Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(45)

“We only know what we read in the papers,” said Mary, lighting a cigarette.

Alistair’s nerves sparked when he looked at her. He hoped the jolt wasn’t visible in his eyes. How ordinary Hilda was, beside Mary—and how shabby his own need for warmth.

He took some more wine. “You probably all know more than I do, about the overall situation. I’m afraid they only tell us chaps what we need to know: come here, look lively, bunk up, dig in.”

“Tom tells me you fought the Germans in France,” said Mary.

He looked down at his glass. “Briefly, yes.”

“What was it like?”

In her face there was a simple anxiety that he could hardly bear. It made her so tender. He found he couldn’t speak.

“Darling . . .” said Tom, putting a hand on her arm.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Oh no, that’s quite all right,” Alistair said quickly.

She blushed, and he realized that perhaps she was a little drunk too. He was a swine for making the moment awkward. He wondered what he could say: show a temperate reply that her question had not been out of place, and also to answer her honestly.

But what ought he to tell her? None of it was suitable to relate. The Germans had swooped on them in stiff airframes with bull whistles screaming. Under the hardened sky they had squared off the undulant plain with gray armor. They always held the direct line. They scorned roads that had wound for millennia. People and animals were spooked—the land had no natural resistance to the pure black method.

How could one speak of it over lunch? After the hard planes and the hard tanks had come hard men in hard formations, banging their black boots in adamant time. A terrible hardness was how it had seemed to Alistair: a preternatural hardness that ordinary men had fled from and exceptional men had dashed themselves against and been ground into the soft French mud, the perfectly regular imprint of the hard iron tracks making no distinction between corpse and clay. He saw his friends’ faces crushed and flattened. He saw Tom’s, and Hilda’s, and Mary’s faces crushed and flattened. Good god—he was gripping his wineglass. Good god.

He made himself take a breath. “The Germans were just well organized. The next time we tangle with them, we’ll be organized too.”

Mary said, “You’re just like my father.”

Alistair was relieved to move on. “And what does your father do?”

“He’s a politician,” said Mary, stubbing out her cigarette and holding his eye with an irony that she might be inviting him to share—he couldn’t tell.

“He’s MP for the Wensum Valley,” said Tom.

Alistair said, “Well then I’m sure you know more than I do about the war picture.”

Mary inspected her nails. “I’m afraid they only tell us girls what we need to know: come here, look lively, bunk up, dig in.”

Alistair laughed, and Mary flashed him a prankish grin. How quickly she could turn in conversation.

Hilda, who seemed slightly at sevens with the whole exchange, shook their third wine bottle and proclaimed it empty. She stood, slightly unsteadily and with a clattering of cutlery to the floor.

“Oh come on, you lot, let’s jilt this dump and go somewhere with music.”

Alistair took care of the bill—it was true what they said: you couldn’t take it with you—and then they were out in the hot blue Saturday afternoon, in Hyde Park, Mary and Tom up ahead, arm in arm, and he bringing up the rear with Hilda, who shrugged her cardigan down off her shoulders and smiled up at the sun with half-closed eyes.

“Isn’t this grand?” she said, taking his arm. “It was stuffy in there.”

“Yes,” he said. “Grand.”

“Don’t you love the feeling you get when the sun comes out in London?”

“Are all the questions this easy?”

She laughed and leaned her head on his shoulder as they walked. The feeling of her at his side was pleasant, and now that they were outside and the first overpowering blush of her perfume had mellowed, she smelled warm and rather nice. Up ahead, Mary in her summer dress and white straw hat threw her head back and laughed at something Tom had said. Alistair felt unbearable anguish.

They bought ices from a kiosk and ate them as they walked. Mary slipped along with the carefree, long-limbed swing of someone on whom the present hour was neither too tight nor too loose.

Hilda was saying, “Can’t you just tell straight away, sometimes, when a person is all right?”

“You’re doing it again,” he said.

“And you’re noticing again, so we’re even.”

“Isn’t it fun to keep score?”

She poked him in the ribs. “See? Now you’re getting it.”

Over the streets, the barrage balloons bobbed nicely against a few small cotton-puff clouds. Hilda chatted happily. Wherever they were headed, Alistair guessed, it was likely to have wine.

The four of them wondered what they might do, since it was too early for dancing and too hot to keep strolling in the sun. A show would be the thing, but in theaterland nothing seemed to be beginning—it was four in the afternoon—and they bumped from place to place until Mary said they should go to the Lyceum. The minstrel troupe was playing there, as it had since forever, and she had a pupil, Zachary, whose father was a performer.