Unexploded Read online

  ‘Today we hear the gunfire in the Channel. We turn on the wire-less; we hear an airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine caught fire; he plunged into the sea; the light turned green then black. Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening.’

  And Evelyn was again in her own shuttered sitting room, in her chair, as Geoffrey tuned the wireless. Wasn’t it the same in every house? The news was as irresistible as it was dreaded.

  ‘Do we strain Wordsworth’s famous saying about emotion recol-lected in tranquillity when we infer that, by tranquillity, he meant that the writer needs to become unconscious before he can create? Yet think of our modern writers. During all the most impressionable years of their lives they were stung into consciousness of things changing, of things falling, of death perhaps about to come. There was no tranquillity in which they could recollect. They told the unpleasant truths, not only the flattering truths. That is why their autobiography is actually so much better than their fiction or poetry. Consider how difficult it is to tell the truth about oneself – the unpleasant truth; to admit that one is petty, vain, mean, frustrated, tortured, unfaithful and unsuccessful. The nineteenth-century writers never told that kind of truth, and that is why so much of the nineteenth-century writing is worthless.’

  Evelyn’s pen hesitated. She wondered what it must be like to stand before more than a hundred readers and declare a broad swathe of nineteenth-century literature chaff. Surely Mrs Woolf was wrong in this one regard …?

  Did her own face betray her? For Mrs Woolf seemed suddenly to train her gaze upon her. Did she appear petty, vain or mean? Did Mrs Woolf suppose she was frustrated, tortured or unfaithful? Perhaps she did. Perhaps she was. But Mrs Woolf continued, and indeed she seemed to look at her kindly as she spoke, as if she above all needed to hear: ‘If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.’

  And rather than shrink under the older woman’s attention, Evelyn stopped scribbling, met her eyes, and straightened in her seat, grateful that she had been noticed at all; grateful that Mrs Woolf seemed to confer upon her those simple, revelatory words.

  She was afraid. That was the truth. She would have written it down now like an SOS if she could have, and held it up for Mrs Woolf alone to see. The bleak absurdity of each day was stripping her back. It was making her small, mean and narrow.

  Who was Geoffrey? Lately she’d felt herself almost gag on the question. One evening as their ritual in front of the wireless began, she’d actually had to rush from the front room to the lavatory to retch, as if there were a single answer she couldn’t quite keep down; as if truth lay like an infection in her gut.

  He had deceived her about the night they had met; about the dark mood that had possessed him; about his vile behaviour. Worse still, had a part of her always suspected? Had her mind assembled the stray details of that night – the man’s hot stare, his Jewishness, the split in Geoffrey’s tailcoat – into a truth she had intuited long ago? And if she had sensed it and remained quiet about it, what did that say about her?

  Perhaps there were more lies. Over a tipsy lunch in Mayfair before Christmas, Sylvia had intimated that Geoffrey had bedded some well-bred call girl on the night of the ball years ago, on the very night he had apparently fallen in love with her. ‘Not that the girl’s rounded vowels were her greatest assets,’ Sylvia had added, lifting an eyebrow. She had paused in her monologue when she saw Evelyn’s face. Her eyes had narrowed through the haze of her cigarette smoke. ‘I tell a lie. I’m always mixing that lot up. It was Fitz. Not Geoffrey. It was Fitz. Tom, Freddie and Fitz. The reprobates. There’s too much pink in this gin – what on earth makes it pink?’

  How could he sleep so soundly these nights? He had decided to abandon his family to chance. He ’d made a charade of their marriage.

  His presence in their bed was both strange and repellently familiar. She hated the shape of his head on the pillow. She hated the slab of the back of his neck. She’d started to notice his smell – milky, as though that were the smell of love when it had soured. She could hardly bear his kiss, his teeth knocking against hers in his solitary passions. Yet he pretended not to know. He insisted on taking her arm when they walked out. He’d play-acted for Tom and Sylvia at the ball on Saturday evening. Later, in the early-morning half-light, he’d looked at her with only mild concern as she lay inert beneath him.

