Unexploded (19 page)

‘Suitor or husband?’ His face approximated a smile.

She extended her arm for a light, raised the cigarette to her lips and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Brother.’

An entirely new feeling came over him, a molten surge. She was lying.

He opened his wallet and riffled through the cash. ‘Extra – for the …’ He nodded with apparent indifference to her bruised wrists. He hoped the overt reference to payment would be the insult he meant it to be. Normally he simply left it without a word on the dressing table.

She tossed the notes into the Eiffel Tower and tied the sash of her dressing gown.

What more could he do or say? He lowered his face, struggling for composure, and pretended to search for his collar studs. How ugly and tantalizing life had become. Six months ago, Leah, this room, the man’s dark stare – all of it would have seemed utterly unthinkable.

He washed at the basin and reached for his shirt. His fingers fumbled over the buttons. He didn’t merely feel close to her, to this woman whose history was entirely unknown to him; he felt a raw and powerful attachment to her.

She turned the photo towards the wall. A belated concession? A signal that she understood, that she
did
feel something for him, Geoffrey? Or was it simply a habit remembered too late?

She passed him his wristwatch.

He ran a comb through his hair.

‘How do you do?’ he said from the other side of the makeshift screen.

‘How do you do,’ she replied flatly.

‘I am Otto. Otto Gottlieb.’

She tensed and opened the book in her lap. Above them, flies buzzed in the rafters. Had they followed Death into the infirmary?

‘And you?’ he inquired.

‘Mrs Beaumont.’ She pushed her hair, still lank with sweat, off her forehead. ‘The Superintendent’s wife,’ she added, although she knew he knew this well enough already.

He cleared his throat. ‘And your
Christian
name – if you will permit a Jew the liberty?’

Did he think himself witty?

‘Please, you’re quite welcome,’ he called, ‘to pull your chair to this side of the screen …’

Again, the presumption. It was not for him to invite. It was for her to say what she was and was not prepared to do. In any case, she had agreed to read to him only on the condition that she remained where she was. She pulled her chair closer to the screen but she would go no further. Let him think her prim or ridiculous. Perhaps it would allow
them at least to forget the spectacle she’d made of herself, just now, over the bucket.

After that wave of wretchedness, she had –
oh, the relief
– found a standpipe down the hill, just below the hut. There was no one anywhere nearby, only the sea, and the cool chugging of water from the tap. She’d been able to rinse her mouth, unbutton her blouse, lower her slip and splash herself clean, although she’d also managed to soak her shoes. She’d rinsed the bucket. If she could just right herself now, she could almost pretend it had never happened.

Of course he would have heard her from his side of the screen. How awful for him. And how awful for her. It was incredible she’d returned to the infirmary for her bag, that she hadn’t simply fled.

Yet she knew her agreement to read for him had been no act of charity, however it appeared. The charity, if anyone’s, was his. He seemed to understand she wasn’t yet steady enough to rejoin the world. She could hear it in his voice, in the note of concern he was trying to disguise. Here, they both knew, she could shelter in a room with painted-over windows in the refuge of someone else’s words.

‘I am pleased to meet you at last.’ He laughed, not unkindly, at – she assumed – the irony of the screen.

‘How is your arm?’ she ventured, across the distance.

‘Mending, I think. A pinched nerve, an unsteadiness, which you’ll appreciate isn’t ideal for a painter, but things could be worse. Thank you for asking.’

Still he irked her. ‘Indeed. It could be worse. I’m told you would have died were it not for the efforts of your guards.’

‘True, true,’ he said. ‘Of course, life might
also
have seemed worth living were it not for the efforts of my guards, but’ – and she could hear him rising to some rhetorical flourish – ‘you say “tomato” and I say “tomahto”.’

She wondered if she preferred him hostile. ‘Guards
guard
,’ she said. ‘It is simply what happens if one is detained.’

‘“Detained”. I am grateful for your optimism. It sounds as if my employer has merely required me to work late this evening. It is an excellent term.’ And he sounded genuinely amused, amused by her. What possibly could account for his good spirits? ‘For the duration of your visit,’ he continued, ‘I shall try to forget that I have been
detained
for over three months without a trial and that, as there is no trial, there can be no prospect of release.’

