Unexploded (33 page)

Now, in her kitchen, the chicken stew was gently bubbling.

She had rinsed her hands and was scrubbing her nails at the sink when the telephone went, startling her from thought.

‘Yes, Mrs Chavasse … Yes, I remember. The Book Tea … Well, please don’t give it another thought. There’s no need to –’ She gripped the cord. ‘No, I simply assumed … Because just last week her lecture at the –’ She reached for the banister. ‘No, I hadn’t heard …’ She sank to the staircase. ‘Mrs Chavasse? Mrs Chavasse, I’m afraid I must ring off because my son is coming through the door from school. Thank you for … Yes, sad, very sad indeed. Thank you for ringing.’

The receiver dangled in her hand like something dead; like the chicken with its broken neck, which she’d carried home only an hour before from Mr Hatchett’s when the world had still been itself. She sat hunched on the second step. She needed to be small. She needed to be still. She was vaguely aware of a nail on the step beneath her, its sharp tip pushing its way up through the stair carpet into her thigh, but she felt no pain, no sting, nothing but the tolling of her heart.

When Otto heard someone at the back door, he opened it, expecting the boy to enter, the childish chatter always immediate and reassuring

‘Mrs Beaumont, to what do I owe –?’

Her eyes were swollen; her face was red and raw. She was clutching the jacket he’d abandoned on The Level that day a fortnight before and she also clutched the book she had promised him,
Mrs Woolf ’s latest novel,
The Years
. He stood to one side and motioned her through. ‘Please. Yes. Please come in. My jacket, thank you. How kind of you to bother. May I get you something? A cup of tea or’ – he smiled falteringly – ‘a cup of tea?’

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Just listen to this.’ Her eyes were alight. She still wore her apron. Blood stained its front. She opened the book and started to read. ‘It’s Rose and Sara speaking. Rose speaks first.
“
‘
What did you do today?’ she said at length, looking up abruptly.

‘ “ ‘Went out with Rose,’ said Sara.

‘ “ ‘And what did you do with Rose?’ said Maggie. She spoke
absent-mindedly. Sara turned and glanced at her. Then she began to play again.”
She’s playing piano,’ said Evelyn fiercely, looking up at him. The book trembled in her hand.

He took a seat on a kitchen chair and stared at the linoleum, grave and intent.

She continued:
‘ “ ‘Stood on the bridge and looked into the water,’ she hummed, in time to the music.”
That’s Sara.
“ ‘Running water; flowing water. May my bones turn to coral; and fish light their lanthorns; fish light their green lanthorns in my eyes.’ ”
What,’ she demanded of Otto, shaking the book, ‘what is that supposed to mean?’ Tears slid down her face. ‘And this. Just listen to this.’ She screwed up her eyes and flipped pages. ‘It’s Sara again:
“ ‘So I put on my hat and coat and rushed out in a rage,’ she continued, ‘and stood on the bridge, and said, “Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without meaning?” ’ ” ’

She was sobbing. ‘Mrs Woolf … I can’t believe it.’

‘I am so very sorry,’ he said, for he understood. He understood entirely.

She raised the skirt of her apron and pressed it hard to her face. ‘Apparently, children spotted her. In the Ouse. Near the bank, I think.
Can you believe it? They thought she was …’ She released the apron. Her eyes flashed. ‘They thought she was
a log
.’

She looked away, to the ceiling, to the floor, to the mattress on the floor. She kicked at it in frustration. ‘What on earth is that doing here? I said that you could sleep in the study. Not in the kitchen. Not on their mattress. Have you
no
regard for other people’s things?’

‘Forgive me,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll return it as soon as you go.’

She covered her eyes with her hand, then balled her hand into a fist and hit her head as if to force herself to return to the self who had been calmly jointing a chicken just an hour before. ‘No … No. Forgive me.’ She shoved her hair back and turned her face up, inhaling hard. ‘I don’t mean that at all. You’re trying to live out of just the one room. I know that. It’s thoughtful of you.’

He stood and gently removed the book from her hand, and then tenderly, slowly, drew her to him. ‘You’ve had a bad shock.’ Her arms were goose-pimpled. She was trembling. His arm hovered in the air near her back. Could he? In that moment it seemed the only thing that was right and good. He rubbed her back, up and down, up and down. Her shoulders convulsed. ‘Shhh …’ he said. ‘Shhh now.’

She fell stiffly against him. Her breathing slowed and deepened.

