by Chris Cleave
“But why, dear?”
“Because everyone insists that I must stop.”
“And it doesn’t occur to you that perhaps everyone is right?”
“They are blind to what’s wrong. I see the wealthy untouched by this war and the poor bombed out by it, and yet rich and poor alike make not a murmur. I see Negro children cowering in basements while white children sojourn in the country, and yet both camps beg me not to rock the boat. Look at us, won’t you? We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.”
Her mother took her hand. “Enough. If we must negotiate, then please remember I have played this game longer than you. You ask me to try for Alistair’s release, and I have set out my conditions. Attach your own if you must, but please don’t pretend you would choose a principle over a husband. What about Alistair’s happiness, festering there in prison? Is that yours to weigh against your ideals?”
“You might sentence him to a year in his own company, Mother. I shan’t sentence him to fifty with a hypocrite.”
“Please don’t punish us like this. Whatever else it is that we have done to you, do be brave enough to spit it out. But please don’t pretend you would choose niggers over family.”
“They are only children, Mummy, and they have helped me without attaching conditions.”
They watched each other for a moment.
“Must we fight the whole thing out again?” said her mother. “Perhaps we can leave any decision for a while, until we have both had a chance to settle down. Only do come home for Christmas, darling. Do let us be a family again.”
Mary used her father’s trick of smiling when there was nothing else to be done.
Her mother stood. “Well, you must consider it. I shall go out, I think, and collect myself a little. I shall return for supper at six, and you must let Palmer know if we should expect you. If you are here when I get home, then I shall assume my conditions are acceptable. If you are gone, then it’s best we don’t see each other for a while.”
“Mother—” said Mary.
“Six o’clock. Please don’t be late—I don’t think I could bear it.”
“I am so sorry, Mummy.”
Mary watched her mother make herself smile. And so now they both smiled, and kissed on both cheeks with precision, here and here—since after all the heart was not the foundation of manners and must not by its collapse undermine them.
After her mother left, Mary sat with her elbows on the tablecloth. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke through her nose. The old house exhaled with her. Now that her mother was gone, the maids could sing as they made the beds upstairs. From the kitchen, pans clattered. Cook found laughter in something.
After a while Mary felt a presence in the room, an inflection of the light. “Palmer?”
“Miss Mary?”
“Might you bring me another small brandy? On its own, no fuss?”
“Very good.”
“And would you have a cab pick me up? And let my mother know, when she’s back, that I’m afraid I can’t make it for supper.”
There was an unaccustomed pause.
“My apologies, Miss Mary. I have attended you since you were small, and I should like to make sure that I have the message correct. I’m to tell Madam that you won’t be joining her?”
“Thank you, Palmer, for always getting the message.”
A pause. A breath. And then, with no expression, “Very good.”
When Palmer returned with brandy, he carried it on the heavy silver tray. Mary glanced up. “Oh, is my father back from the House?”
“Not until this evening, madam.”
“Then why . . . ?”
His impartial eyes. “Forgive me, Miss North.”
“Oh, Palmer . . .”
“Will there be anything else?”
“No, thank you. That will be all.”
“Very good.”
Half an hour later, when the door clicked shut behind her, Mary found Hilda in the back of the taxi that waited on the curb.
“What are you doing here?”
Hilda’s scars were puckered and raw, her confusion twisting them further. “I thought you had asked for me?”
“I did nothing of the sort.”
“Oh . . . but on the telephone Palmer said I was needed very urgently.”
Mary softened. “And you came for my sake?”
“I have missed you dreadfully.”
Mary hesitated only for a moment. “You had better get out then, hadn’t you? We can hardly go for a stroll with you sitting in there.”
Mary paid the taxi driver, linked arms with Hilda and they walked through the rain. They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.
Later, Mary said, “Alistair’s alive.”
Hilda put her hands to her mouth.
“I love him,” said Mary. “Do you hate me?”
“No. I’m glad for you.”
“I’ve missed you too, you know.”
Hilda took her hands. “Come and stay at the flat for the weekend, won’t you? There’s a sofa bed, the wireless, and as much tap water as you can drink. Unless you need to be at the Lyceum?”
“Maybe my taking a weekend off would do everyone good. You and I have met people on fire who made less fuss than children being forced to learn reading.”
“You’re a dreadful teacher anyway.”
“Thanks. And you’re a useless nurse.”
“So, you’ll come to stay?”
“Thanks, I should love to.”
They walked east and north toward Hilda’s flat, the undamaged streets giving way to the general destruction. The sleet came harder now. As they approached Regent’s Canal only a thin path had been cleared between the mounds of rubble.
“Don’t mind the mess,” said Mary. “I shall build cottages along here for you—little thatched things such as one sees in Lowestoft—and I shall arrange for a handsome and unattached man to be installed in every one.”
“Tall?”
“You’ll need a ladder to kiss them. One of those two-step efforts you get in libraries.”
“Dark?”
