Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (33 page)

The all-clear sounded at four-thirty, and Hilda shivered with relief.

“Thank god. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”

“Are we still going to the party?’ said Mary.

Hilda nodded, and checked her makeup. “Bloody Hitler. It’s one thing to keep a girl up all night, but it’s quite another to leave her looking it.”

“Look on the bright side. You didn’t kill a soul, and I didn’t put a scratch on the van.”

Clive was snoring in a corner so they left him to it and went upstairs with Huw. As they stood making their goodbyes, a flash lit the whole sky. The glare lingered in their eyes and the sound of an explosion came, huge and heavy, followed by a crashing of falling debris that lasted for half a minute.

“Wonderful,” said Huw, in the silence.

Hilda had jumped back inside the doorway. “What was it?”

“Delayed-action bomb. Big one.”

Hilda thought. “Mary, bring the van up front. I’ll go downstairs and get the address when it comes in. Huw, would you wake up Clive?”

Mary drove. The searchlights had all been extinguished and there was only a dull orange glow on the underside of the clouds, reflecting the fires in the east. The narrow slits of the headlights were not enough. Twice Mary almost crashed, pulling up hard a few feet from a wall, then reversing to make the turn she had missed. She felt disconnected from the reality of it. The war, the fires, the driving—one saw it all through slits.

At Billiter Street they understood straight away that it would be nothing like the first callout. A crowd was pressing, in various states of dress from pajamas to duffel coats, with a policeman struggling to keep them to one side of the street. With the raid over, people had been making their way home from the public shelters. And now this. Mary used the horn and nosed the ambulance through the crowd.

When they got to the center of the damage there were a dozen houses down in one terrace. The ones where the bomb had hit were simply gone, while those at the blast’s extremity gaped open. The scene was ten minutes old, and no one knew which houses had been occupied. People milled in the dark and yelled for their families. More police arrived and tried to push people back. An ARP patrol searched by torchlight in the shattered houses.

A woman was struggling with the police, demanding to look for her son. She was hysterical, hitting out.

Mary took her arm. “We can look for him. Tell me where he is.”

The woman pointed at a house. The front was gone, and inside Mary could see ARP men playing their torch beams over the interior walls. It was not a wallpaper she would have chosen.

The missing boy’s mother said that they had just got back from the shelter at the corner of the street, and that she had left her boy inside while she went to fetch a candle from a neighbor.

“Wait for us here,” said Mary.

She went into the house with Hilda. They climbed over the pile of brick that had been the front wall. They found the ARP men picking through the front room and the kitchen at the back.

“Anyone?” said Mary.

The men shook their heads.

“Upstairs then,” she said to Hilda.

They went up together. The banister was gone, fallen into the hallway below, and the stairs hung from the party wall they were keyed in to. The staircase swayed, but it held. There was a stair runner up the middle of the treads, patterned with a broad stripe up the center. At the head of the stairs was a bathroom, and by the flame of Mary’s lighter they could see there was no one in it. The ceiling was down, the contents of the attic poking through the joists in a muddle of albums and suitcases.

On the landing that ran back parallel with the stairs, there was a fecal smell in the air—a soil pipe must have cracked. The landing gave on to two bedrooms. Hilda took the first and Mary the second. They trod as softly as they could, since the floor was unsupported at the street end and the whole thing was bouncing nastily. She flicked on her lighter, looked for a moment, then snapped it off and knelt in the dark, forcing breath in and out of her body. In the snap of light she had seen a boy lying still, his face gray, his body covered in shreds of blue flannel pajamas and some foul-smelling mess that must have come from the broken waste pipe.

“Hilda,” she said. “Could you come as quick as you can?”

Outside, the mother was still shouting, the fear in her voice more awful now the crowd was quietening down. Mary made sure that the place she was kneeling couldn’t be seen from the street. She flicked her lighter back on, and set it on an upended toy box.

“Oh,” said Hilda when she came in.

They knelt beside the boy’s body. Hilda put her ear to his mouth.

“Anything?” said Mary.

Hilda shook her head. The mess was not from a broken pipe. The boy’s insides were out.

