by Chris Cleave
Tom was silent for a minute. “Thank you.”
“I thought you might take it harder.”
“I will miss you.”
“You certainly will. You’ll have no one to tell you to cheer up. That’s why I’m giving you Gaius Julius Caesar. Every time you look at him, I want you to imagine him saying: ‘Tom, for god’s sake cheer up!’ ”
Alistair whipped the cat around when he said this, so that it addressed Tom directly. He had sewn two large coat buttons over the sockets for eyes and they were pearlescent and exuberantly mismatched, so that the effect was of a startling and demented supervision.
“Well, I want you to have this,” said Tom, giving Alistair the jar of jam.
Alistair peered at the label. “A crude etiquette but a famous vintage, the ’39. I believe I shall lay it down. We shall open it together at war’s end, yes?”
Tom looked at him. “Will you be all right?”
“How should I know?”
“Sorry.”
“Christ,” said Alistair. “I’m sorry.”
He lay on his back on the floor, holding the jam up to the skylight.
“Tea?” said Tom after a while.
“If you’re making.”
“There’s no more sugar, I’m afraid.”
Alistair said nothing. Tom watched the scarlet and the purple light across his friend’s face.
October, 1939
SINCE MARY MUST NEITHER bump into her mother nor anyone who conceivably might, she had a day to fill on her own. Autumn had come, with squalls of rain that doused the hot mood of the war. She walked along the Embankment while the southwesterly blew through the railings where children used to rattle their sticks. In the playground at Kensington Gardens the wind scoured the kiteless sky and set the empty swings rocking to their own orphaned frequency.
How bereft London was, how drably biddable, without its infuriating children. Here and there Mary spotted a rare one whom the evacuation had left marooned. The strays kicked along on their own through the leaves, seal-eyed and forlorn. When she gave an encouraging smile, they only stared back. Mary supposed she could not blame them. How else would one treat the race that had abducted one’s playmates?
The wind that buffeted her had already blown through half of London, accruing to itself the pewtery, moldering scent of all missing things. Mary drew her raincoat tight and kept walking. In Regent’s Park the wind wrenched the wet yellow leaves from the trees. Horse chestnuts lay in their cases, grave with mildew. She supposed that nature had no provision for conkers beyond the earnest expectation that boys in knee shorts would always come, world without end, to take them home and dangle them on shoe laces and invest each one with brash and improbable hope.
Mary found a café where she was not known and sat at the back, away from the steamed-up window. Over stewed tea she took paper and pen from her bag to write to Zachary.
Just writing the address made her fret. It was one of those villages in the faraway England that London never called to mind unless some ominous thing happened—a landslip, or the birth of a two-headed foal—that brought its name into the newspaper. She did not know how parents could bear to ink such addresses onto letters for their children. Corfe Mullen, Cleobury Mortimer, Abinger Hammer: these, surely, were places of obfuscating mist and sudden disaster, from whence one knew nobody, and of which one knew nothing. Places full of country folk: eerie and bulb-nosed, smeared with chicken blood on full- moon nights.
Dear Zachary, I feel dreadful that I was not able to keep my promise to come with you, but I hope that you do understand the need for the evacuation.
She gnawed at the top of her pencil. Now that great solid London was blacked out and sandbagged and dug in, here was this awful silence that the wet wind couldn’t disguise. Autumn had come but the Germans hadn’t, after all.
I trust you have found a good family to take care of you.
The wind rattled the café’s windows, and in the absence of shrill voices she could hear the cutlery scrape as the couple by the window chased peas around their plates. They were parents, of course they were: there was no other way to accrue such intricate worry lines. Are we quite sure we have done the right thing?
On every corner Mary had passed that day there had been posters explaining that the children should remain evacuated—that the greatest Christmas gift to Herr Hitler would be to bring them home into harm’s way.
I am sure you are being jolly fearless
Mary frowned and rubbed this out. The authorities imagined that the individual was a glove, requiring only the animating hand of a slogan. She could almost see her father, in some windowless room of the House, penning the script in committee. All morning the damp southwesterly had caught at the corners of the new slogans and sent them flapping against the billboards, exposing the fossil seams of earlier imprecations in their sediment of paste.
Even though I was your teacher for only a week, I should like you to know that you are a blazing creature despite being an absolute knave, and that I slightly miss teaching you. I trust things are going well for you, but just in case they are not—and if you can bear to hold your nose and make a promise to a silly woman who has already broken her promise to you—then please guarantee me that you will write to let me know.
She signed the letter “Miss North,” tucked it into its envelope, and went out into the rain for a postbox.
She was home at five, as dusk fell. The front door swung open when her foot fell on the first of the steps that rose to it.
“Thank you, Palmer,” she said, giving him her raincoat to hang.
“How was teaching?” called her mother from the drawing room.
“Well,” said Mary, “you know children.”
“I only know you, darling, and I daresay they aren’t all so maddening.”
Mary popped her head through the drawing room door. “I am fond of you too, Mother.”
“Fortunately I had Nanny whenever it got too realistic.”
