Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (6 page)

Tom poured the jam into the hot boiled jar, snapped the lid shut and ran the glass under the cold tap to let the vacuum make the seal. He dried the outside of the jar, licked a bookplate label to activate the gum, stuck it onto the flat roundel on the jar and wrote:
London, 1939
.

“Well?” he said. “And so what if she does only want a job? Teaching is important work, and I think she might be good at it.”

“You’ve lost me again. Did you want to marry her, or hire her?”

“I haven’t the budget for either. I was just grateful for a civilized conversation. Honestly, she might be the only person in this city apart from you and me who understands that there are many ways to serve. That one isn’t being unpatriotic by declining to rush off like a schoolboy to fire popguns at the Germans.”

“The Germans did rather start it.”

“Yes, but you know what I mean.”

Alistair tried to smile.

“What is it?” said Tom.

“I suppose all of us have to look at our job and ask how it now serves the cause. I suppose one is lucky if a simple answer presents itself.”

“But it’s hardly us, is it?” said Tom. “Me with my district and you dashing all over these isles stashing our heirlooms into caves. The question would be more pointed if one were—I don’t know—a speculator or a thief.’

Alistair tweaked the cat’s tail, pointing the end skyward the way Caesar had worn it in life. “I walk past a recruitment post every morning—on Regent Street. You overhear the damnedest conversations in the queue. I think the fear of going to war is less than the shame of admitting that your country can get along quite well without whatever-it-is that you have been up to. In the end, of course, the conclusion of the man is the same as that of the military—that getting killed is the least one can do in the circumstances—except that the two parties reach the same conclusion by different routes.”

“You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”

“I’ve had nothing better to do. The Turners went weeks ago. We have a few Romantics left to move out of the side galleries, then half a dozen Surrealists. Soon we’ll be down to the paintings I could have done myself.”

“But you’ve said it often: we can’t let them make us into barbarians. Someone must stay behind who understands how to put it all back together.”

Alistair looked at his hands. “Well, the thing is, that someone shan’t be me.’

Tom felt the shock of the words before he understood their meaning. A constriction in the veins, a sense of imminence, time clenching like a sphincter. A half second’s diminution of the hearing, so that he felt his ears roar for one heartbeat. “God, you haven’t . . .”

Alistair looked up. “I’m sorry. I did it yesterday.”

Tom stood with the jam jar still gripped in his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right. There’s bound to be something we can do. There will be a procedure for people who have signed up by mistake. It must happen fifty times a day. There will be some kind of system for it.”

“The whole point of the system is that one cannot go back, surely. I signed a solemn contract. In any case, it was the right thing to do. I’m going, Tom.”

“When?’

“They didn’t say. They gave me three days’ pay and told me to await instructions. There will be recruit training and an officer cadet course, then I suppose I go wherever I am needed.”

“This isn’t some horrible joke?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Tom sat down on the floor beside his friend and stared around at the place. The garret changed as he looked. Its devil-may-care medley of bric-a-brac was transformed now into banal juvenilia. As he watched, each carefully cultivated eccentricity—from the unswept floor to the carelessly scattered library books—shrugged off its enchantment until all that was left was an attic flat in an unexceptional borough of London. The flat would revert to the landlady, their life to the world.

Oh,
thought Tom,
so it finishes as quickly as this. All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

“I’m sorry for what I said, about running off like schoolboys.”

“That’s all right. A lot of them practically are. You should have seen the recruiting line. I’m twenty-four, and I felt like the old man.”

Tom swallowed. “Do you think I should volunteer too?”

“Good god. Why?”

“Well, I mean I honestly hadn’t thought about it until now.”

Alistair threw a balled-up sheet of newspaper. “You’re made to be an educator, you old fool. Find a way to do your job again, and then do it. If one could stash schoolchildren down a disused mine in Wales then I’d insist you enlisted with me, but until then I’d say that war isn’t on your curriculum.”

Tom was silent for a minute. “Thank you.”

“I thought you might take it harder.”

“I will miss you.”

“You certainly will. You’ll have no one to tell you to cheer up. That’s why I’m giving you Gaius Julius Caesar. Every time you look at him, I want you to imagine him saying: ‘Tom, for god’s sake cheer up!’ ”

Alistair whipped the cat around when he said this, so that it addressed Tom directly. He had sewn two large coat buttons over the sockets for eyes and they were pearlescent and exuberantly mismatched, so that the effect was of a startling and demented supervision.

“Well, I want you to have this,” said Tom, giving Alistair the jar of jam.

Alistair peered at the label. “A crude etiquette but a famous vintage, the ’39. I believe I shall lay it down. We shall open it together at war’s end, yes?”

Tom looked at him. “Will you be all right?”

“How should I know?”

“Sorry.”

“Christ,” said Alistair. “I’m sorry.”

He lay on his back on the floor, holding the jam up to the skylight.

“Tea?” said Tom after a while.

“If you’re making.”

“There’s no more sugar, I’m afraid.”

Alistair said nothing. Tom watched the scarlet and the purple light across his friend’s face.

October, 1939

SINCE MARY MUST NEITHER
bump into her mother nor anyone who conceivably might, she had a day to fill on her own. Autumn had come, with squalls of rain that doused the hot mood of the war. She walked along the Embankment while the southwesterly blew through the railings where children used to rattle their sticks. In the playground at Kensington Gardens the wind scoured the kiteless sky and set the empty swings rocking to their own orphaned frequency.

How bereft London was, how drably biddable, without its infuriating children. Here and there Mary spotted a rare one whom the evacuation had left marooned. The strays kicked along on their own through the leaves, seal-eyed and forlorn. When she gave an encouraging smile, they only stared back. Mary supposed she could not blame them. How else would one treat the race that had abducted one’s playmates?

