by Steven Sater
But all that, so suddenly changed. All that, already changed—long before the air-raid warnings. More, well more, than a year before the Nazi incendiaries began burning holes in the sky, leaving whole villages in flames . . . All so irrevocably changed, on that soft-dying day, when the stark pain first raked Alfred’s chest; when that racking cough, like some scrawling wind, cast its dark signature over him; his lifted arms, feverish, battering back—
“Are you all right, Alfred?”
Overcome, coughing so loudly, so long—he nearly lost consciousness.
“Are you?!”
Trembling, he fell—fell for real—coughing still. Till, it seemed, his breathing had stopped.
“Mrs. Hallam—it’s Alfred!”
Immediately, the housekeeper, Mrs. Austerlitz, bounding in—Alfred’s brother, next. Finally, his near-frantic Mum, dropping to her knees, trying to breathe her heart into his.
“Alfred, darling—it’s Mummy. Talk to me!”
And still he did not, would not talk. Would not look up. As if some negative integer of him kept canceling him out, annulling him.
And yet—Alice knew—he still was, he must be still, all that he was.
All at once, that lunkhead brother of his lifting him—so carelessly. Alfred’s feet dangling so lifelessly!
“But where are you—”
“To hospital,” his Mum briskly instructed. Her stacked-square heels following the hoisted Alfred across the wine-dark carpet.
“I’m going, too,” determined Alice.
“No no, darling.” Without even a rearward glance: “Mrs. Austerlitz, ring her Mum.”
“No—please—Mrs. Hallam!”
That terrible slow door shut. Locked shut. She hurled herself senselessly against it.
“Alfred!”
No one there. Not a sound returned. She tried calling, screaming, pleading. Not a sound.
She tried knocking banging pounding. No one.
It echoed within her, haunting her: “There’s no sort of use in knocking,” as their book said. (A thing Alfred, playing the Frog-Footman, had so often said . . .)
Gonegonegone.
There she stood. No one there. For how long? Just stood and stood.
Shuddering, wary. Unsure how even to move. Unsure that there she even was, that any of this was—she’d stood. Merely stood. Beside that senseless slate fireplace, suppressing some weird sense that she’d always been waiting for this, had always dimly known she’d be left by this slate, alone as it. (This slate, which seemed to shrug, “So it goes,” as though it shared her sense of abandonment.)
But she was, she remained, alone. All those months, him in hospital. The winter and spring of his illness. She, never allowed to go visit. Never allowed to be near him. She, at school, or shut in her room—unable to bring herself to open their book. She, seated stiffly at dinner, receiving false-cheer talking-tos from Mum: all these mad gabs about enlarging her world (as if anyone else had half-nearly so large a world), about making new friends (as if that would help, to be staring in the face of some healthy someone else).
Till finally, that too-tardy July, months after he’d come home again, and only after the most rigorous, soul-sickening talks with his Nurse and Mum, she was once again let in his room. How washed-out, how emaciated, he’d looked; and yet, so demonstrably him. How glad he’d been to take her hand again, his eyes mirroring hers, welling with tears.
And how many more months from then . . . ? Till every day had become afternoon once more. He, as she’d sit with him, always so ready to leap up and act out each chapter. To sing out—in full-throated ease—their Mock Turtle song. To wave, wave his flappers—or what were they, forepaws?—in time to that boisterous “Lobster Quadrille.” She, always struggling to coax and cajole him just to lie still, to let her read to him.
So it was, so it went—they, so themselves again—till the terrible rain of night-fire began—the bullets tearing holes in the sky, night after night, all the desecrated stars falling through—till that harrowing night, that abysmal gap in time, when both of their houses were hit, and she went running prowling searching howling . . . till she found him, wounded, led him through those desolated streets, and settled them, finally, down here. She, no longer by his side, but still holding on, making him her whole mind.
She had to. More now than ever, she knew. He had no one but her now. No one else to look after him. No one who knew him. Up she sat again, and peered round. Nothing she could see of him but the dimly shimmering curtain surrounding him.
