Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(55)

“If there had been more time, or less, it all would have been easier. If it’s an hour, one can say what one likes. If it’s a year, one can be what one is like. A day is exactly the wrong length of time to be oneself in, don’t you think?”

She looked at him desperately. He took a step toward her but the locomotive blew its whistle.

She said, “You should go.”

He held her eyes. “Yes. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

He picked up his duffel bag and turned to go.

Mary said, “I hope you’ll be all right.”

Alistair turned back. “You’ll be very happy. Tom is the best man I know.”

She paused.

“Tom always told me you were funny. I hadn’t for a minute imagined you would be so terribly sad.”

Alistair set down his bag, put his hands in his pockets, and stared at his shoes for a moment.

“I’m hopeful,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“Hopeful that what?”

“That this war does as much good as harm.”

“You sound like the government posters.”

He smiled. “After the war there’ll be less distance between us all.”

“Is that your theory?”

“I can prove it. Last night the men and I were on the back streets, to see if we could make ourselves useful. There was an old man we helped, in the wreck of his house in a bathtub he’d been sheltering in. It was half full of water from the hoses and when we got to the man, he scrubbed his back with a loofah to make us laugh. The whole street torn to shreds, and all of us in stitches. Don’t you see? It makes me think there’s hope.”

“Promise me you’ll hold on to that.”

“Oh good lord, yes. Rather that than a loofah.”

She laughed then, brightly and without complication, and he laughed too, and for a moment the war with its lachrymose smoke was blown away on a bright, clean wind. Alistair marveled that she could do such a thing with the tiniest inflection of her mouth and the lightest look in her eye: even exhausted, in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.

The whistle screamed again and an officer yelled from the platform for Alistair to board.

“Well, goodbye,” said Mary. “Don’t let the Germans take all the best seats.”

“Goodbye, Mary. Good luck.”

He shouldered his duffel bag and walked away down the platform. This was the end of it, he knew—they could give each other nothing more. There was a perfect sadness to it, but as the train took him back to the war and its hard hours issued singly, it wouldn’t do to think of her. He left her where she was: fragile but intact beneath the hot black smoke that rose a mile above the wounded city.





PART TWO

ATTRITION





September, 1940





HILDA PICKED HER UP at noon and they took a cab east to look at the damage. Hilda wore black: melodramatic, Mary thought. With a handkerchief to press to her face in case of smoke and dust. And knee-high lace-up boots, since one couldn’t anticipate the conditions underfoot. It seemed to Mary that Hilda was dressed for something between a funeral and Passchendaele. Mary had opted for pumps and a light blue day dress.

When they got to Bow she saw that Hilda had been right. Every window was out. In the bright sun, glass lay everywhere, so that if one half closed one’s eyes the streets bejeweled. Pavements were undulant, walls bowed, streetlamps wilted by heat. The city’s perpendiculars were defeated: it was as if the bombs had reserved a particular spite for right angles. The pipes were cracked too, and marshy water pooled in every new depression. Children splashed. The pigeons spritzed their wings in it.

Their road was blocked by rubble, and the driver pulled up. Hilda opened the door and hot air rolled in, heavy with soot and sewage. Everything smoked or steamed, as if one had crossed into a tropic of disaster. From the gaping fronts of bombed-out houses, the dazed locals stared. Mary stepped out of the cab into a puddle that leached foul-smelling mud through her shoe and into her stocking.

“Don’t you think we should go straight back?” she said.

“Don’t be wet,” said Hilda. “These poor people have been through hell.”

“But I feel such a ghoul for gawping.”

“We’re observing. And I’m damned if we’ll be the only ones who haven’t. It’s all anyone will be talking about.”

Mary gave in. They linked arms, going around gas flares that rose from cracked mains. They gave a wide berth to sewage bubbling up.

“You see?” said Hilda. “This is why I prefer the West End.”

“This isn’t funny at all.”

Hilda looked as if she might cry. “Did you kiss him?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you and Alistair kiss?”

Mary hesitated. “Shall we talk about it at home?”

“There’s no privacy there. If Palmer isn’t hovering then your mother is materializing over one’s shoulder. It isn’t a home, it’s a haunting.”

Mary looked away down the shattered alley. “At your flat, then.”

“ ‘But it’s never the right moment, with you. You think you can do what you like, and we never mention it. But what about Tom? What about me?”