Moments before locking her husband’s office door, Evelyn tried to formulate a plan. She would scribble a secret note on the Agatha Christie’s title page. ‘Dear Mr Otto Gottlieb, Please rest assured that your paintings are safe. Yours sincerely, Mrs Evelyn Beaumont.’ But even that posed too great a risk. She would shake his hand and murmur her thanks for his work. The rest would have to be understood.
In the distance, she could see a mirage of boiler suits. Was he among them? She squinted into the day. The men were working in teams, hauling oversized sandbags, sledge-hammering stone to dust, and stirring huge vats with long spades and shovels. Cement. Always more.
As she skirted the edges of the parade square, her head held high in a pose that belied her nerves, she passed the windows of the main barracks and slowed her pace, marvelling. Into their blue paint, graf-fiti had been faintly scratched. On the first was a doodle of a naked woman. Further along: names and words, some in other languages. Then, a drawing, like a child’s, of a ship foundering at sea.
She walked, clutching her stage prop, the novel. Another sketch – a lover’s arrowed heart – appeared at the next window. Her own knocked at her ribs. Which guard would she encounter at the barracks door? Her performance had to convince. And how had life been reduced to this? Otto Gottlieb wasn’t a conman. Her husband was.
Even that morning she wouldn’t have believed him capable of blackening another man’s name. And for what? To keep her away from this place, from its grim truths at the edge of the town.
A Government White Paper had been published at long last in the wake of all the controversy surrounding the camps. She’d seen it reported in a remote column of The Times. If a prisoner could demonstrate his ‘usefulness’ to the war effort, citing skills in one of eighteen categories, he could make a case for his release to the Camp Superintendent. Artists, writers and musicians were excluded from consideration, apparently because of their inherent uselessness.
An information leaflet had been prepared and distributed to all internees. Out of more than three hundred men still interned on Race Hill, her husband had released just six. The need for cement was, he’d explained to her, acute. In Brighton, there were few priorities greater than gun emplacements and public shelters. How could he justify the loss of labour at such a time?
She looked up at the windows of the barracks again. What was it like to have to scratch crudely towards the light? She stopped to squint, to wonder, for at the next window some kind of mathematical equation emerged strangely from a rectangle of blue while, on the final pane in the row, someone had scratched bar after delicate bar of music. A composition in a labour camp. And she saw again in her mind’s eye the instruments Geoffrey had locked away in his secret room: a cello, violins, an accordion, each confiscation recorded in a file in his own hand. ‘Contraband’.
How dare he?
Unfortunately, the guard at the barracks door was less daunted by her arrival than she’d hoped. ‘If he doesn’t want the book, Private, he may cut it up for cigarette paper if he chooses. But I promised the man a book and, trifling though it is, I am duty-bound. If you would summon him, I would be most grateful.’ She heard her mother’s icy tones.
‘With respect, Mrs Beaumont, we don’t have an allowance for books, and even if we did, Gottlieb’s not here.’
‘He’s been released?’ But how could that be? His operation had been on Friday. Today was only Wednesday.
‘Back to the infirmary. That bullet op of his didn’t go too well. Blood poisoning now. Could be curtains.’ He paused and smiled shyly. ‘I dessay you’ll think I’m fishing, Mrs Beaumont, but I’m partial mesself to a good Agatha Christie …’
Did she even reply? She remembered only breaking into a run – down Race Hill, through the corridor of wire, past the empty Gypsy camp, down Elm Grove and towards the square towers of the Crescent that rose up from the town like beacons of a certainty she would never reach.
Home, he thought, as he turned the key in the door, home, and the familiar overwhelmed him like a gift. The floorboards creaked re-assuringly beneath his feet. Even the sight of his own sitting room felt like a reprieve after the hours spent hidden in the pub between its sweating walls. He could breathe once more. Evelyn’s cardigan trailed over her chair, and he caught it in his fingers. The noise of the trains no longer rumbled in his bones. He laid his hat on the banister knob. Next door, through the common wall, he could hear Mrs Dal-rymple’s wireless and the booming of the BBC’s programme of organ music. How lucky he was. How lucky. ‘Evvie?’ he called, dropping his case, slipping off his jacket. ‘Philip?’
He found her in the kitchen, reaching for a jar on a high shelf, and on impulse, he bent low, circling her waist with his arms, holding on even as she flinched, as if to say to her, I will not let you go. He’d made up his mind. When he sacrificed Leah, he’d made up his mind. He’d given up Leah, though he loved her, because he loved his wife more. Evelyn. Because he loved Evelyn more. He knew it now. He would never not know it again.
She turned to him, her face cold, waxen.
‘Evvie?’
She shrugged herself free of his arms. ‘I can smell her on you, Geoffrey. I can smell her.’
It was like a punch to his lungs.
The atomizer, Leah’s scent. It had survived the smoke and stink of that pub. The possibility had never occurred to him. Her lipstick, yes. The sweat of them, yes. He’d always washed quickly at her basin. But not that, not her scent. Say something, he ordered himself. Say something. ‘What on earth do you –?’
‘Go back to London, Geoffrey. Go back to her.’
‘Evvie …’
She refused to look at him.
I’ve given her up! he wanted to yell. I’ve given her up for you!
‘There is no woman in London,’ he said coldly.
Seated on the highest stair, Philip felt the reverberations of his parents’ row rise through his tailbone. He clutched Clarence on his lap. Mrs Dalrymple had given him permission to tortoise-sit during her late-afternoon nap, and, as his father’s voice boomed in the kitchen below, Philip wished he too could retract his head into some dark, sheltered place.
When the doorbell rang, he didn’t move. The knocker started up, knocking inside his head. It was Mrs Dalrymple come to shout at them about the shouting. His parents had woken her from her nap. He descended the staircase unsteadily. He pressed Clarence to his chest, as if to make of his friend a living shield. But when he’d braced himself and heaved the door open, it wasn’t Mrs Dalrymple in her nightdress and foxtail. It was a shorter, fatter figure.
‘Orson!’
Orson had never visited his house; he, Philip, had always gone to Orson’s. But here, now, after an entirely Orson-less summer, stood Orson. Except his eyelids were puffy. His nose looked red and raw. Even when bullied at school, Orson had never cried. The most upset he’d ever been was the time Mr Stewart-Forbes had told him that the Stewart-Forbeses were not distantly related to royalty after all. Orson had taken the news badly.
‘I thought you’d never come home from your grandmother’s.’
Orson stared, his eyes pale and watery in the bouncing light of August. The blue blaze of them had gone out.
‘My parents are having a row,’ Philip added, to fill up the silence between them.
Orson’s face was hard like old putty. ‘You have to come,’ he said.