Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  He unbuttoned his pyjama top and climbed back into bed, forcing himself to turn away from her, towards the clock, as if the steady progress of the luminescent minute hand would dispel this morning’s need, more urgent than usual. After their upset yesterday, he’d removed himself to the sitting room with a glass of brandy. His mind had clamoured suddenly for the deep escapism of sleep, but he’d dozed only fitfully, waking every few minutes to the bombardment of brass-band hymns from the Salvation Army citadel across the street.

  Dinner was overcooked chops, green beans and day-old bread. The onion fiasco had spoiled her Good Housekeeping hopes. Philip had chattered, mercifully. Tarzan Finds a Son was playing at the Regent, and could he go? Orson’s big brother, Hal, had seen Tarzan when he’d dived off the board at the SS Brighton, which was before Johnny Weissmuller was Tarzan, but after he’d swum to fame at the Olympics. Now Hal was twenty years old and serving in France, but Orson said Hal said that Tarzan was still his hero because only the fittest survived in the jungle.

  After dinner, Philip had played with his yo-yo in the Park while Evelyn did the washing-up. At half past eight, she called him in, got him washed and to bed. Geoffrey listened to her overhead, walking slowly from room to room, closing each set of shutters for the blackout, sealing the three of them off, as if theirs were suddenly a house of mourning. When she joined him again, the excuse of her novel and the nightly, pre-news broadcast of the national anthems of all the Allied nations relieved them both, once more, of the pressure of conversation.

  She disappeared before the end of the news, busying herself with the peroxide and hot-water bottle before running a late-night bath. She said she could still smell the scorched onions in her hair; that he should get himself to bed anyway; his bottle was ready. He nodded and said, ‘Yes, why not? You relax, it’s been a long day’ – even though neither could remember the last time they hadn’t retired for the night together. If he was honest with himself, wasn’t he relieved that she had decided to spare him her tears?

  Now, irrationally perhaps, he longed to bridge the distance between them. Her slip had climbed up over her thighs in her sleep. He fingered the ends of her newly washed hair, a dark tangle that smelled of her DuBerry’s shampoo. He moved closer to the arc of her back, to her vertebrae, a Braille for his fingers. Yet to wake her would mean watching the new, painful memory of yesterday cross her face, and the prospect of it unsettled him as much as his longing impelled him.

  He kissed the nape of her neck, slightly salty now after the warmth of the night and the heaviness of her hair upon it. Beneath his palm, the skin on her elbow was rough; the hair on her arm, fine and soft. He ran his hand over the curve of her hip, fuller in the last few years. His testicles ached pleasurably. ‘Evvie.’

  ‘Hmm …’

  It was not entirely disingenuous. ‘Your arm. You’re sleeping on your arm again.’

  ‘It’s fine …’

  ‘Just shift a little …’ He drew her close, wrapping her feet in his. The muscles in his calves tightened. His heart drummed in his ear.

  Why, he asked himself, from the deep comfort of their bed, had he agreed to the Bank’s request? He hadn’t admitted to her that no one at Head Office had exerted pressure. On the contrary, they’d suggested he take a bit of time, mull it over, but he’d told them no – of course – someone had to be prepared. He was the branch manager. It simply made sense.

  Sometimes, privately, he felt unnerved by the depth of his feeling for her. It was at odds with the moderate person he usually was. He loved her too much – needed her too much – and perhaps he was never quite sure where one feeling ended and the other began.

  Had he agreed so readily to Seymour-Williams’s request simply to prove to himself that he could? Had he wanted somehow to caut-erize his heart?

  If so, he was making a kind of progress, not only in the guarantee he’d given at Head Office the day before, but also in the grim business of the pills. He’d cancelled the appointment twice, prevaricating, but, at last, he’d made the necessary arrangements with Dr Moore. He’d acted rationally. He hadn’t allowed any personal weakness to stop him from taking the difficult decision that other men had taken, discreetly, for their families.

