“We’re evacuating,” says Richard. “Going out into the countryside. It will be safer there.”
“Everyone will be leaving,” says Agnes. “The bombing’s not letting up. The city will be flattened by morning.”
“But my son isn’t back yet,” says Maeve. “I have to wait for him.”
“Won’t he be evacuating as well?” asks Richard. “Won’t you have a better chance at being reunited with him outside the city?”
There have been other moments in Maeve’s life when she’s had to make a definitive choice. When she found out she was pregnant she had to decide whether to give the baby up. When various suitors had proposed marriage, she had to decide whether she wanted them, or simply the easier life they offered. When she felt restless with a situation or a place, she had to decide whether to stay put or go elsewhere.
Maeve recognizes this moment at the bottom of the staircase as being one of those times when she must make a choice between two unknowns. What is the best thing to do? If she remains here, the house could be bombed and she could be killed before Jeremy returns. Or he could come back within the hour. If she evacuates into the countryside, she could meet her son there or she could never find him again.
The dark pocket at the bottom of the stairs holds the three figures, motionless and shadowy.
When the choice was whether to move on or stay put, Maeve always chose to move on. When the choice was to join up with someone or remain alone, Maeve chose the latter. When the choice was to keep her illegitimate child or give him up for adoption, Maeve chose to keep him. Given her nature and her experience, the odds are even as to whether she will go with Richard and Agnes or stay waiting.
Maeve had been thinking of giving Jeremy up after she gave birth to him. It was the easier thing to do. Her family would welcome her back, indeed they would pretend that the whole unpleasant business had never happened. But when Maeve was handed the baby, when she saw him for the first time, she felt the string connecting them. Whenever Jeremy moved or cried, Maeve felt tugged toward him. It didn’t feel like a choice to keep him. It felt as though it was the only thing she could do.
If Maeve stays in the house, her life is more at risk than if she walks out of Coventry. She is no good to her son dead or injured.
She closes her eyes. She can see the tiny creature Jeremy once was. She can still feel the tug between his needs and her actions. He is alive, she knows that. And he is a sensible boy. He likes systems and plans, the logical approach. If he is safe, he will stay put until the bombing is over. If he is in danger, he is more likely to find his way to safety than to remain at risk.
Maeve opens her eyes. Behind the grey figures of Richard and Agnes she can see the glow of the moon over the smoky garden. When Jeremy was born, there was a moon as bright as this one. She remembers it shining through the window at the end of the ward. She took its brightness to be a good omen.
“I’ll come with you,” she says. “Just let me go and fetch my coat.”
Maeve hastily puts on her coat and scarf. She writes a note for Jeremy and leaves it on the kitchen table. She jams an apple and a torch into one pocket, her sketchbook and pencil into the other. She can’t think of what else to take, and so she doesn’t take anything, just follows Richard and Agnes out onto the street.
They hurry up the road, turn the corner, and head away from the city. Almost immediately they see other people, other travellers through the darkness. Some people are pushing prams or wheelbarrows loaded with belongings. Some people are carrying children. One old man leads a donkey.
It makes Maeve ill to think she is leaving Jeremy in Coventry, so she tries to think instead that she is going toward him, that he’s waiting for her in the countryside. She falls into step beside Richard and the man with the donkey, and she imagines Jeremy walking this same road, just ahead of her, just in front, barely out of sight.
The library has been bombed. Most of it is burning. Harriet can feel the heat from the flames trickle across her skin. She and Jeremy are crouched behind a wall of rubble across the street from the fire. The library burning is worse for Harriet than the cathedral burning. The reference room had these lovely stone arches and open shelves, two floors high. Harriet used to stand on the balcony, looking down over the railing at the long wooden tables with the uncomfortable chairs, at the men and women, heads bowed solemnly over their books.
When a building is lost, everything that had happened within its walls is lost as well.
