Unexploded (8 page)

Enemy aliens. It was necessary, said Churchill, to ‘collar the lot’.

A dirty pall of smoke hung over the Crescent. On the pavement below, in the middle of their quiet street, she watched men in
face-shields and asbestos gloves huddled over tools and generators. Then a stocky man raised a gloved hand, a fury of sparks erupted into the street, and a section of the wrought-iron spears of her fence collapsed, ringing out as it hit the pavement. It was the same all over Brighton that June. The metal drive. What more could they take? (
Either you sacrifice your selfishness for the nation – or you sacrifice the nation to your selfishness.
)

Inside, the house was as close, as airless, as a forcing jar. Two large flies flung themselves at the hot glass panes. She lowered herself on to the bed in the spare room to wait until the queasiness passed. When it didn’t she turned the eiderdown back and pressed her face to the cool sheets. And she saw them again in her mind’s eye: the two bright green capsules buried in her terrace garden like toxic seeds. Almost three weeks had passed, and, still, she couldn’t stop seeing them.

For eight years they had rearranged their lives around the threat of any possible pregnancy. She’d never so much as asked Dr Moore about another child because that small mark still stained the ceiling in the sitting room like a blood blister beneath the skin. Wasn’t it her body that had let them down? After Philip’s birth, their great openness had given way to solicitude and caution. She’d learned to feign pleasure and he’d learned to believe; they separated nervously afterwards, and quickly, as Dr Moore’s prophylactics leaflet had advised. Middle age had descended upon them too early – a delicacy, a self-consciousness better suited to late or second marriages. But now, he had done the unthinkable. He had resigned himself to the loss of her.

He must have sat, one long leg crossed over the other, in the high-ceilinged surgery. Through the window behind him, he would have been able to see the swathe of Hove Park and the lawns where
he had run as a boy. Dr Moore would have folded his hands benignly against the maroon leather of his desk. Perhaps Geoffrey had avoided his old doctor’s gaze, but little by little, in the course of that clipped conversation, they would have navigated past the hard edges of the unspeakable.

Two cyanide pills. The only responsible thing.

And what had she done? Had she run up the stairs last night, clenching them in her palm, and shaken him from sleep? Had she accused him over breakfast and washed the vile things down the sink?

No. She had tucked the flap of the Lloyds envelope back into place as if it were an RSVP for a dull party to which she had resigned herself. She’d laid the envelope flat at the bottom of the tin and covered it with the sheaf of twenty-pound notes. She’d pushed the tin back into its hollow, piled the earth into place, and flattened the surface with the back of the spade. Then she’d brushed herself down, returned the spade to the soil, stepped back into the kitchen and turned the key.

The kitchen was strange, its edges moonlit and exaggerated, its surfaces bulging as if under some internal pressure of their own. The cutlery had flashed like spilled mercury in the tray on the sideboard. The coal in the scuttle had gleamed. She’d wiped her feet and slipped off her damp plimsolls.

In their room Geoffrey slept deeply, on his back. She hooked his cardigan over the bed knob and eased herself back into bed. The raw smell of earth was on her hands; washing at the sink would have set the pipes of the house groaning. She clutched one goose-pimpled arm in the other and listened to the steadiness of her husband’s breath. As she lay, eyes open to the dark, she grew conscious of a wider, looser scent. Next to him – next to his smell of heat and hair
oil and Imperial Leather – she smelled of the outdoors, of the night air. Hadn’t she taken something of the night, of its feral silence, inside with her? It was hers now, even more than it was his: the secret of that tin.

Because she hadn’t been able to crush the things under the heel of her shoe. Because she couldn’t be sure that, some fearful day, she wouldn’t not be grateful for them.

The world seemed to twist into a less physical, less solid, version of itself, as if any of its elements – the moon, the Park, the sturdy arc of the Crescent – could suddenly slip from its position, like a flimsy bit of scenery in a Sunday School tableau. If
she
slipped – and she was already slipping – if her grip on life was anything less than firm, how would she trust herself? And if Geoffrey were to leave, how could she be trusted to keep Philip safe? (
Do you show your children that you are calm and undisturbed? It isn’t enough to pretend to be calm – you must actually be so.)

