by Chris Cleave
Hamilton returned to his papers. He paged through the quartermaster’s weekly provisions report, and it seemed he intended to read the thing in its entirety. Simonson felt a snap of unease. The longer one was made to wait, the harder it was to like what one waited for. He kept his eyes on the wall map of the island, as if the siege might be lifted by further study.
Hamilton finished the report, took a red pencil and made careful annotations in the margins of several pages. This gross of biscuits to be issued; that ounce of aspirin to be allocated to sick bay. Finally he took off his reading glasses, lit a cigarette, and slid a typed sheet across the desk.
“Have you any explanation for this?”
He rocked back in his chair and watched Simonson read the document. It was a signed statement from a junior officer at Luqa, admitting to having moved Heath up the evacuation order under instructions from Royal Artillery.
Simonson looked up. “The poor man has completely misunderstood, of course. I brought no special pressure to bear, and I certainly issued no order.”
“He must be exaggeratedly stupid, then.”
Simonson gave a thin smile.
“Amused, Simonson?”
“I hoped you’d called me in for good news.”
Hamilton stood and went to the thin, barred window. With his back to Simonson he looked out over the darkening courtyard where four hundred men, following orders, were lying on the ground to save strength.
“I know you were friendly with Heath. You sunbathed. You sailed.”
“I try to be agreeable with all my fellow officers.”
“Don’t soft-soap it. You two were thick as thieves.”
“Not really, sir. Heath meant no more to me than the others.”
Saying it made him feel as close to ashamed as starvation permitted. How good it had been, back then, to chat with Alistair of this and that while the sun tanned them and the local beer softened their responsibilities. They had lain sprawled together like puppies, laughing till their sides ached. They had shared a grace that even the enemy sensed. Fighter pilots had stayed their hands on the firing switch. Mines had missed them by inches, by the gap between auguring stars.
“The word is important,” said Hamilton. “Are you quite sure the two of you weren’t friends?”
“If you must know, I thought Heath rather inferior. If I made an effort with him from time to time, it was because I felt sorry for him.”
“To be clear, you thought him socially inferior?”
“It’s hardly a man’s fault, but yes. I’m afraid it comes down to that. Anyway, he wouldn’t be the first who’d queered things to get off the island.”
“No, but he’d be the first from an honorable regiment. I hope you still appreciate the distinction.”
“I do, sir.”
“So you say Heath pulled strings, and you had nothing to do with it?”
“God damn it, yes.”
“And if I were to ask Heath the same question, no doubt he would say that it was you who pulled the strings, and that he had no hand in the affair?”
“If he has any sense at all, I hope that’s exactly what he’ll say.”
They watched each other while the old war turned through another minute of arc.
“I see,” said Hamilton at last.
“I’m very sorry.”
“Do you know what my days consist of now? HQ gives me orders that are almost supernatural. This caloric requirement to be transcended, these mortal wounds to be healed, those laws of nature to be revoked. As if we weren’t soldiers but saints.”
“I remember when we were human beings.”
“Yes. Well, I don’t suppose you’d have let Heath take the swing on his own, back then.”
Simonson closed his eyes. A girlfriend had written the week before: Catherine, trusting he was having fun. He remembered her at Oxford. Her hair, smelling of strawberries. Their punt, adrift among the meadows of the Cherwell. His cheerful incompetence with the pole. The summer sun fixing the memory, immortalizing her laughter even as it pealed.
Outside, another raid was starting up. The courtyard emptied as everyone hurried to the guns.
Simonson stood. “I should go to my men—”
“Stay where you are. What good to them is a man like you?”
Simonson sat back down. The bombs came, shaking the earth, deepening his headache until he felt his skull must crack. Officers, bloody and disheveled, began to bring their reports—communications with HQ were cut; number nine gun was a total loss; Grandfield and Barlow were killed.
Hamilton sat behind his desk and took the reports one by one.
“Do you see it yet?” he said in a lull. “Do you see it from my point of view? Because I have all night, you know. We can do this as long as you like.”
More reports came.
“Oh, look,” said Hamilton, sliding a damage chit across the desk. “That aimer on Nine Gun—you know, the Geordie—he’s had the front of his foot blown off. Shall we give him an evacuation number, do you think, or should we pull some strings?”
Simonson held his aching head while bombs blew it apart.
“Interesting,” said Hamilton, replacing the handset of the field telephone. “There’s a second casualty from that hit on Nine Gun. He—”
“All right,” said Simonson, “you’ve made your point.”
The war would grind them down until all that remained was this bitter and sullen fury pounding in the center of his skull. The war would find the true hearts of them all as it found his own heart now: incensed, incandescent, unconsoled.
The raid died away, the guns fell silent. In the hiatus before the all-clear there was the stuttering sound of the damaged tail-enders fleeing.
“I hope you also see it from my point of view,” said Simonson. “For someone he cares about, a man must do what he can.”
“Regardless of the social order?”
“Regardless of the evacuation order.”
