Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

  They went to the party and got nastily drunk at opposite ends of the room. Hilda left with a flight lieutenant. Mary left with a spinning head and a certainty that she was not up to encountering her mother. She walked to a taxi rank and gave the address of the garret.

  She sat in the cab with her cheek pressed against the window. She watched London, with its gapped teeth and blinded eyes. It got to her all at once, for the first time since the disaster. All the emptiness in the world drew her in, and she rolled her forehead on the glass. There was no sense to it—this was the unendurable thing. The war was ten million severed and jangling nerves. It was all loose ends.

  Before, life had been a tradition, a tendency to forgiveness, a regression to the mean. The city she loved had been one of plane trees that had grown for three centuries, of bridges improved as horse gave way to steam, of great coordinated endeavors in which every convergent component could be relied upon: of symphonies. But now any light could be snuffed without warning. When she had seen the dead boy, she had thought of Zachary. A child was lost as easily as a shilling. And once one had understood that, though one’s heart continued to beat, one was never entirely alive again. She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of this. It was hardly fair on the living.

  On reaching her destination she was pale and the taxi driver asked her, ‘”Are you all right, my love?” and she smiled brightly and said, “Yes, thank you.”

  When she let herself in to the garret it still smelled faintly of Tom. She switched on the electric heater, took off her shoes and lay down on his bed. When she opened her eyes again, Tom had made her tea in one of his stock of jam jars that resisted all her attempts at improvement. She sat up to kiss him, since she tried hard to show him that everything was all right, and as she kissed him she woke up and it was noon.

  She washed her face in the corner basin, with cold water and a small gray fossil of soap. Everything remaining in the garret was Alistair’s. She had boxed Tom’s possessions weeks ago, and sent them to his mother. When everything he had owned was packed and labeled, with Caesar in the last box and the tip of his tail just sticking out, Tom’s things had filled six cardboard boxes, each eighteen inches square by nine inches deep. The volume a man left was ten cubic feet.

  Mary went to Alistair’s room, opened the wardrobe door, and stood looking at his empty clothes. She pressed his shirts to her face. She noticed a cuff that was beginning to fray, found a needle and thread and sat down to mend it. She was not at all good at needlework. At home the rule was that the maid did anything fiddlier than dealing cards, while Palmer lifted anything heavier than a gramophone arm.

  She forced herself to be patient; to keep her stitches small and neat. It was something to do. If she could bring little to the war, nor bear to side with her mother in avoiding the whole thing entirely, then at least she could fix these frayed edges.

  When the shirt was mended, Mary hung it back in Alistair’s cupboard. And then, because she needed to live for the new hour at least, and because a pen and paper were available, she sat down at Alistair’s rickety table and wrote to him again.

  March, 1941

  FOR A WHOLE MONTH the northwest wind blew cold and imperious. The siege drew taut around the island. The enemy’s capital ships, black hearted and lupine, circled just below the horizon where the coastal artillery could not reach them. Their warplanes wound white ropes of vapor around the blue dome of the sky, weaving the island a net to starve in.

  Alistair, alone, was happy.

  Alistair,

  I mended a shirt of yours, even though it is an awful shirt that ought properly to be torn into strips, plaited into rope and used to hang your tailor. I have not mended a shirt for anyone before, so you must count yourself lucky.

  In any case, whether or not you wish me to proceed to the rest of your wardrobe (and perhaps you had better let me know), your dreadful blue shirt is mended.

  Affectionately,

  Mary

  Since Mary’s letter had got through the blockade, Alistair had not minded at all about the millions of tons of material that hadn’t. The island was without fuel oil, electric bulbs, aspirin and margarine. His regiment was without new barrels for the artillery pieces. The magazines were down to five days’ worth of shells at the present rate of usage. Islanders and soldiers alike were beginning to eat dogs, starting with the kind without collars.

  Alistair cared little. He roared with laughter when Simonson read out his own letters from his duplicitous girlfriends. The two captains aped the Knightsbridge voices together. The stews grew leaner, the meat giving way to bones that were used and reused until the marrow was gone and they leached more good than they gave.

  Alistair didn’t mind. The bread became one eighth sawdust and then three sixteenths and then one fifth. He took it with a shrug. He felt a solidarity with the wood-boring insects, and cheered his men by performing impressions of the bugs. Soon they were all eating insects in any case. Alistair organized beetle hunts and commissioned an engraved trophy—the Cup of Plenty—for the man who collected the most bugs each day. Fruit could not be found at all. Men’s teeth worked loose. The local children in their black church trousers with their knees yellow from dust began to have the restless eyes of cardsharps or poets. Alistair sneaked them crackers in his pockets.

  Mary,

  I do not know what you have against my shirt. It will be fashionable again, one must simply take the long view.

  It is inconvenient that I cannot rush home to London to thank you in person, but the oddest thing has happened. The Axis, who disapprove of sentimentality, have encircled Malta with the greatest concentration of warplanes and shipping ever seen, in order to prevent me from coming to see you. I expect they are doing the same sort of thing at your end? I suppose we must be flattered.

