Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (5 page)

Tom was left with twenty mothballed schools and a light scattering of the children who were either too complicated to educate, or too simple. To cheer himself up he practised the trick of flipping a blackberry from his hand to strike his elbow and bounce into his mouth. He was no good at it at all—he didn’t get it once in six attempts—but he was sure he would improve with time. It was the great folly of war that it measured nations against each other without reckoning talents like these.

He lifted his eyes. Beyond his zone, London sprawled away to the rank marshes in the east and the white marble walls in the west. Along the line of the Thames they were testing a flock of miniature zeppelins. Tethered on cables, these were supposed to offer a variety of protection, albeit of a vague and unspecified stripe. The balloons’ snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.

Tom took his hatful of blackberries with him down the hill, back into the furious city with its mushrooming recruitment posts. Strangers met his eye, anxious to nod the new solidarity.
YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION
, read the billboards that used to hawk soap.

It was still only eight—too early for the office—so he went back to his garret. Home was a sitting room with two bedrooms attached, in the converted attic of a town house off the Prince of Wales Road. The attic had been converted—as his flatmate Alistair Heath put it—in the same way the Christians had converted the Moors. It seemed to have been done at the point of a sword, leaving the continual threat of reversion. Winter brought leaks and bitter drafts, summer a canicular heat from which slight relief could be obtained by running one’s head under the tap of the little corner kitchen.

Tom found Alistair sitting on the bare floorboards in his pajama bottoms, smoking his pipe and stuffing shredded newspaper into the pelt of a ginger cat. The head and shoulders were done, the empty eye sockets bulging with newsprint.

“My god,” said Tom, “is that Julius Caesar?”

Alistair did not look up from his work. “Grim times, old man. The taxidermist sent him back unfinished. Tea’s in the pot, if you’re interested.”

“Why didn’t they finish him?”

“Perhaps he was incurable.”

“Insatiable, more like. Remember how he used to strut back in here after a big night out?”

Alistair grinned around his pipe stem. “I miss the randy old bugger. Came in the first post—landlady brought him up just now. Tanned and neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper. Not his usual entrance.”

“Feeling a little flat.”

“I’m stuffing him with editorials. He’ll be full of himself.”

Tom offered his hatful of blackberries. “Going to make jam. Try one?”

Alistair did. “Good god, forget jam. You could make claret.”

Tom tipped the blackberries into a pan, stooped to retrieve the ones that had missed, and ran in a cupful of water. “Was there a note with Caesar?”

“An apology. Shop closing down, regrets etcetera, we herewith return all materials. I can’t imagine there’ll be much call for taxidermy until the war is over.”

“They should just call it off,” said Tom.

He set the pan to simmer, and turned to watch Alistair sewing up the cat’s belly. He was handy at it, putting in a row of small, neat stitches that would disappear when the fur was brushed over them. Tom had always admired Alistair’s hands, strong and unfairly capable. Alistair could mend their gramophone, play piano—do all of the things that made Tom feel like a Chubb key in a Yale lock—and he did them without seeming to worry, as if the hands contained their own grace. Alistair rather overshadowed him, though Tom supposed his friend didn’t notice. Blond and robust, Alistair had the stoic’s gift for shrugging off war and broken plumbing with the same easy smile, as if these things were to be expected. He was good-looking not by being ostentatiously handsome but rather by accepting the gaze affably, meeting the eye. It was Tom’s experience of Alistair that women sometimes had to look twice, but something drew the second look.

Alistair tapped out his pipe. “I shan’t be home tonight. I’m taking Lizzie Siddal to the countryside.”

“Oh? Which painting?”

“The ‘kiss me, I can’t swim’ one.”

“
Ophelia
?” Tom mimed the gaze and the pious hands.

“We’ve built a box for her, and we’re driving her to Wales in an unmarked truck.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a marked truck, in this situation. Is there actually a fleet of government lorries labeled
PRICELESS ART TREASURE
?”

“Do leave it out,” said Alistair. “You take all the romance out of mundane logistical operations.”

