Unexploded (21 page)

The boy, who could only have been three or four, stood very still in the Bank’s panelled hush. He was dressed in grey woollen shorts, a matching school blazer and tie – cast-offs that had been hastily tacked up to fit a boy too young for school. When he discovered Geoffrey studying him – a tall man, a wooden pillar among the
Bank’s wooden pillars – he stared back intently, with the eyes of the man in the photo.

Why was Leah here of all places? She should have been at her window, on the sill, lifting her face to any breeze; turning languor-ously as he entered the room; stubbing her cigarette out in the Eiffel Tower. She was in his Bank, not that she had any notion that it was his Bank or even that he was a banker. From his office doorway, he could hear her smoky voice and halting English, though she herself stood just out of view.

He risked it. He let himself be drawn. From a few feet away he noticed, with a barb of both concern and embarrassment, that her arms were bare. The marble white of her flesh glowed too obviously in the Bank’s half-light. He could see the scar from the gas ring on her forearm. Her dress was simple and dignified but it was obvious even to him that it had been made at home. She had neglected to wear not only a summer jacket, but also a hat and gloves, and from behind, he could see that the heels of her court shoes were worn down to their shafts.

She was explaining to his clerk that she would like to open an account; yes, she was a legal alien; here were her papers to prove it, and her Identity Card; no, she had not realized three signed references were required. She could assure him she had funds for the account.

She remained composed as always, but he could hear the suspicion rising in her voice, and no doubt Matthews could hear it too. It wasn’t difficult to understand. She feared the paperwork was a ruse to keep foreigners out, and in truth it was.

She glanced over her shoulder to check on the boy, looking without seeing anything other than his obedient grip on the hoop. He stared solemnly at his mother’s back, and in the discreet gloom, amid the restrained queues and the penumbra of the counter lamps,
Geoffrey drew closer, close enough to see, in the pool of lamplight, that the notes she presented to Matthews were large.

The question cut through him. Paid to her by whom?

From a few feet behind, over the wooden slats of the grille, Geoffrey caught the clerk’s eye and nodded his sanction. A benign gesture, Matthews would have assumed. An official pardon for non-Englishness. Then he smiled tersely at one or two clients in the queue, appeared to check his wristwatch against the clock on the wall, and withdrew to his office, his heart banging like a bull at the gate of his chest.

It was, she thought, as if all the world were parched. The soil of Race Hill lay cracked and pale. Flies quivered over dried-out piles of dung but there were no sheep left, for there was almost nothing to graze. She strode higher, towards the course, watching her step as a matter of habit, on the lookout for the wild orchids and moon daisies of late summer, but only the rangy husks of toadflax clung on.

(
Is your journey really necessary? Think before travelling!
)

Occasionally the ground crumbled away as she walked; not even that seemed solid these days. Beneath the soles of her summer shoes, she could almost feel the chalky scarp rising through the turf, like a skeleton, bone-bright. The hill, that August, no longer knew bees in its wild thyme, or the blue flashes of butterflies, or skylarks lifting off from their nests. Everything was burned out. Yet the day was as muggy as a Turkish bath.

She had submitted to the morning’s knitting circle and the endlessly patient clacking of all those needles. She had procrastinated, queuing for fresh plums and blackberries, only to leave the grocer’s with half a dozen bruised cooking apples for which she’d paid a fortune.
She hadn’t believed she would actually go that afternoon until she started the climb up Elm Grove.

It was Wednesday. Geoffrey was certainly on his train to London; there was no risk of discovery or of him telephoning her at home. Still she’d hesitated. How could she bear to return to the Camp? She wanted only to forget the sight of Otto Gottlieb’s ruined back, for what could she do, even had she any energy left to think about it? What’s more, there was Geoffrey’s warning of Otto’s criminal his-tory; a cautionary tale told for her benefit. Yet that didn’t render it untrue. In any case, it was impossible now to visit the man, whoever he really was, and she no longer had the desire. Desire for almost anything was leaching away. These days, her plans and hopes seemed only to point towards her own foolishness. Better to forget. Better not to want.

Yet here, once again, she was climbing Race Hill, and as the white roof of the grandstand came into view, she stopped, panting for breath, and turned to look back over the town. She could change her mind. There was no requirement to carry on. Indeed it would be sensible to turn back.

