Coventry (12 page)

“You said the pub around the corner was where your mother went?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go and look for her,” says Harriet, standing up.

The Coachman is still standing. The front door opens to a touch. The bar is empty and the fire is out, but Harriet can see the pint glasses on the tables in the moonlight from the open door. They are covered with dust.

Jeremy finds the door to the cellar at the back of the pub and wrenches it open. They can hear voices down there, see the stuttering light from candles.

“Hello,” calls Jeremy as they begin their descent. “Hello.”

The cellar is small and damp. The knot of people in the centre of the room are quiet as Harriet and Jeremy come down the staircase.

“We’re a bit full, mate,” says one of the men, finally.

“We’re not wanting to stay,” says Jeremy. “I’m looking for my mother. She might have been here earlier?”

“There was a woman here when the sirens first started,” says another man. “She was sitting by herself in the pub, drawing pictures.”

“That’s her,” says Jeremy.

“Said she was going home to her son,” says the man.

When they get back to the house, Jeremy stands for a moment in the front hall, absorbing the stillness of the building.

“God,” he says, looking down at his sleeve. “I still have that woman’s blood on me. I can’t stand this. I’m going to go and change.” He bounds up the flight of stairs and disappears into his bedroom.

Harriet can’t help following Jeremy. She doesn’t want to be separated from him now. She stands in the doorway to his room, watching him unbutton his overalls. The moonlight slanting through the bedroom window makes everything look milky.

It’s a boy’s room, not a man’s room. There is a cricket bat leaning against a wall and shelves holding toy cars, even a line of soldiers marching across the window ledge. There is a teddy bear on the bed, leaking straw through its belly.

Jeremy has unbuttoned the uniform but hasn’t removed it yet. He looks over at Harriet standing in the doorway. She has to think quickly.

“What’s the most precious thing you have?” she asks.

“That’s worth the most?”

“That means the most.”

Jeremy walks over to the window ledge and takes a small object from there, brings it over to Harriet at the doorway.

The tiny coal fire on three miniature legs glows red from some combination of paint and a sparkly stone. Perhaps mica, thinks Harriet, remembering suddenly the page of minerals in a book on geology that she once looked at in the library.

“It’s supposed to warm the soldiers in the sentry box,” says Jeremy. “They come together as a sort of set, the sentry box and the fire. When I was a boy I just moved my soldiers around the fire, to warm them up.” He looks at the coal fire, burning in the palm of his hand. “I don’t know why I like it so much,” he says. “But it’s sort of perfect, I think.”

“It’s almost like a jewel,” says Harriet.

“Yes,” says Jeremy. He holds it out toward Harriet. “Here,” he says. “You have it.”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” she says. “I don’t want anything.”

“You have it,” says Jeremy. He presses it into her hand, closes her fingers over it. “So you’ll remember me.”

“How could I forget you?” asks Harriet.

Jeremy puts his hands gently on Harriet’s shoulders. “I don’t know what to do,” he says. “Tell me what to do.”

Harriet can feel her heart ticking in her chest. “Do what you want to do,” she says.

Jeremy hesitates for only a moment, obediently struggles his arms from the sleeves of his overalls. They slide down his body, drop onto the floor.

Their embrace is awkward and desperate. They stumble onto the bed. When Jeremy kisses Harriet, he tastes of smoke. He tastes of the burning city.

Harriet’s overalls are still attached by one ankle. Jeremy’s socks are on, and his underpants are pulled down around his knees. The bed is narrow and Harriet’s head knocks against the headboard for the few thrusts that Jeremy manages before he shudders to a stop, lying heavy and damp on top of her.

There is a moment of complete calm. A moment when Harriet can see the light changing in the bedroom window over Jeremy’s shoulder. Now it looks like a saucer. Now it looks like the prow of a ship.

She runs her hands over Jeremy’s back, feeling the joinery of spine, the latch of ribs. He doesn’t say anything, and it takes Harriet a moment to realize that he has fallen asleep. She feels completely exhausted too, but she doesn’t want to sleep through this moment.

Harriet knows Jeremy is awake when she feels his body stiffen. He doesn’t look at her, struggles up, off the bed. “I should go.”

