Unexploded (26 page)

The projectionist had been blinded by flying glass.

It had taken an eternity for anyone to find the lights.

The screams, they said, were heard as far as the seafront.

St George’s Road, Lavender Street, Essex Street, all along to Bedford Street – wrecked.

Philip and Orson were meandering through the crowd, marvelling at calamity, when Philip’s heart jumped.

‘Frank!’ He couldn’t help himself. ‘Frank! Frank, it’s me, Philip!’ He sprinted away, running after a tall, lanky figure in the crowd. Orson squinted after.

At the boating pond, Frank Dunn stopped at last, but his eyes couldn’t seem to focus.

‘Frank, it’s me, Philip.’

‘Phil?’ he said, blinking.

Should he say …? ‘You have blood on your jacket, Frank.’

‘Tubby’s mate?’

He nodded, braced for Frank’s anger because he’d left Tubby without a good friend in the world. But Frank didn’t look angry. He looked busy. He kept reaching for something in his pocket over and over again.

‘Are you bleeding, Frank?’ he tried again. ‘I thought you might be bleeding.’

Orson came up from behind, grinding a blackjack between his jaws. ‘Orson Stewart-Forbes,’ he said, offering the cornet of sweets.

Frank stared over their heads, searching the crowd.

‘This is Frank,’ Philip said to Orson. ‘Frank Dunn. Tubby’s – Norman’s – brother.’

‘Ah,’ said Orson. ‘Yes, I remember …’ He looked at the state of Frank’s shirt. ‘A jolly good thing your mother is a laundress.’

Frank had dark rings under his eyes and his skin was grey like ash. ‘We ran out of room, Phil.’

‘Ran out of room where, Frank? Have a sweet. The pear drops are nice.’

‘Sister said we had to take ’em out by trolley, tip ’em on to a stretcher in the mort, then plant ’em in the barrow out back in the yard. But the barrow was filling up and the ambulance wasn’t coming, and that first one, bloody hell, she was heavier than she looked. ’Cos I’ve only ever carried the sick, haven’t I? Not the stone dead.’ He started turning his pockets out.

‘I had the legs end and me mate, ’e had her head, but the blanket kept slipping. “Don’t look down,”’e said, like you tell someone when they’re standing on a ledge. ’Cos her legs, she had no stockings on, and they were pale. All pasty coloured. I never seen a colour like that.’

‘Frank works as a porter at the Royal Sussex,’ Philip added for Orson’s benefit.

‘The back part of her left leg was shattered at the knee. It was –’

‘Horrid,’ said Orson.

‘Meat,’ said Frank. ‘Just meat. Then we nipped back inside, stuffed some corpses closer together on the floor and cleared up to make room for the others that were coming in. But nobody comes for a while, not after the first rush, and a sort of disappointment hits us. We’re pacing up and down in the yard, getting hot and bothered, and the more bothered I get, the more I think about Lorraine, my girl, and wonder where she is, ’cos her ol’ gran lives that way, on Lavender Street, doesn’t she, and I’m wondering if she, Lorraine I mean, is okay. Except the truth is, I’m not worrying ’bout her, Phil, not like I should be, I’m imagining her looking like those people, like Lorraine, but like Lorraine as meat, and Phil – Phil? – be a good lad and go pinch us a gasper.’

Philip and Orson stared. Frank’s hands were trembling like someone had them on strings.

Orson made a sharp movement with his head, which meant,
Leave him now
.

‘I have to go, Frank. But would you say hello to Tubby for me?’

‘Tubby’s in hospital.’

The bottom fell out of Philip’s stomach. ‘Right now?’

Frank nodded and looked away, and it all came rushing in. Tubby had no one. Tubby had had to go to a matinee on a Saturday instead of stopping out to play. If it hadn’t been for the Pier that evening, thought Philip, and the lock-up and his father forbidding him from seeing Tubby, and him agreeing because he didn’t want his father to tell his mother, Tubby would never have been at the Odeon, watching that film. They would have been out together, like every Saturday before.

‘He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?’ He waited for the answer like a fist to his face.

The muffin men were shouting. Up ahead, a woman was sobbing. Philip opened his eyes at last and saw Frank’s eyes trained on an old gent who was lighting up a few feet away. Frank spoke too slowly. ‘Should think so, Phil. After he’s scrubbed down … Caught it in the shelter, the quack says. Scabies.’

