Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

He hovered on the top step, contemplating retreat, yet even as he did, he couldn’t shake a growing awareness of something within his chest, an electric crackle of possibility, a clarifying jolt to his senses. An odd sort of hopefulness where he had expected shame and queasiness. Some new dynamic had propelled him that afternoon down Race Hill, down Elm Grove, through the town and uphill again past the station. After weeks of deliberation and prevarication, here he stood at Number 39.

  The lobby of the Metropole and the women there had been out of the question. Too public, too chandelier-bright.

  It was an experiment, he told himself. Would he find himself ‘capable’ here?

  He counted the notes in his wallet, and, as he did so, the memory of his confrontation last month, with the Category A prisoner, returned. He saw again the man’s black, sardonic eyes and the faint line of mockery on his lips. The truth was, Geoffrey wouldn’t have disciplined his men had they neglected to haul this particular prisoner out of the sea. He was a common cheat who’d arrived in the country with forged bank notes; who’d been living in Brighton on a stash he hadn’t turned over to the authorities. He was a drifter without regard for the daily imperatives under which most people laboured; a coward who had bungled even his own suicide. A homosexual, possibly. A Jew, certainly. He called himself an artist, though the art establishment in Berlin had disagreed. The Home Department had deemed him Category A: a would-be agitator, a subversive.

  He pulled hard on the bell.

  As Evelyn stepped from the barbed mouth of the tunnel on to what had been, only two months before, the course’s pristine finishing line, her bag slid to the ground. Beyond the grandstand itself, the green turf had disappeared beneath a blight of weather-boarded barracks.

  Mistaking her shock for admiration, the young sentry drew her attention to the Camp’s key features, spread out over more than a mile: a squat cookhouse, a canteen, a fuel store, a laundry, latrines and, in the area that was once, as she recalled, the winners’ enclosure, rows of accommodation that housed the permanent patrol unit.

  They walked on, passing a row of stable blocks – housing for the new arrivals, he explained. Men in grey boiler suits aired straw mattresses on a patch of grass. Others laboured over vats of cement. ‘Gun emplacements,’ he said. ‘We’re the biggest local supplier.’ As she passed, their guard shouted something in fierce gutturals, and the men lowered their eyes.

  ‘See the tote building over there?’ her escort prattled. ‘That’s where they used to take the bets, through the slots at the bottom of those little windows. But it’s a detention block now, ’cos the windows are that small a man would be lucky to get more than a square of toilet paper through – pardon my French. It’s as good as airless in there, so if a troublemaker finds himself locked up, he starts behaving, or he does if he wants to breathe again.’

  She felt sick, as if she were about to be motioned to the door and asked to cut a blue ribbon. ‘Where is the infirmary? Are there patients today?’

  He pointed with his bayonet. ‘The furthest hut. You can just see the tin roof from here, in the old parade ring. We got one chap – tried to top himself last month.’

  He offered to carry her bag. She shook her head. ‘He’s dying?’

  ‘Should be dead but our lads saved the daft beggar. From what I hear, he’s tuppence off the pound.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Just one, ’s far as I know. Old geezer. On his way out. And over there, behind the latrines, is our new ablutions block. We had a pipe burst again last week, so it was a right ol’ mess, as you can imagine.’ He showed her to her husband’s ‘HQ’. ‘Now you make sure you have someone to show you out of here, Mrs Beaumont. Pardon my French, but I wouldn’t put anything past this lot. If you ask me, some of ’em need extra bromide in their bread. The I-talians especially.’

  In the stuffiness of the office, she stared at her husband’s steel desk. The Head of Patrol was no happier to see her than she was to see him. ‘I’m sorry to appear awkward, Sergeant, but I think you’ll find Mr Beaumont is somewhere. It is Monday, after all, and on Mondays, as we both know, he has his inspections.’

  The woman smoothed her dress and stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Geoffrey surveyed the room.

  An iron bed and washstand were pushed up against one wall. A gas ring and a kettle occupied a dressing table, under the leg of which someone had shoved a wedge of card. A packet of Player’s lay next to the kettle. On a painted shelf, a silver frame, the only thing of value in the room, was turned to the wall. He was curious but his eyes flicked past it. The floorboards were warped and bare save for a bright rag rug. The yellow edge of a child’s hoop stuck out from under the bed.

