by Chris Cleave
“Emmanuel,” whispered Kenneth.
His wings, which were of papier-mâché, slipped down to his waist. Poppy, who was dressed as a lamb, went behind him to hold the wings up to his shoulders. Together, they made a hybrid creature that had not been needed in any of the myths. Tom laughed, but tears prickled at the same time.
He supposed he was only exhausted. The bombing kept everyone awake. At the office one had become accustomed to colleagues making a sudden break for the lavatory. Everyone knew it was only to weep, and yet it would seem to outsiders as if the city were in the grip not of war but of some great bellicose incontinence.
He tried to concentrate on the play. Thomas, dressed in a toga and with a laurel crown on his head, propelled himself to center stage in his wheelchair, which had been clad with gold boards to make it into a Roman chariot.
Betty said, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus.”
Thomas said, “All the world shall be taxed!”
Maud came to the front with Zachary, both in robes and tea towels, with halos wobbling. Maud was a timid girl, rather a good casting for the virgin mother. Tom felt that Zachary was an inspired choice for Joseph, and he wondered if Mary had meant it as a joke. It would be easy to verify the divine provenance, the deity being white and the husband as dark as Herod’s heart.
Now he worried that he didn’t know whether she had meant it to be funny. He knew her less than he had at the start. The enemy dropped payloads of doubt.
He wished he had Alistair for advice. Alistair, old man, he might say. I am beside myself. I am spent. But Alistair was in Malta now, and his letters came infrequently. When they did, they had no substance. Everything operational was omitted, anything sentimental avoided, until only their old jokes remained. Perhaps the friendship was over. Perhaps it was not possible, after all, for a man who had gone to war to abide a man who had stayed.
Tom gripped his tiny chair and ground his teeth in misery.
Betty said, “But in Bethlehem, there was no room for them anywhere.”
The children lined up to sing. They stood in order of diminishing glory, angels to lambs. Beside Poppy were two more lambs in white jumpers with cotton wool twists. There was little Beryl, the beauty with her fixed smile and disconcerting stillness, and there was the idiot George, whose size was alarming amid the diminutive cast but who followed Poppy with great docility. The lambs lined up beside Caesar, the holy spouses, the angel and the narrator. As Mary struck up the tune on the piano, they sang.
No beautiful chamber, no soft cradle bed
No place but a manger, nowhere for His head
No praises of gladness, no thought of their sin
No glory but sadness, no room in the inn
Tom lurched from anguish to a desperate urge to laugh again. How perfect that a savior had come to earth who could heal and forgive, but that what everyone sang about was the local guesthouse being full. It was a perfectly English take on a divine visitation—the kind of thing old colonels wrote indignant letters to The Daily Telegraph about.
Sir—
But there was a comfort, after all, in the old unchanging story. Perhaps the distance would close again between him and Mary. Perhaps it wasn’t just him—maybe everyone felt unsure. From the crushing fatigue and the fear, the constant mental strain of saying to others, We shall prevail, and to oneself, I am defeated.
Now, hearing the children sing, Tom felt a glow of hope. Perhaps the war would be won after all. Mary would laugh in his arms again, and the great moaning sirens would stop.
When the children came to the end of the song, Mary kept the music going softly while the holy couple laid a doll in a straw-lined milk crate.
Betty said, “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. And the shepherds came from the fields and asked Joseph the newborn’s name. And Joseph said . . .”
A long pause. “And Joseph said . . .”
Zachary was frozen, eyes wide.
“Come on, darling,” prompted Mary. “Joseph said . . .”
Zachary burst into tears and bolted, slamming the classroom door behind him. The children began to laugh and murmur until Mary silenced them with two claps of her hands. “Children! Please! We’ll practise the hymn again. Mr. Shaw, would you please go and see to Zachary?”
Tom found himself making the foolish gesture of Who, me? and almost died under Mary’s patient look.
He found the boy in front of the school, kicking furiously at the snow.
“It’s stupid!” Zachary shouted when he saw Tom. “It’s a stupid play and I don’t even want to remember my stupid lines!”
Tom almost argued, then gave up and leaned against the porch.
Zachary scowled at him. “You don’t care?”
“It isn’t Hamlet.”
“You’re drunk.”
Tom lit a cigarette. “Tell me, why do you come to school?”
“Get my education.”
“And what will you do with it?”
“Get a job. I’m not going in the minstrel show.”
“Why not?”
“You saw it. Would you be in it?”
“I can’t imagine the equivalent. There’s no such thing as a white minstrel show, is there? Unless one does count Hamlet.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“You don’t care about much.”
“You don’t know.”
“But you keep running away. Miss North showed me your reports.”
“So?”
“So, I’m just saying. If you want to come to school, why do you run off?”
Zachary looked down. “Are you going to give me detention?”
Tom couldn’t help laughing.
“What?” said Zachary.
“Detention? No. Not unless you kick any more of that snow my way.”
