by Chris Cleave
April, 1942
AT THE PUBLIC RECORDS office, on the fourth day of trying, Zachary had found his father’s name. He hadn’t asked for help and he hadn’t wanted it.
Now the rain came in with the wind. There was an avenue of chestnut trees and he found the broadest for shelter. There was bright sun between the showers, and the light fell green through the leaves. Jackdaws pecked at the edges of the walkways. They hopped among the headstones, finding the worms the rain had brought up and helping them into the light.
Next to his father’s name, which he had recognized from long familiarity, had been: EHZT NOLNOD CMETYRE. He had frowned at the words in the register: sometimes they could be made compliant. He had tried looking from the corner of his eye, then surprising them. EZTA NALDON MCFETRY.
The rain would soon blow through. On the graves the jackdaws fussed at the moss that grew through the gravel. Zachary lit a cigarette. He had waited for a rainy day, to be here alone.
EATS NNLDNN CEMTHGY. He had drawn his thumbs together, isolating each letter as Mary had shown him. He had made a one-letter prison between his thumbs and slid it across the first word: E . . . A . . . S . . . T. He had repeated the word to himself, then interrogated the whole sentence. EAST LONDON CEMETERY. Beside the location had been written a plot number for a mass grave.
The rain stopped. Water dripped from the chestnut leaves, the city inverted in each drop. Zachary came from under the tree and walked among the numbered plots at the margins of the graveyard. There was so much freshly dug earth. Weeds would take before grass.
His father’s plot was marked with a two-inch metal plaque on a wooden stave. The plot was twenty feet by ten, its boundary made with stakes and green twine. One didn’t know how many were buried there. Zachary stood for a while. Dandelions covered the plot. There was a smell of wet earth.
“I’m sorry it took me so long,” he said.
In the footlights his father had addressed the audience at the close of every show: For those who couldn’t be with us tonight.
Zachary smiled, and flicked away his cigarette. He could start now. He would try south, across the Thames. There was a rumor that his kind was trying there. Flat rubble waited for them on the far bank of the river. Rubble to build on was no one’s business but their own. It did not catch the light, having no promise but what they brought with them.
He tried not to be afraid. London was a lightening of the sky. It was the bloody last hour of a milk tooth. It was a city dying to begin.
May, 1942
HILDA POURED TEA, PROPPED an elbow on her kitchen table, and read Simonson’s note again.
It was brave of you to include your photograph in the last letter. What a terrible mess—you must be devastated. That pompadour will have to go. As for the scars, I do not see what you are fretting about—one hardly notices them. In any case, it is only your face—this is why we were all issued with two.
She held the aerogramme to her cheek. It smelled of smoke and mail sacks. Through the open window, pigeons were cooing in that emollient, slightly medical way they had, as if it were a purgative for something nonspecific.
Having no photograph to hand, Simonson had drawn her a self-portrait in blue ink. He had made himself scrawny and bearded, more castaway than soldier. In his cartoon he wore sergeant’s stripes and bawled at men on parade. Hilda thought it adorable that he was so touchy about his demotion. She resolved to sew him various insignia, denoting ranks of her invention, which she would include in subsequent letters.
You write that it was clever of Alistair to induce the two of us to correspond, but I do not think him bright. It will have been no more than simple visual association on his part, since you are rather pretty and I am strikingly handsome. I should also like to correct any lies with which he might have supplied you. He may claim that I correspond with several girls, while in fact I only have ink for you.
Hilda smiled. Well, and so what if the man wrote around? She thought his letters reckless and sweet, as unworn as London in May.
Through the window the traffic rumbled. On the street, beneath the barrage balloons, couples finished each other’s thoughts again. Strapped shoes had been brought out for the season, hems raised by an inch and a half. The capital had remembered itself. She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of his letter. How good it would be to fall in love—how perfectly, anciently new.
June, 1942
“YES BUT I’M LIKE a piano,” said Hilda. “I need men to move me.”
“And Simonson?” said Mary.
“I like the convenience of mail-order.”
They were at the Ritz, at a table where they could be seen from the door. Mary spread her hands on the pristine tablecloth. “But there’s always some problem with the delivery, isn’t there? Oh, why do I feel so anxious?”
“Insufficient drink,” said Hilda, snapping her fingers the instant her diagnosis was made. Two more gin fizzes appeared.
“Thank you for coming out,” said Mary. “I know it’s silly, but I couldn’t wait for him on my own.”
She brushed away ash where it had missed the ashtray, and moved the flowers in their vase to catch the light from the chandelier at the center of the room.
“Did he say when he would come?” said Hilda.
“Straight from Waterloo, off the nine o’clock.”
“Any minute, then. Do stop fussing, or I shall have the waiter etherize you.”
“I just want everything to be perfect when he gets here. After all this, I couldn’t bear for him to be put off by a little thing.”
“He didn’t mind when I told him you were a wreck. I shouldn’t think he’ll mind ash on the tablecloth.”
