by Chris Cleave
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe and Thrupp?”
“I should rather die.”
“You nearly did.”
“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.”
“Well I blame you for getting in their way. There are a dozen ways of serving, for a young woman of your abilities, that are safer and more beneficial to the cause. Do you think less of your father, for example, that he serves in the House rather than in the street?”
“Of course not. But I let the War Office decide how I was to serve, and they made me a schoolteacher. Everything else has followed from that.”
Her mother looked away. “All the other mothers wrote letters to Whitehall, of course. But at your father’s level one must be so careful about the exercise of influence. I feel awful about it now. I never imagined the War Office would be so obtuse as to assign you to the ordinary lottery.”
Mary kissed her cheek. “I really don’t mind in the least.”
“Because you are intoxicated, darling. But I mind, very much. What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?”
“But I am happy. Isn’t that what matters?”
“You aren’t ready to make your own choices. Look where it’s got you.”
“Where has it got me? Here I sit, in the very same room as you.”
“And yet you are miles away. It kills me to see you so dissolute.”
“You kill me, Mother. You hate my choices but make none of your own. We tiptoe on our carpets, deferring some imagined joy to a hoped-for day when Father will do some good for people. And in the meantime we do not live among people at all. We swim in aspic.”
The quick April clouds sent white and gray shades through the room.
“Your father was my choice. You were my delight. You may despise my life for its smallness—it may seem as nothing to you—but please do not think it is nothing to me. And the smaller it becomes, the more frightening I find it, because all that is left is so dear.”
Her mother had tears in her eyes, but Mary could not feel a thing.
April, 1941
MARY WALKED TO THE Lyceum, limping on her left leg. The craters in the Strand were a bore, but the wags had put up signs beside the deepest: GRAND CANYON, and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE. London slipped by with no trouble, parting its late-morning crowds around her. It smelled of all the smokes promiscuously: cigarette, pipe, locomotive, house coal, and roof joist. At the theater the huge portico was pocked by shrapnel but otherwise unharmed. The manager told her that Zachary was out, but Mary went down to the basement anyway, since she supposed he could not stop her. He would hardly lay hands on her.
Underground, the empty dance floor was sticky with sweat and beer. The electric bulbs—their array much degraded—interfered with the fraying light of the morphine. She had a small jolt of feeling, but it didn’t have to last. She picked her way between the unmatched tables and chairs. The basement was deserted but there were children’s voices coming from the bar on the far side. She made her way over.
The bar was of rough wood and everywhere reinforced, a certain amount of dancing upon it being inevitable. In their racks the glasses were of the indestructible variety. She missed the lightness of things—the jeu d’esprit in which the stuff of the world had once been made as finely as possible, in anticipation of forces falling within a mannered range. She put down her bag and dug out a bottle of morphine. She took a dozen drops and lit a cigarette, listening to the children’s voices. She peered over the bar top.
“Can’t a person get any service around here?”
Zachary’s head emerged over the counter.
He gave her a cautious look. “Are you angry?”
“Not at all. Did you get my letter?”
He shook his head. “I thought you hated me.”
“Should I? You probably saved my life.”
A colored girl’s head appeared over the bar. She was seven if Mary had to guess, with gapped teeth and a minor squint. “I’m Molly.”
“I know,” said Mary.
“How?”
“Because you just told me.”
Molly grinned. “Do you want to wobble my tooth?”
“Thank you, I should love to.”
It was a premolar in the lower jaw and it did have a good wobble to it. It was immensely satisfying to nudge it to and fro. Sound the air-raid warning, thought Mary. We are losing our milk city. Molly chattered away. Mary gathered that she had lost her parents, and that the minstrels were supporting her and Zachary. Both children seemed to accept this as natural.
“How many ration books do you have between you?” said Mary. “Really? None at all?”
“We eat down here,” said Zachary.
“What, exactly? You’re both awfully thin.”
“Biscuits. Bread. Whatever they’re selling.”
“Really? People come in here and take money from children for food?”
“And milk and sweets.”
“When was the last time you ate eggs, meat, or fruit?”
Molly’s lip began to tremble. “Are we in trouble?”
“Only from scurvy.”
She grabbed each of them by an arm and marched them up to the alleyway. The children blinked and screwed up their eyes against the light. Zachary had on a stained white shirt and a black bow tie. He needed seven kinds of haircut.
“You mustn’t tell Molly I can’t read and write,” he whispered.
Mary looked over at her. The girl wore a purple dress with white bows. She was staring at the sky as if it might be ordered away.
“Would she mind?” said Mary.
“I told her I was clever. You know—so she’d stay.”
Mary smiled. ‘It doesn’t work like that.”
“How does it work?”
“People stay if they can.”
He squinted up at her. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, thank you.”
The dark look boys gave to a pale answer. Years went by. Feelings almost came. The war ended, and saplings grew through the rubble.
