Unexploded (6 page)

Geoffrey and Philip emerged on the market’s far side, on the London Road, and stopped at the forge to peer in through the stable door. This was their daily ritual, before Geoffrey turned south for the town centre and Philip humped his bicycle west up the hill to the Grammar.

Dawkins, the farrier, was easing the shoe off a Co-op delivery horse. Its large feathery hoof rested between the man’s knees on his leather apron, a vast energy somehow made still in this place of fire and steam.

The dray snorted as the old shoe came away. Dawkins rubbed the matted foreleg and lowered a new shoe into the hungry furnace until it emerged white hot. He lifted the horse’s leg again and tried it roughly for size. Through the fuming cloud came the sharp stink of burning hoof, and they saw the dray’s yellowy eyes roll.

At the anvil, the farrier pounded the shoe into shape, then moved to the barrel of cold water and plunged it in. Steam hissed, Philip’s face exploded into a grin, the tang of cooling metal rose into the air, and Dawkins reached for the first nail.

‘What if it’s too long?’ Philip whispered.

‘I expect the horse will let him know.’ Geoffrey winked. He was putting on a good show of paternal steadiness, but, privately, as he watched Dawkins hammer the nail into the huge hoof, he envied the farrier his ease, his apparent rightness in the world. Already at eight o’clock, he himself was hot; sweaty with a mute shame he couldn’t reason away. His collar felt tight. His testicles felt leaden. The scene
earlier with Evvie – the strange failure of his body – had left him jangling.

The dip in the sea before work had merely been his excuse to escape the house and the unease between them. Now he needed it, the relief, the punishment, of cold water.

The old beach chalet was lit by cracks of light as thin, as impermanent, as hope. He groped, clearing cobwebs and dead flies as he stepped over remnants of the previous summer: two deckchairs, a beach pail that clattered with shells, a threadbare towel. He stumbled out of his suit and arranged his clothing on the pegs. Beneath his bare feet, the planks creaked, and the smell of his childhood summers – the sweetness of balsam wood baking in the sun – recalled, instantly and too keenly, an ancient freedom from himself, from self-consciousness, from everything but the imperatives of running and diving.

As he stepped outside, he had that sensation of nakedness, of exposure, that he experienced each year before his first swim, as if he were some classification of mollusc emerging pale and soft from its shell into the open air. But the morning sky, east towards Saltdean and west as far as Shoreham, was a trumpet-blast of blue, and, against all expectation, he felt the heaviness of the morning lift as he squinted into the light. There, alone and briefly unaccountable to anyone, the relief was immense. His neck unstiffened. The knot of shame in his stomach loosened, and his twelve-year-old self seemed to flicker to life within him. He could almost see himself running again, gangly-legged, with friends, across the gated green lawns of Hove down to the lagoon.

This morning, Brighton beach would do – it was a shorter journey back to the Bank – and, at the age of thirty-six, he walked across the pebbles. Soon the beach would be closed for the war but today,
the scene was as ever – or it was if he let himself forget the strange emptiness of the piers and the promenade.

On the seafront behind, hunched carriage drivers waited between the Palace Pier and the West Pier, their restless horses jingling with promise for any visitor foolhardy enough to risk a seaside town marked for invasion. High overhead, cirrus cloud drifted like the ragged end of a dying man’s last thought. The Italian ice-cream man sat on the kerb next to his three-wheeled bicycle reading his paper, no doubt hoping against hope that Mussolini would not enter the war. Further down the prom, a fishwife hollered ‘Winkles! Sixpence a pint!’ to no one.

The King’s Road was bright, still, and as empty as a place of contagion. Not so much as a chip carton blew down the prom. No summer holidaymakers raced against the breeze on bicycles or laughed behind the wheels of sporty motors. The excursion boats no longer ferried pleasure-seekers from the end of the Palace Pier to Dieppe. Hotel porters and bellboys, jellied-eel and cockle sellers, shopkeepers and carriage drivers seemed suspended in the heavy translucence of aspic.

But on the beach itself, one could still imagine that nothing had changed. The tide was in, and the surf dragged the shingle in a perpetually casual show of force. An old man in a beach slip bobbed in the waves ahead like a white-headed seal. A mother and three children in newspaper sailors’ caps played in the shallows, the youngest screaming at the crashing arrival of each new wave. A stray mongrel sprinted back and forth, tussling with a dead cuttlefish in its mouth. Three teenaged girls in beach pyjamas planted their tuppenny deck-chairs on the pebbles.