In her mind’s eye, she could see the white, uneven grin of his teeth and the red of his lips. His ears were pink, translucent, and the tiny hairs on his lobes caught the light. She could almost feel his childish hands in her own, the ink-stained fingers, the dimpled knuckles. She saw again the curving fringe of his lashes as he slept and the soft brown V of hair at the nape of his neck. His cheek was velvet against her palm; the sleepy warm smell of him delicious. Sometimes, as he nodded off, she traced the delicate blue veins at his temples.
All of this I made
, she thought. Yet would she swallow death one day? Would she feed it to her child on a spoon piled high with jam?

She’d be no good, no good at all. Her brain always seized up; when she panicked, she froze. Who was she to stand up to any enemy person? Even her father’s rants and taunts used to strike her dumb. He’d never hit her or her mother, but the threat of violence had
pervaded the atmosphere of her childhood, and in her girlhood room, as the syllables of his rage burbled up through the air vents in the floor, she used to pray before sleep that it would stop, that
everything
would just stop.

She doubted she was either canny or tough enough to manage on her own – the civilian reports out of Holland and Belgium had been so desperate – and again, the memory of those capsules flashed like foul treasure in her mind.

In the spare room, she lay stiffly at the very edge of the bed.

The flies continued to cast themselves at the hot pane.

It was not within her power not to love Geoffrey, but for this – this fear of herself that was now hers to carry – she could not forgive him.

9

For the first time, he could not say the old words. After everything he’d known and seen, he gave up the habit here of all places, in the tranquillized quiet of a makeshift infirmary on the remote edge of a seaside town.

He didn’t open his eyes. He could hardly bear to see the four walls of his failure. It was enough to smell the bleached lino again and the wood of the cheap hut baking in the heat of June. He reached to his back and ran his fingers over the bandaged lump where his left arm met his shoulder. The bullet was as long and wide as his little finger and burned as if someone were pressing a cigarette to his flesh.

Years ago, of course, Otto had ceased to believe in the prayer’s potency, but he’d murmured it each morning anyway for its mundane comfort; for the memory of his mother beside him in his narrow bed, stroking his head as he slipped into sleep. Each night for weeks, she had taught him the strange words – the only Hebrew he would ever learn – and he’d fallen asleep to the scent of her hair on his pillow.

‘Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehechezarta bi nish-mahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha.’

Now, his stomach lurched at the impossible coincidence of the words rising in the space of the infirmary. He managed to turn. The
mumbled prayer belonged to the old man in the bed next to his, the only other wretch ill enough to be abandoned to that airless hut.

For four days they had woken side by side on their metal camp beds in the overcrowded barracks without exchanging a word, for Otto had refused conversation, and it was assumed he spoke little English. Relative silence was the only permissible form of privacy. Today, once again, they were side by side, this time in the room that passed for an infirmary, and his neighbour’s ears, Otto realized, were far better than his lungs. The old man – a Jew, evidently – must have overheard his murmured recitation each morning and recognized it.
‘
Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehechezarta bi nish-mahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha
.’

‘I give thanks to God for restoring my soul to my body.’

This morning, the old man was saying the words for him.

He would have laughed mirthlessly were it not for the pain in his lungs. Didn’t his neighbour know? In places like this, small acts of kindness were cruel as razor wire. Nor did he need his pity. Yesterday had not, in fact, been a day of despair. The light had been extraordin-ary; the horizon opalescent where it met the sea; the open air a balm. After months in the barracks, he could hardly believe he now found himself standing on a beach on the very edge of England.

He sucked at the stale air. His wound still burned. But at least all was finally still, apart from the buzzing and ringing in his right ear – the phantom whizz of the bullet. Stillness, of course, is not the same thing as peace. The quiet was strained, brittle, like that quarter of an hour each morning at Sachsenhausen, before the pretty nurse with the doe eyes arrived with the injection. Who, who, they’d wonder, would it be this time?

That sickbay had always been stuffed full with the infected, the tormented and the broken, while this room was strangely empty
except for their two bodies, each pitiful beneath the cheap regulation blanket. From time to time, the old man’s bronchial gasping turned to a retching that echoed in the rafters above them, but otherwise: silence.