“No, don’t go. Please.”

Jeremy is hastily pulling on trousers. He walks over to the wardrobe to get a shirt. “I should go back out and help the others. I should go back out to Marjorie Hatton’s aid station and help her. I’m sure my mother must be safe, wherever she is, and I’ll find her here when the raid’s over.” He puts on a shirt, doesn’t stop to button it up, bends down to tie his shoes. “Think of that poor woman in the park, and the old man buried under the rubble.”

Old man.
The dead man with the medals on his chest from the last war had been barely older than Harriet.

“Jeremy,” she says, but he doesn’t look over at her, doesn’t stop to answer her. He laces his shoes and bolts from the room.

Harriet lies on the bed, listening for the sound of the front door opening and closing. The small fire, curled tight in her fingers, feels as though it is burning a hole through her skin.

She feels as though it is her fault that he has left, embarrassed at what has happened between them. She wants to run after him, make him come back to her; but Jeremy doesn’t owe her anything. He’s not obligated in any way. They were together this evening because they chose to be, and now he has chosen to go off alone. Harriet has to let him.

Harriet thinks of Owen, how she always saw him as a man when they were together—because she was young then too, because she looked up to him. But now she can see how he, too, was still only a boy.

Harriet has been out with only one other man after Owen. It was about five years ago, and it didn’t last long. His name was Stanley, and he was the younger brother of one of her bosses. He had come to town for a visit and she had been invited to have dinner with the whole entourage of wives and bosses. It was a set-up; she’d known it from the start. It may even have been presented to her that way by Mr. Bartlett.
Stanley is alone, and I know you are too, Harriet.
The dinner was bearable because there were so many people there that Harriet didn’t really need to talk to Stanley, but afterwards he offered to walk her home and she felt she had to oblige him. He wasn’t in the coal business, which was a relief as Harriet found the coal business rather boring. Stanley had moved away from the family enterprise. He’d become a law clerk, although he seemed to fancy himself a proper barrister. They walked through the streets and he regaled Harriet with points of law that she couldn’t care less about. He never asked her a single question about herself, and when they got to the wall outside her flat he pressed himself against her and pushed a hand up her skirt.

“What are you doing?” she had said, wriggling away from him.

He looked affronted at her non-cooperation. “You’re a widow,” he said. “It’s what you want.”

“It’s not what I want at all,” she said.

“But how can you not want a man’s attentions?” asked her friend Daisy, several years after Owen’s death.

Harriet couldn’t explain that she didn’t really feel like having a physical relationship with anyone. She felt lonely, but she blamed it on Owen dying. It was as though love and sex was a room she had once entered, and now she had simply left that room, turned off the lights, and gently closed the door. It didn’t feel as though she had given up anything. It had given her up.

Harriet stands in front of Jeremy’s house, looking up at the window of his bedroom. She opens her hand, looks at the small soldier’s fire lying there, and then tucks it into the pocket of the coat she has borrowed from a peg in the hallway and begins walking.

Harriet can’t go back into the city. It makes no sense to do that. She knows how much damage is there, how hard it will be to find shelter; so she decides she will head in the other direction instead. She leaves Jeremy’s street and turns toward Warwick Road, one of the main thoroughfares of Coventry that leads into the countryside. She will walk out of the city.

These are the drawings that Maeve has wanted to make but hasn’t been able to: the shoe that dangles from her mother’s foot when she sits with her legs crossed, how provocative it seems, and how that one gesture doesn’t match anything else about her character. The mother who did not accept her for who she was.

The dead hedgehog she found in the garden last week. There were no marks on its body, and it was still standing up, as if it had been walking along the ground and had simply died.

Her own face in the dressing-table mirror in her bedroom. She has actually tried to do this before, has spent a week attempting a self-portrait. Every day for a week she sat down on the stool embroidered with roses in front of her dressing table and drew lines on the page, looked up at the planes of her face, looked back down to the paper. Each self-portrait had looked nothing like the next and that had surprised Maeve. She had always thought of herself as remarkably constant. The drawing had showed her that perhaps she was adaptable, and that, when the moment changed, she was able to change with it.

