by Chris Cleave
The man turned and saw him. “Sorry, sir, didn’t know it was you.”
“I hardly know myself. Never mix wine and whisky, that’s an order.”
“Not unless you’re buying again, sir.”
Alistair moved from man to man, keeping it light. Under the chatter the men shook with anger. When it was time to face the Germans again, the grudge would be particular.
His fellow officers returned singly or in pairs, looking rather better off than he, and they all set to work to re-form the pacified and compliant men into the sterner geometries of war. On the station concourse the men lined up quite docilely in their ranks while the officers puffed on pipes and took the roll call and made sardonic inquiries concerning the men who were still AWOL. At nine, with the half-past raising steam at the platform and the men lining up to board, Alistair felt the universe returning to a bearable configuration.
He looked up from the company list and saw Mary arriving on the concourse in the dress she had worn the day before, conspicuous amid the uniforms. She carried his duffel bag, which he had left at the Lyceum.
His body’s first instinct was to take cover. She hadn’t seen him yet. He could easily just board the train, and he knew he ought to. Instead he waited and smoked his pipe. He could not stop watching her. He was a little sick at himself for it, but he was too tired now to be a saint.
As the men headed for the platform and their ranks thinned, Mary spotted him, broke into a smile and waved. He caught himself waving back, his chest tightening, immediately guilty now that the choice could not be unmade. She hurried over, and then her face fell and she stopped a yard short.
She said, “I was worried something might have happened to you.”
“It did. I popped into town and collected this hangover.”
“It suits you.”
“It’s a little tight around the temples. The others are all right, I hope?”
“I told them I was going home to check up on Mother and Father.”
“Well, now you can.”
She looked down. “You wish I hadn’t come, don’t you?”
He tapped out his pipe. “It might have been better.”
She looked up with a spark of anger. “I am in love with Tom, you know.”
“That’s good.”
“He is the gentlest man.”
“ ‘Well, you know, I like him myself.”
“I’m sure we shall be married.”
“And I’m sure I’ll be delighted for you. Let me know if you need a bridesmaid.”
They stood without speaking, while the last of the soldiers lugged bags toward the train and steam began to hiss from the locomotive.
Mary set down his duffel bag on the platform between them.
“Thanks,” said Alistair.
“Hilda was furious.”
“That’s what you came to tell me?”
She closed her eyes. “I came to make sure you were all right.”
“ ‘Well, now you can tell Hilda I’m all right.”
“Must you be so . . . ?”
“I’m sorry,” said Alistair.
“No, I am. I’m just very tired.”
“We’ll both feel better after a night’s sleep.”
She managed a smile. “Yes, I’m sure we shall.”
The locomotive’s boiler hissed louder. Alistair watched the last of the men boarding. He nodded to the officers who stood on the platform, watching this presumed lovers’ parting with theatrical amusement.
He turned back to Mary. “Look, yesterday was—”
“Wasn’t it? Maybe I was wrong to bring Hilda. I hope you didn’t feel too set up?”
“It was sweet of you and Tom to do the up-setting.”
“I just didn’t think you’d be so . . .”
Alistair waved it away. “Hilda is lovely. I’m sure if there’d been more than twenty-four hours . . .”
“If there had been more time, or less, it all would have been easier. If it’s an hour, one can say what one likes. If it’s a year, one can be what one is like. A day is exactly the wrong length of time to be oneself in, don’t you think?”
She looked at him desperately. He took a step toward her but the locomotive blew its whistle.
She said, “You should go.”
He held her eyes. “Yes. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
He picked up his duffel bag and turned to go.
Mary said, “I hope you’ll be all right.”
Alistair turned back. “You’ll be very happy. Tom is the best man I know.”
She paused.
“Tom always told me you were funny. I hadn’t for a minute imagined you would be so terribly sad.”
Alistair set down his bag, put his hands in his pockets, and stared at his shoes for a moment.
“I’m hopeful,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“Hopeful that what?”
“That this war does as much good as harm.”
“You sound like the government posters.”
He smiled. “After the war there’ll be less distance between us all.”
“Is that your theory?”
“I can prove it. Last night the men and I were on the back streets, to see if we could make ourselves useful. There was an old man we helped, in the wreck of his house in a bathtub he’d been sheltering in. It was half full of water from the hoses and when we got to the man, he scrubbed his back with a loofah to make us laugh. The whole street torn to shreds, and all of us in stitches. Don’t you see? It makes me think there’s hope.”
“Promise me you’ll hold on to that.”
“Oh good lord, yes. Rather that than a loofah.”
She laughed then, brightly and without complication, and he laughed too, and for a moment the war with its lachrymose smoke was blown away on a bright, clean wind. Alistair marveled that she could do such a thing with the tiniest inflection of her mouth and the lightest look in her eye: even exhausted, in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.
The whistle screamed again and an officer yelled from the platform for Alistair to board.
“Well, goodbye,” said Mary. “Don’t let the Germans take all the best seats.”
