Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(124)

Mary began to believe that everything really might be all right. Since Alistair’s exoneration they had exchanged letters almost weekly while he waited for a convoy home. Her letters were full of apology, his of understanding. She had confessed to passing up the chance to have her father write a letter that might have reduced his sentence. But if you hadn’t your ideals, he’d written, you’d be no different from the others, sipping champagne at Black’s. For his part Alistair found it hard to believe that she did not despise him for jumping the evacuation queue. But perhaps this was love, at the second time of asking: the understanding that each would not mind what had been necessary locally.

In the light of the chandelier, men in lounge suits converged on their table in oblique trajectories described by the pull of desire and the push of manners. They noticed Hilda’s face when they were already too close, and swerved. Some had prepared opening gambits that they swallowed. Others made attempts of varying skill to demonstrate that they had only been on their way to the men’s room.

Hilda looked into a third gin. “This will be my whole life, you know.”

“You mustn’t think that.”

“It’s hard to stay gay, though. Do they imagine I’m cut all the way through?”

Mary was drunk enough to touch Hilda’s scars. “What’s this on them? Healing cream?”

“It’s foundation, damn you.”

Mary drew her hand back. “I’m sorry.”

“Not that it does any good. I could wear a carnival mask and the scars would still show through.”

“And so? Damn these spivs and idlers. A million better men will come home from the war, and they shan’t want a girl who sat it out. When Simonson looks at your scars, he’ll see someone.”

“I’m afraid he won’t want to look. That he shan’t want to be reminded.”

Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. “What sort of a man do you want anyway?”

“Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees.”

“Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win—”

“Oh, I think we’ll win, don’t you? Now that the Americans are all-in?”

“Yes, but there’ll be such a mess to sort out. Not just all the rebuilding. We’ll have to put society back together, in some better configuration.”

Hilda snorted.

“What?” said Mary.

“Well, we want such different things from men. You earnestly want someone who will help you reform society.”

Mary smiled. “Whereas you . . . ?”

“. . . just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.”

Mary looked out over the tables, each white linen world orbiting the great central chandelier of the lounge, each world encircled in turn by its moons of women and men, laughing and drinking, occulting and eclipsing. How rudderless one was, in truth. How governed by unmastered forces.

Hilda touched her hand. “I haven’t upset you, have I?”

“Not at all,” said Mary.

But now her own heart faltered. For these long months she had held on to the idea of love so fiercely that she had not considered a daunting possibility: that she didn’t love Alistair after all—that his great merit was in having known her only before she fell apart, while her great cowardice was not to have admitted to him that she was diminished. She wasn’t the girl who had once walked in bombs as if they were drizzle. She had lost her exemption from the ordinary, and as soon as he realized it, he wouldn’t love her either.

She twisted her hands in her lap. How well did they know each other, after all? She and Alistair had never had the civilian progression into love by small and reversible steps, by increments of dancing and dinner in which joy was imperceptibly solemnized. All they had had was an air raid, and a moment at Waterloo Station, and two pounds by weight of aerogrammes that might one day be discovered, in a suitcase, in some attic being converted to a flat, and flung into a waste cart with old books and cups.

“But you look so glum,” said Hilda.

“Don’t be silly.”

“You’re getting cold feet, aren’t you?”

“It’s just . . . I mean what if—oh Hilda, I can barely remember his face.”

“You’re panicking, you silly fruit.”

“Do you think?”

“He’s a little late, that’s all it is, and you have altar nerves. I’ll bet Alistair’s just the same: he’ll be in a pub around the corner, getting up some Dutch courage. Breathe—that’s it! Take a really good deep breath.”

Mary felt a little better. Drinks came, magnifying the effect.

“Now listen,” said Hilda, licking gin from the end of her cocktail straw and jabbing it in Mary’s direction. “What you need is to take out his photo.”

Mary laughed. “I shan’t sit here mooning over him.”

“You know the trouble?” said Hilda, rummaging in Mary’s bag for her. “Your mother bred all the sense out of you. Now look,” she said, slapping the brownish vignette of Alistair down among the ash and the coasters. “Look at that and tell me you’re not in love.”

How many times Mary had stared at Alistair’s photograph. Once it had provoked a simple gladness.