Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(102)

“I don’t know. I’m just happy.”

She put her arm around his shoulders. “Idiot.”

He leaned his head against her. “Fool.”

“Work on your vocabulary. You wouldn’t want Charles to get ahead.”

“No I wouldn’t, you bonehead.”

“Stop it!” she said, pinching his arm.

Both of them laughed, and then a woman passing in the opposite direction lifted a blue-gloved hand and slapped Mary full in the face. The shock put her on the ground, with bright points of light flashing.

Zachary was kneeling over her, one hand under her head to keep it off the flagstones, the other hand smoothing her hair away from her face.

“I’m quite all right,” she said. “I’m fine.”

His shock was too much. She collected herself and managed to sit upright. He looked as if he might cry.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

She looked around for the woman who had hit her, but it seemed she hadn’t stopped. There was only the city, in irreconcilable fragments.

“Help me up,” she said. “It’s nothing, you know.” She smiled, to show that it really was. “Let’s go to the river, shall we, and regroup?”

Down at the Thames, the water flowed as it always had and the soft breeze smelled of the sea. The tanned longshoremen worked their lines while the brown tide swelled beneath them. Mary thought that everything might be fine after all. But as they sat on the wall—now that her back was to the city—she began to sob. She couldn’t stop.

“It’s all right,” said Zachary. “It’s all right.”

“It is not all right.”

Her voice shocked her—shrill, brittle. The attack had knocked the last of the morphine out of her. Her face was hot where the woman had slapped it, but her body crawled with ice. Her bones froze and cracked. Her hands shook so hard that she had to ask Zachary to take the bottle of morphine from her bag. He held her head and managed to get a dozen drops into her mouth. She was beyond shame, not caring that Zachary knew what she had become.

After a few minutes the pain was chased from her bones by a warm and forgiving kindness.

Zachary’s eyes said it all.

“You’re right,” she said in a hoarse voice. “I’ll give it up.”

“Sorry,” said Zachary, and threw the brown bottle into the Thames.

“Oh,” said Mary. It didn’t matter yet. Morphine dulled any feelings of despair at its disappearance. The worst imaginable eventuality—that of the morphine being gone—was the event for which it was the only cure.

What a perfect trap it was. And all her own work, too. Even Hilda could not have sprung it better. Now the air-raid sirens began. They soared up, and she was amazed at the thrill in her chest as they started their downward swoop.





May, 1941





BACK AT THE THEATRE Mary taught the children all afternoon. She invented a game for Zachary: the letters on a page were enemy soldiers he’d captured, and he had to interrogate them individually. If he never gave the letters a chance to compare stories, they couldn’t conspire to swirl and change and confound him. She had him use his thumbs to isolate each letter and sound it out. In this way he made quick progress at reading the commoner words, and she saw again his expression of mild disappointment when there turned out to be less sorcery in reading than he had imagined. They enjoyed themselves so much that she lost track of time in the windowless basement, and when the air raid began she was stuck underground with the children.

It was the worst night of bombing so far. The earth lurched and liquefied. London seemed to bleed. Mary watched, astonished, as red fluid streamed down the walls of the Lyceum’s basement and puddled on the dance floor. It seemed impossible that anyone would survive, and when the all-clear sounded it was the most unlikely flourish. It was as if a conjurer had flipped a coin one thousand feet into the air and made it land on its edge.

She left the children to sleep, and went to see if the garret was still there. It was, though its windows were blown in. She didn’t mind. What was important was that when she fished in the dustbin for the last discarded bottle of morphine, there were still a few drops in it. She took them, then ran water into the bottle, rinsed it around, and drank it. When she began to feel more domestic, she swept up. The window glass sounded lovely as it surrendered itself to the dustpan. This was what the best composers would write from now on: orchestral scores for broken glass and brooms. She threw the morphine bottle in with the shards. She smiled because this was so ingenious. By tossing it in with all the other spent glass, without ceremony, one would move on from the whole episode.

Withdrawal from morphine would be perfectly manageable. She placed it in that category of hardships over which the fainthearted made a terrific fuss but which could actually be borne quite readily by a person who had been brought up to put on a sweater, rather than complain of the cold. The withdrawal would be more of a melancholy than a suffering—like taking the train home after a holiday in Devon.

The May morning blew in unimpeded. It was a tonic after the stale air in the Lyceum basement, even if there was smoke. Mary couldn’t find the makings of tea. She looked out over London, but the city didn’t seem likely to furnish her with tea, either. It stood in stunned silence, with white ash upon it in a shroud. Flames crackled here and there in the ruins. The morning cast a directionless shade through the smoke.