The fishermen were already tipping out the second catch of the day, and their children hopped between boats or clambered out
from below them. Earlier that week, these same men, men of the old fishing families – the Gunns and the Rolfs, the Leaches and the Howells – had been hauling the desperate and the wounded into their boats while bullets strafed the sea around them like skipping stones. Men who had never ventured further than the Isle of Wight had steered their way to Dunkirk by the glow of fire on the horizon.

Now they were at their dees again, as if all the smoke of France had been only a brutal trick of the light, as if the beach weren’t soon to close. The children helped out before school each day, with the older boys spearing twenty or thirty herring on a stick before laying them out in gleaming rows, ready to be smoked.

An ancient man, wearing a blue woollen cap even in the day’s heat, looked up from the net he was mending to spit cord from his mouth. ‘On your way,’ he called to the children, ‘or the Schoolboard Man will be here to lock up the lot of you!’ They scattered like pigeons at gunfire, chasing each other across the beach, the boys threatening the girls with scale-smeared hands.

Two women sunbathed on vast white hotel towels. One looked up dreamily, vaguely irritated by the children’s noise. On spotting Geoffrey, she adjusted the knot of her haltered swimming costume and turned her face.

It was a curious sort of freedom to be divested of his pinstripes. For this rare quarter-hour, he was not one of the town’s leading bankers. He did not approve, decline and seal fates. He had not agreed to serve as Superintendent at the new internment Camp, nor did he head the town’s Invasion Committee. The man who entered the sea was not that reliable citizen, and, for a few moments more, he imagined himself walking free of his identity, unpeeling his responsibilities and abandoning them like clothing at the water’s edge.

He had not told his wife of twelve years he might abandon her and their son if the worst came to pass. She had not looked up at him this morning, her eyes narrowing with mistrust.

When the first wave hit, he felt as if he’d been cut in two. His lungs snapped. His bones ached to the marrow. The heat of the day was misleading. It was only the end of May, after all, and this, the open Channel. Yet it was the stranglehold of the cold water, its overwhelming of all thought, that drove him deeper.

He flung himself below an oncoming wave and his heart kicked in his chest. The cold punched his ears. His forehead throbbed. Something brushed his leg and was gone. A yellow-and-brown tin of KLIM powdered milk rolled in the seaweed at the bottom. He surfaced at last into the sunshine, spitting salt water, eyes burning.

When he looked around, he was briefly disoriented. The sea was blinding; the horizon seemed to have dissolved. The reliable buoy of the old man was gone, and the currents had pulled him thirty or forty yards. His fellow swimmer was heaving himself up the beach, his elderly girth now covered in a towelling robe.

A few of the fishermen looked past the old man to him, their eyes narrowing over their tins of tobacco. Water was something you tried to stay out of, their eyes said. Whoever you are, you’re a grown man and you’re bad luck, throwing yourself at the sea like that.

Somewhere in the Channel a boat blew its siren. At the end of the Pier, the anglers cast their lines and floats into the swell. He climbed the steep shelf of the beach as the automated music from the carousel started up in the distance, a dismal, tinny accompaniment to his exertions. He looked to the men at the dees, and looked away again only to see the two women sunbathers staring warily too, as if, in his stumbling preoccupation, he might at any moment intrude upon their privacy. He blinked in the strong light, trying to spot his chalet in the
long, monotonous row, and in that moment he felt lost, out of step, in a place as familiar to him as his own childhood.

They’d got it wrong, the fishermen. He wasn’t bad luck. It was worse than that. ‘
Precautions
,’ she’d whispered hoarsely. No precautions. She’d eased the rubber off and her eyes had dared him. It wasn’t just that another pregnancy could kill her. That was
his
fear, more than it was hers. Her stubbornness about the rubber was code for what she wouldn’t bring herself to say: that it was he, her husband – not the enemy – who had suddenly put her and Philip at risk. If the enemy landed, he’d leave them. It was a betrayal. An abandonment. What, her eyes had demanded, was the point of precautions
now
?