“You’re quite right,” said Mary, thinking that Hilda was quite wrong. The heart was a bicameral thing, both stoical and skittish. Who was to say that it mightn’t endure the years of separation and the abrupt reversals of fate, only to be repulsed by a misaligned vase, by a lipsticked tooth, by a hundredth of an ounce of ash?
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Hilda. “Where did you get that hat?”
“White’s, in Burlington Arcade. Do you like it?”
“I actually think I must eat it.”
“Thank you,” said Mary. “The feathers are real phoenix, you know.”
“And your dress is just right. Any more décolletage and you’d look rather as if you might; any less and you’d look as if you might rather not.”
When Hilda was on form she was hard to resist—and in any case it was fun to be back at the Ritz, which seemed to have excused Mary sooner than her family had. Here they honored one’s name in that generous way the Ritz knew, which was to remember it only when one was sober. Seated at the grand, the pianist played some Schumann.
Mary began to believe that everything really might be all right. Since Alistair’s exoneration they had exchanged letters almost weekly while he waited for a convoy home. Her letters were full of apology, his of understanding. She had confessed to passing up the chance to have her father write a letter that might have reduced his sentence. But if you hadn’t your ideals, he’d written, you’d be no different from the others, sipping champagne at Black’s. For his part Alistair found it hard to believe that she did not despise him for jumping the evacuation queue. But perhaps this was love, at the second time of asking: the understanding that each would not mind what had been necessary locally.
In the light of the chandelier, men in lounge suits converged on their table in oblique trajectories described by the pull of desire and the push of manners. They noticed Hilda’s face when they were already too close, and swerved. Some had prepared opening gambits that they swallowed. Others made attempts of varying skill to demonstrate that they had only been on their way to the men’s room.
Hilda looked into a third gin. “This will be my whole life, you know.”
“You mustn’t think that.”
/> “It’s hard to stay gay, though. Do they imagine I’m cut all the way through?”
Mary was drunk enough to touch Hilda’s scars. “What’s this on them? Healing cream?”
“It’s foundation, damn you.”
Mary drew her hand back. “I’m sorry.”
“Not that it does any good. I could wear a carnival mask and the scars would still show through.”
“And so? Damn these spivs and idlers. A million better men will come home from the war, and they shan’t want a girl who sat it out. When Simonson looks at your scars, he’ll see someone.”
“I’m afraid he won’t want to look. That he shan’t want to be reminded.”
Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. “What sort of a man do you want anyway?”
“Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees.”
“Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win—”
“Oh, I think we’ll win, don’t you? Now that the Americans are all-in?”
“Yes, but there’ll be such a mess to sort out. Not just all the rebuilding. We’ll have to put society back together, in some better configuration.”
Hilda snorted.
“What?” said Mary.
“Well, we want such different things from men. You earnestly want someone who will help you reform society.”
Mary smiled. “Whereas you . . . ?”
“. . . just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.”
Mary looked out over the tables, each white linen world orbiting the great central chandelier of the lounge, each world encircled in turn by its moons of women and men, laughing and drinking, occulting and eclipsing. How rudderless one was, in truth. How governed by unmastered forces.
Hilda touched her hand. “I haven’t upset you, have I?”
“Not at all,” said Mary.
But now her own heart faltered. For these long months she had held on to the idea of love so fiercely that she had not considered a daunting possibility: that she didn’t love Alistair after all—that his great merit was in having known her only before she fell apart, while her great cowardice was not to have admitted to him that she was diminished. She wasn’t the girl who had once walked in bombs as if they were drizzle. She had lost her exemption from the ordinary, and as soon as he realized it, he wouldn’t love her either.
She twisted her hands in her lap. How well did they know each other, after all? She and Alistair had never had the civilian progression into love by small and reversible steps, by increments of dancing and dinner in which joy was imperceptibly solemnized. All they had had was an air raid, and a moment at Waterloo Station, and two pounds by weight of aerogrammes that might one day be discovered, in a suitcase, in some attic being converted to a flat, and flung into a waste cart with old books and cups.
“But you look so glum,” said Hilda.
“Don’t be silly.”
“You’re getting cold feet, aren’t you?”
“It’s just . . . I mean what if—oh Hilda, I can barely remember his face.”
“You’re panicking, you silly fruit.”
“Do you think?”
“He’s a little late, that’s all it is, and you have altar nerves. I’ll bet Alistair’s just the same: he’ll be in a pub around the corner, getting up some Dutch courage. Breathe—that’s it! Take a really good deep breath.”
Mary felt a little better. Drinks came, magnifying the effect.
“Now listen,” said Hilda, licking gin from the end of her cocktail straw and jabbing it in Mary’s direction. “What you need is to take out his photo.”
Mary laughed. “I shan’t sit here mooning over him.”
“You know the trouble?” said Hilda, rummaging in Mary’s bag for her. “Your mother bred all the sense out of you. Now look,” she said, slapping the brownish vignette of Alistair down among the ash and the coasters. “Look at that and tell me you’re not in love.”
How many times Mary had stared at Alistair’s photograph. Once it had provoked a simple gladness.
“ ‘Oh, I don’t know,” said Mary. “What would you have me say?”
“That he is beautiful. That you love him. Only that.”
