Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (27 page)

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 have 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.

He spent a brisk twenty minutes with the men, made a joke of their minor gripes and a note of their major ones, and reached the officers’ mess in time for grace. Army and Navy together, they were sixty seated at two long tables with Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton presiding. Alistair was last to arrive and he hurried to his place, nodding his apology. Hamilton returned an affable nod, then bowed his head in prayer.

“Lord,” he said, “on this holiest of days, we thank you for food and ammunition. May our ships get through and the enemy’s get lost.”

They all said “Amen” and then the orderlies brought in something that the cook had made out of bread crumbs and canned malevolence.

Alistair lifted the corner of his with a fork. “I don’t know whether to put mustard on it or marmalade.”

“Or whether to eat it or give it a Christian burial,” said Simonson. “Did Santa bring you any post?”

“Not this time.”

“Maybe you weren’t nice. Cheery bastard keeps a list, you know.”

“Whereas you . . . ?”

Simonson twirled his knife like a swagger stick. “I had three letters from two girls. They both think they’re the only one, of course.”

“I’m sure you’re the only millionaire they write to.”

“You don’t know the right sort of girl, is your problem. When we go on leave, I’ll introduce you around town.”

“I fear that your sort of girls would cut my poor body to ribbons, simply by using their accents.”

Simonson ignored him. “ ‘Of course if I can just make major before we go back, then my damned brother shan’t have the last laugh after all. When one is a major dear god the women one can have! I shall bag a gorgeous debutante and parade her in silks before dear Randolph’s hag of a wife.”

“I suppose it’s lucky the Germans started all this for you.”

Simonson frowned. “Is everything quite all right? You seem out of sorts.”

“I’m weary from all the excitement.”

“Damn it, Alistair, if you get all out of shape over a brass band, wait until you see some real action.”

“Do remind me to tell you about my trip to France, one day.”

“Exchange visit, was it?”

“We exchanged withering fire, if that counts.”

“And do you still keep in touch?”

“Oh yes. You see, I’m hoping to go back one day.”

“But in all seriousness, what’s wrong?”

For a moment Alistair considered telling him. But of course, it wasn’t the right thing. The war, after all, was a legal riot and a bright pageant and a marvel of near-misses. It was a perfect adventure until proved otherwise, and so it would hardly be a kindness, on Christmas Day, to produce evidence. One pulled crackers for the snap of their mild detonation.

Simonson patted him on the back and told him to buck up, and they ate with the chatter of their brother officers around them. For dessert the cook had turned up tinned apricots. They had them in the smallest bowls, but the fruit still looked lost. Each officer had exactly two and a half little apricot halves in a quarter-inch of clear syrup. They drank water from the fort’s well, which tasted of its own yellow limestone sides and whatever Turks and Moors had been thrown down there over the centuries.

Hamilton stood and tapped his glass for silence. “The King.”

They all rose. “The King.”

They drank his health in well water and left in ones and twos, hungry.

Alone, Alistair set Tom’s jar of blackberry jam in the arrow loop window and stared at it until a thin moon rose over the sea.

January, 1941

IN THE PLACE THEY
had made for him in the chorus at the Lyceum, with twelve singers to his left and eleven to his right, Zachary stood in the red glow of lights that cast fire over a great painted backdrop of London. Its monuments were shattered, its walls breached.

In front of him, at center stage, the new Interlocutor spoke to the audience in a deep voice modeled on Zachary’s father’s. Staring at the man’s back, seeing him silhouetted in the red light, Zachary believed that it really could be his father. He tried to make it true by force of will. He did not want to imagine it was impossible. His father had vanished and left no body behind, like an illusionist or a saint.

But every time the new Interlocutor spoke, Zachary knew his father was gone. “And so, ladies and gentlemen, for this our final number tonight, we remember all those who have perished in this beloved city of ours, the city of mankind. And we remember that there is another city, both identical to ours and superordinate to it, where death has no dominion.”