“Goodbye, Mary. Good luck.”
He shouldered his duffel bag and walked away down the platform. This was the end of it, he knew—they could give each other nothing more. There was a perfect sadness to it, but as the train took him back to the war and its hard hours issued singly, it wouldn’t do to think of her. He left her where she was: fragile but intact beneath the hot black smoke that rose a mile above the wounded city.
PART TWO
ATTRITION
September, 1940
HILDA PICKED HER UP at noon and they took a cab east to look at the damage. Hilda wore black: melodramatic, Mary thought. With a handkerchief to press to her face in case of smoke and dust. And knee-high lace-up boots, since one couldn’t anticipate the conditions underfoot. It seemed to Mary that Hilda was dressed for something between a funeral and Passchendaele. Mary had opted for pumps and a light blue day dress.
When they got to Bow she saw that Hilda had been right. Every window was out. In the bright sun, glass lay everywhere, so that if one half closed one’s eyes the streets bejeweled. Pavements were undulant, walls bowed, streetlamps wilted by heat. The city’s perpendiculars were defeated: it was as if the bombs had reserved a particular spite for right angles. The pipes were cracked too, and marshy water pooled in every new depression. Children splashed. The pigeons spritzed their wings in it.
Their road was blocked by rubble, and the driver pulled up. Hilda opened the door and hot air rolled in, heavy with soot and sewage. Everything smoked or steamed, as if one had crossed into a tropic of disaster. From the gaping fron
ts of bombed-out houses, the dazed locals stared. Mary stepped out of the cab into a puddle that leached foul-smelling mud through her shoe and into her stocking.
“Don’t you think we should go straight back?” she said.
“Don’t be wet,” said Hilda. “These poor people have been through hell.”
“But I feel such a ghoul for gawping.”
“We’re observing. And I’m damned if we’ll be the only ones who haven’t. It’s all anyone will be talking about.”
Mary gave in. They linked arms, going around gas flares that rose from cracked mains. They gave a wide berth to sewage bubbling up.
“You see?” said Hilda. “This is why I prefer the West End.”
“This isn’t funny at all.”
Hilda looked as if she might cry. “Did you kiss him?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did you and Alistair kiss?”
Mary hesitated. “Shall we talk about it at home?”
“There’s no privacy there. If Palmer isn’t hovering then your mother is materializing over one’s shoulder. It isn’t a home, it’s a haunting.”
Mary looked away down the shattered alley. “At your flat, then.”
“ ‘But it’s never the right moment, with you. You think you can do what you like, and we never mention it. But what about Tom? What about me?”
“I didn’t kiss Alistair, if you must know.”
“I don’t believe you for a moment.”
Mary shrugged. “Fine.”
Hilda’s hands shook. “You can tell me. I won’t say anything to Tom.”
“Gosh. Well. That’s big of you.”
“Please don’t be cross,” said Hilda, chewing her lip. ‘I saw how you looked at Alistair.’
Mary softened. “ ‘Well one does look, doesn’t one? The eye may be an obligate scout but the heart is not an incurable follower. Anyway, I saw how you looked at Alistair too.”
“But I was there to look, and you weren’t. We feign dispassion, don’t we? It is called manners.”
“Have it your way. But I didn’t kiss him.”
“Then what were you doing all that time?”
“We were talking. You should try it. It’s hardly my fault if you pack your wits into a hatbox whenever a gentleman calls.”
“But you’ve no right always to poach the man I like, just since you can.”
“I didn’t poach. I took him his bag. I told you to do it but you wouldn’t.”
“I was furious with him, don’t you see? For going off without saying goodbye. I could hardly show it by running after him with his luggage.”
“ ‘Well, you must tell me how fury is turning out for you.”
Hilda scowled at the ground. “You’d be the same, if it happened to you.”
“You should have followed him out of the basement. You didn’t have to send me.”
“I was scared!”
“And you suppose I wasn’t?”
Hilda only raised her hands and let them fall to her sides.
Mary closed her eyes for a moment. “I promise I didn’t do anything with Alistair. I’m in love with Tom and I try extremely hard to show it.”
Hilda gave her a bitter look. “And did trying work, last night?”
“Yes. All that happened was that Alistair went away on a train, with his bag, to who-knows-where he’s to be deployed. So if you’ve anything to say to him I suggest you jolly well write. I shan’t think of him again. I have a man I love, and a class to teach, and for me the matter is closed.”
“And yet you are always, incorrigibly, you.”
“All I can tell you is how you seem to me now. This rubble was people’s homes only yesterday. And here’s you, standing on it and bleating. Sometimes, Hilda, though I try not to, I think you impossibly spoiled.”
The color bled from Hilda’s face.
“Oh no,” said Mary, reaching out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Hilda pushed her arm away. “I’m glad you did. Because although I’ve tried for years not to, I think you impossibly selfish. I know you kissed Alistair. I’m exhausted from always forgiving you, and I simply won’t do so anymore.”
“Please—” said Mary.