  After the unconventional unhappiness of his childhood home – the secrets, the dissembling, the mournful visits to his mother in her room at Graylingwell – he had never aspired to anything more than a conventional family life. He’d wanted only an affectionate home, a shared sense of purpose, and the respect and love of his wife and son. The simple things in life were actually rather extraordinary – he’d never believed otherwise – and if he provided the life, the four walls of it, Evelyn animated their home. She was the thinker, the natural wit, the discerning eye. Next to her, he was a primitive; a blunt mass; straightforward, diligent, and clear in his judgements only because he lacked the patience for complication.

  He felt a surge of being, not only in their most intimate moments, but also in seemingly unremarkable exchanges: when his palm brushed hers in the space between them on the train; when she glanced at him over the top of her book; when her voice called from the top of the stairs. It was as if her hand or glance or the shape of his name on her lips released him into life.

  ‘My muse,’ he’d once called her, warmly if a little self-consciously, and she’d looked up, quizzical, surprised, but delighted, as if, in that evanescent moment, he’d seen through to the beating heart of her.

  He glanced behind him at the clock. Twenty minutes to seven. And again the thought, fast and sharp as the nick of a blade: what might the day bring?

  ‘Evvie?’ His thoughts were snapping in all directions. ‘’Morn-ing …’

  She turned towards him at last.

  ‘My tooth is better.’

  ‘That’s good …’ Wifely. Perfunctory. Only at the cusp of waking.

  He kissed a spot behind her ear, and she pressed her back and buttocks to him, sleepily, instinctively. Nothing, no memory of yesterday, intruded. He turned, briefly, groping for the bedside drawer – the ringing jingle of the old brass handle, the sweet, sudden scent of mahogany, his fingers grappling, then the brown paper bag and the square of waxed paper and cellophane. He concentrated on the wrapper, making a small tear with his teeth and lifting the thing free. He blew into it twice, to check it was sound, cautious as always.

  ‘What time is it?’ Her voice was thin, anxious. She ’d remembered.

  He moved to her, hauling her gently on to his chest. She was still light-boned, small, almost breastless, and the heat of her thighs on his made him strain towards her.

  ‘No rubber,’ she said through the murky darkness.

  ‘Yes, it’s there. I’ve got it on already.’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Leave it off.’

  He reached out an arm and found the switch, but as his hand came away, he knocked the small white marble base; light flooded their bed, their faces, their eyes, and the heavy gold fringe of the shade trembled.

  ‘No more,’ she said.

  He rolled her on to her side, then leaned towards her on one elbow. ‘No more what?’

  ‘Rubbers.’

  ‘I don’t under –’

  ‘Just no more.’

  He could feel the latex wrinkling around him. He heaved himself over her, supporting his weight on his splayed hands. He closed his eyes, and rocked against her, trying to revive himself, to move past the moment. He bent low and kissed the line of her collarbone, then her shoulder, already brown with the heat of spring. He was still conscious of his infected mouth; he must keep it away from her lips. When he opened his eyes, she was staring at him, coldly, her eyes straining.

  ‘Evvie?’

  ‘I won’t have it.’

  ‘What won’t you have?’

  She looked at him, embarrassed, angry. ‘Precautions.’

  Yesterday. It was still yesterday. The shock of his news. She squeezed her thumb and index fin
ger to the corner of her eyes to stem the tears. The dirt under her nails distracted him briefly. How had she got dirt under her nails? She’d bathed before bed.

  He didn’t expect her to reach down and slide the rubber off him. He didn’t expect her to guide him into her. He felt both strangely relieved – she wanted him, she wanted him after all – and disturbed, by her insistence, by the anger still sharp in her face, by the tears standing in her startled eyes. He tried not to think. He’d withdraw on time.

  Through the shutters and the window open behind, he could hear the sounds of the new day on the Crescent and beyond: the treble of a blackbird; the heavy hoof of the pig-man’s horse in Union Road; his clamorous tipping-out of the swill-bin; Mrs Dalrymple meowing to her tortoise on her front step. The waves of pleasure and tension rose and dipped. He raised her hip in his hand and pressed her to him. A moment more, he thought, he’d allow himself just a moment more – when he withered inside her.