The chorus began the hymn, and Zachary joined in as best he could. As they sang, the floodlights brightened, and in their soft glow a new backdrop was revealed: London, rebuilt and restored—but more than that. Every spire was taller, every bridge broader, each old familiar landmark improved. As the red floods brightened they were no longer flames but the glow of the sunrise. Yellow and white lights joined the red, until eternal London shone in the full light of day. As the singers threw back their heads to raise the final chorus, the audience rose to its feet. Zachary felt nothing, except perhaps a dull surprise that they bought it.

When the curtain came down, the manager took him aside. They stood in the wings while from the auditorium came the muttering, shuffling sound of the audience departing.

“You winning, big man?” said the manager.

Zachary smiled. “Sure.”

“Because from where I stood, I had twenty-three souls in my chorus, and then I had you.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try harder.”

“You do that. Happy Negroes, that’s what we serve here. One sad coon in my chorus, it’s a hole in my bucket. All the magic leaks away, you know?”

Zachary shrugged. “Maybe I can take a break.”

“And do what? So long as you’re for sleeping in my basement, I’m for getting some work in return.”

“I could play piano in the interval.”

“With that long face? I’d sooner give the gig to a German.”

“I could bus the tables, then.”

The manager gave a weary look. “I’ve got forty kids queuing up for that chorus. I’d just as soon take you off it, but all my players would say ‘Give the boy a slot, you owe it to his father.’ And before I know it I’ve traded one sad face for nine. So come on, why won’t you sing?”

Zachary shrugged again and said nothing.

“You shy? Because you’ve got a nice voice. I wouldn’t march you down to Parlophone to cut a disc, but I wouldn’t pour lead in my ears either.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What, then? This is your break. You’d rather the street?”

Zachary hung his head. “I’d rather something.”

The manager laughed. “Think if you hold out long enough I’ll open up my other box of jobs for Negroes who can’t write their name? What is it you’re holding out for? Pope, or prime minister?”

Zachary said nothing, and finally the manager sighed. “All right, bus my tables, then. Collect the tips and good luck to you, but the job doesn’t pay. Sleep in my basement, but if you want a wage then you’ll damn well sing in my show. Got that?”

Zachary nodded.

Afterward, when the players were gone, Zachary lit a candle and went down alone to the basement. He sat with a metal basin between his knees and a mirror propped against the wall at the end of the bench. With a cloth and cold water he scrubbed off the white greasepaint lips and the white rings around his eyes.

He clasped his hands. “Sorry, Dad.”

There was no answer, though he listened for one in the silence.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

Nothing. The darkness in the basement was frightening. It scuttled and knocked. A month had not cured him of the fear of it. He curled up under drapes in the corner, but sleep would not come.

“Are you there?” he said in the lowest voice he could.

He waited. His candle seemed to flicker, and perhaps this meant that his father was there.

“I don’t know what to do.”

In the silence, in the endless underground night, the candle flame seemed to be steadier. Perhaps his father meant that he ought to be steady too. Zachary squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the drapes tight against the dark.

January, 1941

MARY SAT WITH HILDA
on the train back from Tom’s funeral. His had been the only body available to be buried—to each of the other families she had made do with sending flowers. Even this had been made difficult by the war, the Dutch blooms no longer considered essential cargo and the English hothouses having been given over to food production. She had turned up a few early snowdrops, some forced hyacinths. She had hesitated to send them, uncertain if they would be a comfort.

In their compartment Hilda smoked, and jabbed at the
Times
crossword with a self-propelling pencil. She was likelier, Mary felt, to infuriate the puzzle than to solve it.

“It was kind of you to come,” said Mary.

“I could hardly let you go with Palmer.”

Mary managed a smile. “Palmer might have brought brandy.”

“Palmer might have exchanged places with the deceased. Is that not among his duties?”

The train shrieked steam into the plunging clouds. It didn’t lighten them.