Unexploded (17 page)

He checked his wristwatch, then his nails. He almost made it sound offhand: ‘Are you a Jewess?’

At the window, she drew deeply on her cigarette. Someone passed in the street below, and she turned, feigning interest in their progress. Beyond the street, on a platform at the station, a guard blew a whistle, hard and shrill.

‘A Jewess?’ she said, but her voice betrayed nothing. She bent, letting the sill take her weight, and flicked ash with one hand while rubbing the small of her back with the other, up and down, her long fingers splayed against her haunches. Beautiful fingers.

Then the curtains lifted in a rare, rippling breeze, and she turned to him through the veil of muslin. ‘You say …’ and she held his gaze.

In the distance, something crashed. At the station, a carriage was being shunted into line with a vengeance.

She sat down on the bed beside him.

Look at her
, Otto thought, as she seated herself at the foot of the old man’s bed. What was the English expression? ‘Lady Bountiful’. There she sat, speaking charitably while the tailor rasped his pitiful replies. She’d looked horrified at her first glimpse of him. Unnerved. Reality was not to her liking. Now she seemed more confident. Too confident. She moved from the foot of the bed to the old man’s side and took his hand in hers.

Her face puckered at the sight of the bucket beneath the bed, not far from her feet, and she called to the Nazi guard, demanding, as the
Superintendent’s wife, that he empty it. She reached for the sponge that floated in a bowl of day-old water and pressed it to the old man’s cracked lips. She also required a chair.

‘Has the doctor been?’

The guard shrugged.

From his bed, Otto failed to suppress a laugh, and she pivoted, her eyes hot, flashing, as if deciding that, whoever he was, whatever his suffering, he had just forfeited any claim he might have had to her compassion. She smoothed her skirt over her knees but, as she turned back to the old man, her foot knocked the carrier bag by her chair. Books tumbled out across the lino, and not only books. Over the top of them – incongruously, flamboyantly – lay a pair of flesh-toned silk stockings, wrinkled, as if they had been removed in a hurry.

She stooped quickly, pushing them and all but one of the books back into her bag. The guard pretended not to see. Otto laughed again.
Let the Superintendent call in the firing squad
, he thought.
A prisoner has seen Mrs Superintendent’s stockings
. In Berlin, he’d painted models in every state of undress. This woman looked – what was the word? – ‘corseted’.

‘Please, Mr Pirazzini,’ she was murmuring, ‘you rest. No, I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’ As if the crisis were hers. ‘Thank you. I shall read to you now. Would you like that? It’s a calming piece. I believe you might enjoy it.’ She was flustered, embarrassed. The old man closed his eyes obligingly.

She looked behind her, to see if Otto still dared to watch.

Not only did he still watch, he was, she saw, laughing to himself.

She turned her head sharply back. ‘
The Waves
,’ she announced brightly, ‘by Mrs Virginia Woolf. “
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky
…” ’

Had her husband told her, Otto wondered, about his failed effort
to drown himself? Of course he had.
The Waves
.
Such comedy
, he wanted to declare
. Of all the books in that bag. What a riposte. Ha ha!

He was diving in again. He could see under water. So clear, so clean, and soundless. No children’s faces. No cries. He could have stayed there for ever.

Her voice composed itself into a pleasing music. He could tell she liked the rhythms of the prose. On and on she read. Mr Pirazzini was asleep. Or dead. Did it matter? She was intent on her charity. He had to turn from the sight of her, though tears sprang to his eyes each time he tried to move his shoulder on the pillow. The operation had been postponed again. Staff shortages, too many injured evacuees. The wound festered. Would his arm, his painting arm, ever be steady again?

‘Thank you,’ he heard her say to the Nazi, as he slid the bucket below the old man’s bed. ‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’ Her voice was the silk of the stockings in her bag. The guard’s boots passed the end of his bed, to and fro, to and fro. Sweat poured from him. He could no longer distinguish fever from fear. The scar tissue on his back was inflamed, a reaction to too many days inert in bed. During his admission examination, the Army medic had bent to study the crude geometry of hobnails. Then he’d picked up a pen, scribbled a note on a form, ticked a box that said PREVIOUS, and passed Otto the regulation overalls.

