by Chris Cleave
Sparrows classroom was closest to the cellar. She gauged what needed to be done. The boards would have to come off the tall windows, for a start. If a raid came—well, that was what the cellar was for, but until then her classroom would be a place of light. And the dust would have to be swept, and the mustiness purged with vigorous airing. If a ladder and paint could be found then she would get the children to restore these walls to white.
This parquet floor would scrub up, these chairs would rediscover their élan after a once-around with screwdriver and sponge, and as for the desks with their intricate chronicle of graffiti, either they could be sanded bare, or the opinions of generations of pupils could be allowed to stand. Mary found that she didn’t much mind either way. Beyond the superficial errors of spelling there was little that she felt justified in correcting, after all, when she read the collective wisdom concerning Miss Vine.
At the front of the classroom the mice had got onto the teaching desk and eaten the carton away from the chalk, so that it lay splayed. They had eaten the bitter leather from the corners of the gym mats piled in the corner. They had taken the barren seeds from the beanbags used for throw-and-catch. They took what the war could give them.
Mary gathered the chalk and found a pot for it. She wrote her name on the blackboard: Mary North. Then, to see how it might look, she rubbed out “North” and wrote Tom’s surname, forming the letters slowly and carefully in the exemplary hand required for blackboard work. When her fingers gripped the chalk, the pink blood shrank from the knuckles so that something of chalk’s nature seemed to seep into her.
Mary Shaw.
To see how it might sound, as she turned from the board she said brightly to the room: “Hello, class. My name is Mrs. Shaw.”
She lifted her hands to her mouth. Tom was standing in the doorway of the classroom. His efforts to disappear were to his credit, but unsupported by a pitiless physics that refused to let him vanish. He squirmed and tried to shrink behind the door, and gave up on that and instead pretended to have been whistling a tune. He gave up on that too, since if he really hadn’t heard what she had said, then here it was, inscribed on the blackboard in the Marion Richardson script that was favored for the modern and unambiguous manner in which the letters were formed.
You silly girl, she thought. If he has any sense he will never speak to you again. And the worst thing about it, as she watched his resigned smile, was that she really did like him a lot. His awkwardness was gone, in this moment when it finally couldn’t matter anymore. There was something honest in his surrender to the situation. It was only now that she understood how difficult it must have been for him, to like her and to be petitioned by her at the same time. All he had needed was for her to understand that things should be taken carefully and slowly. She dropped her hands and mirrored his sad smile.
“Sorry,” she said.
He watched her in the half-light of the electric bulbs.
“No,” he said. “It’s I who should apologize, Mrs. Shaw—it seems that I am late to this class. Have you already taken the register?”
She hesitated, then beamed. “Oh! I mean . . . well, as it happens, you are in time. I was just about to do it.”
He gestured at the rows of desks. “So may I . . . ?”
“Yes . . . oh, yes, sit anywhere. No, actually—sit down here at the front where I can keep an eye on you.”
She invested her face with the appropriate severity. He took a desk in the front row. His knees came halfway to his chin when he sat in the tiny chair. He laughed. She frowned. “Settle down.”
From the drawer of the teacher’s desk she took a pencil and the register book, blew off the dust, and opened it to the first clean page. At the top she wrote: Sparrows Class, Spring Term, 1940. She wrote Tom’s name on the first ruled line.
“Tom Shaw?”
“Present.”
“Splendid,” she said, looking at his name on the clean page. “Well, you are my first.”
April, 1940
“I’M QUITE SURE YOU’RE doing it wrong,” said Hilda, wincing as Mary dug the comb into her scalp.
“This preposterous hairdo is wrong. I’m following the instructions exactly.”
“Oh do give it here,” said Hilda, snatching American Vogue and jabbing at the illustration of Step 3. “See? It says to tease. And you are back-combing.”
“I am teasing.”
“You aren’t,” said Hilda. “And I should know.”
“Oh, do it yourself then, if you’re so good.”
Mary threw the comb onto Hilda’s dressing table, where it clattered against the china pigs she kept there. She lit a cigarette and flopped on the end of Hilda’s bed.
“All right,” said Hilda. “I’m sorry. Perhaps it just wants more lacquer.”
“I’ve used half the can already. It’s against nature.”
“You’re jealous I thought of it first.”
“Hardly, Hilda. What we see laid out in these instructions is not a hairdo. It is a folly.”
“Then it is a folly everyone’s wearing this season.”
“And therefore you suppose that officers will be attracted to it.”
“With all this hair spray, they’ll be lucky if they don’t become part of it.”
“You should carry emergency solvent, in case you need to unstick one.”
Hilda made a pleading face in the dressing-table mirror. “Don’t leave me half done like this. I look like Frankenstein’s mistress.”
“It’s an improvement.”
“Charming. Is this how you are with the children in your class?”
“Oh no, as Miss North I am sweetness and light. That’s why I have all this frustration to take out on you.”
