by Chris Cleave
Tom found Alistair sitting on the bare floorboards in his pajama bottoms, smoking his pipe and stuffing shredded newspaper into the pelt of a ginger cat. The head and shoulders were done, the empty eye sockets bulging with newsprint.
“My god,” said Tom, “is that Julius Caesar?”
Alistair did not look up from his work. “Grim times, old man. The taxidermist sent him back unfinished. Tea’s in the pot, if you’re interested.”
“Why didn’t they finish him?”
“Perhaps he was incurable.”
“Insatiable, more like. Remember how he used to strut back in here after a big night out?”
Alistair grinned around his pipe stem. “I miss the randy old bugger. Came in the first post—landlady brought him up just now. Tanned and neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper. Not his usual entrance.”
“Feeling a little flat.”
“I’m stuffing him with editorials. He’ll be full of himself.”
Tom offered his hatful of blackberries. “Going to make jam. Try one?”
Alistair did. “Good god, forget jam. You could make claret.”
Tom tipped the blackberries into a pan, stooped to retrieve the ones that had missed, and ran in a cupful of water. “Was there a note with Caesar?”
“An apology. Shop closing down, regrets etcetera, we herewith return all materials. I can’t imagine there’ll be much call for taxidermy until the war is over.”
“They should just call it off,” said Tom.
He set the pan to simmer, and turned to watch Alistair sewing up the cat’s belly. He was handy at it, putting in a row of small, neat stitches that would disappear when the fur was brushed over them. Tom had always admired Alistair’s hands, strong and unfairly capable. Alistair could mend their gramophone, play piano—do all of the things that made Tom feel like a Chubb key in a Yale lock—and he did them without seeming to worry, as if the hands contained their own grace. Alistair rather overshadowed him, though Tom supposed his friend didn’t notice. Blond and robust, Alistair had the stoic’s gift for shrugging off war and broken plumbing with the same easy smile, as if these things were to be expected. He was good-looking not by being ostentatiously handsome but rather by accepting the gaze affably, meeting the eye. It was Tom’s experience of Alistair that women sometimes had to look twice, but something drew the second look.
Alistair tapped out his pipe. “I shan’t be home tonight. I’m taking Lizzie Siddal to the countryside.”
“Oh? Which painting?”
“The ‘kiss me, I can’t swim’ one.”
“Ophelia?” Tom mimed the gaze and the pious hands.
“We’ve built a box for her, and we’re driving her to Wales in an unmarked truck.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a marked truck, in this situation. Is there actually a fleet of government lorries labeled PRICELESS ART TREASURE?”
“Do leave it out,” said Alistair. “You take all the romance out of mundane logistical operations.”
“Anyway, if it’s so secret, should you even be telling me?”
“Why? You won’t tell Hitler, will you?”
“Not unless they give me back my secret radio transmitter.”
“It is all rather evil and sad,” said Alistair. “I spent five months restoring the frame on Ophelia—just the frame—and now we’re boxing her up and burying her in some old mine shaft for who knows how long.”
Tom poured the whole of their tea sugar from its Kilner jar into the pan, brown lumps included.
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Alistair, “only I hate to think of it down there in the dark. It makes one think: what if we lose the war?”
Tom stirred the sugar into the fruit. “There won’t be a real war.”
“What if all of us are swept away and no one remembers Ophelia, and she remains there for all eternity, in the dark, under a mountain?’
‘They’ll always have Caesar. They can reconstruct our aesthetics from that. Even if you have overstuffed him.”
Alistair eyed the cat critically. “Have I? No. The old man always had to be careful about his weight. This is him in one of his especially sleek periods.”
“It’s not an entirely terrible fist you’re making of it. You really might consider being a conservator or something of that ilk.”
“You should see the Tate now,” said Alistair. “The light is boarded out, the great gallery echoes, and the paintings are all dispersed.”
“Well, sign it and call it Modern. Anyway, damn you. I have a dinner date with an actual woman this evening. Marriage is a certainty and you should prepare a best man’s speech forthwith.”
Alistair lifted the half-stuffed cat to his ear and listened to what it whispered. “Caesar decrees that you tell all, without leaving anything out.”
“Well, she’s called Mary North and—”
“God in heaven, Tom Shaw, are you actually blushing?”
“It’s this jam. It’s the heat of the pan.”
Alistair stuffed paper into the cat’s hindquarters. “Caesar assumes she is beautiful, brighter than you, and unable to cook?”
“Caesar knows my type.”
“Then you’ll pardon me if I don’t wear down my quill with a wedding speech right at this minute. This one will end where all of your romances do, Tommy: with you gazing wistfully at the receding figure of a nice girl who has grown fond of you but has reluctantly concluded that you are neither wealthy nor gifted at dancing.”
Tom turned up the heat under the pan. “It’s different this time. I have already talked with Mary quite a bit. We have things in common.”
