Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Paul!’ she cries sharply. ‘Paul.’

  He runs, with his head down and his satchel bumping. By the gate he nearly trips but he saves himself by grabbing the post. A man catches hold of his arm and he tears himself free.

  ‘I was only trying to help, sonny!’ the man shouts after him as Paul jumps the steps. He is inside. The door slams and Mum shoots the chain into its slot.

  ‘Where’re Sally and Bridgie?’

  ‘In the back.’

  Mum pulls the curtains across in the sitting room. As the curtains swish together, he sees faces bobbing over the hedge.

  ‘Do you think they’ll break in?’ he asks.

  ‘No. They’re newspaper photographers, that’s all. They want pictures.’

  ‘Why are they here?’ he asks, but he knows, just as he knew even before he found the unanswered composition question in his paper. Mum turns to him. It is darkish in the hall but he can see her face.

  ‘Dad was remanded in custody this morning.’

  Mum thinks he knows what that means. Sometimes she thinks he knows more about English words than she does, because he was born here and she wasn’t.

  ‘Are they going to let him come home?’ It’s a stupid question. Childish. He knows that as soon as it comes out of his mouth, just as he knew it would be worse than useless to write out one of the essay titles and underline it, in the couple of minutes he had left.

  ‘No. In custody means in prison.’

  ‘Custody,’ says Paul.

  ‘Bridget thought he had been put in a big pan of custard.’

  ‘Did you tell Bridget?’

  Mum frowns. ‘I said the police were talking to Dad about an accident. She’ll be more frightened if she hears things that she doesn’t understand. Or if people say things to her.’

  Paul doesn’t agree. Bridget is only five, and blurts out everything. ‘But why custody, Mum?’

  ‘Dad didn’t get bail, which means he can’t come home. They’re keeping him in prison until the trial.’

  ‘But Dad hasn’t done anything.’

  Mum looks down at Paul’s hand and says sharply: ‘Come into the light.’

  In the kitchen he too sees that his hand is bleeding.

  ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘I caught it on the gate.’ He thinks he remembers, now, a pain he didn’t feel at the time. There’s a scrape across the back of his hand, and a deeper cut. Mum reaches up to the shelf where she keeps the Dettol. She pours a capful into a cup of water, takes down the cotton wool and bathes his hand with the cloudy liquid. He likes the ordinary smell of the Dettol.

  Mum reaches up. ‘There should be some plaster in the tin, if Bridget didn’t have it all for her knee …’

  She finds the plaster, and snips it to size with her kitchen scissors. Now the cut is hidden.

  ‘There,’ says Mum. ‘Remember to keep it out of the water when you have your bath.’

  ‘What do they say Dad’s done?’ he asks, his voice small and casual. What he thinks is that Dad must have killed someone by accident, when he was driving the car. Dad always drives too fast.

  Mum has her back to him as she reaches up to the shelf again to replace the tin. ‘They say that he has given important secrets to the Russians.’

  It is so unexpected, so extraordinary, that Paul can’t take it in. Mum must have gone mad.

  ‘You mean, like a spy?’

  ‘Yes. They think he has taken information from his work and given it to the Russians.’

  ‘But Dad doesn’t know any Russians.’

  ‘They think he does.’

  ‘If Dad was doing anything like that, we’d know about it.’

  Mum pushes back his hair from his forehead, and strokes his head as if he were as young as Bridget. ‘Sally is playing Ludo with Bridget in the dining room,’ she says. ‘I’ll come in a minute and hear Bridget’s reading while you and Sally do your homework.’

  ‘Mum, you didn’t tell Bridget, did you? About them thinking Dad was a spy?’

  ‘No. Oh, Paul, I forgot all about your exam. How did it go?’

  ‘It was only the practice, Mum.’

  ‘Didn’t it go well?’

  ‘I missed out the composition question.’ He pauses. Mum knows what that means. She’s a teacher. She’ll be angry that he did something so stupid.

