Maeve grabs hold of Harriet’s sleeve. “I don’t want to lose you,” she says.
“You won’t lose me.”
They are almost at the cathedral, but there are so many people blocking them that Harriet can’t see the building. She looks up for the spire, sees nothing but the head of the man in front of her and knows that the cathedral has been gutted.
There is nothing left of the roof. It has collapsed into the centre of the building, and the walls have crumbled. The windows are gone, but the window arches remain. Smoke is still trickling from the beams. They jostle nearer, Harriet actively pushing through the jam of people ahead of them.
“Look,” says Maeve, pointing upward, and Harriet looks up to see that someone has tied two of the charred beams together in the shape of a cross and hung it over the altar.
It seems as if all of Coventry is in the ruined cathedral. Some people are weeping openly, some walk along with their heads bowed. The men have removed their hats. The children are silent. Everyone seems dazed, stumbling forward over the rubble that fills the space. The ground feels hot through Harriet’s shoes, and much of it is impassable. As they get closer to the altar, Harriet can see that someone has written Father Forgive behind the cross of burned wood. Around the altar are placed glass jars with wildflowers in them.
It seems impossible that Harriet was once standing on the roof of this building, that she walked up and down, under the stars and above the frosted ground.
Maeve feels as though she’s going to collapse.
“Wait,” she says to Harriet. “Stop.” The cheerful optimism and bravery has drained out of her since entering the cathedral. She feels afraid.
“I need a minute,” she says, and she and Harriet walk over to the side of the cathedral, out of the moving crowd.
Harriet has a hand on Maeve’s arm to steady her, turns to look at the crowd gathering behind them, thinking that perhaps Jeremy might have made his way back here too, that he might be standing in this mass of people, recalling how he once stood on the roof, how he paced with Harriet under the heavens, guardians of the city. In that moment when Harriet turns to look for Jeremy, she sees Marjorie Hatton. She’s moving slowly forward in the middle of the throng.
It is harder to push against the crowd than to be carried along by it, and Harriet struggles to fight her way through to Marjorie. But soon she is there, and has the nurse by the sleeve.
“Marjorie,” she says. “Remember me? Harriet Marsh?”
Marjorie Hatton looks confused, and then recognizes her. “I’m glad you made it,” she says.
“Jeremy,” Harriet says. “Do you know what happened to Jeremy?”
Marjorie lowers her head, and Harriet feels cold with fear.
“He found a bus,” says Marjorie. “A sort of ambulance bus, on his way back to my shelter. I mean, it was a regular bus that had turned into an ambulance, with a driver who was taking the wounded to hospital. We were loading my patients into the bus. Jeremy had just gone back for the last one when he was hit by the blast.”
“Hit?”
“Killed,” says Marjorie Hatton. “We pulled him into the bus and took him to hospital with the others, but he was already dead. I’m so sorry.”
Harriet stands still in the centre of the cathedral. All around her people move forward to look at the altar, to place flowers in the glass jars there.
Jeremy, like Owen, has left her. She shouldn’t have let him go. She should have kept him with her, kept him safe. She puts her hand into her pocket, finds the miniature fire that he gave her. It is cold to the touch.
In this grey morning, the tide of living people rises around her.
Harriet can see Maeve leaning against the wall. She begins to move forward, toward Maeve, already shaping the words she knows she has to say.
And then, right in front of Maeve, Harriet sees her neighbour, Wendell Mumby. He is standing talking to two men under what used to be the chancel roof and is now just a patch of grey sky. Wendell Mumby has his sleeves rolled up and his good tweed cap on. He throws his head back as Harriet is watching and laughs at something she can’t hear.
Maeve sees Harriet moving back toward her through the crowd. Harriet is moving with purpose. She has something to tell Maeve, and Maeve can see by the look on Harriet’s face that she knows something.
