Exposure (15 page)

Perhaps it’s a form of courage, thinks Lily now. Your son is in prison, accused of espionage, and you talk as if he’s an adolescent who has got into trouble at school. You pay for the solicitor, because he is a Callington. When Julia meets an acquaintance, does she say, ‘I expect you’ve heard that Simon’s got himself into a frightful pickle?’ Lily touches the cold glass of the window. She must go to bed. She has lessons in the morning. Everything is marked and prepared. Twenty to three. Four hours’ sleep, maybe four and a half. It’ll be enough.

She can go to bed now. No one will come at this hour, and those are only shadows under the lamp-posts.

They tell him everything is going well, but he knows they are lying. Liquid seeps out of the drain in his leg. He catches a smell like wet sawdust on a butcher’s floor. The kind of butcher who doesn’t sweep out his shop often enough. He remembers: that’s how wounds smell, when they go bad. Last night a nurse came with a syringe and jabbed morphine into his thigh. She gave him a roguish look as she straightened up, and he turned his head aside. His leg throbs in the pulley.

He wants to see the charts they fill in every four hours. Sister puts the thermometer into his mouth, looks at it, shakes it down, writes, puts the clipboard with his chart back on to the end of his bed. The blood-pressure cuff wheezes on his arm.

‘Is there much fever?’ he asks, detached and professional. But Sister isn’t fooled.

‘You are doing splendidly, Mr Holloway. Mr Anstruther’s coming in this afternoon.’

‘Are you going to take off my leg?’

‘Good heavens, what an idea! Whatever put that into your head? Your leg is coming along nicely. You have an infection, but the penicillin is dealing with it.’

‘It smells pretty high to me.’

The walls are nearer than they ought to be. If he keeps very still, with his eyes wide open, everything is fine. As soon as he moves, the walls begin to close in on him. He holds on for as long as he can, but at last, with vast, exquisite relief he lets go. How deep it is. His leg, the pain, all of it gone like the light as you fall down a shaft. He sleeps.

When he opens his eyes, a new nurse, one he doesn’t recognise, is writing on the wall. Big, looping words appear across the paint, in a script Giles can’t read. How extraordinary that nurses are allowed to write on the walls. He struggles to unseal his lips, which are dry and swollen.

‘Is that my chart?’ he croaks.

She turns, and looks at him over her shoulder. Her face is vivid with laughter. It’s the roguish nurse again. He isn’t sure if she is laughing at him, or at what she has written.

‘What language is that?’

Instead of replying the nurse stretches up and writes a final line, above everything else she has written. As Giles watches, the language melts into English, and he sees his own name.

‘What are you writing about me?’ he pleads, but she won’t tell him.

He falls asleep again, and while he’s asleep she wipes off every single trace of the words from the wall.

And now he’s getting better. One day passes, and another. He is drinking well, and his temperature is down. The penicillin is doing its work. He is getting better but he’s almost too weak to stir. The nurses give him blanket baths. They expose one limb at a time, wash it in warm soapy water, towel it dry, cover it, move to the next. Afterwards they give him hot, sweet tea in a feeding-cup. Sister doesn’t want him to have visitors. He needs to be kept quite quiet. At the end of next week, they hope, he will be moved to the King David Convalescent Home. His hands on the sheets look veiny and old. Old Giles. Is that who he is?

‘Would you like to listen to the wireless?’ Sister asks him.

‘I don’t think so.’

He doesn’t want anything. Not even a cigarette or a bottle of whisky. He just wants to lie here, perfectly still, unget-at-able, thinking of nothing and no one.

He lies there for a long time, listening to the tap of the nurses’ sensible shoes outside his room, and the roar of London beyond the windows. They wear such ugly shoes. He cannot get back to that deep place where the nurse wrote on the wall. He must think. Inside him, in spite of him, the machine is turning. He cannot help it. The engine of survival has carried him so far, and he can’t switch it off now. He must think, plan, act.

‘Do you know what,’ he says to Sister the next
morning, ‘I think I’ll glance at
The Times.
And the
Daily Express
.’

‘You must be feeling better.’

‘I believe I am.’

‘Not too much reading at first.’

He crunches toast and marmalade. His body is no longer the pure, empty thing that might have carried him away over the lip of the waterfall, wherever that goes. The papers come in, smelling sharply of newsprint.