Mary blinked. It was the morphine that sent time in these meandering rivers, orphaning a loop without warning and leaving it isolated, a little oxbow of memory with no clue of how it had got there. She was seeing the look with which Zachary had dismissed her, on the day of the evacuation. In his face as he flicked away his imaginary cigarette had been this same hint of a sadness evolved beyond consolation. As if misery, winged and pelagic, had left behind the doughy shore and its brood of flightless comforts.
She had the children wait in the alleyway while she flagged down a cab on the Strand. When the driver stopped she held the door and the children piled in. In his rearview mirror the driver’s face was a picture.
He said, “Where are we taking the piccaninnies?”
“To Piccadilly. Where else? The Ritz.”
“It’s your neck,” said the driver.
Molly put her head on Zachary’s shoulder and fell asleep. He looked out at the city. The driver watched them in the rearview mirror with an expression of perfect disgust. When it became tedious, Mary gave the man a bright smile and said, “They are from Timbuktu, you know. I got them for six strings of colored beads and a daguerreotype of the King. Didn’t I do well?”
The driver reddened. “I would of kept the beads.”
“I would have kept the beads,” said Mary, and now the man made them get out and walk the last half mile.
“I thought I was the stupid one,” said Zachary.
Mary gave him a wounded look. “Yes, but it is absolutely your fault for being as black as pitch, don’t you see?”
He smiled, for the first time that day. “Why did you come?”
She nodded in the direction of Molly, who was skipping ahead. “I was jealous of the attention you were getting.”
“But really?”
“I thought you might be lonely.”
“I’ve got Molly to look after.”
Fine, she thought, but would you mind awfully if I stuck around anyway?
At the Ritz her father’s name was good enough for a table, despite the unconcealed anguish of the staff from the headwaiter down. Mary and the children were seated for lunch as far from the other guests as the great dining room permitted, but even so a couple objected and required to be moved to a more distant table. Mary gave them a wave.
“They’re mine,” she explained loudly. “From different fathers, I think—one loses track.”
“Madam,” said the waiter, “I must ask you to consider our guests.”
“Waiter,” said Mary, “I must ask you to bring us Tamworth ham, cheeses of the mild sort, bread rolls, diced avocado pears with lemon so they don’t go brown, Cumberland sausages, hard-boiled eggs thinly sliced, scones with and without currants, fruit jams but please not peach, cocoa but not too hot, two large oranges, and two large apples in not too big slices.”
“Cox’s or Granny Smith, madam?” asked the waiter, recovering.
“As they come. Oh, and coffee. Oh, and an ashtray.”
“Very good. Will there be anything else?”
“That will depend,” said Mary, “on whether anyone is sick.”
“Very good, madam.”
The children watched with wide eyes as the waiter receded.
“Are we even allowed in here?” said Zachary.
“It’s this place that shouldn’t be allowed. Your only crime is hunger.”
Mary drank coffee, geeing up her third cup with a dozen drops of morphine. She managed half a scone. Her stomach was tight from sleeplessness, and the drug queered her appetite anyway. Across the dining room, a pianist was playing the “Blue Danube.” Mary watched the children eat everything on the table, beginning with what was nearest to them and finishing—when there was no more bread to spread it on—by licking the last of the butter from its dish. They passed it between them, without ceremony but with no imperfection of manners that Mary could detect. Zachary left a little extra for Molly, who was very small and frail. The girl laid her head on the perfect white tablecloth and fell asleep again, with her mouth open and her arms hanging vertically.
From their tables the other guests watched, over the tops of ironed newspapers. It would be minutes rather than hours, Mary realized, until the scene was relayed to Pimlico. With the morphine, it was possible to know that this was unfair on her mother, and also not to mind.
Zachary wiped his face on the tablecloth. “May I have a cigarette?”
“Not until you are thirteen. Tell me, do you like looking after Molly?”
“It’s all right.”
“You’re good with her.”
“I’m no good at anything.”
“Nonsense. You’re a fine musician and a champion paste eater.”
“Everyone should be able to read and write. You said it yourself.”
“I was wrong,” she said. “I have buried a man who could read, you see, killed by people who can write.”
She tried to light a cigarette, but the flame and the end of the cigarette wouldn’t converge. Zachary had to guide her wrist.
“Thank you,” he said.
“What for?”
“For coming to find me.”
She supposed she must have. And here she was, apparently, in the Ritz, with Negro orphans. Diners stared back at her, stiff with condemnation. And here she was—oh, here she still was, yes—even now, with no clear idea, just for the moment, of how one might have got here.
May, 1941
THE WIND PUSHED A raft of cloud over the island, and the bombing stopped for six days. Alistair rotated with the battery, back from the highlands to Fort St. Elmo. It was cooler by the sea, and the officers found a sharpness in themselves again. When the wind blew some Sicilian fishermen into Grand Harbour—their engine had thrown a piston—Alistair hatched a plan that Simonson liked enough to take to the lieutenant colonel.
