On the terrace the sun was already strong. Seed pods exploded in the heat. Dragonflies hovered. Geoffrey glanced at the grainy picture in the Sunday Times in which a middle-aged man hovered in the surf, his hand a blur of white. ‘Poor devil.’
Evelyn looked up briefly, quizzically, then returned to the Ladies’ Page. He read on. The bobbies on the beach had taken Eelco van Kleffens for a German spy, and had assumed his arrival in Brighton was a bungled affair. They had been ready to arrest him on charges of illegal entry when they found themselves obliged instead to find, between them, the Dutch Foreign Minister’s train fare to London.
Philip ate his egg. He did not tell his father he had seen the man and the handkerchief with his own eyes. He knew better than to admit to ‘roaming’ Brighton with Tubby, Alf and Frank.
Gulls wheeled over the Park. Geoffrey reached for a piece of toast and a grilled kipper. The impossible had happened. There was even a photo on the front page. Paris had fallen in just four days, Paris, yet here they were, eating Sunday breakfast on the terrace under yet another untroubled blue sky. He fished a midge from his tea, Evelyn buttered a piece of toast, Philip swung his legs idly from his chair, and next door, Mrs Dalrymple cooed to her tortoise.
He tried not to think about the Camp, about the weekly inspection tomorrow. He’d had a call. A Category A alien had tried to take his own life. He’d have to interview the man. The Home Dept. would require a report. He’d have to be sure the man wasn’t trouble.
He lowered his paper and reached for the teapot. From underneath the brim of her hat Evelyn raised her face, but only briefly. Would they ever meet each other’s eyes unselfconsciously again?
It had been difficult again that morning – earlier. If he had once imagined that she somehow brought him into being each new day, she now had the power, it seemed, to turn him to stone. Neither of them had the words. Below him in their bed, she’d maintained an attitude of willingness, but there was something new etched in her features: a pinched virtue, a shadow of disdain. ‘Shhh,’ he’d accidentally whispered aloud, ‘shhh’ – as if to ward off her unhappy thoughts. But it was no good. They had gathered around the bed like a silent jury.
Across the table, she nodded, without expression, at the front-page story. ‘They’re coming, then.’
He refilled her cup but did not look up. ‘It would seem so.’
France had fallen and yet, madly, the Ladies’ Page was still dispensing French fashion advice. This week, it was ‘L’Air Militaire’ – as if the French had epaulettes and brass buttons on their minds now. She thought about poor, beautiful Paris and the easy days of their honeymoon there, and, for no reason, she remembered how, in 1928, respectable French women, like English women, had worn gloves by day but by evening had abandoned them provocatively. As a bride of twenty, she had thrilled to the sight of bare, elegant arms and glowing skin in the nightclubs and restaurants.
At the bottom of the page, a Ministry of Information notice warned the Sunday Times’s female readership: ‘Do you know that if you fail to carry your Identity Card you may be fined anything up to £50 and sent to prison?’ Suspicion paraded as national security. She almost said to Geoffrey, Prison. It’s ludicrous. But she stopped herself. The morning’s freedom from conversation was a small, fleeting luxury, for each of them, she imagined. In any case, Geoffrey would no doubt see the sense of such precautions; these days, he saw the sense of every precaution, and she could hardly bear much more good sense. His own sensible precautions, those two pills, waited in the earth just a few feet away, like two gleaming eyes fixed on a future she didn’t want to know.
That morning, in the dim light of their room, he had moved again across the sheets towards her. She’d watched his eyes train themselves on a spot somewhere above the headboard. On and on. She’d glanced at the nightstand, at the clock, at the heads of lilac drooping in the stagnant water. ‘Shhh,’ he’d whispered, ‘shhh.’ His forearms had trembled, and ‘Shhh’ he insisted – sharp, half-audible reproaches, though she hadn’t made a sound. Then, ‘Sorry,’ he breathed, smiling weakly as if only just remembering her below him. Sweat lay clammy on his forehead. ‘Talking to myself. Mad. Sorry.’ He kissed the top of her head and pulled away, his neck blushing as he slipped off the redundant rubber. They seemed neither able to right themselves nor to speak of it.
Now she surveyed her terrace garden. Yellow oxalis, or ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as she’d known it as a child, was spreading everywhere, strangling the perennials. Without Tillie to help in the house, she no longer had the time to look after the garden, and in the early unsea-sonable heat the weeds were running riot. She reached down and yanked, then bent to take up the spade.