Lily goes into the newsagent to pay their weekly paper bill. It is Saturday morning. Mrs Forfar flips the pages of her order book, finds their address and tears out the weekly tickets. Simon usually goes down with Bridget to pay the bill, while Bridget chooses her Saturday sweets.

‘The rubbish they put in the papers,’ says Mrs Forfar as she turns to her cash-register and rings up the total. ‘It’s a wonder to me sometimes, why people buy them.’ She laughs. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, saying that. I’ll put myself out of business.’

She likes Simon. She has a soft spot for him. Bridget comes home on Saturdays with extra sweeties in her bag, which certainly doesn’t happen when she goes in with Paul and Sally. Lily says nothing. She is stiff, she knows. People think she’s cold.

‘Your change,’ says Mrs Forfar, stiff now in her turn.

Lily takes the coins, and the tickets, and leaves the shop. This woman pities her. At school, so far, they
have said nothing. She walks along the Broadway with eyes burning into her. Don’t be stupid, Lily, of course they are not looking at you. They have better things to do on a Saturday morning. That little boy is having a temper tantrum, so why should his mother care about Lily Callington? It is a beautiful, cold morning. The first of the real winter mornings. The air streams into Lily’s lungs. The paper boy delivers
The Times
, but this week Lily has also bought the
Daily Express
, at a newsagent far from their house. She hid the newspaper in her shopping bag, and read it in the bathroom. There was a photograph of their house, with the hedge and their dolphin door-knocker. They had dug up a photograph of Simon, looking straight ahead as if he were staring into a police camera. But it’s not a police photograph. It must have been taken a few years ago, because Simon parts his hair differently now. It’s neither a good photograph nor a bad one. You wouldn’t look at this man, and think: traitor. Spy. She reads the columns carefully. Neighbours in the quiet north London suburb were shocked by news of the arrest. Who was shocked? Who spoke to the newspapers?

She doesn’t think anything has been said to the children at school. Fortunately, children don’t read newspapers.

Monday morning. Paul walks to school with Sally and Bridget. Normally, he hates walking with them, but now, with all the stuff about Dad … They walk close together, a phalanx of Callingtons.

Paul and Sally take Bridget round to the Infants’ playground, and watch as she runs straight to Miss Goldberg and wraps her arms about Miss Goldberg’s coat. Paul and Sally both remember the feel of that coat. It’s brown tweed, warm and nubbly. Miss Goldberg is the nicest teacher in the whole school, and Bridget loves her.

Sally hurries indoors. She is Tidiness Monitor and has a lot to do before Assembly. Paul leans against the wall, in a patch of sunlight. He feels tired, although the day has only just started. Mum went to work early, so he and Sally washed up the breakfast things and laid the fires for tonight. Mum is going to get a full-time job.

Danny Coughlan comes and leans alongside him.

‘Is it true what they’re saying, your ma’s a German?’ Paul turns his head aside. The sun is so bright it makes his eyes water. That’s because it’s winter and the sun is low in the sky. ‘My uncle Joe was in prison for stealing scrap metal,’ offers Danny. ‘He got six months.’

‘My dad’s not a thief!’

‘Calm down, for feck’s sake. I’m not saying anything.’

‘You’d better not.’

‘Or what? Are you the hard man now?’ He jostles Paul in the ribs, friendly. ‘I told Ali Wigley to shut her
cake-hole when she was going on your ma was a Nazi.’

Ali with her long plaits and her crying. Paul has always been nice to her. He’s never pulled her plaits, shouting,
Ding-dong!
and then run away.

‘Who cares what Ali Wigley says. She’s as thick as a plank.’

‘As thick as pigshit,’ says Danny.

Mrs Wilson has set Sally’s class a composition. Usually there is a choice of three subjects, but today there is only one. Mrs Wilson writes it on the board, underneath the date. The subject is ‘Winston Churchill’. Sally is relieved, because she knows quite a lot about Winston Churchill, but Penny Grant puts up her hand.

‘Do we have to write about his childhood?’

‘You may write about his childhood if you like, Penelope. But I want you all to think about how Winston Churchill served his country, and write about that. He was one of our greatest patriots. Now, who can tell me what “patriot” means?’

Sally knows. She has her hand up before anyone else, but Mrs Wilson chooses Andrew Lammeter.

‘Yes, Andrew?’

