Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (43 page)

Harriet gets tired easily these days, even though she tries to keep herself fit by striding along the beach or, on good days, walking up onto the top of the cliffs to stumble along the backs of the hills. She has travelled up from Sussex and she is glad that all that is required of her today is to enter the cathedral and sit down for the opening ceremonies.

The inside is beautiful, much more beautiful than she could have imagined from the exterior. Harriet slides into a pew at the back of the church and spends the entire length of the ceremony looking at the magnificent stained-glass window. The blue in it is a colour so deep it seems to have drifted up from the bottom of the ocean to roost there, on the wall of this church. Coventry blue.

When Harriet steps into the old cathedral, it is as though no time has passed at all. The debris has long been cleared from the floor and the stones are swept clean. But everything else is the same as it was the morning after the bombing. The window arches are still empty of glass. The roof is still gone. There are benches placed discreetly around the outside walls, and Harriet moves to one of these and sits down.

There is the wall that Maeve was leaning against when Harriet had to tell her that her son was dead. There is the place in the sky where she once walked up and down on the roof with Jeremy Fisher.

It has taken Harriet all this time, twenty-two years, to try to write about that night, and she hasn’t done it properly yet. She has traded her descriptions for poems, and has had some success publishing them. She has a book that did modestly well in the reviews, and she is working hard on another one. Her poems have been included in anthologies and broadcast on the wireless. What Harriet has been searching for in her poems are the words to make sense of what happened on that night in November all those years ago.

She keeps in loose touch with Maeve Fisher.
I promise I will always let you know where I am
is what Maeve said, and she has been as good as her word. She moves around a lot. Right now she is living on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland.
The light is beautiful,
she had written to Harriet recently.
And the strict, shadowed cliffs rising up from the sea are exactly how I feel.

There are a lot of people milling about in the old cathedral. Almost as many people as there were on the morning after the bombing. There are some in their sixties and seventies, some who, like Harriet, must have been there the night of the raid. They don’t talk much, just walk slowly around the walls, or sit on the benches, like Harriet, watching the crowd.

Harriet still looks for Jeremy. Everywhere she goes she scans the faces, searching him out. It has become a habit and she can’t rest until she has done it now, looking quickly and anxiously at the visitors to the new cathedral. Of course, he isn’t here. But there is something in the act of looking for him that keeps his memory alive for Harriet. In the end, that is what she has been left, and this is her way of keeping faith.

The day is a lovely one, the air soft and the sun sliding in and out of the clouds. Harriet likes this time of year, how long the light stays in the evenings, how green the fields are. She closes her eyes to feel the warmth of the sun on her face, opens them and sees, falling through the air above the cathedral, a single swallow. It seems delighted with all the space, climbing and diving, scissoring through the open window arches.

Harriet buys a postcard of the new cathedral, and on her way back to the station in the taxi she writes to Maeve. They are not the right words to give her, not yet, but they are closer than she has ever been before.

Maeve walks away from the jetty. She heads uphill, to her cottage, but when she reaches the front gate she hesitates and keeps going, up toward the fields sewn sloppily together by the low stone walls that cover the island. In the pocket of her bulky cardigan is the bundle of mail she has collected from the boat. There is a postcard from Harriet in with the letters and bills. It seems wrong to go indoors, into her dark kitchen to read the card. She will find somewhere to sit down, in the sun, so she can fully appreciate Harriet’s words.

The village on Innismor where Maeve lives is little more than a scattering of houses arranged haphazardly around the small harbour. The houses seem to have been lifted there by the sea, their white walls set like bleached bones among the rocks.

Maeve stops on the road to catch her breath, turns and sees the houses flashing white behind her. Beyond them, she can see the mail boat lurching away from the jetty, heading back across the Atlantic to Galway.

Maeve had expected Tom to be on the boat. That is why she had gone down to the harbour, to meet her husband. But Tom probably got talking with someone, or tried to squeeze in one more errand before the boat left, and arrived on the Galway dock just in time to watch the battered black hull of the mail boat pushing out to sea.

