Sylvia’s mother-in-law’s house was tucked away in a secluded valley in the North Downs. ‘Come!’ Sylvia had insisted. ‘We’ll have the run of the place. Martha is doolally and with us in town these days, but Tom still can’t bear to part with the old heap. I expect that when London is lost, he’ll insist we maroon ourselves out here.’ She raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘I’ll kill myself, of course.’
It was dark so early these days. How long, Evelyn wondered, had the two of them been sitting there in what Sylvia called ‘the nook’? The teapot was cold, the spiky heads of the teasels in the vase on the hearth seemed to be blackening with the heat, and little by little, the fire and the spectacle of each log’s collapse was overcoming her like a drug.
‘You do still love him, Evvie …’
She couldn’t be sure if Sylvia was asking her or assuring her, and for a fraction of a moment, a moment that arrived like an illicit gift, she felt the relief of simply giving up. Love whom?
When she looked up, Sylvia was beating back her mother-in-law’s Pekingese with the fat roll of The Times. The dog would neither stop begging nor yapping, yet she felt strangely, pleasantly detached. She watched as Sylvia bent down and surrendered to the thing an entire plate of biscuits. ‘Fortnum & Mason’s,’ Sylvia declared. ‘That should shut it up.’
‘Well, it’s either that or ring that nice man the taxidermist.’ Sylvia gave a nod to the stag’s head on the wall, threw another log on the fire, and sank back in her chair. ‘Do you still love him, Evvie?’
She blinked, shaking out her hair, as if she’d been caught in a sudden shower. ‘I must … Or I will again.’ And she meant it. Since the concert in the Camp and his small displays of tenderness, something – a warmth of some kind, or the memory of it – had been restored. She no longer seemed to recoil at his touch, and not only because she was too weary to sustain any pitch of feeling. No one belonged only to themselves, after all. Compromise made life possible.
So why then at night did her thoughts bolt? It is too hard between us, Geoffrey. You don’t love me. Not truly. Roll up the razor wire. Roll back the oil drums. Let them land on the beach. Give every invader a stick of Brighton rock and a souvenir postcard. Get the orchestra back on the West Pier. Muster up a fanfare and go. Go off to your war … Because it’s time. Surely for the two of us, it’s time.
Over the ruins of their tea, Sylvia lit a cigarette and chattered on. She and Tom had been at the Café de Paris the night before. Vivien and Larry were out and married at last – no longer a scandal. ‘So that was dull. But Vivien had the appetite of a wolfhound. Who would think to look at her? She ate oysters by the plateful and then an entire Steak Diane. When the waiters flambéed the thing at their table, you’d have thought it was Atlanta burning all over again. Why, I’ve never seen such shameless over-acting.’ Sylvia tapped ash into a cut-glass vase. ‘Someone had to upstage her.’
Evelyn smiled. She felt herself coming to. ‘You are incorrigible.’
‘Me? I simply danced a dance with a beautiful woman in a dinner jacket, and it seems that no man there, including Olivier, could take his eyes off us.’
‘No man except Tom of course. He removed himself to the Gents, where he read his daily stack of memoranda, I expect. He loves and deplores the bohemian in me in equal measure. But he always forgives me, because that is what we do, isn’t it, darling girl?’ She drew hard on her cigarette. ‘Now tell me, who was Geoffrey’s woman?’
‘I don’t have the faintest,’ she said. Her own voice sounded strange to her. ‘Someone in London.’
‘No.’ Sylvia stabbed at the fire with the poker. ‘Tom would have said. He and Geoffrey have their drink every Wednesday at the Traveller’s Club, on The Mall, then Geoffrey goes direct to the station.’
‘Tom wants to spare me, I imagine.’
‘Possibly, but he wouldn’t spare me. There wasn’t a woman in London, not unless Geoffrey was suddenly taking a later train home. There wouldn’t have been the time, not between the Traveller’s and his arrival back to you.’
‘Well there was a woman. He confessed as much.’ Brighton then. She had to shut her eyes, force the images back – and the smell of that scent.