“Such as?”
“Such as our attitude to children, for example.”
“The two of you have discussed it already? I don’t believe I’ve even told you where babies come from.”
“Not having them, you fool. Educating them.”
“You haven’t been talking shop at her?”
“She came to talk to me, if you must know. I couldn’t get a word in.”
“And what was the gist?”
“That teaching has to change. That the teacher must be an ally of the pupil, and not just a disciplinarian.”
Alistair yawned. “Caesar proclaims that Mary gives him a headache.”
“Caesar pronounces before learning that Mary is jolly attractive.”
“Then why is she interested in you? I’m surprised you show up on her retina.”
“She came to the office, to ask me for a job. Apparently the War Office assigned her to teaching and we found her a post at Hawley Street School, but she got the boot for being incorrigible. She wants a new class to teach.”
“I didn’t think you had any classes left.”
“That’s what I told her, and yet she insisted. I said, ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve already evacuated everything with two legs and one head,’ and she said, ‘Well I’m afraid that’s just not good enough.’ Hands on her hips, and deliciously pink. So naturally I asked her what she damned well expected me to do about it, and she said: ‘I think you should damned well take me to dinner.’ ”
Alistair stared at him.
“What?” said Tom.
“Where to start? As I perceive it, you have three immediate problems. The first is one of professional impropriety. The second, personal ugliness.”
Tom raised two fingers. “And the third?”
“Is that your jam is looking punchy, old boy.”
“Damn it!”
The pan was at a murderous boil, spitting hot lava in all directions. Tom advanced on it, using the pan lid as a shield, spoon extended to the limit of his reach to turn off the heat. The boil faded to an aggrieved hiss and then to an occasional vindictive pop as a captured pocket of air escaped.
“Think you caught it in time?”
&
nbsp; Tom prodded it. “It will set, I can promise you that. It could be jam, or it could be brittle.”
“We all know a girl like that.”
Tom ignored him. “Meeting Mary is the first thing to make me feel that this war might not be completely awful.”
“Oh, Tommy, just because the grown-ups have left you alone in the nursery for a little while, it doesn’t mean you can draw on the wallpaper.”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t kids’ stuff. I’m taking her to Spencer’s tonight.”
He’d tried for a worldly tone, but it came out sounding shaky. Maybe Alistair had a point. And he thought, my god, she is only eighteen. And the worst thing was that he knew her age only because he had gone straight from his office to the personnel department and pulled her file from the records.
“Sorry,” said Alistair. “Don’t mean to be discouraging. I suppose I’m just envious of your dinner.”
“No, that’s quite all right. I mean, now that I come to think, I can’t be sure what she meant by it. Maybe she does just want to talk about a job.”
Alistair raised an eyebrow and returned to his taxidermy.
“What?” said Tom.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
Alistair snapped a length of cotton with his teeth and threaded his needle again. “Only you could fret about what ‘dinner’ meant.”
“Yes, but what does it mean, in this context? Is she implying that she sees me as more than a job opportunity? Or is she demonstrating that I am so evidently merely that, that she can safely invite herself to dinner with no possible danger of misconstrual”
Alistair stared into space for a moment. “No, I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Could you do me a diagram, with different-colored pencils?”
“Or even,” said Tom, “could she be ambivalent about her feelings with regard to me, or unsure about my intentions with regard to her, and therefore, since she is very bright, could she have been making the suggestion in a deliberately obtuse fashion in order to observe the sense in which I construed it? You know, to see how I would react?”
“And how did you react?”
“I might have become slightly tongue-tied.”
“Oh, perfect. Fortunately she is unlikely to eat you for breakfast, since dinner will be the occasion.”
“Go to hell. But seriously. What do you think? You’re an experienced man.”
“I’m an experienced man who is currently stitching a dead emperor’s arsehole shut.”
“Yes, but even so.”
Alistair let his needle and cotton drop and looked up in exasperation. “There are two kinds of dinner and two kinds of women. There is only one combination out of four where both will be rotten.”
“But how awful if that was the case!”
Alistair said nothing. He finished stitching, snapped the thread and set the cat up on its paws. The balance was off at first, and he splayed the limbs until the creature held steady. “There,” he said. “Caesar bows to no man.”
He filled his pipe, lit it, and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at the cat. There was something awry in his own posture, in his stiff back, and it saddened Tom. Sometimes it was no longer altogether funny, this double act they played in which he was the boy to Alistair’s man of the world. They had fallen into the roles in some primordial conversation in their friendship—something that must have raised a laugh at the time—and the joke had been good enough to bear a few cycles of elaboration and eventually to become a habit between them. And now here they were, two finches evolved to feed on a fruit that was probably becoming extinct.
Tom lit a cigarette and tried to make himself enjoy it. He took the empty Kilner jar, chipped out the last brown encrustations of tea-soaked sugar, rinsed it, and set it to boil in a pan of water. While the jar sterilized he took a spoonful of the jam and blew to make it cooler.
