Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

  December, 1941

  AT DAWN RAIN BEAT on the garret roof and leaked here and there in drips. Mary reached out a hand and tasted it. Now that the morphine was long gone from her system, the clarity of sensation was extraordinary. Things no longer shifted and warped. Until now she had never understood how much one could love this dignified stillness of still things.

  There had been no major raids since May. It might all start again, of course—Mary found that she knew less of the war the longer it went on. Certainly it was still growing, drawing countries in, and when it reached sufficient size perhaps it would come back for London. The newspapers had stopped printing situation maps, which suggested that the picture was dispiriting. She kept her anxieties to those she could do something about. Zachary had still to learn his times tables beyond six. Charles must be encouraged not to use the geometry compass as a weapon. The war expanded and the world shrank to what one knew.

  Memory retreated to its old boundaries and renounced its incursions into sight. Emotions submitted to the authority she had learned in childhood to exercise over them. Pleasant sensations she allowed their effervescence, dark thoughts she quarantined. Rain drove against the skylights and streamed down the panes in sheets. It was a steady and confident rain from a vast and somber sky that seemed installed for the duration.

  A knock came in the early morning: the landlady, with the post. Mary thanked her and went back to bed to slit the envelopes open. The first was a begging letter from her old finishing school, inviting her to help a fresh batch of girls to—well, to finish, she supposed. The second was an aerogramme from Major Simonson.

  Dear Miss North,

  I am sorry to write again. I assume the Army has told you that Alistair is safe but I imagine it has exercised discretion in communicating the details.

  Mary put the letter down on the blanket and stared at it. It was too early in the morning to cry, the day having not yet delivered enough venom to be expelled. She leaned back on the headboard and closed her eyes tight. Her fingers scratched at the sheets. It was as if her body wanted to burrow.

  When it was finished, she sat for a while in a daze.

  I do not know how things stand between you and I do not wish to pry, but I am informed that Alistair is forbidden from sending or receiving letters. I do not know if you have been made aware of this and I write to apprise you.

  Following the loss of his arm in May, Alistair was to be invalided home but there were perhaps irregularities in the repatriation list. These came to light after Alistair reached Gibraltar, where he was taken by the Navy having been recovered when his aircraft ditched.

  The upshot is that Alistair has been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for absence without leave. He is to serve this time in Gibraltar. I have tried to get the sentence set aside, emphasizing Alistair’s selfless record and his wound. My efforts have been unsuccessful, and I pray you will both forgive me. Though Alistair was under my command, it is as his friend that I write.

  Mary read it through again. Alistair was alive. The world remade itself. Her hands clasped and unclasped. It had been so long since she had numbered herself among the fortunate that she had lost all immunity to the shock of it. Joy, at first, was foreign and unsettling.

  After the first hour she began to wonder what one might do. It wasn’t possible to travel to Gibraltar as a civilian. Nor, apparently, could she write to Alistair there. She thought it through, but nothing came. In the end, reluctantly—but it hardly dragged at her at all, she was so elated—she supposed she ought to talk to her mother.

  She put on her mac and limped through the sleet to untouched Pimlico. At her parents’ house on Warwick Square the white stucco facade, the classical portico and the first-floor balcony with its sculpted box bushes all spoke of exemption from the things she had lived through. She climbed the six steps to the black door with its leonine knocker but as she lifted her hand, the door swung open. One couldn’t know what mechanism of housemaids and semaphore detected one’s approach.

  “Good morning, Miss Mary.”

  She stepped inside as if it was nothing. “Hello, Palmer. Are you well?”

  Palmer afforded the minutest inflection of an eyebrow, sufficient to relegate his well-being to the category of things without import. Mary found that her raincoat was already across his arm.

  “We expect Madam home at eleven. Shall you wait for her by the fire in the morning room?”

  “Oh yes, very good. Thank you.”

  The slightest nod. Palmer was so invariant that Mary herself was suddenly unsure whether she had been away for seven months or seven hours. In the morning room she sat on the green settee. On the pewter tray Palmer brought cocoa with golden amaretti and a hint of apology.

  “Unless Miss might prefer sherry?”

  “Even for a monster like me, it’s a little early.”

  His face didn’t change. “I shall make a note.”

  Her mother came home, spilling over with cut flowers and instructions for their display. Her graying hair was dragged back in a bun. When Mary showed herself in the hallway, a single strand escaped to lift in the winter draft.

  “Hello,” said Mary.

  “Darling,” said her mother, the production of the word being necessary according to Newton’s third law.

  “I hope it isn’t a bad time,” said Mary.

  Her mother let her coat be taken. ‘You do understand that you cannot make a scene. Your father is this close to being called up to Cabinet—he may return at any time, and perhaps with a visitor. We are being careful not to display the wrong sort of periodicals, let alone . . . well, there is no need to elaborate. Oh, you’ve been crying.”