CHAPTER IV:
—
ON SUCH A NIGHT AS THIS
ONLY a month, a little month ago, was it? On a night like this, on such an autumn night as this, I sat beside you, Mummy. In our sitting room, behind the blackout curtains. You, beside the heater, counting shillings—every shilling meant another egg, you said. “Black market eggs, is that our way? It isn’t, Alice. Thank God, your Papa’s been spared the seeing it. But what’s a body to do, since the rations began? Not an egg—not an orange—to split between your sister and you. And say we get hold of one, who can enjoy it? Knowing how we got our guilty fists around it. Honestly, love, these days, we’ve forgotten how to feel the joy of anything . . .”
At your knees beside you, Mummy—all that gravy-browning painted up your legs, since now there were no stockings . . . I sat watching you not watching . . . from your corner of the sofa, from your throne of paisley cushion—with the ever-fraying tassels. You were reading T. E. Lawrence, or no longer. Rather, setting him aside, those smudged old vellum pages open by the window, while you retrieved your darning. “Tell me, Alice,” you said, “how is Alfred? Was this another good day?”
Can we not, not—just please not? Can’t you hum me something, Mummy?
“Alice?”
“Yes, it was a wonderful day. They are all of them, such wonderful days.”
“Oh”—you would not smile—“I hope so, darling.”
Can’t you please not? Can’t you just lean in and say again: “Mr. Churchill? Well, he’s always Mr. Churchill. I’ve never seen a man so much himself, I tell you.” Tell me. Tell me that, Mum.
“You are spending every day again there, Alice. It was one thing when you were seven—or even ten. But you’re older now, love. A boy’s a boy.”
Excuse me?
“I don’t need that look, thank you,” on you went, Mum. “My main point is: that boy’s remained your only friend.”
“He isn’t. He never has been. And, what if he is? Why shouldn’t I spend every day with him?”
“What happens if he goes away again?”
“To hospital? He won’t. He’s better. Everyone, they all agree.”
“Pray God, he is—and will be. It’s you that I’m concerned about.”
“For what, Mum? What can happen? Nothing, nothing bad can happen. Nothing will. Not again. Not to him or me.”
“There’s a war on, Alice.”
Yes. No. No more, please. Just sit with me, and hold me. Let me set my head against you once again, our room suffused with you again. Not like before the war, I know—you in your gorgeous French perfume—but like on all our summer evenings, you in your lovely Yardley water. All that lavender that was you, as you’d hold and rock me near. Come, hold me. Tell me once again, Mum: “Alice, when this blackout ends, we’ll see our evening star again—our ancient star, in that most ancient sky. Our British sky. And that star will be our inner light, I tell you. Like the word of God that willed it and does still.”
“Back to your bed,” that dread Nurse had commanded. As if those were the wizardwords, and her merely saying them would somehow resolve the witless mystery of everything. Would wipe some nursical sponge over a world in tears.
But how? How could Alice just be back to bed? When he, her friend, might be wondering where she was. The truth was, she could feel
he was, despite the fact he might be resting—and although he might need her now less than rest.
“Thinking of him still, Miss Drooping Head?”
“Him? No. Absolutely,” Alice answered. Without a clue, really, whom she was answering.
Whooo? Seeing without feeling, she peered about, scanning the dim ambiguous crowd. (Once again, with the dismal, dizzying sense that everywhere she looked boiled down to nowhere in particular.) Till, there, she spotted her listener across and above the track—beside the glowing orb of that cracked Tube-station clock—that street-tough Tabatha. Poised in her perch on high, her long, unbandaged legs sometimes dangling from that cavernous nook, sometimes disappearing with her into that wide toothless chink in the tile. There, where the mosaic mold of the ceiling had split its mortised seams and crumbled away. She who, like Alice’s kitty, had accustomed herself more to the house (here, the tunnel) than to the people living in it.
But how ever in the world, Alice wondered, had that unearthly girl discerned the slant and droop of her head? From such a distance—and with her eyes all bandaged to boot? That Tabatha—always so aloof, maintaining that comfy-kitty distance from those “cracked-egg souls” (as she called them) on the platform. So accustomed to distance in general, and to that perch in particular, it seemed like she, so early abandoned, so long an orphan, had probably been living there for years.