‘It’s a sad, sad thing,’ he murmured. ‘It’s only natural you’re upset.’ Up and down, up and down, his palm against her back. She let her cheek rest against his chest. ‘Shhh now,’ he said.

Neither of them saw Philip appear at the threshold and freeze, like a boy caught in a spell.

Nor did either see him disappear again and race back along the perimeter path, across the terrace, up the staircase to his bedroom, where he opened his sketchbook and started tearing it apart.

She raised her head and wiped her eyes with her fists. ‘I am so sorry.’ She pulled a hair from her mouth. ‘You must think me mad.’

‘On the contrary. I thought you a little mad before. Today I think you’re really quite sane.’

She smoothed down her apron, then her hair. She was returning to herself. Soon she would leave. This wouldn’t happen again – he knew that. He braced himself for the emptiness of the room after her.

‘I’m very grateful,’ she said.

Her composure had returned.

‘Whatever for?’

She mustered a smile. ‘May I ask a favour?’

‘There’s no need,’ and he smiled. ‘I will say nothing to anyone. Please don’t worry about such things.’

She shook her head, impatient – with herself. ‘It isn’t so much a favour as a question.’

It had only entered her head as she’d stood, trembling, next to him. Could she say it aloud? Her thoughts were small fires springing up. She’d dampen one down only for another to rise up.
Life, it hardly lasts.
We
hardly last. Fear nibbles away at it, at what there is of it, like fish at the drowned, like worms at the beloved dead. Death doesn’t ravage life. It’s fear, fear.
And she longed to slide free of its vicious grip.

He could still, almost, feel the warmth of her face against his chest; the dip of her back under his palm. He picked up
The Years
and, once more, saw her hands clasping it in her passion.

‘Is it too late,’ she began, in the overly modulated voice that came out of her when she was anxious, ‘is it too late to ask if you are still in need of a female model?’

He looked up.

‘I can sit tolerably well. Deportment classes … once upon a time.’ She wiped her face again, reached for the book, placed it on her head and started to walk. Then she walked back towards him, book still on head, and smiled without hope.

4 2

May came helplessly round once more. The horse chestnuts sprang green and full-breasted, the Park was alive with birdsong, and Mrs Dalrymple, true to her word, died of her own accord. On a bright Saturday afternoon, a pair of haughty black horses with plumes on their heads arrived on the Crescent, pulling a glass carriage followed by four men whom no one knew. Her grown-up sons from London, somebody said. Each wore a sleek top hat and a hard face.

Geoffrey had already left for a meeting at the local Army base but Philip and Evelyn came out of the house to bow their heads as the gleaming coffin glided by. Not one of Mrs Dalrymple’s sons had knocked on their door to ask about her final days. Not one had invited them to any wake, funeral or funeral tea. They only bore her away.

‘Men are execrable buggers,’ Philip whispered as they passed, and his mother squeezed his hand. He turned his face up to her.
Don’t be stolen away from us
, he wanted to say.
Don’t go again to Number
5,
to that man
.

Instead he feigned childishness for her. ‘Will Mrs Dalrymple meet Clarence in Heaven?’

In those final days, the ordinary world imploded slowly.

At Army HQ, Geoffrey shook Lieutenant Lowell’s left hand.

‘Plans for the weekend?’ asked Lowell.

‘Only the usual,’ he smiled. He might bowl a few balls with his son. Nine now and growing fast …

He couldn’t stop turning it over in his mind. Neither a suicide attempt nor a botched operation nor his own subterfuge had resolved the problem of Otto Gottlieb. Now it so happened that the man was frequenting a soup kitchen across from their house. Was there no removing him from their lives?

In one way, he reasoned, it was merely as Evelyn had said: he would be doing the man a favour. Gottlieb was to report for work the following morning at seven. Full instructions were in the Unit’s letter, which Geoffrey slipped now into his breast pocket for safe keeping. There were always ambiguities, he thought. Grey areas.

He wanted only for them to be a couple again, for life to return to itself – he wanted it desperately – and now, miraculously, it seemed she wanted that too. Her forgiveness was more than he deserved – sometimes that knowledge hit him like an SC-50 – and as he walked into what passed in Brighton for an Officers’ Mess, with that bomb still falling and the letter strange in his pocket, he felt the urgent need of the single malt the Lieutenant was already ordering at the bar.