‘Evvie, darling’ – Sylvia pushed the tea things out of the way with one sweep of an elegant arm – ‘these things mean nothing, you know.’ She leaned across the table. ‘I mean, they mean nothing to them.’
She felt the line of her mouth harden. ‘Of course not.’ It wouldn’t do to sound like a child.
‘So you’ve forgiven him?’
She forced a laugh. Then suddenly, overwhelmingly, she understood. For all of Sylvia’s displays of nonchalance and uncon-ventionality, she was on a mission. She had commiserated. She had displayed indignation and sympathy. Now she was telling her, in the tone of her voice, in the blue-grey slate of her gaze, that it was time to accept. To behave. To toe the line. That was why it had had to be a weekend visit. In the country. With neither escape nor diversion. ‘Do you think Sylvia might have a word?’ Geoffrey would have said to Tom. ‘Darling’ – Tom to Sylvia – ‘would you mind speaking with Evelyn when the time is right?’
‘Have you, Evvie? Forgiven him.’
‘I haven’t sued for divorce yet, if that’s what you mean!’
Sylvia eased herself back in her chair, removed a book from the bookcase, and withdrew a slim bottle of gin. ‘Sweetie, you know very well that’s not what I asked.’
The Unit had had to burn out all vegetation and roots before digging the shafts down. Now, only the white wooden marker of the UXB cross remained, ghostly among the blackened stumps of the trees and hedges.
It was one of those November days, Geoffrey thought, when the sun was destined never to appear. A staff sergeant stood solemnly at the opening to the main shaft, intent on his listening equipment. Geoffrey, an official observer, stood at the edge of the blighted field as the Lieutenant updated him. It was day three. They’d located the thing at last. The sterilizer was on standby. A block and tackle had been slung over the joist of a neighbouring house. They had their removal lorry at the ready – a cattle truck the Army had commandeered. Early that morning, as they’d driven it through the town, the men on the squad had poked their heads through its bars and mooed at the Saturday shoppers. Now, in the gloom of Shaft 3, forty feet underground, two of them were trying to fit a clock-stopper to the belly of a bomb.
It wasn’t only a matter of extracting a ticking fuse, which was hellish enough, said Lowell. Now the fuses themselves were booby-trapped with wire-sprung switches. Even if their clocks were stopped, they could still blow if moved. In one test, a pencil tap on the bomb case had set the thing off.
Every house and shop within a radius of eight hundred feet had been cleared. Traffic had been stopped. The depth of a bomb, Lowell mumbled, depended on the soil. Clay offered greater resistance to the bomb but it also made ‘the dig’ more difficult. If the disposal crew weren’t blown sky-high, they could still be buried alive.
The Army was low on timber for shoring up the shafts. They’d had to forage in bombed-out houses for floorboards and doors. Worse still, the war effort couldn’t spare trained sappers. Lowell had to make do with retired soldiers, young men deemed unfit for ordinary duties, a watchmaker and a pair of gravediggers. They worked in relays of two for twenty minutes apiece to minimize the risk. Remarkable men, Lowell said.
The month before, he’d lost ten in one blow. Bomb Disposal Section 28. He went to check the time on his right arm, then remembered it wasn’t there. His sleeve dangled uselessly. ‘Almost dark and not yet half past three.’
Those who waited their turn to go into the shaft seemed neither white-faced with nerves nor grim with resignation. Geoffrey watched them. They didn’t appear to be gathering up memories of a first kiss or their father’s hands or a child’s sleeping face. They looked bright-eyed; their pupils were wide, their cheeks ruddy, like men in love. Like men on the edge of something.
He envied them that. In their company, he felt inert and unformed, a cipher, while they moved through the November gloom and across the wasted field with a strange grace, like men half made of light.
*
Orson came up with the plan. They were to meet in the Park on the Saturday Philip’s mother was away in the country and his father was out on Army business.