Jeremy’s head is close to Harriet’s. She can feel his breath on her cheek. She wants to know if the world in which she lives, this place where she is using herself up every day, will remember anything of her. Will the buildings that she has carefully studied, walked through, touched—will they recall her footsteps, the weight of her body on the stone steps, the smooth flat of her hand on the banister? Will the cobblestones hold her footfall? Will the river or the rain remember the shape of her body?
Harriet is sure she can smell the books burning in the library. She thinks she can smell the pages turning to ash, all the pages she has pored through, the paper thick and slightly damp, the edges of the pages brown with foxing and sometimes sticky to the touch. She used to pride herself on all the information she knew. For some reason it was a comfort, all this knowledge she could unravel with a breath. Now, that still contemplation she had in the library seems completely unreal.
Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.
A bomb falls nearby and they duck down farther behind the wall. Jeremy holds his hands over Harriet’s head, as if he is holding an umbrella for her, as if what falls is simply rain.
Harriet closes her eyes. She can feel the heat from the burning library against her eyelids. She remembers an old book on colour that showed a patch of colour, and then it linked that colour to places in nature where it was found. Everything was described in the most delicate way. A white was described as the white of the human eyeball or the inside quill feathers of the kittiwake. It was the reference book that Charles Darwin took with him on the Beagle when he went to South America. It was how he identified and catalogued the creatures he saw there. She remembers taking the heavy book down from the shelf, opening it on the library table. The colour patches still seemed brilliant. The descriptions were written in spidery handwriting. Sometimes there were blanks, as there was no vegetable to match the breast of a lapwing, no mineral that could be linked to the scarlet leadington apple. Harriet liked to try to fill in these blank spots, to match up a colour with the colour on a bird’s wing, or a mouse’s belly, or a stone pulled from a riverbed.
How would I describe the world? By describing something, doesn’t the thing itself cease to exist? How would I decide what to marry—this shade of grey with the low-slung clouds of November. Not precise enough. This shade of grey is cigarette ash. That shade of grey is water running over clay. Not vivid enough. That shade of grey is old mortar between old bricks.
Jeremy is quiet beside her. Harriet puts a hand on his arm. He had rolled up his sleeve when he was working in the aid shelter. His skin is soft under her fingertips, softer than her own.
“We should go,” she says.
Harriet and Jeremy move away from the library, continue on down Hertford Street. Home is not far now. From inside some of the shops there is a sound like artillery fire. It takes a while to determine that it is the noise not of gunfire but of the tinned goods in the shops exploding. They pass a row of houses burned to nothing but their frames, and yet on the windowsill of each house is a cat, curled up, nose to tail.
Cats stay with the building, thinks Harriet. Dogs go with the people. They have seen many dogs scuttling along the streets, pressed tight against the walls, tails between their legs, or nosing through the rubble, looking for their owners. Jeremy has put his hand out to several of the dogs, but they are too s
kittish to come near. But the cats seem relaxed, sitting in their places like sentinels.
The route they are travelling means that they will get to Harriet’s house before Jeremy’s. Harriet wishes she had taken them another way, but the other ways were blocked. She doesn’t feel ready to arrive at her house yet. She feels better able to deal with Jeremy’s impending grief rather than her own. She has less to lose.
A bomb explodes a little way in front of them. Harriet can feel the blast of hot air push her backwards. She puts her hands over her head to protect herself.
The bombs falling on the city are an unnatural phenomenon, and yet they have to be thought of through past experience. The people of Coventry have lived through storms. They have listened to the bass notes of bells, and so the bombs become all of these things. The bombs feel to Harriet like an earthquake shaking the ground, lightning striking the earth, the deep, sonorous toll of a bell.
When something is unnatural, there is no new language for it. The words to describe it must be borrowed words, from the old language of natural things.
This must be how it was for Owen, thinks Harriet. This never knowing what will happen next, this living in constant peril. She is worn down by one night of it. She can’t imagine how Owen must have felt after days and days of living like this. Maybe he wasn’t killed in the trenches but crawling away from there. One of the customers of Bartlett’s Coal had fought in Ypres. He had told Harriet once that the ground near the trenches was packed with so many bodies that it was as springy as a mattress.
