Unexploded (15 page)

Then the floorboards creaked, and they turned their ears like dogs attuned to a special frequency.

All went quiet again and Orson opened the wardrobe door. ‘This is Hal’s bat. Essex willow.’ He crawled inside. Hangers clattered on the rail. A jacket tumbled from its perch. ‘Shoes. Oar. Bicycle pump. Bicycle lamp. Jigsaw box. One-man tent. Croquet mallet.’

‘I thought we weren’t supposed to touch anything.’

‘Mother ignores Hal’s jumble.’ He retreated deeper. ‘Tennis rac-quet. Girlie playing cards. Tennis ball. Old atlas. Binoculars. Boxing gloves …’ A milk crate appeared. Philip caught hold of it, and Orson tumbled out after.

‘Jumpers?’

‘Don’t be daft.’ Orson reached beneath the woollens and pulled out a heap of things: a tie; a pair of pressed trousers; a black shirt with buttons at the shoulder, like a fencing jacket; an armband with a lightning bolt on it; a gramophone record; a pair of black boots; a lady’s stocking half filled with broken glass; and a leather belt with a shiny buckle. ‘Watch this.’ Orson took the belt, held it vertically, and clicked on the back of the buckle. Out popped a row of sharp steel spikes. Philip had never seen anything like it. He picked up the stocking and held it to the light; the glass bounced in the silken foot.

Orson was at the table, winding up the gramophone.

‘What if your mother hears?’

He lowered the needle. ‘She’s downstairs with Ivy.’

A man’s voice crackled to life: ‘– have striven to arouse in this country the feelings and passions of war with a nation with whom we made peace in 1918. We fought Germany once in our British quarrel. We shall not fight Germany again in a Jewish quarrel!’

‘Mosley,’ Orson whispered. ‘Hal saw him in Worthing three times. The crowds were so big you would have thought it was the King.’

Philip jumped up. ‘What was that?’

Orson lifted the arm of the gramophone. Neither moved.

Outside, in the road, someone was whistling. Philip knew the tune … It was one the Dunn brothers had sung beneath the Pier that day in May. He ran for the window, grinned, and raised his hand to the glass. Orson reached for his specs. ‘Who is it?’

‘My friend.’

‘You mean, your housekeeper’s son? Tell him to go home. He’s bloody well going to get us caught in here.’

Philip had never heard Orson swear before. He waved urgent arms at Tubby while Orson struggled with the bolts. ‘Tubby!’ he whispered at last down to the street. ‘What are you doing?’

‘You didn’t come to ours for your tea. My mum says she’s worried witless. She sent Frank off towards the Grammar to look for you, and I said I’d run to your house fast, in case you were on your tod on the front step. When you weren’t, I thought you might be here but I didn’t know which house so I had to whistle.’

‘Why am I having tea at yours?’

‘My mum said your mum said. She left you a note. We’re having bread and scrape, liver but no onions.’ Tubby hugged himself, as if he were standing in the rain.

‘What did you say his name is?’ Orson slammed the window shut.

Philip hesitated. ‘Norman.’

‘That’s curious …’ Orson studied Tubby as if he were something flat on a glass slide.

‘What is?’

‘He looks like a Jew.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Bony. In need of a good wash.’ Orson pressed his face and specs to the pane. Then he fixed the bolts, closed the shutters, and returned to the crate.

He was putting Hal’s things away.

‘Tubby – I mean, Norman – is a Roman.’

Orson didn’t turn. ‘I didn’t say he
was
a Jew. I said he
looked
like a Jew.’

‘How do you know what Jews look like?’

Orson forced the crate back into the wardrobe, pushed the door shut, and leaned against it. ‘Hal told me, of course.’

17

She’d done her evening duty by her absent neighbours. She’d checked their houses. It was an odd sensation, she thought, walking through other people’s private lives; disturbing their ghosts; bumping into corners one didn’t expect.

She hooked the three sets of keys into place on the key board.

‘All clear?’ Geoffrey asked with a perfunctory smile.

She nodded and dropped into her chair. He reached for his cigarette. The wireless buzzed to life. Philip pressed his cheek to the broadloom. Beside him lay his crumpled visions of Hawker Demon bombers and his pencil.

