Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(23)
If Tom’s intention had been to avoid any appearance of impropriety by keeping the communication official, then she rather subverted it by rushing to his office, dragging him out to the café over the road, and drinking only three sips of tea before kissing him on the cheek. He touched his face as if her lips might have left a tangible remainder: a smoking impact crater, or an epistolary X with the ink still wet below the signature.
Later, when she was alone in the raw wet wind, strangers smiled at her in the street. It was eerie. The raindrops were champagne bubbles bursting on her skin. The iridescent spills of fuel oil on the wet tarmac of the road were tiny proofs of the covenant.
She supposed she must be in love. That Tom was slightly infuriating, and that she didn’t mind in the slightest, might be proof of it. And of course it would be nice if he were more daring about the whole thing, but she could be patient. Soon Tom would realize that there was nothing more important than Mary North—that it was only her sorcery causing the planets to stay aligned and preventing the milk from curdling.
Almost as strange as being in love was being in it with someone she liked: someone her mother would not countenance nor Hilda even consider. Without the war, how would one ever meet an ordinary man like Tom?
And here was what she wanted to know (now that she had left the café, and London closed around her with its smell of coal smoke and truck exhaust and Tube ventings and railway grease and frying and horse droppings and wet masonry and exhaled cigarettes and damp worsted overcoats and quick brown water coursing in the gutters and slow brown water infusing with disintegrating newsprint in the puddles, along with the butts of everything that had already been smoked, in anarchic and listing flotilla)—here was what she wanted to know (as the clouds made the day dark and she pulled her mackintosh tight and crossed Chalk Farm Road between the cars with their slotted headlights that made them look as if they had just arisen after a heavy night and were fumbling for the tin of aspirin)—here was what she wanted to know: was one meant to feel certain, about love?
She carried on down Chalk Farm Road, lighting a cigarette and exhaling a little of her buoyancy. Her feet seemed to touch the pavement again, and it was wet, and she noticed the water stains on the mid-tan leather of her oxfords.
After their last dinner—the slightly-too-much-wine dinner—they had gone for a walk on Hampstead Heath, in a mist so thick as to have been almost a paste. You could have lost your gloves in the fog and found them half an hour later, suspended in the air at wrist height. She had tried to get them lost in the vapors but he, misreading the situation entirely, had piloted them back to safe streets with a quiet and unerring skill. If it had rather irked her that she must contrive to produce in Tom the behaviors her mother insisted held primacy in all men, then she had forgiven him on the spot when he gave her a shy, proud smile. Her heart had lifted in her chest, as the magazines insisted it must.
She remembered him like that now: transported from cares, his cheeks damp from the mist and flushed for once with something other than embarrassment. Was it love that she felt? Or did she just find him sweet for not allowing them to become lost on Hampstead Heath and only discovered years later, with her mackintosh in tatters and his beard down to his knees?
Mary hurried on and tried to pick out the landmarks. The worst of it was that people were still high on the intrigue of the war, and prone to suspicion if you asked them for directions. Such people, and they were not always joking, would ask you who was the Prime Minister—as if no enemy spy could possibly speak the name without combusting.
How much better it would be to ask her: If you are one of us then how—hypothetically—would you know if the trembling physical feeling you have for a man, say, five years your senior, handsome without being a knockout, and from a slightly inferior social background to your own but not in such a way that it was necessarily a problem provided that you remembered to show him the right way to hold a sherry glass before he met your father—how would you know if that feeling was love?
The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover—after one was taken—that it hadn’t been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn’t love, and then to discover years later—old and unconsoled—that it had been. No: the worst thing—the worst, worst thing—was this having to decide.
She sighed, and turned left into Hawley Street. She hadn’t had a moment to really look at the school until now. It was a grimly masculine building, red bricks set off in three frugal bands by courses of hard London yellows. The windows rose from wide sills to Gothic arches; the gables were decked out with barge boards and topped with lanceolate finials. Mary thought these the most fun bits of the building: these spikes aimed skywards, impalers of trespassing angels.
She stepped from the gloom of the street into the dark of the school and used her cigarette lighter to find the switch. The bulbs came on down the corridor. Mary wrinkled her nose. There was a lot of dust, thin in the center of the corridor and deeper at the skirting boards where the draft had piled it into drifts. There were the tracks of gnawing creatures, the serpentine lines swept by their naked tails, and a crusting and crumbing of the dust where their urine had soaked and dried. All this dust, and the shuttered-school smell of inkwells and spitballs and apple cores gone rotten in desks. What could she do about it all, alone, even with soap flakes and an optimistic outlook and three days to go until Monday morning?