Orson leaned in close, so close Philip could feel his breath against his ear. ‘See?’ he said. ‘What did I tell you? Dirty,
dirty
.’ In his eyes, the blue gaslight flared.

32

The nights were drawing in. It had taken an age to come. October the 16th. Now, at last, over three hundred men gathered in the stands. Most of them hadn’t seen moonlight in months, except through painted windows, but that evening, the full moon over the Camp seemed bigger than the blackout. He’d timed it right.

I’ll give you the grandstand,
he’d said to her once, and tonight he needed his plan to work, more than he’d ever needed a plan to work before. He escorted her from his office at the last possible moment. ‘Is it bad news?’ she asked him. ‘Has something terrible happened?’ She hated the place. She’d refused at first to go. ‘Why? What is it? What aren’t you telling me? Has another man died up there, Geoffrey?’

Earlier that day, he’d thought they’d never get the Steinway up the hill but somehow it had been accomplished. A few of the men had knocked together a rough stage. A piano-tuner had appeared. New turf was laid over the finishing straight in front of the grandstand. There was no rain in the forecast. Even in mid-October, summer hadn’t released them from its hot grip.

They took their seats. A gull let out a long, plaintive cry overhead.

When the first notes from the piano spilled into the atmosphere, her eyes still hadn’t adjusted, and she couldn’t see the source. She
turned to him, helpless, bereft, at the adagio’s slow lament, as if he, Geoffrey, were taunting her in some way; as if it could only be a trick, a phonograph, a bone to a dog.

Then the marbled clouds drew back to reveal the moon, and the piano itself seemed to rise, like a black, white-capped wave. A refugee called Eli played tenderly, in spite of a hand damaged by frostbite. In the wide night, there was only the full moon, the grave piano and, minutes later, the reprieve of the violins. Two prisoners from Italy bowed the darkness.

In the stands behind them, the prisoners went still.

Evelyn gasped, craning forward. Nor did she flinch as he reached for her hand, and he felt he might have wept.

All the while, far below, the sea hypnotized the stony shore and, in the rear of the benches, Otto Gottlieb – returned from hospital and from death a second time – let his eyes linger on the sight of her.

Her arms were bare and, leaning forward as she listened, she stroked her forearms and idly touched her own cheeks and lips in the way women often do at the theatre, lost to the world around them even as they draw the attention of it. Her hair was pinned up. The nape of her neck was white and fine in the moonlight. He heard again her reading to him through that screen, the beautiful resonance of her voice … How rare, though, were glimpses of her face.

He’d seen her properly on her first visit in July, as she’d stood at the end of Mr Pirazzini’s bed, though the sight of her there, that day, had irritated him, and he had deliberately looked away. Later during her visit, she’d pivoted on her chair, apparently affronted by his smile, and the indignation of her face had been, he’d convinced himself at the time, unattractive.

At the standpipe, on the day of Mr Pirazzini’s death, he’d been
granted her profile only, a glimpse stolen. Literally, stolen … Otherwise that day, he could only curse the screen that concealed her.

Turn, turn
, he willed her now. But she didn’t turn, nor did she at any point that evening. Of course she didn’t.

He saw the Superintendent reach for her hand, and closed his eyes, breathing as if music were air.

To every man and woman listening that night, nothing had ever sounded sweeter or more stark. It hollowed them out. It recast them. As the nightly procession of planes stormed in off the Channel, Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ climbed high into the atmosphere over Race Hill.

Only much later, as the men filed back to their barracks, did Geoffrey lead her up, up, up through the stands to a narrow side staircase and from there, through a hatch on to the grandstand’s roof.

Its expanse lay incandescent beneath the moon. A breeze stirred the night. The music still conjured their senses. On top of that grandstand, on top of a sea-lit cliff, it was as if they floated peacefully in a phosphorescent tide, he in his pale linen suit and she in a light summer dress she hadn’t yet packed away for autumn.

Otto turned back, hearing voices as though from another plain, and, peering into the moonlight, saw them.

He stopped. His heart stopped. It broke in his chest like a wave on the stones below.