He yawned. On Friday evenings, his father sometimes carried him upstairs to bed. He considered his mother’s legs, crossed at the ankles. One of her slip-ons had slipped off. In the dim light she read her Mrs Woolf. When she looked up over her page, he closed his eyes quickly.

He heard his father inquire about his mother’s day. His mother inquired about his father’s. His mother said she’d learned how to take out a man’s eye. His father sat down, leaned his head back, and exhaled smoke, dragon-like, from his nostrils.

On the other side of the shutters, a thrush sat speckle-breasted on a chimney pot, rehearsing a single phrase. Bats flitted and dived over the hood of a street lamp. There was the rot of the swill-bin and the
whiff of a backed-up drain, and over it all lay the green luxury of June, every leaf etched and bright.

A bicycle bell chimed twice and receded up the street. In the shadow of the Salvation Army’s ramparts, two boys bounced a tennis ball at the brick wall. To the west of the Crescent, on the slow-climbing crest that was Ditchling Road, summer lay rapt beneath a snowfall of hawthorn blossom, cow parsley, elderflower and daisies, while to the east, on the Lewes Road, a lone army truck rumbled past on a loose suspension.

The moon rose gravely above the horizon.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock. ‘This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the
Nine O’Clock News
.’ No one could reassure the nation as assuredly as Alvar Liddell, dressed in his BBC announcer’s dinner jacket. All was seemingly shuttered calm. Evelyn turned another page of
The Years
and found Eleanor musing again: ‘There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair exasperated.’ Evelyn could hear her. Her voice was like Mrs Woolf ’s, resolute but uninsistent; old and young at the same time. ‘There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.’

Geoffrey rose to adjust the dial, Philip muttered in his sleep, and Eleanor was evaporating into black marks on the page when, as if from another dimension, Evelyn had a sudden, final glimpse; an impression of white hair and tanned cheeks.

How strange it all was. Was she imagining Eleanor or was Eleanor, the ‘queer old bird’, imagining her?

Of course she wasn’t. She was tired, that was all, and lonely. The Pargiters’ lives had become more solid than her own.

Geoffrey glanced across to her, and together, falling into habit, feigning marriage, they smiled, weakly, fleetingly, at the sight of
their sleepy son, while somewhere on the Crescent, a front door shut, a passing dog yapped, and –
thwack
– the ball bounced off the wall again.

When Geoffrey had arrived home, he’d asked, not unkindly, why she hadn’t prepared the evening meal. ‘There’s only us,’ she’d said, as if that explained the departure from routine. ‘Philip is at Tillie’s.’

He didn’t ask why, and to ensure he didn’t, she rose immediately from her chair to make him a sandwich.

Now, beneath the glassy calm of the evening, the secrets of the day gathered. While domestic rituals unfolded up and down the Crescent behind windowpanes burnished gold in the setting sun, as Alvar Lid-dell read the news in crisp, clipped consonants that sedated a nation, it was as if every armchair, picture frame and side table in the Beaumont home drained of colour, slid into shadow, and became something other. A blast wave of the unsaid moved through the four walls, permeating every dovetail joint, every knot of wood, and every bubble and warp of the windowpanes.

Philip had slid guiltily through the front door an hour before. He said yes, Tillie was well, and yes, the liver was good. He did not say that, just that afternoon, he had held a stocking filled with broken glass; that Hal’s belt was even better and he’d longed to pop the spikes himself, but then Tubby had turned up outside whistling, and Orson had put Hal’s things away, and now he’d probably never have the chance to pop the belt again.

He did not confess that he had not returned home to find his mother’s note on the kitchen table; that he had not left Orson’s when he should have; that Tubby and Frank had been sent by their mother to find him, and the three of them had only just got in the door when the sirens went. Nor did he say that Tillie had slapped his leg and hugged him so hard that his lungs had hurt.

Although she had assumed she would, Evelyn did not, in the end, tell Geoffrey that she had attended Mrs Woolf ’s lecture. She did not mention Mr Hatchett or describe Mrs Woolf with her handkerchief and her sandals and her lips that were ink-stained – stained as if she’d been
feeding
herself on words.

After the lecture, as the sirens went, Evelyn retreated to the shelter beneath The Level. There, in the stink of creosote and urine, she’d checked her notepad and murmured the words to herself: ‘Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly …’

The woman seated on the bench across from her, corpse-like in the blue light, had mistaken it for ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and had elbowed her husband to bow his head.