Philip scooped charcoal out of the Park’s bonfire pit. Orson arrived with a mortar and pestle and the two packets he’d lied for at the chemist’s: flowers of sulphur (for his brother’s boils) and salt-petre (so his mother could cure a side of pork). Philip fetched his father’s box of matches from the mantel. Orson produced the special ingredient: cordite strips extracted from bullets and sold for tuppence a piece behind the bicycle shed at the Grammar.
The case was a sardine tin. Orson had soaked the fuse in saltpetre overnight.
The day was overcast and grim. The Park was empty. No one was about. Clarence was asleep in his annual hibernation.
Orson examined him. ‘His shell is as good as a bunker. Besides, all his bits are tucked in.’
Philip agreed that they were. The idea was to measure Clarence’s flight-path.
It was louder and brighter than they’d expected. The horseshoe shrubbery exploded, and it seemed like a dream. Then Clarence was in pieces, Philip was crying, and Orson told him there wasn’t time for that. Nothing made sense. Orson started to run. Philip had never seen him run before. When he returned, it was with the box that had been Clarence’s bed. It always sat next to Mrs Dalrymple’s scullery wall.
Orson started to dig in the ground with his hands.
Philip shivered. ‘That’s the turnip plot.’
‘So?’
‘So people will dig for turnips.’
Back on the Beaumonts’ terrace, Orson pointed to the spade that was stuck upright in the soil. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Deep enough so your parents won’t find it.’ But Philip didn’t move – he couldn’t make himself – so Orson sighed and reached for the spade himself. When the spade hit metal, his eyes popped behind his glasses.
MCDOUGALLS SELF-RAISING FLOUR. FOR PASTRIES, CAKES, SCONES, PANCAKES & BOILED PUDDINGS.
Philip took it from him. ‘It’s not yours.’
‘Then you open it.’
He met Orson’s eye. ‘You killed Clarence.’
‘So did you.’ Orson nodded at the tin. ‘Are you going to open it or not?’
They had to bash the lid against the terrace table. Then Orson’s hands plunged in. ‘Money,’ he said.
‘You can’t have it.’
Orson fished at the bottom. ‘What the …?’
‘You’re not allowed.’
Orson lifted the flap of the envelope.
Philip peered in. ‘Medicine?’
‘No …’ Wheels and sprockets spun behind Orson’s eyes.
‘Sweets?’
‘Definitely not sweets …’
‘My father will be home soon.’
Orson slipped the pills into his shirt pocket.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I might need them.’
‘What for?’
‘For Hal. If he doesn’t get better.’
‘You said they weren’t medicine and you said Hal won’t get better.’
‘Happier. If he doesn’t get happier. He might not want to go on if things stay like they are. He hates it. The bedpan and the sponge baths and Mother dressing him. He hates it all. And her kisses before bed. And the way she cuts and combs his hair. And that phonograph … I told her, “You’re making everything worse!” I said, “You’re nasty, Mother! He doesn’t belong to you!” and Father locked me in the telephone cupboard all night as a punishment.’ He fixed Philip with a wild stare: ‘Remember … You promised. You promised you’d help.’
Orson had said nothing of it since that summer day but now he was saying it – he’d remembered – and worse still, there was a dirty old tin buried in his garden, and a pair of bright pills in Orson’s pocket that didn’t make anyone better, and worse than everything, worse even than the broken mess of Clarence, was the promise he’d made to Hal that day … We have to get Hal a Jew.
Orson chose a spot, among the dead stalks of autumn, for Clarence’s grave. ‘It’s jolly good the Park is empty today,’ he said. ‘If anyone asks, say you heard the blast and it was a lorry backfiring.’
Philip’s teeth chattered. The force of the blast still trembled in his jaw. A cold drizzle fell. ‘I killed him,’ he whispered. Because Orson was right, it was his fault because Clarence had been his friend, not Orson’s.
‘He died in his sleep,’ Orson said. ‘That’s the best way to die.’
‘I killed him.’ How Mrs Dalrymple would hate him if she knew.
Orson checked the pills in his shirt pocket and buttoned his coat. ‘Never mind. I won’t tell anyone what you did.’ His eyes were sticks that poked.