“I shall organize them by street for you. Dark, blond, funny, rich. If you want more than one quality, you just knock near an intersection.”
‘Uniform?”
“Any you like. Soldier, sailor, engine driver. Every house will have a dressing-up box.”
“I believe I will like your new London very much.”
“Then you shall be mayor of it,” said Mary, sweeping an arm in a magnanimous arc.
“I suppose it should be me. You’ll be too busy with Alistair.”
Mary saw the twitch in her friend’s smile. “I’m sorry, Hilda.”
“Don’t be. You’ll be married, I suppose?”
“He’s in prison, in Gibraltar.”
Hilda stopped. “What for?”
“He left Malta before he should have.”
Hilda looked miserable. “I sent him a letter, you know. I told him you were gone to the dogs.”
Mary considered it. “I can’t say you were wrong.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t right. It’s no wonder I’m alone.”
“Stop it. You’ll meet someone soon.”
“But how? There aren’t any parties anymore. Either that or there are parties everywhere, and no one tells me.”
“Yes, I should think it’s that. You’ve always struck me as a charmless and unpopular girl.”
“But it’s these scars,” said Hilda. “They’re the only known antidote to me.”
“Then we’ll find you a man with scars that match.”
Hilda smiled.
“See?” said Mary. “You’re pretty when you do that.”
“I don’t suppose I have done it much, since we fought.”
“Me neither. From now on let’s remember the trick of not fighting, shall we? Why do you suppose we ever forgot?”
Hilda sniffed, turned her face up to the gray sky, and caught sleet with her tongue as it fell.
“Hard to tell,” she said. “Perhaps it’s something they put in the bombs.”
December, 1941
MARY PUT ON HER mackintosh and sou’wester hat, stubbed her cigarette and went out into the morning. The cold weather had brought her limp back and she nursed it through Regent’s Park, skirting the deserted zoo. By the lake, its surface quick with rain, the rowboats were drawn up under canvas. The park wardens waited under the bandstand for the weather to pass. They smoked pipes, their clothes rolled and pinned where limbs were missing. The bare oaks with their ageless trunks held up the woebegone sky.
She carried on through Marylebone and Fitzrovia, which had never seen the worst of the bombing. Only a few gaps spoiled the Georgian terraces, and the rubble had been carted away. Where there were craters the rain had flooded them, so that the spaces between the houses mirrored the sky and made from each loss if not beauty, then at least a quiet neighbor.
Mary walked down to the Embankment and looked out over the broad sweep of the river from Parliament to Blackfriars. She no longer lingered here but it was not possible to lose the lover’s habit of looking downstream, to the sea. She tightened her mackintosh at the throat and hurried on to the Lyceum.
This was the best part of the day, looking forward to teaching her class. There were nine colored children living in the basement now. It had taken the war to reveal London’s heart, centrifugal for white children and gravitational for Negroes. When it was all over, she supposed, Miss Vine would bring her school back, and all her teachers would carry on quite deliberately as if nothing had happened. They would even make a virtue of it, in makeshift classrooms, thinking themselves the stoics. They would have no idea at all that life had been able to invent itself without them.
In the auditorium the minstrels were taking a break from rehearsal. They sprawled around the stage on boxes and folded drapes, smoking.
“Good morning, Miss North,” Bones called out.
Mary stopped at the foot of the stage. “Good morning, Mr. Bones. How goes the minstrelsy trade?”
“In its usual way—thank you for asking—which is to say, proportionate with your people’s kind purchase of tickets. How goes teaching?”
“In its customary manner, thank you, with two steps forward and one point five back, or half a step forward when expressed in net terms.”
He came to the front of the stage. “A minute of your time, Miss North? Which I believe is one sixtieth of an hour when expressed as a fraction?”
They climbed up to a high row in the auditorium and sat on the fold-down seats, leaving an empty one between them.
“This thing you’re doing for our children,” he said. “So kind. Though there’s been some talk that it might be better if you didn’t come every day.”
She smiled. “Children will say that, won’t they? But the truth is, letters and arithmetic come best through daily practice. I try to make it fun, but there’s no substitute for the weekday grind.”
Bones looked at his hands. “The talk that you might come less often. It isn’t from the children.”
“Oh. I see.”
“It isn’t that we’re not grateful. What you’ve done for them is terrific. I see kids who couldn’t read who are writing now. I see kids who wouldn’t talk, and suddenly they won’t quit nagging me for money.”
“Well, then . . .”
“It’s just that these things don’t always end well. See what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure I do. Surely it doesn’t harm them to learn? Quite the reverse: when their peers come back from the countryside, they’ll need to hold their own.”
“We’re not saying they shouldn’t be learning. We’re maybe asking, respectfully, if you’re the best one to teach them.”
Down on the stage the minstrels were rehearsing a slapstick piece, with a long plank and all its attendant physics. Mary had never realized how many men must be hit in the face before such a thing became funny.
