A hundred yards from the Palace Pier, Geoffrey let himself loiter under the canopy of a derelict oyster stand. The day was overcast, the sea the colour of gunmetal, and the beach abandoned. CLOSED FOR THE WAR BY ORDER OF THE CORPORATION. The signs had been hammered to the railings down the length of the prom.
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.