by Chris Cleave
“Mary, are you quite all right?” Alistair had his hand on her arm.
“Thank you, darling, I am fine.”
And she would be fine, of course: she would make conversation when the air seemed the right shape for it, and she would laugh when laughter seemed a better fit. It was nice that the drinks kept coming, since the glow they gave was terrific.
He took his hand away. “What would you like us to do now?”
“Well, they do a nice dinner here—although it’s getting rather late—or we could go to one of the cafés on Haymarket, or if you’re not hungry we might even still make the cinema.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I suppose what I meant was, what would you like now, for us?”
Mary gripped the table. The room revolved around the chandelier. Their white planet spun through the plush black smoky space.
“I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “I’m ahead of myself. Ignore me—this is what I was like after France. That’s what I was trying to warn you about earlier on.”
“It’s all right. I’ve so looked forward to seeing you again. I thought I would know just what to do when you came. I’m sorry.”
He nodded and looked away, to the other tables where guests glowed in firmer orbits.
“On Malta, with the blockade, one doesn’t imagine that people live like this at home. It is hard to imagine how hungry everyone is on the island.”
“I can imagine it,” she said, feeling even as she said it what a foolish thing it was to blurt out.
He smiled kindly enough, but now she saw herself as he must. In the bright light of the chandelier, before he arrived, London’s circle had seemed quite equal to the earth’s equator. Now she saw the smallness of it. How vain she had been in her nest, feathering it with mirrors. She was a teacher nobody needed, a daughter whose parents despaired. And now here was Alistair, this man who had stood up to the enemy while she had been so proud of standing up to her mother. Did she really sit at this table, even now in her new feathered hat, wondering if she loved him?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
His face was pale with concern. “Whatever for?”
“Forgive me,” she said, standing abruptly so that the chair fell to the carpet. “Please, darling, forgive me . . .”
She fled into the blacked-out night, into the ruined city beyond the consolation of chandeliers.
For a moment Alistair thought to go after her, but he was afraid that he could not have understood the situation. There must be something monstrous about him that had made her run. He was even more ruined than he had thought.
He sat in his uniform at the empty table while a waiter righted the overturned chair without irritation or comment. The pianist played without interruption. Mary’s place was cleared: the glass and its coaster removed on an electroplate tray, the tablecloth swept of ash until there was no sign she had ever been there. How abruptly people were taken. His body grieved, while his thoughts struggled to recall how he had got there. He had carried her body all the way back to barracks, and collapsed unconscious in the guardhouse. No, that wasn’t it. He had not opened the jar she had given him, carrying it instead to war’s end.
No, that wasn’t it at all. He had loved her.
—
It had been the tiniest chance that he would still be sitting there, and when Mary saw him she cut corners between the other tables, not minding the diners’ indignation. When she appeared by Alistair, out of breath, it seemed to startle him. He looked up from a drink that couldn’t still have been his first.
“Mary?”
“This place,” she said. “It isn’t me. Think what you like of me, but I wanted to tell you that.”
He stood, needing the table for balance. “What place is more you?”
“I don’t have a place anymore.”
“Is there somewhere you might feel better, at least?”
“I like the river,” she said. “I went there, sometimes, when you were missing.”
“Should we go there now?”
“I don’t know. It’s late.”
He checked his watch. “What time do they switch the Thames off?”
“Are you furious at me?”
“No. I thought you were disappointed.”
A waiter had been hovering, uncertain whether to bring cognac or coats.
“What would you like to do?” Mary asked Alistair.
“I’ll walk, if you’d like to. We don’t have to go anywhere in particular.”
“I’m slow on my leg, I should warn you.”
“I’ll do the sprinting, then, if you’ll do the handstands.”
Outside, an unused moon was rising. It shone along the axis of Piccadilly and sent their shadows west. As they walked down to the Embankment, Mary’s mood—which had lifted for a moment—began to sink again. Alistair could take her arm only with his left, and since her left side was the one needing support, they tended to separate. The awkwardness leached into the silence between them. The Thames, when they reached it, was no help. With its silvered crests in the soft night air it should have seemed dear, but she saw the slick blackness of the troughs, and felt on her skin the sobering drop in temperature.
They walked south along the river. Parliament seemed indigo in the light. The plane trees of Millbank had limbs splintered here and there by the bombing. They spoke of these small things, grateful when they presented themselves.
When they reached the Tate they saw that the bombing had blown its roofs off. Alistair was shaken and wanted to look. Inside, the mosaic floors were wrecked and the rain had washed their tiles out. Ten thousand colored marble chips, blued by the moonlight, lay in a mound at the foot of the stairs.
Alistair went ahead into the galleries and Mary hung back, poking at the mess with her toe. It seemed redundant to follow him, now that he had seen her as she was. She had only ever been an imprint in the London clay, of inherited money and looks. How pleased she had been with the impression she made, thinking it her own. But there were thousands of her stamp, and thousands more would come, each imagining they escaped the pattern. There would be countless small rebellions, numberless mothers defied. After the war these tiles would all be picked up and stuck back where they’d fallen.
