Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (17 page)

But the ache deepened as she watched him play. And she thought:
But so what?
There might be a sniffy letter, even an official reprimand. But perhaps one ought to set one’s own transgressions against the enemy’s, these days. When one considered that the Germans would establish air superiority before bringing in a spearhead of tanks backed up by infantry in phased echelons, and follow up with collective reprisals against civilian elements that continued to resist, to dance seemed quite inoffensive.

“On second thought, thank you,” she said. “I’d love to dance.”

She took his hands. The gramophone rang brassy through its horn. And there, at the point marked on the map in her original orders, in the small space of parquet floor she had scrubbed clean herself between the front row of desks and the blackboard, Mary danced the Charleston with Zachary and it seemed to her that both of them were rather good at it.

August, 1940

TOM SAID, “I HAD
a letter from Alistair. His mob is due to ship out again and they’re giving them leave beforehand.”

Mary propped herself on the pillow and lit a cigarette. “He’s your friend, you should get him up to town.”

“You know I’ve tried. I wonder if we might go to see him instead.”

“To the provinces? Hay wains and bigotry? I can’t say I’m tempted.”

“You know it isn’t like that.”

“Unless one is colored or otherwise vulnerable, darling.”

“And since we are neither of those things?”

“ ‘Then of course the provincials would doff their caps to us, the lambs.”

“Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you.”

“You see?” said Mary, tapping ash. “You are brighter than you look.”

“I do miss Alistair, though. I worry something’s happened to his head.”

“Shell shock, do you mean?”

“Oh god,” said Tom, “not as bad as that. His letters are perfectly fine. For a start, they are letters. They’re not—oh, you know—poetry.”

“At least there is that.”

“I can see it might feel queer, though, coming back to town after battle.”

Mary frowned. “Is Alistair good-looking?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, is he tall?”

“I suppose so. Six-one, six-two?”

“Good. And his eyes?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever noticed them.”

“I despair. But he is a full captain? Own teeth, no visible Nazi insignia?”

“Confirmed on all counts.”

“Then he’ll do for my friend Hilda. Invite him for a double date. Tell him Hilda is pretty, and comfortably off, and disinclined to chastity. If that doesn’t prise the poor man out of the countryside then perhaps it’s best if he stays.”

“You really won’t come to visit him there?”

Mary stubbed out her cigarette. “Not till perdition congeals.”

“You shouldn’t damn the whole of England, you know, over what happened to one boy.”

“I shall damn as I please. What is the use of coming from a good family, if one cannot damn as the need arises?”

“It’s just that you seem rather soft on Zachary.”

“No softer than on any of my other children.”

“But last month—don’t you see? Don’t you think one crosses a line, slightly, when one actually dances with a nigger?”

“Must you bring it up again? And don’t use that word. It’s cheap.”

“It’s only an endearment, isn’t it? Like ‘Taffy’ or ‘Jock.’ If the child were Welsh and I called him ‘Taffy,’ you wouldn’t blink.”

“But the child is American. His father moved them here ages ago. Call him a Yank if you must.”

“And that would be better because?”

“Because ‘Yank’ is a proper noun and it takes a capital and it has a capital too, whereas ‘nigger’ has neither. The day we allow the child his own country and lodge our ambassador in its principal city is the day I shall let you call him ‘Nigger,’ and even then I shall jolly well expect to hear the capital N when you enunciate.”

Tom held up his hands. “I didn’t know he was American.”

“Half the black entertainers are. Where did you think they were from?”

“I assumed they were supplied by some ministry, in support of morale.”

Mary softened. “You see! My Tom
is
still in there somewhere.”

“I suppose I’m just jealous.”

She kissed his cheek. “He’s eleven years old, darling.”

“Just . . . you know. Try not to dance with him again.”

She drew away under the covers. “I shall dance as it pleases me.”

He grinned. “But you don’t want to make waves, do you?”