“Have you any more pupils yet?”
“Still only four. One mongol, one cripple and two who barely speak.”
“He has done you proud, that man of yours.”
Mary stubbed out her cigarette. “It will take time. More will come once the parents realize that there isn’t to be any bombing.”
“Still, if it were me I shouldn’t bother. It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to, opening a school for the sake of four no-hopers.”
“That’s the difference between us. I want a better world, you want better hair.”
“Hardly as an end in itself. I want the hairdo so I can get a man in uniform.”
Mary sighed, stood, and picked up the comb again. Hilda smiled at her in the mirror, and Mary returned the favor. “Your face is not entirely dreadful to behold, you know,” she said, angling Hilda’s head. “You might almost pull off this look, in conditions of very low light.”
“Sadly your flaws as a friend would be visible in pitch dark.”
“You are indolent and asinine,” said Mary.
“You are obstinate and self satisfied,” said Hilda.
Mary worked as well as she could, segmenting the hair on the top of Hilda’s head into bands, front to back, and pushing each band in turn down to its roots with the comb until it developed sufficient body to bolster itself. It was rewarding work, what with gravity being such a bully and hair so plainly the underdog. Hilda’s scalp was warm and the air in her room pleasantly fogged with lacquer and cigarette smoke, while a fresh rain lashed the window and ran down the pane and caused Pimlico to warp and swim.
“And your mother?” said Hilda, after a while.
“Barely seen her in days. I had hoped to show her the school, now that I am no longer pretending, but she is too busy whoring for Father. He is set on becoming a Cabinet minister, and of course there are luncheons and functions.”
“I’d murder to have your mother. If mine has ambition then it is somewhere at the back of a drawer.”
“Yes but here is the war—don’t you see?—shaking everything up. Father’s world seems so small now. All those closed co
mmittees of men who were at school together. All the beaming wives competing. All of us daughters racing for husbands when the trap opens. Glossy fillies that we are, keeping dutifully in our lanes.”
Hilda fixed her in the mirror. “Just so long as you stay out of mine.”
“Careful, Hilda—remember who has the hairpins.”
“Well don’t come crying when you grow out of your little pauper.”
“Tom is hardly poor.”
“He lives in an attic, for pity’s sake. You told me so yourself.”
“Yes, but—”
“An attic, Mary. I’m sure you don’t love him at all. You only love the idea of your mother’s face when she meets him.”
Mary ignored her. She layered the bands of aerated hair, starting at the back and working toward the forehead to make a gratifying mound.
“It’s the same reason you write to that Negro,” said Hilda. “It’s to say to your mother, ‘Look at me!’ If I were you I would simply go to her lunches and dinners. Smash the teacups if you must. Kiss the Minister of Aircraft Production. But at least do it when your mother is jolly well watching.”
Mary fixed her with a pitying look. “I write to Zachary because he is a human being.”
“Is that what you told his father? He must have been impressed.”
Mary turned Hilda’s head left and right in the mirror, a little more sharply than was absolutely necessary. “I told him that he might consider bringing his child home. And that I could assure him of a school place, with a shelter in the event of any raid.”
“Did he look at you like this?” said Hilda, making a rubbery grimace and widening her eyes to make saucers of incomprehension.
“He wore a coat and tie like any man, and received me very civilly.”
“Did you make him presents of colored glass beads?”
“He told me about his life in America.”
“And counted the spoons when you left.”
Mary gave Hilda’s hair a last blast of spray to set it. “Your attitude is just like society’s.”
“Oh good,” said Hilda.
Mary lifted the hand mirror so Hilda could see herself from the back.
“Interesting,” said Hilda.
“What is?” said Mary.
“Nothing,” said Hilda, supposing that it would have to do until she could get to the salon.
May, 1940
IN THE GARRET TOM lay back against the bolster and drew on the cigarette Mary put to his lips. The cigarette’s pull lit them up, flaring and fading again.
Outside, wardens policed the blackout. Light, which had always united the city in a universal glow, had shrunk back into points. It was its old self again: a privateer, a dweller in nooks. People sheltered flames from drafts. Shadows grew by accretion, thickening nightly, as if the day wouldn’t rinse off the dark.
Tom blew smoke at the ceiling. Mary curled her foot around his. He held back a laugh.
“What?” said Mary.
“Nothing.”
“Tell or be sorry.” She plucked at the hairs on his chest.
“Ow! I was just thinking how different it feels.”
She looked wistful as she tapped ash from her cigarette. “You won’t love me anymore, now that we’ve done it.”
“It isn’t that.”
“What, then?”
“Actually,” he said, “I was thinking how much more I love you.”
In truth, this is what he had been thinking: that from now on—at work, on the bus, in the park—he would have more fellow feeling with dogs who were sexually experienced than with men who were still virgins.
“And what are you thinking?” he said.