“Anyway, if it’s so secret, should you even be telling me?”

“Why? You won’t tell Hitler, will you?”

“Not unless they give me back my secret radio transmitter.”

“It is all rather evil and sad,” said Alistair. “I spent five months restoring the frame on
Ophelia
—just the frame—and now we’re boxing her up and burying her in some old mine shaft for who knows how long.”

Tom poured the whole of their tea sugar from its Kilner jar into the pan, brown lumps included.

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Alistair, “only I hate to think of it
down there in the dark. It makes one think: what if we lose the war?”

Tom stirred the sugar into the fruit. “There won’t be a real war.”

“What if all of us are swept away and no one remembers
Ophelia,
and she remains there for all eternity, in the dark, under a mountain?’

‘They’ll always have Caesar. They can reconstruct our aesthetics from that. Even if you have overstuffed him.”

Alistair eyed the cat critically. “Have I? No. The old man always had to be careful about his weight. This is him in one of his especially sleek periods.”

“It’s not an entirely terrible fist you’re making of it. You really might consider being a conservator or something of that ilk.”

“You should see the Tate now,” said Alistair. “The light is boarded out, the great gallery echoes, and the paintings are all dispersed.”

“Well, sign it and call it Modern. Anyway, damn you. I have a dinner date with an actual woman this evening. Marriage is a certainty and you should prepare a best man’s speech forthwith.”

Alistair lifted the half-stuffed cat to his ear and listened to what it whispered. “Caesar decrees that you tell all, without leaving anything out.”

“Well, she’s called Mary North and—”

“God in heaven, Tom Shaw, are you actually blushing?”

“It’s this jam. It’s the heat of the pan.”

Alistair stuffed paper into the cat’s hindquarters. “Caesar assumes she is beautiful, brighter than you, and unable to cook?”

“Caesar knows my type.”

“Then you’ll pardon me if I don’t wear down my quill with a wedding speech right at this minute. This one will end where all of your romances do, Tommy: with you gazing wistfully at the receding figure of a nice girl who has grown fond of you but has reluctantly concluded that you are neither wealthy nor gifted at dancing.”

Tom turned up the heat under the pan. “It’s different this time. I have already talked with Mary quite a bit. We have things in common.”

“Such as?”

“Such as our attitude to children, for example.”

“The two of you have discussed it already? I don’t believe I’ve even told you where babies come from.”

“Not having them, you fool. Educating them.”

“You haven’t been talking shop at her?”

“She came to talk to me, if you must know. I couldn’t get a word in.”

“And what was the gist?”

“That teaching has to change. That the teacher must be an ally of the pupil, and not just a disciplinarian.”

Alistair yawned. “Caesar proclaims that Mary gives him a headache.”

“Caesar pronounces before learning that Mary is jolly attractive.”

“Then why is she interested in you? I’m surprised you show up on her retina.”

“She came to the office, to ask me for a job. Apparently the War Office assigned her to teaching and we found her a post at Hawley Street School, but she got the boot for being incorrigible. She wants a new class to teach.”

“I didn’t think you had any classes left.”

“That’s what I told her, and yet she insisted. I said, ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve already evacuated everything with two legs and one head,’ and she said, ‘Well I’m afraid that’s just not good enough.’ Hands on her hips, and deliciously pink. So naturally I asked her what she damned well expected me to do about it, and she said: ‘I think you should damned well take me to dinner.’ ”

Alistair stared at him.

“What?” said Tom.

“Where to start? As I perceive it, you have three immediate problems. The first is one of professional impropriety. The second, personal ugliness.”

Tom raised two fingers. “And the third?”

“Is that your jam is looking punchy, old boy.”

“Damn it!”

The pan was at a murderous boil, spitting hot lava in all directions. Tom advanced on it, using the pan lid as a shield, spoon extended to the limit of his reach to turn off the heat. The boil faded to an aggrieved hiss and then to an occasional vindictive pop as a captured pocket of air escaped.

“Think you caught it in time?”

Tom prodded it. “It will set, I can promise you that. It could be jam, or it could be brittle.”