  ‘It wasn’t the real exam, was it?’

  ‘No. I think I did the rest OK. Craven will go mad when he sees my paper.’

  ‘Take no notice of him,’ says Mum. ‘He’s been in that school too long.’ Mum has never said anything like this about his teachers before. ‘Take no notice of anything that anyone says. They will say things, you can be sure of it. Ignore them.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ he asks, although he already knows.

  ‘Lies about your father.’

  Behind them, the doorbell rings, and goes on ringing.

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer it, Mum?’

  ‘They’re journalists. They’ve been ringing that bell all afternoon. They’re trying again because they saw you come in.’

  ‘I could disconnect it,’ says Paul.

  ‘Could you?’

  Paul picks out the small screwdriver from Dad’s toolbox in the cupboard under the stairs. He’s watched Dad replace the batteries loads of times. First, he must twist off the bell’s metal cover by hand. Luckily, it has stopped ringing. Paul undoes the two screws that hold down the bell’s connections, and pulls out the ends of the wires. Easy-peasy. He replaces the cover, and scoots down the hall to put the screwdriver back in its exact place. Mum is pleased.

  ‘Did you put the bolts across?’ Paul asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  He likes feeling together with Mum, doing jobs for her. She has shot both bolts across, top and bottom.

  ‘I’ve bolted the back door too,’ says Mum. ‘I don’t want Bridget to play out in the garden tonight.’

  Bridget always plays out after supper, even when it’s pitch black. She’s scared of dark in the house, but not of dark in the garden. She has a camp down by the apple tree, with the cushions from the old sofa they had before Mum bought this one with her teaching money.

  The door-knocker bangs against its metal plate. It’s the dolphin door-knocker that Dad found for Mum in a junk shop. They shouldn’t be touching it.

  ‘They’ll stop soon,’ says Mum. ‘I’m going to make corned beef hash. I haven’t been able to get to the shops.’

  ‘Did they stop you going out?’

  ‘No, but they’ll take photographs, and try to talk to me. Don’t worry, Paul. Tomorrow they’ll be somewhere else.’

  The children are in bed. Lily stands by her bedroom window, screening herself with the curtain even though she is sure that all the press people have gone. One of them came up to the letterbox and shouted through it, but that was before the children came home from school. His dirty voice filled her hall.

  ‘What do you think about your husband, Mrs Callington? Is he a Soviet spy?’

  Maybe he wasn’t even a journalist. All kinds of people jump on the bandwagon. He might have been a neighbour who has always, secretly, wished them harm.

  The hearing was so short, less than five minutes. She’d thought it would be longer. Simon was brought in with a policeman on either side of him. He wore the dark grey suit and navy tie that Lily had chosen for his court appearance. He looked straight ahead as he confirmed his name and address. His face was very still, as if he were making himself absent. He didn’t look round for Lily. If you didn’t know him, you would think he was arrogant. She wanted to say to him: Simon, don’t look like that. They are watching you. The charge was read. The ridiculous, incredible words were read aloud.

  ‘The case of Simon Paul Everard Callington, charged with offences under Section One of the Official Secrets Act 1911, that he did conspire with a person or persons unknown to breach the said Act on one or more occasion between the thirtieth of November 1959 and the twentieth of November 1960.
’

  There was no application for bail. The magistrate remanded him in custody. One moment Simon was there, and she could look at him, and then they had turned him away and he went down the steps and disappeared. It was over. One of the clerks said something which made the other smile.

  The glass of the bedroom window is cold against her face as she looks out. There’s London, all the lights of it spreading beneath her. When they first came here, you could see nothing of it some winter nights, because of the pall of smog that hung there. Often smog crept all the way up the hill to where they were. It stank for weeks, yellowly, and people went out with handkerchiefs over their faces. How Sally coughed that winter. Lily would sit up with Friars’ Balsam melting in the steamer, and hold Sally so she could breathe more easily. But now Sally is as strong as can be.

