She took a seat in a pew, bent for his jumper, and pressed it to her face. But nothing. No trace. Was that what she’d feared all this time? The final proof of his absence.
Today, she told herself. She would tell Geoffrey today, for how could they go on? The memories – the knowledge – would never leave them, and they could pretend no more.
She turned her face at last to the fresco and felt her own sharp intake of breath. Its scale was vast; her naked back, monumental; her skirt, a dull navy. The crude tin bucket at her feet shone in the light.
He had seen her. That day at the standpipe that terrible day.
She had bent at the waist, just as she bent now – high on the wall overhead. She’d cupped her hands to splash her face and, now, in his painting, the action of her left forearm covered her pendant breast. The point of view was his – or King David’s rather – from his position on the slope above. At the standpipe, the water gushed out over her shoes and pooled brightly at her feet. Even that was as it had been that day, for she’d forgotten to kick off her shoes.
Yet he had said nothing. Why?
She’d never know.
Each of their three faces was obscured – her profile by the gush of water, Geoffrey’s by a pair of binoculars, and Otto’s because he stood with his back to the onlooker. Turn around, she wanted to say to him. Turn for me. He was David, King of the Jews, in a thin MoD blanket. His hair was shorn. His shoulders were bare and wasted. The turf beneath his feet was burned yellow. Overhead, as he watched her, a male sparrowhawk rode a thermal.
In the chapel, the morning’s light streamed, and it occurred to her that it was as he’d said: his colours were drawn into life by the carbon of her breath, by the light of her eye, by the speed of her heart.
She wanted to say to him, Otto, my heart is dead.
On the grandstand roof, above a group of prisoners in grey, Geoffrey as Uriah watched two fighter planes through binoculars. The sky above him was ripped by razor wire and contrails. In his breast pocket, poking out over the top, her lilac envelope waited with the letter of instruction. She could see Otto still, turning it in his hands after she’d delivered it that afternoon. He’d smiled to himself, amused no doubt by the thought of her coloured stationery finding its way into his composition.
All the way across the triptych, the edge of cliff-line made a thin, undulating ribbon of brilliant white, and, suddenly dizzy, as if with those heights, she had to lean forward to rest her head in her hands against the next pew. The cold of the flags rose through the soles of her shoes. She was hungry, and yet, again, the wave rolled through her, nausea, grief, anger; anger that he’d left her to this, to the loneliness of a stone chapel, to the cruelty of him gone. She hadn’t ventured near Number 5. She’d paid a woman to clean his room and take away the wreckage of that night.
She was still light-headed as she rose and walked, eyes straining … but yes, there it was, his name on the envelope, just as she’d written it, only painted here in his own hand. Gottlieb. It was all that appeared of his name over the edge of Uriah’s suit pocket – his only signature on the fresco.
The air in the chapel seemed to surge and crest like a wave in the light that radiated from the three walls, and for a fleeting moment, she felt the massive life of the painting gather her up, as if it had extended itself into three dimensions to absorb her, there in the pew with his jumper in her lap; as if there were no boundaries between her body and his vision; between the present moment and their past.
Was she seeing on these three walls the story of Bathsheba, Uriah and King David or another story, their own, lying in wait within the ancient one, ready to ambush them all: this war, their passion, the Camp’s high roof, the mean standpipe, that stray wingless bomb …? In Otto’s story, Uriah was sending David to his death. Their fortunes had reversed, and here, Bathsheba’s hand was in – on – that letter, for how could the lilac envelope ever mean anything else now?
Time churned. How alive she’d felt in his arms that night, so alive there was no knowing it for the joy that it was.
She turned and walked to the rear of the chapel. She needed to hold the whole of his composition in her mind’s eye, as he must have done that morning before leaving. His vision shuddered to life on the walls. The colours pulsed. The razor wire glinted. And she saw. The war he’d evoked wasn’t this war, their war, it was only war; the war that never ended but only began somewhere new, time and again.