‘Slàinte!’ said the Lieutenant. The bottle landed between them on the table.

Geoffrey knocked back the shot and forgot the letter, or, rather, he knocked back the shot so he would forget the letter. No one required Gottlieb to take the job.

‘I don’t imagine you’ve heard about Hess?’ said the Lieutenant, repinning his empty sleeve. Lowell’s diction was strangely top-drawer in that makeshift Mess. He was one of those Edinburgh chaps
who’d had every trace of Scottishness knocked out of him at Scotland’s best public school.

‘The Deputy Führer?’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ve heard
of
Hess. I haven’t heard about him.’

Lowell smoothed the tips of his moustache. ‘Landed in a twin-engine fighter plane in Scotland on the 10th. Somewhere south of Glasgow. Was flying solo – in every sense of the word apparently. German High Command is furious.’

‘Did we pick him up or did he turn himself in?’ The whisky burned pleasurably in his throat. He forgot Gottlieb. He forgot that he rarely drank.

‘A ploughman arrested him in his field with the help of ’ – Lowell guffawed – ‘a pitchfork. It’s classified still of course. The papers don’t have it yet. Won’t for a few more days, I shouldn’t think. He’s insisting he speaks to Churchill.’ He nodded encouragingly towards the bottle.

‘Brave man,’ Geoffrey said.

Lowell let out a short laugh. ‘Or just plain barking.’

An Army driver delivered him to his front door. In the sitting room, he collapsed into his chair. Where were the old wingbacks? Who’d taken them? He wanted their cover, like a spooked horse wanted its blinkers. He was woozy, unwell. But why spooked? Why jangled? He couldn’t recall. Evelyn appeared happy again. Sometimes they held each other in the night. That was something surely. And they hadn’t been bombed out of their home. The enemy hadn’t landed. His funk was only the by-product of half a bottle of whisky on a Saturday afternoon. In spite of his size, he couldn’t handle it. He had never been a merry drunk.

Philip appeared in the doorway and stared at the spectacle of his father slouched in his chair. Cricket was off.

Evelyn arrived with a ham-and-cress sandwich on a plate and a cup of tea. ‘Your father is tired,’ she said.

Eyes closed, Geoffrey reached into his breast pocket and produced the letter. ‘I’ll walk this up to …’ he said sleepily. ‘It only needs an envelope.’ Where was it to go? His thoughts slipped from his mind like loose change from his pockets.

‘A job?’ she said, her voice low. ‘You’ve found one?’

And it came to him, fleetingly. ‘A
paying
job,’ he slurred. ‘Army shift work.’

She walked to Geoffrey’s study, past their son who hovered, and checked the desk for Bank stationery. None. She returned to the sitting room, opened the drawer in the side table, and removed the box of notepaper that Philip had given her at Christmas. She glanced back at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off his father.

‘He only needs a bit of rest, darling.’

She read the letter of instruction quickly, hesitated, shook the words from her mind, and folded it into a neat oblong. On the envelope, she wrote Otto’s name. It was an odd little pleasure.

‘I’ll drop this across to the Salvation Army and ask them to pass it to him when he comes in for his meal – this evening with any luck.’

‘Good thinking.’ He sighed.

‘Saves you going up to St Wilf ’s.’ She bent and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you.’

He grimaced drunkenly. ‘Let’s say no more of it.’

‘You haven’t touched your sandwich.’

‘Did I tell you the latest?’

She smiled and perched on the arm of his chair.

‘Rudolf Hess has landed in Scotland. Can you believe it? Last Saturday.
The Führer and Mrs Deputy Führer have gone their separate ways, it would seem.’ Opening one eye, he winked at her. ‘Now he wants to bend Churchill’s ear.’

She stroked his cheek and traced his lips with her fingertips. There was no other woman. Not any longer. She knew it finally. They could repair their lives. For Philip, for the family they were, they would.

‘Philip, darling? Philip …’ She pivoted on the chair arm. ‘Why don’t you play in the Park until –’

But already he was gone.

43

Hanover Crescent was, as always, as silent as it was grand. Philip stood on the wide curving drive and, hand to mouth, called high. ‘Orson, I know you’re there!’

The sash on the overhead window fell with a clunk.

‘I have something to tell you!’

The pane was dark against the light of day but he knew Orson was up there.

‘News from Army HQ … My father was there this afternoon.’

The sash lifted by inches – ‘Bugger off, Beaumont’ – and the curtains fell.