A heat haze had settled over the bowl of Brighton, a yellowy fug of smoke and steam that rose like a stale sigh of purpose from, she supposed, the station, the munitions factory and the ack-ack guns. She turned her face skyward. Above her, above the hill, a sparrow-hawk rose, its wings outspread as if in an act of will over gravity. She shielded her eyes and squinted.

A lone female. She could see the bars on its breast.

She fumbled for the two keys in her pocket – still there, jingling on the loop of twine she’d cut as soon as he’d left the house.

She had come this far.

*

The humidity aside, it was good, he thought, to be out, good to have departed the Bank and its stately gloom. He took long strides, out-pacing most of the lunchtime wanderers on the Queen’s Road. His travel pass and Identity Card were safely stowed in his breast pocket, his attaché case was in one hand, and he clutched his newspaper gamely under his arm. The platform for London would be Number 4 as it was always Number 4. First Class would be empty at this hour, which meant that the journey would be time to gather his thoughts over a cigarette or two, and to clear his head of the morning’s visitation by Leah and her child. Why feel jangled? She had a right to go about her business; to shop; to post letters; to present herself at a bank.

He picked up speed. Somewhere on the far side of the station, on the shimmering tracks ahead, whistles were blowing and a Klaxon sounded. He’d been warned there were delays. Up the line, hundreds of burst tins of jam were wreaking havoc following a hit to a freight container in the early hours. Still, delay or no delay, he would board a train as he did every Wednesday. He would watch the tawny fields of Sussex flicker past his window and, thirty minutes from Victoria, he would cast his eye over his weekly report for Head Office.

Only he didn’t. At the end of Queen’s Road, he carried on walking, head bowed, past the station, making the steep climb up Terminus Road. He passed the camouflage factory where the girls spilled out for lunch, green-handed and green-faced; then the Waterloo Arms where sawdust for the floor was being delivered and spread for the day.

There would still be time to make his train if he chose to, particularly given the delays. He had only to turn around and revert to type. There would then be no need for a telephone call to Seymour-Williams first thing tomorrow. No excuse to be made (the
jam
, the ridiculous jam). But when he looked up, blinking himself out of thought, he discovered he was already standing in the road where Number 39 stood back from the other houses, like a plain girl at a dance.

She wasn’t expecting him.

Evelyn stood once more at the mouth of the tunnelled entry. At least she and the young sentry had grown accustomed to one another. They exchanged a few words, then she followed him up the corridor of wire while a fighter plane chugged overhead. ‘No books today?’ he asked without waiting for her reply. He turned his raw, boyish face to the sky, squinting at the vapour trail through the criss-crossings of wire. ‘Ours,’ he said. ‘Not to worry, Mrs Beaumont.’

‘I just need to collect a few of my things from my husband’s office.’

She followed him up the hill and out the tunnel’s other end, where he quickly assessed the grounds for her benefit – ‘All right from here, Mrs Beaumont?’ – and returned down the hill to his post.

The first of the two keys turned cooperatively in the lock, and the relief was immense. How easily she was in, through the stable-style door of his office. In the previous life of the racecourse, this room had actually been the VIP cloakroom. She had a vague memory of passing her fur across it to a smiling attendant one cool spring evening and asking Geoffrey to keep the ticket safe in a pocket. ‘Don’t dare lose it, will you now, duck,’ the woman had said to her as she admired the fur, ‘or I’ll be looking the business mesself next Saturday night.’

Evelyn eased the door shut behind her, seated herself in her husband’s chair, and allowed herself simply to breathe. She considered the room. The HQ. The Superintendent’s office. The rows of coat rails were long gone of course but, even given its functional history, the room was a place of comparative privilege. The furniture, firstly,
wasn’t nailed to the floor. On the far wall, the King looked out in stern endorsement from a huge framed photograph. The walls had been freshly painted in a creamy white, and there were two windows, each of which, she could see, opened perfectly well. One window presented a view of the sea; the other overlooked what had been, in another lifetime, the square of the racecourse. The light bulb had a proper shade and was not dimmed with offensive orange paint. There was a washbasin on the far wall, a bar of Imperial Leather soap, and a clean hand towel, where presumably, each Monday evening, before leaving, her husband washed his hands of it all.