  Appearances, appearances. They were a lovely couple. It was often said. But Geoffrey, it seemed, had decided for them both that appearances were enough; that the habit of marriage would suffice. How could she bear it, how could she live the rest of her life miming pleasantries? Other couples did – of course they did – but she couldn’t bear to live so alone.

  A week before their wedding, she had squeezed his hand as they’d strolled through the Pavilion Gardens. It had been a lover’s question: ‘If I were to die,’ she’d grinned, ‘would you marry again?’ But he hadn’t foresworn the thought. He didn’t, in the spirit of the question, in the happiness of the moment, declare ‘Never!’, whatever the truth of the future might actually be. He hadn’t wordlessly insisted on any sacred bond. ‘I suppose so,’ he’d confessed with a bemused smile.

  Need, yes, he needed her. He needed a wife. When they had met, he had thought her clever, pretty, different. He had never known a girl like her, a girl still shy in the world but one with ideas, and such spark in her eyes, he’d said. Tenderness. Yes, she was sure he’d felt that. And a deep affection too. But love? He had confused it with need, a need for family and stability. Of course it had affected him: his mother removed from the family home when he was just a small boy. ‘Almost unable to eat,’ he’d said, only once. She’d wondered that such things were possible.

  He’d grown up, he said, on monthly visits to the asylum and brittle hugs from a mother who was painfully, disastrously thin. Her breath was never right, he’d once confessed, and he’d winced immediately for having said it.

  He claimed his father never recovered from the loss of her; a loss he and Geoffrey had both experienced long before her actual death, but she suspected that it was he, Geoffrey, who had never recovered from his mother’s long absence, and that, ultimately, the price of his youthful confusion, of his carefully hidden grief, was Evelyn’s to pay. He had married her for the wrong reasons. She’d been too innocent, too trusting, to know otherwise; to believe that a marriage between two willing people could be about anything other than love.

  Only now did she understand the terrible gravity of those vows, and the potential of a marriage to spoil a life. After twelve years, he had finally outgrown his old need of her. The war seemed to have inspired in him a certain recklessness, a new and unexpected talent for the unpredictable; a dark sort of autonomy. He had cast off the dependence they had both mistaken for his love and he’d abandoned her to the rituals of their marriage. She found it difficult to fall into line; to be what Geoffrey termed ‘sensible’, which was the opposite of course of what the French meant by sensible. That, that allowance for feeling, for sensitivity, was entirely lost these days, vanished, and a failure to numb one’s feelings in wartime was as much of an indulgence as overpriced black-market rouge.

  On good days, she muddled through. On bad days, she wanted everything – their forced smiles, his habit of clicking his neck, his chemical-animal smell in the loo in the morning – over. She wanted all of it over, gone, and … she could think only of those two bright green pills that lay buried in the garden.

  But Mrs Woolf, the lecture, the privilege of it – what was she thinking, letting her thoughts wander? She shook herself back into time. She lifted her face, contrite and open. She listened intently, trying to pick up the thread of the lecture, but something still distracted. It was Mrs Woolf herself. She was somehow … disparate. Her eyes were wide, almost too wide, with a sma
ll, shrunken pupil. She might have been a soothsayer in silver specs and Roman beach sandals, a woman who, like Cassandra, saw too much; someone for whom fear had necessarily become part of the fabric of everything she beheld. But the fear behind her eyes was at odds with the liveliness, with the life, of her voice and the genuine, if weary, courtesy of her smile.

  Which was Evelyn to believe: her haunted eyes or the animation of her voice?

  ‘We can begin, practically and prosaically, by reading omnivorously, simultaneously, plays, novels, histories, biographies, the old, the new … Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way ourselves. Let us discover how to read and to write, how to preserve and how to create.’

  She smiled uneasily and fanned herself with a sheet of foolscap, then fumbled for the handkerchief that was no longer in her pocket. ‘I am grateful for your attention and am happy to take questions.’

  A silence followed, terrible whole minutes of it, during which the gloomy convenor checked his wristwatch, and even Mrs Woolf, literary celebrity, looked exposed and small before the certitude of the Periodic Table. Then, at last, ‘Yes, you, sir?’ and everyone in the front rows, including Evelyn, turned in their seats to see Mr Hatch-ett rise to his feet, his left hand gripping his apron.

