Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(117)

“I did nothing of the sort.”

“Oh . . . but on the telephone Palmer said I was needed very urgently.”

Mary softened. “And you came for my sake?”

“I have missed you dreadfully.”

Mary hesitated only for a moment. “You had better get out then, hadn’t you? We can hardly go for a stroll with you sitting in there.”

Mary paid the taxi driver, linked arms with Hilda and they walked through the rain. They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.

Later, Mary said, “Alistair’s alive.”

Hilda put her hands to her mouth.

“I love him,” said Mary. “Do you hate me?”

“No. I’m glad for you.”

“I’ve missed you too, you know.”

Hilda took her hands. “Come and stay at the flat for the weekend, won’t you? There’s a sofa bed, the wireless, and as much tap water as you can drink. Unless you need to be at the Lyceum?”

“Maybe my taking a weekend off would do everyone good. You and I have met people on fire who made less fuss than children being forced to learn reading.”

“You’re a dreadful teacher anyway.”

“Thanks. And you’re a useless nurse.”

“So, you’ll come to stay?”

“Thanks, I should love to.”

They walked east and north toward Hilda’s flat, the undamaged streets giving way to the general destruction. The sleet came harder now. As they approached Regent’s Canal only a thin path had been cleared between the mounds of rubble.

“Don’t mind the mess,” said Mary. “I shall build cottages along here for you—little thatched things such as one sees in Lowestoft—and I shall arrange for a handsome and unattached man to be installed in every one.”

“Tall?”

“You’ll need a ladder to kiss them. One of those two-step efforts you get in libraries.”

“Dark?”

“I shall organize them by street for you. Dark, blond, funny, rich. If you want more than one quality, you just knock near an intersection.”

‘Uniform?”

“Any you like. Soldier, sailor, engine driver. Every house will have a dressing-up box.”

“I believe I will like your new London very much.”

“Then you shall be mayor of it,” said Mary, sweeping an arm in a magnanimous arc.

“I suppose it should be me. You’ll be too busy with Alistair.”

Mary saw the twitch in her friend’s smile. “I’m sorry, Hilda.”

“Don’t be. You’ll be married, I suppose?”

“He’s in prison, in Gibraltar.”

Hilda stopped. “What for?”

“He left Malta before he should have.”

Hilda looked miserable. “I sent him a letter, you know. I told him you were gone to the dogs.”

Mary considered it. “I can’t say you were wrong.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t right. It’s no wonder I’m alone.”

“Stop it. You’ll meet someone soon.”

“But how? There aren’t any parties anymore. Either that or there are parties everywhere, and no one tells me.”

“Yes, I should think it’s that. You’ve always struck me as a charmless and unpopular girl.”

“But it’s these scars,” said Hilda. “They’re the only known antidote to me.”

“Then we’ll find you a man with scars that match.”

Hilda smiled.

“See?” said Mary. “You’re pretty when you do that.”

“I don’t suppose I have done it much, since we fought.”

“Me neither. From now on let’s remember the trick of not fighting, shall we? Why do you suppose we ever forgot?”

Hilda sniffed, turned her face up to the gray sky, and caught sleet with her tongue as it fell.

“Hard to tell,” she said. “Perhaps it’s something they put in the bombs.”





December, 1941





MARY PUT ON HER mackintosh and sou’wester hat, stubbed her cigarette and went out into the morning. The cold weather had brought her limp back and she nursed it through Regent’s Park, skirting the deserted zoo. By the lake, its surface quick with rain, the rowboats were drawn up under canvas. The park wardens waited under the bandstand for the weather to pass. They smoked pipes, their clothes rolled and pinned where limbs were missing. The bare oaks with their ageless trunks held up the woebegone sky.

She carried on through Marylebone and Fitzrovia, which had never seen the worst of the bombing. Only a few gaps spoiled the Georgian terraces, and the rubble had been carted away. Where there were craters the rain had flooded them, so that the spaces between the houses mirrored the sky and made from each loss if not beauty, then at least a quiet neighbor.

Mary walked down to the Embankment and looked out over the broad sweep of the river from Parliament to Blackfriars. She no longer lingered here but it was not possible to lose the lover’s habit of looking downstream, to the sea. She tightened her mackintosh at the throat and hurried on to the Lyceum.

This was the best part of the day, looking forward to teaching her class. There were nine colored children living in the basement now. It had taken the war to reveal London’s heart, centrifugal for white children and gravitational for Negroes. When it was all over, she supposed, Miss Vine would bring her school back, and all her teachers would carry on quite deliberately as if nothing had happened. They would even make a virtue of it, in makeshift classrooms, thinking themselves the stoics. They would have no idea at all that life had been able to invent itself without them.