At the door, a dull-eyed guard, a new face – new to Otto in any case – rubbed and scraped at the mud that caked his boots; perhaps one of the men who had been digging the latrine-and-shower block yesterday when the pipes burst. Otto watched him, fascinated by the comparative ordinariness of this man’s morning; by his frowning attention to the insult of the mud. Yet now more than ever, Otto wished he could turn off his artist’s habit of seeing in detail; of dividing every figure, every body, into its component geometry. The guard was all blunt lozenges, with a face that looked as if it had been flattened in the birth canal. His pale blue eyes protruded, oversized and glaucous. His hands were square mitts. Only his forehead was recognizably human: unexpectedly high, vulnerable, and smooth as a child’s.

The man looked up and Otto closed his eyes. At Sachsenhausen, the mere affront of eye contact could mean that the nurse would arrive with her doe eyes and the injection. She’d stroke the soft underside of an arm for the vein – a woman’s touch, oh God, the tenderness – before the eyes of her patient rolled back and his body went limp.

The guard raised his left boot and rested it on his right thigh. The hobbed soles winked in the dull light of the hut.

Otto would never forget the orchestrated clatter of the hobnailed boots on the cobbled streets of Berlin. He’d never forget the torment of the forty kilometres he later marched and ran each day on the boot-testing track at Sachsenhausen. The memories still terrorized him each night in his dreams: the twenty-kilo pack; the sunstroke;
the frostbite; the studded, broken ground; the boots always too large or too small; the crippled, bleeding feet in the communal baths; the men who dropped and were trampled, while others ran to the perimeter, to end their lives on the electric fence.

Was this man one of the Nazi naval prisoners who had, it was rumoured, been promoted to guard duties in this place? It was hard to say. Everyone – whether enemy alien or prisoner of war – wore the grey boiler suits donated by the local munitions factory, for most of the interns had arrived with only the clothes on their backs – dinner jackets, rumpled shirts, pyjamas. Those who’d been picked up at home had been informed there was no need to pack a case; they would be home again in a day or two after their papers and tribunal records were checked. Otto had known better. Three years before, he’d been given the same assurances before he was placed in the van that drove him away from Berlin for the last time.

He was thirty-five and yet a part of him wanted to sob like a child – though why now? He had suffered far worse than this, and here, once more, he was learning how not to feel. Already he was becoming less than human. Already he stank – of stale sweat, salt water and piss. And worse than this wretchedness, worse even than the sheet-soaking terrors of his dreams, was the knowledge he’d woken to that morning.

He was not dead after all.

They’d hauled him from the sea. Pumped his chest. Stopped the bleeding.

His mother’s prayer had worked, it seemed. His soul – damned and degenerate – had been restored to his body despite him.

10

Tubby Dunn’s mother was Tillie, who had been, until that May, the Beaumonts’ housekeeper. The Dunns lived just streets away from the Crescent – streets and a world away, in a tall, pinched house on Magdalene Street in the great shadow of St Joseph’s Church. The Dunns, Philip knew, were Romans, and Romans, he’d been told, were Romans because they didn’t have a picture of the King in their church. Tubby’s real name was Norman, after his uncle who had died in the Great War, but at home he was known as Tubby because however much he ate, his shoulder blades stuck out like bent coat hangers, his eyes were big in the bone of their sockets, and because the Dunn brothers liked a joke.

Learning didn’t come easily to Tubby. Alf, his brother, told Philip it was because when Tubby was a baby, he slept in the bottom of a chest of drawers and that, one day, their Auntie Vi’s husband shut the drawer without thinking, and Tubby nearly suffocated in his sleep before their mother realized.

Alf was thirteen and Frank, the eldest of the Dunn boys, was fif-teen. Plus there was Peg, their little sister who was always crying. Tubby’s father, Mr Dunn, worked as a street-lamp fitter until the blackout came and the Corporation turned off all the lights. He was a hunched man with black eyebrows and deep grooves like tramlines in his forehead. For a time, he had work painting all the bulbs in train
carriages blue; then his papers came, and Tubby heard his mother crying in the lav at the end of the garden.