by Simon Mawer
An entire city blown off the map.
She thought of the Japanese. She didn’t quite know how to picture them. Images came to mind of submissive women, hands together, bowing like nuns. And savage, monkey soldiers being killed in their thousands on fragments of rock and spits of sand in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. What else was there? Samurai warriors. Geisha girls. Madame Butterfly. All reduced to charcoal one fine day.
The super bomb had happened.
At breakfast her father seemed bewildered. ‘What have we come to?’ he asked, of no one in particular, from behind his copy of The Times. ‘Now it appears we can massacre tens of thousands of people without any risk to ourselves. It seems the very depths of barbarism.’
She tore a fragment of toast and buttered it with care. ‘Do you know what, Father?’
He flipped the newspaper down and looked at her with a hopeless expression. ‘Tell me, my dear.’
‘If they had possessed a bomb like this when I was in the camp and they had dropped it on Berlin to end the war …’
‘You would have cheered them on? Of course you would have, Squirrel. And, had I known the plight you were in, so would I. But it’s a complex piece of mathematics, isn’t it, balancing numbers of dead? I wonder how many deaths my daughter’s life is worth?’
Why did that bleak little speech upset her so much? But the upset wasn’t an overt one. There were no tears, no hysterics, just a profound misery eating away at the very foundations of her mind. She spoke quietly, almost as though she was only just understanding: ‘That’s what Clément was doing in Canada. That’s why I got him out of Paris.’
The following silence was punctuated by the ritual sounds of breakfast, the buttering of toast, the pouring of tea, the stirring of sugar.
‘Pelletier?’
‘Clément Pelletier, yes. That’s why they wanted him – to help build that bomb.’ It seemed incredible, the implications unremitting and inexorable, spreading out like the shockwave of the bomb itself. From her small presence in Paris to this story on the news – another city on the other side of the world obliterated.
Her father looked at her over the top of his paper. ‘Now how would you know a thing like that, Squirrel? It would all have been most secret. It says here in the paper, “complete secrecy guarded all these activities, and no single person was informed whose work was not indispensible to progress”.’
She felt a sudden anger. ‘Didn’t you ever listen to what Ned used to say, Papa? Ned told me. For God’s sake listen! Ned told me. He told you as well, although you wouldn’t listen. This secret the papers talk about wasn’t a secret at all. Ned said—’
‘Oh, Ned always says—’
‘—that everyone in science knew. It was obvious. Don’t you remember that last Christmas in Geneva before the war, how he and Clément were talking about it all the time? Energy, vast amounts of energy liberated by the splitting up of atoms. And all you could say was it sounded like alchemy.’
He frowned, as if the mad ideas of his son couldn’t possibly have had an impact in the real world. ‘The transmutation of the elements?’
‘That was it, that’s what Clément was working on in Paris with Frédéric Joliot. When I turned up in the city during the occupation, Clément knew very well why they’d sent me.’ She looked around for something else to say. But there was nothing really, and nothing much to feel – just her own little fragment of guilt lodged like a sharp splinter in her sternum. Or worse, like a small nodule of uranium, apparently harmless but giving out radiation, a constant emission of radiation eating away at her tissues. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’
Three days later they dropped a second bomb on a second city no one had ever heard of; three days after that Japan surrendered and the war, the whole war, had finally come to an end.
Furze
It was my mother who suggested we take Marian down to the cottage on the coast. It would do her good, Mother decided. The sea air would do her good. The sound of the sea and the cry of the gulls would all do her good. Ozone, no doubt she mentioned ozone; which everyone seemed to think would also do people good, although ozone is an allotrope of oxygen, and it’s poisonous.
The cottage, Furze Cottage, belonged to my father’s family. It was where he had spent most of his childhood holidays and where we had gone every summer until it disappeared inside the restricted coastal defence area in 1939. Clad in weatherboard, the building has something of the appearance of a houseboat about it – clinker-built and sturdy, capable of floating but marooned by a high tide on the side of a hill overlooking Pett Level, which is flatland trying not to be salt marsh and not always succeeding. In the distance is the low spit of Dungeness. At the back of the house the land climbs to the top of sandstone cliffs that, being dirty beige, are a marked contrast to the patriotic chalky white ones further along the coast in either direction.
