Unexploded (25 page)

‘He’s starting to cry, Orson.’

‘No, he just needs his drops. The doctor told us his tear ducts aren’t right because the bullet went right through the bridge of his nose. Lucky for him he can still see well enough through one eye. They had to leave the bullet in his brain because it was too dangerous to take out after all, but at least his hair’s grown all the way back,
hasn’t it, Hal?’ He leaned towards his brother’s ear and shouted. ‘I say, Hal, your hair’s grown all the way back!’

Philip wasn’t sure how he preferred Orson: quiet and sad, as when he’d appeared at the door, or oddly cheerful as now. ‘Don’t you think he’s tired, Orson? He looks tired to me. I should go.’

‘Don’t be a clot, Beaumont. He always looks like that, and you’ve only just arrived. Besides, Hal doesn’t get many visitors.’ He ran to the card table, lifted the needle on Mosley, and threw open the wardrobe’s doors. ‘Here! Look. Hal says you’re allowed. You can pop the special belt. Remember?’

He remembered. But when had Hal said he was allowed? Hal wasn’t saying anything now, and, as Orson dangled the belt, its leather gleaming, its buckle shining, Philip knew it was wrong to take it, with Hal propped up in his chair and his arms and legs all wrong like a starfish.

‘Go on,’ said Orson. ‘Have a go.’

The steel of the buckle was cool in his hand. ‘I like your belt,’ Philip croaked, and as he pressed the button on the back, he felt the pleasure of the studs as they popped at his will.

‘Now, Beaumont. The belt is yours for today. And this is mine …’ He bounced the silk stocking with the foot full of crushed glass. ‘Hal gets this.’ He popped the old Luftwaffe helmet on to Hal’s tipsy head. ‘ Righty- ho.’

‘Righty-ho?’ said Philip.

‘
Righty-ho
,’ said Orson. ‘Hal gets to go first.’

Geoffrey stood at the kitchen door, blowing smoke into the evening air. The long shadows of the trees in the Park were melting into twilight, and as he looked out, he could almost see it: innocence, the last
of their innocence as a couple, slipping darkly, abjectly, out of the day. ‘I’ve ended it. I don’t know how many times I can say it.’

‘It’s not only what you’ve done … It’s what you
won’t not
stoop to do.’ She listened to herself. How impassioned she sounded. Yet it was only a line she had rehearsed in her head weeks ago. She didn’t care, she didn’t care. In truth she felt only a cool, hard resignation. ‘Are you sure the ambulance is on its way to the Camp?’

‘He will get hospital treatment tonight. Rest assured there will be no distinguishing Otto Gottlieb from one of the noble wounded. Now let that be an end to it.’

His tone brought her round, sharp as smelling salts. ‘Good God. This war, this wretched war, has gone to your head.’

‘Perhaps you would rather I’d buried it in the sand.’

‘Everything has been taken from those men, and yet you lock away instruments and … and books! What end could that possibly serve?’

He dropped his cigarette outside the door and turned to her. ‘It is a labour camp, Evvie. A
labour
camp. I am not proud of it. I dread the days I have to be there. But you know as well as I do that I don’t make the rules.’

‘No, you only follow them, slavishly. What possible reason could there be to –?’

‘Are you in love with him?’

She turned, aghast. ‘So inquires the man who keeps a mistress in London!’

‘Keep your voice down.’

‘You’re ashamed!’ She could hear herself, acid and shrill.

‘Of course I’m ashamed! And Philip is upstairs.’ He slammed the back door and dropped into a chair.

‘I have to leave …’ she heard herself say.

‘Whatever are you talking about?’

‘Leave. I have to leave here.’ She spoke – or rather the words emerged from her – but inside she was dumb and reeling. Because it was with her still, that smell, the woman’s scent on his jacket, in his hair. And the pills … buried just outside. Foul treasure. The bodies, she’d heard, exuded the smell of bitter almonds.

‘I’ll sleep at Number 5 tonight. I have the key. It’s straightforward enough.’ Did the war taint everything finally, everything, even this little life?

‘Do I so repel you?’

‘I shan’t leave of course until Philip is in bed, and I’ll be back in the morning before he wakes. If the alert goes, I’ll come back for him immediately.’ Would she go? she wondered. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Nothing really mattered. That was the truth of it all. Everything these days was words, words. And lies.

She looked up and called through the ceiling – ‘Philip!’ – for there was still the faint, almost illusory notion of dinner to see to; of hands to be washed; of his uniform to be tried for the new term – ‘Philip!’ Of this little life.

