes. In the murky light, her lips were ashen.

  And Otto was there again – fleeing across the Death Strip in a pair of boots that kept falling off his feet. Earth sprayed up with each bullet from the tower. Pitter pitter pitter. His legs were collapsing, his feet bled, children were crying for sweets as he ran. Then a calm came into his head: ‘ Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehech-ezarta bi nishmahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha.’

  He woke to hail against the window and squinted at the clock. Five minutes past four in the morning.

  Chairs lay toppled. Below his back, he could feel shards of glass on the mattress. His pillow was damp with blood. His head ached. Near the range, the brass doorstop glinted like some terrible totem.

  I give thanks to God for restoring my soul to my body.

  His mother’s prayer. It had been almost a year since he’d even thought of it. Now, today, it had returned.

  He dressed quickly, shoved his sketchbook down his shirt, and buttoned his coat up to the neck. He read the Army’s letter of instruction again, returned it to its envelope, and slid it into a pocket. Key in hand, he realized he was hungry.

  He scanned the room. There was nothing for it. He walked to the table and picked up the cornet of sweets. It had survived the eye of the storm.

  Three hours later, triumphant, paint-smeared and bright-eyed, he reported to the Army meeting point. From there, the squad was transported to a pasture, a salt-dashed field where you could stand on the high edge of England in the spendthrift light. For the weather had come good, and the sea was vast, alive. He’d never not thrill to it.

  The other new recruit, a mechanic called Nick, leaned towards him on the stone wall where they waited. ‘Good prospects,’ he said with a click of his tongue. ‘Life expectancy, ten whole miserable weeks.’

  Otto laughed.

  The farmer was fuming because he’d painted his herd with luminous paint and still the Huns had dropped their bombs.

  ‘Those Huns,’ mumbled Nick. ‘Not an ounce of regard for bovine life. They deserve everything we can throw at them.’

  ‘At me,’ grinned Otto.

  ‘Yeah …’ said Nick. ‘At you. Cows. You barbarian.’

  Nick was almost the only man on the squad who hadn’t said, ‘You’re German? Bloody hell. Don’t get ideas, will you?’

  The glowing carcasses of the eight cows had to be removed before the squad could start, and the day wasn’t going to be action-filled. The original plan had been to dig for an SC-500 buried near the swill-yard, but early that morning, the Unit got word of a cluster bomb dropped in the farmer’s field. Nobody could say how many ‘bomblets’ had been released as they fell, and how many lay scattered or buried, still live. They were likely to be fitted with the new trembler-fuses, which meant they couldn’t be disarmed. They’d have to be either surrounded by sandbags and destroyed in situ or shot by a marksman from a safe distance.

  When Otto and Nick weren’t heaving sandbags between controlled explosions, they were required only to observe. There would be more legwork, they were told, later, when the field needed tidying. Nick spat over the wall and laughe
d. ‘Legwork!’ He lifted up his trouser legs and knocked on his braces. ‘Ever get the feeling they’ll take any fucker?’

  ‘Polio?’

  ‘Yip.’

  ‘You, a cripple, and me, the enemy,’ Otto declared. ‘What a team we’ll make.’ He pulled the sweets from his pocket. ‘I lied to the Lieutenant. I’m only here until I have enough for a deposit for a room. A week or two at most.’

  Nick tssk-tssked. He plucked a handful from the cornet. Otto did the same. They were sucking noisily when Otto jumped from the wall to his feet. A sparrowhawk – half bird, half memory – was lifting off from the field. It glided over the cliff edge, its wings tilting like a spinnaker to the wind. ‘There!’ said Otto. ‘Do you see it?’ But Nick couldn’t pick it out against the sky.

  The Butterfly Bomb, or bomblet, was a two-kilogram anti-personnel weapon. Its thin cylindrical outer shell hinged open when dropped, giving it the appearance of a metal butterfly as it fell to earth. It was new – only Lieutenant Lowell had seen the diagrams – but the day was an unqualified success. Easy work, comparatively. Dull, largely. At seven, as the others packed up the lorry, Nick and Otto walked the field, scanning it for the unexploded butterflies. ‘The duds have no wings left,’ Lowell had said. ‘They look like ordinary tins.’