It is not the first time this has happened, and because it has happened so many times before, Maeve isn’t overly surprised or worried. Tom is dependable in his vagrancy. He will show up tomorrow, or the day after, cheerfully apologetic, bounding spryly up from the beach with stories and his canvas bag filled with food and some small present for Maeve from his time in the city.

Maeve had not expected to marry and be happy. She had not expected to meet someone late in life, someone who liked to move around as much as she did. But Tom is even more of a nomad. He is originally from America, but has spent most of his life elsewhere. He has lived throughout South America and Europe and has come to the Aran Islands because, like Maeve, he can live cheaply there, and he loves the way the light shovels in off the Atlantic.

Tom is a painter. He has fashioned a studio out of the small barn behind their cottage. He wakes late and spends much of his day in the studio. In the evenings he and Maeve read, or walk to the one pub on the island to have a pint. He never minds company when he works, and Maeve likes to go into the studio to watch him paint. He has an energy when he works that she finds intoxicating. In some ways he reminds her of Jeremy, of the concentration Jeremy used to have when he set himself a task.

Where once Maeve would have found the resemblance painful, now there is some comfort in it.

Maeve begins to walk up the road again. Slowly the houses fall away and she is walking with green fields on either side of her. Each field is bordered by a wall made of the stones that had been cleared from the field. The walls have no gates. If a farmer wants to shift his cows and sheep to another field, he simply removes some of the stones from a section of wall, replacing them when the animals are safely away in the next field.

This is another reason why Maeve likes living on the Aran Islands. Everything here is as it always was. There is no electricity, no motor cars. Many of the people on the islands still speak Gaelic. The lack of change is reassuring, though Maeve wonders if she will be able to survive the harshness of the conditions into her very old age. But Tom is already talking about moving them to Spain; though Maeve loves the starkness of Innismor, the thought of the Spanish sun warming her bones is tempting.

The road is steep, the centre of the island being much higher than the sea that twists all around it. Maeve has to pause frequently in her climb. She hasn’t really minded becoming old, but it still surprises her that she can’t move as fluently as she once did.

Her heart is whirring fast inside her chest.

This is probably far enough.

She settles down with her back against a wall and takes the bundle of mail from her pocket. The postcard from Harriet slips easily out of the pile.

It is a picture of the new cathedral. It looks nothing like the old one—all sheer and modern—but Maeve’s hands start shaking at the sight of it. She takes a deep breath. The stones from the wall are warm against her back, warm through the thick wool of her jumper.

This is what she and Harriet do—pass the memory of that night in November 1940 back and forth between them. Harriet will send Maeve a poem. Maeve will send Harriet a drawing. Where once Maeve drew the world around her to navigate it, now she draws only the images from the night when Coventry fell, and when Jeremy died. Drawing something used to be a way for her to record what was being lost, a way to slow the moment down long enough to get a good look at what was moving just out of reach. Now it is purely a way to hold on to what she has lost.

Every act is an act of mourning, thinks Maeve. Every moment is about leaving the previous moment behind.

She has drawn the cramped, dark pub cellar where she sheltered at the beginning of the bombing. She has drawn Jeremy’s soldiers in frozen march across his bedroom window ledge. She has drawn Harriet’s hands cradling her own when they were atop that pile of rubble where they had heard the woman’s voice calling out to be saved. And she has drawn the metal rib cage of the Anderson shelter with the ragged hole torn through its side.

But even though this exchange of memory is a way for Harriet and Maeve to keep something of Jeremy alive, it is always a shock to remember. It is always a shock to get a card or letter from Harriet, and to have to open herself, again, to the horrors of that night.

