by Chris Cleave
He crumpled that page up too. Was she asking him to talk about Tom, or allowing him not to? She missed Tom, he missed Tom—but the living must live with the living, this was understood in her letter. Therefore, how boorish of him to bang on about Tom.
He rubbed his eyes. It was impossible. In the history of the world there was not one example of a man ever having written a satisfactory letter to a woman who mattered to him. How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks, when his letter would go straight out on the next available airplane. War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.
Mary,
Damn the garret and damn my old clothes, I wish I were there with you.
He stopped. Perhaps he was entirely misreading it. Now that he read her letter again, he was ashamed. She loved Tom, and Tom was dead, and her letter was a game attempt to buck herself up. She was a child talking herself into courage and she wanted a brotherly word from him, nothing more. She needed him to tell her that it was all right, that he felt hollow about Tom too—that this was simply how it was with the dead, and it did not mean that one had not loved them enough. And yet at the same time, her letter seemed to say, “I love you—can anything be done?” after only the mildest decryption.
He put his head in his hands and groaned. She had had this effect on Tom too—had driven his poor friend around the twist wondering if it could possibly be true that she liked him. If Alistair could believe that he felt Tom laughing at him from beyond the grave, it might make everything easier. But the truth, of course, was just as Mary had put it. One felt nothing at all from the dead. They died, and then they were gone, and one’s heart ached from the sudden absence of feeling more than from any surfeit.
He held Mary’s letter and breathed in the smell of it: soap and cigarette smoke. Here it was, in his hands, this hour of her life in London that he supposed had not been straightforward.
He picked up his pencil and began again.
Mary,
I do not mind what you do with the garret. I mind if you are happy. Do not keep the garret on my account. Keep it if you feel better there. Please consider not taking the ambulance driver position. You know that it is dangerous work in a raid, and you have lost quite enough already. What I find with my men is that they will rush into harm’s way after they have lost a friend. Partly it is the desire to avenge, but it is more than that. I tell them that the war is not their fault. I give my men permission to feel guilty if they die themselves, and not before.
Do not let them tell you that you cannot teach anymore. If you are good at it, then teach. Find a way—I do not think you are one to follow orders. We are all of us orphaned by this war—the world that bore us is gone and now we must be useful where we can.
Yours,
Alistair
He folded the aerogramme, addressed it, gave it to Briggs and collapsed back onto the cot.
—
His letter flew off the island on the same Wellington that had brought Mary’s. The aeroplane also carried a burned RAF man, bound for home via Gibraltar. The casualty lay on a carpet of mailbags in the narrow tunnel of the tail section that ended in the rear gunner’s turret. The pilot kept the Wellington at sixty feet until they were out of range of Axis fighters operating from Sicily, and then he climbed and began to thread a high line between Sardinia and the Barbary Coast.
Sixty miles north of Tunis, the burned airman died of his wounds. It happened quietly in the drone of engine noise, and in the last minutes the numbing cold of high altitude was a comfort to the man. There in the sweet sacking smell of the mailbags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home. He looked down through the Perspex side panel of the Wellington and watched the endless blue Mediterranean wash the blood away from all shores.
The crew of the Wellington experienced no mechanical problems and encountered no enemy aircraft. Leaving Algiers to port, the pilot turned across open water to Gibraltar. There was cloud in the western Mediterranean, and as they closed on the Spanish coast it came lower. By the time the pilot made radio contact with the tower at Gibraltar, he had been forced down below one thousand feet and a southerly wind was buffeting the plane from side to side. The tower had the pilot make a west-to-east landing from the Atlantic side.
As they came in behind the rock, the crosswind kicked up a sudden gust and yawed the plane just as its landing gear touched down. The Wellington lifted one wing, dug the other wingtip into the deck, and spun sideways off the end of the runway into the sea. In the cold water off Gibraltar, Alistair’s letter sank to three hundred feet along with eleven hundred other letters, the burned airman and the six-man aircrew, and none of them ever made it home.
February, 1941
A MONTH WENT BY with no reply from Alistair. When a letter came accepting her for a post as an ambulance driver, Mary smoothed it out on the writing table of her bedroom at her parents’ house. She frowned at it, holding her cigarette any old way, not caring if it stained her fingers. Smoke had gone over to the enemy’s side in any case. It had once been the same stuff that curled from a genie’s lamp. Now it only reminded one.
What ought she to do? Perhaps she should give in and let her mother marry her off. Or she could join the ambulances, and see what good she might do there. The war might punish either choice with equal probability.
The longer she thought about it, listening to the maid dusting on the landing, the more daunting any choice seemed. To begin life the first time had been a breeze. Being so newly fledged, one had only to step off the bough and be astonished by the sudden rush of air. Now, at twenty, it was hard to begin again. One had to take off from the ground. Every wing beat had to be forced against an unsympathetic gravity.