A few years after Harriet had gone to Ypres, the town was rebuilt. A memorial was constructed at the Menin Gate. Harriet saw photographs of the rebuilt church, the buildings in the centre of the town repaired and looking as though they’d never been bombed. It was a shame, she thought, that they’d seen fit to do that. Not that she couldn’t understand the need of the people who lived there to go on with their lives, to have back what had been taken from them; but she had thought that the ruined town was a much better memorial to the dead than the rebuilt one. There was a dignity and a sorrow in the desecrated buildings that wasn’t present in the redone models. They spoke more directly to what had happened there. There was more truth in them.
What will happen to Coventry? she thinks. Will there be anything left to rebuild, to memorialize? It is so hard to tell how much of the city has been destroyed, how great the damage is. But so much seems to be gone, and the bombers just keep coming back. There will be nothing left by morning. And what of the next night? The Germans could keep it up until everything and everyone is extinguished.
“Let’s go,” yells Jeremy into her ear, and she realizes that the bombing has moved off, moved away from them. She stands up stiffly, her arm aching, struggles through the rubble.
The smoke-shrouded moon shines high above them now, straight overhead. The sky is as red as blood.
They reach the end of Berkeley Road without incident, and then it happens, the moment that Harriet has been dreading. They turn the corner and begin to move down toward her house. They hurry past where Mrs. Patterson’s house used to stand, just a crater there now. The rose hedge that used to front the garden has been completely buried in rubble. The house next door to Mrs. Patterson’s is standing, and the one next to that.
“Which one’s yours?” shouts Jeremy.
“At the end of that row.” Harriet can’t look for fear of what she might see. She looks down at the ground instead, at her feet moving carefully around the bricks and bits of broken wood. “Look for me,” she says to Jeremy. “It’s the last house in the row. Mine was the flat on the top floor. Wendell Mumby lived below me.”
“It’s gone,” Jeremy says. “The last half of the terrace is gone.”
Harriet looks up then and sees immediately that there is nothing left of her house, or the one beside it, or the one beside that one. The wall still surrounds the garden, but the garden is entirely gone.
“Wendell,” she says. Jeremy has his arm around Harriet’s shoulders and she leans into the hollow of his collarbone. Jeremy smells of smoke and camphor. His skin is gritty against Harriet’s face.
She is afraid that she will find the body of Wendell Mumby in the rubble, but if he is there, he is well buried under the bricks and broken pieces of furniture. Her flat has collapsed into the ground-floor flat. Even so, she finds precious little that has remained intact.
“Look for my wedding photograph,” she tells Jeremy. “It’s in a silver frame.”
They are moving cautiously over the debris. Even with the bright of the moon it is still hard to see properly.
“You’re married?” says Jeremy.
“Was married. My husband died in the last war.”
In the photograph, Harriet and Owen are standing at the door of the church. She has the bottom of her dress gathered in her hand because they’re about to go down the stone steps. Owen is wearing a morning coat. The photograph has stood on Harriet’s bedside table since he died. Every night she goes to sleep looking at it, and every morning she wakes up doing the same.
They don’t find the photograph. All they find is a small wooden box covered with shells that Harriet had kept buttons in. The buttons are gone, but the box has remained whole. They find pages of books and fragments of crockery. Jeremy unearths a bent spoon, straightens it, and hands it to Harriet. Not knowing what to do with it, she puts it in the box covered in shells.
“Mrs. Marsh,” calls a voice, and Harriet looks down from the hill of rubble to see her neighbour Mr. Carter from the other end of the terrace.
“Have you seen Mr. Mumby?” shouts Harriet.
Mr. Carter shakes his head. “No,” he says. “But I have your cat. I have Abigail.”
The Carters’ house is as it ever was, not even a window blown out. It seems miraculous to walk inside and see all the cups and saucers intact, sitting on the shelves the way they always have.