  Each carried a sling for their collection. By dusk, Nick was limping, but they’d covered most of the field. They made plans for the pub. They met mid-field and popped a few more sweets in their mouths. Yes, Otto said, there was a woman. Or at least, there was now. He grinned at the ground. He needed to find his feet again. This was the start, he said. Her and his painting.

  The paint was still drying, he told himself, the colours were emerging; she was emerging.

  They surveyed the next field for strays, taking a half each. Only a few glinted in the evening light. ‘Over there!’ Nick called. He pointed to a green edge where field became cliff. Otto jogged easily towards it. The day dropped its cargo of light and the world expanded to the horizon. He felt again the softness of her lips; the press of her palm against his, their fingers laced; the ends of her hair brushing his face; her legs cleaving to him. And that morning, still, he’d felt the fluid lines of her move through him, through his arm, as he finished the triptych in the chapel.

  The sparrowhawk swooped again. Was it trying to determine if the shiny butterflies were edible? He felt almost as streamlined as it as he ran, in spite of the sling that bounced at his hip and bit into the tender flesh of his back.

  He looked out over the edge. Wasn’t that beach the very one where the guards had taken him and the other men to bathe that day last June? The beach where he’d tried to swim out, away from life, and had failed. Or did he only imagine it was?

  The horizon dissolved and the world fused in the furnace of the evening. Everything was fleetingly, unremarkably, translucently whole – sea, sky, the bird, the boat rotting on the beach below, the men’s voices from the field, the sweet in his mouth. His mind flared. Reality rippled. He felt its flux at his fingertips as he dropped the dud into the sling. He could already see the thickness of paint, its slather and the promise of this, all this, on canvas. He’d got it, it was there, held in his mind’s eye when the sea light exploded, the sparrowhawk shrieked and his mother’s head turned next to his in the darkness …

  He could smell the scent of her hair on the pillow, and Evelyn was reading. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky. Then Klara laughed, the women argued over their Passover dishes, the hammer whirred towards Jakob’s head, his Ballhaus dancers burned, the water spilled over her breast and shoes – she swore some light shallop had foundered – the boots stamped on his back, the sonata rose high, and her hands found him –

  It was more than an hour before Nick found the path down the crumbling cliff side. He scrambled, falling most of the way on legs locked in their braces.

  It was impossible, the Army said, to recover the body before morning.

  Night fell. The sea pounded the beach. The wind picked up.

  Otto was dead before he hit the beach; dead before the rockfall buried him. Nick told himself that.

  He sat by the mound until first light, flouting orders to return to the transport. He couldn’t feel his legs. He had no coat. He didn’t know Otto’s last name but he knew, though nothing had been said, that he had already been alone too much in life. He wouldn’t leave him now.

  The dew turned to frost, then to dew again.

  47

  Otto wouldn’t have been mad enough, Nick would later tell the Coroner, to pick up the bomb if it had still had its wings – no matter what he had or hadn’t attempted in the past. He’d had plans to get lodgings, to paint pictures. There was a woman. He was happy. Christ, he’d had sweets in his pocket.

  Of course Otto hadn’t shaken the thing, deliberately or otherwise. Of course he wasn’t some German saboteur. He’d just dropped the dud in his sling, same as before, when it went off.

  After the verdict that day, Nick went for their drink on his own; a lonely, bitter memorial. When had life grown so cheap? Otto hadn’t even been allowed his ten miserable weeks.

  ‘Death by misadventure’. The phrase meant nothing. It changed nothing. Weeks later, the official advice on unexploded butterfly bombs would be deemed ‘flawed’.

  Upstairs, in the heavy hush of their room, Geoffrey left the cup of sugary tea on her nightstand and turned back the bedspread. He removed, very gently, her shoes and stockings. He said she must lie down. But she only sat, rigid on the edge of the bed, watching the steam rise from the tea.