‘But it’s simply not a matter for a trial!’

‘Mrs Beaumont, I am trying to forget. If you could humour me, I would be most grateful.’

‘I don’t believe you are “trying to forget”. I think you’re laughing at me in some way I fail to understand.’

‘Very well, then. I enjoy riddles. When is the denial of a man’s freedom not a matter for a trial?’

‘When? When you are a …’ She could feel her parents’ spite bubbling up within her. The sound, the consonant was forming on her lips, and in the heat of the moment, she didn’t know what would emerge: a G or a J. ‘When you are a
German
. In other words, when you are a person from an enemy nation. It is nothing personal.’

‘How curious. It feels rather personal.’

Again, the flippancy. She opened her mouth to speak, unsure what she was about to say, but she was spared. The guard at the door stepped into the room, glanced at her seated next to the screen, then departed again. Given the hut’s tin roof, it was even hotter inside than out. Everything had gone wrong. She didn’t ever want to return to this place. Geoffrey was right. Her literary mission, her charitable notions, had merely been –

‘The prose,’ Otto Gottlieb said, ‘it’s very musical, isn’t it? I’m not
sure I make complete sense of it, but nor do I feel that’s what the author
wants
me to do. I feel he or she requires something else of me altogether.’

It was kind of him, very kind.

‘She,’ she said. ‘Yes, I agree.’ She hesitated, assessing the gamble; whether it was risky to offer any personal account of herself. ‘I was fortunate enough earlier this summer to hear the author – Mrs Woolf – speak. Here in Brighton, actually.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘How wonderful …’

His voice was warm, and so full of unexpected – undeserved – affection that she found herself suddenly at a loss. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. The book fell from her lap and she bent quickly to retrieve it. Yet even in her confusion, she’d felt it: his words, his warmth, thrown to her like a rope.

‘Now then,’ he said, as if settling back on an imaginary heap of pillows, ‘I shall simply listen. I have missed my books such a lot. I used to
scour
– I believe that is a correct usage? – the junk shops when I first arrived in Brighton, and I made some very good finds. It takes patience. You have to work your way past the cracked china, the greasy hymnals and the spectacles of the assorted dead, but I assure you, it is well worth the effort.’

Yes
, she thought, smiling, and now, too late, she wanted to take her chair to his side of the screen. Instead, she turned the pages until she found the point at which, the week before, during his grim operation, he had lost consciousness and she had lost her nerve.

‘“
In the garden,”’
she began,
‘“the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship …” ’

22

Trouble roosted between the days of August like the starlings that nestled on the piers at the day’s end. They abandoned the town’s treetops, chimney pots, domes and towers and occupied those white-decked outcrops that stretched hundreds of feet out to sea. They flickered past the candyfloss booth, the fortune-telling machine and over the frozen electric train. They traced in mid-air the skylines of the ballroom, the orchestra hall, and the vaults of the penny arcade. They settled on the limbs of the rides, on the wild-eyed horses of the carousel, and on the pagoda hats of the little booths. Then, in a single indecipherable instant, as daylight ceded to dusk, twenty thousand birds swelled into one body – a twisting helix, a black tornado of feathers – before descending, minutes later, into a stillness, a shadow over the Pier, a feeling across the back of the neck.

If London looked to the steadiness of Big Ben and the gravitas of St Paul’s for a reminder of dignity in strife, Brighton’s emotional compass had been the ring-a-ding-ding and the music, the electric lights and the ticket-stub happiness of the Palace and West piers. When the Explosions Unit had arrived that evening back in June, the town prepared to lose its bearings. Even to the casual observer, each pier looked like nothing less than a welcoming dock, an unloading zone for any invading ship, and while both were spared outright
destruction, section after strategic section – of decking, piles and girders – was blasted into the sea.

That year, Alf Dunn, Tubby’s middle brother, turned fourteen and craved something more than digs in bombed-out houses. As the starlings gathered and the sun slid from the sky, he and a dozen others also descended on the seafront.

It was no casual operation. They had wire-clippers for the razor-wire fencing, rope from a builder’s yard, switchblades for cutting it, and mud for camouflage. The tide was rising, but the evening itself was calm, and there was just time to cast a rope bridge from gap to gap, using the stumps of the blasted piles and relying on Tommy Leach’s skill with knots.

