Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(36)

“All right. But if you get a hard time, I’ll get you out. From now on they don’t split us.”

They walked through Regent’s Park, past the boating lake where soldiers in khaki were rowing women in dresses. The men rowed badly, the women laughed and splashed water. Zachary’s father pulled him up with a hand on his shoulder. “You see them in their boats? You know what’s crazy?”

Zachary looked, wondering what his father might mean, but he could see nothing. He had to assign it to that great category of words and clocks, of mysteries. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”

His father laid a hand on the nape of his neck. “It’s the water. It’s only a foot deep. We could walk right across that lake if we wanted to. Take off our shoes and hang them round our necks.”

Zachary gave a small laugh, since this seemed to be what was wanted.

“But see,” said his father, “they don’t know they could just get out and walk. Like I didn’t know I could just come and fetch you home.”

“It’s fine,” said Zachary. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s no one else’s. I’m happy for you, wanting that schooling. Maybe you won’t finish dumb like me.”

Zachary looked out over the little lake. “You’re not dumb,” he said. It looked deep.

He held his father’s hand and they took the canal towpath out of the park and on toward Hawley Street.

The heavy door of the school porch stood open. Singing came from inside. Zachary blinked. Had the rest of them come back? He wouldn’t be surprised by anything. It must have been written somewhere, and he had just sat there and blinked at it. He could hardly think at all, he was so hungry. He looked around at the orderly, clean street. He looked down at his ripped shorts and his muddy legs and shoes. He did not completely understand the trick that had been played on him, but he was ashamed.

Inside the school, they were singing “When a Knight Won His Spurs.” He hung on to the railings, feeling faint.

His father held him up. “Still want to go in?”

Zachary nodded. The corridor was dark. He looked through the doors of the first classrooms. They were empty and dark too. All the windows were boarded up. They followed the sounds of the voices along the corridor, past more empty classrooms.

No charger have I, and no sword by my side / Yet still to adventure and battle I ride. Somewhere, in the heart of the school, one class was singing. They found the classroom and stood outside. Zachary eased the door open and blinked in the sudden light.

Though back into storyland giants have fled . . . The singing tailed off as the children noticed Zachary standing there. There were only seven of them, not a whole class, and they were not all the same age. He recognized only two of them: most were not children he had been evacuated with. The older ones stopped singing first, and soon the little ones fell silent too. Last to stop was the teacher, who stood conducting the children with her back to the door. She carried on singing as she swept out the time in the air.

“ . . . And the knights are no more and the dragons are . . . Oh, do come along, children, what on earth is the matter, why don’t you sing?”

She spun around and Zachary flinched. Then her face softened. She nodded to his father, took a step toward Zachary and folded him into her arms. He collapsed against her, too weak to talk.

“Zachary Lee,” said Mary. “You are frightfully late, as usual.”





July, 1940





PARIS FELL, THE GRANDFATHERS manning the pissoirs as Hitler in his Mercedes cabriolet rutted the lawns of the Champ de Mars. The invaders marched behind his car with polished boots while the old men with their brandy headaches pissed venom against the zinc. The thing was to resist. It did not matter that it splashed back on their shoes.

In her classroom on Hawley Street, Mary chalked an outline of Europe on the blackboard and marked Paris with an Eiffel Tower. She topped off the tower with a beret and tucked a little baguette under its arm, since that was the only way the thing ought to be drawn.

“Who can tell me who built the Eiffel Tower? Yes?”

“Was it Napoleon?” said Maud Babington.

Mary smiled. “Nearly.”

Betty Oates was waving her hand in anguish, as if the answer’s continuing presence within her body were causing unbearable pain.

“Yes, Betty?’

“Gustave Eiffel!’

“Very good. The Eiffel Tower is made of ferrous metal and it has a magnetic field that generates romance within a mile of it.”

George Hampton, who was simple, became flustered at the word “romance.” He was fifteen and handsome. Young women dropped their purses in front of him to start a conversation, until they realized what was the matter. Now he pressed both palms to his temples and made the noise of a door hinge wanting oil.

Betty, ever diligent, was writing in her exercise book: Eiffel Tower. Magnetic field. Romance < 1 mile. George was still agitated. Poppy Brown, the mongol, climbed down from her desk and shuffled over to his place. She took his hands by the wrists and clapped them together until George forgot what had upset him. He wiggled his fingers, which to his great delight responded with pleasing undulant motions. “Pop-pop-pop,” he said, forming an accidental spit bubble with every bilabial. Poppy, who was five, clambered back up to her seat and stared at the blackboard with her slanted brown eyes that squinted outward, her bottom teeth protuberant over the upper lip.