She remembers watching Jeremy leave the house yesterday afternoon for his fire-watching duties, how she had stood at the window in the sitting room as he sauntered up the road. He liked wearing the uniform. It put a bounce in his step. At the corner, confident his mother was watching, he turned and bowed. Cheeky monkey, she had thought.
Harriet is there, has taken Maeve’s hand in her own, is already saying the words that Maeve will have to carry with her forever. But she isn’t listening. She’s high up, on the top of a double-decker bus, flying through the streets of Coventry. The sun is warm on Maeve’s hands where they grip the seat in front, and the spirited girl she has just met is beside her, whooping with joy. It seems to Maeve that her life is perfect. There is nothing else to want.
MAY 26, 1962
Harriet steps into the new cathedral. She has taken a train to Coventry, up from her small flat by the sea in Newhaven, and she is tired from the journey. She has come straight from the station, for fear of being late for the ceremony, and hasn’t had a chance to look around the city yet. But she can see that it is unrecognizable. In the twenty-two years since she was last here, the main part of Coventry has been completely rebuilt. Harriet finds the new architecture ugly, certainly no replacement for the seventeenth-century buildings that used to occupy the space.
Coventry Cathedral was the only cathedral in Britain to be destroyed in the war. The decision to rebuild it happened the day after the bombing, but it has taken all these years to make that decision a reality. The new cathedral is modern, with great sheer walls inspired by Norman architecture, but which remind Harriet of all the other modern buildings she has driven past in the taxi from the train station. What has drawn her to the new cathedral is that they have incorporated the ruins of the old cathedral in the building of the new, have attached the two, so that one can walk through the splendour of the rebuilt church and then out to the roofless shell of the old St. Michael’s.
Harriet gets tired easily these days, even though she tries to keep herself fit by striding along the beach or, on good days, walking up onto the top of the cliffs to stumble along the backs of the hills. She has travelled up from Sussex and she is glad that all that is required of her today is to enter the cathedral and sit down for the opening ceremonies.
The inside is beautiful, much more beautiful than she could have imagined from the exterior. Harriet slides into a pew at the back of the church and spends the entire length of the ceremony looking at the magnificent stained-glass window. The blue in it is a colour so deep it seems to have drifted up from the bottom of the ocean to roost there, on the wall of this church. Coventry blue.
When Harriet steps into the old cathedral, it is as though no time has passed at all. The debris has long been cleared from the floor and the stones are swept clean. But everything else is the same as it was the morning after the bombing. The window arches are still empty of glass. The roof is still gone. There are benches placed discreetly around the outside walls, and Harriet moves to one of these and sits down.
There is the wall that Maeve was leaning against when Harriet had to tell her that her son was dead. There is the place in the sky where she once walked up and down on the roof with Jeremy Fisher.
It has taken Harriet all this time, twenty-two years, to try to write about that night, and she hasn’t done it properly yet. She has traded her descriptions for poems, and has had some success publishing them. She has a book that did modestly well in the reviews, and she is working hard on another one. Her poems have been included in anthologies and broadcast on the wireless. What Harriet has been searching for in her poems are the words to make sense of what happened on that night in No
vember all those years ago.
She keeps in loose touch with Maeve Fisher. I promise I will always let you know where I am is what Maeve said, and she has been as good as her word. She moves around a lot. Right now she is living on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland. The light is beautiful, she had written to Harriet recently. And the strict, shadowed cliffs rising up from the sea are exactly how I feel.
There are a lot of people milling about in the old cathedral. Almost as many people as there were on the morning after the bombing. There are some in their sixties and s eventies, some who, like Harriet, must have been there the night of the raid. They don’t talk much, just walk slowly around the walls, or sit on the benches, like Harriet, watching the crowd.
Harriet still looks for Jeremy. Everywhere she goes she scans the faces, searching him out. It has become a habit and she can’t rest until she has done it now, looking quickly and anxiously at the visitors to the new cathedral. Of course, he isn’t here. But there is something in the act of looking for him that keeps his memory alive for Harriet. In the end, that is what she has been left, and this is her way of keeping faith.