Whatever her own private logic, it was between them, unspeakable, an oily dark thing, and it hardly mattered what actually came to pass. It hardly mattered if German barges appeared at this very moment, an ominous semaphore on the horizon, or if he and Evvie lay next to each other, safe in their bed for the next forty years. He had told her it was possible he would leave.

6

That morning, as his father turned south for the Bank, Philip cycled up the London Road, past the Co-op Department Store and Goodall’s Greengrocer; past the Cat and Dog’s Meat Shop, Jessop the Barber’s, the watch-repair shop, and the boot mender’s, the open door of which released the delicious smell of new leather. Behind him, a milkman’s barrow jingled with empties. At the tram stop, two Gypsies waved fistfuls of wildflowers. He bumped over the kerb, crossed the tram-rail and glided past Dr Baldwin’s surgery and Mrs Dowley of Dowley’s Fish ’n’ Chips, bending over, tipping yesterday’s chip fat down the drain and showing, by accident, the backs of her fat, fish-white legs. Then the gas fitter’s flashed past, the radio-set shop and the tinsmith’s window, where the morning light bounced off milk pails and cake tins.

At the corner, he made a sharp, wheel-juddering turn and heaved himself up the hill of the Old Shoreham Road. He stood tall on the pedals and wobbled up and up, through the colossal, catacombed darkness of the railway viaduct bridge. High above him, pigeons sat on the narrow ledges of the iron girders, immobile as toy ducks lined up in the shooting gallery on the Pier.

Orson’s brother, Hal, had been known as a damnfineshot. His hands, Orson claimed, always smelled of gunpowder. From the time he was just twelve years old, Hal had won every prize at the shooting
gallery. Next he was made Squadron Leader in the school militia. Now he was a Second Lieutenant overseeing three rifle sections and two dozen men in France. Orson said there was nothing Hal couldn’t do. Philip wished he had an older brother. He wished it all the time. Orson had Hal. Tubby had Frank and Alf. He had no one.

The underworld of the bridge spewed him into the light, and he aimed one hand at the sky. ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!’ he shouted, and enemy aircraft fell from the sky.

At the Grammar, he leaped from his bike. Orson was waiting. ‘You won’t believe it,’ he said in his own lugubrious way.

Philip turned, but the school was still there.

‘
Behind
us,’ Orson sighed.

Philip walked around to the other side of the sheds.

It didn’t seem possible.

Overnight, a city of tents had risen from the playing fields.

Never before had those fields been so crammed with life and yet so hushed. The two boys kept to the sidelines. The tent-dwellers stared at the sky like old men in a dole queue. They gnawed at buns and gulped water. They rubbed their hands across their whiskers. But they weren’t old.

The first few faces did not look outwardly hostile, but something in their expressions, in the glaze of their eyes, made Philip’s stomach tighten. One man had no arms, only bandaged stumps, like the pollarded trees that poked up stiffly over the playing fields from the road beyond. A swarthy, shirtless man with a red-and-white towel wrapped around his head was striding towards them. Orson stumbled into a run but the man caught Philip by the shoulder. ‘Cannae you read?’ He pointed at a white placard nailed to the boundary fence.

Philip swallowed and looked past him to the two men at the near-est
tent. One gargled at the other: ‘Oi, Jimbo, gimme back me ruddy crutch!’ They seemed to speak English but not as he knew it.
Were
they English? Hal had a smart uniform. That’s what Orson said. Many of these men were only half dressed. In the distance, three were washing from the same bowl. The broadest had a pirate’s patch over one eye.

‘Whass your name, lad?’

He tried to stop his leg from trembling. ‘Philip.’

The man bent down and laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. ‘Philip, this is noo place. It’s noo place at all. Now go find your mate an’ get yourselves to your lessons.’

Philip’s voice wobbled in his throat. ‘Are you prisoners of war or war heroes?’

‘I’ll be honest with you.’ With slow, careful fingers, the man shifted the towel on his head. ‘I’m not so sure myself this morning.’ And now Philip could see. The towel wasn’t a towel. It was a loose white dressing.

The man swatted at a fly but it landed again and again. Between the bandages, blood oozed, thick and dark as blackcurrant jam.

The wireless buzzed as the juice went through it. ‘Germany calling. Germany calling. Germany calling. Station Bremen 1, Station Bremen 2 and Station DJB on the ninety-metre band. You are about to hear a talk in English.’

‘Not tonight, Geoffrey …’