Could she do it?
She had seen the police constable outside their front door. She’d heard the low, urgent tones, but still it didn’t make sense. A man who is about to kill himself does not wheel and deal on any black market. A man who wants to end his life does not bother to hoard cash.
Wednesday was Geoffrey’s half-day at the Bank and his weekly trip to London.
She could hear him upstairs, shaving, dressing. In a moment or two, he’d come dashing down the stairs, the bloodied specks of tissue on his face a testament to his impatience to be gone.
She reached up to the key board, took down his set, and prised the two shiniest keys from the fob.
It was the child he saw first, or rather the child’s hoop, just visible from his office door. He remembered it suddenly, sticking out from beneath Leah’s bed. Yellow, if his sense of colour could be trusted. Now, here it was, out of place, like a sickly detail from a dream.
The boy, who could only have been three or four, stood very still in the Bank’s panelled hush. He was dressed in grey woollen shorts, a matching school blazer and tie – cast-offs that had been hastily tacked up to fit a boy too young for school. When he discovered Geoffrey studying him – a tall man, a wooden pillar among the Bank’s wooden pillars – he stared back intently, with the eyes of the man in the photo.
Why was Leah here of all places? She should have been at her window, on the sill, lifting her face to any breeze; turning languor-ously as he entered the room; stubbing her cigarette out in the Eiffel Tower. She was in his Bank, not that she had any notion that it was his Bank or even that he was a banker. From his office doorway, he could hear her smoky voice and halting English, though she herself stood just out of view.
He risked it. He let himself be drawn. From a few feet away he noticed, with a barb of both concern and embarrassment, that her arms were bare. The marble white of her flesh glowed too obviously in the Bank’s half-light. He could see the scar from the gas ring on her forearm. Her dress was simple and dignified but it was obvious even to him that it had been made at home. She had neglected to wear not only a summer jacket, but also a hat and gloves, and from behind, he could see that the heels of her court shoes were worn down to their shafts.
She was explaining to his clerk that she would like to open an account; yes, she was a legal alien; here were her papers to prove it, and her Identity Card; no, she had not realized three signed references were required. She could assure him she had funds for the account.
She remained composed as always, but he could hear the suspicion rising in her voice, and no doubt Matthews could hear it too. It wasn’t difficult to understand. She feared the paperwork was a ruse to keep foreigners out, and in truth it was.
She glanced over her shoulder to check on the boy, looking without seeing anything other than his obedient grip on the hoop. He stared solemnly at his mother’s back, and in the discreet gloom, amid the restrained queues and the penumbra of the counter lamps, Geoffrey drew closer, close enough to see, in the pool of lamplight, that the notes she presented to Matthews were large.
The question cut through him. Paid to her by whom?
From a few feet behind, over the wooden slats of the grille, Geoffrey caught the clerk’s eye and nodded his sanction. A benign gesture, Matthews would have assumed. An official pardon for non-Englishness. Then he smiled tersely at one or two clients in the queue, appeared to check his wristwatch against the clock on the wall, and withdrew to his office, his heart banging like a bull at the gate of his chest.
It was, she thought, as if all the world were parched. The soil of Race Hill lay cracked and pale. Flies quivered over dried-out piles of dung but there were no sheep left, for there was almost nothing to graze. She strode higher, towards the course, watching her step as a matter of habit, on the lookout for the wild orchids and moon daisies of late summer, but only the rangy husks of toadflax clung on.
(Is your journey really necessary? Think before travelling!)
Occasionally the ground crumbled away as she walked; not even that seemed solid these days. Beneath the soles of her summer shoes, she could almost feel the chalky scarp rising through the turf, like a skeleton, bone-bright. The hill, that August, no longer knew bees in its wild thyme, or the blue flashes of butterflies, or skylarks lifting off from their nests. Everything was burned out. Yet the day was as muggy as a Turkish bath.
She had submitted to the morning’s knitting circle and the endlessly patient clacking of all those needles. She had procrastinated, queuing for fresh plums and blackberries, only to leave the grocer’s with half a dozen bruised cooking apples for which she’d paid a fortune. She hadn’t believed she would actually go that afternoon until she started the climb up Elm Grove.