  The house is a ship, riding the waves high above London. This is what Lily has always told herself at night, when she’s afraid and the noise of the city becomes forlorn, even terrifying, as if anything might happen.

  Lily no longer speaks a word of German, but she still hears the noise of thousands and thousands of throats, open, baying. It’s only the traffic, or the wind.

  She was allowed to visit Simon in prison before the hearing. His hands shook. It was very slight, just a tremor. Although the men – the guards, the prison warders – were sitting very close, she doesn’t think they would have noticed it. Simon looked all wrong. It reminded her of when Bridget was a baby and Erica looked after her for a couple of hours. She came back smelling of a different house and of Erica’s perfume.

  Simon made a grimace when he saw her. It wasn’t a smile, but a way of controlling his face in case it gave him away. She had seen that look before, on her father’s face, on the day he had to report to the local police station with his papers. Of course, her father came back. He made light of it. They were idiots, fools. But he had been away for hours. They’d kept him waiting, he said.

  She always loved Simon’s hands. They were fine and long-fingered, unlike her own workaday hands. He had almond nails. But his hands were not too soft, because he liked doing jobs, liked getting out the oil and screwdrivers and little spanners, and working on the train set with Paul. Or he would put a new hinge on the shed door. He liked it when she had a little job of work for him to do.

  He folded his hands together and put them on the prison table. She was afraid he would be handcuffed to the guards, but no. They sat a little way off, one at either side of him.

  She ignored the guards. She knew there was never any point in trying to propitiate such men. She was there for Simon, only for him. She told him some things about the children, bringing him back to her. The grimace that held his mouth began to relax. There were brown stains of sleeplessness under his eyes. This is what can happen to a man, she thought, in a few days. She didn’t allow herself to wonder what they had done to him. She knew – she believed – that there were rules here in England. There was the rule of law and Simon would be treated according to it. She smiled at him, and said, ‘The children talk about you all the time.’

  She wanted to say: You are just the same to us. We think of you in exactly the same way as always. We haven’t changed.

  She said, ‘Have you got enough cigarettes?’ and one of the guards stirred and looked at her closely, as if he suspected that Lily had cigarettes hidden somewhere and was about to give them to Simon. But she knew that wasn’t permitted.

  ‘You know I was trying to cut down,’ said Simon.

  It’s two in the morning, and the children have been asleep for hours, but Lily can’t even think of sleep. She is lit up. Her body is full of ferocious energy and she cannot sit down. Earlier she caught herself pacing up and down the hallway like an animal, taut for sounds from outside or a stir from the children in their bedrooms. They have no protection now, except for her.

  Behind her, on the bedside table, there is an envelope covered with figures. She has to calculate how they are going to manage. She may lose her job. Once next morning’s papers appear, the news of Simon will be everywhere. There was a piece in the Standard’s late edition which gave details of the charge against him. Erica rang to tell her. But it was on an inside page, quite small. Tomorrow will be worse. They wouldn’t have sent so many reporters and photographers to the house otherwise. Once the morning papers are out, her school will know. They might not even wait until the trial. They will sniff the wind. There will be low-voiced meetings in the Headmistress’s study. Miss Harrold will come in with a tray of tea. She will enjoy being part of the excitement, and demonstrating, yet again, her discretion. Besides, she has never liked Lily. Perhaps parents will telephone the school, or write letters of complaint about a teacher with such connections being allowed into the classrooms. Miss Harrold will open those letters, read them, and place them in the middle of the Headmistress’s desk. She will field the telephone calls, and pass on every word. Parents read the newspapers, and quickly work themselves into a lather of indignation if things aren’t to their liking. They won’t want their children to learn French from a woman whose husband is in prison. They are the ones who pay the bills.

  And the children, her children; their children. What will it be like for the children? Will women turn round after them as they walk home from school, and spit on the pavement? This is England, Lily. You are safe here. Their school cannot make them leave.