“Oughtn’t we to pump his chest?” said Mary.

“How should I know?” said Hilda in a small voice. “It might make it worse.”

“Worse how?”

Hilda knelt very still with her back straight.

“Come on, Hilda, what shall we do?”

“I think it might be hopeless,” said Hilda.

“But there must be something we can do. There must have been something in the training?”

“I’m sorry,” said Hilda, covering her face with her hands.

The boy was brown-haired, slight, eight or nine years old. His eyes were open and his gray face was fixed in an agony that was hard to look at. In his bedroom there were postcards on the wall: silhouettes of every aircraft type. On a chest of drawers was a trophy collection of the kind boys had: fallen iron splinters, a brass shell case from a Bofors gun, a scrap of tortured aluminium that looked as if it might have flown. The metal on its ridges had been polished to a shine by the boy’s fingers. Outside, the mother in a raw voice was shouting, “Mouse! Mouse!”

Mary stood, took her lighter and left the room. Outside on the warped landing, she fought back nausea. The stripe along the center of the carpet was not a pattern after all. Even now the stain was widening as the sisal took it up. Mary lit a cigarette. The boy had been downstairs when the bomb hit and he had dragged himself up to his room, and died.

“Hilda?” she said.

Hilda came, and Mary passed her the lit cigarette. Hilda couldn’t hold it, and so Mary held it to her lips for her while she drew on it, then exhaled.

“What are we doing?” said Mary. “What are the two of us doing?”

Hilda hugged herself tight around the stomach. “Don’t.”

“Remember after that first raid? When we took a cab to see the mess?”

“But everyone was doing it, it wasn’t just—”

Mary cut her off. “Do you think we’ve seen enough now?”

“But it’s different now. We’re helping.”

“Are we?” said Mary. “How many rooms are there in your flat?”

“Oh I know what you’re trying to do, but—”

“Isn’t it awful? I’ve honestly never counted. Two dozen rooms in my house, I should think, and six in your flat, and hardly a bomb has touched Pimlico. If we truly wanted to help, we could have hosted this whole street in your place and mine, instead of digging through their rubble.”

“We do what we can.’

“We visit by night and we fly west at dawn. We are ghouls, I’m afraid. We are monsters.”

Hilda closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the wall. “So what would you have us do?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never done anything, have we? We’ve no talent but conversation.”

“Then go and talk to the policeman who’s with the mother. Have her taken somewhere. Then bring Huw and Clive. Quickly, while I can still cope.”

Mary stared for a moment, until understanding passed between them.

“Oh,” she said.

When Mary came back with Huw and Clive, Hilda had rolled the dead boy in the rug that he had bled on in his bedroom. They took up the runner on the stairs and the landing, and made a second roll from that. They carried both rolls out on stretchers, each covered with the standard gray blanket, and secured them on the roof of the Hillman.

At dawn, the sun rising through smoke, they delivered the boy to Moorgate. In fine cursive Hilda wrote in the mortuary logbook that the child had died instantly and with no suffering, in a tidy and well-kept home. This was what the mother would read when she came for her son’s body.

They went to the party and got nastily drunk at opposite ends of the room. Hilda left with a flight lieutenant. Mary left with a spinning head and a certainty that she was not up to encountering her mother. She walked to a taxi rank and gave the address of the garret.

She sat in the cab with her cheek pressed against the window. She watched London, with its gapped teeth and blinded eyes. It got to her all at once, for the first time since the disaster. All the emptiness in the world drew her in, and she rolled her forehead on the glass. There was no sense to it—this was the unendurable thing. The war was ten million severed and jangling nerves. It was all loose ends.

Before, life had been a tradition, a tendency to forgiveness, a regression to the mean. The city she loved had been one of plane trees that had grown for three centuries, of bridges improved as horse gave way to steam, of great coordinated endeavors in which every convergent component could be relied upon: of symphonies. But now any light could be snuffed without warning. When she had seen the dead boy, she had thought of Zachary. A child was lost as easily as a shilling. And once one had understood that, though one’s heart continued to beat, one was never entirely alive again. She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of this. It was hardly fair on the living.

