Did it make it better or worse that he emptied his wallet on her dressing table before fleeing Number 39? The entire episode was his fault. He knew it. He couldn’t help but know it. Wasn’t this the time-honoured way in which men betrayed women? He imagined it was. At the moment a man finally gained a woman’s trust, he ran. He felt smothered. He discovered the bounder within himself. And if he did manage to stay, he forever reserved the right to show her his complacency or disdain.
For years, Evelyn had been the exception. He had wanted her truly; had needed her truly. Then the war had come and that weight of need had shifted between them. He’d outgrown her, against his every expectation – it was a relief, it was a bereavement – and, in a way that they both seemed powerless to stop or explain, she’d grown smaller, angrier and more anxious. They moved these days in their own spheres. Because what could either say?
And Leah? She was a remarkable person. If he had sensed that before, he knew it, clearly, today. He even suspected he loved her and that he would miss her dreadfully. She had simply said too much; she had revealed too much. How ironic that her first real words to him were the proof of feeling he had secretly craved from her for all these weeks. Yet once they had come –
He glanced back to see her, poised and inscrutable at her window.
Obviously the boy had remembered him, at the Bank. But it was utterly unthinkable that Leah might come to know a single detail more of his real life. He couldn’t expose Evelyn and Philip to that kind of embarrassment or risk. There wasn’t a decision to make. He walked briskly on.
His train from London wouldn’t pull into Brighton for another four hours. At the usual time, he would join the shadow of his former self at the station’s exit, remember who he was, and turn left on to Trafalgar Street, just as he did every Wednesday afternoon. He’d recover his equilibrium as he fell in with the other commuters. However, until he did, he felt exposed and sick with himself. What’s more, he couldn’t be seen, at a loose end, about town.
On Terminus Road, the public bar of the Waterloo Arms was hushed and dank. He knew better of course than to ask if there was a saloon, while to inquire about a snug would have been tantamount to asking to be taken out back and beaten till his brain bled. The pub-lican stared. The men at the bar stared. They’d been eating from a tray of winkles, prising the creatures from their shells with pins and catching them fast between their teeth. At the sight of Geoffrey at the threshold, the oldest, a man with a silver-and-black widow’s peak, sighed, pushed the tray to one side, and slid a misshapen parcel beneath his jacket.
It was a stagey gesture. They were on ‘Brighton business’, and they wanted him to know it. What other kind of men were without work in the middle of a summer’s afternoon with a war on? Since the closure of the racecourse, most of the betting, the loan-sharking and the black-marketeering had moved into pubs of this kind, off the beaten track. Only last month, a determined police sergeant had taken a punch, immediately below the chin – the cleanest way to snap a man’s spine.
Geoffrey removed his hat and bent low, grateful for both his size and the distraction of his newspaper. The day’s sawdust was still fresh but the musty sweetness of a century of spilled ale, tobacco smoke and woodsmoke clung like tar to the walls. The blackout curtains were two-thirds lowered, even at this time of day, and overhead, the ceiling bulged like a tumour.
He made his way to the bar, knocking his head against a beam and swearing softly. His eyes were slow to adjust. The drinkers remained silent, apparently uninterested in either him or the reason for his intrusion. The air was thick and tacky, as if suspicion and casual ran-cour mingled with the dust. The publican and his stomach leaned corpulently over the bar, resenting the irritation of a new customer with a good fedora and a leather case. In a low voice Geoffrey ordered a stout, lit a cigarette, nodded to the winkle-eaters, and made a show of glancing at the headlines. Only as his bottle hit the bar did he reach for his wallet.
His face must have betrayed him.
Beside him, a man with small, rabbit eyes laughed into his beer. ‘She must have been very dear, sir!’
A roar went up. The joker’s hand rested lightly against the bar. A razor blade was taped to his finger, snug as a wedding ring.
A joke, Geoffrey told himself. A lucky guess. They were always going to have their fun.
‘May I interest you in a loan, sir?’ It was the oldest man, the one with the lumpen parcel. ‘I dessay you must be feeling spent this fine afternoon.’ He raised a winkle to him, caught the soft dead thing on the end of his pin, and tongued the end of it in a grotesque pantomime. Another boom of laughter rang out, and Geoffrey took in the hard, glittering eyes and the brilliant white rose in the man’s buttonhole. Only now did it occur to him. The house for ‘Gentlemen Lodgers’ was just half a mile away. For what other purpose did men like himself appear in this part of town?
‘I should be fine, thank you,’ he said to the widow’s peak. Then he flashed the publican an unsteady smile while, behind the cover of the bar, his fingers scrabbled furiously in the depth of his pockets.
Three shillings delivered him.
A raucous cheer went up.
Thank God he’d left her when he had.
It was as if, Evelyn thought, she had stepped into some deep pocket in the lining of the day.
She propped the door open with the picture of the King, and in the vague light, could just make out shelves to either side and, to the right, what might have been a coat rail. She could find no light switch, and the storeroom only grew darker as she edged her way up its length, the smell of mothballs and dust catching at the back of her throat. She stifled a cough and narrowly avoided something large on the floor – a gramophone, could it be? – only to crash into a metal filing cabinet. Was the Head of Patrol still outside?
She edged her way down the length of the room. A slim chain knocked cold against her cheek and she cried out, like a child walking into a cobweb. Quiet, she told herself in her mother’s sternest voice. Quiet. Then she reached up, yanked, and the room flooded with light.
At one of the only two tables, he sipped his stout and lit a cigarette. Four hours to kill. He had loose change enough for one more bottle. Both it and his paper would have to last. He smoothed out the front page and, at the window next to his table, he eased up the blackout curtain by inches.
‘We Shall Come! Says Hitler’.
He sighed and turned the page.