  She was a fool when Simon was arrested. When the police took him away, she believed that in a few hours it would all be over. The authorities would come to their senses and understand that they had made a mistake. It was a case of mistaken identity. The evidence really referred to someone quite different. They wouldn’t apologise, but they would find a way to let Simon come home. Even after that prison visit, she still believed it.

  His court appearance has changed everything. She’s seen the big smooth gears of the law begin to move around Simon, meshing him in. He was the defendant now. A policeman stood on either side of him, so that if he tried to run they could prevent him. That was their job. There was whispering and conferring before the proceedings opened.

  She doesn’t like Simon’s solicitor. She doesn’t think he is the right man to defend Simon, but the Callingtons are paying, and they have chosen Pargeter.

  The famous English legal system was at work in front of her, and she didn’t understand it. She knew hardly anything about it. She was a foreigner. She knew that they couldn’t possibly have a case against Simon, and yet there they were, standing up, sitting down, saying things in quick, smooth voices, moving Simon further and further from Lily and the children and all his life before. It was all so polite and quick and almost off-hand. They remanded Simon in custody until his trial. She understood that. They were sending Simon back to prison. He looked quickly all round the courtroom then, his gaze blurring over Lily, not seeing her. But he didn’t struggle. He bowed his head in acquiescence, and went down.

  Simon’s solicitor came over to Lily. He was fresh and cheerful, as if everything had gone according to plan. He took her elbow to guide her out of the court, and she understood that Simon’s case was only one of a run of cases this morning. In the corridor he said to her, quite nicely, ‘Sit down for a moment. You are very pale.’

  ‘I’m always pale.’ She didn’t want to sit down with him standing over her, like the police officer who had come to their house.

  ‘You understood that no application for bail would be made?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In a case like this, bail won’t be granted. There’s no point in having a refusal on record, in my opinion. Now, I have a spot of news which may cheer you up. Learmonth has agreed to take the case.’

  She must have looked at him blankly, because he said, rather impatiently, ‘He’s the barrister we wanted to instruct.’

  ‘Oh – of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise the name for a moment …’

  ‘Of course not.’ He was gallant again. ‘A very tricky morning for you, Mrs Callington. Y
ou’re not used to this sort of thing, I suppose.’

  ‘Hardly,’ she said, with all the dryness she could muster. Did he imagine they were a family of criminals?

  ‘It’s not so bad, once you grasp what’s going on.’

  ‘What happens next?’ she asked him. ‘When will he be tried?’

  ‘Oh, it’s early days yet. There’s a tremendous amount of preparation for a case like this. My money would be on late Feb, early March, but it could be later.’

  ‘Have you been involved in a case like this before? When someone has been accused of spying?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Cases of alleged espionage are quite rare, Mrs Callington. A solicitor who specialised in them would be twiddling his thumbs for nine-tenths of his time. However, I can assure you – Why don’t you have a word with your father-in-law? He’ll be able to put your mind at rest.’

  She’d offended him. He thought she doubted his professional competence, and that she was an ignorant fool. No doubt he was a top man. The Callingtons would have made sure of that. But she still didn’t like or trust him. He was much too much at home in the court. That was his world, and Simon was incidental.

  ‘Have you got anyone with you?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’ll forgive me, you do look most awfully pale. There’s a coffee place about a hundred yards down the road. Go right and right again.’

  He was dismissing her. He didn’t like her, either. She knew it. He was the kind of man who would always know, without even having to think about it, that Lily was a Jew.

  There’s London, spread out below her window. Somewhere in it is Simon, but she can’t see him or touch him. Twenty-five past two. Perhaps he’s also awake, but she hopes not. To be awake, in a cell with no window that you can open, to be unable to get up and walk downstairs, make a cup of tea, or drink a very small glass of whisky, as Simon might do when he couldn’t sleep … To be unable to choose a book from the shelves, or a biscuit … Or go out to stand for a moment on the doorstep, breathing in the cold night air—