On reaching her destination she was pale and the taxi driver asked her, ‘”Are you all right, my love?” and she smiled brightly and said, “Yes, thank you.”

When she let herself in to the garret it still smelled faintly of Tom. She switched on the electric heater, took off her shoes and lay down on his bed. When she opened her eyes again, Tom had made her tea in one of his stock of jam jars that resisted all her attempts at improvement. She sat up to kiss him, since she tried hard to show him that everything was all right, and as she kissed him she woke up and it was noon.

She washed her face in the corner basin, with cold water and a small gray fossil of soap. Everything remaining in the garret was Alistair’s. She had boxed Tom’s possessions weeks ago, and sent them to his mother. When everything he had owned was packed and labeled, with Caesar in the last box and the tip of his tail just sticking out, Tom’s things had filled six cardboard boxes, each eighteen inches square by nine inches deep. The volume a man left was ten cubic feet.

Mary went to Alistair’s room, opened the wardrobe door, and stood looking at his empty clothes. She pressed his shirts to her face. She noticed a cuff that was beginning to fray, found a needle and thread and sat down to mend it. She was not at all good at needlework. At home the rule was that the maid did anything fiddlier than dealing cards, while Palmer lifted anything heavier than a gramophone arm.

She forced herself to be patient; to keep her stitches small and neat. It was something to do. If she could bring little to the war, nor bear to side with her mother in avoiding the whole thing entirely, then at least she could fix these frayed edges.

When the shirt was mended, Mary hung it back in Alistair’s cupboard. And then, because she needed to live for the new hour at least, and because a pen and paper were available, she sat down at Alistair’s rickety table and wrote to him again.

March, 1941

FOR A WHOLE MONTH
the northwest wind blew cold and imperious. The siege drew taut around the island. The enemy’s capital ships, black hearted and lupine, circled just below the horizon where the coastal artillery could not reach them. Their warplanes wound white ropes of vapor around the blue dome of the sky, weaving the island a net to starve in.

Alistair, alone, was happy.

Alistair,

I mended a shirt of yours, even though it is an awful shirt that ought properly to be torn into strips, plaited into rope and used to hang your tailor. I have not mended a shirt for anyone before, so you must count yourself lucky.

In any case, whether or not you wish me to proceed to the rest of your wardrobe (and perhaps you had better let me know), your dreadful blue shirt is mended.

Affectionately,

Mary

Since Mary’s letter had got through the blockade, Alistair had not minded at all about the millions of tons of material that hadn’t. The island was without fuel oil, electric bulbs, aspirin and margarine. His regiment was without new barrels for the artillery pieces. The magazines were down to five days’ worth of shells at the present rate of usage. Islanders and soldiers alike were beginning to eat dogs, starting with the kind without collars.

Alistair cared little. He roared with laughter when Simonson read out his own letters from his duplicitous girlfriends. The two captains aped the Knightsbridge voices together. The stews grew leaner, the meat giving way to bones that were used and reused until the marrow was gone and they leached more good than they gave.

Alistair didn’t mind. The bread became one eighth sawdust and then three sixteenths and then one fifth. He took it with a shrug. He felt a solidarity with the wood-boring insects, and cheered his men by performing impressions of the bugs. Soon they were all eating insects in any case. Alistair organized beetle hunts and commissioned an engraved trophy—the Cup of Plenty—for the man who collected the most bugs each day. Fruit could not be found at all. Men’s teeth worked loose. The local children in their black church trousers with their knees yellow from dust began to have the restless eyes of cardsharps or poets. Alistair sneaked them crackers in his pockets.

Mary,

I do not know what you have against my shirt. It will be fashionable again, one must simply take the long view.

It is inconvenient that I cannot rush home to London to thank you in person, but the oddest thing has happened. The Axis, who disapprove of sentimentality, have encircled Malta with the greatest concentration of warplanes and shipping ever seen, in order to prevent me from coming to see you. I expect they are doing the same sort of thing at your end? I suppose we must be flattered.