by Chris Cleave
In the front row Zachary’s father sat with Poppy’s mother, and next to them were Kenneth’s mother and both of Thomas’s parents. In the back row Maud’s mother was making a point, it seemed to Mary, of sitting as far from Zachary’s father as she could—but at least she had come. There was something about the star, rising above the stable, that still pulled a crowd in from the fields.
She pressed out the last chords of the hymn, let her hands fall to her lap and nodded for the play to begin. Betty stepped forward into the improvised spotlight that George’s father had made from an electric fitting and an empty baked-bean can.
Betty froze until Mary whispered: “Long ago . . .”
“Long ago,” said Betty, “in the city of Nazareth, an angel—”
“Behold!” yelled Kenneth. “A! Virgin! Shall! Be! With! Child! And!”
“Shh, not yet!” hissed Mary.
The boy clamped both hands over his mouth, eyes bulging.
Betty said, “An angel came to Joseph and Mary. And the angel said . . .”
Mary willed Kenneth to say his line. “Behold . . .” she whispered.
Nothing. In the front row the parents were agitated, and looking to her. Kenneth was staring up at the ceiling.
“Behold . . .” she said again, and still nothing happened.
Tom widened his eyes at her and pointed to his ear. Now she heard it, a low rumbling. The air-raid sirens began. Mary felt the familiar punch of fear, followed immediately by fury at the enemy. Today of all days, they had chosen to start the raid early.
She stood from the piano. “We will go down into the basement. Children first please, calmly and quietly, holding hands in twos as we practised.”
She issued candles, one to each pair of children, as they went down the basement stairs. Poppy went with George, Maud with Kenneth, Zachary with Betty, then Beryl on her own since she would not let anyone touch her, and finally Thomas in his father’s arms, his wheelchair parked in the corridor.
Mary had Tom see everyone down the stairs while she went to the boiler room and shut off the electricity, the gas and the water. Back in the classroom she checked that no one remained. She tucked the Christ doll under her arm, closed the piano lid and walked down into the basement.
There was a confusion of places and a nervous laughter among the adults. The children squabbled for seats on the two long gymnasium benches that Mary had set up when she cleared the basement.
Mary clapped her hands twice. “Right. Grown-ups, please move those benches as close to that back wall as you can, and sit on them. Leave this space in front clear—this will be our stage. It’s less room than we’ve practised in, so shepherds, I need you to keep your flocks close, and angel—where are you, Kenneth?—angel, I need you to watch where you flap your wings. Betty and Maud, more candles, please, in those jars, and put them on the floor along the walls. Yes, anywhere there is good. And now, children, places as you were, please, and George, please can you bring that stool for Thomas to sit on? Very good. All right, then, we shall go from ‘And the angel said . . .’ ”
“Behold!” said Kenneth. “Behold!”
In the candlelight, the audience cheered. The children made no more mistakes and Mary sat to watch them, while the distant concussions of the raid sounded through the underground walls. The candle flames shone on the ancient shelves that lined the basement. The yellow light glinted on the dented globes. It glowed on the musty needlework. It made the laid-down maypoles into long bones, white in the darkness.
When it came time for the next hymn, Mary took a glockenspiel from its pine box, gripped the wooden beaters, and frowned at the instrument. It might be harder than she had allowed.
“Here,” said Zachary’s father, “let me have that. What’s the song?”
“ ‘No Room in the Inn.’ ”
He began straight away, giving two bars and nodding the children in. He played evenly, not making any more fuss of the tune than it needed. Mary closed her eyes while the children sang.
Later, when Mary and Joseph had lain the doll in the glockenspiel case that took the place of the manger, and after the last hymn, the play was over but the bombing raid was not. The explosions came through the ground, no nearer but no fewer. The children clustered on the benches in the arms of their parents and waited for the all-clear. People spoke in whispers, as if the war were listening. Since there was nothing else to watch, they all looked at the doll in the manger with the candles ringed round it in jars.
Mary sat beside Tom on the end of a bench. “Feeling Christmasy?”
“As an elf in rum butter.”
She put her head on his shoulder. “Like it down here?”
He gave the basement a critical eye. “It could use a woman’s touch.”
She dug him in the ribs. “I hate you.”
“This school is yours now, you know. I mean, after the war, everyone will come home and I daresay you’ll have to hand the place back, but you and I will know who held the line when it mattered.”
“Oh, I’ll be glad to give the key back. It’ll be a relief not to be in charge.”
“I don’t see you, somehow, taking orders from Miss Vine. Not after this.”
“No?”
“I don’t see any of it being as it was. Just look at us, down here in the dark. Coloreds and cripples and cranks—but we’re the ones holding on. When the rest get back they’ll have to respect what happened here.”
Mary yawned, and stretched out her legs alongside his. “I just want to get through. I must say I don’t frightfully care who feels good once this is over, so long as it isn’t the Germans.”
He grinned. “I don’t care about anyone at all, apart from you. If there is one person who—”
Three huge detonations came, knocking the breath from their lungs and blowing out the candles. Children and parents screamed. Mary found herself stunned, lying on top of Tom, both of them struggling to get up. She fumbled in her pockets until she found her lighter.