  Please do your worst with my wardrobe. In return I shall make good such treasures as you may condemn to my care. As a conservator I am trained to repair all kinds of damage invisibly. Expect me at around five past the end of the war. My shirt will have come in to its own by then, I assure you.

  Warmly,

  Alistair

  Alistair could not lose his smile, though the bombers were wicked and rapacious. Sometimes there was only an hour in each day for the civilians to swarm up from the shelters, to throw out the night soil, to queue for kerosene, and to take in the new ridges of rubble where the ageless streets had stood. Then the bombers came again and everyone fled back underground. The surface became foreign, the underworld familiar.

  Sometimes Alistair was caught in a raid and he had to go to ground with the islanders. In the neolithic burial chambers where the old bones had been pushed to one side, in the Roman catacombs reconsecrated with miniatures of the Virgin, in the cold and dripping new tunnels gouged deep in the yellow rock, the fathers of the crammed-together families met his eyes while the walls shook. The children whimpered and the mothers rocked them, and Alistair joined them to pray: “Heart of Jesus, heart of Mary, make the bombs fall in the sea or in the fields.”

  Alistair,

  I cannot imagine what you are moaning about—a blockade by the enemy is nothing. Think of what I go through in Pimlico, entirely encircled by the inferior types of Chelsea and Belgravia. It is hell.

  There is opportunity here for your restorative talents, if you have the heart for it. You should report to me at your earliest convenience. In uniform, for heaven’s sake, as you clearly cannot be trusted to dress yourself.

  Insightfully,

  Mary

  Whenever the airmail made it through, Alistair forgot the hunger. At all other times he was obsessed with it. One early morning he put the jar of Tom’s blackberry jam into the bright slit of light from the arrow loop in his room. The aperture commanded a field of fire across the harbor approaches. Conversely, it drew in the full brightness of the rising sun and fired it through
the jam jar. The color rose with the sun, from venous to arterial. Every tiny pip, suspended in its matrix, cast a black light of shadow.

  Sharpness flooded his mouth. How far had he carried this jar? How many different tents and barracks and forts had he shared with it? Once he had hoped to eat it with Tom at war’s end; now he hoped only to take it to Tom’s grave. Surely he wouldn’t crack now. And yet his mind, unsolicited, came up with endless helpful reasons why it would be sensible to open the jar.

  These mornings were the hardest, just after waking, when one splashed the well water on one’s face and drank a bitter yellow glass of it to fill the stomach. The water tasted of Malta itself, ancient and recessive, steeped in cordite and blood. The stone was porous, the hunger insatiable. Alistair put his hands to the jar and began to twist the lid. He stopped himself, and picked up a pencil instead.

  Mary,

  As usual, you are delusional. The uniform is far worse than the civilian wardrobe—even mine. This you would see if you were not blinded by the sheer glamor of this war. One sports a Sam Browne belt (which I am sure you would carry off better than I) and a cap with a polished leather peak. If it were not for the legitimizing effect of guns, enemy, etc., then the outfit would suggest nothing more nor less than the presence, within the psyche of the wearer, of perversion of the most florid stripe. Your handwriting conveys the same to me, by the way.

  Astutely,

  Alistair

  Today the battery was to rotate to Fort Bingemma, away from the city, on an escarpment high on the Victoria Lines in the northwest of the island. It was time. Alistair’s men were broken and somnambulant. Three of his thirty-five were dead, and seven in Simonson’s troop. The enemy’s bombing had not let up for eighty-six nights. Up in the hills the regiment could regroup and re-equip. Perhaps, in the countryside, there would be a little more to eat.

  Alistair looked out to sea one last time. The northwesterly screamed through the signaling masts of the ships in Grand Harbour. The waves came in and in, as they always had. To the horizon clung a haze from the smokestacks of the encircling warships, corraling the island in time.

  To: Cpt Alistair Heath, RA

  From: Mairie & Northe, Solicitors at Law

  Re: Slander

  Sir,

  We are commanded by our client, Miss Mary Anne Elizabeth North of London, SW1, to convey her intention to pursue you in law in the eventuality that you do not immediately and in full retract in writing your vile calumny, viz, that our client is delusional. Your comments apposite to her handwriting our client will allow to stand, but wishes us to communicate to you a fact of which your own various letters constitute proof abundant, viz, that our client’s written submissions are qualitatively superior not only in calligraphy, but also in composition, to your own.

  Legally,

  Mairie & Northe

  When Alistair looked up, he was surprised to find the war. She had done it again, her trick of making it all disappear. He laced up his duffel bag, shouldered it, and put on his uniform cap as he stepped into the bleaching light of the fort’s central quadrangle.

  “Heath! There you are, you tardy bastard!”

  “Simonson,” said Alistair, saluting with as much precision as it merited.

  “Get in the truck, won’t you? Anyone would think you didn’t want to go on holiday.”

  Alistair climbed up into the passenger seat of the Bedford. Simonson started the big petrol engine and put it into gear straight away, so as not to waste an iota of fuel. The men had gone ahead in a fleet of requisitioned charabancs and wagons, most of them horse-drawn, dispatched along the road at irregular intervals to avoid drawing the enemy fighter aircraft which were now almost unopposed. Alistair and Simonson drove out over the main drawbridge. The quartermaster had issued them with a full load of artillery shells to take to the fort, and enough petrol—measured with a metal pipette to the nearest fluid ounce—to get them exactly to their destination providing that they coasted down hills.