Evelyn put him from her mind. She no longer cared that the man had been so desperate that he had, according to the sentry’s account, tried to take his own life. He did not seem desperate to her. He seemed highly amused.

She could not hate a total stranger – she would not allow herself to be so irrational – but she despised this man somehow, this enemy alien, and that strength of feeling made her read with a peculiar
vivacity, a surge of will, that was carried, in the undulations of those waves of prose, across the room to him.

The Waves,
ha ha. Of course
, Otto thought.
Ha ha
, he laughed, trembling.

Mr Pirazzini opened his eyes and closed them.

She paused mid-line. Behind her, the man was openly laughing now. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to shout,
What on earth could you possibly find to amuse you here? What on earth could you have to laugh about?

She closed her book. Her heart thudded. The room went quiet, and the heat was suddenly unbearable. She lifted her hair from her neck and then, quickly, self-consciously, let it drop again. She wanted to turn –
Who
are
you? Are you mad?
– but she sat, gripped by a strange gravity, a force field of heat, silence and expectation … She didn’t even know the sound of his voice.

Mr Pirazzini coughed, and she started in her chair. On and on, he struggled to get his breath. She got to her feet and tried to prop him higher. She called for the guard but nothing helped. Mr Pirazzini’s lungs rattled like a pair of dice in a game he could not win.

That airless night, Geoffrey and Evelyn lay together in their blacked-out room, feigning sleep.

He rolled on to his side, stirring at the memory of Leah glimpsed through pale muslin. ‘You say,’ she murmured again through slick, painted lips.

The relief, at last, had been tremendous.

Beside him, Evelyn cringed again at the memory of the stockings. She could still feel the pressure of Otto Gottlieb’s gaze on her back.

All over Brighton that night, people needed air, a breeze. They longed to draw back the blinds, shutters and curtains. The weather
needed to break. The war needed to break. The entire town seemed to live on short, staggering breaths.

Then, as if in reply to some reckless act of the collective will or an unspeakable communal wish, something in the atmosphere gave way that July night. Squalls and showers blew in from the west. The lid of summer came off. And in a moment that was, after so many months of waiting, as much longed for (secretly, ashamedly) as it was dreaded, the first bomb was tipped into the early morning of the new day: a fifty-kilogram falling star, gravid, lethal and indifferent.

19

Seven others would follow, whistling terror.

Early in the morning of the 15th of July, the Dornier 17 slipped in under the radar and circled the town.

Most lay clenched in their beds.
Not us. Don’t get ideas. On your way now. Bugger off.

Imagine it.

You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast. The walls of your house are sucked in – a full ten inches – before they are pushed back out by a blast wind that is, briefly, of hurricane force. You wake, unable to understand why heaps of gravel and brick dust are being shovelled over you at speed. When you finally look up, your mouth and nostrils are crammed with dust. The skin is flayed from your forearms where you raised your hands to protect your head. Your eardrums have burst, and the pain leaves you staggering as you climb free of the rubble that is your bed.

It’s not easy to get your bearings. The dividing walls have fallen. There is a hole of grey sky in the roof. The sense of space is dizzying, and your ears are bleeding. You have to take a running jump to get to the stairway, and downstairs, the floorboards in the hallway are up, as if someone has been shuffling them like a pack of cards.

You stumble outside for air, but even here the day is thick with dust, soot and – you can’t make sense of it – a blizzard of feathers.
Throughout the neighbourhood, pillows, bolsters and mattresses have exploded.

There are puffs of smoke. You can’t see them, but from high above, they look only like those a child might draw.

You manage to avoid your front garden, which is not a garden at all but a crater. At the kerb, you turn to stare. Your home stands open to the world, a grim, oversized doll’s house. How is it possible? The front wall has disappeared. Your private life has been turned inside out. Your mother still smiles from the picture on the side table.

At the back of the house – for your view is brutally clear – the bedroom and kitchen curtains hang in shreds. A cheval mirror, broken on its axis, wobbles like a tooth. In the front room, the furniture lies buried beneath the tons of wet chalk that erupted from the garden. Later, the Regional Officer of the War Damage Commission will approve compensation for your domestic contents, clothing and personal effects to a maximum of £200. He will stamp your C1 form. Payments in most cases, he will note, won’t be issued until after the war.

