Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(126)

“What were you going to say?” said Alistair.

“Oh, it was nothing. You?”

“Only that . . . oh, it can wait.”

Drinks came. The pianist played some nocturnes of Chopin. Black-coated waiters appeared out of the black background to light Mary’s cigarettes. One had only to think of fire and fire came, as if the incendiary thought scorched the air. One had only to need a drink, and the pull of the need itself caused the drink to arrive on a heavy tray in a glass that had been handled with white cotton. It might carry on all night, Mary supposed: this matching of an equal and opposite solution to every resolvable human need—done with this exquisite precision that extended to the fullest extremity of the possible and therefore only made one ache all the more despairingly with doubts that could never be soothed by lackeys. It was the perfect antithesis of the war, this torment of solicitude. How strange, that the struggle and its absence should leave one equally afraid.

“Mary, are you quite all right?” Alistair had his hand on her arm.

“Thank you, darling, I am fine.”

And she would be fine, of course: she would make conversation when the air seemed the right shape for it, and she would laugh when laughter seemed a better fit. It was nice that the drinks kept coming, since the glow they gave was terrific.

He took his hand away. “What would you like us to do now?”

“Well, they do a nice dinner here—although it’s getting rather late—or we could go to one of the cafés on Haymarket, or if you’re not hungry we might even still make the cinema.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I suppose what I meant was, what would you like now, for us?”

Mary gripped the table. The room revolved around the chandelier. Their white planet spun through the plush black smoky space.

“I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “I’m ahead of myself. Ignore me—this is what I was like after France. That’s what I was trying to warn you about earlier on.”

“It’s all right. I’ve so looked forward to seeing you again. I thought I would know just what to do when you came. I’m sorry.”

He nodded and looked away, to the other tables where guests glowed in firmer orbits.

“On Malta, with the blockade, one doesn’t imagine that people live like this at home. It is hard to imagine how hungry everyone is on the island.”

“I can imagine it,” she said, feeling even as she said it what a foolish thing it was to blurt out.

He smiled kindly enough, but now she saw herself as he must. In the bright light of the chandelier, before he arrived, London’s circle had seemed quite equal to the earth’s equator. Now she saw the smallness of it. How vain she had been in her nest, feathering it with mirrors. She was a teacher nobody needed, a daughter whose parents despaired. And now here was Alistair, this man who had stood up to the enemy while she had been so proud of standing up to her mother. Did she really sit at this table, even now in her new feathered hat, wondering if she loved him?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His face was pale with concern. “Whatever for?”

“Forgive me,” she said, standing abruptly so that the chair fell to the carpet. “Please, darling, forgive me . . .”

She fled into the blacked-out night, into the ruined city beyond the consolation of chandeliers.

For a moment Alistair thought to go after her, but he was afraid that he could not have understood the situation. There must be something monstrous about him that had made her run. He was even more ruined than he had thought.

He sat in his uniform at the empty table while a waiter righted the overturned chair without irritation or comment. The pianist played without interruption. Mary’s place was cleared: the glass and its coaster removed on an electroplate tray, the tablecloth swept of ash until there was no sign she had ever been there. How abruptly people were taken. His body grieved, while his thoughts struggled to recall how he had got there. He had carried her body all the way back to barracks, and collapsed unconscious in the guardhouse. No, that wasn’t it. He had not opened the jar she had given him, carrying it instead to war’s end.

No, that wasn’t it at all. He had loved her.

—

It had been the tiniest chance that he would still be sitting there, and when Mary saw him she cut corners between the other tables, not minding the diners’ indignation. When she appeared by Alistair, out of breath, it seemed to startle him. He looked up from a drink that couldn’t still have been his first.

“Mary?”

“This place,” she said. “It isn’t me. Think what you like of me, but I wanted to tell you that.”

He stood, needing the table for balance. “What place is more you?”

“I don’t have a place anymore.”

“Is there somewhere you might feel better, at least?”

“I like the river,” she said. “I went there, sometimes, when you were missing.”

“Should we go there now?”

“I don’t know. It’s late.”

He checked his watch. “What time do they switch the Thames off?”

“Are you furious at me?”

“No. I thought you were disappointed.”

A waiter had been hovering, uncertain whether to bring cognac or coats.