Maeve stops when the donkey does. It makes sense to her that the animal will know when he’s safe. She doesn’t want to go too far away from Coventry in case Jeremy is still there. She sees the donkey being led into a field, and she follows it.

There is no organization. No one seems to be in charge of taking people’s names or offering any sort of aid. People wander aimlessly around the dark field, too nervous and restless to settle. It’s quieter and darker out in the countryside because there isn’t the light from the fires. Maeve notices this right away; also colder, as there isn’t the heat from the scorched and burning city to warm the night air. The bombing is muffled and distant and suddenly seems elsewhere rather than overhead.

Amos is grazing. His owner has let the rope around the donkey’s neck go slack and is having a cigarette.

Maeve runs her hand over the flanks of the donkey. There are raised lines of flesh under his fur.

“Do you whip him?” she asks the owner, not able to stop herself.

“He was whipped,” says the old man. “But not by me.” He turns toward Maeve, the end of his cigarette burning a hole in the darkness between them. “He was my daughter’s pet,” he says. “When she was a little girl. She raised him. We lived on a farm then.” He strokes the donkey’s neck. Amos is undeterred from his task of eating the grass.

“My daughter grew up and moved away, and we sold the donkey. He changed hands a few times and I lost track of his whereabouts. Then one day I was doing some work for a farmer and I saw the donkey in his field. He had welts all over him from being beaten.” The man drops his cigarette and grinds it out under his boot. “My daughter loved the animal,” he says. “So I bought him back.”

“Well, that’s a nice thing to do,” says Maeve.

“Not entirely,” says the old man. “You see, it was the wrong donkey. I took it home and my wife said it wasn’t the right donkey. My daughter’s donkey had a white patch near one ear.” The man pulls on the donkey’s ear and it brays in irritation. “See, nothing.”

“Yes,” says Maeve, even though it’s too dark to be able to notice where the white patch might have been.

The man pauses for a moment, enough time for Maeve to guess what he’s going to say next. “My wife was killed, standing in the kitchen, making us a cup of tea.”

The smoke from his cigarette curls up around his head like a halo. Maeve doesn’t know what to say in response to his story. She looks around the field, at all the darkened figures shifting around the perimeter. Everyone in this field, everyone in the city will have been touched by the bombing raid. Everyone will have lost someone or something tonight. Everyone will have to remake their lives. And the men dropping the bombs, the men in the planes slicing through the darkness, they will bear no witness to the misery and suffering they’ve caused.

Jeremy isn’t in the field. Maeve walks every inch of it, peers into every face she sees, asks everyone if they’ve seen her son. He isn’t here, but she tells herself that this doesn’t mean he won’t appear. Every moment there are more people emptying out into the field. He could show up five minutes from now, an hour from now.

It is just after two in the morning. Maeve asked someone for the time, having left her watch in her house. It has been seven hours since the bombing started and there are still flashes over Coventry to indicate it is continuing unabated. Jeremy could still be sheltering in the basement of the cathedral. He might not make it out of the city until morning.

Maeve settles down against a hay bale near the road where she will have a good view of the evacuees. If her son is walking past, she will be close enough to see him. She watches the road, watches the people who leave the mass of refugees and drift into the field. She watches those who keep going. She knows Jeremy so well that she could recognize him in an instant—his profile, his walk, his clothes, the way he rubs his head sometimes when he’s nervous. All she has to do is scan the crowd every few minutes. If he comes, she will not miss him.

These are the things that Maeve has drawn in the sketchbook she has with her tonight: a rabbit, an elm tree, an old barn, a shingle beach, Jeremy.

The rabbit was the one that had come near her in the field this evening. The tree was one in a long avenue of elms that she had seen last week from the window of a bus. She had bicycled back to the trees the next day to draw it, bringing her folding stool and a flask of tea. What she liked about the elms was how twisted their bare branches were, as though each tree had been grasped from above and given a half turn in the earth. The branches seemed tentacled and melancholy. Even the bark was split and twisted, so that there wasn’t a single straight line for her pencil to follow.