Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(4)
“My father plays in the minstrel show at the Lyceum. Is that useful?”
“For morale, certainly. If minstrels weren’t needed I daresay they’d have been evacuated days ago. On a gospel train, don’t you think?”
The boy refused to smile. “They won’t want me in the countryside.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t they?”
The pained expression children had, when one was irredeemably obtuse.
“Oh, I see. Well, I daresay they will just be awfully curious. I suppose you can expect to be poked and prodded a little, but once they understand that it won’t wash off I’m sure they won’t hold it against you. People are jolly fair, you know.”
The boy seemed lost in thought.
“Anyway,” said Mary, “I’m coming to wherever-it-is we’re going. I promise I shan’t leave you.”
“They’ll hate me.’
“Nonsense. Was it minstrels who invaded Poland? Was it a troupe of theater Negroes who occupied the Sudetenland?”
He gave her a patient look.
“See?” said Mary. “The countryside will prefer you to the Germans.”
“I still don’t want to go.”
“Oh, but that’s the fun of it, don’t you see? It’s a simply enormous game of go-where-you’re-jolly-well-told. Everyone who’s anyone is playing.”
She was surprised to realize that she didn’t mind it at all, being sent away. It really was a giant roulette—this was how one ought to see it. The children would get a taste of country air, and she . . . well, what was the countryside if not numberless Heathcliffs, loosely tethered?
Let us imagine, she thought, that this war will surprise us all. Let us suppose that the evacuation train will take us somewhere wild, far from these decorous streets where every third person has an anecdote about my mother, or votes in my father’s constituency.
She imagined herself in the country, in a pretty village of vivid young people thrown into a new pattern by the war. It would be like the turning of a kaleidoscope, only with gramophones and dancing. Just to show her friend Hilda, she would fall in love with the first man who was even slightly interesting.
She squeezed the colored boy’s hand, delighted by his smile as her bright mood made the junction. “Come on,” she said, “shall we get back to the others before they have all the fun?”
They stood up from the straw and she brushed the child down. He was a bony, startle-eyed thing—giving the impression of being thoroughly X-rayed—with an insubordinate crackle of black hair. She shook her head, laughing.
“What?”
“Zachary Lee, I honestly don’t know why we bother evacuating you. You look as if you’ve been bombed already.”
He scowled. “Well, you smoke like this.”
He gave his impression of Mary smoking like Bette Davis, as if the burning Craven “A” generated a terrific amount of lift. The cigarette, straining to rise, straightened the wrist nicely and lifted the first and second fingers into the gesture of a bored saint offering benediction.
“Yes, that’s it!” said Mary. “But do show me how you would do it.”
Slick as a magician palming a penny, Zachary flipped the imaginary cigarette around so that the cherry smoldered under the cup of his hand. He cut wary eyes left and right, drew deeply and then, averting his face, opened a small gap in the corner of his mouth to jet smoke down at the straw. The exhalation was almost invisibly quick, a sparrow shitting from a branch.
“Good lord,” said Mary, “you smoke as if the world might tell you not to.”
“I smoke like a man,” said the child, affecting weariness.
“Well then. Unless one counts the three Rs, I don’t suppose I have anything to teach you.”
She took his arm and they walked together—he wondering whether the lions would be dropped on Berlin by day or by night and she replying that she supposed by night, since the creatures were mostly nocturnal, although in wartime, who knew?
They rotated through the exit turnstile. Mary made the boy to go first, since it would be too funny if he were to abscond again, with her already through to the wrong side of the one-way ratchet. If their roles had been reversed, then she would certainly have found the possibility too cheerful to resist.
On the grass they found the school drawn up into ranks, three by three. She kept Zachary’s arm companionably until the headmistress shot her a look. Mary adjusted her grip to be more suggestive of restraint.
“I shall deal with you later, Zachary,” said Miss Vine. “As soon as I am issued with a building in which to detain you, expect to get detention.”
Zachary smiled infuriatingly. Mary hurried him along the ranks until they came to her own class. There she took plain, sensible Fay George from her row and had her form a new row with the recaptured escapee, instructing her to hold his hand good and firmly. This Fay did, first taking her gloves from the pocket of her duffel coat and putting them on. Zachary accepted this without comment, looking directly ahead.
The headmistress came to where Mary stood, twitched her nose at the smell of cigarette smoke, and glanced pointedly heavenward. As if there might be a roaring squadron of bombers up there that Mary had somehow missed. Miss Vine took Zachary by the shoulders. She shook him, absentmindedly and not without affection. It was as if to ask: Oh, and what are we to do with you?