On the weekend, the German bombers over London mostly flew at a very great height and dropped their bombs at scattered points with no apparent plan. It can only be assumed that the object is to terrorize the civil population, and those targeted are best able to judge for themselves how completely these attempts fail. The destitute awaiting money after raids remain very cheerful.
Somehow, he doubted it.
At her feet, towers of cigarettes: Du Maurier, Three Bells, Player’s. Viceroy. Pall Mall. Woodbines. German brands. Russian words. Contraband. An Aladdin’s cave of it.
On page 3, ‘Parliamentary Debate’.
In the House of Lords, the Lord Bishop of Chichester petitioned for the release of internees in the nation’s labour camps. ‘Do you know, my Lords, that Jews and non-Aryan Christians who have been brutally imprisoned in camps in Germany or expelled, individuals who are not regarded as Germans at all or as human beings by Hitler and who cannot possibly be a danger to England, form the great majority of the internees?’
He drew hard on his cigarette. He had the Lord Bishop of Chichester to thank, he thought bitterly, for the fact of Otto Gottlieb. According to the tribunal notes, the Bishop had arranged for him to be released from a German camp just days before war was declared. Now Bell was denouncing Britain’s labour camps too, and the scandal was growing.
*
She could hardly take it all in. Suits. Some beautifully made. An entire rail. Shirts of every size. Three dinner jackets. In the pocket of one, an engraved silver flask. On the shelves overhead: vodka, gin, whisky, Caribbean rum. Neat rows.
He checked his wristwatch and surveyed the situation at the bar. No change there.
Churchill tells the House of Commons: ‘Our people are united and resolved, as they have never been before. Death and ruin have become small things compared with the shame of defeat or failure in duty.’
Yet below …
Reports from public shelters in poor crowded districts suggest that harsh lighting, inadequate clothing, cold concrete floors, and the noise of crying children fray people’s nerves. Public disorder and arrests grow more frequent.
On the lower shelves: a box of wristwatches. Here at the Camp, time no longer moved. A chessboard. Notebooks. Cigarette cases. Letters, tied with string. Framed photos – each face, an innocent unaware of this place in which they’d landed.
And books. Dostoevsky. Dorothy L. Sayers. Flaubert. Kafka. Best Jewish Jokes. The Waverley novels. A monograph: ‘Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity’. Agatha Christie. The Confessions of Saint Augustine.
He sipped his beer and tried to stretch out his legs without drawing attention.
In Folkestone last night, German bombers swooped out of the sun and people saw the bombs leaving the racks as the raiders dived to within a few hundred feet of the roof tops. Fatalities were few. Three laun-dresses are reported dead.
He thought of Tillie. How was she these days? he wondered fleetingly.
She’d come full circle, it seemed. At her feet again: the gramophone. Phonographs, too, piled on the shelf above with sheet music, an accordion and a mouth organ. In the corner, a cello case leaned like a woman against the wall. Three violin cases were propped alongside.
At the cabinet, she riffled through the files. Fender. Finke. Gabbler. Gas. Glick. Golden. And there: Gottlieb.
She opened his passport. Its front page was stamped with the word ‘Entartete’. Meaning? She found his Identity Card; glanced at the record of his tribunal – ‘Sachsenhausen’, ‘counterfeit’, ‘Category A’, ‘Intern No. 6031’. She lifted out a single sheet: ‘Record of Contraband and Confiscations’. The list was long and careful. She knew the hand.
oil paints
watercolour paintbox
stolen butter knife
oyster shell (paint palette)
pencil
quill pen
three brushes
lumps of chalk, removed from grounds
charcoal, stolen from Camp laundry
strips of wallpaper – stolen from former lodging house, found in lining of jacket
Images 1 to 3 on wallpaper: sea through wire; sheep through wire; Gypsy boys through wire
Images 4 to 7 on card: internee body in watercolours.
She rummaged among the boxes and shelves till she found it: a brown-paper parcel at the back of a high shelf.
She ripped the string with her teeth. The pictures were fragile in her hands: small paintings on the card backing of a soap-flakes box. Sea, yes. Sheep. Children, yes. Barbed wire, everywhere.
Then, as she’d dreaded: Mr Pirazzini, haggard and yellow with death, his eyes open in surprise. Two images.
On the edge of the blanket near his shoulder, the artist had captured the stamp of his four regulation digits. But there was something else, something less defined. His face, though emptied by death, had been softened. The watercolours had rendered him transparent, translucent, as if he were already dissolving between worlds. It was a release, she thought. Freedom. That’s what Otto Gottlieb had tried to give him.
He must have got hold of his paintbox on the night of Mr Pirazzi-ni’s death. He must have bribed someone to bring it to the infirmary or traded some risky IOU for it. One could work quickly in water-colour. She knew that much from her own primitive efforts as a girl. One trusted as much to chance as intent.
Otto Gottlieb’s shoulder had been bandaged, the bullet only just extracted, and a nerve in his arm damaged, yet he had managed this much before he was discovered.
The third was a study of Mr Pirazzini’s hands, folded on his chest, their blue veins swollen, their liver markings more vivid now than the flesh they marked. The fourth, the fourth was simply the stub of his finger, pale, waxy, yet here, in Otto Gottlieb’s vision, not incomplete, not unsightly, but precious.
She had to look away, bow her head, take a breath. It had taken her until now to believe what Otto Gottlieb had tried to tell her, to reassure her of, that afternoon from the other side of the screen. Mr Pirazzini’s death – his life, rather – had not passed without notice.
She returned the paintings to their parcel paper and reached blindly for a novel from the storeroom shelf. Agatha Christie.
She would feign ignorance of the ban; she would go to the barracks door and insist on delivering it herself. Who would argue the point with the Superintendent’s wife?
‘Thank you,’ she would humbly say to him.