In the half light from the courtyard, in the silence that lay on the white crocheted bedspread, she felt herself dissolving. Her father was away at his constituency. Her mother was spread thin with her coffees and committees, achieving a busy translucence. Some days Mary lay on the bed for hours.
At first, with the funerals, and boxing up Tom’s things, and writing to Alistair, she had crackled with a desperate energy. She had been certain that Alistair would reply. It had seemed to her that she would be fine again with just the slightest word to get her started in some direction. Now she cringed when she thought how foolish she had been, to imagine that he might mind about her. And it wasn’t only Alistair. Since receiving the manager’s letter she had written to Zachary directly at the Lyceum, and received nothing in reply. Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed.
She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The covings depicted an endless rope. At each corner the rope described an inward whorl before embarking on the next cornice line. One could follow the rope all day.
The telephone rang downstairs, and presently Palmer came up to call her to it. Nothing had changed in his tone. That he continued to treat her as if she was not greatly diminished—as if she required no particular sympathy—struck her as a colossal kindness. She followed him down the central stairway as a girl might follow a grown-up, in her bare feet on the soft runner, still wearing her nightgown at noon. The telephone was off the hook on the console table in the hallway. White narcissi overhung it, vased in crystal gray.
It was Hilda. “So, did you get yours? Your letter?”
“Yes,” said Mary.
“And you’re accepted, too?”
“Yes.”
A squeal came down the line, as if a kitten had inhaled a kazoo. “Oh, we’ll have an adventure!”
Mary leaned her head against the wood paneling. “I’m not sure.”
“You haven’t been thinking, have you? There’s really no need. You
see, there will be a peaked cap, with a badge.”
“You know I’m not a uniform girl.”
“But it’s hardly for your benefit, is it? It will work on men like catnip.”
“I’m not in the market.”
“Nonsense, darling. I telephoned the speaking clock. The time for mourning is over.”
“But you are outrageous!”
“Now look here,” said Hilda. “If you were mourning then I’d leave you to it. But now you are just moping. You’re almost certainly the reason Hitler is still bombing us. You know the Nazis cannot stand a funk.”
“I just—”
“Stop it. Say you’ll take the ambulance job. I’ve never worked a day in my life and I’m hardly going to start without you.”
Mary stared at the flowers. Their trumpets screaming with pollen. The gray light surprised into colors by the vase. “I’m just not sure if—”
“Oh do come along now,” said Hilda in a plaintive voice. “Won’t you put down the handset, whoever you are, and fetch my friend Mary to the telephone?”
“I don’t feel as if I’m for anything anymore, that’s the trouble. I used to know straight away what was the right thing to do.”
“Yes but never mind, because that was infuriating.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t deserve you.”
“The only thing you don’t deserve is what’s happened to you. Of course you feel low. But the longer you hide in your room the worse it’ll be.”
“I just don’t know if an ambulance job will help. It might only remind me.”
“But don’t you already think about it now?”
“Constantly.”
“It will be the same, then, only with uniforms and badges. Why wander through your thoughts when you could drive through them quite recklessly, with sirens? The worst that could happen is that we might help someone.”
Mary smiled despite herself. “Us. Imagine.”
“I know! Don’t tell me you can’t picture it. Screeching to the rescue—‘Oh, where did I put those bandages? I’m sure they were in this box but it seems to be full of glamour.’ ”
Mary hesitated. “I suppose we could try it for a while, and see.”
“That’s the spirit. Or at least, it’s something to put your spirit in when we find it again.’
Mary closed her eyes. “Thank you.” And when no reply came, “Hilda?”
“It’s just that you’ve never thanked me for anything before.”
“See?’ said Mary. “You should try being nice more often.”
March, 1941
AT SUNSET MARY REPORTED to the Air Raid Precautions station at St. Helen’s church in Bishopsgate. The church was undamaged, with only the windows boarded up. The area all around was laid waste. Mary made a point of not looking. If one kept the great yellow mounds of smashed brick in the corner of one’s eye, then the mind understood them as the contours of nature and forgot its trick of making one unhappy.
A man wrapped in a gray blanket was sitting outside at a trestle table.
“I’ve come on church business,” said Mary. “I’m the new vicar.”
The man raised his eyes with what Mary felt was impressive weariness.
“Mary North,” she said. “I’m to be the new driver for the Joint War Organisation stretcher party.”
He looked her up and down. He was fiftyish and gaunt, with red eyes and a silver two-day beard. He wore knee-high Wellingtons and his jacket bloomed with water stains. His breath was vapor in the thin light of the sunset. “You can drive?”
“Was it in the job description?”
At last, the man smiled. “I’m Huw. I’m one end of the stretcher. Clive is the other. He’ll be here once he runs out of beer money.”
“Glad to know you,” said Mary.
“You won’t be. Have you done this work before?”
“It’s my first time.”
He angled a thumb over his shoulder. “ ‘Well the van’s around the back if you want to familiarize yourself. There’s no bells or whistles. It’ll be just like a normal Sunday drive, only with bombing. The new nurse is already there—keen little thing she is, says she’s been here since two.”
