Unexploded (36 page)

When Otto and Nick weren’t heaving sandbags between controlled explosions, they were required only to observe. There would be more legwork, they were told, later, when the field needed tidying. Nick spat over the wall and laughed. ‘Legwork!’ He lifted up his trouser legs and knocked on his braces. ‘Ever get the feeling they’ll take any fucker?’

‘Polio?’

‘Yip.’

‘You, a cripple, and me, the enemy,’ Otto declared. ‘What a team we’ll make.’ He pulled the sweets from his pocket. ‘I lied to the Lieutenant. I’m only here until I have enough for a deposit for a room. A week or two at most.’

Nick tssk-tssked. He plucked a handful from the cornet. Otto did the same. They were sucking noisily when Otto jumped from the wall to his feet. A sparrowhawk – half bird, half memory – was lifting off from the field. It glided over the cliff edge, its wings tilting like a spinnaker to the wind. ‘There!’ said Otto. ‘Do you see it?’ But Nick couldn’t pick it out against the sky.

The Butterfly Bomb, or bomblet, was a two-kilogram anti-personnel weapon. Its thin cylindrical outer shell hinged open when dropped, giving it the appearance of a metal butterfly as it fell to earth. It was new – only Lieutenant Lowell had seen the diagrams – but the day was an unqualified success. Easy work, comparatively. Dull, largely. At seven, as the others packed up the lorry, Nick and Otto walked the field, scanning it for the unexploded butterflies. ‘The duds have no wings left,’ Lowell had said. ‘They look like ordinary tins.’

Each carried a sling for their collection. By dusk, Nick was
limping, but they’d covered most of the field. They made plans for the pub. They met mid-field and popped a few more sweets in their mouths. Yes, Otto said, there was a woman. Or at least, there was now. He grinned at the ground. He needed to find his feet again. This was the start, he said. Her and his painting.

The paint was still drying, he told himself, the colours were emerging;
she
was emerging.

They surveyed the next field for strays, taking a half each. Only a few glinted in the evening light. ‘Over there!’ Nick called. He pointed to a green edge where field became cliff. Otto jogged easily towards it. The day dropped its cargo of light and the world expanded to the horizon. He felt again the softness of her lips; the press of her palm against his, their fingers laced; the ends of her hair brushing his face; her legs cleaving to him. And that morning, still, he’d felt the fluid lines of her move through him, through his arm, as he finished the triptych in the chapel.

The sparrowhawk swooped again. Was it trying to determine if the shiny butterflies were edible? He felt almost as streamlined as it as he ran, in spite of the sling that bounced at his hip and bit into the tender flesh of his back.

He looked out over the edge. Wasn’t that beach the very one where the guards had taken him and the other men to bathe that day last June? The beach where he’d tried to swim out, away from life, and had failed. Or did he only imagine it was?

The horizon dissolved and the world fused in the furnace of the evening. Everything was fleetingly, unremarkably, translucently whole – sea, sky, the bird, the boat rotting on the beach below, the men’s voices from the field, the sweet in his mouth. His mind flared. Reality rippled. He felt its flux at his fingertips as he dropped the dud into the sling. He could already see the thickness of paint, its slather
and the promise of this, all this, on canvas. He’d got it, it was there, held in his mind’s eye when the sea light exploded, the sparrowhawk shrieked and his mother’s head turned next to his in the darkness …

He could smell the scent of her hair on the pillow, and Evelyn was reading
. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky.
Then Klara laughed, the women argued over their Passover dishes, the hammer whirred towards Jakob’s head, his Ballhaus dancers burned, the water spilled over her breast and shoes – she swore
some light shallop had foundered
– the boots stamped on his back, the sonata rose high, and her hands found him –

It was more than an hour before Nick found the path down the crumbling cliff side. He scrambled, falling most of the way on legs locked in their braces.

It was impossible, the Army said, to recover the body before morning.

Night fell. The sea pounded the beach. The wind picked up.

Otto was dead before he hit the beach; dead before the rockfall buried him. Nick told himself that.