  Simonson piloted them through the ruins of Valletta. Alistair dropped the side window and enjoyed the warmth of the early morning. It was the right time of day to be making the trip out of the city. The sun wasn’t too hot yet. The aces of the Luftwaffe were still on the ground in Sicily, signing photographs of themselves or doing whatever they did between bombing trips to a defenseless island.

  The two captains rolled through the winding canyons that had been made in the vast acres of rubble. Every building seemed to have been reduced to the infinite repetition of the same yellow stone block, two feet long by one across by one deep. It was the atom of civilization, the largest component that two men could lift between them.

  Simonson scowled through the dusty windshield.

  “Looks like my alphabet blocks after Randy found the castles I made.”

  “Heard from your dear brother lately?”

  “Oh, he won’t write. I’d be astonished if the bastard can even read.”

  “Hasn’t he had his call-up yet?”

  Simonson fixed Alistair with a look of delighted condescension. “Dear boy. They have to keep a few good men back. Otherwise we chaps might all get home from this jollity and demand the keys to the kingdom.”

  “Would that be so frightful?”

  “You are a sluggish learner. Perhaps you are slightly retarded.”

  “I’m sure you used to be funny.”

  “Too many casualties of late, Alistair, that’s all.”

  Alistair looked at him, and Simonson looked ahead at the road. It was the first time Simonson had used his first name.

  Alistair said, “I never thought you minded much, about the men.”

  Simonson cut the engine and coasted to a halt. He pulled the handbrake on and searched for his cigarettes in the pockets of his tunic.

  “I didn’t mind at first. When Dryden was killed, I thought, Well, that’s his lookout. And then Norris got it—such a terrible bloody aimer—and I was just glad it wasn’t someone useful, like Carter.”

  Alistair nodded. “I’m sure Norris is a better shot now he’s dead.”

  “Well, exactly. And in any case I have never been fond of the men the way you are. I hardly understand them and I always supposed I had no more feeling for them than I do for cats. But then the next week Carter was killed after all, and I remember looking down at his body. We knew it was him by his wristwatch. His face wasn’t where he left it, you see, and it made me furious. I don’t know why that should be. It’s not as if he was a handsome man in life. And yet I remember thinking: I would bury you myself. You know how hard it is to dig a grave on this island. Three inches of soil and then solid rock. But I would have done it, if the men had let me. And then Vickers was killed, and Cullen, and Casey, and Urquhart—all in that one dreadful week, do you remember?—and I have been desperately angry ever since. I actually loathe being an officer.”

  He exhaled smoke and pressed his thumbs to his eyes.

  Alistair patted his shoulder. “It could be worse—you could make major.”

  Simonson took Alistair’s arm and held it. “All of this will stick to us, you’ll see.”

  “After the war, you mean?”

  “ ‘The men will loathe us. If any of the poor bastards are left.”

  “The men don’t hate officers.”

  “It is the men’s function to hate us. The fact that you don’t understand it only shows your lack of breeding.”

  Alistair grinned. Simonson turned the ignition. “My brother won’t be called up. England won’t change. It was built with its blocks, the same as this damned island. When they reuse the rubble, you will see that it can only fit back together one way.”

  “I will bet you five pounds that England is different, after the war.”

  “Oh, spare us.”

  “Don’t you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one�
��s class will matter less and one’s convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.”

  “I bet you five pounds we shan’t see war’s end.”

  “That’s not a bet I could ever collect on.”

  “See how it works?” said Simonson.

  He let out the clutch and steered the truck down the rubble-strewn road. They lurched on, through the interlocking turrets and ramparts that marked the limit of the city. They were terrific fortifications and would prove their worth the next time the Ottoman Turks invaded. In the meantime they would be useless against the German air assault.

  Perhaps Simonson was right that the regiment would not survive the siege. They were all turning to stone from hunger. They took cover behind stone walls. They painted their trucks and their helmets and their guns to resemble stone blocks, as if by sympathetic magic some hardness might accrue. They saw rubble walls when they closed their eyes at night. Sometimes, when one was particularly hungry, the omnipresent yellow limestone had the exact hue of cheddar, and when the enemy’s paratroopers finally came it would afford about as much protection.

  Alistair rested a notepad on the dash and dug out a stub of pencil.

  To: Mary North, c/o Mairie & Northe

  From: Allis, Terre & Heythe, Solicitors at Law

  Re: A guided tour of the island of Malta

  Madam,

  Our client, Alistair Heath (Cpt, RA) commands us to convey to you—

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” said Simonson. “You are like love-struck schoolchildren passing notes.”

  Alistair looked back at him mildly. “So?”

  “So, teacher says there’s a war on.”

  “It’s just a bit of fun.”

  “Well it is sickening to be around. So you are in love—bully for you. You’re not obliged to rub it in everyone’s face.”

  “Oh come on, Simonson, you know I only have eyes for you.”