“But it’s been so long, and I’m such a mess. I hardly remember—”
“Then think: what was the spark? The hour you looked into those eyes and thought: I want no one else? God knows, I can remember.”
Mary stared at Alistair’s portrait. It didn’t seem kind to tell Hilda that it hadn’t been his eyes at all, but his back. She’d known with certainty that she needed him only when he had turned away from her on the platform at Waterloo. How her heart had dropped—as if there were no end to falling. When the hour had come for the war to take him away, that had been the first and last moment she had known without doubt that she loved him.
One knew how one felt only when things ended. And yet here was the world of white tables, insisting on beginnings. And here was Alistair now, with a footman throwing open the door of the lounge. Here was Alistair, tall and gaunt, the chandelier showering him with light. Here he was in his uniform, smiling and unsteady, his right sleeve empty and pinned. Here was Alistair, meeting her eye.
Mary stood, knocking over her drink. Gin sluiced over the tablecloth and deepened the red plush of the carpet.
“Alistair,” she said, so overcome that she forgot to embrace him and instead offered her hand to shake. It was ridiculous—and even worse since she offered her right, which he had to take with his left.
“Hello, Mary.”
They disengaged. He raised and then dropped his good arm, helplessly. “Sorry I’m late. There were Germans.”
Mary managed a laugh; Alistair too.
“Hello Alistair,” said Hilda. “Gin all right with you?”
“Gin? Fine. Hello, Hilda, how are you?”
“Back in a jiffy,” said Hilda, giving them the table.
“Her poor face . . .” said Alistair as Hilda curved to the ladies’ room.
“Shrapnel,” said Mary.
Gin came, and Alistair took a sip. He grimaced and widened his eyes.
“Nice?” said Mary.
“I’d almost forgotten what we were fighting for. And you only look more beautiful.”
“You’re very kind. But it’s the war, I’m afraid. I’m so much older.”
Alistair gave her a look so tender that she thought she might dissolve. The two of them might be all right, she realized. She must make more effort to take it slowly this time, that was all. Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.
“You haven’t missed the weather,” she said. “It’s mostly rained since you left.”
Alistair took in the Ritz’s lounge—the laughter, the crystals of light that flattered the crowd. He said, “I thought I wouldn’t make it back to all this. I was sinking by the time the Navy pulled us out. I was going down and there was this great roaring noise, which was the sound of the rescue launch’s engines, but I thought it was the end. They had to pump my chest.”
The words struggled to connect, and Mary found herself already saying, “And of course it snowed a lot in January.”
Hilda appeared back at the table, all purpose and powder. “Well,” she said, “I shall leave you lovebirds to it.”
Mary took her arm. “You mustn’t go.”
Mistaking her terror, Hilda kissed her on both cheeks. “Don’t be silly, I’ll be fine. I shall call at the garret tomorrow to catch up on all the news.” She gave Mary a look of tipsy significance. “But I shan’t arrive before noon.”
“Oh Hilda, you really don’t need to—”
“Nonsense. Now be good, you two, and if you can’t be good, be a warning to others.”
She was gone with a wave of the fingers, weaving between the tables. A waiter dimmed the chandelier. The pianist took a break.
“In Malta it was mostly sunny,” said Alistair. “But there could be a terrible wind.”
“I was so desperate when I heard you were missing,” said Mary at the same time.
Their hands, a foot apart on the tablecloth, could not seem to make the junction.
The pianist sat back down and played “La Campanella.” More drinks came. Alistair packed his pipe—not making too bad a fist of it with one hand, Mary thought. A waiter arrived to light it from a cut-glass lamp. The staff at the Ritz had the quality of apologizing with a murmur for each of their perfect actions. They smelled of nothing and had faces that made no demands on the eye or on the heart. They melted into shade, not allowing themselves to be silhouetted against the chandelier. They eluded cognition entirely, like sorcerers, or fathers. At the tables all around them the guests chattered away as if life were not on the meter, while the waiters took away ash.
“I think I should warn you—” said Mary.
“I ought to let you know—” said Alistair.
“You go,” said Mary.
“Please, you first.”
Someone dimmed the chandelier further, until it seemed to cast a light that was darker than its absence. The high notes scattered from the piano. They glittered in that thin register where one heard the strings and hammers.
“What were you going to say?” said Alistair.
“Oh, it was nothing. You?”
“Only that . . . oh, it can wait.”
Drinks came. The pianist played some nocturnes of Chopin. Black-coated waiters appeared out of the black background to light Mary’s cigarettes. One had only to think of fire and fire came, as if the incendiary thought scorched the air. One had only to need a drink, and the pull of the need itself caused the drink to arrive on a heavy tray in a glass that had been handled with white cotton. It might carry on all night, Mary supposed: this matching of an equal and opposite solution to every resolvable human need—done with this exquisite precision that extended to the fullest extremity of the possible and therefore only made one ache all the more despairingly with doubts that could never be soothed by lackeys. It was the perfect antithesis of the war, this torment of solicitude. How strange, that the struggle and its absence should leave one equally afraid.