Orson squeezed himself into the space beneath Hal’s desk. ‘Right,’ he ordered, ‘now push Hal’s chair in front of me so you can’t see me at all.’

‘I should go home …’ said Philip, wheeling Hal over to the desk.

‘Can you see me at all?’

‘No.’

‘Is the handbrake on?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the helmet? Is the helmet still on Hal’s head?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we can begin.’

‘My parents don’t know I’m here.’

‘Excellent.’ He peered out from behind Hal’s chair. ‘That was me speaking, incidentally, not Hal.
Now
it’s Hal.’

He cleared his throat and deepened his voice. ‘It is a sunny day when I’m decorated for bravery on the Pavilion lawns under the big bandstand. Hitler pins the medal to my chest. Then he pounds me on my back, and all the people clap, and I am wheeled inside the Pavilion. There are musicians and servants and drinks trays and flowers everywhere. Oswald Mosley is there already and Lord Haw-Haw. Everyone shakes my hand, then we drink Pimm’s and stuff ourselves with cucumber sandwiches and –’

‘Orson.’

‘
Hal
.’

‘
No
, Orson.’

Orson’s head appeared. ‘What?’

‘Hal’s eyes are leaking again.’

Orson crawled out from the desk space and looked into his brother’s face. ‘Hello, old egg. Everything all right?’

But things weren’t all right and they never would be again. Hal was moaning and beating the arms of his chair.

‘Does that mean he’s hungry or that he needs the loo?’ whispered Philip.

‘Hal, quiet now … Ssshhh …’ Orson murmured gently, more gently than Philip would ever have thought possible. ‘It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here, Hal. Me.
Orson
.’

Hal’s starfish legs started to kick and spasm, and if Orson’s face had ever had any natural colour in it, it left him now.

‘What is it, Hal? What is it?’

But Hal was in the grip of something dreadful, an arm-to-arm, leg-to-leg combat with an invisible enemy.

‘His lips are turning blue,’ breathed Philip. ‘I’ll call your mother.’

‘Don’t,’ Orson said in a steely voice. ‘She’ll just cry. That’s all she does. He goes like this sometimes. Almost never. But sometimes.’ He swallowed hard, got hold of one of Hal’s shaking, man-sized hands and pressed it tightly between his own. For long, shuddering minutes, he held tight to his brother’s hand until Hal’s tremors subsided. When he finally let go, he went on trembling for a moment himself, as if caught by the tail end of Hal’s storm.

‘Would he like a glass of water?’ whispered Philip.

‘We have to make Hal happy,’ Orson said, and his voice went queer again, as if he were speaking from inside a dream. ‘We really do.’

Philip pushed his fists deep into his pockets. A sadness like he’d never known was inching up inside him, little by little, like water in one of Houdini’s tanks. He felt for Hal. It was terrible to be somebody who only made your mother cry. He thought he understood, and that paralysed him even more.

‘You have to help, Beaumont.’

He wanted to help. ‘Let’s push his chair to the window. Let’s get him some air.’

But Orson didn’t release the handbrake. ‘He doesn’t want air. Hal is a Second Lieutenant. He saved an entire rifle section of men in France. He doesn’t just want air.’

‘What does he want?’

‘Want?’ Orson turned the word over in his mouth. ‘Why, Hal wants a Jew, of course.’

The sadness was filling him up. ‘Don’t be daft.’

But the spell of Orson’s voice wouldn’t stop: ‘That’s what he wants … We have to get Hal a Jew.’

‘A Jew for what? I don’t know what you mean and, besides, I have to go home now.’

Orson was wiping Hal’s face with his hankie. ‘If it weren’t for the Jews, there wouldn’t be a war, and if there weren’t a war, Hal wouldn’t be … this way.’ He turned slowly back to Philip. He was crying now, from inside his dream. Snotty tears were streaming down his face. ‘Tell Hal you’ll help.’

‘Get one how?’

‘You have to tell him.’ Orson wiped away his tears and turned to his brother.

‘But I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Will you help or won’t you?’

The helmet sat jauntily on Hal’s crooked head. The secret belt and the stocking lay at Philip’s feet. He looked at the ceiling, then at the door, then at Orson. His heart was balled up like an old sock in his throat.

He looked into Hal’s fixed blue eye and nodded.