“No. Goodbye. I’ll go home on my own.”
Glass cracked under her boots as she went. Mary slumped against a steaming wall and looked up at the sky. The blue was stained by updrafts of smoke as the air drifted toward the fires in the docks. How sad one could feel. She wondered how it had happened that Tom was so distant, and Hilda so bitter, and the world so thoroughly shattered.
She supposed she ought to go home. At least as one went west the streets would become clean and undamaged. One could always imagine that one’s life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.
She took the long way home along the Embankment. The Thames was black with oil. Sickly foam gushed up wherever the deep current of the river was forced to the surface by obstructions—crashed bombers, buses blown off bridges—who knew what was down there now? The old and changeless river was suddenly uncharted. She stared down into the black water, scorched in patches by little pools of burning oil that whirled and eddied in the current. Flaming barges, their mooring ropes burned through, were drifting upstream on the flood tide. She wondered how far upriver the barges would get. If they kept on burning then it would be a furious light they cast on Pimlico, where Palmer, even now, must be readying tea to serve at four.
December, 1940
SNOW WAS FALLING OUTSIDE the window of Tom’s office at the Education Authority. A secretary brought him a manila envelope containing a letter from the Royal Air Force. He gave a silent prayer of thanks. He had volunteered after that terrible night in the basement of the Lyceum, and held his breath ever since. Now he stubbed out his cigarette in the blue glass ashtray on his desk, took a deep breath and tore the letter open.
These were the facts: he had achieved an excellent pass on one hundred verbal and spatial exercises to be completed in ninety minutes. He had seen the numbers nine and four in a field of dots that would have seemed numberless to men who could not perceive color. He had surrendered into glass vials 1 (one) fluid ounce of urine and 1 (one) of venous blood, and both had been assayed and found to be as suitable as such fluids could be.
Under the supervision of a mustachioed man from Bristol he had stripped to his smalls and completed fifteen push-ups and eight pull-ups, then climbed a rope eighteen feet in height and two inches in diameter. Using the check boxes provided he had affirmed that he was neither an atheist nor a conscientious objector, and that his allergies were nil. A nurse had cupped his scrotum while he coughed, though the letter did not mention this.
It went on to confirm that he had performed well at interview. The recruiting officer had liked Tom’s use of the RAF’s published battle losses. Twenty men per day were being killed: Tom had framed it as one good man each hour. When viewed in that way, he had told the interviewer, one understood a life’s value concretely. One saw the hours as a chain joining peacetime to peacetime, with oneself as a willing link. The recruiting officer had found his answer very satisfactory.
Tom couldn’t wait to show Mary the letter. There had been such a distance between them since the raids began. Nothing was said but he missed the way they used to walk—as they had after their first night together—through a world made anew. He missed the way they had made rain hilarious, and passersby mysterious, and bridges cross more than the river.
Of course there was the bombing, which kept them apart every night, she in the Anderson at her parents’ home and he in the public shelter on Prince of Wales Road. But even alone together at the weekend in the garret, there was a certain hesitation. Their lovemaking felt like politeness.
But now here was the letter, to remake him in Mary’s eyes and his own. Life had f
inally arrived and been released from its manila envelope.
In the final paragraph the recruiting officer regretted to inform him that his application had been vetoed by the War Office, who considered his current role essential. He read the thing through again, and there was no ambiguity. It was a feature of the authorities that they could exempt one’s profession from service without sparing one’s feelings. Tom sat in his empty office, laid his head on the desk and closed his eyes.
When he could no longer stand it he crossed the road to the public house and drank three doubles in a row. He went out into the snow, walked for a while without purpose and then headed for Mary’s school. When he got there he knocked the snow from his shoes and coat, sat on a tiny chair at the back of her classroom and watched her taking the children through the dress rehearsal for their nativity play.
A savior was born for all mankind: this seemed to be the gist of it. Everyone would be excused, for everything they’d done. It sounded neat. His hands still shook from the cold, so he clasped them to his knees.
Mary mouthed to him: Are you all right? He smiled back at her across the children’s heads while his awareness broke into fragments and each nerve vibrated with the high note of a cable approaching its maximum tension.
The little ones were in costume. Mary sat at the piano, producing a rather chirpy version of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” She even managed to swing the tune a little, giving the distinct impression that whatever had come on that clear midnight had come via the drinks cabinet. He ached for her. There was nothing she couldn’t transform. It was unbearable.
She had cast a nice, sensible girl as the narrator. Betty came forward as the last chord faded. “Long ago in the city of Nazareth, an angel came to Joseph and Mary. And the angel said . . .”
There was a long silence during which everyone looked at the angel.
From the piano, Mary whispered, “Behold . . .”
Kenneth remembered his line. “Behold! A! Virgin! Shall! Be! With! Child! And! Shall! Bring! Forth! A! Son! And! They! Shall! Call! His! Name! Emmanuel!”
“Speak up,” said Mary. “There are a few Chinese who mightn’t have heard you.”