  “No, but . . .” she said in a small voice, and then tears welled up and her mother’s arms were around her. “I am so tired, Mummy.”

  “Darling, of course you are . . . oh, how we have missed you.’

  The warm air of the house blew over them, the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso on the stair rods. Faintly, a hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far inside, crockery clacking as a maid did dishes, and coal rumbling as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium.

  Behind her mother, the front door closed with a tidy click of the latch. The war was muted. One felt the relief of the heart as it fell in with the old, shuffling rhythms of the maids. Everything would be well again. She would have Alistair—it still seemed only half real. And so what if he had lost an arm? It was easily done in these times. The brooms swished as they swept the quiet chambers of the house. The dusters banged between balusters. In the hall a Christmas tree, decked with Venetian glass, stood in its great brass bowl.

  Mary followed her mother through to the drawing room, where Palmer brought tea in blue china. He served Mary’s according to her most recent preference: without milk but with three sugars, the way she had taken it when the morphine had sweetened her tooth.

  “Thank you, Palmer, but if it isn’t too much trouble I should like my tea the old way.” She spoke deliberately, making sure her mother understood.

  “Very good,” said Palmer, in the neutral tone he used whether one needed him to arrange a taxicab or a resurrection. He produced for her a tea without sugar and withdrew to his own measured bounds.

  “Mummy,” said Mary, “I am so sorry for everything.”

  “Oh, shh. No one could expect perfection from you, after so much loss. You’ll find your room just as you left it.”

  “Thank you—but I’m not moving back.”

  “No?” said her mother with the mildest incredulity, as if Mary had declined a macaroon. “But it would be so nice to have you home for Christmas.”

  “The thing is, I need to ask you for something.”

  “I see. You are yourself again, at least.”

  “I haven’t touched morphine in months.”

  “I’m glad. It wasn’t you at all
. Shall we just forget it? You haven’t done irreparable damage to your father, provided you and I now embark on a comprehensive tour of the salons. When they see you like this again, the rumors will seem far-fetched. You’ll find that I have rather talked up your wound sustained in the line of duty—I hope you don’t mind—since it clothed your more naked indiscretions.”

  “I’m sorry for the scene at the Ritz.”

  “So am I. The Ritz, with a brace of niggers? If you had to send me a message, it might have hurt less to tie it to a stick and beat me with it.”

  “Must you call them ‘niggers’? They’ve done nothing to you.”

  “Except to hook my daughter on morphine.”

  “The reverse, Mummy. One of them got me off the stuff.”

  Her mother blinked. “But then why? Of all the people a girl might consort with.”

  “I am not consorting. I’m teaching.”

  “Well it kills me that you are doing so on my shilling. At least their parents ought to pay you a wage. Or do they even have parents? One hears that the fathers in particular have no more domestic feeling than do fishes.”

  “I don’t feel I give the children any more than they give me, but I will stop drawing the allowance if it pleases you.”

  “So what do you want from me if it is neither money, nor sane opinion, nor my simple invitation to make your poor father happy?”

  Mary took her mother’s hand. “The man I told you I was keen on. Alistair. I love him.”

  Her mother stared for a moment. “I suppose you’ll tell me his people are fascists, or some such thing? You don’t ever make it easy.”

  “Oh, he’s from a good family. Before the war he was a conservator at the Tate.”

  Mary felt her mother’s hand relax. “When you say a good family . . . ?”

  “We don’t know them, if that’s what you mean. But you must imagine there are families, unknown in our circle, that nevertheless orbit the same sun and do so without eclipse or indiscretion.”

  “I suppose they are socialists, then.”

  “Do you? One day you must teach me how you can tell.”

  Her mother took her hand back. “Why do I sense a caveat?”

  “Alistair lost an arm in Malta, and—”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, so what? He can always grow a new one.”

  Mary smiled. “I do love you, Mother. That’s just what I thought.”

  “You are a dear girl. If you weren’t impossible I shouldn’t love you half so much. You’re what I might have been if I’d ever had the courage to tell my mother to mind her own business.”

  “And you’re what I might hope to be, if I could put family before myself. I know I’ve been selfish. I shan’t make any more scenes at the Ritz, but neither can I be Mrs. Henry Hunter-Hall, however much it would help.”

  Her mother sighed. “I am sure some middle ground can be found. And I know you will give me your indulgent smile when I say this, but you will find that it is different in any case, once you are married. Our own passions become muted—well, perhaps that isn’t the best word. Our passions become lighter, and seem to weigh on us with less urgency. Do you imagine that I was not idealistic at your age? I was for women’s votes, you know. I chained myself to things.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “I suppose you will say I chained myself to your father.”

  “You are happy though, aren’t you?”

  “Happy? Oh goodness, is that is even a word in wartime?”

  “But the war hardly touches you.”

  “I expect you think nothing does.”

  Her mother took a cigarette from Mary’s pack and lit it with hands that shook a little.