It was Wednesday. Geoffrey was certainly on his train to London; there was no risk of discovery or of him telephoning her at home. Still she’d hesitated. How could she bear to return to the Camp? She wanted only to forget the sight of Otto Gottlieb’s ruined back, for what could she do, even had she any energy left to think about it? What’s more, there was Geoffrey’s warning of Otto’s criminal his-tory; a cautionary tale told for her benefit. Yet that didn’t render it untrue. In any case, it was impossible now to visit the man, whoever he really was, and she no longer had the desire. Desire for almost anything was leaching away. These days, her plans and hopes seemed only to point towards her own foolishness. Better to forget. Better not to want.
Yet here, once again, she was climbing Race Hill, and as the white roof of the grandstand came into view, she stopped, panting for breath, and turned to look back over the town. She could change her mind. There was no requirement to carry on. Indeed it would be sensible to turn back.
A heat haze had settled over the bowl of Brighton, a yellowy fug of smoke and steam that rose like a stale sigh of purpose from, she supposed, the station, the munitions factory and the ack-ack guns. She turned her face skyward. Above her, above the hill, a sparrow-hawk rose, its wings outspread as if in an act of will over gravity. She shielded her eyes and squinted.
A lone female. She could see the bars on its breast.
She fumbled for the two keys in her pocket – still there, jingling on the loop of twine she’d cut as soon as he’d left the house.
She had come this far.
*
The humidity aside, it was good, he thought, to be out, good to have departed the Bank and its stately gloom. He took long strides, out-pacing most of the lunchtime wanderers on the Queen’s Road. His travel pass and Identity Card were safely stowed in his breast pocket, his attaché case was in one hand, and he clutched his newspaper gamely under his arm. The platform for London would be Number 4 as it was always Number 4. First Class would be empty at this hour, which meant that the journey would be time to gather his thoughts over a cigarette or two, and to clear his head of the morning’s visitation by Leah and her child. Why feel jangled? She had a right to go about her business; to shop; to post letters; to present herself at a bank.
He picked up speed. Somewhere on the far side of the station, on the shimmering tracks ahead, whistles were blowing and a Klaxon sounded. He’d been warned there were delays. Up the line, hundreds of burst tins of jam were wreaking havoc following a hit to a freight container in the early hours. Still, delay or no delay, he would board a train as he did every Wednesday. He would watch the tawny fields of Sussex flicker past his window and, thirty minutes from Victoria, he would cast his eye over his weekly report for Head Office.
Only he didn’t. At the end of Queen’s Road, he carried on walking, head bowed, past the station, making the steep climb up Terminus Road. He passed the camouflage factory where the girls spilled out for lunch, green-handed and green-faced; then the Waterloo Arms where sawdust for the floor was being delivered and spread for the day.
There would still be time to make his train if he chose to, particularly given the delays. He had only to turn around and revert to type. There would then be no need for a telephone call to Seymour-Williams first thing tomorrow. No excuse to be made (the jam, the ridiculous jam). But when he looked up, blinking himself out of thought, he discovered he was already standing in the road where Number 39 stood back from the other houses, like a plain girl at a dance.
She wasn’t expecting him.
Evelyn stood once more at the mouth of the tunnelled entry. At least she and the young sentry had grown accustomed to one another. They exchanged a few words, then she followed him up the corridor of wire while a fighter plane chugged overhead. ‘No books today?’ he asked without waiting for her reply. He turned his raw, boyish face to the sky, squinting at the vapour trail through the criss-crossings of wire. ‘Ours,’ he said. ‘Not to worry, Mrs Beaumont.’
‘I just need to collect a few of my things from my husband’s office.’
She followed him up the hill and out the tunnel’s other end, where he quickly assessed the grounds for her benefit – ‘All right from here, Mrs Beaumont?’ – and returned down the hill to his post.
The first of the two keys turned cooperatively in the lock, and the relief was immense. How easily she was in, through the stable-style door of his office. In the previous life of the racecourse, this room had actually been the VIP cloakroom. She had a vague memory of passing her fur across it to a smiling attendant one cool spring evening and asking Geoffrey to keep the ticket safe in a pocket. ‘Don’t dare lose it, will you now, duck,’ the woman had said to her as she admired the fur, ‘or I’ll be looking the business mesself next Saturday night.’