Mary was thinking how much she was enjoying the war. The passions, which had been confused against the general glare, could flicker in the blackout. With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now she could feel as she did—happy—as the ancients evidently had and her mother probably hadn’t. The capital’s heart had moved from Pimlico to Piccadilly, where the loud circus of electric bulbs was silenced and Eros, unsighted and teetering on his pedestal, now loosed his arrows into the dark. London lit her up from the inside. The great diurnal city learned the language of the night.
She said, “I was thinking I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“But you’re a man. You’ll move on, to plunder the next settlement.”
He nodded. “Primrose Hill.”
“Or Hampstead.”
“Can’t I plunder you a bit more first?”
She inspected her nails. “From time to time, I daresay. If I have nothing on.”
“I like you best when you’ve nothing on.”
She flicked his thigh. “Dirty old man.”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“Yes. It’s indecent.”
He worried that it was. “I do love you, you know.”
“But do you really?”
“Yes.”
“But do you really, Tom?”
“Absolutely. I’d show you the readings on my dials, but we would have to open the inspection hatch in my chest.”
“Could we? I should like to be sure.”
“I didn’t bring the right tools.”
She rolled onto her back and blew smoke in a slow blue jet. “I hate you.”
He frowned. “You can’t prove it.”
“I haven’t got dressed for you. I won’t even get out of bed for you.’
“Not even if I do . . . this?”
“Especially not if you do that.”
She put the cigarette to his lips again and he drew on it. The flare lit up two pale discs in the darkness of the garret: Caesar’s button eyes, watching from the top of the piano. For god’s sake cheer up, Tom told himself involuntarily. His muscles tensed.
“What’s wrong, darling?”
“Nothing,” he said, but the moment was broken. She rolled onto her stomach to stub out the cigarette.
Tom realized, with a guilty ache, that he hadn’t thought about Alistair in days. Lately his friend’s letters made him miserable. Of a long march with heavy packs Alistair had offered: The trick is to wear two pairs of socks, one thin and one thick. Of life in barracks he had written: It is gayer if one takes the view that it is Butlin’s with guns. There was no substance. The last really personal letter had come months ago, in December, when Alistair had written rather rawly about a soldier who had been blown up in training. Since then, the distance between them had started to show in the letters.
Tom tried to put Alistair out of his mind. It was four o’clock on Saturday morning. The wine was nearly finished. They had another hour of darkness before the daylight came. Mary rolled onto her back and lit up again, and he put his hand between her thighs.
She blew a smoke ring. “This war is amazing. Is that terrible to say?”
“Well, I shouldn’t go writing it on the blackboard.”
“I’m nineteen and I have a school of my own. I can teach the children however I like, and I can hug them when they graze their knees.”
Tom thought it was lovely that she was so happy, but it was a shame that she was still talking, given that his hand was where it was.
He said, “You’d have found something terrific even without the war.”
“You and I wouldn’t have been thrown together. Thinking about it makes my head spin. Imagine how many there are like us, at this moment, lying in bed because the war has brought them close. In Cairo. In Paris.”
“Yes.” He moved his hand between her legs.
She said, “In Germany, too, I suppose.”
This caused his hand to stop. The continuation should have been natural. There should have been bliss, and instead here were the Germans.
“Steady on,” he sa
id. “The Hun do not go to bed with one another.”
“ ‘Well then, and how do they make little Hun?”
“In factories on the Ruhr. According to detailed blueprints. I don’t know.”
He wished she would leave it. Beyond the four posts of the bed, the world could go to hell and seemed determined to exercise that privilege. To speak of it was to bring it under the covers with them, into the warmth and the darkness. And now he couldn’t stop thinking of it. Far out there in the night somewhere, his best friend was shivering in a bunk, with bromide in his tea and postcards of Betty Grable. Tom felt guilty again, and sighed.
“What’s wrong?” said Mary.
“It’s just that I feel such a shit.”
“Whatever for?”
“For not joining up. For being here when the world is there.”
Mary stubbed out her cigarette. The movement set the bedsprings quivering. His hand, between her legs, could neither sensibly advance nor retreat now but simply cupped her, foolishly, with its own instinctive tenderness.
She said, “You aren’t meant to be a soldier.”
“Why not? I could fight.”
“You couldn’t shoot someone.”
She stroked his face. It seemed to him that her touch traced his limits.
“I could kill if I had to.” Immediately he felt the absurdity of it as a boast.
She smiled. He flushed. “Well perhaps you don’t believe it, but I could.”
He took his hand from between her legs, propping himself on one elbow in the dark. She flicked on her cigarette lighter. In the provisional light it made between them, she looked at him so calmly that he was ashamed.
“God,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She snapped the lighter shut, and in the quick darkness he saw the bright negative of the flame. She rolled onto her side and took his hand and put it back between her legs. “If they call you up for the war, go. Until then, don’t spoil it.”
“Mary, I—”
“Shh, darling. Let’s not let the war win.”