  ‘Fine, yes?’ She blotted her lips on a tissue.

  He walked to the window and pushed aside the pale muslin curtains. The light of late afternoon tipped like syrup across the chimney pots, the wireless masts and the roof of Brighton Station. On the railway bridge, a train sped by, hissing steam, and the prisoner’s words returned to him unexpectedly, their tone amused, ironic, overly familiar.

  I daresay it’s also rare to meet a Superintendent who takes so great an interest in his prisoners.

  He followed the line of the train; felt the pounding of the tracks, the stoked heat of its engine. His hostess, he realized belatedly, was waving a hand, motioning to the room. ‘Clean. Yes?’

  He blinked and turned, relieved she made no effort to smile in spite of the false cheer of her question. She was tall, in her late twenties or early thirties, with dark hair, slack lips and heavy, pendant breasts. She was not a pretty woman – her eyebrows were too heavy, her face too broad – but she had a full-bodied gravitas, a sombre sensuality, and a voice that did not repel him.

  It was enough.

  He flexed the tension from his hands. She passed him a matchbox and the pack of Player’s, taking one for herself. Then she opened a drawer and produced a bottle of vodka and two tumblers. ‘Sorry, Doctor. No tonic.’

  ‘I am not a doctor,’ he said, striking a match.

  She shrugged, as if to say, Suit yourself, and held out her cigarette for a light.

  He obliged, lit his own, and exhaled. On the ceiling, a yellowed strip was studded with flies. ‘May I ask your name?’

  ‘Leah.’

  Her back was beautifully straight. He found it surprising in a woman of her class, and the puzzle of it irked him briefly. ‘Where do you come from, Leah?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ she said, screwing the vodka lid back on. ‘Nowhere you know.’ He watched her tap ash into the Eiffel Tower. On her upper arm a livid mark flashed red.

  ‘You’ve had a bit of an accident.’ He nodded to it. It was recent, still blistering, and the shape, all too clear. He didn’t need to be a doctor to know that someone had forced her arm down on the gas ring. He looked for a moment too long, wondering at the intensities she had known.

  ‘I put something else on. You won’t see. Drink, drink. Is hot today, no? You walked far, I think. You sweat.’

  He looked up.

  ‘A man must sweat!’ she said.

  ‘Are there other girls, other girls like you, who live here?’ He could hear nothing, no signs of life, but he imagined ears at the door.

  ‘Why “other girls”?’ Her lip jutted. ‘I told you. This’ – she nodded at the burn – ‘is nothing.’ She reached for the dressing gown on the hook of the door but hesitated, realizing the point was not to put more clothing on.

  Was she up to this? he wondered. Was he? Or would he feel compelled to pay her out of pity and leave?

  ‘You are worried,’ she said. ‘Forget.’

  ‘Not worried,’ he said. ‘Curious.’ The Experiment.

  He could smell the scent of her hair, loose and unpinned. She dropped the dressing gown on the bed next to him and walked to the window. In the light, the curve of her thighs showed through the thin cotton of her skirt, and he felt a sudden, overwhelming desire to take their flesh betw
een his teeth.

  He slipped off his jacket, folded it over the bedstead, and took a seat on the edge of the bed. The vodka slid down his throat. He’d never looked twice at this shape of a woman before, but sitting here, studying her, he realized he liked the substantialness of her. She was heavily female. Only now did it occur to him: he had never been with a woman he hadn’t been half afraid of breaking.

  He checked his wristwatch, then his nails. He almost made it sound offhand: ‘Are you a Jewess?’

  At the window, she drew deeply on her cigarette. Someone passed in the street below, and she turned, feigning interest in their progress. Beyond the street, on a platform at the station, a guard blew a whistle, hard and shrill.

  ‘A Jewess?’ she said, but her voice betrayed nothing. She bent, letting the sill take her weight, and flicked ash with one hand while rubbing the small of her back with the other, up and down, her long fingers splayed against her haunches. Beautiful fingers.

  Then the curtains lifted in a rare, rippling breeze, and she turned to him through the veil of muslin. ‘You say …’ and she held his gaze.

  In the distance, something crashed. At the station, a carriage was being shunted into line with a vengeance.