“That’s my friend Hilda. Hates to miss a party. We signed up together.”
“You wait years, then two come along at once.”
The ambulance was a black Hillman saloon with red crosses on the door panels and four stretchers in a rack on the roof. Hilda was done up in a duffel coat two sizes too big for her. She was organizing the medical bag, and when she looked up her cap fell down over her eyes.
“Should we hug or salute?” she said.
“Shall we do both, to be safe?”
Hilda’s Red Cross brassard slipped to her elbow on the backswing.
“Idiot,” said Mary. “Let me fix that for you.”
“Thanks. You’d think I might put it on properly, wouldn’t you? I can bandage an arm recurrent, figure-of-eight or spiral reverse, and I have a brand-new certificate to prove it.”
“It’s always harder on oneself,” said Mary, repinning the band.
“I hope they’ll send us out with a proper nurse just to start with.”
“But you are a proper nurse. Look at you, with your hat and armband. All you’re missing is a fob watch.”
“I’ve had two weeks’ training! I took longer than that to learn to use a gas oven.”
“Well, if we do pick up a casualty, I shall just have to drive us to the hospital quickly.”
“Do you know if we actually have to wear the tin hats, by the way? Only mine makes me look like a mushroom. It’s all right for you tall girls, you can carry it off.”
“You know they become fashionable during the raids.”
Hilda tugged at her lower lip with her teeth. “I suppose . . . but goodness, it’s hard to make anything of this uniform. I’ve tried it like this with the skirt and stockings and I’ve tried it with the trousers, which are just urgh. I’ve been up since five, you know.”
Mary said, “You look fine.”
She had simply put on the skirt with which they had issued her, cinched the belt around the jacket, and jammed a pack of Craven “A”s into each pocket. She lit one now.
“Oh,” said Hilda, “are you cold? Let’s sit in the van, shall we?”
Mary’s hands were trembling. It was something they had done since the disaster—a bore, really—and it was sweet of Hilda to pretend it was only the cold. It was pleasant in any case to get into the Hillman. Mary settled in the driver’s seat and cracked the window an inch to let the smoke out. The interior smelled nicely of laundry, which she supposed must have been the cargo until the van was requisitioned.
In the passenger seat Hilda checked her makeup in the mirror. She reapplied her lipstick, clicked the top back on, and said, “Alistair still hasn’t replied to me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mary.
“It was a long shot, but I thought he might at least write back.”
Mary found that she couldn’t hold Hilda’s eye.
Hilda stared. “You aren’t writing to him as well, are you?”
“No,” said Mary, electing to interpret Hilda’s tense as the present simple.
“I suppose he’s just a cad, then,” said Hilda.
“I thought you liked him?”
“Only if he likes me more. Those are the rules.”
Mary nodded. “Sometimes you are almost Christlike.”
Hilda beamed. “You can say you were my first disciple.”
“I’ll say I did your hair.”
Hilda looked at her watch. “I’m terrified, aren’t you? We wouldn’t be doing this if it was really dangerous, would we?”
“You know what you should really worry about? It’s that so many girls have volunteered, it won’t see
m exotic anymore.”
“You suppose men won’t care?”
“Goodness, no. Ambulance girls are two-a-penny.”
“You ruin everything.”
“Well you can’t have it both ways, can you? It’s either a dangerous duty, and dashing, or a breathtaking bore, and banal.”
“I liked it better when I was petrified.”
“Then hush and let me work this van out. It’s fine for you, Miss La-Di-Dah with your two weeks’ training. All they gave me was my bus fare here.”
Mary worked the pedals and moved the lever through the three gears in the box, plus reverse. The whole setup was far looser than her father’s Austin Windsor. It would need to be sworn at quite robustly, but she felt it could just about be driven. Now that it was happening—now that the war had put her in uniform and issued her with a steering wheel andclutch—she felt more resignation than excitement. She supposed that there would be chaos now, and fire and furious noise, and yet it seemed much less of an adventure than her class had been. How her nerves had buzzed with it, back then. Now, she felt less alive. Perhaps one died in slices, like a loaf.
“Do you suppose they’ll give us tea?” said Hilda.
“They’ve told me nothing. You’re the one who always knows things.”
“Oh, that’s just gossip,” said Hilda. ‘No one tells me facts.”
“Maybe they’re worried you’d repeat them.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing something, even if I am only here to dish out aspirin and sticking plasters. The matron wouldn’t trust me with anything, you know. She had me on bedpans half the time I was supposed to be training, so of course I never caught sight of a healthy man.”
“Well that is rather the point of nursing, isn’t it?”
“But I wanted to go on the ward rounds with the junior doctors. The way the nurses get themselves up, the poor men don’t stand a chance. They’re married with two children and a Labrador before their pulse gets back below a hundred. I wonder if we’re meant to write down any supplies we use or whether someone comes and checks it at the end of the shift? I wonder if—”