“We make pressed flowers. We make decorations with poster paint and glue. Waves don’t come into it.”

“But you must see what I’m telling you.”

“I’m not entirely sure I do.”

“Please, Mary. Must we talk about work?”

“Oh, are we talking about work?”

“I suppose we are, now.”

“Fine, then I suppose I shall get out of your bed, now.”

She stalked across the garret, put on his discarded dressing gown, sat at the piano and struck an ironic discord.

He groaned. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, please, never apologize for being professional.”

He said nothing.

Mary sighed. “What?”

“Well, you don’t seem to see the trouble you could make.”

“For my teaching career? It could hardly get worse. I am on half-pay and I have half a class of retards, cripples and pariahs. If I were to be sacked I might consider it a promotion.”

“You wanted that job.”

“So what would you have me do? Bow to you in gratitude?”

“Look, you know I’m in a spot. I want the schools open as much as you do, and yet the policy is to maintain the evacuation. I have a little leeway but I’m walking a tightrope. You do understand the delicacy?”

“No, Tom, it never once occurred to me. I suppose it is because you are a man with weighty responsibilities and I am just a foolish young girl.”

Tom held his head and was silent for a minute. “All right. Fine. Please may I have Mary back now?”

She went to ruffle his hair. “Not until you’ve apologized to Miss North.”

Tom took her hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry. I am. It’s just that keeping the school open is harder than you know, and it’s only really doable at all so long as no one, you know . . . notices.”

“Do give me some credit. I’m running a school, not a jive club. The children worked all week, and this was half an hour on a Friday afternoon.”

“Friday, Saturday or Judgment Day. You dance with a n . . . with a Negro boy, and people will talk.”

Mary pulled her hand away and lit a cigarette. “Don’t you suppose they have bigger things to listen to? You know, what with the Germans being so vocal?”

“But you know how people gossip. It’s a comfort, isn’t it, to fall back on the old prejudices when everything else is in flux.”

“Are we talking about other people’s prejudices, darling, or yours?”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s just that no one else has complained, have they? I might have expected a note from a parent or some busybody. But hardly from you.”

“Mary, please.”

“Don’t
Mary
me.”

“Sorry. But it isn’t for us to change how things are. I’m just an administrator. You’re just a teacher.’

“Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”

He stared at her as if he had only just noticed she was real. She was angry, she supposed, at more than just him. Even as she railed, a hollow feeling grew that perhaps life would turn out to be like this. Not, after all, the effortful ascent to grace that she had imagined, but rather a gradual accretion of weight and complexity—and not in one great mass that could be shouldered as Atlas had, but in many mundane and antiheroic fragments with a collective tendency to drag one down to the mean. Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else’s report.

Tom was unsmiling. “If I were you, I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”

“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”

Tom held up his hands. “I’m sorry, you’re losing me.”

Mary exhaled smoke. “Possibly I am.”

September, 1940

THE PACKED EIGHT O’CLOCK
brought Alistair’s regiment to Waterloo from their Hampshire barracks. Into the sky the train disgorged vapors; into the capital, sixty officers and three hundred men. They had twenty-four hours’ leave, orders to rest and recuperate and a tendency to do neither.

In his new uniform of a captain in the Royal Artillery, Alistair stood on the platform to wish his men the best. Wills would be drawn up, he supposed, and mothers reassured of sons’ immortality, and fathers slipped letters to be opened in case of contradictory news. Blushing sisters would be introduced to suitable fellow officers, younger brothers issued with gobstoppers and wooden rifles. The enamored would be betrothed, the betrothed espoused. Entire human lives would be conceived, in unorthodox locations, by hurrying bodies cheerful with wine and still mostly clothed, at two thirty in the afternoon. The Savoy’s best spoons would be pocketed, things that were not cricket cricketed. He didn’t even like to think.