“The fact is,” said Bones, “we’ve got our thing going on here, and people leave us alone. We have our trade, and this theater to work in, and a home of sorts for the children who’ve lost their people. While it’s just us, no one pays us mind. But if people thought we were mixing, they’d pay us more attention. Which for us is like daylight for vampires, you see what I’m saying? There’s an understanding between life and the colored entertainer. Your people give us a corner of the night, and we don’t darken your day.”
“But I hardly come and go with a fanfare. I use the stage door and I teach in the basement.”
“You may come discreetly into our place, Miss North, but I wonder how carefully you leave yours.”
“I don’t brag about what I’m doing, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do your friends know? Do your mother and father?”
“Yes, but—”
“And do they wholeheartedly approve?”
“No, but that hardly—”
“And so they talk to people, and people talk. Are we licensed for the number of shows we do? Are we allowed to sell drink? Did any of those orphaned children come with adoption papers and ration cards? And yet we are afforded the comfort of our small community because it would take wearisome paperwork to scatter us. We are forgiven our skins, you see, so long as no one—officially—notices.”
Mary hung her head. “You want me to stop coming.”
“It’s not anything I want, Miss North. We’re all partial to you. But you mustn’t think the children won’t get their schooling. I may not have your facility, but I can give them the language. And the manager he isn’t going to be teaching them any mathematical theorems but he has been known to balance the books.”
“What if I started coming less often?”
He pursed his lips and looked down on the stage. “Fine. What if you started today?”
And so here she was, leaving before she’d even had time to take off her raincoat. She wondered if the months of morphine had weakened her tendency to resist. Or else it was the solitude, in which the self hardened but also grew brittle.
It was always a lurch, coming out of the Lyceum into the crowd of white faces in the Strand. There was a period of acclimatization, until one stopped finding white skin strange. Until then it seemed unnatural and rather horrid, as if something medical or blanchingly industrial had happened to everyone. There was a moment before one understood that one belonged with them—a moment outside time, as if one had stood up too suddenly.
January, 1942
THE FOUR LOCAL MEN who brought Captain Braxton’s body back up the cliff to Fort St. Elmo had done the best they could to make it decent, straightening the limbs and wrapping a shirt around the ruined head. Simonson thanked them with a promissory note for kerosene, then had the surgeon decant the dead man into a coffin and nail it shut. The nails had to be extracted from the doorposts of the fort, and straightened on an anvil.
Simonson stubbed out something they were still calling a cigarette. He pawed at his tongue for the bitter tobacco fragments that had stuck there. His head pounded.
The battery under his command stood at seventy-seven men, with Braxton freshly subtracted. There were rations enough for thirty. It was a feature of the tactical situation that the more men he lost, the more the rest could eat. When a raid came, one didn’t know whether to send the men down to the shelters in their tin hats or up to the ramparts in their PT shorts. Occasionally an officer dealt with this and all other uncertainties forever, by taking a stroll at dawn and not stopping when he came to the sea cliffs.
Simonson supposed o
ne should feel pity at a suicide, but he rather hated the dead man for it. Absent Alistair’s good humor, the island had become lethal to his spirit. It was as if an invisible bile seeped from the bomb craters. He loathed every yellow rock. Since there was nothing to eat, he smoked in an uninterrupted chain, until smoke seeped into the gaps between every cell of his body. Until it was only force of habit that caused the smoke, and not his person, to disperse.
All morning his subordinates plagued him. Captains Appleby and Fisk had fallen out over which of their guns ought to receive a new barrel that had been fought through. Simonson flipped a threepenny bit along the corridor and had them chase after it to decide. Lieutenant Spencer reported, assuming he would be captain now that Braxton had left the situation vacant. Five minutes later, Lieutenant Cooper dropped by to confirm—just as a nudge, between old Harrovians—that he, and not the overweening Spencer, was in line for the same promotion.
All afternoon it went on, while the enemy attacked. Down poured the rain of blood and sulfur, and up slunk these privateers from the underground parts of the fort. Here was Major Huntley-Chamberlain, hoping that it would be his favorite, Ives, who took the vacant captaincy. Here was Major Hall, lobbying for Williams.
At dusk, at last, Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton summoned him to his office. For the first time in weeks, Simonson felt something akin to gratitude. Having noticed how overstretched he was, Hamilton must finally be disposed to take some of the heat off. Simonson put on his cleanest shirt, blew the dust off his cap and hurried down to the ops room.
Hamilton glanced up from his papers when Simonson knocked.
“Too bad about Braxton.”
“Dreadful, sir.”
“Married?”
“No. Just parents.”
“Well, that’s something. ‘Killed in action,’ I suppose?”
“I’ll get the letter off tonight.”
“Fine. Do sit.”
Simonson did. He crossed his legs and put his cap on his knee. He supposed he was to be loaned to HQ for a spell. It didn’t do to think of it as a holiday—one ought to relish the added responsibility—but just now he felt only relief at the prospect of release from daily command.