“Where’s Hilda? I saw her coat in the hall.”
“I made her go through to the scullery. I don’t care how much good these cigarettes do your chests, they are ruinous for the curtains.”
“They are slimming.”
Her mother lowered her voice. “They are slimming you, darling. They must do the opposite to Hilda.”
“Perhaps she lights the wrong end.”
“Her life is a carousel of torpid men and toffee éclairs. I tell her she should volunteer for war work, like you, or at least find a man who will.”
“She is fond of Geoffrey St. John.”
“As tripe is fond of onions, darling, but what a fright they look together in the pan.”
“Don’t be mean about Geoffrey, Mother—he kisses rather well.”
Her mother treated her to a knowing expression that Mary felt sure was pure bluff. It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with.
Mary breezed from the drawing room, blowing a kiss on the way out.
In the hallway the familiar air of the house closed around her—the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso that burnished the stair rods. A hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far within, crockery clacked as a maid addressed the detritus of afternoon tea. Coal rumbled as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium. That evening, it seemed, the fires would be lit for the first time since March.
In the scullery Hilda was smoking by the small window.
“And what of wild intrigue?”
Mary grinned. “I’m working on Tom. I shall telephone him again today. I’m sure he’ll find me a post. I keep reminding him there are scads of children who haven’t been evacuated.”
Hilda mimed a hunchback with the twisted
face of a lunatic.
“Oh stop it,” said Mary. “I see no reason why they shouldn’t all be given a chance to learn. I just need to persuade Tom.”
“He seems a drip, if you ask me. You go for dinners, you practically beg him to kiss you, yet he offers you neither his lips nor his patronage. I should move on, if I were you.”
“Yes but he is a man though, don’t you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.’
“Move on, darling, before the drip-drip leaves you soaked.”
“All it is, is that Tom is rather shy. When I’m with him . . . well, it’s nice.”
Hilda offered an eyebrow.
“No, really! Tom is lovely.”
“What’s he like?”
“Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.”
“These are English words for ugly.”
“Not at all. He’s tall with soft brown eyes. He’s quite gorgeous and I don’t think he has any idea, which is sweet.”
“Don’t forget you only care because he can offer you a job.”
“Which I need, thanks to you dropping me in it.”
“Well it’s your own fault if you won’t tell the truth to your mother.”
“Oh, but who does? You punish me too hard over one little kiss.”
Hilda affected puzzlement. “Kiss?”
“No! Oh, Hilda, don’t say you are over it already. I just spent the whole beastly day in the rain doing my penance for the Geoffrey Indiscretion.”
Hilda yawned. “Have Geoffrey, if you wish. He still flatly refuses to volunteer for the war.”
“As do you.”
“Which is why I need a man I can nobly support.”
“In absentia, though.”
“Oh, in furs.”
“Tom won’t sign up and I admire it. He . . . well, it’s just not him.”
Hilda widened her eyes. “Mary North!”
Mary smiled. “Well, and so what?”
“You are actually soft on the man!”
“No, no, but he has—oh, you know, eyes, and he is tall, and . . . well, I think it’s lovely that he thinks teaching is important, because I think so too.”
“Since when?” said Hilda.
“Since the moment they said I couldn’t. Why must we do what we’re told?”
“To keep life pleasant and convivial?”
“Says the girl smoking in the scullery! Why not say to Mother: ‘I shall smoke in your drawing room, and if you must replace those curtains then do let me pick you out a pattern that is not so exquisitely vile.’ She’d respect you for it.”
“She’d never let me visit again.”
“Which might force you to widen your circle of friends.”
Hilda blinked.
“Oh,” said Mary, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you’re the way you are, and I’m the way I am.”
“And you are determined to fall in love with Tom, apparently, just because it goes against all available grains.”
“One dinner, one lunch and three telephone calls. I hardly call it love.”
“What do you call it? Do you want him to give you the teaching job, or do you want, you know, him?’
Mary bit her lip. “Are both allowed?’
“If I said no, wouldn’t you only go and do it?”
Mary took her arm. “And we need to find you a nice soldier, do we?”
“An airman would do in a pinch. I draw the line at navy blue.”
“Nice girls do. I shall keep a lookout for you. Of course it is quite ridiculous in any case. There is no actual fighting, is there?”
“God no,” said Hilda. “They’re nice in uniform, not battle dress.”
November, 1939
AN ARTILLERY SHELL ROSE high over Salisbury Plain and slowed in the rain at the zenith of its arc. Beneath it the wide grasslands moved in a green blur, resolving around the azimuthal rim into the still marshes of Somerset and the unchanging hills of Dorset. With the scream of a fresh start the shell dropped from the sky and buried itself shallowly under the meadowland turf of the plain.
There was a deficiency in the impact fuse, and the shell did not explode. It lay in its pocket of black soil in the bed of a shallow ravine. Its mechanism trembled. The thing could barely contain itself.
Three miles distant, Alistair Heath stood in driving rain while a sergeant major screamed at him.
“WHAT MAKES MY GRASS GROW?”
