Free Unexploded by Alison MacLeod

no,’ he’d muttered impatiently. ‘The wheel goes round. The wheel goes round.’ His mottled hands had sketched circles on the air,his left ring finger lost, presumably, to an accident with the shears or a sewing machine.
    Stooped behind the Singer, his wife had smiled, lifted her foot from the pedal and said, with an accent that was still heavily Italian, ‘Please, Mr Beaumont. My husband is he-goat, and life is short, no?’ Behind his back, she imitated Mr Pirazzini’s circling finger, but in a punning motion, beside her ear. Loco , that finger said, but her eyes were tender.
    She was probably on the Isle of Wight. In the women’s camp. No letters between spouses.
    He’d laughed that day all those years ago and had put away his wallet. ‘Well then, will I at least be able to persuade you to accept my custom?’
    Mrs Pirazzini returned to the sleeve beneath her needle. Mr Pirazzini spat the pins into his four-fingered hand. ‘Mr Beaumont, do you not know? A tailor, like an undertaker, always accepts the custom of a tall man.’
    So he invented something about a pair of new flannel trousers that needed cuffs. Mr Pirazzini shrugged obligingly. He’d had no idea then that the old man was booked weeks, even months, ahead; that he had clients who drove down from London.
    The wheel goes round, the wheel goes round. Now, in the barracks, the old man waved the shiny stump of his finger over the endless row of beds. ‘Mr Beaumont, shall we agree on one thing? You will not pity me my accommodation, and I will not pity you the drape of that jacket.’
    Enemy aliens. It was necessary, said Churchill, to ‘collar the lot’.
    A dirty pall of smoke hung over the Crescent. On the pavement below, in the middle of their quiet street, she watched men inface-shields and asbestos gloves huddled over tools and generators. Then a stocky man raised a gloved hand, a fury of sparks erupted into the street, and a section of the wrought-iron spears of her fence collapsed, ringing out as it hit the pavement. It was the same all over Brighton that June. The metal drive. What more could they take? ( Either you sacrifice your selfishness for the nation – or you sacrifice the nation to your selfishness. )
    Inside, the house was as close, as airless, as a forcing jar. Two large flies flung themselves at the hot glass panes. She lowered herself on to the bed in the spare room to wait until the queasiness passed. When it didn’t she turned the eiderdown back and pressed her face to the cool sheets. And she saw them again in her mind’s eye: the two bright green capsules buried in her terrace garden like toxic seeds. Almost three weeks had passed, and, still, she couldn’t stop seeing them.
    For eight years they had rearranged their lives around the threat of any possible pregnancy. She’d never so much as asked Dr Moore about another child because that small mark still stained the ceiling in the sitting room like a blood blister beneath the skin. Wasn’t it her body that had let them down? After Philip’s birth, their great openness had given way to solicitude and caution. She’d learned to feign pleasure and he’d learned to believe; they separated nervously afterwards, and quickly, as Dr Moore’s prophylactics leaflet had advised. Middle age had descended upon them too early – a delicacy, a self-consciousness better suited to late or second marriages. But now, he had done the unthinkable. He had resigned himself to the loss of her.
    He must have sat, one long leg crossed over the other, in the high-ceilinged surgery. Through the window behind him, he would have been able to see the swathe of Hove Park and the lawns wherehe had run as a boy. Dr Moore would have folded his hands benignly against the maroon leather of his desk. Perhaps Geoffrey had avoided his old doctor’s gaze, but little by little, in the course of that clipped conversation, they would have navigated past the hard edges of the unspeakable.
    Two cyanide pills. The