The Sicilians were hauled up on the dock and invited in exchange for their lives to spit on a photograph of Mussolini. This done, they were treated to a feast. They had roast meats and fancy breads, a gramophone and brandy. The officers of the Royal Naval Dockyard, dressed in their parade-best uniforms and whistling airs from Gilbert and Sullivan, repaired the fishermen’s engine, not neglecting to fasten a portrait of the King to their cabin’s central bulkhead using star-headed brass screws that could not be undone except with a particular issue of Royal Navy screwdriver.
The work being finished and the wind falling calm, the combined brass bands of the various regiments defending Grand Harbour were assembled on the quayside in tropical dress, with folded blankets secreted beneath their tunics where their bellies ought to have been. They shouldered their tubas and played an extended medley of Vaughan Williams and Elgar while the fishermen were escorted back out through the harbor’s mine cordon by the polished mahogany launch of the Admiral of Her Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet Andrew Browne Cunningham, the First Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, flying the white ensign. Thus the enemy’s fishermen carried home the intelligence that the island was doing very much better than the enemy had imagined, and ought not to be invaded just yet.
When the signals officer on the ramparts of Fort St. Elmo put down his binoculars and reported that the fishing boat had gone out of visual range, the brass bands were stood down. Officers and men folded their parade uniforms and put on the frayed and malodorous battle dress that they had lived in these many months. The admiral’s launch was returned to its mooring and covered with the stained tarpaulin that made it look, from the air, like any of the harbor’s little boats. Its tank was drained of diesel oil, which was needed for the electric generators in the forts. The admiral himself, who was on the same rations as the men, found that he could barely lift his arm to return the salute when his subordinate came to report that the operation had been a success.
The scraps of food that the fishermen had left were collected into a basket, covered with a cloth, and taken to the central stores to be allocated to one of the batches of soup that would be distributed to the starving garrisons.
“Well,” said Simonson, his feet up on Alistair’s metal desk, “you are not a handsome man, but I will admit that your plan went off well.”
“The men were magnificent, weren’t they?”
“I daresay they needed it. Nice to be the ones dishing it out for once.”
Alistair lurched, sat down on his cot and closed his eyes.
“All right?” said Simonson.
“Give me a moment. I’ll be fine.”
Simonson lit a cigarette, rocked back on his chair, and exhaled. “I don’t think you will be fine, Alistair.”
“No, I don’t suppose I will.”
“Do you think we might get that arm taken off for you now?”
“The surgeon still feels I can keep it.”
“We wouldn’t be keeping the surgeon if we had any choice. He is a sawbones and I’ll bet he learned medicine at the Army Veterinary College.”
“Then be glad he hasn’t put me down.”
“But he is killing you, isn’t he, in his way? Letting your arm fester like this? Look at you—it’s up to your shoulder.”
Alistair tried to think, through the nausea. “We haven’t had much luck, have we, with the men who’ve gone into his theater?”
“We’d get you a Navy surgeon. They’d pipe you aboard, whip the arm off, and send you away with rum. We’d just have to watch they didn’t issue you with a hook hand and a parrot—you know the Navy.”
Alistair cradled the arm. “I’m not sure.”
; “Think of that girl of yours. She’d put you straight.”
“She still doesn’t write.”
“But I shall still have to write to her, if you die from this infection. You know how I hate writing those letters.”
“Drop it, won’t you? It makes me nervous when you’re tedious.”
“It makes me tedious when you’re dying. Be a good chap, won’t you, and get the arm taken off? Then I can have you evacuated. There’s an orderly queue of cripples and grotesques. As soon as your number comes to the top of it, they fly you home on the mail plane.”
“I’d rather stay and help.”
“You’re no help dead.”
The sirens sounded. Simonson stood wearily.
“Enjoy every moment,” said Alistair.
“Will you think about what I said, and let me have your answer?”
Alistair turned away, then nodded.
“Good man.” Simonson put on his cap and left, and the garrison crept back into its shell to take another beating.
Alistair looked out over the harbor. He heard the aircraft before he saw them. They came in as they always did, from the north, and he steadied his field glasses to watch them. They were Heinkels, lined up along the horizon with their fighter escort larking above. The RAF had nothing to put up against them and so there was nothing for the German fighters to do. Alistair imagined they practised aerobatics and scored the others’ maneuvers for aesthetics and technical difficulty, while far beneath them the grubby Heinkels laid their turds of high explosive.
Through the glasses one could sometimes catch a glimpse of a bomber pilot through the frontal glass of his aircraft. They still wore jackets and ties to the fight. Alistair tried to make out the pilots’ faces, but they were too distant. He would have liked to know how the enemy looked as he approached the Maltese coast.
Alistair tracked the bombers until they were almost overhead and the stonework blocked his view. The fort’s Bofors guns and 3.7s opened up. It was not the ceaseless barrage it had been a year ago. Now, having little ammunition, the gunners did their best. The bombs began to fall. Alistair was too weak to go down to the shelters and he sat on an empty ammunition box, took up the brushes with his left hand and worked at the restoration. The explosions made dust. Grit got into the thinners.