He sat by the mound until first light, flouting orders to return to the transport. He couldn’t feel his legs. He had no coat. He didn’t know Otto’s last name but he knew, though nothing had been said, that he had already been alone too much in life. He wouldn’t leave him now.

The dew turned to frost, then to dew again.

47

Otto wouldn’t have been mad enough, Nick would later tell the Coroner, to pick up the bomb if it had still had its wings – no matter what he had or hadn’t attempted in the past. He’d had plans to get lodgings, to paint pictures. There was a woman. He was happy. Christ, he’d had sweets in his pocket.

Of course
Otto hadn’t shaken the thing, deliberately or otherwise. Of course he wasn’t some German saboteur. He’d just dropped the dud in his sling, same as before, when it went off.

After the verdict that day, Nick went for their drink on his own; a lonely, bitter memorial. When had life grown so cheap? Otto hadn’t even been allowed his ten miserable weeks.

‘Death by misadventure’. The phrase meant nothing. It changed nothing. Weeks later, the official advice on unexploded butterfly bombs would be deemed ‘flawed’.

Upstairs, in the heavy hush of their room, Geoffrey left the cup of sugary tea on her nightstand and turned back the bedspread. He removed, very gently, her shoes and stockings. He said she must lie down. But she only sat, rigid on the edge of the bed, watching the steam rise from the tea.

He, too, was in a kind of shock. He didn’t know what he felt, not for Otto, not for himself. He could think only of her. And Philip.
He’d deliberately timed the news so that Philip wouldn’t yet be home from school.

Rain drummed the roof …

He was closing the shutters when he heard her storm down the stairs.

She hardly felt the ground at her feet as she ran. The rain was cold. Otto, she told herself, would turn the key and open the kitchen door as always. He would press her close and weep with her. Something, she would tell him,
something
had gone very, very wrong. How had
this
happened to them? Life didn’t sacrifice its lovers. That was the stuff of novels.
What am I to do with you gone from me?

On the perimeter path in the downpour, she stopped short. It occurred to her only now. Geoffrey had removed her shoes. Her foot was bleeding. There must have been something sharp on the path.

‘Come inside, Evvie. Come and get warm.’

He had followed her into the Park.

She was drenched and didn’t care. She cared still less about the cut on her foot. The rain would wash it clean. Or not. What did it matter? She turned and took him in, standing tall in the pouring rain, incongruous in his jacket and tie.

‘He would have been better for you than me. I know that. He would have made you laugh as you need to laugh.’ She was pale, almost translucent, with grief, with the shock of the news. He coaxed her up the stone steps but, halfway across the terrace, she stopped to stare at the lilac bush and the handle of the spade stuck in the ground beneath.

‘Evvie, please, let’s talk about things inside.’

‘You knew,’ she said, without turning.

‘You knew about that job.’

‘He needed the work.’ The rain trickled past his collar.

‘That’s why you got drunk with Lowell. Because you knew. You knew how dangerous it was.’

He laid his jacket over her shoulders and seated himself at the table, surrendering to the weather.

But still she didn’t turn. Still she didn’t look away from the spot where the tin lay buried. ‘And I gave him the letter. I’m the one who arranged it all.’

‘You weren’t to know. You asked me to find him what I could. And I did.’

‘Do you ever think what it would be like to leave all this, Geoffrey?’ She motioned vaguely to the Park, to the sky, to the Crescent’s solid turrets. She looked back over her shoulder. Rain streamed down her face. ‘We seem to make death, you and I …’

‘That’s a nasty cut on your foot. Come inside.’

‘You’re relieved, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Why not? You found us together. I loved him.’

‘Because you love me. You love me
as well
.’ His eyes filled.

Her voice was small. ‘Death breeds death, doesn’t it?’ She thought of the pills, just a few feet away. ‘First Mr Pirazzini. Now Otto. And still, those pills, just there …’

He bowed his head low. ‘How long have you known?’

‘From the first …’

The rain drove at his back. ‘I’ll dig the things up. I’ll get rid of them.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, leave them now …’

Something in the tone of her voice unnerved him, and he rose from the chair, reaching for her hand. ‘It’s upset you. I can see it’s upset you.’

In the soak of her clothes, she was tiny, frail. Her teeth chattered. Her foot bled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s the sensible thing, isn’t it?’