The trick to a successful traverse, Alf explained, was to lie on top of the rope, bend a knee, hook the foot of that same leg over the rope, and keep the other leg straight for balance. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Your pins don’t move. It’s your arms and hands that get you from end to end. If you slip under the rope, don’t panic. Hook a leg and the opposite arm over, and push down with the other hand to right yourself.’

Tubby and Philip had been allowed to bring up the rear, if only to bear witness and to carry the bucket of camouflage mud. They watched Alf army-crawl his way to the first, second and third landings, wave from the deck, and glide back.

As the moon rose, pock-faced and pale over the darkening sea, the next boy, Vince Hunnisett, crawled on to the first rope bridge, his legs unsteady. ‘Don’t look down!’ Alf called. It was a painfully slow traverse but Vince made it, from deck to deck to deck, and back again. Frankie Boxall was up next. He claimed it was the best blast from a boner he’d ever known.

Boys queued up. Two more boys covered the distance and back, as the ropes juddered and the black sea climbed up the shelf of the
beach. It was a relay race against the tide, and it seemed a race they were destined to win until Denny Pilbeam lost his grip, slipped through the third gap and fell into the sea. As he went under, his wail went up, and a vast cloud of starlings rose from the Pier. Bobbies from the King’s Road started running their way. ‘Scarper!’ Alf hol-lered, then dived into the sea to drag Denny out. Half an hour later, Alf, Denny, Tubby and Philip sat wet, alone and defeated in the basement lock-up of Brighton Town Hall.

The Duty Sergeant was in no hurry. He unlocked four cells and ushered each boy in, silencing their protests and excuses. For a long, lonely time that evening there was only the murky basement, the squelching of their shoes and the smell of the sea. Finally, their respective fathers (and Frank Dunn, aged sixteen) were summoned to claim them.

Geoffrey said only two things to his son on the walk home through the moonlit streets of the North Laine. Firstly, Philip was under no circumstances to tell his mother; she would be sick with fright if she learned the truth. Philip nodded, grateful for the pact. He knew his mother would cry with him if he told her about the cell in the basement and how frightened he’d been without her there to sing to him like she did in the coal cellar. Secondly, and most importantly, Philip was not to see Tubby or the Dunn brothers again. Geoffrey forbade it.

His father had never forbidden him anything before, and Philip knew, without even opening his mouth to plead, that Tubby, whom he’d known almost his entire life, was a goner.

23

Earlier that same evening, as Evelyn turned on to Park Crescent, the low, mournful notes of a brass-band hymn rose up from the Salvation Army’s citadel like a plume of smoke from a November bonfire. After the infirmary, she hardly remembered where she’d been. She’d wandered. She’d sat in a high field, staring out to sea. The beauty of the view, of the day, had seemed reckless. At her front door, she stepped inside, cautiously, as if she might have somehow confused her home with another. But no. Geoffrey’s keys hung on the key board in the vestibule. He was back before her.

She found him on the terrace, his head thrown back, his face turned skyward. He hadn’t heard the back door or her steps across the flagstones. The long lines of his body were stretched out, relaxed. He looked almost boyish.

They kissed lightly on the cheek, looking past one another. ‘Philip,’ he said. ‘At Tillie’s, I presume?’ He didn’t stand to pull her chair from the table. He seemed odd, distracted, not himself.

Neither could have imagined the reality of the moment; their young son in a dim cell in the basement of the Town Hall, with Tubby in the next cell and Alf Dunn in another.

She took a seat and slipped off her shoes. ‘Yes, I said he was to be home by dark.’ Overhead, gulls swooped past in formation like cutout paper birds. Nothing seemed true these days.

His tie lay crumpled on the table. She watched his index finger drum the iron scrollwork. She had interrupted a pleasant train of thought. That’s what his finger said.

They stared out over the Park, each in their separateness. A gardener was trimming the horseshoe shrubbery, and small children emerged, startled at the invasion of their territory. In a few days, an army of volunteers would arrive and overturn every lawn, every flower bed, for vegetable plots. When would they ever enjoy this view again?