There’s a hurricane lamp on the worktop, and candles burning for light. Mrs. Carter pours them water from a large saucepan on the floor. “You’re welcome to shelter here with us until morning,” she says.
The elderly Carters and their equally elderly collie, Jack, have been lying on a mattress under their heavy oak dining table for protection against the bombs.
“The cat won’t come near the dog,” says Mr. Carter, leading them into the kitchen. “She prefers the upstairs landing window. We found her sitting on the wall of your garden.”
Harriet leaves Jeremy in the kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Carter and bolts the stairs two at a time. Abigail, just as reported, is curled up on the ledge of the window at the top of the stairs. She meows when she sees Harriet, and Harriet bursts into tears. It is not that she is overly fond of the cat. She was a stray that Harriet took in and initially they merely tolerated each other. But Harriet has grown attached to her and now, except for that vulgar box coated in shells, she is the only thing she has left. She reaches out her hand and strokes the cat’s head, rubbing behind her ears as Abigail likes. When she takes her hand away, it is dusty with ash.
“What happened to Wendell?” Harriet asks Abigail. “Where did he go?” Abigail meows again, and then gets down to the serious business of grooming her right back leg.
Jeremy is crouched under the table with the Carter family. The plates rattle on the shelves as a bomb explodes nearby. The dog appears to be asleep.
“He’s deaf, poor lamb,” says Mrs. Carter.
“Lucky dog,” says Jeremy.
The dog kicks out his legs in his sleep, dreaming of running.
“No sign of Wendell?” Harriet asks.
“We haven’t see him,” says Mrs. Carter.
Another bomb goes off. Chunks of plaster fall from the ceiling onto the table. Everyone flinches, even though they’re not hit.
“I can’t believe my house is gone,” Harriet says to Jeremy. She keeps alternately forgetting and remembering this fact. She feels disembodied.
“Poor lamb,” says Mrs. Carter, patting H
arriet’s knee.
They’re close together under the table. Harriet has to keep shifting on the mattress to avoid coming into contact with Mrs. Carter or Jeremy. Mr. Carter keeps patting her shoulder. She is getting a cramp in her calf from the unnatural way her legs are bent. Her arm aches and her throat is sore. Wendell is gone. Her house is destroyed. The cat is safe. This is the sum total of her life.
“I should go to my house,” whispers Jeremy in her ear. “I need to find my mother.”
Harriet feels immense relief when he says this. She found the Carters boring before the war, and even though she is grateful for their kindness, she is eager to get away from their well-meaning blandness.
The donkey’s name is Amos. He is not impressed with the bombing, or with the long night perambulation he is being forced to undertake. Periodically he stops dead in the road and the man leading him has to lean his weight backwards on the rope to get Amos moving again.
Maeve likes the irritable donkey, his stubborn refusal to do as he is bidden. She likes the undulations of his leg and shoulder muscles as he walks. She likes the smooth grey wall of him, less than an arm’s length away from her own body. She looks at him as much as possible, trying to memorize him so that she’ll be able to draw him later on.
No one talks. The line of evacuees just moves forward, each step taking them farther away from Coventry, farther away from this terrible night of destruction and death.
Maeve eats her apple and gives half to the donkey. His teeth are big and yellow; even in the moonlit darkness she can see their tarnish. He must be an old donkey. He takes the piece of apple from the flat of Maeve’s hand and stops to eat, chewing with his mouth open, as all animals do.
Jeremy would have liked Amos, thinks Maeve, and then she reprimands herself for using the past tense to think about her son. Jeremy will like Amos.
When Maeve first came to Coventry five months ago, she had a little money saved from her last job and didn’t have to work right away. She put her energy into setting up the house and getting Jeremy settled into his job at Triumph. She was waiting to hear if she’d been accepted to work as a postman; with so many men away they were taking women. But this hadn’t happened yet. She spent her days looking after domestic duties and then, in the afternoons, she worked on her drawing. Not since she was a young girl had she had such a calm routine. This autumn had been almost a rest because the pace of her days had been so relaxed.
Coventry: A Novel Page 8