She did not tell Geoffrey that, these days, she was full of fear, but that the contempt she had come to feel for him frightened her most of all.

He reached for another cigarette and snapped the case shut. For his part, he had no intention of telling Evelyn, or anyone for that matter, that he had stopped at the Open Market on the way back from the Bank that afternoon. He could still see the herbalist’s face – the brief lifting of her lips, the pinched-off smile – as the word ‘fertilizer’ came out of his mouth.

The wireless was hissing static. He surfaced only to realize that Evelyn was speaking to him. She had put down her book, the news was over, and she was saying, ‘So I’ve decided.’

He turned dutifully in his chair.

‘The hospital.’

‘The hospital?’

‘I’ll volunteer.’

‘Ah.’ He was still at the herbalist’s stall, cringing.

‘I’ll make a few inquiries. About reading. I think it might be restorative for some. Why, just the other day on the BBC, they were saying –’

‘At the hospital?’

‘I’ve just said.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Clearly I think so,’ she said with a determined brightness, ‘or I wouldn’t have mentioned it.’
Let us discover how to read and to write, how to preserve and how to create.
Words made worlds, new worlds.

In the spume of his dreams, Philip sat on the seafront with Hitler, Mosley and Orson. From their deckchairs, they watched the waves and sucked on sticks of Brighton rock. They had taken off their shoes and socks, and Mosley was wriggling his toes. The sun was warm. Hitler frowned at the incoming tide and chewed his moustache. The stick of rock was delicious. When Philip looked at its middle, he saw the same lightning bolt in the circle of blue that he’d seen on Hal’s armband. ‘Look!’ he said, and Orson nodded. Hal, he said, was in the shooting gallery on the Pier, winning every prize. ‘Listen,’ he said.

‘They’ve started …’ said Geoffrey. ‘They had to clear the entire seafront, as a precaution.’

Together they turned to the shuttered windows and listened to the glass rattle in its frames.

‘As I say, I’ll make a few inquiries.’

‘It’s just that you’re not particularly good with blood. Your last WI visit to the hospital left you quite upset.’

‘Will it go on all night?’

‘For much of it, I daresay.’

‘The Camp then.’

He looked up. ‘The Camp?’

‘I’ll read to the prisoners. Surely you’re not letting them bleed too much?’ She folded her hands in her lap.

‘It would be awkward.’

‘Perhaps they will have requests – their own favourite poems or novels. On the BBC they said that to be read to was –’

‘It’s a kind thought.’ He waited for the next dull boom to fade.

Philip smiled faintly in his sleep.
Boom, boom, boom
. Hal was winning every prize.

‘But I’m afraid it wouldn’t be permitted.’

Anger burst within her; a small, hot shell. ‘Why ever not?’ She smiled quizzically. ‘
Who
would not permit it?’

‘The Camp is strictly “men only”, Evvie. The regulations don’t even allow me to employ female cooks or laundresses. Only the rare visitor is permitted, usually Army or Corporation personnel. Never female, charitable or otherwise. Regulation aside, it wouldn’t be safe. It’s simply not the place.’ He checked his wristwatch, then heaved himself to his feet and gathered Philip from the floor. ‘Good lad,’ he murmured, cradling their son’s sleeping head against his chest.

She had to look away. Sometimes, it was still an effort: to hate him so she would not love him. He’d always been such a good father.

Less than a mile away – another explosion.

‘I’ll see you upstairs,’ he said.

She fanned herself with her book. ‘I’ll bathe first. Don’t wait up.’

‘Sure?’

She lifted her chin and smiled again.

At the sound of his footfall on the upstairs landing, she rose, clicked the lamp’s switch with her foot, closed the door soundlessly, and stood alone, stooping as if winded. Something gripped the hollow of her stomach – she’d forgotten to eat since that morning – and
she felt, too, a pressure under her ribcage, the hot insistence of her clamouring heart.

She walked to the far wall and lay her forehead against its cool plaster, its blank vertical, as if only its solid geometry could keep her standing. In the darkness, a moth flapped its desire in the hot lamp it madly mistook for the moon. She and it. She and it. She and it. On and on it crashed and struggled, as she pressed her cheek and mouth to the cool of the wall. How to cease to feel?
That
was the trick of living.

Something replied.