Yet the fresco was luminous. Here was every brute evil and loss, but above it, through it, rolled the light off the Channel and its vast reprieve.
She walked to the front again, slipping past the chapel’s small bare altar, and raised her hand to the wall to feel him in his work; in the brushstrokes of the hillside where he’d handled the pigment more freely. If only she could conjure the flat of his palm against hers – but again, nothing. Something painful welled in her chest and her heart laboured beneath her ribs, while, unknown, within, at the end of a fine fuse of flesh and blood, life pulsed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks must firstly go to the remarkable team of people at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books. I am especially grateful for the talent, insights and generous support of my editors Simon Prosser, Anna Kelly and Juliette Mitchell. I’m proud to be with a publisher that champions some of the best literary fiction being written today. Long may they thrive. I’m also grateful to my publicist, Lija Kresowaty, for her energy and skill; my copy-editor, Sarah Coward, for her exceptionally fine eye; and editorial assistant Marissa Chen for her enthusiasm and ready help.
Equally, I’d like to extend my thanks to my agent, David Godwin of DGA, whose passion for literature is always inspiring, and to Heather Godwin, for her kind support behind the scenes at DGA. I’m also grateful to Kirsty McLachlan, Caitlin Ingham and Anna Watkins for their thoughtful words and efforts on this book’s behalf.
Thanks are due to my good friends Karen Steven and Hugh Dun-kerley. Each read the manuscript at a crucial point in its development, and offered vital perspectives and suggestions. I would also like to thank my friends Theresa Burgess, Rebecca Ford, Jackie Quinn, Adam Marek, Sally O’Reilly and Sue Roe for their good company and generous understanding of the writing life.
In the last six years, Diana Reich, Artistic Director of the Inter-national Charleston Festival, has offered me kind support, and that has been a gift. Di Speirs at the BBC has been a warm and generous presence; her interest in my work has been invaluable. Helen Dunmore’s encouragement has meant a great deal and is much appreciated. Cathy Galvin, Director of Word Factory, has been another great inspiration.
Funding from the Canada Council for the Arts arrived in 2008, just when I needed it most, and I’m profoundly grateful to the Council and my native land for these lifelines it offers its writers. In the UK, I’m also very grateful for the Authors’ Foundation, which offered me generous financial assistance. The lovely people at Book-trust do the most wonderful things to promote writers, and I’m very lucky to have been on the receiving end. I’m fortunate, too, to share in the dynamic literary culture my colleagues and students – past and present – create at the University of Chichester.
My mother, Freda MacLeod, my sisters Kate MacLeod and Ellen MacLeod, and my sister-in-law, Liz Payne, have been unfailingly supportive. The writing of any novel is a marathon of sorts – at times exhilarating and at times gruelling – and it’s a process that extends over years. It has always meant so much to me to have their love and encouragement, and never more than during the writing of Unexploded.
I am indebted to the work of Virginia Woolf and specifically, to her novels The Waves and The Years, and to her essay ‘The Leaning Tower’. Woolf ’s life and work have been an inspiration, and I am very fortunate to have been able to cite from her work.
I am also indebted to Brighton Behind the Front: Photographs & Memories of the Second World War, which was compiled and published by the ever-impressive QueenSpark Books of Brighton. An account from this b
ook – reproduced with the permission of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex – is the source of my character Frank Dunn’s description of the bombing of the Brighton Odeon on 14 September 1940.
Unexploded is a work of fiction. While great care has been taken to create an authentic picture of the period and place, it is not always possible to serve the literary demands of a narrative and each historical fact in a single work. This novel features major and minor events from the period May 1940 to June 1941. This said, it should not be taken as an entirely accurate historical record of that year.
Alison MacLeod
HAMISH HAMILTON
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Published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd, 2013.
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Copyright © Alison MacLeod, 2013
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-14-319081-3
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