The day is a lovely one, the air soft and the sun sliding in and out of the clouds. Harriet likes this time of year, how long the light stays in the evenings, how green the fields are. She closes her eyes to feel the warmth of the sun on her face, opens them and sees, falling through the air above the cathedral, a single swallow. It seems delighted with all the space, climbing and diving, scissoring through the open window arches.
Harriet buys a postcard of the new cathedral, and on her way back to the station in the taxi she writes to Maeve. They are not the right words to give her, not yet, but they are closer than she has ever been before.
Maeve walks away from the jetty. She heads uphill, to her cottage, but when she reaches the front gate she hesitates and keeps going, up toward the fields sewn sloppily together by the low stone walls that cover the island. In the pocket of her bulky cardigan is the bundle of mail she has collected from the boat. There is a postcard from Harriet in with the letters and bills. It seems wrong to go indoors, into her dark kitchen to read the card. She will find somewhere to sit down, in the sun, so she can fully appreciate Harriet’s words.
The village on Innismor where Maeve lives is little more than a scattering of houses arranged haphazardly around the small harbour. The houses seem to have been lifted there by the sea, their white walls set like bleached bones among the rocks.
Maeve stops on the road to catch her breath, turns and sees the houses flashing white behind her. Beyond them, she can see the mail boat lurching away from the jetty, heading back across the Atlantic to Galway.
Maeve had expected Tom to be on the boat. That is why she had gone down to the harbour, to meet her husband. But Tom probably got talking with someone, or tried to squeeze in one more errand before the boat left, and arrived on the Galway dock just in time to watch the battered black hull of the mail boat pushing out to sea.
It is not the first time this has happened, and because it has happened so many times before, Maeve isn’t overly surprised or worried. Tom is dependable in his vagrancy. He will show up tomorrow, or the day after, cheerfully apologetic, bounding spryly up from the beach with stories and his canvas bag filled with food and some small present for Maeve from his time in the city.
Maeve had not expected to marry and be happy. She had not expected to meet someone late in life, someone who liked to move around as much as she did. But Tom is even more of a nomad. He is originally from America, but has spent most of his life elsewhere. He has lived throughout South America and Europe and has come to the Aran Islands because, like Maeve, he can live cheaply there, and he loves the way the light shovels in off the Atlantic.
Tom is a painter. He has fashioned a studio out of the small barn behind their cottage. He wakes late and spends much of his day in the studio. In the evenings he and Maeve read, or walk to the one pub on the island to have a pint. He never minds company when he works, and Maeve likes to go into the studio to watch him paint. He has an energy when he works that she finds intoxicating. In some ways he reminds her of Jeremy, of the concentration Jeremy used to have when he set himself a task.
Where once Maeve would have found the resemblance painful, now there is some comfort in it.
Maeve begins to walk up the road again. Slowly the houses fall away and she is walking with green fields on either side of her. Each field is bordered by a wall made of the stones that had been cleared from the field. The walls have no gates. If a farmer wants to shift his cows and sheep to another field, he simply removes some of the stones from a section of wall, replacing them when the animals are safely away in the next field.
This is another reason why Maeve likes living on the Aran Islands. Everything here is as it always was. There is no electricity, no motor cars. Many of the people on the islands still speak Gaelic. The lack of change is reassuring, though Maeve wonders if she will be able to survive the harshness of the conditions into her very old age. But Tom is already talking about moving them to Spain; though Maeve loves the starkness of Innismor, the thought of the Spanish sun warming her bones is tempting.
The road is steep, the centre of the island being much higher than the sea that twists all around it. Maeve has to pause frequently in her climb. She hasn’t really minded becoming old, but it still surprises her that she can’t move as fluently as she once did.
Her heart is whirring fast inside her chest.
This is probably far enough.
She settles down with her back against a wall and takes the bundle of mail from her pocket. The postcard from Harriet slips easily out of the pile.