Zachary stopped. “It’s too much, if you want to know.”
“What’s too much?’
“Writing. Math. All of them staring at me in class. My head goes I can’t do this, I can’t be here, louder and louder till I run. I want to stay but I can’t.”
Tom turned up his collar and lit a cigarette from the end of the last.
“Well?’ said Zachary.
“Well, what? I’ve no idea what’s wrong with you.”
Zachary hesitated. “But you think there’s something?”
“Miss North thinks you have word blindness. She hasn’t reached a diagnosis for me.”
“Why, what is it with you?”
Tom shrugged. “With a name it might be excusable.”
The wind got up, whipping snow at their faces.
“How long do you want to stay out here?” said Tom at last.
Zachary dug his hands in his pockets and said nothing.
“It’s harder to go back, isn’t it?” said Tom. “Why don’t you let me drag you?”
Zachary showed no expression. “Go in if you’re cold. I’ll follow if I like.”
Tom weighed it for a moment, then said, “Fine,” and went in. Halfway down the corridor, in case the boy was following, he said over his shoulder: “The newborn’s name is Jesus, by the way. In case the shepherds ask again.”
A pause, a scuffing of shoes behind him. Then, “I’m not retarded.”
Tom grinned.
In the classroom Betty Oates was saying, “An angel told the shepherds to come from the fields and look, and the shepherds came and they were amazed.”
George and Poppy had been giggling together, and now their laughter became hysterical. Mary frowned over the top of the piano. “When your parents are here tomorrow for the real thing, neither I nor the angels shall expect to hear any silliness, is that understood? Now carry on, please.”
>
The children sang “Silent Night.” They changed back into their uniforms and tidied the manger. They hung halos up on pegs and went home early, to be well ahead of the evening’s raid when it came.
Mary sat down with Tom in the back of the empty classroom.
“You did well to bring him back.”
“Oh, I didn’t do anything. You were right about the boy. He’s okay.”
She stroked his cheek. “You’re okay.”
“Ah, but you’re something else.”
“That’s what my father says, although I am not sure he means it as kindly as you do. Walk me home?”
“I’m not sure . . .”
“Oh, you mustn’t mind my father. He’s almost never at home, and if he is then he’ll make you drink a glass of his Christmas wine, that’s all. Palmer makes it from cloves and church bells and Dickens. Practise your face for me.”
Tom licked his lips. “That is superb.”
Mary looked worried. “Too much.”
Tom tried again. “What an interesting flavor.”
She nodded approval. “You oughtn’t to overdo it, or Father will make you drink a second glass. It has happened before.”
“Did the victim survive?”
“The dog found the vat one year. We buried him under the japonica.”
They went outside. The snow fell in graceless clumps. It turned to a greasy slush on the pavement, and soon they were both cold and wet.
“Isn’t it good?” Mary said. “If this holds up there won’t be a raid tonight.”
Tom eyed the sky. “I really hate them, you know. I never thought I had it in me. But they really are the most hateful bastards.”
“That’s why we call them the enemy. See how it works now, darling?”
He smiled. “I don’t know what I should do without you.”
“You’d live your life in terrible confusion,” she said gaily, taking his arm.
He slowed to a stop under the scant shelter of a grocer’s awning. The shopwindow was crosshatched with tape, and behind it the bacon slicer and the cheese wire and the black iron scales stood on the empty shelves, the vocabulary of a language with no remaining speakers.
“Tom? Darling?”
He realized he was still staring into the hungry shop.
“I think you should leave me,” he said.
The wind whipped wet snow at their legs. Engines raced as motorcars’ tires spun in the slush.
Mary said, “Shall we go somewhere warm?”
They found a café, two tables wide, with empty sugar shakers and a bare Jacob’s-biscuit display case on the counter. They were the only customers. They took off their gloves but kept their coats and hats on.
“I don’t suppose you’ve anything to eat?” said Mary to the waitress.
“There’s only tea.”
“Splendid,” said Mary. “Let’s have some, shall we?”
It came in a brown glazed teapot. Looking into it as it was stirred, one could cultivate the hope that the tea was strong. One hoped, as one had hoped all through these gradually diluted months, until one poured it out over the quarter inch of thin white milk and saw that it was practically clear. The leaves were used to exhaustion.
Tom rattled a teaspoon around his cup. “I tried to join the Air Force.”
She put her hand on his. “No . . .”
“I thought I might have it in me to shoot at the Germans’ bloody airplanes, now that it’s self-defense. But the War Office won’t let me.”
“Oh Tom . . .”
“I thought you might be proud of me in uniform.”
She took his face and angled it up to look at her. “Do you really think so little of me?”
“You are a sweet, loyal girl. But we both know it isn’t how it was.”
“Of course it isn’t, you silly man. We are a thousand years older.”
“I sometimes imagine what it would be like for you if you were with a man like Alistair. Someone fighting the real war.”
