Unexploded (12 page)

He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. On the Pier, the rides stood quiet. Only a few defiant anglers tried their luck from the end of the deck. In the tide, mines bobbed at the surface, horned and deadly. Every fishing boat had vanished, as if by some ill-fated sleight of hand.

He tried to focus on the survey for the Committee, on the report he would need to compose to confirm that all was in place for Churchill’s visit. He’d been avoiding the task all week.

He cupped the flame of his lighter against the breeze and drew hard on his cigarette. Every beach chalet, including his own, had been strategically manoeuvred and filled with stones. Up and down the shingle, anti-landing-craft spikes lay in heaps, ready to be dug in. Vast coils of razor wire blotted the views east and west, while concrete tank-traps stood five feet high, colonizing the shore. Across the King’s Road, the elegant rooftops of the Grand Hotel and the Metropole had been upstaged by the guns on the new naval station.

Without the boats, without the herring dees and the winkle-pickers, the shingle was a bleak vista darkened by the apparatus of war and the rank of oil drums that stretched endlessly towards Hove. Each drum squatted beneath the prom, ready to be rolled down the beach, past the ghosts of erstwhile paddlers, children and old people, into the sea. Each bore ten thousand gallons of petrol, and, for a moment, looking out, he saw it, the impossible: a sea on fire.

Even as he walked the beach, white sheets and pristine table linen were hanging from every window on the Channel Islands. That was the morning’s news.

Any day. It could be any day.

That afternoon, there was nothing for it. What choice did he have? He walked back through town in the direction of the Crescent, but at The Level, he crossed the road instead and found the stall almost too easily among the jostle of the Open Market.

The woman looked unexpectedly sensible in a white cambric shirt and a pair of man’s corduroy plus fours. Tillie had often told him over breakfast what a marvel she was; how she had cured her son Frank when, at eighteen months, his throat had nearly closed up with strep. Apparently, she had delivered onion poultices three times a day and saved the boy when Dr Baldwin from the London Road, for all he charged, did nothing except wait in readiness to cut a hole in his infant throat. Tillie had sworn by the woman ever since.

From the back of the queue, Geoffrey watched her bend over her scales, add another paper parcel to the balance, and remove a brass weight. She appeared matter-of-fact, unshockable, though she possessed the sort of fair, ruddy complexion that would betray any blush. Her eyes were a pale, sharp blue with exceptionally white whites; her face was unlined; her hands were chapped from a life
lived outside. She had the sturdiness, the gravitas, of late-middle age, though whether she was thirty or fifty he couldn’t have said. What a sight he must have made, he thought, with his fedora and his attaché case in the queue of pregnant women and miscellaneous others with lice-ridden heads, scabied limbs, and teeth in need of pulling.

The week before, when he had inquired at the surgery in Hove, Dr Moore had tersely mumbled something about two varieties of dysfunction before turning to the window and advising showers over baths. Then, on his Wednesday trip to London, with only minutes until his train home departed, he’d suddenly turned from Victoria and loped back up Buckingham Palace Road and through Green Park to Piccadilly. He turned left into Berkeley Street and on to Bru-ton, where he slowed his pace. He tried to gather himself but in no time – too soon – he found himself on New Bond Street. He felt sweat prickle beneath his collar. Henrietta Place, Wimpole, Wig-more and, finally – could he do it? – Harley. He hesitated outside a black Regency door with a fantail window, then pressed the bell.

Dr James Lawrence insisted he was delighted by the surprise visit from his favourite cousin’s husband. Until that moment, he quipped, he never would have credited a banker with spontaneity, and it was jolly good to be surprised because he had, of course, desperately few things to be surprised by these days, unless you counted the enemy raiders overhead, though even they had become disappointingly predictable. To his mind, the smallest deviations in life’s flight path were to be celebrated these days. Wasn’t that the middling nature of middle age?

‘Evelyn fine?’ he asked briskly. ‘Philip still at the Grammar?’ Geoffrey nodded and reciprocated. They shared a joke about Mrs Lawrence, Geoffrey’s formidable mother-in-law and James’s aunt. They murmured a glum lament for the British Expeditionary
Force, then rallied and exchanged hopes for the cricket season. They noted the excellence of the weather, or, as James expressed it, ‘the rising sap and all that’, at which point Geoffrey sallied forth into what already felt like a battle he was losing against himself.

