Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (40 page)

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.

The barn was in the field behind her parents’ house in Sussex. She had been down recently on a reluctant visit, leaving Jeremy to fend for himself for the weekend. She had been sitting in the garden in the weak autumn sun, having tea and listening to her father lecture her (again) about the wasted life she had chosen for herself. To stop herself from screaming, or even from talking back, Maeve had drawn the sweet collapse of the barn. Part of the roof had fallen in, and the timbers around the windows were swayed with the strain, but the barn was solidly holding on to the idea of itself as an upright building. The door was buckled but still inside the frame. The posts at the end of the barn were stubbornly vertical.

The drawing of the shingle beach was from that same visit. Maeve had told her father that she was on a later train, and had arrived at the station early and walked over to the beach. The tide was out and the shingle was wet and oily, tangled with seaweed and decorated with the odd jellyfish. Part of the beach had been cordoned off by barbed wire in case of invasion, but the section that was still used by the fishing fleet had been left open, and Maeve had walked along the stony ground for a while and then had parked herself by one of the fish huts in order to sketch the scene. What she liked was the look of the stones, how they rolled the eye toward the sea, how the sea pushed the stones back up onto the beach. It was a kind of violence, the way the water and rock interacted with each other. Each rock had been worn smooth by the constant tumble of the sea, but there had been no surrender. This was not a willing intimacy but a forced one.

The drawing of Jeremy was done quickly. He is in profile. He was with his mother at the pub for a drink. They were sitting by the fire because the evening had been cold, and the light from the fire threw shadows onto Jeremy’s face that, when sketched in, make him look older and more miserable than he had indeed been that evening. The drawing is of the side of his face, one shoulder, and his arm raised at the elbow with a beer glass held in his hand. Maeve is not fond of the drawing. Jeremy looks too much like her father in it, and she feels that she has got the shadows in his face completely wrong. But she does like the ease with which he holds the pint glass. His hand is strong and it is wrapped around the glass confidently, fingers spread and flexed against the surface. She has thought about redoing the drawing just as that, as the image of her son’s right hand gripping his glass of ale.

There are hundreds of people, a slow procession of human traffic, drifting down Warwick Road like smoke. Some of them carry suitcases, some wheel prams and wheelbarrows stuffed with boxes. A woman walks by carrying a man’s hat full of tinned beef. A man balancing a birdcage on the handlebars of his bicycle passes Harriet. She joins the line, stepping in behind a woman who holds the hands of two young children, one on either side of her.

“Where are you going?” Harriet asks the woman next to her who’s pushing a pram loaded with clothes and books.

“Out,” says the woman. “I’ll walk to Birmingham if I have to, but I won’t go back.” She gestures to the pram full of belongings. “This is all I have left, and some of it is damaged.”

“I have nothing either,” says Harriet. “My cat survived, but I left her with my neighbours.”

The woman nods in sympathy and Harriet can’t think of what to say next. She misses Jeremy already, and she feels badly about how they parted. They walk in silence for a while. Harriet bows her head and concentrates on following the hem of the coat of the woman in front of her.

Jeremy could be all the way back to Marjorie Hatton’s by now. Or he could be sheltering somewhere. Or he could be dead. Harriet wishes she could have him back. What if something happens to him? It will be her fault.

Instead of the wall circling the interior of Coventry, there are now just roads that lead out from the centre, like spokes in a wheel. They exit the city where the original gates for the walled city used to stand. The city gradually begins to fall away. There are trees and grasses along the road the evacuees are travelling on. In the starry distance Harriet can see the dark slant of the fields.

“What’s your name?” asks the woman walking beside her.

“Harriet.”

“Do you think you could have a go, Harriet? My arms are tired.” The woman drops her hands from the pram, and Harriet obediently steps in to push.

“What do you have in here, rocks?” The pram springs are flattened out and the body seems to be grinding against the wheels.

“Tins,” says the woman, looking suspiciously right and left, as though expecting people to jump out of the hedgerow, leap upon her, and steal her hoard of sardines or snook.

I suppose, thinks Harriet, straining against the handle of the pram, that the choice is always between sentimentality and practicality. A photograph or a tin of ham? The family silver or pots to use for carrying water?

“Do you think the bombing will last all night?” asks Harriet.

“How should I know?” says the woman.

The war has not improved people’s tempers. All this talk of how it brings out the best in people is simply rubbish, thinks Harriet. Miserable people are made more miserable by the war’s deprivations and dangers. Happy people can still return to being relatively cheerful. But everyone, regardless of temperament, is weary of the fighting, and nervous that they are losing the war. The fall of Coventry will be a big victory for the Germans. If Coventry could be bombed to pieces, then why not London? Surely that is how it will go, that is what will happen next.

The night is darker away from the fires of the city, away from the moon’s reflection off the buildings. It is easier to talk, the farther they get from Coventry, and Harriet can hear conversations start all around her, like small fires catching on a roofline.

People gradually leave the procession. When they reach the first set of fields, many walk out of line to sleep in the grass. Harriet can understand how people are weary, but it still seems too close to the city for safety. She keeps going. Just past the first fields she passes the pram over to another willing helper.

It feels good to walk without debris underfoot, to take a long stride down the centre of the road. She feels as though she could walk forever, that she might very well continue on to Birmingham. And then, the moment she thinks this, she suddenly feels incredibly tired, as if she could collapse on the road and sleep for a year. She looks over at the man who has replaced her pushing the pram, wishing that she could scoop out the contents and curl up inside it herself.

She drops out at the second set of fields, and no one says a word when she leaves the group. The grass is wet. She can feel it whisper against her ankles as she walks into the field. The dew is coming up. It seems bizarre that life will continue as usual, regardless of the destruction of Coventry.

All throughout the field are the forms of people sleeping in the grass, covered by coats and blankets. Some people are leaning up against the hay stooks, talking and smoking; a few people are walking slowly about the field, looking for friends and relatives perhaps.

Harriet stands near the edge of the field, looking for somewhere to lie down. It is cold away from the bombing, and she is glad that she’d had the presence of mind to borrow a coat from Jeremy’s house. She wraps her arms around herself, tips her head back to the heavens. The sky is still dark, too early for there to be any sunlight leaking in at the edges. She sees the rattle of stars overhead, the first stars that have been visible all evening. The bombing continues, a soft
thud thud
over the distant city.

Harriet sits on the ground, her arms still tight around herself. She is dizzy with tiredness, but she finds it too cold to sleep, too cold even to sit for long on the grass; so she gets up again and starts walking through the field. Perhaps someone has made a small fire that she can warm herself by. Perhaps someone will be kind enough to share a blanket. She wishes that she’d had the nerve to pinch something from the woman with the pram.

She grows tired from walking and sits down again. She closes her eyes and then wakes, shaking off the cold, and dozes again, dreaming of Jeremy.

When she wakes, the field of people seems the dream. Harriet is reminded of a Russian novel she recently read. If this were a Russian novel, she thinks, there would be a horse in the field and an argument. There would be several loaves of bread and a long declaration of love.

She thinks this, and then she sees a horse grazing quietly a few yards away from her. She moves closer, sees that it is a donkey, not a horse, but she is still unnerved by the sight of it. The good thing about books is that they remain themselves. What happens in their pages stays there. Harriet does not like the idea of the story bleeding through into real life. She trusts a story, and doesn’t trust real life. But what makes her trust a story is the knowledge that it will stay where it is, that she can visit it but that there is no chance it will visit her.