“Blood, blood, blood!” the men replied.
“WHOSE BLOOD?”
“The enemy’s!”
“WHOSE ENEMY?”
“The King’s enemy!”
Alistair joined in the bayonet drill without enthusiasm. He had heard the shell falling—a stray from the gunnery range. The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
He could not help thinking of shells as things he had always collected, with his sisters, on the beaches at Lulworth and Bracklesham. When the instructors spoke of firing them, he could not help seeing the dumpy 3.7-inch howitzers projecting cockles and scallops in looping trajectories over a blue horizon. Invariably the scallops, when he visualized them, were the jaunty little things from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
“HEATH!”
“Yes?”
“PERHAPS YOU BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE ABOVE ALL THIS? ARE YOU GIVING THIS VITAL DRILL, MR. HEATH, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF YOUR GRACIOUS CONCENTRATION?”
“Oh yes, absolutely.”
“OH YES ABSOLUTELY WHAT?”
Alistair could not think what the man was driving at.
“Yes, I am giving it my full attention.”
“YES I AM GIVING IT MY FULL ATTENTION WHAT?”
The man was retarded. The wind blew over the wide miles of Salisbury Plain—hateful and blasted, pocked with the charred metal twisted in the violent shapes it had cooled to. It was a southwesterly wind, wet with brine from the Channel, sharp from the numb Purbeck Hills. It had passed through no city and picked up nothing of the scent of men and their consolations. It slowed Alistair’s brain and took the feeling from his fingers. And here the sergeant major stood infrangible in the wind and the rain—as he had stood the whole fortnight—with his chest puffed out and his stomach sucked in and his face vermilion with fury. Now he was staring at Alistair and still waiting, apparently, for him to say something.
“Oh!” said Alistair. “I mean, sir.”
The other men laughed. After a month, one shouldn’t forget the word.
“WHAT, SIR?”
“I’m sorry?”
“WHAT IS THE MESSAGE THAT YOU ARE COMMUNICATING TO SIR, SIR?”
“Oh I see,” said Alistair. “Sorry. I am giving this exercise one hundred percent of my attention, sir.”
“THAT IS BETTER,” said the sergeant major.
Alistair was glad the man felt that way. The bayonet drill resumed.
“WHAT MAKES MY GRASS GROW?”
“Blood, blood, blood!”
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU, LADIES! WHOSE BLOODY BLOOD?”
“The enemy’s blood!”
“WHOSE ORRIBLE NARZI ENEMY?”
“The King’s horrible Nazi enemy!”
“THEN KILL THE ENEMY! WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE THE POINTY END IS FOR? DO IT TO HIM BEFORE HE DOES IT TO YOU!”
The men roared and the sand oozed in clotted clumps from the bags they stuck with their bayonets. Every wound Alistair drove into the wet sacking opened a corresponding rent in his morale. How he hated this—the indefatigable tyranny of the sergeant major, and the insidious Salisbury chill that grew inside one like an infection after two weeks camped out under dripping canvas. Most of all, he hated the flicker of warmth that hatred gave you. You imagined the sergeant major on the point of your blade, and felt a horrid little twitc
h at the thought of driving it home.
He executed the bayoneting to the minimum standard that left the King’s enemy eviscerated, and when it was over and the sergeant major blew the whistle, he took his rifle and walked off a little way. He unstrapped his helmet and let the rain wash the sand off his face. He threw his pack down on a tussock to keep it off the sodden ground, and ducked into its lee to light his pipe. The damp tobacco shivered in the bowl. The matches failed one by one. In bleak exhaustion, Alistair watched the last one stutter.
“Nuh . . . need a light, Huh . . . Heath?”
It was Duggan, the only man on the course from that indeterminate age the other side of thirty. He was the one who used the standard-issue folding knife and fork to skin and bone the sardines from their ration tins, as if he were taking tea at Fortnum & Mason. He held his rifle slightly away from his body when they marched, the way one might carry a child that had wet itself.
“Thanks,” said Alistair.
With Duggan’s cigarette lighter it was easier. His pipe caught and the mild blue smoke was a comfort. It blew, he supposed, toward London.
“In the muh in the muh in the mood for company?” said Duggan.
Alistair eyed his pipe bowl. “I’m stuck for conversation, after that drill.”
Duggan sat on his own upturned pack. “If the wuh . . . wisdom of age may guide you, I pretend that the suh . . . sandbag is just a suh . . . sandbag.”
Alistair looked up. “It bothers you too?”
“The way I see it, all the bloodthirsty sh . . . shouting is more for the benefit of the muh . . . men. You’ll be an officer, I take it?”
“I hope so. I’m to begin a conversion course, assuming I get through this one without bayoneting the sergeant major.”
Duggan got a cigarette lit. “I shouldn’t think they’d necessarily muh . . . mark one down for that. Anyway, I dare say officer training will be a more suh . . . civilized business.”
Alistair nodded. “They’ll assemble us around a cheese board. The CO will ask, ‘What do we serve with this?’ and as one we shall reply . . .”