For a while, after the night of the bombing, Maeve believed that Harriet had simply been a guide through the ruined city to her son. But the longer her association with her continues, the more Maeve has come to realize that something else must have happened the night Coventry fell. Harriet has never said, and Maeve can’t bring herself to ask, but she assumes now that Harriet and Jeremy were briefly lovers. Why else would Harriet keep this vigil with her? Once Maeve might have minded this, but now she is only grateful that her child was loved during his last night on earth.

The sun is making Maeve’s eyes water. She runs her thumb along the straight edges of the postcard. Down one side, along another, as if they were streets she was walking.

The night still makes no sense, no matter how hard Maeve looks at it, no matter what pictures she is able to pull from the wreckage. But thank god for Harriet Marsh, she thinks. Thank god that in the loneliest of griefs, she is not alone.

She turns the card over and begins to read the words Harriet has sent to her.

I would like to thank my agent, Frances Hanna, and my editors, Phyllis Bruce and Amy Cherry, for their work and wisdom in shaping this story.

Thanks to the following people for seeing me through the writing of this book: Mary Louise Adams, Elizabeth Christie, Craig Dale, Carol Drake, Melanie Dugan, Sue Goyette, Elizabeth Greene, Anne Hardcastle, Cathy Humphreys, Paul Kelley, Hugh LaFave, Paula Leger, Susan Lord, Barb Mainguy, Bruce Martin, Daintry Norman, Joanne Page, Elizabeth Ruth, Su Rynard, Diane Schoemperlen, Glenn Stairs.

Special thanks to Valerie Ashford. I couldn’t have done this without you.

What inspired you to write about the night the Germans bombed Coventry?

As with all my novels, a number of things came together and inspired the idea. I had been thinking for a while of telling a story that took place during one night. I had also been thinking about war, and about the war in Iraq specifically. And I had been thinking about art as a redemptive force. When I was researching
The Lost Garden
, I came across many references to the bombing of Coventry, and while the themes of war and art and darkness were swirling around in my head, I remembered this information and started to explore it again.

What research enabled you to render that dreadful night so vividly?

I wanted to document the experiences of the people of Coventry during the night of November 14, 1940, so first-person accounts of that night were the basis of my research. (I also read eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Baghdad.) I tried to be faithful to the real experiences of the citizenry in the telling of my story. Even though it was an aerial bombardment that the city suffered, I was interested primarily in what happened on the ground, in the people who were caught in the action.

The novel begins and ends at the cathedral. Why there?

The cathedral, whether one was religious or not, was the heart of the city. It was the only cathedral in Britain to be bombed to ruins during the war and its destruction was a symbolic blow to England. It is also in the very centre of Coventry, and because my story is about how the city fell, it had to be, by necessity, at the centre of the novel.

Were there in fact any female fire-watchers in the Second World War, or was the scene in which Harriet stood watch on the cathedral one of imagination?

There were female fire-watchers in the war, but there were no women fire-watching that night on the cathedral roof in Coventry. This is why in the story I have Harriet taking the place of one of the male fire-watchers—which was within the realm of possibility. The strange and wonderful thing is that, since the novel has come out, I have met two different women who were daughters of two of the four fire-watchers on the cathedral roof on November 14. They approached me after readings and told me the stories of their fathers. Meeting direct descendants of the cathedral fire-watchers was an amazing gift.

What traditional male roles did women take on in the Second World War, and were they valued much at the time, or only later?

Women took on many traditional male jobs during the war—labouring in factories, delivering mail, driving buses, driving tractors—and though some people objected, the work was supported because it was seen as a necessary contribution to the war effort. Women were simply “doing their bit.” What happened after the war, when the men returned to their lives and their jobs, was harder for the women, who had experienced a certain amount of liberation in entering traditionally male occupations. My first novel,
Leaving Earth
, was about women pilots in the early part of the twentieth century, and I know from my research that, during the Second World War, a lot of women held jobs in aviation. After the war they were expected to surrender these jobs, and in extreme cases some women killed themselves because they couldn’t bear to be prevented from flying.