30

Across Brighton, the raids had quietened and, by late August, life seemed almost languid again. Men played patient rounds of cricket on The Level, couples lounged on the Pavilion lawns, and a weekend parade of elephants marched up Grand Parade led by waving, sequinned girls.

Philip was eating a plum at the table on the terrace. His father was at a meeting at the Camp. His mother sat beside him, with her cup and saucer, her book, and his name tag to stitch to his new school blazer. Plum juice dribbled pleasurably down his chin. The sky over the Park was a ribbon of blue and, at first, it was only as if pins had pricked the fabric of the day. Tiny marks. He shielded his eyes to stare. Then a column of planes burst out of the sky.

He stumbled to his feet, knocking his mother’s cup to the terrace where it smashed, but his mother was stuck to her chair, her astonished face turned to the sky. Plane after plane after plane. A swarm of fighters and bombers. The roar of their blaze filled the world.

Why wasn’t she moving? They needed to run down the terrace stairs, through the scullery door and out the other side to the coal cupboard beneath the street. But his mother only stared as the enemy planes sawed the air overhead, splitting the sky so fiercely in their flight it was as if Heaven and all of its dead would come falling through.

She pulled him close to her. Her cheek was wet against his. ‘Poor London,’ she murmured, and he looked up too, marvelling, trembling and willing all at once.
Yes, keep going, keep going, get London, not us.

Day after day, twilight came, the gulls went mad and, within minutes, the planes appeared, roaring over the cliffs of Sussex like grievous angels.

Life was a long, clenched vigil; a shuddering climax endlessly delayed. In
The Times
, Anthony Eden warned that the threat of an invasion by sea was ‘acute’. In Germany, Radio Bremen reported that ‘Hitler may at any hour give orders for the invasion to begin.’ On the six o’clock news, Churchill himself reported that invasion plans were moving steadily forward. There were rumours of an invasion attempt withstood at sea, though Geoffrey’s own sources couldn’t agree the location or the number of ships involved. The following week, it seemed they were spared again; the invaders, they were told, had turned back for the coast of France after encountering high winds in the Channel.

The beaches were only as ready as they would ever be. Army wagons rumbled up and down the Lewes Road, day and night. Geoffrey had his military travel pass and papers on him at all times, for any day now, at any moment, he might be required to leave. A packed suitcase waited under his desk at the Camp; another sat behind the door of his office at the Bank; a third in the under-stairs cupboard at the house. He and his small team at the Bank had rehearsed their departure each Tuesday for months, and he had long ago resigned himself to that dreadful day – to the slow tolling of the church bells and the agony of departure, to the panic on the streets as he made his way to the station. But now, little by little, in one form or another,
Evelyn was leaving
him
. He had prepared for every eventuality but that.

What was worse, he had no idea what to do or how to bring her back. And so, in spite of every plan, he could no more contemplate leaving her than he could erase his memory of the first time he saw her, under that paper lantern, her eyes brighter than he’d known eyes could be.

Of course she was no longer that girl. He was no longer that unhappy young man who’d felt redeemed by her arrival that summer’s night. A single moment couldn’t ultimately matter. What was it compared to the span of a marriage and its undoing? Yet there in the dark of his office, on the grim edge of a camp dedicated to the manufacture of gun emplacements, with the sickening drone of the first planes of the night already in his ears, that thin, fleeting, first moment overwhelmed him again. He’d risked too much to be with Leah, more than he’d dared imagine. But in the moment he’d given her up, the knowledge of what he stood to lose had suddenly loomed. If he lost Evelyn, he’d lose his world.

AUTUMN

31

In those weeks, bombs dropped like the leaves of autumn. Edward Street was hit. The Lewes Road. The streets of Whitehawk.

Yet, after the nightly pounding of London, these attacks were afterthoughts only. Leftover bombs were surplus weight to be tipped by enemy pilots before the long journey home.

For those on the ground, week after week, sleep was fitful and the days were drowsy. Then, on a golden afternoon in mid-September, the Odeon Cinema took a hit in the broad light of day. The town staggered.

From every side of Brighton – north, south, east, west – people gathered on The Level to hear the reports. Tins rattled for donations. The muffin men called. A man with a sunburned face declaimed from the Book of Revelation. Gypsies read palms by the public loos. It was a morbid, confused carnival, and the tattered news of the day blew in like litter across the green.

A matinee. Dozens dead. Fifty dead. Hundreds dead. Many more injured. Children. Their parents. Gone. All before Saturday teatime.