Zachary was staring back at her, eyes wide with terror.
“It’s all right,” she mumbled, her tongue pasted with brick dust. She was slow from the concussion. “It is quite all right. Quite safe down here.”
Another explosion came, huge and even closer, knocking the lighter from her hand. When she felt for it and flicked it back on, Zachary was gone. His footsteps banged up the wooden stairs that led up from the basement.
“No! Wait!”
She made to go after him but Tom pulled her back. “I’ll get him.”
He went, leaving her to bring order to the tangle of parents and children. She got the candles alight in their jars, then checked on the injuries. Zachary’s father was badly concussed, swinging his head in confusion. Thomas’s father had dislocated a shoulder and sat on the floor with his back against the wall, green-faced. The children had got away with bruises.
Once she had them all calm, she took stock. Her ears rang—she must have struck her head harder than she had thought—but at least the bombing seemed distant, for now. She didn’t know how long Zachary and Tom had been gone—five minutes, perhaps. She went up into the corridor, stumbling on uneven legs—it seemed she had lost a shoe—and decided to take a quick look outside. She swung open the heavy front door and was amazed to find that it was still daylight. The street was deserted, with rubble strewn across it. A house was down in the middle of the row.
She looked up and saw no bombers. She took a few steps into the street, thought better of it, and hurried back into the shelter of the porch. It was ridiculous—it was bombs that threatened, not rain—and yet in the corner of the porch a wooden box held the parents’ furled umbrellas, and a sensible part of her mind realized that she ought to take one, since it must be better than nothing. She was reaching for one when she saw, through the open door, the child at the end of the street. He was Zachary’s build, but
white, in a white sweater and shorts, and she yelled at him to come into cover. The child stared at her, backed away two paces, and fled.
It was five streets before she caught him, with bombs beginning to fall again close by. When she finally got hold of Zachary, his eyes were blank with fright. She dragged him into an angle behind a wall, and gasped to get her breath. He cowered, arms raised as if she might strike him, and she wondered how it had come to be that he was white, and she also wondered why he was afraid of her. He was crying tears of a brown liquid, and she would not understand until later that they were ordinary tears, cutting through the white dust.
“Why?” she managed to say. “Why is it always you who runs off?”
He howled, chest heaving. “I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry . . .”
She shook her head. “You have to come back. We can’t stay out here.”
“I’m not going back in the basement.”
“Oh yes you jolly well are.”
She half dragged, half led him back through the air raid, which was all around them now, and in the mouth of a side street she saw that Tom was lying on the pavement, asleep in the snow with the winter sun slanting over him. It was a stress reaction she had read about—the mind shutting down when it all got too much. She would have to go back for him as soon as she had delivered Zachary to the shelter. (How extraordinary that she was the one who was calm in this situation; who could take in everything clearly and without panic.) She hauled Zachary back to Hawley Street, with the bombing seeming distant again, and here there was an interesting phenomenon. (How glad her father would be to know that his daughter could be cool in a crisis.) This was how it sounded in her mind, as she held Zachary by his thin wrist and felt the pulse in it while the drone note of the bombers faded away into the east: I am witnessing a phenomenon related to the bombing.
The thing was that Hawley Street was there but the school was gone. She walked up and down the length of the street, twice, calmly but briskly, pulling Zachary by the wrist and looking for the school. Because of course the phenomenon would have a simple explanation: perhaps that someone unfamiliar with the area had taken the building and put it back in slightly the wrong place. She started laughing because it was silly that one couldn’t find something so big and stolidly Victorian as Hawley Street School. All she could find was an enormous pile of red bricks, dotted with decorative London yellows. What a ridiculous place to leave bricks. And this was when her stomach fell and she understood that the problem was a perceptual one: that her concussion was worse than she had supposed, that she was hallucinating. It was frightening but at least it all made sense now: Zachary turned white, Tom fast asleep, the school absent without leave. How funny the mind could be. She sat in the thick white dust and laughed.
Afterward they told her it was normal, with shock. Someone came and took Zachary away from her. They had to prise her fingers off his wrist. And then for hours all she could think was what a waste it was: a new carton of chalk had been delivered that morning and now it must be ruined, all twenty sticks of it. She explained to a nurse that they would simply have to make do, and write on the blackboard with the stubs of old chalk.
They took her to a rest center and wrapped her tight in blankets. They told her that it helped to be swaddled like a baby. Days passed, which she experienced as the daylight flickering on and off. As if there were a bad connection. They told her that no bodies had been recovered from inside the school, only fragments. The only body was Tom’s, recovered from the street, and they unwrapped her from the blankets long enough for her to be taken to identify him.
The morgue was an improvised facility, in a church hall. Someone had marked Tom’s forehead with an X, in red grease pencil. It meant that there was an internal injury. They told her Tom had been killed by the pressure wave of a bomb, which was why there wasn’t a mark on his body except for that X. Mary hardly heard them. It was evident to her that the bomb had done nothing to him—that the cause of death must somehow be connected to that terrible letter on his forehead: the unknown in all algebras, the singularity.