  She sat down on the bed beside him.

  Look at her, Otto thought, as she seated herself at the foot of the old man’s bed. What was the English expression? ‘Lady Bountiful’. There she sat, speaking charitably while the tailor rasped his pitiful replies. She’d looked horrified at her first glimpse of him. Unnerved. Reality was not to her liking. Now she seemed more confident. Too confident. She moved from the foot of the bed to the old man’s side and took his hand in hers.

  Her face puckered at the sight of the bucket beneath the bed, not far from her feet, and she called to the Nazi guard, demanding, as the Superintendent’s wife, that he empty it. She reached for the sponge that floated in a bowl of day-old water and pressed it to the old man’s cracked lips. She also required a chair.

  ‘Has the doctor been?’

  The guard shrugged.

  From his bed, Otto failed to suppress a laugh, and she pivoted, her eyes hot, flashing, as if deciding that, whoever he was, whatever his suffering, he had just forfeited any claim he might have had to her compassion. She smoothed her skirt over her knees but, as she turned back to the old man, her foot knocked the carrier bag by her chair. Books tumbled out across the lino, and not only books. Over the top of them – incongruously, flamboyantly – lay a pair of flesh-toned silk stockings, wrinkled, as if they had been removed in a hurry.

  She stooped quickly, pushing them and all but one of the books back into her bag. The guard pretended not to see. Otto laughed again. Let the Superintendent call in the firing squad, he thought. A prisoner has seen Mrs Superintendent’s stockings. In Berlin, he’d painted models in every state of undress. This woman looked – what was the word? – ‘corseted’.

  ‘Please, Mr Pirazzini,’ she was murmuring, ‘you rest. No, I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’ As if the crisis were hers. ‘Thank you. I shall read to you now. Would you like that? It’s a calming piece. I believe you might enjoy it.’ She was flustered, embarrassed. The old man closed his eyes obligingly.

  She looked behind her, to see if Otto still dared to watch.

  Not only did he still watch, he was, she saw, laughing to himself.

  She turned her head sharply back. ‘The Waves,’ she announced brightly, ‘by Mrs Virginia Woolf. “The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky …” ’

  Had her husband told her, Otto wondered, about his failed effort to drown himself? Of course he had. The Waves. Such comedy, he wanted to declare. Of all the books in that bag. What a riposte. Ha ha!

  He was diving in again. He could see under water. So clear, so clean, and soundless. No children’s faces. No cries. He could have stayed there for ever.

  Her voice composed itself into a pleasing music. He could tell she liked the rhythms of the prose. On and on she read. Mr Pirazzini was asleep. Or dead. Did it matter? She was intent on her charity. He had to turn from the sight of her, though tears sprang to his eyes each time he tried to move his shoulder on the pillow. The operation had been postponed again. Staff shortages, too many injured evacuees. The wound festered. Would his arm, his painting arm, ever be steady again?

  ‘Thank you,’ he heard her say to the Nazi, as he slid the bucket below the old man’s bed. ‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’ Her voice was the silk of the stockings in her bag. The guard’s boots passed the end of his bed, to and fro, to and fro. Sweat poured from him. He could no longer distinguish fever from fear. The scar tissue on his back was inflamed, a reaction to too many days inert in bed. During his admission examination, the Army medic had bent to study the crude geometry of hobnails. Then he’d picked up a pen, scribbled a note on a form, ticked a box that said PREVIOUS, and passed Otto the regulation overalls.

  Evelyn put him from her mind. She no longer cared that the man had been so desperate that he had, according to the sentry’s account, tried to take his own life. He did not seem desperate to her. He seemed highly amused.

  She could not hate a total stranger – she would not allow herself to be so irrational – but she despised this man somehow, this enemy alien, and that strength of feeling made her read with a peculiar vivacity, a surge of will, that was carried, in the undulations of those waves of prose, across the room to him.

  The Waves, ha ha. Of course, Otto thought. Ha ha, he laughed, trembling.

  Mr Pirazzini opened his eyes and closed them.

  She paused mid-line. Behind her, the man was openly laughing now. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to shout, What on earth could you possibly find to amuse you here? What on earth could you have to laugh about?