Evelyn eased the door shut behind her, seated herself in her husband’s chair, and allowed herself simply to breathe. She considered the room. The HQ. The Superintendent’s office. The rows of coat rails were long gone of course but, even given its functional history, the room was a place of comparative privilege. The furniture, firstly, wasn’t nailed to the floor. On the far wall, the King looked out in stern endorsement from a huge framed photograph. The walls had been freshly painted in a creamy white, and there were two windows, each of which, she could see, opened perfectly well. One window presented a view of the sea; the other overlooked what had been, in another lifetime, the square of the racecourse. The light bulb had a proper shade and was not dimmed with offensive orange paint. There was a washbasin on the far wall, a bar of Imperial Leather soap, and a clean hand towel, where presumably, each Monday evening, before leaving, her husband washed his hands of it all.
If she were a man in Geoffrey’s position, would she be any different?
She didn’t know.
The desk was bare save for a plumbing invoice on a steel spike and a stack of manila files in an ‘out’ tray. She shuffled through them: Brandt, Frankel, Ganz, Montefiore, Oster, Pirazzini. There he was, his name in green ink, while at the bottom, in a mimeographed box, someone had rubber-stamped the file ‘Closed’. Inside, clipped together, lay her old friend’s passport, his Identity Card, and the record of his brief appearance before the Enemy Alien Tribunal Board the year before. The paperwork was minimal. The less said. On the final page, two neat sentences in black ink stared back at her: ‘Death by natural causes. No reparations due from War Damages Commission.’
The man she shared a bed with had written one sentence after the other, tidy as sums on a balance sheet. If she felt a jolt of contempt for him, she felt only slightly less for herself. She should have insisted that Mr Pirazzini be moved to hospital. That would have been a far more valuable show of friendship than her determined efforts to read to him. Otto Gottlieb, conman or not, had been right to laugh at her.
She rattled one of the deep steel drawers – locked. As was the next. And the third. The second key on her loop of twine opened nothing. Her hunch had been wrong. The gamble of the journey had been pointless. Outside the pot-brush head of the Head of Patrol passed the window, and she sank low in the chair. The ridiculous truth was that she had no idea what she’d imagined she’d find.
Geoffrey knocked a second time, and a cow-eyed girl of about sixteen opened the door, peeping over her duster as if it were a feather fan and she a showgirl. ‘Are you inquiring about a vacancy, sir?’
She yelped as he brushed past her and sprinted up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Leah, it’s only me,’ he said, speaking through her door.
There was a long, sickening pause.
‘I am with someone.’ Her voice was low and heavy.
It was early, just past midday. Yet – someone. Like a kick to the groin.
But if he was here, why not another? His mind skidded.
He had started back towards the staircase when he heard the key turn on the other side of the door. Christ.
What choice did he have but to recede back up the corridor and allow her guest to beat his retreat down the stairs? Who wanted to see another man here? To imagine. He disappeared around a corner and sank back into its shadows, willing the moment to pass. The carpet smelled of mildew. A plate with bread crusts sat outside one door; a stained teacup outside another. The walls were crammed with faded pastoral scenes of happy shepherds and shepherdesses. He shouldn’t have come.
Unbearable minutes passed. She didn’t call to him. When he finally risked a return, he merely found the door open.
He hovered in the doorway, noting the cheap flowers that stood stiff in a vase on the dressing table. Were they red? He could distinguish neither reds, pinks nor greens, but it hardly mattered.
The dress she’d worn earlier in the day, at the Bank, hung on a wire hanger from the curtain rail. Now she wore only her dressing gown and her leather mules. She was spraying the room with its mist of scent. The smell, as always, was clean and crisp; lemon and cedar-wood. Evelyn had never worn scent, and the discovery of it on Leah – on her neck, at her cleavage, her collarbone, behind her earlobes – had, in itself, been enough at first.
What was this thing that had happened to him?
The Experiment, as he had once laughingly described it to her, had been short-lived. The ‘cure’ had been quick and decisive. Whatever it was that had followed – love, lust or some wordless fascination – whatever it was, it had taken possession of him quickly. He had expected to feel queasy, remote, those first few times, there with a stranger whom he would pay within the hour. This wasn’t the 43 Club, after all, and he wasn’t twenty-one and numb with whisky. There was Evelyn; there was Philip. Yet the startling revelation had been, not how mechanical the experience had felt, but how intimate.