In the bright morning wash from the garret’s single skylight, the jam glowed in the metal spoon. Its center, where it was deepest, was indigo. At its shallow edges the color thinned to a limpid carmine. He closed his eyes and tasted it. By luck he had arrested it on the verge of caramelization, between honeyed and bitter. The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that crackled in his mouth like bereaved punctuation.
He stood with his eyes closed for a full minute before he took another spoonful. He was absolutely uncertain. Perhaps it was the most exquisite thing that had ever been cooked, or perhaps it was perfectly ordinary blackberry jam, on an averagely bright October morning, in an unexceptional attic in which two typical young bachelors were putting off the real duties of the day in pursuits at which they did not excel. Perhaps it was only average jam and perhaps Caesar, corpulent and lumpy and with his empty eye sockets spewing shreds of the newspaper, was only a poor stuffed cat.
Tom poured the jam into the hot boiled jar, snapped the lid shut and ran the glass under the cold tap to let the vacuum make the seal. He dried the outside of the jar, licked a bookplate label to activate the gum, stuck it onto the flat roundel on the jar and wrote: London, 1939.
“Well?” he said. “And so what if she does only want a job? Teaching is important work, and I think she might be good at it.”
“You’ve lost me again. Did you want to marry her, or hire her?”
“I haven’t the budget for either. I was just grateful for a civilized conversation. Honestly, she might be the only person in this city apart from you and me who understands that there are many ways to serve. That one isn’t being unpatriotic by declining to rush off like a schoolboy to fire popguns at the Germans.”
“The Germans did rather start it.”
“Yes, but you know what I mean.”
Alistair tried to smile.
“What is it?” said Tom.
“I suppose all of us have to look at our job and ask how it now serves the cause. I suppose one is lucky if a simple answer presents itself.”
“But it’s hardly us, is it?” said Tom. “Me with my district and you dashing all over these isles stashing our heirlooms into caves. The question would be more pointed if one were—I don’t know—a speculator or a thief.’
Alistair tweaked the cat’s tail, pointing the end skyward the way Caesar had worn it in life. “I walk past a recruitment post every morning—on Regent Street. You overhear the damnedest conversations in the queue. I think the fear of going to war is less than the shame of admitting that your country can get along quite well without whatever-it-is that you have been up to. In the end, of course, the conclusion of the man is the same as that of the military—that getting killed is the least one can do in the circumstances—except that the two parties reach the same conclusion by different routes.”
“You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”
“I’ve had nothing better to do. The Turners went weeks ago. We have a few Romantics left to move out of the side galleries, then half a dozen Surrealists. Soon we’ll be down to the paintings I could have done myself.”
“But you’ve said it often: we can’t let them make us into barbarians. Someone must stay behind who understands how to put it all back together.”
Alistair looked at his hands. “Well, the thing is, that someone shan’t be me.’
Tom felt the shock of the words before he understood their meaning. A constriction in the veins, a sense of imminence, time clenching like a sphincter. A half second’s diminution of the hearing, so that he felt his ears roar for one heartbeat. “God, you haven’t . . .”
Alistair looked up. “I’m sorry. I did it yesterday.”
Tom stood with the jam jar still gripped in his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right. There’s bound to be
something we can do. There will be a procedure for people who have signed up by mistake. It must happen fifty times a day. There will be some kind of system for it.”
“The whole point of the system is that one cannot go back, surely. I signed a solemn contract. In any case, it was the right thing to do. I’m going, Tom.”
“When?’
“They didn’t say. They gave me three days’ pay and told me to await instructions. There will be recruit training and an officer cadet course, then I suppose I go wherever I am needed.”
“This isn’t some horrible joke?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Tom sat down on the floor beside his friend and stared around at the place. The garret changed as he looked. Its devil-may-care medley of bric-a-brac was transformed now into banal juvenilia. As he watched, each carefully cultivated eccentricity—from the unswept floor to the carelessly scattered library books—shrugged off its enchantment until all that was left was an attic flat in an unexceptional borough of London. The flat would revert to the landlady, their life to the world.
Oh, thought Tom, so it finishes as quickly as this. All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.
“I’m sorry for what I said, about running off like schoolboys.”
“That’s all right. A lot of them practically are. You should have seen the recruiting line. I’m twenty-four, and I felt like the old man.”
Tom swallowed. “Do you think I should volunteer too?”
“Good god. Why?”
“Well, I mean I honestly hadn’t thought about it until now.”
Alistair threw a balled-up sheet of newspaper. “You’re made to be an educator, you old fool. Find a way to do your job again, and then do it. If one could stash schoolchildren down a disused mine in Wales then I’d insist you enlisted with me, but until then I’d say that war isn’t on your curriculum.”