  4

  Evelyn Lawrence met Geoffrey Beaumont at the Royal Pavilion Midsummer Ball of 1926. She had turned eighteen that year and had spotted her gown in the arcade of glass display cases at Plummer’s Department Store: a simple sleeveless design in white chiffon with a drop-waist sash and an organza flower at the hip. Her mother had studied the gown through the glass display as if she were viewing a breed of monkey at the London Zoo. The handkerchief hemline was questionable; the fabric flimsy. Did Evelyn want to be showy?

  Her cousin James was on his hols from Cambridge where he was reading Medicine, and had gladly agreed to escort her. But after his third glass of Veuve Clicquot, as they strolled between dances in the Pavilion Gardens, he’d confessed to her that he’d persuaded a beautiful girl to join him for a cigarette and a discussion of whether art was possible after a world war, or – he grinned at Evelyn – was everything doomed to idle expressionism?

  Evelyn glanced back. The girl, a redhead in pale green silk, waited on a galleried balcony.

  ‘I take it the question is hers, not yours?’

  ‘I only need a line, Evvie …’

  ‘You have too many already, James!’

  ‘She’s clever. She’s clever like you.’

  ‘You see!’

  ‘You once told me that finishing school would have finished you off were it not for the art classes.’

  ‘History of Art classes. If she knows her art, she’ll finish you off.’

  ‘It is my sincere hope.’

  ‘James!’

  ‘Evvie, dear heart, listen. If I fail in my cause, I’ll have no choice but to confess to your parents that you are so winsome, I’ll need to marry you myself, and to hell with even-featured, physically impressive children who don’t drool. I think they’ll come round to the idea once they realize your dowry won’t even have to leave the family.’

  She shook her head, smiling. ‘My first proposal … Somehow, I’d imagined it all so differently.’

  ‘I’ll tell your mother it all began with that sudden shower as we stepped from the cab, when, yes, Aunt Maude, it was as you’d feared: Evvie’s flimsy gown clung to her, and I couldn’t help but observe –’

  ‘With your anatomical eye …’

  ‘With my anatomical eye – of course – that her breasts are of a size and shape otherwise seen only in the delicacy of champagne glasses’ – he glanced for corroboration at the empty coupé in his hand – ‘and that’s when I knew, dear Aunt, that’s when I knew I had to have her.’

  ‘One line …’

  ‘You are the bestest.’

  ‘You are unstoppable. Ask her if she regards Max Beckmann as an idle expressionist.’

  ‘Beckmann?’

  Her smile was sly. ‘See you shortly.’

  The Pavilion’s oriental domes and minarets were floodlit and golden, as beautiful and unlikely as ever. High overhead, gulls floated spectral against the inky sky, while partygoers strolled across the lawns, their laughter rippling strangely. From the ballroom, the slow-slow-quick-quick tempo of a foxtrot spilled into the night, and, somewhere, a woman declared drunkenly that she’d lost a shoe.

  As the lawns emptied, Evelyn began to wonder just how late it was … Had James forgotten her? Ahead, in the dim light of a red paper Chinese lantern, she could see loops of smoke rising from a cigarette, although she had to edge closer before she could make out its owner. ‘Sorry to trouble you.’ She tried to sound breezy. ‘Would you have the time?’

  As he stepped into the light, smoke escaped his nostrils. ‘Certainly.’ He pushed back a starched shirt cuff. ‘It’s twenty minutes past ten.’ He was tall, long-limbed. She couldn’t help but observe that the sleeves of his tailcoat were actually too short. ‘The only thing worse than borrowing one’s tailcoat,’ she heard her mother declare, ‘is buying one’s furniture.’ For her mother, it went without saying that one inherited one’s worldly goods – and that one owned a good tailcoat.

  On his breath she could smell whisky, no doubt from a flask hidden in the pocket on the underside of his tails. He reached into his jacket and offered her a cigarette from a case but she shook her head. She never managed not to cough, she explained, privately regretting that she sounded like a child. She met his eye, and looked away again, as if to examine the paper bloom of the lantern. He invited her to join him on a nearby bench but she declined, unable to say that a damp bench would mark her gown. Across the lawn, the lanterns were dissolving into the mist that had crept up from the front. ‘You can smell the sea,’ he said.

  In the narrow pool of light, his eyes were a rich brown, warm as autumn chestnuts, but was there also, she wondered, something guarded about them? Did he labour under a certain reserve? And now, was he simply too polite to walk away and rejoin his party?

  ‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, remembering the sea. ‘There’s a definite tang in the air.’

  He pointed to the Pavilion’s central dome and offered some fact about its construction. As he did, she noticed that the underarm seam of his jacket was split, and had to suppress a smile.

  A stray couple walked past. The man was singing a tune – ‘’Deed I Do’ – and tapping out the renegade beat on his top hat as his partner’s hips sashayed to the rhythm. Their figures disappeared before his voice did, but, when it too was gone, the night seemed quieter, emptier – as strange as a theatre after closing, when the boxes, the bright plaster cherubs and even the chandelier’s dazzle have been absorbed into the ubiquitous dark.

  Each suddenly felt odd, like an exile, between worlds. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with the toe of his shoe. ‘Would you like me to escort you inside?’

  ‘I’m keeping you.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Not at all. I only thought –’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, getting hold of herself. ‘Yes, I really should locate my cousin.’

  They introduced themselves, belatedly. She liked his smile, even though his strong teeth seemed slightly overlarge for his mouth. His expression was reserved yet honest and direct. It was a good face, she decided.

  She rocked slightly on her heels while both ransacked their brains for something more. She almost laughed. How, in the middle of provincial Brighton, had she found herself standing with a stranger in the gardens of a pleasure palace? When had they stepped into The Arabian Nights ? Her mouth tingled with a sensation she couldn’t put words to, while he considered reaching over the rail to break off a bloom for her hair. But ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Lilac, still.’ After her words, the gesture, he decided, would have been stagey.

  She was about to inquire about his party inside but stopped herself. He did not offer her a sip from his flask. Too familiar. Nor did he offer her his tailcoat for her shoulders, because the night was, after all, warm.

  ‘I hope you’re clever with a needle and thread,’ she said, taking even herself by surprise. He looked bemused. She laughed and took the liberty of poking her index finger into his armpit. ‘It would seem you’ve expanded tonight.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, a sm
ile playing on his lips. ‘How careless of me.’

  ‘And in a debutante’s company.’

  ‘It seems I’ve let myself go.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have to see such things.’

  ‘Quite.’ He nodded gravely.

  ‘I’m shocked, of course.’

  ‘I can only apologize. Sometimes, I shock myself …’

  She forgot her performance. ‘I don’t believe you!’ She grinned, then turned her face quickly to the sky.

  ‘Drat.’ He reached for his cigarette case. ‘There goes any hope I had of intrigue.’

  She shrugged. ‘If it helps at all, I can’t actually see you in the dark.’

  ‘That’s very kind, thank you.’

  ‘Shall we repair to the light?’

  ‘Yes, I really must get you back.’

  ‘I would say that my cousin will be worrying about me, but it’s more likely I’ll have to remind him who I am.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Alas, you don’t know James.’

  ‘Alas’ – his voice in the night was amused and warm – ‘I don’t imagine you’re easily forgotten.’

  She turned, snapped a lilac bloom off the bush, and slid it behind her ear. ‘Mr Beaumont, I’ll beg you to remember that, as a debutante, I am entirely forgettable, and my escort will challenge any man who avers otherwise.’ Her smile twitched.

  At the top of the flight of stone stairs, the anteroom was as stuffy and raucous as a schoolroom. Near the door, a group of perhaps half a dozen young men clutched their capes and canes, and debated loudly and drunkenly the effects of May’s General Strike. His party, she assumed. Four of them greeted Geoffrey as he passed, and he returned a few quick words. One of the four also nodded warmly to her. Another among them, a man with a monocle – black eyes, a hair-line crack at the rim of his eyepiece – looked intently at Geoffrey but did not nod. Was it a snub?

  She would think little more of it, of this stranger, until a year later when she’d turn in her seat at the Savoy Theatre and recognize him immediately in the row behind them. He’d been peering at the programme, monocled again, the edge of its lens still faintly cracked. As he’d chatted with his companion, she’d murmured instructions to Geoffrey to turn around, to look casually, but he’d merely shrugged, seemingly without recollection. After the interval, the pair didn’t return, and at the time it had seemed both something and nothing.