  He, too, was in a kind of shock. He didn’t know what he felt, not for Otto, not for himself. He could think only of her. And Philip. He’d deliberately timed the news so that Philip wouldn’t yet be home from school.

  Rain drummed the roof …

  He was closing the shutters when he heard her storm down the stairs.

  She hardly felt the ground at her feet as she ran. The rain was cold. Otto, she told herself, would turn the key and open the kitchen door as always. He would press her close and weep with her. Something, she would tell him, something had gone very, very wrong. How had this happened to them? Life didn’t sacrifice its lovers. That was the stuff of novels. What am I to do with you gone from me?

  On the perimeter path in the downpour, she stopped short. It occurred to her only now. Geoffrey had removed her shoes. Her foot was bleeding. There must have been something sharp on the path.

  ‘Come inside, Evvie. Come and get warm.’

  He had followed her into the Park.

  She was drenched and didn’t care. She cared still less about the cut on her foot. The rain would wash it clean. Or not. What did it matter? She turned and took him in, standing tall in the pouring rain, incongruous in his jacket and tie.

  ‘He would have been better for you than me. I know that. He would have made you laugh as you need to laugh.’ She was pale, almost translucent, with grief, with the shock of the news. He coaxed her up the stone steps but, halfway across the terrace, she stopped to stare at the lilac bush and the handle of the spade stuck in the ground beneath.

  ‘Evvie, please, let’s talk about things inside.’

  ‘You knew,’ she said, without turning.

  ‘You knew about that job.’

  ‘He needed the work.’ The rain trickled past his collar.

  ‘That’s why you got drunk with Lowell. Because you knew. You knew how dangerous it was.’

  He laid his jacket over her shoulders and seated himself at the table, surrendering to the weather.

  But still she didn’t turn. Still she didn’t look away from the spot where the tin lay buried. ‘And I gave him the letter. I’m the one who arranged it all.’

  ‘You weren’t to know. You asked me to find him what I could. And I did.’

  ‘Do you ever think what it would be like to leave all this, Geoffrey?’ She motioned vaguely to the Park, to the sky, to the Crescent’s solid turrets. She looked back over her shoulder. Rain
streamed down her face. ‘We seem to make death, you and I …’

  ‘That’s a nasty cut on your foot. Come inside.’

  ‘You’re relieved, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’m not.’

  ‘Why not? You found us together. I loved him.’

  ‘Because you love me. You love me as well.’ His eyes filled.

  Her voice was small. ‘Death breeds death, doesn’t it?’ She thought of the pills, just a few feet away. ‘First Mr Pirazzini. Now Otto. And still, those pills, just there …’

  He bowed his head low. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘From the first …’

  The rain drove at his back. ‘I’ll dig the things up. I’ll get rid of them.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, leave them now …’

  Something in the tone of her voice unnerved him, and he rose from the chair, reaching for her hand. ‘It’s upset you. I can see it’s upset you.’

  In the soak of her clothes, she was tiny, frail. Her teeth chattered. Her foot bled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s the sensible thing, isn’t it?’

  Later, after school, Philip would find them together in the kitchen:

  His mother, small and wet, curled like a question mark on the lino.

  His father, on his knees, wet too and huddled over her, as if the roof of their house were falling in.

  48

  In June, the German Army turned east. Hitler had decided to invade Russia rather than England. After a year of extraordinary tension, Brighton exhaled.

  When she arrived, St Wilf ’s was still closed for renovations, but a workman smiled kindly and produced a key. It had taken her more than a month to feel capable of this and now, unexpectedly, as he unlocked the side door, she found herself stepping directly into the Lady Chapel.

  The stained glass glowed with the morning but the air was cold and stale, the air of a crypt.

  Her footsteps rang out in the hush. The gleam of the pews was dulled by dust and fallen dust sheets. The jumper he’d been wearing that night in the kitchen, the one he’d suddenly peeled off, lay now on the flagstones between two pews. His sketchbook sat propped on the font, open to his final study where water from the kitchen tap streamed like grief over her face.