The weekly Camp inspection, Geoffrey now understood, would never fail to be anything other than grim. Each Monday, he signed off the misery of men bewildered by circumstance and imprisoned out of view on top of a coastal cliff. The Camp had opened in early May, claiming the town’s racecourse, and although it was already his fifth inspection, he’d never grow accustomed.
In the old stables, new arrivals were housed like livestock, while those who had arrived in the early weeks were crammed into hot, airless barracks, the windows of which were painted over and covered in grilles. Buckets served for toilets, and standpipes for the ablutions of hundreds. The mission was cement. Day in, day out, under the tireless eyes of their guards, the prisoners produced cement. The dust of smashed limestone got everywhere – in their hair, their nostrils, their teeth, their food. No one was exempt from labour, except those ill enough to be confined to the flimsy hut that passed for an infirmary.
The Army ran the show, but the Home Department had required someone well regarded in the area to put his name to it all, to turn a blind eye, and Geoffrey had won the dubious honour. He could hardly speak of it, not to his colleagues at the Bank, not to Evelyn – least of all to Evelyn once he discovered the newest arrival.
That afternoon, he’d flinched at the sight of his old tailor hunched on a metal bed in the regulation boiler suit. He’d wanted to turn, to run, to pretend he hadn’t heard his own name. His brain was reeling, but the old man had smiled, and he had no choice but to pause in his progress through the barracks. ‘Now, tell me, how is Mrs Beaumont?’
To hear him, Geoffrey could almost imagine they were simply passing the time at the bottom of Trafalgar Street. He couldn’t meet Mr Pirazzini’s eye. He felt too tall, too … well. Blood pounded in his ears and, as if from a distance, he heard himself reply. ‘Yes, she’s very well … Thank you.’ What a sickening charade.
After the first arrests, most of the German and Austrian tailors’ shops on Trafalgar Street had been looted, but Pirazzini and his wife endured in their premises until that morning, when Mussolini declared war on Britain, and the police arrived.
The tailor’s advanced age had guaranteed him a bed in the barracks at least, a bed no wider than he was, a bed that was screwed to the floor.
‘Please. Give her my best, will you?’
Geoffrey nodded. Impossible, he thought.
The old man had never failed to ask after Evelyn, not since the day nearly nine years ago when he’d spotted her, six months pregnant, carrying too many boxes and bags home from town. She had been a stranger to him then, but he’d insisted she come into the shop and take a seat with his wife before he went out again to find her a cab. He’d paid the driver before she realized, and the next day, through a mouthful of pins, he had refused Geoffrey’s efforts at repayment. ‘No, no,’ he’d muttered impatiently. ‘The wheel goes round. The wheel goes round.’ His mottled hands had sketched circles on the air, his left ring finger lost, presumably, to an accident with the shears or a sewing machine.
Stooped behind the Singer, his wife had smiled, lifted her foot from the pedal and said, with an accent that was still heavily Italian, ‘Please, Mr Beaumont. My husband is he-goat, and life is short, no?’ Behind his back, she imitated Mr Pirazzini’s circling finger, but in a punning motion, beside her ear. Loco, that finger said, but her eyes were tender.
She was probably on the Isle of Wight. In the women’s camp. No letters between spouses.
He’d laughed that day all those years ago and had put away his wallet. ‘Well then, will I at least be able to persuade you to accept my custom?’
Mrs Pirazzini returned to the sleeve beneath her needle. Mr Pirazzini spat the pins into his four-fingered hand. ‘Mr Beaumont, do you not know? A tailor, like an undertaker, always accepts the custom of a tall man.’
So he invented something about a pair of new flannel trousers that needed cuffs. Mr Pirazzini shrugged obligingly. He’d had no idea then that the old man was booked weeks, even months, ahead; that he had clients who drove down from London.
The wheel goes round, the wheel goes round. Now, in the barracks, the old man waved the shiny stump of his finger over the endless row of beds. ‘Mr Beaumont, shall we agree on one thing? You will not pity me my accommodation, and I will not pity you the drape of that jacket.’
Enemy aliens. It was necessary, said Churchill, to ‘collar the lot’.
A dirty pall of smoke hung over the Crescent. On the pavement below, in the middle of their quiet street, she watched men in face-shields and asbestos gloves huddled over tools and generators. Then a stocky man raised a gloved hand, a fury of sparks erupted into the street, and a section of the wrought-iron spears of her fence collapsed, ringing out as it hit the pavement. It was the same all over Brighton that June. The metal drive. What more could they take? (Either you sacrifice your selfishness for the nation – or you sacrifice the nation to your selfishness.)