Though Tabatha’s trek—as she’d detailed it to Alice—had not been so simple as that. Consigned as she’d been, re-assigned as she’d been, from one orphan-asylum to another. From that Home of Poor and Abandoned Children (where the ultimate lesson had been that she herself was to blame for being born poor and alone) to the East London Orphan Asylum, where blank-faced teens sat on long blank pews. (“All of us,” she’d said, “in uniform. To teach us, I suppose, that we, too, were uniform.”)
From those pews she’d gone on, to the care of two caretaker-women in Devon, where a febrile young orphaned girl had clung to her like a sister. Had attempted to spend every moment with her. And then, when Tabatha broke free, had simply insisted on running off with her. And she had. Such a hallowed sort of soul-time those two had spent, together in London. Haunting the streets, crouching nights under bridges. Finding themselves so serenely indifferent—like the moon balanced over them—peering out on the ruddy pandemonium of anti-aircraft fire.
Telling themselves such truths, and such patent untruths, night after solitary night; till that “scraggly ginger of a thing” had been lost in a sudden air raid—only a single tree left, where once Milton Court had been. There the poor girl lay, windpipe fractured, suffocated. Her fingers sunk limp into the dust heap beside.
So, Tabatha had found her way here, to this shelter belowground. Had perched in that crack in the tile—on her own again. Cowled about that cracked and opalescent clock, as if it were her truest mirror.
And yet. No matter how remote she might seem—crouched on her high ceremonial perch—never did she refrain from making pithy observations. Just as now (like some local, nocturnal oracle), through that preternatural grin:
“So, Alice. Not thinking of him?”
“Not thinking. Period,” rejoined Alice, lifting her chin in defiance. “And certainly not about him.” With a studied “I’ll show you” on her face, she pulled back her shoulders, careful not to droop one bit or let her pooling eyes confess.
“But”—submitted Tabatha—“aren’t we always thinking about precisely what we’re not thinking about?”
“Certainly not.”
“All right, then,” Tab concluded. Threatening, with a pout, to remove herself from such petulant premises.
Arrgh. But no arguing it. “One moment. Please!” Alice called after. Then, dropping her sorry grey gaze, gave in: “If I could only be near him again, could merely sit and watch him . . . I’d be good, so good, at keeping quiet.”
“Ah yes. You would be good at that,” hummed Tabatha slyly. “You, so long familiar with the quiet . . .”
And how did she know that? The truth was, even before all this, Alice could sit so long, so silent, she sometimes could lose track of where she ended and where the evening quietude began.
“Besides,” Alice hazarded, “I know well, from my kitty, how to let a body sleep.”
“While you dream on about him?” Tabatha hazarded back. Her legs folding, disappearing into that shadow-cranny with her.
“Stop. It isn’t that,” Alice called after. Then considered, “To watch someone asleep, it’s more like . . . Like accepting that you’re never with them, really—not in that other room inside their head.”
“Ack, ack! Anti-aircraft! Hear that?” someone cried out, elbowing Alice. “Shall we have a flyboy row, then? Shall we?”
Who, now? Who else but Harold Pudding—the inimitable Pudding—that poor, traumatized soldier. He, a gangly seventeen, who was meant to be lodged on the cot to her left, except that he rarely could sit still long enough. No, he was always jerking about, jolted about—just as now—as if in some wild, head-wounded flight from the pain. With some desperate message to impart but no word, no way to say it.
“Pudding. Harold Pudding,” Dr. Butridge decreed, flailing at laying a hand on the lad. “Hypnagogic Hallucinations—i.e., ungodly visions, obscuring that last fraying state before sleep—due to Subdural Hematoma, Cerebral Edema . . .”
“Dr. Butridge, please!” the Nurse bawled balefully.
There, hear them? All of them. All one merry muddle. Soldier. Doctor. Nurse. Each with their own voice, and yet each dissolved into one voice. Like they were the voice of night, mused Alice. The one-voiced night, which murmurs on, below the continual cries of the sirens: No, Alice, nothing we articulate can ever bring relief from all the pain.