He lowered his voice, conspiratorially, as they walked through to James’s office, and made himself say it: ‘Out of curiosity, tell me, how do you medical sorts advise a chap when the sap
isn’t
rising?’ He grinned too hard. It was a clumsy transition – but at least, at last, he’d found the words. Or if not
the
words, words.

His wife’s cousin studied him through a fixed but good-humoured smile. The telephone on his desk rang but he didn’t answer it. Instead, he clasped his chin and ran his hand ruminatively over his throat. ‘When it “isn’t rising”, you say?’ Geoffrey nodded curtly.

Without word or warning, Dr James Lawrence dropped into his chair, clapped his palms together and laughed with gusto. ‘Well, naturally, I advise glandular treatment!’ He shook his head and laughed again, then sprang to his feet, still grinning, reached for his pipe and pipe-cleaner, closed the blackout, slid a heavy gold pen into his breast pocket, and pushed in his chair. ‘I say, what chap in his right mind would turn down a bit of monkey testicle? I myself look forward to the day when I can afford a bit of chimpanzee scrotum or, better still, a baboon bollock or two. Olivia – dear, patient woman that she is – will be relieved to no longer have to check in with me to confirm, very tenderly, whether I’ve ‘quite finished’. Then there’s the rather less patient prostitute in Whitechapel who always insists on asking a colleague of mine’ – he summoned his best cockney voice – ‘“Ave you slimed yet, sir?” ’ He sighed comically. ‘Now, Geoff, what do you say? A malt? My club’s only around the corner.’

The herbalist’s stall was less of an ordeal, but his resolve flagged as he stood in the queue. He felt obliged to let every person who
arrived after him go before him, insisting with an easy and benign smile that their needs were greater than his. In his own neighbour-hood, just over the road from Park Crescent, he couldn’t risk being overheard.

Years before, an old gentleman in the saloon of a seafront pub had confessed he swore by a compound of pulverized roots. Geoffrey had laughed genially at the time. He’d even listened with polite interest to the old man’s renewed interest in peep shows, and had been careful to disguise the expression on his face, which said,
Poor bastard
. But the old gent had declared himself a new man.

As he waited and watched, Geoffrey rehearsed his words. It was a case for pragmatism. If only he could remember the name of the root. It hardly mattered that she was a woman. In any case, and most conveniently, she didn’t look much like a woman. But the moment he opened his mouth to speak, the words abandoned him.

‘No, no,’ he’d assured her, ‘wrong stall, I now realize. Apologies.’ She raised her eyebrows. He felt obliged – foolishly obliged – to explain. His eyes scanned the bottles of herbs on the shelf behind her, and he slipped into the tone of forced jollity one used with servants. ‘My mistake! The end of a long day, I’m afraid.’ In fact, he announced too loudly, he’d only been looking for – he strained to think – ‘fertilizer’.

His cheeks blazed at the accident of a word as the sirens sounded.

15

She walked up the London Road with her ration book and a new recipe folded in her pocket, like an insurance policy against failure. As she crossed Mr Hatchett’s threshold, the stink of raw meat caught her by the throat. The recipe, she explained, was for ‘Ragout of Mutton’. In the cold-cabinet lay brains, trotters, tripe, faggots, meat pies, ox-tails and a single calf ’s liver. She needed a pound of breast of mutton.

Mr Hatchett’s skin was pulled tight over the bone of his skull, as if to advertise the fact that there was no excess, no waste, in his business. ‘No mutton breast today, Mrs Beaumont,’ he pronounced flatly, with a nod to the cabinet. ‘Or tomorrow. Or any day in the foreseeable.’ His eyes were slate grey, almost lidless. They followed her every step as she walked up and down, assessing the trays of meat, at a loss to determine which piece of flesh she could bear to handle. A rabbit dangled from a steel hook behind his shoulder, staring at her glassily, and the pressure of their collective gaze made her point at last and without confidence to the shiny slab of calf ’s liver.

Mr Hatchett did not reach for the tray but stood, instead, pulling on the scrawn of an earlobe, and a vision swam up in her mind – an image of him pulling at his scrotum instead of his earlobe – and she had to wince it away. Had she ever cooked calf ’s liver before? he inquired. It required a degree of skill. If she overcooked it, she might
as well serve Mr Beaumont the soles of his shoes this evening. Undercooking posed even greater risks. Could he recommend the beef brain? Two brains would serve a small family. She had only to remove the membrane from each, along with any blood clots she could see on the surface.