Later, after school, Philip would find them together in the kitchen:

His mother, small and wet, curled like a question mark on the lino.

His father, on his knees, wet too and huddled over her, as if the roof of their house were falling in.

48

In June, the German Army turned east. Hitler had decided to invade Russia rather than England. After a year of extraordinary tension, Brighton exhaled.

When she arrived, St Wilf ’s was still closed for renovations, but a workman smiled kindly and produced a key. It had taken her more than a month to feel capable of this and now, unexpectedly, as he unlocked the side door, she found herself stepping directly into the Lady Chapel.

The stained glass glowed with the morning but the air was cold and stale, the air of a crypt.

Her footsteps rang out in the hush. The gleam of the pews was dulled by dust and fallen dust sheets. The jumper he’d been wearing that night in the kitchen, the one he’d suddenly peeled off, lay now on the flagstones between two pews. His sketchbook sat propped on the font, open to his final study where water from the kitchen tap streamed like grief over her face.

She took a seat in a pew, bent for his jumper, and pressed it to her face. But nothing. No trace. Was that what she’d feared all this time? The final proof of his absence.

Today, she told herself. She would tell Geoffrey today, for how could they go on? The memories – the knowledge – would never leave them, and they could pretend no more.

She turned her face at last to the fresco and felt her own sharp intake of breath. Its scale was vast; her naked back, monumental; her skirt, a dull navy. The crude tin bucket at her feet shone in the light.

He had seen her.
That day at the standpipe that terrible day.

She had bent at the waist, just as she bent now – high on the wall overhead. She’d cupped her hands to splash her face and, now, in his painting, the action of her left forearm covered her pendant breast. The point of view was his – or King David’s rather – from his position on the slope above. At the standpipe, the water gushed out over her shoes and pooled brightly at her feet. Even that was as it had been that day, for she’d forgotten to kick off her shoes.

Yet he had said nothing.
Why?

She’d never know.

Each of their three faces was obscured – her profile by the gush of water, Geoffrey’s by a pair of binoculars, and Otto’s because he stood with his back to the onlooker.
Turn around
, she wanted to say to him.
Turn for me
. He was David, King of the Jews, in a thin MoD blanket. His hair was shorn. His shoulders were bare and wasted. The turf beneath his feet was burned yellow. Overhead, as he watched her, a male sparrowhawk rode a thermal.

In the chapel, the morning’s light streamed, and it occurred to her that it was as he’d said: his colours were drawn into life
by the carbon of her breath, by the light of her eye, by the speed of her heart.

She wanted to say to him,
Otto, my heart is dead.

On the grandstand roof, above a group of prisoners in grey, Geoffrey as Uriah watched two fighter planes through binoculars. The sky above him was ripped by razor wire and contrails. In his breast pocket, poking out over the top, her lilac envelope waited with the letter of instruction. She could see Otto still, turning it in his hands after she’d delivered it that afternoon. He’d smiled to himself,
amused no doubt by the thought of her coloured stationery finding its way into his composition.

All the way across the triptych, the edge of cliff-line made a thin, undulating ribbon of brilliant white, and, suddenly dizzy, as if with those heights, she had to lean forward to rest her head in her hands against the next pew. The cold of the flags rose through the soles of her shoes. She was hungry, and yet,
again
, the wave rolled through her, nausea, grief, anger; anger that he’d left her to
this
, to the loneliness of a stone chapel, to the cruelty of him gone. She hadn’t ventured near Number 5. She’d paid a woman to clean his room and take away the wreckage of that night.

She was still light-headed as she rose and walked, eyes straining … but yes, there it was, his name on the envelope, just as she’d written it, only painted here in his own hand.
Gottlieb
. It was all that appeared of his name over the edge of Uriah’s suit pocket – his only signature on the fresco.

The air in the chapel seemed to surge and crest like a wave in the light that radiated from the three walls, and for a fleeting moment, she felt the massive life of the painting gather her up, as if it had extended itself into three dimensions to absorb her, there in the pew with his jumper in her lap; as if there were no boundaries between her body and his vision; between the present moment and their past.