But enough of that, Alice thought, and cast her glance back to that chink, hollowed out of the tile high above. Namely, Tabatha’s throne. Now, not a hint of a grin, nothing but shadow—and cobweb—there. While here, just before her, came Private Harold Pudding again, clambering out from under some other cot, like a golden Lab surfacing from a pond, shivering off scores of melancholy water drops. “Shall we have a riddle? A roomy riddle—with no answer? Shall we?”
Had he plucked that riddle—that unanswerable riddle—from her precious book of Wonderland? And, having learned the riddle, had he somehow turned to riddle? Hoping, praying, that by asking (by becoming he-who-asked-it), he might find that (like most askers) he already knew the answer?
Or perhaps there was no answer. For surely, the real riddle was: why was it he—a simple northern lad, who’d signed up, who’d enlisted, who’d been so proud to be an infantryman—why was he the one who’d ducked the bomb but split his skull, and yet who, unlike his mate Freddie, was still here? And why, being here, could he not be still, not sit still? Not stop himself from jitter-jumping, as-as-asking: “Shall we have some tea? Tea for two. For him and me—with me. Say, shall we?”
Such a kind soul, really. And how, Alice asked herself, how and when, had Harold learned to do those glorious drawings, those elegiac sketches on his sketchpad? And why was he always trilling those riddles? And had he not been split, would he still be asking?
Barely could Alice ask, let alone answer, herself on the matter, when Harold dove, all at once, as if under a bunk. Shivering, suddenly sweating and trembling, clamping his palms firmly over his ears. Crying out, to his lost comrade, “Duck! Duck, Freddie! Quick!”
Oh no. Not again!
Settled contentedly upon that same cot (just to the right of Alice’s cot), lost in some content-free thought, sat the ash-and-dusty Angus Wilkins (how could anyone—Angus or not—accumulate such ash, so much dust, so young?). Breathing forth a surreptitious, blue opium smoke-stream (terribly debonairly, from his antique ivory pipe); not bothered a bit, not a whit, by the threat of that pipe being taken from him, nor by the bellowing soldier below him. Bemusedly, he fixed his realm-less eyes on Alice. �
��Harold Pudding, hmm. Loses his wits on the front, then comes home to the Blitz.”
“Misplaced wits!” Dr. Butridge abruptly declared, some unswallowable lump arising in his throat, as he went battering, clipboards clattering, past. Just as abruptly, he paused, and pivoting, seized hold of Angus’s wizened wrist. Hearing again there something low-pulsed and familiar: “Wilkins.”
“Him I am, ma’am,” Angus Wilkins quipped, his vision seemingly as blurred as his speech was slurred. “Wilkins, yes. Formerly the punter teen in Leeds, dreamin’ all the usual dreams. Believin’, I did, that once in the Royal Air Force, life would be so jolly good. Such adventures I’d have, yeah? No longer pitchin’ in weekends cleanin’ litter boxes in my Dad’s pet shop. No, I’d be risin’ high. In some single-seat Spitfire—or highfalutin Hurricane—whirlin’ through the bloomin’ blue. Never dreamed I’d be spendin’ these raids wipin’ windows, cleanin’ tires—till I’d barely see the inside of a plane. Meanwhile, spendin’ my nights in some bloody Tube.”
O-o-o-o, from his resinous mouth, toward Alice’s ear, nose, and throat, the wolfish Angus Wilkins let those smoke rings bluely go. Each one breasting the air bravely, a moment, then smaller and smaller, one after the other, as if their successive diminishment mirrored the tale of his own disillusionment.
But Butridge, of course, saw nothing, knew nothing of that. Indeed, he barely bothered with that human instrument in front of him, too intent on diagnosing it: “Opioid Dependence in the Nucleus Accumbens—namely, that grey, pre-optic area in the frontal lobe . . .”
It’s like he talks in riddles, really! Alice barely had time to observe, when . . . seeing Butridge tarry, the Red Cross Nurse erupted: “Dr. Butridge! Come, this moment! Listen to the hacking of the Hallam boy! We must move him immediately.”