A pair of brother officers invited him to join them for breakfast but he declined. He invented some quick excuse—an aunt or an aneurism—which he forgot as soon as he had uttered it but which the others seemed to find sufficient. In any case they left without taking offense. Alistair was so adept at this now—at keeping to himself—that he did it without conscious effort. He might have bowed out of this leave entirely if Tom hadn’t insisted he come.

He watched his battery disperse. Each group of six or a dozen men ringed itself off from the others with laughter of its own particular key. Alistair knew the men well but he did not know how they formed their clans to go drinking in. He had ministered them all under fire, without making any more distinction than the bullets and the shells had done. By what unobservable law did they now divide themselves into these friendship groups that cut across the lines of their official units?

Of course the men were not cattle, and yet he did not understand how fierce could be the loyalty to this or that faction, while another merited only disdain. And yet that was men for you: there was always this counter-current, this Escheresque sleight that they performed without ever seeming to defy their orders. The Army made them into a flock of birds while the men made themselves into shoals of fishes, swimming in the contrary direction.

His men headed for the pubs on the back streets behind the station, where the licensing hours had been quietly surrendered. The soldiers would drink ale until dusk and then switch to whisky and fists. They would fight the Navy if available, other regiments if not, and the RAF as a last resort since it was not considered form to bother the afflicted. They would fight for the simple joy of doing so without 7.2-inch howitzers. Then they would return at dawn and call him “sir,” with their heels the regulation width apart.

Alistair knocked out his pipe on the heel of his shoe. If there was one thing the war had done, it was to change his mind about the class of people who never came into the Tate. Men and good paintings had a genius for escape from the frame.

He took a cab to Belgravia, where he had an appointment with the regimental physician. The fare was two shillings ha’penny and he handed over a half crown and told the driver to keep the change. The man blessed him, so Alistair tipped him another shilling. He thought:
This might be the last bright blue morning, the last London taxi in its livery, the last quiet shilling with its lion and its crown.
It occurred to him that no one who hadn’t been in battle could know what things were worth.

At the doctor’s offices they kept him waiting in a pink-carpeted anteroom with six Windsor chairs and a large framed print of the King. Looking up at him, Alistair began to feel that the King was an old chum. The King sat alone and rigorously upright in full ceremonial dress with what looked like ten pounds of medals and braid hanging off it. He rested one gloved hand on the pommel of a ceremonial sword. His expression suggested that he would not hesitate to use the sword on himself or others, should the portraitist require him to maintain the pose for one more damnable minute. Alistair’s knees jiggled up and down as he sat.

This was what he had not understood, until the war: that all men were of one blood, embedded from king to serf in a perfectly rigid formalism and all quietly abstracting themselves from it. The men did it with fighting and cheap women, the officers with theater and costly ones. Alone in his mind each man knew himself free as a king, while the King alone knew himself enslaved. Alistair felt euphoric. This was the great joke, and until the war he hadn’t got it.

These insights were coming to him continuously, and with terrific effervescence, after yesterday’s god-awful low. He laughed at himself. There was no reason to fret about it: why should one expect to feel the same every day, in a world that was rearranging itself by the hour? He was pleased with this formulation, and said so to himself. He was pleased with . . . in fact no, it was gone—his thoughts were coming so quickly—but no matter. He was pleased with . . . well, he was just pleased.

The doctor called him in after ten minutes. He was a portly man with side whiskers, in a white cotton jacket with gold insignia—the effect, to Alistair’s eye, falling somewhere between avuncular surgeon and cruise ship maître d’. The man remained seated behind his desk, not looking up when Alistair came in.

“Heath?” he said.

“Doctor.”

“Be seated. Nothing the matter, I hope?”

“Nothing,” said Alistair.

“No aches, pains, unscheduled loss of limbs?”

“I find I don’t much care for seafood.”

“Good man,” said the doctor, inking his rubber stamp.

Holding it poised over Alistair’s paper, he looked up for the first time. “And how’s morale?”