The atmosphere of the house is of family intimacy of a faintly old-fashioned kind. At the seaward end there’s a sitting room with sagging sofas, old leather armchairs and a log fire that smokes when the wind blows in the wrong direction; leading back from this is a corridor lined like a picture gallery with monochrome memories of past summers – my father as a young boy showing a fossil he had found in the cliffs; my parents on their honeymoon looking awkward and slightly surprised, as though whatever had happened in the privacy of their bedroom was not quite what they had expected; aunts and uncles disporting themselves in various clumsy swimming costumes; myself as a toddler with my mother almost smiling with delight. But for me it is different now because every time I go there I feel the presence of Marian. I barely even recall her parents, who were with us as well – it is just Marian. Marian sitting curled up in one of the armchairs; Marian in the kitchen, cooking brown crabs that we bought from a fisherman in Hastings; Marian down on the empty shingle beach where mines had only just been cleared, paddling in the water at low tide, her ivory limbs imbued with some kind of magic, as ethereal as any Pre-Raphaelite lady of the lake. She wore a navy swimming costume with a narrow pelmet across the bottom. I remember that, the scrupulous attempt to hide her crotch. I watched her closely, and tried not to; I hung around her whatever she was doing, and pretended to be about my own business. She must have seen through my subterfuges but I think she felt sorry for me, and apologetic for having been instrumental in my breaking my collarbone, which was still in the process of mending, although I was by then no longer forced to wear a sling. Perhaps that is why, while my sister made sandcastles under the careless eye of my mother, Marian was willing to join me in a search for fossils beneath the cliffs, or poke around among bits of wrack that lay about the place, wreckage from a recent storm. The rocks were encrusted with mussels which we broke open to reveal a slippery, viscid inner life. ‘Moules,’ she told me. ‘We French love moules.’
We French. Nous autres Français. Moules. I watched her mouth as she uttered the words. To speak French seemed to require a different movement of her lips, a plasticity, a mobility, a prehensile grasp of the sound. I shivered with repugnance and delight.
We returned to our towels and she lay down in the sun with her eyes shut. Lying a few feet away I could look at her more closely, at the angle of her neck, the soft hillocks of her bosom. Hiding beneath the pelmet of her costume was a sleek curved delta of cotton that concealed I knew not what: something marine, something molluscan of which I had only the vaguest idea. On the inside of her groin there was a scribble of hair like the byssus of the mussels we had gathered.
But such pleasures were as fleeting as the inadequate sunshine. Most days we went walking along the dunes or up on the cliff paths, talking of things that were centuries away from the war and its ghastly aftermath. In the evenings, in front of a fire of driftwood, while the others read, she and I attempted a jigsaw that we found in a wooden games chest. We knelt at the table and the picture gradually took shape beneath our fingers – Millais’s painting of Ophelia drowning.
/> It was the first time I had been in such close and prolonged proximity to an adult who wasn’t family. I was fascinated and thrilled by her physical closeness, by the brush of her hair against my cheek as she reached across to place a piece; by our sudden collision of hands as we each grabbed for the same piece and, laughing, wrestled with it for possession; by her scent which seemed to belong to her alone, as much her as the particular curve of her mouth or the strange gaze of her dark eyes. This sense of proximity to her was continued even when we all retired to bed because she occupied the room next to mine and the wall between us was mere plasterboard and I could hear her moving about, hear the flow of water in her washbasin, the creaking of the floorboards beneath her feet, the sound of bedsprings as she lay down. I followed her every move through the house, knew when she slept and when she rose, when she was in the kitchen making coffee or in the bathroom washing. One morning, as I hovered in the corridor, she opened the bathroom door and came out, pulling her dressing gown around her and giving me a glimpse, just a treasured glimpse, of one loose, lard-white breast with its surprising, roseate nipple. ‘Whoops!’ she exclaimed, and laughed, crossing the corridor and closing the door to her bedroom behind her and leaving my stunted twelve-year-old mind swollen with her presence, bloated with fantasy.
She, of course, saw things quite differently. Level-headed, she played the dutiful and attentive daughter and friend. She tolerated the boredom. She walked, went swimming, played with the little girl and the tiresome older brother who couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Doubtless her parents found it all very touching and a confirmation of the idea they had, that the break would do her good, get her away from her nightmares, bring her gently down to earth. But Marian Sutro was practised in the arts of dissimulation. She knew when to laugh and when to argue – never too forcefully and always with a due concession at the end – when to show affection and when to show submission. She knew how to play the part, how to live her cover story as though it were her own.
‘What a wonderful morning,’ she would exclaim when she sat down at the breakfast table. ‘What’s the plan today?’ As though a plan brought purpose to our stay. As though the future, either immediate or distant, might be given meaning. But inside she knew the awful abyss of indifference, the great void left by what had happened to her and what had happened as a result of her. At night she lay awake and watched the sky through the window of her bedroom to witness the moon rise. The sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night. She felt burned by the moon, governed by the moon. It pulled at the tides of her body, touched her as Benoît had touched her, and Clément, and the Air Force pilot whose name she had almost forgotten. Walcott. Alan Walcott. And Véronique. She thought of Véronique dying on the sands of the Appellplatz while the other women watched. She thought of Benoît dead, and Yvette and Emile lost. And the dead darlings – Violette and Noor, Yvonne and Lilian and others, girls she had known only by reputation, or a glance across some briefing room, or a nodded acknowledgement as they passed each other in the corridor of Orchard Court. All dead. All dead, too, the tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dead beneath the sun of Clément’s super bomb.
And she, for reasons that were unclear to her, was alive. Beyond being touched, beyond emotion, beyond caring about anyone or anything. As cold and pale and desolate as the moon, planning things out with all the care she had shown when organising a parachutage or the pick-up with the Lysander; governed by the moon.
