Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(111)

She felt alternately distraught and euphoric. Sometimes she stumbled, and at other moments it seemed to her that she moved with no effort, gliding left and right to let the umbrellas pass, one-two-three, waltzing on the pavement while the cellars swung beneath her. London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once—the urgent and the always—each in earshot of the other.

She realized, with a cold sweat, that she probably ought not to go back to the garret alone and without the benefit of morphine. It was the same feeling she’d had by the river: not that she might harm herself, but that she might not know the difference if she did.

It was queer the way things crept: the night, and these feelings. One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless. It was patient and subtle, gauging the heart’s output of light. Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous, the great clash of music in an endlessly accelerating rush: on and on and on.

She came to, the steam from the nightclubs rising around her, surprised to find her cigarette only half smoked. She felt a fear that was close to panic and hurried off again. She didn’t stop until she reached the Lyceum. The minstrel show was going on in the auditorium and she went in through the stage door from the alleyway.

In the basement it was quiet except for the laughter and applause from above. The children were sitting on the low raised stage where the band had played during the worst months of the bombing. The nightclub had gone back above ground now. Zachary was at an upright piano while Molly and Charles argued and Ruth, a new arrival, moped in a corner.

When Zachary saw her, he stopped playing. “What happened?”

“I’m quite all right,” she said, giving the children a bright smile. “I think I might just sit down for a moment.”

She woke hours later, wrapped in blankets. Her body was wet with sweat and wracked with unsparing pain. Molly was holding her hand. Zachary was kneeling beside her, laying a cloth on her forehead.

“You fainted,” Molly said.

She sat and looked around. Her joints were packed with hot glass.

“Oh . . .” she said. “Oh . . .”

Zachary turned to Molly. “Go off and play.”

After she did, Mary collected herself. “Zachary,” she said in her teaching voice, “would you find whoever handles these things among the players, and fetch me just one dose of morphine?” Then she added with perfect cunning: “Say it isn’t for me.”

But his face! As though she had asked him to murder someone. It was too bad that she had taught him geometry but no sense of proportion.

“Do go, won’t you? There must be some around here.”

“I can’t.”

“But it is perfectly simple. Just put your shoes on, and go!”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Have a cigarette instead.”

He took them from her bag and lit one for each of them. She didn’t try to forbid him and so, without fuss, he passed from her power. She almost laughed. He watched the glowing end as if it contained lost summers, then stubbed out the cigarette half smoked—not crushing it but rolling the point until it was extinguished, to keep for later. Mary smoked hers till it blistered her lip.

“Please?” she said again.

He lifted a strand of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. His “no” the louder for going unspoken. Her mood—which had cooled to a pale despair—now boiling over again into furious irritation.

“After everything I have done for you! You act the man but you are an ungrateful child. I might have known your sort would never come right.”

He shrugged.

“But you are incorrigible!” she said, unable to stop a miserable grin curling at the corners of her mouth. “You are a lazy, unappreciative nigger who will not lift a finger to help.”

He said nothing.

She raised a warning hand. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m from a good family and if it weren’t for you I’d be with them now. I wish I’d never come looking for you. I wish I’d never come to this nasty jigaboo club.”

Zachary didn’t change his expression at all. The light seemed to be dimming and she did not know if they had any candles. She did not know if candles were still available. She was not convinced that light was still manufactured.

Her anger was gone. She did not remember ever being angry. There was only a feeling of dread: of the darkness finding its way. And here was the boy. She shivered in her blankets as his eyes became Alistair’s. She moaned and turned away.

Now, finally, the full gaze of the war came upon her. Her mind was fragments, each loud with its voices. She fought to keep one image of herself alive at the center. She was rushing across town with a willing heart, to a point marked with an X. She was wearing her alpine sweater. Yes, that was it. But war had been declared, and it was thrilling and then it was terrible. Life was all the heavier for starting with a lightness of heart.

“You mustn’t have any more morphine,” said Zachary.

Her eyes snapped open and she stared at him, wondering how it was possible that he was still here, unchanged, when she had gripped the blankets and shut her eyes tight through the terror of eternity.

“What?” she whispered.

“No more.”

“Just a little, don’t you see? Just to take the edge off.”