  She closed her book. Her heart thudded. The room went quiet, and the heat was suddenly unbearable. She lifted her hair from her neck and then, quickly, self-consciously, let it drop again. She wanted to turn – Who are you? Are you mad? – but she sat, gripped by a strange gravity, a force field of heat, silence and expectation … She didn’t even know the sound of his voice.

  Mr Pirazzini coughed, and she started in her chair. On and on, he struggled to get his breath. She got to her feet and tried to prop him higher. She called for the guard but nothing helped. Mr Pirazzini’s lungs rattled like a pair of dice in a game he could not win.

  That airless night, Geoffrey and Evelyn lay together in their blacked-out room, feigning sleep.

  He rolled on to his side, stirring at the memory of Leah glimpsed through pale muslin. ‘You say,’ she murmured again through slick, painted lips.

  The relief, at last, had been tremendous.

  Beside him, Evelyn cringed again at the memory of the stockings. She could still feel the pressure of Otto Gottlieb’s gaze on her back.

  All over Brighton that night, people needed air, a breeze. They longed to draw back the blinds, shutters and curtains. The weather needed to break. The war needed to break. The entire town seemed to live on short, staggering breaths.

  Then, as if in reply to some reckless act of the collective will or an unspeakable communal wish, something in the atmosphere gave way that July night. Squalls and showers blew in from the west. The lid of summer came off. And in a moment that was, after so many months of waiting, as much longed for (secretly, ashamedly) as it was dreaded, the first bomb was tipped into the early morning of the new day: a fifty-kilogram falling star, gravid, lethal and indifferent.

  19

  Seven others would follow, whistling terror.

  Early in the morning of the 15th of July, the Dornier 17 slipped in under the radar and circled the town.

  Most lay clenched in their beds. Not us. Don’t get ideas. On your way now. Bugger off.

  Imagine it.

  You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast. The walls of your house are sucked in – a full ten inches – before they are pushed back out by a blast wind that is, briefly, of hurricane force.
You wake, unable to understand why heaps of gravel and brick dust are being shovelled over you at speed. When you finally look up, your mouth and nostrils are crammed with dust. The skin is flayed from your forearms where you raised your hands to protect your head. Your eardrums have burst, and the pain leaves you staggering as you climb free of the rubble that is your bed.

  It’s not easy to get your bearings. The dividing walls have fallen. There is a hole of grey sky in the roof. The sense of space is dizzying, and your ears are bleeding. You have to take a running jump to get to the stairway, and downstairs, the floorboards in the hallway are up, as if someone has been shuffling them like a pack of cards.

  You stumble outside for air, but even here the day is thick with dust, soot and – you can’t make sense of it – a blizzard of feathers. Throughout the neighbourhood, pillows, bolsters and mattresses have exploded.

  There are puffs of smoke. You can’t see them, but from high above, they look only like those a child might draw.

  You manage to avoid your front garden, which is not a garden at all but a crater. At the kerb, you turn to stare. Your home stands open to the world, a grim, oversized doll’s house. How is it possible? The front wall has disappeared. Your private life has been turned inside out. Your mother still smiles from the picture on the side table.

  At the back of the house – for your view is brutally clear – the bedroom and kitchen curtains hang in shreds. A cheval mirror, broken on its axis, wobbles like a tooth. In the front room, the furniture lies buried beneath the tons of wet chalk that erupted from the garden. Later, the Regional Officer of the War Damage Commission will approve compensation for your domestic contents, clothing and personal effects to a maximum of £200. He will stamp your C1 form. Payments in most cases, he will note, won’t be issued until after the war.

  On the pavement, there is blood by your feet. A stray dog is sniff-ing at it. Someone offers you bandages for your arms, a blanket, shoes, and a cup of tea with extra lumps of sugar. You can’t hold the cup for shaking.

  Shrapnel still tinkles down the rooftops, though you hear nothing of course and won’t ever again. But you can smell the pounded brick dust. You see the lady’s corset that dangles from a branch in the tree above you. Glass crunches underfoot. As you make your slow progress, you almost trip over two of your neighbours who are resting on stretchers. Why has no one given them a blanket? ‘All right, Iris?’ you say. You hear your voice only as a vibration in your throat. ‘All right, Ernest?’ They don’t stir. Concussed, you tell yourself.