She waited until three o’clock in the morning, the time when, Napoleon himself said – and he should have known well enough – that you need real courage. She dressed, as silently as she could, in the slacks and an old sweater she used for walking, then moved silently through the house, carefully avoiding the particular floorboards that creaked – they’d even taught her how to do that at Beaulieu – to the front door. In the glass porch she laced up her walking boots and, once ready, made her way silently through the garden onto the cliff path. The moon was almost full, riding high over shards of cloud, beating the sea from pewter to silver. In its light she could see the path clearly enough and it took her ten minutes to reach the place she had chosen, where the path ran close to the edge and someone had erected an approximate fence.
It was easy enough to climb over the fence and walk over the uneven turf to the lip of the cliff. She stood there in the updraft of wind, looking out across the glittering sea towards France, with the wave noise coming up from below like the roar of a great engine. Before her lay the vacant space into which she might leap. Just a step.
How long she remained there without moving wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear to her except the breeze and the sea stretching out across to the continent, and the moon. She thought of the impoverished space of her cell at Fresnes Prison where there had only been a narrow slot of blue or grey high up in the angle between wall and ceiling, where sometimes, if you got the right angle, you could see the moon; and the wide space of Ravensbrück where the moon was the only beautiful thing you ever saw. The sun was not beautiful; it was harsh and burning, the power of the atom made manifest, the strong nuclear force that had reduced two Japanese cities and their inhabitants to charcoal, unleashed. But the moon possessed almost no force, only the pull of gravity that Ned said was the weak force, the weakest force in nature, just enough strength to tug at the coat-tails of the earth and pull the ocean back and forth. Yet it would suffice to pull her down within seconds.
She stands, poised on the edge of the abyss. She jumps. There’s a rush of wind. It’s the falling dream, the flying dream, the dark hole down which she plunges or floats, watching the world go past, sometimes slowly, sometimes too fast to see clearly. This time it’s cold and she gasps and cries out. This time it’s fast and the world cartwheels round her, giving a glimpse of rock and a slanting, sly shine of water. This time there’s the dull black of the cliff and the luminous black of the sky, and the moon swirling around her. Then the crack of her parachute overhead like the sound of a sail filling with sudden wind and the boat keeling over and somewhere someone laughing with the pure pleasure of it.
She sat down with a thump, her feet slithering from under her, bits skittering over the edge, her bottom settled on some lump of rock. And like a small child falling over she burst into tears, more from the shock and indignity of it all rather than any hurt. She had been fearless walking to the edge but now fear gripped her. Poised over the abyss, she moved and slithered. She remembered training in Scotland, splashing through the bogs, crawling through the wet grass and over the rocks, grabbing at heather, grabbing now at whatever her claws could find, pulling herself up the slope to the path and sitting there in the moonlight, weeping.
She hadn’t bothered with her watch so how long she sat there she could only tell by the moon, which had shifted across the sky by the time she moved. How many degrees? Ned would have known. He’d probably have been able to convert it to minutes and hours. Twelve hours for one hundred and eighty degrees. Twelve goes into one hundred and eighty fifteen times. So fifteen degrees for each hour. Which left only the problem of how to measure degrees in the sky.
She got to her feet, shaking. She was not brave enough to die, ergo she had no choice but to live. There was some kind of logic to that, and some kind of obligation. She set off back along the cliff path, stumbling occasionally over a rock or a clump of turf, trying not to think too hard about anything. Life is an interlude between two deaths; there was no choice but to endure it. Eventually below her, lit by moonlight, drawn in chiaroscuro and cross-hatched with shadow, was the roof of the house. Furze Cottage. Silly name.
She walked down, opened the gate, went through the garden. In the porch she took off her boots and placed them on the little wooden rack where they had been before. Then she opened the front door and stepped silently into the living room, and gasped as she came in, because I was sitting on the sofa watching her.
‘Christ alive!’
For a moment I thought she might be about to scream
but she recovered her composure quickly enough. ‘Sam. God, you gave me a fright.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was just … worried.’
‘Worried about what?’ Shaking – I assumed she was cold – she sat down on the sofa beside me, breathing out as though exhausted, folding her legs and clutching her knees to her. There was mud on her face and hands and the smell of crushed grass around her. She felt in her pocket and found a packet of cigarettes and lit one hungrily, pulling at the smoke and blowing it away. I noticed the dirt under her fingernails; and the trembling. On the table in front of us the jigsaw still lay, half completed: a frame of vegetation and Ophelia’s face and disembodied hands. ‘What the devil are you doing up at this hour?’ she asked eventually.
It was a question that I could have put to her. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Same as me. How long have you been up?’
‘Dunno. Where d’you go?’
‘I went for a walk along the cliffs.’
‘In the dark?’
‘It’s practically daylight out there.’
I was incapable of discerning mood or motive in adults. Why wouldn’t she go off for a moonlit walk? It didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to do. And yet I knew other things about her, disturbing things I couldn’t quite understand despite their being so obvious: her shaking, the hurried movements, the uncertainty. Nerves, I thought.
‘Can I tell you something?’ I asked.