  16

  In Orson’s room, Radio Bremen was triumphantly clear. ‘I make no apology for saying again that invasion is certainly coming soon, but what I want to impress upon you is that while you must feverishly take every conceivable precaution, nothing that you or the Government can do is really of the slightest use. Don’t be deceived by this lull before the storm because Hitler is only waiting for the right moment. Then, when his moment comes, he will strike, and he will strike hard.’

  ‘But not Brighton,’ said Philip, shaking himself free of the headset. ‘He won’t strike Brighton hard.’

  ‘No, because he’ll want friendly neighbours,’ Orson said.

  ‘But Lord Haw-Haw never says when Hitler’s coming and that’s just mean.’ Philip looked up. Then he clambered on to the bed. ‘There’s music coming through the wall. I thought you said nobody was allowed in Hal’s room.’

  ‘I’m not and Father isn’t. And Ivy isn’t to go in. But Mother’s allowed in of course. I didn’t mean Mother. Sometimes she plays music on Hal’s old wind-up gramophone, and she tidies up so everything is ready when Hal comes home on leave.’ Orson got to his feet and both boys pressed their heads to the wall.

  ‘She must be sad if she likes that music.’

  ‘No,’ and Orson’s voice went high like a girl’s. ‘She’s happy. She likes tidying Hal’s room and playing Brahms.’

  ‘The music doesn’t sound happy.’

  Orson reached up and retrieved the trophy helmet from its shelf above the bed. ‘Right. Your go.’

  ‘One day I roll out of bed, open the shutters and find a pigeon on the sill outside. It goes peck-peck, peck-peck-peck. A small yellow tube is tied to its leg. There’s a message inside. Guess what it says.’

  ‘Philip Beaumont, you smell.’

  ‘It says, “You are expected today at four o’clock. Speak to no one. Der Führer.” ’

  ‘Why would Hitler write to you?’

  ‘When I arrive at the Pavilion, a servant shows me through. We walk a very long way. I’m a little nervous. There are carved dragons everywhere. The servant has fat legs and his uniform is too tight. I wonder if Hitler will shoot him one day because he doesn’t exercise enough. Then we arrive at a big door and the servant knocks. A dog barks and a voice booms on the other side. “In kommen!”’

  ‘That’s not how you say it.’

  ‘At first I can hardly see anything because the chandelier is so bright. Then I see Hitler. He’s sitting behind a big desk, bigger than the Headmaster’s. On one side is an enormous globe on a wooden stand. He spins it and spins it without looking up once. He’s wearing weekend trousers, black braces and … and a blue turban. When he turns from the globe at last, his eyes are very wide and blue. I think he’s hypnotizing me. “Sitz downen!” he says, and he points to a sofa. I do as he says. His dog is perched by the desk. He throws it a peppermint from his pocket. The dog goes down on all fours with his bottom in the air, and, without meaning to, I go down too. Then he speaks to me. “You vill …” ’

  ‘You will what?’

  ‘You vill give me all the sweets in Brighton.’

  Orson sighed and grabbed the helmet and lowered it on to his head. His eyes blazed blue. ‘There is a knock at our front door. It is not a dirty carrier pigeon. It is a Secret Service officer. His boots shine like black glass, and he’s tapping one boot like it’s Morse code. Open this door immediately. Stop. I hate slowpokes. Stop. I am a very important man. Stop. My mother sees him and screams. The SS man pulls out his pistol. “Spare her,” I say. “Der Führer loves all mothers.”

  ‘The man shoots our geranium basket instead. Red petals fall everywhere. “Very well,” he says, “but you must come with me.”

  ‘ “Let go of me, Mother,” I say, shaking her off, “or I might not be able to save you the next time.” I follow the man to a black motor parked at the kerb. The door slams shut. ‘“Güt,” a voice says. “Ein Sunday drive.” Then Hitler claps his hands and we’re off.

  ‘We take the coast road. We see fishermen’s cottages with tin roofs. They have little dirty yards with dirty, barefoot children running about. Geese cross the road, honking at us, but the Führer will not let our driver run them over – he loves animals. He waves from the car like the King to villagers, sheep and shepherds. Then, “Hier!” he orders, and our chauffeur swerves off the road.

