Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(37)

Mary said, “Thank you, Poppy.”

Poppy pointed at the blackboard—her hand had a thumb and five fingers—and said, “That?”

“Is the Eiffel Tower, darling.”

Poppy made the shape of it with two steepled index fingers, then stuck one up each nostril.

“Don’t do that, please.”

Poppy withdrew her fingers and inspected a strand of mucous that had followed them out, pea green and fabulous. She ate it.

“Ewww!” said Kenneth Cox. “That! Is! Dis! Gusting!”

“Nevertheless,” said Mary, “it is not yet rationed, and I don’t suppose we must blame Poppy for making the most of it.”

The class settled. “All right, children. Some of you have heard the news about Paris, and I daresay you are worried.”

Zachary said, “What’s happened in Paris?”

“The Germans have arrived there.” She made her tone disapproving, as if the Germans had arrived at an inconvenient moment, or with too much luggage.

She was glad Zachary had spoken up. Naturally he was timid, after everything that had happened. If she could get him to put up his hand for one question a day, it was a small victory.

She drew a swastika on the blackboard beside her Eiffel Tower. “Who can tell me what this nasty symbol is?”

Thomas Essom, the cripple, gripped the push rims of his wheelchair. “Swastika,” he whispered.

“It’s all right, you know. You won’t drop dead just from saying the word.”

Thomas tried again. “Swastika,” he said, hardly louder.

He had been sent with another London school on a train to the West Country. They had wheeled him in to the village hall where the evacuees were being chosen. He had waited all night. No one had wanted a polio boy, twelve years old and pimpled. They had not wanted him in the next village either, and finally his mother had gone out to bring him home.

It had been this way for half her class: the countryside had not wanted them. The others had been brought back to London simply because their parents missed them, and this too was an affliction—an oedema of sentiment or a hypertrophy of the heart—unpatriotic in a way that could not be formally censured. This was the situation of Maud, Betty and Kenneth. Only Beryl Waldorf, the beauty, fell outside the pattern. She had returned a month ago and not spoken since. She stared out of the window and hugged her arms tight around her. Something had been off—the parents had sensed it in her letters. The countryside had liked her too much.

These eight, then, were Mary’s class so far. They were London’s remainder, the residual air in its lungs.

She said, “Well done, Thomas.” His lip trembled and he looked down at his desk. Children blamed themselves for what had happened to them. This was why she took pains, in this lesson every Friday, to give them the news of the war. At least she could set out before them, with chalk and modest redaction, the great currents that had washed them up here.

On the blackboard she marked the countries that, for now, belonged to the enemy. She was careful to make the swastikas small in relation to the other things she drew: a skier with a flowing scarf in Norway, a windmill in Holland. She loathed the way the newspapers printed maps with the stark Nazi symbol on a field of plain white, as if Hitler had sent armies of erasers. Better to crowd the swastikas in, to have them jostle for space. She drew them deliberately crooked. Her swastikas were degenerates that leaned at sickly angles and resembled one another vaguely, the offspring of first cousins who had married against the family’s advice.

Finally she drew Britain, being generous with the width of the English Channel and giving the British Isles three times the area on the blackboard that they merited. She thought it unfair to expect children to understand that it was possible to resist, from an island the size of her hand, a tyranny that stretched the whole width of the blackboard from Brest to Bia?ystok.

“And so you see, the enemy has moved into France, but that, you may be perfectly sure, is as far as he will come. Who can tell me why that is?”

Betty had her hand up again, but Mary wasn’t buying. “What do you think, Zachary?”

His eyes came back into focus. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“You mustn’t be.”

He sighed. “Sorry.”

She knelt by his desk. “Anything in the Germans’ way? Any water?”

His eyes brightened. “Oh, the sea. The Channel.”

She smiled. “You see? It’s fine to raise your hand and say these things.”

“I thought it was something difficult.”

“You can trust a dunce like me, you know. If it was hard I wouldn’t know the answer myself, and I shouldn’t ask in case you showed me up.”

He held her eyes, his chin up for once. She hoped it was not too much to ask, that he should trust her. But then again it was not she who had been starved and stoned out of her evacuation village. It was not she who had needed a week in the Royal Free Hospital, with bed rest and vitamin shots, to recover from a trip to the countryside.

She stood to address the class again. “And if they do somehow cross the Channel, we’ll put up a ferocious resistance and they’ll never get inland.”

The inscrutable looks children gave when they understood everything or nothing. In all likelihood they were simply tired. Mary decided to call it a day. She wound the Columbia gramophone that Tom had loaned her, and put Thomas in charge of choosing the discs. It was not officially recommended, an afternoon of light jazz and dance tunes—but neither was it explicitly stated that one ought to bore one’s class to death on a Friday afternoon.