On the pavement, there is blood by your feet. A stray dog is sniff-ing at it. Someone offers you bandages for your arms, a blanket, shoes, and a cup of tea with extra lumps of sugar. You can’t hold the cup for shaking.

Shrapnel still tinkles down the rooftops, though you hear nothing of course and won’t ever again. But you can smell the pounded brick dust. You see the lady’s corset that dangles from a branch in the tree above you. Glass crunches underfoot. As you make your slow progress, you almost trip over two of your neighbours who are resting on stretchers. Why has no one given them a blanket? ‘All right, Iris?’ you say. You hear your voice only as a vibration in your throat. ‘All right, Ernest?’ They don’t stir. Concussed, you tell yourself.

But no. In the blast wave of the bomb, in that sudden desert of oxygen, they suffocated.

Others have been thrown through the air. A seventeen-year-old boy wakes on a rooftop five streets away. A man finds his wife stuck rigid and lifeless to a neighbour’s shed door, her arms outstretched. Later, in the ruins of his house, on her kitchen worktop, he will stare, mute and bewildered, at the two eggs that sit unbroken in a china bowl.

A fire blazes in the middle of the street. A broken gas main, you are told. It has been reported. Remember, smoking is not permitted. You nod, as if you have actually heard him. Water streams past your feet. Bobbing in the current, you see all manner of things: a toilet seat, a leather comb case, a family photo album, a baby’s rattle, a vegetable peeler, a tin of boot polish, a smeared letter, a bicycle tyre and a woman’s muddied hand. It still wears a wedding band. The hand upsets you more than the bodies you have passed.

Later, at sunset, as foundations settle, fires burn out and the drains back up, boys from other parts of town will appear. You’ll see them searching the craters and the broken ground. They’ll dig under roof slates and beams. You’ll watch them whoop with joy when they find souvenir pieces of shrapnel, still hot to the touch.

20

The bombings, everyone said, were only a prelude. In a seaside town that boasted neither industry nor ambition, there were direct hits to the playing fields of St Mary’s Hall. To Chichester Terrace and Mount Pleasant. To Devonshire Street, Pelham Street School and Tamplin’s Brewery. The town centre stank of hops for days.

August the 4th was forecast to be Invasion Day, the anniversary of the day Britain had declared war on Germany in 1914. The passage of time was marked by rumour. Next, it could only be August the 15th, the day Hitler had vowed he’d march through the streets of London. That day, too, came and went, but at last Mr Attlee spoke on the wireless. ‘The whole nation awaits zero hour. I want us all to use the waiting time, be it long or short, to the best possible advantage to our cause.’ But could the nation imagine it as Brighton could? So literal an invasion. The enemy marching up the beach.

In the town’s blackout, illicit roof squatters smoked and star-watched, refusing to be shut in any longer, while in the dance halls of the town, from the Regent Ballroom to the unmentionable Sherry’s, revellers danced through the sirens as the bands played louder. Where the nation was stoical, Brighton grew reckless.

Evelyn felt her own bleak sense of abandon. She would not be dissuaded by her husband from returning with her book to the Camp,
where Mr Pirazzini lay in his bed, rattling with death but seemingly unwilling to die. He was waiting, Evelyn knew, for Mrs Pirazzini to appear. He had a dying man’s faith that decencies, even in a labour camp, would be observed; that Geoffrey would find his wife of fifty years. But Evelyn knew Geoffrey couldn’t admit to the old man that there were no reliable records; that the authorities had – in bureaucratic terms – lost his wife and her camp location; that he would inevitably die without her. Everything didn’t come right in the end. The wheel didn’t go round. Life took care of some and not of others. His faith, like the phrase, had failed him.

Evelyn pressed his papery palm in hers. All she knew how to do was open her book and read to him so that he didn’t die in a morbid, miserable hush. Words were protective. They were beats of breath and life. But who was she really reading for, herself or him?

Behind her, a makeshift screen divided her from the prisoner who’d laughed at her efforts during her first visit. Let him laugh now. He was back in the infirmary, to have the bullet extracted from his shoulder. The doctor had come at long last, a heavyset man with thick spectacles and stubby fingers. He stood in the dim light of the painted-over window, sterilizing his scalpel and forceps with the flame of a cigarette lighter.