Had he deluded himself? He lingered now at her threshold, painfully aware of the reason for the scent; of her back to him; of her silent displeasure and her interrupted appointment; also, of the picture on the shelf of her husband or lover, once again not turned to the wall. Why had he come? Why hadn’t he caught his train? The sight of her with that shiny silver atomizer revolted him. A gift, a gift, but from whom? Across the room, the window was open, as ever and, as the curtains lifted in the breeze, the dress on the rail rose too, revealing what she’d assumed she had managed to hide: her son, curled small on the windowsill, clutching a yo-yo.
If the boy recognized him from that morning, he gave no sign.
On Geoffrey’s office wall, George VI gazed down at her from his vast loneliness. It is time for you to go, my dear, he seemed to say. The midday sun had passed overhead, and the room had started to grow dim. She stared ahead, trying to determine in her mind the moment to leave, the moment when she might cross the grounds and draw as little attention as possible. What had she supposedly come to collect? How foolish of her not to have planned her subterfuge better.
Even as she reproved herself, her mind was idly wondering how Geoffrey, a man impatient with shoddy workmanship, could tolerate the crack that ran up the far wall of his cloakroom-cum-office right beneath the picture of the King. It was unlike him not to insist that the wall be replastered.
She stood and walked slowly across the room.
She reached up and removed the King from the wall.
The crack wasn’t a crack but a groove.
Of course.
The wall wasn’t a wall but a door. Nailed to it was an engraved plate. VALUABLES. At eye level, a brass key-cover glinted.
He removed his hat and, from his awkward seat on the edge of her bed, watched her wander over to the dressing table and pour water into a pot. The kettle on the gas ring was whistling a fury. ‘Why come? Is not your time.’
Her directness, so entirely un-English, embarrassed him. He felt his throat tighten, his mouth dry. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, but he didn’t offer to leave.
He’d been trying to make light of his unscheduled visit, smiling at her son; teaching him, as he’d taught Philip, how to ‘walk the dog’ and how to put the yo-yo ‘to sleep’. But the boy had only scowled and refused to tell him his name. Nor did Leah insist.
‘I am sorry,’ she said flatly. ‘His English, not good. And he is too young for such tricks. Also, if you row with wife, you cannot stay here. Is against rule.’
‘I wouldn’t dream –’
‘Tea?’ she said, looking past him.
‘If it’s no trouble.’
She rolled her eyes, then reached for two cups from the shelf, and poured, before the tea had had time to steep. She passed him his cup and seated herself on the bed beside him, where they sipped in silence. Her beauty mark, he noticed, was missing from her left cheek. Her back was poker straight. The boy had retreated again to the window-sill, and now she spoke gently to him in their own language.
Geoffrey listened and watched, feeling a foreigner’s sense of exclusion. The boy nodded with a gravitas that was disconcerting, almost unpleasant, in so young a child. Above them, the man in the photo watched from the shelf, disapproving and severe, and in that headlong moment, Geoffrey understood what it was that had impelled him past the station and up the soot-stained hill of Terminus Road to her door. After seeing her in the Bank, after watching her smooth out those notes so painstakingly on the counter – after imagining their source – he’d needed to lay claim to her again. To make her his own. It was a sort of fever. He knew it was. But the truth was, there on the edge of her bed, no matter how casual he endeavoured to seem, he felt like a gun about to go off.
He reached across the gap between them and, out of view of the child, gingerly stroked the side of her thigh.
She set down her tea, rose, and moved to the window. ‘He like trains, don’t you, Misha? He watch that bridge on and on. Some time he forget to eat! Me, I no want trains. I want sea, ocean. I come to Brighton for sea, as when I am small child. A window by the sea. But trains, trains, trains! And now, beach closed!’ She ruffled her son’s hair. ‘But he happy, and I thank God. And now, we sleep only to noise of trains at night. If no noise, if too quiet, we wake, eh, Misha?’