The wind that buffeted her had already blown through half of London, accruing to itself the pewtery, moldering scent of all missing things. Mary drew her raincoat tight and kept walking. In Regent’s Park the wind wrenched the wet yellow leaves from the trees. Horse chestnuts lay in their cases, grave with mildew. She supposed that nature had no provision for conkers beyond the earnest expectation that boys in knee shorts would always come, world without end, to take them home and dangle them on shoe laces and invest each one with brash and improbable hope.

Mary found a café where she was not known and sat at the back, away from the steamed-up window. Over stewed tea she took paper and pen from her bag to write to Zachary.

Just writing the address made her fret. It was one of those villages in the faraway England that London never called to mind unless some ominous thing happened—a landslip, or the birth of a two-headed foal—that brought its name into the newspaper. She did not know how parents could bear to ink such addresses onto letters for their children. Corfe Mullen, Cleobury Mortimer, Abinger Hammer: these, surely, were places of obfuscating mist and sudden disaster, from whence one knew nobody, and of which one knew nothing. Places full of country folk: eerie and bulb-nosed, smeared with chicken blood on full- moon nights.

Dear Zachary
,
I feel dreadful that I was not able to keep my promise to come with you, but I hope that you do understand the need for the evacuation.

She gnawed at the top of her pencil. Now that great solid London was blacked out and sandbagged and dug in, here was this awful silence that the wet wind couldn’t disguise. Autumn had come but the Germans hadn’t, after all.

I trust you have found a good family to take care of you.

The wind rattled the café’s windows, and in the absence of shrill voices she could hear the cutlery scrape as the couple by the window chased peas around their plates. They were parents, of course they were: there was no other way to accrue such intricate worry lines.
Are we quite sure we have done the right thing?

On every corner Mary had passed that day there had been posters explaining that the children should remain evacuated—that the greatest Christmas gift to Herr Hitler would be to bring them home into harm’s way.

I am sure you are being jolly fearless

Mary frowned and rubbed this out. The authorities imagined that the individual was a glove, requiring only the animating hand of a slogan. She could almost see her father, in some windowless room of the House, penning the script in committee. All morning the damp southwesterly had caught at the corners of the new slogans and sent them flapping against the billboards, exposing the fossil seams of earlier imprecations in their sediment of paste.

Even though I was your teacher for only a week, I should like you to know that you are a blazing creature despite being an absolute knave, and that I slightly miss teaching you. I trust things are going well for you, but just in case they are not—and if you can bear to hold your nose and make a promise to a silly woman who has already broken her promise to you—then please guarantee me that you will write to let me know.

She signed the letter “Miss North,” tucked it into its envelope, and went out into the rain for a postbox.

She was home at five, as dusk fell. The front door swung open when her foot fell on the first of the steps that rose to it.

“Thank you, Palmer,” she said, giving him her raincoat to hang.

“How was teaching?” called her mother from the drawing room.

“Well,” said Mary, “you know children.”

“I only know you, darling, and I daresay they aren’t all so maddening.”

Mary popped her head through the drawing room door. “I am fond of you too, Mother.”

“Fortunately I had Nanny whenever it got too realistic.”

“Where’s Hilda? I saw her coat in the hall.”

“I made her go through to the scullery. I don’t care how much good these cigarettes do your chests, they are ruinous for the curtains.”

“They are slimming.”

Her mother lowered her voice. “They are slimming you, darling. They must do the opposite to Hilda.”

“Perhaps she lights the wrong end.”

“Her life is a carousel of torpid men and toffee éclairs. I tell her she should volunteer for war work, like you, or at least find a man who will.”

“She is fond of Geoffrey St. John.”

“As tripe is fond of onions, darling, but what a fright they look together in the pan.”

“Don’t be mean about Geoffrey, Mother—he kisses rather well.”

Her mother treated her to a knowing expression that Mary felt sure was pure bluff. It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with.

Mary breezed from the drawing room, blowing a kiss on the way out.

In the hallway the familiar air of the house closed around her—the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso that burnished the stair rods. A hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far within, crockery clacked as a maid addressed the detritus of afternoon tea. Coal rumbled as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium. That evening, it seemed, the fires would be lit for the first time since March.

In the scullery Hilda was smoking by the small window.

“And what of wild intrigue?”

Mary grinned. “I’m working on Tom. I shall telephone him again today. I’m sure he’ll find me a post. I keep reminding him there are scads of children who haven’t been evacuated.”

Hilda mimed a hunchback with the twisted face of a lunatic.

“Oh stop it,” said Mary. “I see no reason why they shouldn’t all be given a chance to learn. I just need to persuade Tom.”

“He seems a drip, if you ask me. You go for dinners, you practically beg him to kiss you, yet he offers you neither his lips nor his patronage. I should move on, if I were you.”

“Yes but he is a man though, don’t you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.’

“Move on, darling, before the drip-drip leaves you soaked.”

“All it is, is that Tom is rather shy. When I’m with him . . . well, it’s nice.”

Hilda offered an eyebrow.

“No, really! Tom is lovely.”

“What’s he like?”

“Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.”

“These are English words for ugly.”

“Not at all. He’s tall with soft brown eyes. He’s quite gorgeous and I don’t think he has any idea, which is sweet.”

“Don’t forget you only care because he can offer you a job.”

“Which I need, thanks to you dropping me in it.”

“Well it’s your own fault if you won’t tell the truth to your mother.”

“Oh, but who does? You punish me too hard over one little kiss.”

Hilda affected puzzlement. “Kiss?”

“No! Oh, Hilda, don’t say you are over it already. I just spent the whole beastly day in the rain doing my penance for the Geoffrey Indiscretion.”

Hilda yawned. “Have Geoffrey, if you wish. He still flatly refuses to volunteer for the war.”