She explained this to the woman who was seeing to her in between signing for the deliveries of the remains that were still arriving at the morgue, in sixteen-inch rectangular cardboard containers requisitioned from a grocer, as and when the heavy rescue men brought them out.
Her mother flashed on and off. She told Mary that the heavy-rescue crews had dug into the rubble for four days and nights, bringing out what remains they could, and then they had put lime down.
People asked questions of her. Mary answered that she was quite all right, thank you. No, she did not need more tea. Yes, she was able to supply a list of the pupils and parents who had been present at the nativity play. No, she and Tom had not been engaged; she had been waiting for the poor man to pluck up courage. No, she did not think that if God had seen fit to spare only one child then it was a pity it had to be the picaninny. No, she did not think that the darkies had the devil’s own luck. No, she imagined that the poor child had run out into the air raid simply because he was unusually resistant to sitting where he was told. Well, and if they must put it like that, then yes, she was rather fond of the nigger.
There were no further questions after that, and Mary did not have the heart to trouble people with her own. Goodness knew, everyone at the rest center was exhausted. Everyone had anguish of their own by now—what was every bomb that fell, if not endings under unbelievable compression? Grief was contagious, and Mary would no more speak of her own than she would cough, in a crowded train carriage, without putting her hand to her mouth.
And so she sat and watched the walls, in the grubby rest center with its bulletin board still announcing church business and cake raffles. She read the small advertisements for odd-jobsmen and cat breeders.
She reminded herself to thank Tom, the next time she saw him, for going out into the raid after Zachary. A moment later she understood that this would not be possible, but the understanding did not prevent her from writing it down on a scrap of paper and tucking it into her sleeve: Remember to thank Tom. He had left the shelter to go into the thick of a bombing raid. That he was dead and that she must thank him the next time she saw him: for weeks it was possible to believe both these things at once.
Quite early on, even before the days slowed their flickering and began to come and go with their usual shopkeeper’s frequency, Mary decided that she would never speak of how she felt. One could only trudge away from the place to which one had hurried with such joy at the start. One could only begin again, a year older, and resolve to carry oneself in such a way that the pressure wave of the tragedy was contained within one’s own body, and could not spread one inch further.
December, 1940
ON CHRISTMAS DAY THE regiment hosted the companies of all the convoy escort ships tucked into Grand Harbour. In sunshine, more than a thousand officers and men assembled in the courtyard of Fort St. Elmo for a service of nine lessons and carols and a tot of Nelson’s blood, supplied by the visiting Navy. Five hundred years of tradition having established the order of service, the rum was administered before the singing.
Though the enemy’s blockade was biting and supplies on the island were scarce, Alistair supposed the War Office had established a vast cache of polishes. Two thousand black boots glowed as if with an inner light. Twelve trumpets, eight trombones, four tubas and a euphonium blazed like the armor of Achilles. It was the genius of motivated men that even when rendered impotent by conditions of total encirclement, they could make themselves preternaturally shiny. As the last chorus of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” reached its triumph, Alistair was nearly blinded.
After the service he sent the men of his battery for a second trip to the rum urn, with instructions to make only a mild nuisance of themselves. He went up to his little cell high in the walls of the fort. When his subaltern, Briggs, dropped by with an airmail fresh from the airfield, Alistair could h
ave kissed the envelope. Warm from the Navy’s liquor he really did feel a glow of goodwill toward all men, even those of the enemy persuasion. It was big of the Italian aviators to let a mail plane through the blockade on Christmas Day. One hoped that one’s own side was reciprocating, in some other theater where Britain was in the ascendant. One struggled to think where that might be—but at Christmas one could think of sleigh bells instead.
The aerogramme bore Tom’s parents’ address in the “Sender” box. Alistair tore it open. How perfect that Tom’s reply should reach him on Christmas Day. Assuming of course that Tom was writing to forgive him for the awkwardness at the Lyceum, then how apt.
The letter was from Tom’s father. The handwriting was almost like Tom’s, but slightly slumped. He was sorry to have to let Alistair know that Tom had been killed, on the nineteenth of December, in an air raid. Since Tom had thought of him as a brother, Alistair was to think of the Shaws as family and to write if there was ever anything they could do.
Alistair put down the letter and stood at the arrow loop window. He watched the forenoon glittering over the sea. In the distant haze he could just make out the flashing signal mirrors of the Italian blockade ships. If one forgot for a moment that the messages wished one evil, they were beautiful.
He washed off the parade grime by sponging himself from his metal basin. He put on a fresh shirt, and since there was half an hour before Christmas lunch was to be served, he visited the men in their mess room. Post would have come for them too, and one couldn’t second-guess the mood of the men. Airmail had the particular violence of recency—it might leave them upbeat, or homesick, or a queer mix of the two—and so it was prudent for their officer to drop by and project a soothing equanimity. Sweethearts might blow cold or hot after all, and mothers might ail or improve, but the 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft gun would always provide a stable firing platform, providing that the leveling jacks on each corner of its carriage were competently deployed. This was the sentiment an officer should diffuse.