A few of the other prisoners turned also, wondering what had brought him up short and half expecting to see a stray plane emerging from the night sky. Instead they discovered the Superintendent and his wife hand-in-hand on high, like immortals, beautiful and remote.

33

In November, the bombs got bigger. A crater smoked in the Pavilion Gardens at the heart of town, and hundreds gathered. One hundred and ten pounds of high explosives had detonated, miraculously, below ground, but wet clots of earth and turf landed up to a mile away on windowsills and chimney pots; on the frozen horses of the carousel and on the great bronze wings of the Angel of Peace on the prom. The town grew strange to itself.

At its highest and furthermost edge, Race Hill lay churned to mud. The wind off the sea had teeth. To look at the place – the grim blue windows, the men hunched in their donkey jackets – who would have believed a concert had taken place there in the moonlight just a month before? Yet it had been worth the effort, Geoffrey told himself. The men’s morale, if not high, was not as desperately low. More crucially, Evelyn had not moved out to sleep at Number 5. She was still in their bed. Some nights, she allowed him to press her feet between his, to warm them in the chill of their room.

He dreaded the invasion less for its obvious catastrophe than for the time it could steal from him. If he were required to leave Brighton before he could put things right with her, they would never be put right again. In the meantime, in their day-to-day life, she was suspicious of anything that smacked of grand gestures, anything at all.

At the Camp, though, regulations were loosening up. Every week
there were new memoranda. Routine decisions were increasingly left to the discretion of camp superintendents. It was an unspeakable relief to empty the contraband cupboard and to order, almost on a whim, the conversion of a stable block for R&R for the prisoners three evenings a week. It wasn’t freedom for them but it wasn’t misery either.

He could say nothing to her of these changes, for he had no right to boast or make claims. Things would have to take their own course. But there was one further thing he would risk.

His motor was delivered on time to the Camp from the lock-up where it had been sitting uselessly for months. In the transport shed, he filled a jerrycan with Army petrol and recorded the quantity in the accounts ledger.

He’d never enjoyed the forty-mile journey from Brighton to Chichester, in spite of the beauty of the views: the golden fields near Amberley, the silver sweep of the Arun River, and Arundel Castle, ornate and majestic above it all. His childhood dread had never fully released him.

When he was three years old, his father had, with the heaviest of hearts, committed his mother to the Graylingwell Asylum in Chich-ester, the best institution of its kind in Sussex by all accounts, so that she could be made to live. His father had expected her home in a month, perhaps two. She never returned.

Neither of them had ever been able to understand why she wouldn’t simply put the food in her mouth and chew. She had wanted to come home to them; she swore, always in tears, that she longed to be home. At times over the years, he’d thought the frustration and grief would kill his father, but rather more predictably, she had died first, in the year he went up to Oxford. It was both desperately sad
and a great relief. His mother had died. Among his university friends, at last, nothing more needed to be said. How much easier than in his schooldays, when he had never found an adequate enough lie to explain her vast absence from their home and their lives.

The asylum’s façade had been grand, he remembered: bright red bricks, endless Georgian windows and a benign clock face at the top of a high central tower. But inside, on a seemingly endless corridor, her room had been austere, without even pictures on the walls. Typically she was dressed in the regulation blue cotton dress and a bib stained with soft food she refused to take from her nurse’s spoon.

He was relieved to speed past the old turning into the grounds and to drive instead in the direction of the spire, to the centre of the small cathedral city.

George Bell, Lord Bishop of Chichester, was one of those men – short, slight, smooth-faced – who had the look of a middle-age schoolboy, yet already in this war, he had gained a reputation as a thorn in Churchill’s side. Bell had long been a fierce critic not only of National Socialism in Germany, but also of the German Church’s acceptance of Government doctrines, on ‘Aryan’ superiority, for example. The problem for Churchill, however, was not Bell’s challenges to the German Church, but the eloquence of his articles in
The Times
and his arguments in the House of Lords. The problem was all that humanity.

Bell denounced the ‘indiscriminate’ bombing of Berlin, adopting the German phrase ‘terror-bombing’ to describe the unofficial tactic employed by both sides. ‘Night-bombing of non-combatants is a degradation of the spirit for all who take part in it.’ He challenged official British propaganda and encouraged his churches to do the same. He pleaded the case of the Jews in Europe and that of Jewish refugees. He denounced Britain’s labour camps.