Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(103)

She hoped she might find a café open somewhere. She put on an overcoat of Alistair’s, rolling up the sleeves. In the Strand the ancient sundial of St. Clements made no shadow. Nothing was open. She wandered to the river. The waves were anxious and pale. Tea, she thought, half remembering why she had come. The word sounded in her head without finding meaning—tea, eee—unrequited, like the bleating of herds in thick fog.

Mary sat on the wall of the Embankment, her back to the disheartening river. In the silence of the morning no traffic moved in the streets. Women with ash faces and charcoal eyes swept neat piles of glass and mortar, neat heaps of splinters and flint, neat barrows for all that was lost. Now Mary began to feel uneasy. The music no longer seemed delightful. The hissing of the brooms carried a whisper: that life was cracked and gone. That any life left behind was not the good kind, which stubbornly built on rubble.

Aside from the brooms there was silence. London was a stopped gramophone with no hand to wind it. It smelled of cracked sewers and escaping town gas and charred wood, wet from fire hoses.

How hadn’t she noticed this? The ageless mechanism of the city’s renewal had faltered. Women only waited now, and swept. Rope cordons ringed unexploded ordnance. Chalk crosses marked the doors that the rescue crews had not yet opened. Mary thought of the mortuaries with their unclaimed dead lying in senseless paragraphs, line after line with an X against each body in the ledger. The point to which she had hurried at the start of the war was gone now, along with all fixed points. Now X marked only the unexploded, the unexamined, the unconsoled. One waited—with the shuffling rhythm of brooms—for some inexplicit resurrection.

It overwhelmed her. Every sense was scoured raw by the retreating grit of the morphine. The Thames was the issue of all the world’s wounded hearts, the billions. The pale brown flow was unending. Oh—she half remembered—I came out to find tea. The Thames was before her, infinite and inexplicable. How brown it was. Oh, she thought, I came to find tea. The Thames was . . . oh.

—

Hilda answered the door in her nightdress. The left side of her face was bandaged and taped, the eye covered. Blood showed through.

“What happened?” said Mary.

After a pause, Hilda said, “I think it’s my cheek.”

“Goodness, Hilda . . .”

“Oh Mary, your face! Do I look dreadful?”

Mary made herself smile. “It always looks worse than it is.”

“Well come in, won’t you?”

Hilda moved with care, her neck painfully straight. Mary followed her through to the little kitchen. She ran water into the kettle and put it on the stove. The pressure was feeble and the gas made a minuscule flame.

Mary said, “I hope you like your tea slow.”

Hilda slumped at the kitchen table. Mary hugged her. “What happened?”

“New driver. Stupid little thing. We dodged bombs all night and then she put us straight through a UXB cordon. The crash set the horrid thing off.”

Mary’s stomach turned. “Oh Hilda, I’m so sorry.”

“How bad do you suppose my face is? They wouldn’t let me look.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Awfully. Like it’s still being cut.”

“Do you have morphine?”

Hilda gave her a look. “Are you asking for me, or for you?”

Mary closed her eyes for a moment. “Both.”

“I’m trying not to use morphine, unless it gets desperate.’

“You’re shaking enough to bring down the building.”

“But they need it for the soldiers. We really have been so thoughtless.”

Mary took her hand. “But how else can one live through this?”

“As ordinary people do. We must learn to live, with no help, on our own.”

Mary said nothing. After a while Hilda said, “Sorry.”

Mary shook her head. “Do you have bandages, at least? You’re bleeding through.”

Hilda swallowed. “In the cupboard over the sink.”

Mary fetched bandages and antiseptic. She had Hilda sit back in her chair while she undid the pins.

“Does this hurt?”

“Only horribly.”

“I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

The bandage came off, dragging clotted blood and saffron-colored serum. Hilda yelped. “Sorry,” said Mary. “I’m so sorry.”

Hilda was shaking so hard that Mary couldn’t hold her. “Try to keep your hands off your face. Please, you mustn’t touch it.”

Mary clasped Hilda’s hands together and held them. Dabbing a clean bandage in the antiseptic, she cleaned the wounds. It was hard to do it properly—she was shaking almost as much as Hilda. When she was finished, she took a careful look at Hilda’s face.

“Now you must tell me where the morphine is.”

Hilda whimpered. “Is it as bad as that?”

“Tell me where it is, darling, and then I will bring the mirror.”

Hilda hesitated. The left side of her face was gore, the right was fear.

“Be brave,” said Mary.

Hilda closed her eyes and said, “Handbag.”

“Good girl.” Mary took two syrettes and they used one each.

Hilda took a deep, shuddering breath. “You were quite right, of course.”