“I see. So, you cut a few corners for Heath. I won’t say it’s unnatural, only unbecoming. Of an officer, you understand.”
“I admit nothing,” said Simonson.
“Then we must do it by the book. One of you pulled strings, and if it wasn’t you then logically it must have been him. So I will wire the C/O at Gibraltar, and have him put that to Heath. And as you say, if Heath has an ounce of sense he will deny any knowledge and you’ll both be off the hook. I expect that’s what he’ll say, don’t you?”
Simonson turned his cap over and over.
Hamilton said, “It’s just that you would need to be certain—wouldn’t you?—that Heath shared your cynical disposition. Otherwise there’s no guarantee he won’t simply do the honorable thing and own up, and serve out the whole of his twelve-months in the loneliest jail in the Empire. Might not even survive it, in his condition.”
“Please. I do understand.”
“Then I shall give you till dawn to think it over. Let me have your answer then. Dismiss.”
Simonson turned in the doorway. “Sir, why must you do this?”
“I wouldn’t, if we had any bread. All I’ve left to give the men is fairness.”
—
Back in his room Simonson sat on his cot. A damaged moon was easing itself up from the sea, and he wished it wouldn’t. One would be released from all cares, at last, if the moon and sun didn’t always pop up like hospital visitors. He wished the Germans would make an effort and sink them both for good.
The orderly had brought a new stack of paperwork and squared it away on his desk. Alistair had gifted Simonson his jar of blackberry jam, and he laid it on the stack now as a paperweight. He rubbed the fatigue from his eyes and sat to write the next day’s manning order. Number One Gun would have a full crew, Number Two would be half manned, Number Three would be . . . oh, but it hardly mat
tered. The magazines were empty.
His eyes strayed to the jam, where the moonlight crept through the jar. The deep ruby color connected directly with his hunger. He could hardly force himself to stop looking. Saliva flooded his mouth. He spat, and lit another bitter cigarette.
If Alistair was too stupid to deny everything, then surely that was Alistair’s lookout. After the surprise and humiliation of his interview with Hamilton, Simonson shook. How could Alistair put him in this position? This was the disappointment with grammar school boys: they pounded on the door and then had no idea how to behave once admitted.
He found his eyes on the jar again. However irritating Alistair was, to eat the jam would be a betrayal—he was supposed to keep it, to share it with Alistair at war’s end. But it wouldn’t do any harm to take off the lid, surely, and smell it. It would not reduce by any fraction the quantity of jam that remained. And how many months had it been since he had smelled anything but smoke? Gun smoke, smoke of cigarettes and pipes, smoke from conflagrations terrestrial and naval, smokescreens laid down for cover. He was curious to know if he could still smell anything else. He unscrewed the jar and breathed in. He tried again. Nothing.
The two possibilities arising—that the jam was odorless, or that he had lost the facility for scents less brutal than smoke—seemed equally bleak. He replaced the lid and picked up his pen again, but he was too hungry for paperwork.
Perhaps Alistair would deny all knowledge, and they’d both be in the clear. Simonson considered it with a quick kick of hope, then came up short. Of course Alistair would do nothing of the sort.
He eyed the jam again. If he had lost his sense of smell, what else had he lost? It was known that battle stress numbed the senses one by one. What he feared most was that his will was gone. It was said that the self surrendered by small degrees before it finally collapsed. Panic tightened in his chest. What if he could not taste?
He unscrewed the lid again, scooped jam onto the blunt end of his pen, and tried it.
All over the desiccated island the bomb craters filled with rainwater. They overflowed, voiding their poison, until the water that pooled in them was sweet. Soon the first green algae began to bloom in their waters. Little creatures, outlandish and fitfully ambulant, multiplied on the bounty. Their tiny bodies quivered with unheard laughter. They lived and died and their resonant forms drifted down to the depths and as the sediment grew richer, plants took root in it, and reached up for the light, and were salves and banes and lilies. Their leaves unfurled and their stamens shook with laughter. Finches came and rested on the stems—the leaves trembled, the birds swayed like gymnasts, the laughter shook the air. More rains came, and seasons, and early evenings with light so delicate and shimmering that the laughter made ripples in the light itself, and turned the light to its own form, and the light made itself into the undulant bodies of lovers. Catherine looked up at him, laughter lining her eyes, while the river looped around meadows.
Simonson cradled his head. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever tasted. How tired he had been, how lost.
He screwed the lid back on the jam and replaced it on top of the stack of paperwork. One found new uses for the equipment one had. He would tell Hamilton the truth and finish the war as a sergeant, yelling at buttons and shoes.
At dawn he shaved, combed his hair and went down to the ops room.
“Sir,” he said to Hamilton, “Heath knew nothing. He’d recently lost his arm, he’d lost Briggs who was his friend, and he was in no state to make judgments. I ordered Heath to take the painting back to the church, and the loss of Briggs and the truck was my responsibility. I ordered Heath onto the evacuation flight. He had no agency in any of it, and nor did Med Command. I told them it was orders from top brass.”