If she were a man in Geoffrey’s position, would she be any different?

She didn’t know.

The desk was bare save for a plumbing invoice on a steel spike and a stack of manila files in an ‘out’ tray. She shuffled through them: Brandt, Frankel, Ganz, Montefiore, Oster,
Pirazzini
. There he was, his name in green ink, while at the bottom, in a mimeographed box, someone had rubber-stamped the file ‘Closed’. Inside, clipped together, lay her old friend’s passport, his Identity Card, and the record of his brief appearance before the Enemy Alien Tribunal Board the year before. The paperwork was minimal.
The less said.
On the final page, two neat sentences in black ink stared back at her: ‘Death by natural causes. No reparations due from War Damages Commission.’

The man she shared a bed with had written one sentence after the other, tidy as sums on a balance sheet. If she felt a jolt of contempt for him, she felt only slightly less for herself. She should have insisted that Mr Pirazzini be moved to hospital. That would have been a far more valuable show of friendship than her determined efforts to read to him. Otto Gottlieb, conman or not, had been right to laugh at her.

She rattled one of the deep steel drawers – locked. As was the next. And the third. The second key on her loop of twine opened nothing. Her hunch had been wrong. The gamble of the journey had been pointless. Outside the pot-brush head of the Head of Patrol passed the window, and she sank low in the chair. The ridiculous truth was that she had no idea what she’d imagined she’d find.

Geoffrey knocked a second time, and a cow-eyed girl of about sixteen opened the door, peeping over her duster as if it were a feather fan and she a showgirl. ‘Are you inquiring about a vacancy, sir?’

She yelped as he brushed past her and sprinted up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Leah, it’s only me,’ he said, speaking through her door.

There was a long, sickening pause.

‘I am with someone.’ Her voice was low and heavy.

It was early, just past midday. Yet –
someone
. Like a kick to the groin.

But if he was here, why not another? His mind skidded.

He had started back towards the staircase when he heard the key turn on the other side of the door.
Christ.

What choice did he have but to recede back up the corridor and allow her guest to beat his retreat down the stairs? Who wanted to see another man here? To imagine. He disappeared around a corner and sank back into its shadows, willing the moment to pass. The carpet smelled of mildew. A plate with bread crusts sat outside one door; a stained teacup outside another. The walls were crammed with faded pastoral scenes of happy shepherds and shepherdesses. He shouldn’t have come.

Unbearable minutes passed. She didn’t call to him. When he finally risked a return, he merely found the door open.

He hovered in the doorway, noting the cheap flowers that stood
stiff in a vase on the dressing table. Were they red? He could distinguish neither reds, pinks nor greens, but it hardly mattered.

The dress she’d worn earlier in the day, at the Bank, hung on a wire hanger from the curtain rail. Now she wore only her dressing gown and her leather mules. She was spraying the room with its mist of scent. The smell, as always, was clean and crisp; lemon and cedar-wood. Evelyn had never worn scent, and the discovery of it on Leah – on her neck, at her cleavage, her collarbone, behind her earlobes – had, in itself, been enough at first.

What
was
this thing that had happened to him?

The Experiment, as he had once laughingly described it to her, had been short-lived. The ‘cure’ had been quick and decisive. Whatever it was that had followed – love, lust or some wordless fascination – whatever it was, it had taken possession of him quickly. He had expected to feel queasy, remote, those first few times, there with a stranger whom he would pay within the hour. This wasn’t the 43 Club, after all, and he wasn’t twenty-one and numb with whisky. There was Evelyn; there was Philip. Yet the startling revelation had been, not how mechanical the experience had felt, but how intimate.

Had he deluded himself? He lingered now at her threshold, painfully aware of the reason for the scent; of her back to him; of her silent displeasure and her interrupted appointment; also, of the picture on the shelf of her husband or lover, once again not turned to the wall. Why had he come? Why hadn’t he caught his train? The sight of her with that shiny silver atomizer revolted him. A gift, a gift, but from whom? Across the room, the window was open, as ever and, as the curtains lifted in the breeze, the dress on the rail rose too, revealing what she’d assumed she had managed to hide: her son, curled small on the windowsill, clutching a yo-yo.