They stirred the pale tea. The wet snow blinded the window.
“I don’t imagine it,” she said.
‘But you’ve thought about it.’
He waited. Her teaspoon clinked against the cup.
“I don’t suppose I was meant to love a man like that, his heart made so heavy by war.”
“But he has had to become like that.”
“Well, we don’t have to.”
“Don’t we, though? I feel worse every day I stay behind. One knows one won’t be killed, but that’s hardly the same as living.”
“Please . . .”
He held his head in his hands. “I’m no use, you see.”
“Don’t,” said Mary. “We’ll get you back on your feet. A glass of my father’s Christmas wine will do the trick. It’s so ghastly, I promise it will make you forget these blues and pray for simple death.”
It made it all the more awful that she was so indestructible. “Please,” he said. “You’d be so much happier without me.”
“But it wouldn’t be my life, don’t you see? You’re the one I’ve chosen, and I love you even more for being good enough to ask me not to choose you.”
A ghost of a smile rose in him. “You are quite mad, I think.”
“Mother just calls me stubborn.”
Tom felt utterly spent, as weak as the tea. It was terrifying, how close one came to cracking up. “God, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “We must take turns, don’t you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.”
They sat for a few minutes in the empty café, finishing the tea while there was still warmth in it. Another couple came in and stamped the slush off their shoes, she in a long hooded cape and he in the uniform of a naval officer. The waitress served them biscuits from under the counter.
Mary laughed and took Tom’s hand. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Out in the snow they drew their coats tight at the throat and walked hand in hand. Although the winter storm was bitter there was comfort in it, since it meant there would be no raid that night. Later they would sleep together—this was understood—and if there was less heat in it than there had been at the start, then perhaps there might be more warmth.
As the dark afternoon sank into night they made their way in silence through the blind city. Their footsteps were softened by the snow. The incalculable damage was hidden, the mounds of rubble turned by the drifts into the shapes of clouds or waves—forms that might naturally be expected to blow through when kinder weather came.
As the light and the sound faded to nothing, all that was left was the two of them. Underneath everything lay the colossal buried city—the patched-up pipes and the improvised lines of communication and the subterranean refuges from the great disincorporating influence of bombs. With the snow it was possible to forget it.
Perhaps, thought Mary, they really would rescue each other in turn. Perhaps the city would stand. For now, though, she could only hold Tom’s hand. The snow settled. One settled.
The searchlight beams rose from their rooftop installations, up through the swirling snow, and played in blue-white circles on the base of the clouds. One could follow the elegant line of a beam up into the whiteness of the storm that spanned all of Europe in its vortex. One could take in the vast sweep of the winter and follow a thin searchlight beam down again into the vigilant city and understand how very fragile it was: a woman and a man holding hands, on streets made nameless by snow.
“I love you,” she said.
“Do you?”
She smiled. “Oh, let’s not go to my parents’. It isn’t far to your place.”
There was an urgency now in the heat of their hands as they clung to each other. This snow would thaw. These winds would blow the clouds away. The n
ext night might see a bomber’s sky.
December , 1940
ALISTAIR SAILED THE BOAT while Simonson—one of two other captains attached to 200 Battery, 10 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery—fished for tunny with a trawling line. In a fourteen-foot sailing dinghy, half a mile off the east coast of Malta, with a breeze blowing in off the immaculate Mediterranean and with two bottles of the local beer in a string bag trailing in their wake to cool, the war seemed improbable and excessive.
“No, I’m afraid you will have to run it past me again,” said Alistair, nudging the tiller with his toe. “There’s a man called . . . ?”
“Something Hitler,” said Simonson. “Axel? Albrecht? German chap.”
“And he wants . . . ?”
“To take over the running of the world.”
“What, all of it?”
“So I hear.”
Alistair frowned. “With all its tedious responsibilities along with the evident perks?”
“One imagines the fellow has weighed it up and decided to press on regardless.”
“Has he considered how vexatious it would be to find oneself in charge of us? Or how independent-minded the Americans are? I should think it would be frowned upon to turn up in Manhattan and start directing the traffic. As a European, I mean.”
“My dear boy, these are questions we Brits have thrashed out over centuries. One cannot expect a Hun to have quite the same level of insight.”
Alistair got his pipe alight while steering with one foot, trimming the jib with the hand he held the match in. He puffed white smoke that the wind scooped away prettily over the russet cloth of the mainsail.
He said, “This German fellow sounds like a card.”
Simonson gave the trawling line an experimental tug. “He has only one testicle, you know.”
Alistair raised an eyebrow.
“Oh yes,” said Simonson. “It is well known.”
One thousand miles to the west lay Gibraltar; one thousand miles to the east, Alexandria. Though it was nearly Christmas and the water too chilly for swimming, it was pleasant in the sun and the two men were comfortable in white shirts and civilian slacks. Simonson pulled in the trawling line to check that the spinner was not tangled.
