Unexploded (22 page)

I am with someone
.

If the boy recognized him from that morning, he gave no sign.

On Geoffrey’s office wall, George VI gazed down at her from his vast loneliness.
It is time for you to go, my dear
, he seemed to say. The midday sun had passed overhead, and the room had started to grow dim. She stared ahead, trying to determine in her mind the moment to leave, the moment when she might cross the grounds and draw as little attention as possible. What had she supposedly come to collect? How foolish of her not to have planned her subterfuge better.

Even as she reproved herself, her mind was idly wondering how Geoffrey, a man impatient with shoddy workmanship, could tolerate the crack that ran up the far wall of his cloakroom-cum-office right beneath the picture of the King. It was unlike him not to insist that the wall be replastered.

She stood and walked slowly across the room.

She reached up and removed the King from the wall.

The crack wasn’t a crack but a groove.

Of course.

The wall wasn’t a wall but a door. Nailed to it was an engraved plate. VALUABLES. At eye level, a brass key-cover glinted.

He removed his hat and, from his awkward seat on the edge of her bed, watched her wander over to the dressing table and pour water into a pot. The kettle on the gas ring was whistling a fury. ‘Why come? Is not your time.’

Her directness, so entirely un-English, embarrassed him. He felt his throat tighten, his mouth dry. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, but he didn’t offer to leave.

He’d been trying to make light of his unscheduled visit, smiling at
her son; teaching him, as he’d taught Philip, how to ‘walk the dog’ and how to put the yo-yo ‘to sleep’. But the boy had only scowled and refused to tell him his name. Nor did Leah insist.

‘I am sorry,’ she said flatly. ‘His English, not good. And he is too young for such tricks. Also, if you row with wife, you cannot stay here. Is against rule.’

‘I wouldn’t dream –’

‘Tea?’ she said, looking past him.

‘If it’s no trouble.’

She rolled her eyes, then reached for two cups from the shelf, and poured, before the tea had had time to steep. She passed him his cup and seated herself on the bed beside him, where they sipped in silence. Her beauty mark, he noticed, was missing from her left cheek. Her back was poker straight. The boy had retreated again to the window-sill, and now she spoke gently to him in their own language.

Geoffrey listened and watched, feeling a foreigner’s sense of exclusion. The boy nodded with a gravitas that was disconcerting, almost unpleasant, in so young a child. Above them, the man in the photo watched from the shelf, disapproving and severe, and in that headlong moment, Geoffrey understood what it was that had impelled him past the station and up the soot-stained hill of Terminus Road to her door. After seeing her in the Bank, after watching her smooth out those notes so painstakingly on the counter – after imagining their source – he’d needed to lay claim to her again. To make her his own. It was a sort of fever. He knew it was. But the truth was, there on the edge of her bed, no matter how casual he endeavoured to seem, he felt like a gun about to go off.

He reached across the gap between them and, out of view of the child, gingerly stroked the side of her thigh.

She set down her tea, rose, and moved to the window. ‘He like
trains, don’t you, Misha? He watch that bridge on and on. Some time he forget to eat! Me, I no want trains. I want sea, ocean. I come to Brighton for
sea
, as when I am small child. A window by the sea. But trains, trains, trains! And now, beach closed!’ She ruffled her son’s hair. ‘But he happy, and I thank God. And now, we sleep only to noise of trains at night. If no noise, if too quiet, we wake, eh, Misha?’

She scooped him into her lap, perched herself on the edge of the sill, and spoke to the window. ‘Out there, trains and aeroplanes are toys … Everything, simple. This is why I come here. So he have simple. Me, when child,
not
simple. I am born in Odessa. On Black Sea. A resort. Like Brighton but more, much more beautiful. In Odessa we all think, ah, I am in Italy. You should see our buildings. And
everybody
is in Odessa. Is port. How you say?
Free
port. Turks, Russians, French, Germans, Armenians, Tatars, Jewishes, Polishes. They come, they stay. Yes? My father is Jewish, my mother is Russian Orthodox. In Odessa, this is nothing. No … is
good
. They meet in orchestra of Odessa Opera Theatre. Very famous the-atre. My mother, on violin. My father, piano. He is from old family in Odessa. Important family. He study at Conservatoire with Witold Maliszewski – yes?’ She turned.