  “Mother—”

  “I am not to be pitied. I still believe it our duty to leave the world improved. Do you suppose you will marry this Alistair of yours?”

  “I don’t know. He is far away and we haven’t spoken of it. But yes, I hope so.”

  “You must choose a husband carefully, you see, because his ideals must stand in for yours, and his ideals will become ambitions, and ambitions need allies, and allies require soirées and galas and seating plans.”

  “You don’t think it will be different between men and women after this war? You don’t feel we are on the cusp of something?”

  “We should make a tapestry of the cusps we have been on.”

  Mary smiled. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “You are trying to distract me, I know. What did you come to ask for?”

  “It’s Alistair, Mummy. He’s being detained, in Gibraltar.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I’m not sure. I think there was a problem with paperwork.”

  “Then why detain him?”

  Mary kept her voice even. “They say he went absent without leave. He is sentenced to twelve months.”

  Her mother put her teacup down with a click. “Palmer? Would you bring us a little brandy?”

  Back the pewter tray came, with glasses and decanters. Palmer set it down on the occasional table and let a measure of syrup into each of two glasses. He scalped an orange and placed a shaving of peel in each glass. These he compressed with a pestle sufficiently to release their oils but not to macerate them. He added a dash of bitters and a measure of brandy to each glass, finishing with ice.

  Mary sipped her drink. Her mother drained her own glass and put it down. “You are quite determined not to make this life agreeable for any of us.”

  “I’m sorry. I truly am. However it looks, I hope you know that I do not go out into the world hunting for disgrace to bring home to you.”

  “A deserter, though? I might have preferred a nigger after all.”

  Mary gathered herself. “Absence is hardly desertion. Father isn’t here from one moon to the next, and yet we keep his books dusted.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Sorry,’ said Mary.

  Her mother was silent for a moment. “So what is the situation?”

  “I think France shook him up. It was just before we met. He had saved goodness knows how many of his men’s lives, but he was awfully rattled by it all. I know he did his best in Malta. And I can’t imagine losing an arm, can you?”

  Her mother said nothing.

  Mary flushed. “But how they can judge a man for the one time he comes up short?”

  “What would you have me say? When Abel’s blood cried out to the Lord, one supposes it was to complain of being spilled. Rather than to recall the glad years of fraternity.”

  “But Alistair hasn’t murdered anyone. I think perhaps all he did was to leave a little soon.”

  “It is a war, not a mixer. One cannot quit if it gets dreary.”

  “I know, Mummy, but—”

  “Your father did not leave a little soon at Ypres or Pozières. If he had, I should never have married him.”

  “But surely he would understand Alistair’s case better than anyone?’

  “Your father’s understanding of absence without leave might not extend beyond the range at which the absentee ought to be shot.”

  “But we have moved on since those days. Do we still have no mechanism for forgiveness?”

  “What would you have me say?”

  “Won’t you ask Father to use his influence? A letter to the War Office would carry tremendous weight. He need only state Alistair’s character.”

  “This was why you came to see me? To get your man off the hook?”

  Mary made herself small and said nothing.

  “Do you understand what it would cost me, from my own capital of influence with your father? I have my own causes, which you might have noticed if you were the noticing type. And those in addition to the drain it makes on my stock each time I have to defend you. Do you even guess at how loyally I have pleaded
your corner before him? And now you would drive me deeper into his debt, and subordinate my own hopes to yours.”

  “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”

  “If I do this for you, the other nonsense must end. Not one drop of morphine, ever again.”

  “Of course. I promise.”

  “And you will go to the War Office and ask for another assignment. If they send you back to the ambulances, you will go gladly. If they send you to the factories, you will don the overalls without a whimper. I will have this family’s name speak of duty again.”

  “All right.”

  “And you will come back to live with us, until you are married. You will join me with good grace at the lectures and the coffee mornings. I shall not make unreasonable demands on your time, but I will expect you to make peace with society. At least make peace to the extent that your wedding, when it does come, will feature on the society page and not on the gossip.”

  Mary hung her head. “Fine.”

  “And you must stop carrying on with the Negroes. I shall do you the favor of calling them Negroes, and you will reciprocate by cutting ties. You will neither frequent their entertainments, nor school their numberless brood.”

  “But Mother—”

  “Because it is not even a kindness that you do for them, pretending they can be helped. They have their world and we have ours, and there can be no more traffic between the two than there is between heaven and earth.’

  “And so we prescribe the countryside for our children and the bombing for theirs? How can you ask me to make peace with a society that makes this kind of war?”

  Mary’s mother sat down beside her. “Please. I was the same at your age.”

  “Honest, you mean to say?”

  “I shan’t rise to that. The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You must tell me which you think the more honest.”

  “Fine,” said Mary, “I will do everything else you ask, since the cost is to me alone. But I won’t stop teaching those children.”