She scooped him into her lap, perched herself on the edge of the sill, and spoke to the window. ‘Out there, trains and aeroplanes are toys … Everything, simple. This is why I come here. So he have simple. Me, when child, not simple. I am born in Odessa. On Black Sea. A resort. Like Brighton but more, much more beautiful. In Odessa we all think, ah, I am in Italy. You should see our buildings. And everybody is in Odessa. Is port. How you say? Free port. Turks, Russians, French, Germans, Armenians, Tatars, Jewishes, Polishes. They come, they stay. Yes? My father is Jewish, my mother is Russian Orthodox. In Odessa, this is nothing. No … is good. They meet in orchestra of Odessa Opera Theatre. Very famous the-atre. My mother, on violin. My father, piano. He is from old family in Odessa. Important family. He study at Conservatoire with Witold Maliszewski – yes?’ She turned.
Geoffrey smiled weakly. ‘I am a philistine. You must excuse me.’
‘I am five years old when Revolution come. Is very bad for my father. His family, too old, too much money. He is a …? How you say?’ She took aim with her finger.
‘Target.’
‘Yes. His brothers are shooted into holes they must dig first for their own bodies. Go, go, go, everybody say to my father. So he go then, fast, to Poland. I am too young. Four years my mother wait in Odessa. Is terrible. When I am nine years old, at last we travel with Maliszewski himself to Warsaw. On train, in compartment, I ask him why we must go, I do not want to go, Warsaw has no sea, and he tell me that Red Army men not like music and better we go where people like. My mother tells me Ssh, ssh, Leah, but Maliszewski smiles into his old, yellow beard and commands for me hot chocolate. Funny, yes, I remember? Then, when I am twelve years old, I study with him, like my father before me, only now at his Chopin Music School in Warsaw. When I am fifteen, he make big konkurencja. Many students. Many countries.’
‘Competition.’
‘Yes. Competition. I am good. Not best. But good.’
And he thought again of her long fingers, of the unexpected elegance of her hands, of their expressiveness – their touch.
He shifted on the soft edge of the bed and looked again at the face of the man in her photo. ‘You haven’t mentioned your brother.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No brother. No sister,’ as if she had forgotten entirely the import of the question and her previous lie.
She set Misha on the floor and reached for her tea. ‘Then, all change again. You understand me? Suddenly, am I Jew? Am I not Jew? In Warsaw, quickly they want to know. Like you here first time. Why this question? For me, for people from city like Odessa, this is like game, as if you demand: are you more or less than five feet five inches in your height? As if everyone pretend, with hard faces, but soon they will say, Ha ha, joke, of course joke! What! You believed us? You were frighted?
‘My father dies one month before Misha is born. Is terrible to bury father and have baby in such days. My mother, as I say, is Russian Orthodox. I tell her, good, bravo, I am Russian Orthodox, and if I am, Misha too. But my father is known in Warsaw for many years. My mother say, Leah, if there is any question, there is no question. You, Misha, you are Jewishes.
‘And so, England. In London, I try for teatime orchestra in this Boots and that Boots. But no job. I try pubs, too many pubs, but no one want me for piano. They say, my English not good. True, I say, but music speaks, not me. Yes, they say, but no one need Chopin in England when war come. The Red Cross in London has too many peoples. So we get train, to Brighton, the sea’ – she turned back to the room – ‘to here.
‘Bad, you think. Yes, bad. Of course, bad. Every day I hate it. I miss my mother. And my piano. But is not for ever.’ She searched his face. ‘Understand me, there is worse. There is very much worse.’ She gathered Misha to her.
He nodded but, suddenly, her gaze oppressed him, like some dimly remembered hot towel thrown over his head in a childhood illness. Her gaze, her voice, the detail – it was all too much. The more she revealed, the more he felt trapped in that small room with the weary rhythms of her voice and the misfortunes of her history. It was shameful but undeniable, and in spite of himself, in spite of his efforts to blink the image away, he saw her once more, pressing and smoothing those large notes on the counter at the till.
On the window seat, Misha was cupping his mother’s ear and whispering something to her, in Polish, Geoffrey presumed. She smiled quizzically, first at her son, then at him. ‘What mean this?’ she asked, her face as unguarded, as trusting as she was confused. ‘Misha say you live in the dark house. Today, in this morning, he call bank “the dark house”.’ She bounced Misha on her knee and smiled. ‘I don’t understand.’