Inside, the house was as close, as airless, as a forcing jar. Two large flies flung themselves at the hot glass panes. She lowered herself on to the bed in the spare room to wait until the queasiness passed. When it didn’t she turned the eiderdown back and pressed her face to the cool sheets. And she saw them again in her mind’s eye: the two bright green capsules buried in her terrace garden like toxic seeds. Almost three weeks had passed, and, still, she couldn’t stop seeing them.
For eight years they had rearranged their lives around the threat of any possible pregnancy. She’d never so much as asked Dr Moore about another child because that small mark still stained the ceiling in the sitting room like a blood blister beneath the skin. Wasn’t it her body that had let them down? After Philip’s birth, their great openness had given way to solicitude and caution. She’d learned to feign pleasure and he’d learned to believe; they separated nervously afterwards, and quickly, as Dr Moore’s prophylactics leaflet had advised. Middle age had descended upon them too early – a delicacy, a self-consciousness better suited to late or second marriages. But now, he had done the unthinkable. He had resigned himself to the loss of her.
He must have sat, one long leg crossed over the other, in the high-ceilinged surgery. Through the window behind him, he would have been able to see the swathe of Hove Park and the lawns where he had run as a boy. Dr Moore would have folded his hands benignly against the maroon leather of his desk. Perhaps Geoffrey had avoided his old doctor’s gaze, but little by little, in the course of that clipped conversation, they would have navigated past the hard edges of the unspeakable.
Two cyanide pills. The only responsible thing.
And what had she done? Had she run up the stairs last night, clenching them in her palm, and shaken him from sleep? Had she accused him over breakfast and washed the vile things down the sink?
No. She had tucked the flap of the Lloyds envelope back into place as if it were an RSVP for a dull party to which she had resigned herself. She’d laid the envelope flat at the bottom of the tin and covered it with the sheaf of twenty-pound notes. She’d pushed the tin back into its hollow, piled the earth into place, and flattened the surface with the back of the spade. Then she’d brushed herself down, returned the spade to the soil, stepped back into the kitchen and turned the key.
The kitchen was strange, its edges moonlit and exaggerated, its surfaces bulging as if under some internal pressure of their own. The cutlery had flashed like spilled mercury in the tray on the sideboard. The coal in the scuttle had gleamed. She’d wiped her feet and slipped off her damp plimsolls.
In their room Geoffrey slept deeply, on his back. She hooked his cardigan over the bed knob and eased herself back into bed. The raw smell of earth was on her hands; washing at the sink would have set the pipes of the house groaning. She clutched one goose-pimpled arm in the other and listened to the steadiness of her husband’s breath. As she lay, eyes open to the dark, she grew conscious of a wider, looser scent. Next to him – next to his smell of heat and hair oil and Imperial Leather – she smelled of the outdoors, of the night air. Hadn’t she taken something of the night, of its feral silence, inside with her? It was hers now, even more than it was his: the secret of that tin.
Because she hadn’t been able to crush the things under the heel of her shoe. Because she couldn’t be sure that, some fearful day, she wouldn’t not be grateful for them.
The world seemed to twist into a less physical, less solid, version of itself, as if any of its elements – the moon, the Park, the sturdy arc of the Crescent – could suddenly slip from its position, like a flimsy bit of scenery in a Sunday School tableau. If she slipped – and she was already slipping – if her grip on life was anything less than firm, how would she trust herself? And if Geoffrey were to leave, how could she be trusted to keep Philip safe? (Do you show your children that you are calm and undisturbed? It isn’t enough to pretend to be calm – you must actually be so.)
In her mind’s eye, she could see the white, uneven grin of his teeth and the red of his lips. His ears were pink, translucent, and the tiny hairs on his lobes caught the light. She could almost feel his childish hands in her own, the ink-stained fingers, the dimpled knuckles. She saw again the curving fringe of his lashes as he slept and the soft brown V of hair at the nape of his neck. His cheek was velvet against her palm; the sleepy warm smell of him delicious. Sometimes, as he nodded off, she traced the delicate blue veins at his temples. All of this I made, she thought. Yet would she swallow death one day? Would she feed it to her child on a spoon piled high with jam?
She’d be no good, no good at all. Her brain always seized up; when she panicked, she froze. Who was she to stand up to any enemy person? Even her father’s rants and taunts used to strike her dumb. He’d never hit her or her mother, but the threat of violence had pervaded the atmosphere of her childhood, and in her girlhood room, as the syllables of his rage burbled up through the air vents in the floor, she used to pray before sleep that it would stop, that everything would just stop.
She doubted she was either canny or tough enough to manage on her own – the civilian reports out of Holland and Belgium had been so desperate – and again, the memory of those capsules flashed like foul treasure in her mind.
In the spare room, she lay stiffly at the very edge of the bed.
The flies continued to cast themselves at the hot pane.
It was not within her power not to love Geoffrey, but for this – this fear of herself that was now hers to carry – she could not forgive him.