Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(32)
Alistair watched the queasy gulls squabble and bob. In the hot afternoon he lurched in and out of time. He had telephoned and got a room at Robertson’s but he still held off posting his note to Tom, deciding to wait until he felt steadier. He didn’t much fancy seeing his old colleagues at the Tate, either. The only thing worse than finding the place depressing and empty would be to discover that they had brought the pictures back after all. He didn’t feel like seeing anyone he knew. The city had him on the back foot.
He watched the brown water swirl. On the way back from Dunkirk, crossing the Channel in a wet mist lit with flashes of white and red, they had picked up a downed RAF man in a tiny yellow rubber dinghy, waving. Alistair had helped him to climb up the netting into their little boat. Shivering, still in his parachute harness and Mae West, the man’s face and arms were black with oil. He gave a salute, which Alistair returned. Alistair found the man some blankets and a tarpaulin to keep the wind off. It turned out that between them they had the makings of a smoke—the airman’s pipe was undamaged and Alistair’s tobacco dry. They shared the pipe at the foot of the mast, without speaking.
After a while Alistair said, “How was the water?”
“Brisk,” said the RAF man. “How was France?”
“Crowded.”
Both men looked into the sun that was rising now through the mist.
Alistair got up from the bench, which he told himself was real, and walked to Soho. He had hours to kill before he could reasonably go to his hotel. Like the ball in a bagatelle he bounced from café to cabaret, while London continued to look him straight in the eye. As if it had battled the tanks itself, in its spiv hat and spats.
There was cold iron armor massing, just a few miles away across the Channel. Any other city would be chewing its knuckles and digging a hole to hide in. Alistair wanted to yell at people: The bullets actually work, you know! What they did not understand was that the city could be extinguished. That every eligible person could die with the same baffled expression that he had seen on the first dead of the war, in those earliest shocking days before the men had learned to expect it. I’m so sorry—I think I am actually hit.
Night came, and it was still hot. In the blacked-out streets Alistair mingled with the uniformed men. They sought each other out for the comfort of it but they did not speak. Some men, like him, walked aimlessly, while others prowled the midnight dances for the pale excitable girls who were out before their shift, or after it—the latter being considered the more waltzable proposition. With Mars and Saturn in the same heaven, the young women air-raid volunteers wore silk beneath their tunics, and hair spray under their tin hats. The uniformed girls winked at Alistair. Sick of himself, he found that all he could do was salute them.
He supposed he should go and see a show. But all the cinemas were showing patriotic movies and all the theaters were full of dislocated men like him, stretched too thin across time. There were musicals with Broadway stars and dancing troupes, set in Monte Carlo, Ceylon, and Siam. London was perfectly prepared to give him a night out anywhere on earth, and yet all he wanted from his city was the thing that didn’t seem to be on offer: the possibility of coming home.
At midnight, in the dark, in the silence that ought to have been filled with churches striking the hour, Alistair carried his duffel bag to Waterloo. He waited overnight on the platform and at dawn he caught the first train out to his parents’ home in Hampshire. It would be quiet out there. He would go for long walks. In the countryside, surrounded by the oaks and the marsh harriers and all the other singular things, he was sure he would feel himself again.
June, 1940
AT THE FIRST EVACUATION school things went bad, and they sent him to another village on his own. The new headmaster stood Zachary up in assembly and said there would be no detention for being a nigger but there would be a detention for bullying one.
It was a limestone village in a limestone valley, the people having traveled no farther than the stones of the houses they lived in. Beyond the last building but before the first quarry, the Back Acre buzzed with summer flies. Zachary was nervous because the field was overlooked from everywhere. There was a tractor, rusted down to engine block and axles. There were clumps of red valerian and tangles of rambling rose, but nothing you could really hide behind. It was the worst place for Simone Block to say she would meet him, but that wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know people.
Simone had said to meet her at eight and he had been waiting since eight in the morning, in case that was what she meant. It had seemed like the sort of thing he ought to understand, and he hadn’t wanted her to think him any more stupid than she already did. He had waited all day and now the sun was sinking over the western rim of the valley. Zachary narrowed his eyes. The slope was a wave and the yellowstone buildings of the village were fishing boats steaming up it, trawling with long black shadows. In the evening mist the church tower was a lighthouse, glowing red on its western parapet, guarding the fleet with its light. Everyone would be saved. He was a coastguard, looking out over a wild sea, and— He made himself stop. This was how he always tripped up, seeing what wasn’t there and not what was: the foot outstretched to trip him, the spitball aimed at his head. Across the Back Acre the bees buzzed from bloom to bloom, smart in their striped jackets, heads in the game. The more he ought to concentrate, the more his thoughts wandered.