It is a picture of the new cathedral. It looks nothing like the old one—all sheer and modern—but Maeve’s hands start shaking at the sight of it. She takes a deep breath. The stones from the wall are warm against her back, warm through the thick wool of her jumper.
This is what she and Harriet do—pass the memory of that night in November 1940 back and forth between them. Harriet will send Maeve a poem. Maeve will send Harriet a drawing. Where once Maeve drew the world around her to navigate it, now she draws only the images from the night when Coventry fell, and when Jeremy died. Drawing something used to be a way for her to record what was being lost, a way to slow the moment down long enough to get a good look at what was moving just out of reach. Now it is purely a way to hold on to what she has lost.
Every act is an act of mourning, thinks Maeve. Every moment is about leaving the previous moment behind.
She has drawn the cramped, dark pub cellar where she sheltered at the beginning of the bombing. She has drawn Jeremy’s soldiers in frozen march across his bedroom window ledge. She has drawn Harriet’s hands cradling her own when they were atop that pile of rubble where they had heard the woman’s voice calling out to be saved. And she has drawn the metal rib cage of the Anderson shelter with the ragged hole torn through its side.
But even though this exchange of memory is a way for Harriet and Maeve to keep something of Jeremy alive, it is always a shock to remember. It is always a shock to get a card or letter from Harriet, and to have to open herself, again, to the horrors of that night.
For a while, after the night of the bombing, Maeve believed that Harriet had simply been a guide through the ruined city to her son. But the longer her association with her continues, the more Maeve has come to realize that something else must have happened the night Coventry fell. Harriet has never said, and Maeve can’t bring herself to ask, but she assumes now that Harriet and Jeremy were briefly lovers. Why else would Harriet keep this vigil with her? Once Maeve might have minded this, but now she is only grateful that her child was loved during his last night on earth.
The sun is making Maeve’s eyes water. She runs her thumb along the straight edges of the postcard. Down one side, along another, as if they were streets she was walking.
The night still makes no sense, no matter how hard Maeve looks at it, no
matter what pictures she is able to pull from the wreckage. But thank god for Harriet Marsh, she thinks. Thank god that in the loneliest of griefs, she is not alone.
She turns the card over and begins to read the words Harriet has sent to her.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my agent, Frances Hanna, and my editors, Phyllis Bruce and Amy Cherry, for their work and wisdom in shaping this story.
I used many books and accounts that detailed the events of November 14, 1940, but the following were particularly useful: The Story of the Destruction of Coventry Cathedral by Provost R.T. Howard; Moonlight Sonata: The Coventry Blitz, 14/15 November 1940 compiled and edited by Tim Lewis; The Coventry We Have Lost (volumes I and II) by Albert Smith and David Fry; the pictorial records Coventry at War and Memories of Coventry, both presented by Alton Douglas in conjunction with the Coventry Evening Telegraph; and Air Raid: The Bombing of Coventry, 1940 by Norman Longmate. My descriptions of the burning city are based on the accounts of the citizens of Coventry, as well as on eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Baghdad.
The guidebook Harriet references in the 1919 section of this novel is the illustrated Michelin guide from that same year, called Ypres and the Battles for Ypres. The letter from Owen Marsh is an actual letter from my grandfather, Dudley d’Herbez Humphreys, who fought in the trenches at Ypres in 1914. References to Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, by Abraham Gottlob Werner, correspond to the 1821 edition published by Patrick Syme.
Thanks to the following people for seeing me through the writing of this book: Mary Louise Adams, Elizabeth Christie, Craig Dale, Carol Drake, Melanie Dugan, Sue Goyette, Elizabeth Greene, Anne Hardcastle, Cathy Humphreys, Paul Kelley, Hugh LaFave, Paula Leger, Susan Lord, Barb Mainguy, Bruce Martin, Daintry Norman, Joanne Page, Elizabeth Ruth, Su Rynard, Diane Schoemperlen, Glenn Stairs.
Coventry: A Novel Page 12