‘A patriot is someone who tries to help his country.’

‘That’s right. If you didn’t know, write it down in your vocabulary book. So, Winston Churchill is a good example of a patriot. Can anyone think of another?’

‘The Queen?’

‘Good, Penny. Any other examples?’

‘Princess Anne?’

Some people laugh, because Princess Anne is only ten, the same age as them.

‘There’s nothing to laugh about,’ says Mrs Wilson. ‘I’m sure Princess Anne is a patriot. Right. Pens ready? Off you go, and I want at least a full side from everyone before the bell rings.’

Paul is waiting for Sally and Bridget after school. They walk home close together. Bridget skips and chatters about Miss Goldberg’s brooch. Sally thinks about her composition, and the red line through her last paragraph, which said, ‘Winston Churchill was a great hero of war. I would like there not to be any wars, even though there wouldn’t be any heroes like Winston Churchill.’ As well as the red line through it all, there was triple red underlining of the word ‘would’, and in the margin Mrs Wilson had written, ‘Don’t you know the difference between “should” and “would” yet?’ She gave Sally five out of ten, and Andrew Lammeter got nine and a half. Mrs Wilson was the quickest marker out of all the teachers. She marked right through lunchtime. Sally always tingled when her exercise book came back after marking, because she was good at compositions.

It wasn’t fair.

Bridget sings:

‘It’s all right for Bridget the Pidget,’ mutters Paul. ‘She doesn’t understand anything. I bet she thinks Dad’s gone on holiday. She thought custody was custard.’

Sally blurts with laughter.

‘Is it going to snow, Sally?’ asks Bridget.

‘I don’t know. I wish it would.’ Not a measly inch that quickly turned to slush under the wheels of the buses, but proper snow. Snow that falls all through the night and fills up the roads so nothing can move. They might close the school. She and Paul would make a snowman for Bridget in the back garden, and when they were so freezing they couldn’t stay out any longer Mum would light a fire in the dining room and Bridget would play under the table. No one can see into their dining room, because it faces the garden.

Every time they go out, people are looking at them. That’s why they walk to school together now. Mum thinks they don’t know what was in the newspapers about Dad, but Paul bought the
Daily Express
with money out of Sally’s Christmas tin. They lay on the floor in Paul’s bedroom, and read the article. When they’d finished, they didn’t say anything. Paul cut out the article with the photo of Dad and the photo of their house, and hid it under his mattress. Sally quickly read ‘The Gambols’, then wrapped up the rest of the newspaper inside some sheets from
The Times
and stuffed it down to the bottom of the dustbin, with the ash from yesterday’s fires on top of it.

People don’t keep newspapers. They use them to light their fires, or they throw them away. Probably, by
now, hardly anybody has still got a copy of that
Daily Express
with the story about Dad in it.

‘Come up in my room when we get back,’ Paul murmurs to Sally.

Bridget is playing out in the cold, dusky garden. Her voice floats up to the bedroom window:

Paul and Sally exchange glances. They feel infinitely older than Bridget, old and weary and heavy with knowledge. Dirty with it.

‘I wish we hadn’t bought the paper,’ says Sally.

‘Don’t be stupid. We had to. Listen, Sal. What’re we going to do if they arrest Mum as well?’

‘They can’t! She hasn’t done anything.’

‘Dad hasn’t done anything either, you idiot.’

‘No, I know he hasn’t, I didn’t mean that, it was only …’ It was only the difference between Mum and Dad. Dad has his own world. Dad disappears. No matter how tightly she holds him, gripping around his neck, breathing in his smell of soap and cologne, he’s already on his way elsewhere.

‘Alison Wigley said Mum was a Nazi. Danny told me.’

Colour floods up into Sally’s face. ‘Doesn’t she know anything? Mum’s Jewish, how could she be a Nazi?’

‘Danny told her to shut her cake-hole. But he asked me: “Is it true your ma’s a German?”’

‘Mum hasn’t even been in Germany since she was younger than you. She only speaks English.’

‘And French and Italian.’

‘They don’t count.’

Mum is less German than anybody. They are more English than anybody. When they were younger – in Miss Goldberg’s class – they would all surge across the playground in a chain, chanting:

They’re both much too old for that now.

‘You know the march Mum went on? I think she could get in trouble for that. Dad didn’t want her to go.’