Geoffrey smiled weakly. ‘I am a philistine. You must excuse me.’

‘I am five years old when Revolution come. Is very bad for my father. His family, too old, too much money. He is a …? How you say?’ She took aim with her finger.

‘Target.’

‘Yes. His brothers are shooted into holes they must dig first for their own bodies. Go, go, go, everybody say to my father. So he go then, fast, to Poland. I am too young. Four years my mother wait in Odessa. Is terrible. When I am nine years old, at last we travel with Maliszewski himself to Warsaw. On train, in compartment, I ask him
why we must go, I do not want to go, Warsaw has no sea, and he tell me that Red Army men not like music and better we go where people like. My mother tells me
Ssh
,
ssh
,
Leah
, but Maliszewski smiles into his old, yellow beard and commands for me hot chocolate. Funny, yes, I remember? Then, when I am twelve years old, I study with him, like my father before me, only now at his Chopin Music School in Warsaw. When I am fifteen, he make big
konkurencja
. Many students. Many countries.’

‘Competition.’

‘Yes. Competition. I am good. Not best. But
good
.’

And he thought again of her long fingers, of the unexpected elegance of her hands, of their expressiveness – their touch.

He shifted on the soft edge of the bed and looked again at the face of the man in her photo. ‘You haven’t mentioned your brother.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No brother. No sister,’ as if she had forgotten entirely the import of the question and her previous lie.

She set Misha on the floor and reached for her tea. ‘Then,
all
change again. You understand me? Suddenly, am I Jew? Am I not Jew? In Warsaw, quickly they want to know. Like you here first time. Why this question? For me, for people from city like Odessa, this is like
game
, as if you demand: are you more or less than five feet five inches in your height? As if everyone pretend, with hard faces, but soon they will say,
Ha ha, joke, of course joke! What! You believed us? You were frighted?

‘My father dies one month before Misha is born. Is terrible to bury father and have baby in such days. My mother, as I say, is Russian Orthodox. I tell her, good, bravo,
I
am Russian Orthodox, and if I am, Misha too. But my father is known in Warsaw for many years. My mother say,
Leah, if there is any question, there is no question. You, Misha, you are Jewishes.

‘And so, England. In London, I try for teatime orchestra in this Boots and that Boots. But no job. I try pubs, too many pubs, but no one want me for piano. They say, my English not good. True, I say, but music speaks, not me. Yes, they say, but no one need Chopin in England when war come. The Red Cross in London has too many peoples. So we get train, to Brighton, the sea’ – she turned back to the room – ‘to here.

‘Bad, you think.
Yes
, bad. Of course, bad. Every day I hate it. I miss my mother. And my piano. But is not for ever.’ She searched his face. ‘Understand me, there is worse. There is very much worse.’ She gathered Misha to her.

He nodded but, suddenly, her gaze oppressed him, like some dimly remembered hot towel thrown over his head in a childhood illness. Her gaze, her voice, the detail – it was all too much. The more she revealed, the more he felt trapped in that small room with the weary rhythms of her voice and the misfortunes of her history. It was shameful but undeniable, and in spite of himself, in spite of his efforts to blink the image away, he saw her once more, pressing and smoothing those large notes on the counter at the till.

On the window seat, Misha was cupping his mother’s ear and whispering something to her, in Polish, Geoffrey presumed. She smiled quizzically, first at her son, then at him. ‘What mean this?’ she asked, her face as unguarded, as trusting as she was confused. ‘Misha say you live in the dark house. Today, in this morning, he call bank “the dark house”.’ She bounced Misha on her knee and smiled. ‘I don’t understand.’

26

Did it make it better or worse that he emptied his wallet on her dressing table before fleeing Number 39? The entire episode was his fault. He knew it. He couldn’t help but know it. Wasn’t this the time-honoured way in which men betrayed women? He imagined it was. At the moment a man finally gained a woman’s trust, he ran. He felt smothered. He discovered the bounder within himself. And if he did manage to stay, he forever reserved the right to show her his complacency or disdain.

For years, Evelyn had been the exception. He had wanted her truly; had needed her truly. Then the war had come and that weight of need had shifted between them. He’d outgrown her, against his every expectation – it was a relief, it was a bereavement – and, in a way that they both seemed powerless to stop or explain, she’d grown smaller, angrier and more anxious. They moved these days in their own spheres. Because what could either say?