Geoffrey was halfway out of his chair. ‘Evvie …?’
The sight of her with the spade had spooked him. She straightened. She wanted to say, What were you thinking, planting death in our garden? But the words were like a code she was required to forget.
She stuck the spade back in the earth, to mark the dread spot by the lilac bush. She collected their plates and ushered Philip upstairs to change.
The day propelled them in and out of St Peter’s and through a luncheon for the Local Defence Volunteers. Then it was cricket in the Park for Geoffrey and Philip while she checked on neighbours’ houses; numbers 4, 5 and 8 stood empty, their owners having fled overseas. Cricket was followed by tea and stale crumpets at her mother’s and a joke from Philip. ‘What’s the full name of the crum-pet factory on Bennet Road?’
His grandmother’s lips twitched sceptically but she played along. ‘The Sussex Crumpet Factory,’ she replied.
‘No,’ laughed Philip, ‘the crumpet crumpet factory! Do you know why?’ She said she truly didn’t. ‘Because so many girls work there!’ He rocked in his chair, revelling in the pun. The fact that the crumpet-like qualities of the opposite sex were lost on him at the age of eight and a half seemed immaterial. Mrs Lawrence glared at Evelyn and, later, suggested that it was time for Philip to ‘outgrow’ the Brothers Dunn.
‘Tillie’s boys, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, though, sadly, we don’t see much of Tillie now.’
‘How do you manage, darling?’
‘We miss her.’
‘I don’t blame you. Whatever must your guests think when you open the door to them?’
Sunday dinner was cold ham and new potatoes followed by the evening buzz of the wireless. Evelyn’s book lay in her lap. Geoffrey’s head leaned wearily against the chair back. Philip drew aeroplanes at her feet. She would have said, Darling, tomorrow after school, why don’t you bring Orson to our house for a change? but Lord Haw-Haw was suddenly intoning.
She looked up. Geoffrey was already blowing garlands of smoke at the ceiling, his gaze trained on the old mark, and an inertia overcame her. She did not leave the room for air or a stroll in the Park as she had intended. She did not send Philip off to his bath and bed. She merely sat with her book unopened on her lap: The Years by Mrs Woolf; Mrs Woolf who had a Jewish husband; a Jewish husband in the Sussex countryside, just beyond Brighton. Were they at this moment listening helplessly too?
Her mother was fond of saying that, if she were a Jew, she would have left for America ages ago. What her mother was actually saying was that all Jews, including those born in England, should do the decent thing and find a country that didn’t mind foreigners. Evelyn’s father, if still alive, wouldn’t have disguised his meaning. Hypocrisy was one of the few faults of which no one could accuse him.
In the end, mercifully, the power of speech was denied him, and his illness drained him of the energy his numerous hatreds needed to sustain themselves. Eight years after his death, her mother madly claimed he’d caught the cancer, not from the toxins of fifty years of chewing tobacco, as the doctors had said, but rather from the germs bred in old wallpaper; in the ancient silk damask that covered the reception rooms at Brunswick Square. The wallpaper theory had been passed knowingly among her mother’s affluently uneducated lady friends, including Lady Sykes, who would condescend to be treated only on Harley Street. But what was the tumour in his mouth, Evelyn told herself, but the lump sum of so many vile words spoken?
Years before, by the boat to Dieppe, as her parents saw her off for her stay in France, her father had not, even then, been able to wish her well. She’d been seventeen and looking forward to a new country and the school at Auteuil. ‘I shall have you checked,’ he’d said, ‘by my own physician when you return. Don’t think I won’t.’
Her mother had pretended not to hear.
It had been her misfortune, she’d concluded when still quite young, to be the only child of people for whom contempt was the natural alternative to worry or fear. In Evelyn’s most private self, Geoffrey’s balance and reason were the evidence she needed that she was altogether different from her parents; that their toxic beliefs had not clung to her like the fabled breath of the old wallpaper.
On the wireless, Lord Haw-Haw was still prophesying doom. The assault of his rhetoric seemed, like her father’s old rants, to be coming from everywhere at once: through the stillness of the sitting room, through the high walls of their home, up through the vents and floorboards, and into the marrow of her. ‘It is surely time for the English people to reflect that if it is Paris today, it will be London in the very near future. To any Englishman, who still follows these politicians who have led him to the tragedy in which he finds himself, I can only say, “Look thy last on all these lovely things, every hour.” ’