“We all know a girl like that.”

Tom ignored him. “Meeting Mary is the first thing to make me feel that this war might not be completely awful.”

“Oh, Tommy, just because the grown-ups have left you alone in the nursery for a little while, it doesn’t mean you can draw on the wallpaper.”

“Oh, come on. This isn’t kids’ stuff. I’m taking her to Spencer’s tonight.”

He’d tried for a worldly tone, but it came out sounding shaky. Maybe Alistair had a point. And he thought,
my god, she is only eighteen.
And the worst thing was that he knew her age only because he had gone straight from his office to the personnel department and pulled her file from the records.

“Sorry,” said Alistair. “Don’t mean to be discouraging. I suppose I’m just envious of your dinner.”

“No, that’s quite all right. I mean, now that I come to think, I can’t be sure what she meant by it. Maybe she does just want to talk about a job.”

Alistair raised an eyebrow and returned to his taxidermy.

“What?” said Tom.

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

Alistair snapped a length of cotton with his teeth and threaded his needle again. “Only you could fret about what ‘dinner’ meant.”

“Yes, but what
does
it mean, in this context? Is she implying that she sees me as more than a job opportunity? Or is she demonstrating that I am so evidently merely that, that she can safely invite herself to dinner with no possible danger of misconstrual”

Alistair stared into space for a moment. “No, I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Could you do me a diagram, with different-colored pencils?”

“Or even,” said Tom, “could she be ambivalent about her feelings with regard to me, or unsure about my intentions with regard to her, and therefore, since she is very bright, could she have been making the suggestion in a deliberately obtuse fashion in order to observe the sense in which I construed it? You know, to see how I would react?”

“And how did you react?”

“I might have become slightly tongue-tied.”

“Oh, perfect. Fortunately she is unlikely to eat you for breakfast, since dinner will be the occasion.”

“Go to hell. But seriously. What do you think? You’re an experienced man.”

“I’m an experienced man who is currently stitching a dead emperor’s arsehole shut.”

“Yes, but even so.”

Alistair let his needle and cotton drop and looked up in exasperation. “There are two kinds of dinner and two kinds of women. There is only one combination out of four where both will be rotten.”

“But how awful if that was the case!”

Alistair said nothing. He finished stitching, snapped the thread and set the cat up on its paws. The balance was off at first, and he splayed the limbs until the creature held steady. “There,” he said. “Caesar bows to no man.”

He filled his pipe, lit it, and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at the cat. There was something awry in his own posture, in his stiff back, and it saddened Tom. Sometimes it was no longer altogether funny, this double act they played in which he was the boy to Alistair’s man of the world. They had fallen into the roles in some primordial conversation in their friendship—something that must have raised a laugh at the time—and the joke had been good enough to bear a few cycles of elaboration and eventually to become a habit between them. And now here they were, two finches evolved to feed on a fruit that was probably becoming extinct.

Tom lit a cigarette and tried to make himself enjoy it. He took the empty Kilner jar, chipped out the last brown encrustations of tea-soaked sugar, rinsed it, and set it to boil in a pan of water. While the jar sterilized he took a spoonful of the jam and blew to make it cooler.

In the bright morning wash from the garret’s single skylight, the jam glowed in the metal spoon. Its center, where it was deepest, was indigo. At its shallow edges the color thinned to a limpid carmine. He closed his eyes and tasted it. By luck he had arrested it on the verge of caramelization, between honeyed and bitter. The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that crackled in his mouth like bereaved punctuation.

He stood with his eyes closed for a full minute before he took another spoonful. He was absolutely uncertain. Perhaps it was the most exquisite thing that had ever been cooked, or perhaps it was perfectly ordinary blackberry jam, on an averagely bright October morning, in an unexceptional attic in which two typical young bachelors were putting off the real duties of the day in pursuits at which they did not excel. Perhaps it was only average jam and perhaps Caesar, corpulent and lumpy and with his empty eye sockets spewing shreds of the newspaper, was only a poor stuffed cat.