And Leah? She was a remarkable person. If he had sensed that before, he knew it, clearly, today. He even suspected he loved her and that he would miss her dreadfully. She had simply said too much; she had
revealed
too much. How ironic that her first real words to him were the proof of feeling he had secretly craved from her for all these weeks. Yet once they had come –

He glanced back to see her, poised and inscrutable at her window.

Obviously the boy
had
remembered him, at the Bank. But it was utterly unthinkable that Leah might come to know a single detail more of his real life. He couldn’t expose Evelyn and Philip to that kind of embarrassment or risk. There wasn’t a decision to make. He walked briskly on.

His train from London wouldn’t pull into Brighton for another four hours. At the usual time, he would join the shadow of his former self at the station’s exit, remember who he was, and turn left on to Trafalgar Street, just as he did every Wednesday afternoon. He’d recover his equilibrium as he fell in with the other commuters. However, until he did, he felt exposed and sick with himself. What’s more, he couldn’t be seen, at a loose end, about town.

On Terminus Road, the public bar of the Waterloo Arms was hushed and dank. He knew better of course than to ask if there was a saloon, while to inquire about a snug would have been tantamount to asking to be taken out back and beaten till his brain bled. The pub-lican stared. The men at the bar stared. They’d been eating from a tray of winkles, prising the creatures from their shells with pins and catching them fast between their teeth. At the sight of Geoffrey at the threshold, the oldest, a man with a silver-and-black widow’s peak, sighed, pushed the tray to one side, and slid a misshapen parcel beneath his jacket.

It was a stagey gesture. They were on ‘Brighton business’, and they wanted him to know it. What other kind of men were without work in the middle of a summer’s afternoon with a war on? Since the closure of the racecourse, most of the betting, the loan-sharking and the black-marketeering had moved into pubs of this kind, off the beaten track. Only last month, a determined police sergeant had taken a punch, immediately below the chin – the cleanest way to snap a man’s spine.

Geoffrey removed his hat and bent low, grateful for both his size and the distraction of his newspaper. The day’s sawdust was still fresh but the musty sweetness of a century of spilled ale, tobacco smoke and woodsmoke clung like tar to the walls. The blackout curtains were two-thirds lowered, even at this time of day, and overhead, the ceiling bulged like a tumour.

He made his way to the bar, knocking his head against a beam and swearing softly. His eyes were slow to adjust. The drinkers remained silent, apparently uninterested in either him or the reason for his intrusion. The air was thick and tacky, as if suspicion and casual ran-cour mingled with the dust. The publican and his stomach leaned corpulently over the bar, resenting the irritation of a new customer with a good fedora and a leather case. In a low voice Geoffrey ordered a stout, lit a cigarette, nodded to the winkle-eaters, and made a show of glancing at the headlines. Only as his bottle hit the bar did he reach for his wallet.

His face must have betrayed him.

Beside him, a man with small, rabbit eyes laughed into his beer. ‘She must have been very dear, sir!’

A roar went up. The joker’s hand rested lightly against the bar. A razor blade was taped to his finger, snug as a wedding ring.

A joke, Geoffrey told himself. A lucky guess. They were always going to have their fun.

‘May I interest you in a
loan
, sir?’ It was the oldest man, the one with the lumpen parcel. ‘I dessay you must be feeling
spent
this fine afternoon.’ He raised a winkle to him, caught the soft dead thing on the end of his pin, and tongued the end of it in a grotesque pantomime. Another boom of laughter rang out, and Geoffrey took in the hard, glittering eyes and the brilliant white rose in the man’s buttonhole. Only now did it occur to him. The house for ‘Gentlemen
Lodgers’ was just half a mile away. For what other purpose did men like himself appear in this part of town?

‘I should be fine, thank you,’ he said to the widow’s peak. Then he flashed the publican an unsteady smile while, behind the cover of the bar, his fingers scrabbled furiously in the depth of his pockets.

Three shillings delivered him.

A raucous cheer went up.

Thank God he’d left her when he had.

It was as if, Evelyn thought, she had stepped into some deep pocket in the lining of the day.