Hamilton came out from behind his desk to shake Simonson’s hand.
“You understand, Douglas, that I really shall have to write this report? That the entire thing falls on you?”
“I understand, Fraser. And I’m sorry to ask you to do it.”
“You shall have a rest now, at least.”
Simonson tried for a smile. “Well, that’s something.”
Hamilton sighed, sat back down and nodded at the wall map of Malta. “Now we can speak freely, what would you do, if you were in charge of the show? With the strength we have, and the provisions remaining, and the enemy able to parachute in to any location?”
Simonson studied the map. “I think I might ask the men, sir.”
Hamilton blinked. “I certainly never had you as a democrat.”
“I mean I might ask for volunteers. There are some who will surrender, when the chance comes, and it seems useless to require them to fight if they can bear a life in captivity. And there are others who will prefer to resist, even though the outcome is clear. I think we have all been here long enough to know our minds by now.”
“So you would split our force?”
“Into two camps, yes. One to yield, another to hold.”
“And in which of the two camps are you?”
Simonson smiled. “Who knows which takes more courage—to die in battle, or to live in vain? It cuts all of us in two, I suppose.”
Hamilton frowned at the map. “And yet, you see, we are only issued with one island.”
March, 1942
IN THE FIRST BIG southwesterly of the year the Americans arrived in London. They came with the storm at their backs, up from Southampton in trucks. They ran a muscular breed of convoy, widening the roads where they had to, shrugging off the bombed-out houses with big-chested bulldozers they had shipped with them from Maine. When they reached the capital, though the officers were too good to mention it, they were amazed at how tiny it was. The landmarks were bigger in their photographs. The British themselves were quite small.
“Say that again in your accent,” said a lieutenant who had asked Mary for directions. She did, and it made both of them laugh. To discover that one had an accent was quite unexpected and wonderful.
Mary had seen the column rolling along the Strand, on her way to the Lyceum. The children had already been out watching it, and it was hopeless to imagine that she could teach them on a day like this. She had joined them instead as they stood in a neat line on the pavement, oldest to youngest, waving American flags they had made.
“What’s with all the Negroes, ma’am?” said the lieutenant.
“Oh,” said Mary, “you’ll find that almost everyone in Britain is colored. Didn’t they tell you in your briefing?”
The lieutenant looked at her in perfect bafflement. “No ma’am.”
“Well, I’m surprised. As far as the Scotch border we are as dark as pitch. It’s only north of there that the race is diluted.”
“And you, ma’am?”
“I’m an albino. Oh, don’t look so worried. It’s fine, really it is, once one gets used to the persecution.”
She had the class salute him as he climbed back into the cab of his truck, laughing and shaking his head.
Mary turned to Zachary. “Did you think they’d be like this?”
“I thought they’d be like my father.”
His tender expression, his nonchalance briefly overwhelmed. Mary tried not to smile. Men were empty hats after all, from which rabbits popped only by a learned effort of conjuring.
“Did you think they’d come in white gloves, playing the baby grand?”
“I thought there’d be some black people.”
“Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He’s a snob.”
“Look at all this. Look how many soldiers there are.”
“And all come to save us. I can tell you now how worried I was.”
“We’ll win now, won’t we?” said Zachary.
“All I know is that it’s good not to stand alone anymore. I don’t suppose we could have held out much longer, on our own.”
“And what about you?”
“Oh, I’m hardly alone. I have my friends and my family.” She looked at him. “And I have . . .”
He touched her arm. “If you ever need me, I can come and help. Wherever I am, if you start at the theatre, they can find me.”
She smiled, thinking how sweet it was at his age. “Thank you,” she said, “but I’ll manage. I’m ever so . . .”
She tailed off, noticing how steadily he held her eye. The convoy rolled on. When the next gap in it came, the children would cross back to the theater side of the street and she would stay on her own. She realized this was understood now. The convoy would continue and she would not. The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in the traffic.
“Well,” she said. “Thank you.”
It came after a few minutes: a letup in the flow. One heard other people’s conversations again, over the engine noise. One looked up and there was the opportunity. There was no time to fuss over it: the children crossed the street while they could. And now the soldiers came again, on and on in their two-ton trucks, blocking her view of her class. The Americans came in a ceaseless river to end the lease of evil on earth. What loads this would impose on the heart everyone was curious to discover, but it was said they carried fuel oil and provisions for two years. Their bulldozers bellowed, and red sparks roared from their stacks. The convoy came without end. The asphalt shrieked and the children cheered. London’s long siege was broken.
The soldiers stood with their feet wide apart in the truck beds, saluting the children smartly. They raised eyebrows at the great mounds of rubble in the streets that the locals were too weary to arrange back into buildings. The Americans were tall men on full rations and it clearly made no sense to them that exhaustion should have the last word in the common language of English. “How come?” Mary heard them yelling to each other, over the noise of the engines. “How come they just left it broken like this?”