  ‘The bodyguard steps from the car, clicks his heels, opens the boot and produces a hamper. There is ginger beer for me and real German beer for Hitler. We stuff ourselves on cooked ham and pretzels. “Save room!” he orders, and out comes Black Forest cake. He tells me he loves Britain. He tells me he has always loved it. Our only mistake, he says, was when we told the King he couldn’t tell us what to do any more. Everyone, he says, needs someone to be the boss of them.’

  Orson got to his feet, walked to his bedroom door, opened it a crack, and listened. ‘Now come with me.’

  Hal’s room smelled of floor wax and mothballs. The wind-up gramo-phone sat on a card table by the far wall. Its horn rose like a monstrous flower.

  ‘I was supposed to be home ages ago.’

  ‘Take off your shoes. And don’t sit on the bed. You’ll make wrinkles.’

  Philip considered Hal’s bed as he unlaced his shoes. The corners of its blue blanket were tucked tightly beneath the mattress, and the bed looked far too short for a grown-up man.

  A faded map of the Empire hung on the wall above. Orson pointed to a shelf of trophies: ‘Do you see the one that looks like an old goblet? It’s the Troubadour’s Cup. Hal won that for reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.’ Orson made his voice go very low. “Into the jaws of Death/Into the mouth of Hell/ Rode the six hundred.”’ He opened the bottom drawer in the chest of drawers. ‘This is his air rifle, .22 calibre.’ He shook a small box at Philip’s ear. ‘These are the pellets.’

  Between the two tall windows, a desk gleamed. There wasn’t a speck of dust. Orson took out Hal’s old collection of Tarzan pictures. In the picture on top, Tarzan clutched Jane to his bare chest, and Jane drew her knees up so close you could see an entire cheek of her bottom. She had only a scrap of leather for a skirt. Tarzan wore his trademark loincloth and a thick blade in a leather sheath. ‘Look!’ Orson pointed to the distinctively shaped handle that poked out near his waist. ‘Tarzan has a stiffy!’ And they punched each other in delight.

  Then the floorboards creaked, and they turned their ears like dogs attuned to a special frequency.

  All went quiet again and Orson opened the wardrobe door. ‘This is Hal’s bat. Essex willow.’ He crawled inside. Hangers clattered on
the rail. A jacket tumbled from its perch. ‘Shoes. Oar. Bicycle pump. Bicycle lamp. Jigsaw box. One-man tent. Croquet mallet.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to touch anything.’

  ‘Mother ignores Hal’s jumble.’ He retreated deeper. ‘Tennis rac-quet. Girlie playing cards. Tennis ball. Old atlas. Binoculars. Boxing gloves …’ A milk crate appeared. Philip caught hold of it, and Orson tumbled out after.

  ‘Jumpers?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Orson reached beneath the woollens and pulled out a heap of things: a tie; a pair of pressed trousers; a black shirt with buttons at the shoulder, like a fencing jacket; an armband with a lightning bolt on it; a gramophone record; a pair of black boots; a lady’s stocking half filled with broken glass; and a leather belt with a shiny buckle. ‘Watch this.’ Orson took the belt, held it vertically, and clicked on the back of the buckle. Out popped a row of sharp steel spikes. Philip had never seen anything like it. He picked up the stocking and held it to the light; the glass bounced in the silken foot.

  Orson was at the table, winding up the gramophone.

  ‘What if your mother hears?’

  He lowered the needle. ‘She’s downstairs with Ivy.’

  A man’s voice crackled to life: ‘– have striven to arouse in this country the feelings and passions of war with a nation with whom we made peace in 1918. We fought Germany once in our British quarrel. We shall not fight Germany again in a Jewish quarrel!’

  ‘Mosley,’ Orson whispered. ‘Hal saw him in Worthing three times. The crowds were so big you would have thought it was the King.’

  Philip jumped up. ‘What was that?’

  Orson lifted the arm of the gramophone. Neither moved.

  Outside, in the road, someone was whistling. Philip knew the tune … It was one the Dunn brothers had sung beneath the Pier that day in May. He ran for the window, grinned, and raised his hand to the glass. Orson reached for his specs. ‘Who is it?’