She stood beneath the shattered central dome of the gallery. Above, between the bare iron hoops, a halo had formed around the moon. She lit a cigarette. The sound of the lighter rang in the empty space and sent pigeons clacking up through the dome.
What good was she to him? And yet days still came, and had to be faced. Perhaps she should go back home. As soon as an occasion presented, her mother would invite the Hunter-Halls. Mary would seat herself as instructed, which she supposed would decide everything else. Society was not complicated, after all. One had only to follow one’s name from table plan to wedding banns and all the way through to the headstone.
She stubbed out her cigarette and edged through the gloom in the direction Alistair had gone. In the galleries a damp line had risen from the floor, a pale fungus in numberless dots marking the creeping edge of it. On the ashen walls a thousand lighter rectangles showed where each painting had hung, and to where it would be restored. How foolish she was, still to hope that Alistair could love her. And yet she followed him, into the dark, even though she knew that each step took her no further from who she was. When the war was over the evacuees would return. The zoo animals would be put back on trucks and returned to their old labeled cages. The world could not wake from its pattern.
The tarnished brass title plaques were still screwed into the gallery walls. In the moonlight they glowed dully. Precisely here and here had been the Constables and the Turners. Here had been Ophelia, and here she would be again, chanting snatches of old tunes.
Footsteps came, and she turned.
“Why did you run out?” said Alistair.
“I couldn�
��t bear myself. You, with everything you’ve been through. And then me, and my small miseries and the Ritz.” She put her face in her hands. “The Ritz.”
He looked around. “This place doesn’t feel like me either. I don’t think I’m anxious to fix it.”
“Do you think, if you can stand it . . . we might try to find a place for us?”
His face hardened a little and he said nothing.
“Alistair?” she said, her heart racing.
“I don’t know. Do you think you’d even be happy?”
“Oh,” she said miserably. “My mother thinks that isn’t even a word, in wartime.”
“I don’t mind what your mother thinks.”
“I would try to be happy. I can be fun, you know. I hope we can be that way again.”
“I might let you down,” he said. “I don’t sleep. My mind isn’t right.”
“But we do let each other down—don’t we?—and it isn’t the end.”
“I don’t know. You might have been right when you ran out.”
She dropped her hands to her sides. “But you might have come after me! I only needed one kind word, you know. I don’t know how to begin, now that we finally might.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t let you go.”
“And I wish I hadn’t run. But this is us from the start, don’t you think? We get so close each time. Darling, we get so close.”
“Were we wrong from the start?” said Alistair. “To pretend that we weren’t in love?”
“I was wrong. I was a coward not to tell Tom. Do you despise me for it?”
He shook his head. “I should have said I loved you. Would that have been the difference?”
‘It’s the difference now. Do you think you might tell me if you still do or if you don’t? It’s all right, you know. I’m sure now that it’s braver to say it.”
He got his pipe lit and leaned back against the wall of the gallery. She leaned beside him, an arm’s width away, and they looked at the pattern of the absent paintings.
“I don’t know how to answer you,” he said. “I don’t have feelings as I used to. These pictures used to move me.”
“I used to move you.”
He took her hand. “I went so far down before they pulled me out. I’m sorry.”
She looked at her hand in his. “You still care, at least.”
“I care that your leg must be aching. I care that I must be making you sad. I care for a thousand things I would like to make better for you.”
“Then might you still try, Alistair? Could you love me again, with time?”
“I’m so afraid in case I won’t.”
“And I’m so afraid in case I always will.”
She kissed him and they stood for a time without speaking. Mary felt the weight of their silence but there was no sadness in it because the silence had not yet found its moment to slip from the heart and lodge itself in the ordinary. Perhaps, if the two of them were careful, then it never would. Perhaps the real work of lovers was to hold themselves apart from theaters and train stations, from jam jars and picture frames, from all the bellicose everyday things that sought to beat one with time. Even to hope for love was a trap, Mary supposed, if when one said love one only meant armistice. Maybe it was foolish to imagine any more definite thing—since the heart, after all, did not declare victory. The heart declared only forgiveness, for which there was no grand precedent and no instrument of surrender.
Her leg was giving out, and she sank to the floor. Alistair joined her. In the empty gallery they sat a little distance apart—not so far that life could easily get between them, but not so close that it couldn’t if it tried. They stared into the pattern of lighter gray shapes where the paintings were supposed to be. Through the holes in the roof and the cracks in the walls the city grew lighter around them—their ancient city with its ordered tides reverting to the sea.
And now from the river in the east rose a vivid red sun, surprising Mary. She hadn’t meant to sleep. The day had got in through the broken dome and flooded the gallery wall. It blinded her and she blinked until the world was restored. Beside her in the ruins Alistair lay with his eyes closed, without a mark on him. The quick bright shock of the light between the cloud and the eastern horizon: an unimagined thing, thought Mary, a life. It was an unscrewing of tarnished brass plaques. It was one tile lost to the pattern. It was a world one might still know, if everyone forgiven was brave.