He pressed his thin, narrow palms together, resting his chin on his fingers, as if he were Confucius in a red-and-white striped apron. Did Mr Hatchett, she wondered, expect her to prove her worth before she was permitted to buy the liver? She wasn’t worthy. She knew it as well as he. But they had to eat. She had to learn to manage. So she lifted her chin, looking past him, and repeated her request. ‘The liver, please. If you could parcel it up.’ Her words, her tone of voice, her sudden attitude of indifference came together in an apparently off-hand display of rank and class, for which she immediately loathed herself.

She couldn’t face lunch. She returned home, got the liver into the Frigidaire, closed the door on it, and set out early for the WI. There, in the stifling hall, she struggled through the weekly self-defence class in which women of all ages learned how to box ears with their hands cupped to burst eardrums; to shatter ankles with the help of a good heel; and, in desperate times, to suffocate the enemy with a blow to the windpipe; or – here the group protested – to gouge out his eye successfully with the thumb. Yet even during her embarrassed attack upon a shop mannequin’s windpipe, she was distracted by the other cutting she had slipped into her pocket before leaving the house.

Friday, 28th June: Mrs Virginia Woolf will lecture on The Modern English Novel for the Workers’ Education Association at five o’clock. The Municipal Technical College, Richmond Terrace, Brighton.

She had snipped the notice out of the
Evening Argus
weeks before and knew it, absurdly, by heart. She couldn’t attend – she was neither a worker nor a technical student – but she’d kept the cutting, pressed like a souvenir ticket stub between the pages of her copy of
The Years
, and that day, the 28th of June, she’d dropped it in her pocket as if it were a paper fortune.

Mornings these days were difficult. She’d wake, only to remember the sirens and the dreamlike sprint to Philip’s bed; the pulling of clothes over his warm, floppy limbs; the three of them negotiating the stairs down to the basement before stumbling through the scull-ery and out of its door into the uncanniness of the night.

The coal cellar lay opposite, a dank cupboard beneath the street itself. The crumbling brick walls dripped, and animal droppings lay underfoot. The night before, she’d gathered Philip to her, stroking his hair and singing him back to sleep, while, at street level, the searchlights had slashed the sky, and Geoffrey had run up the external stairs to pound on Mrs Dalrymple’s front door.

The old lady had appeared briefly at an upstairs window – ‘Would you kindly bugger off, whoever you are!’ – and disappeared again. Beneath a full moon, traitorously bright, Geoffrey went on trying to talk her down. A bomber – German – throbbed overhead, while far below, in a stagnant darkness, Evelyn sat perched on top of the sloping coal store with Philip pressed so close to her he must have heard in his dreams the pitching of her heart.

At the hour of his birth, she and Philip had nearly slipped from life together, and perhaps she had never lost the fear or foreboding that she might fail to keep him, not merely safe, but alive. With the drone of the aeroplanes – lower than ever, it seemed – the two of them had huddled, alone and small, like one body again.

The year before, on a shopping trip to London with her mother,
she’d made some excuse and found her way to the East End, the Whitechapel Gallery and the vast canvas of Picasso’s
Guernica
. The small notice in
The Times
had said the suggested donation was a pair of boots for the Republican cause in Spain but she’d forgotten and had given them instead, with her apologies, a pair of brogues she’d bought for Geoffrey that day. Then she’d walked back and forth, trying to fathom the riotous, monumental geometry of severed limbs and wild faces. One detail above all had stayed with her: the woman at the left of the canvas. Her face was fierce, feral – wolf-like with grief for her child, limp in her arms.

And again, the thought of the two pills flashed.

The large clock on the wall of the WI hall told her she still – just – had time to return home, change her clothing, and go to the lecture. If the details of the lecture were in the paper, surely she had a right to attend, to listen, to escape her own thoughts?

The realization made a small breach in the black dam within her, and the world trickled through. Outside the window, a green finch flashed past, a vivid blur of colour. Afternoon light poured in, golden, voluptuous. It warmed her cheek. It rippled in the loose hair of the young woman in the row in front of her as they practised their kicks.