Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(57)

It went on to confirm that he had performed well at interview. The recruiting officer had liked Tom’s use of the RAF’s published battle losses. Twenty men per day were being killed: Tom had framed it as one good man each hour. When viewed in that way, he had told the interviewer, one understood a life’s value concretely. One saw the hours as a chain joining peacetime to peacetime, with oneself as a willing link. The recruiting officer had found his answer very satisfactory.

Tom couldn’t wait to show Mary the letter. There had been such a distance between them since the raids began. Nothing was said but he missed the way they used to walk—as they had after their first night together—through a world made anew. He missed the way they had made rain hilarious, and passersby mysterious, and bridges cross more than the river.

Of course there was the bombing, which kept them apart every night, she in the Anderson at her parents’ home and he in the public shelter on Prince of Wales Road. But even alone together at the weekend in the garret, there was a certain hesitation. Their lovemaking felt like politeness.

But now here was the letter, to remake him in Mary’s eyes and his own. Life had finally arrived and been released from its manila envelope.

In the final paragraph the recruiting officer regretted to inform him that his application had been vetoed by the War Office, who considered his current role essential. He read the thing through again, and there was no ambiguity. It was a feature of the authorities that they could exempt one’s profession from service without sparing one’s feelings. Tom sat in his empty office, laid his head on the desk and closed his eyes.

When he could no longer stand it he crossed the road to the public house and drank three doubles in a row. He went out into the snow, walked for a while without purpose and then headed for Mary’s school. When he got there he knocked the snow from his shoes and coat, sat on a tiny chair at the back of her classroom and watched her taking the children through the dress rehearsal for their nativity play.

A savior was born for all mankind: this seemed to be the gist of it. Everyone would be excused, for everything they’d done. It sounded neat. His hands still shook from the cold, so he clasped them to his knees.

Mary mouthed to him: Are you all right? He smiled back at her across the children’s heads while his awareness broke into fragments and each nerve vibrated with the high note of a cable approaching its maximum tension.

The little ones were in costume. Mary sat at the piano, producing a rather chirpy version of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” She even managed to swing the tune a little, giving the distinct impression that whatever had come on that clear midnight had come via the drinks cabinet. He ached for her. There was nothing she couldn’t transform. It was unbearable.

She had cast a nice, sensible girl as the narrator. Betty came forward as the last chord faded. “Long ago in the city of Nazareth, an angel came to Joseph and Mary. And the angel said . . .”

There was a long silence during which everyone looked at the angel.

From the piano, Mary whispered, “Behold . . .”

Kenneth remembered his line. “Behold! A! Virgin! Shall! Be! With! Child! And! Shall! Bring! Forth! A! Son! And! They! Shall! Call! His! Name! Emmanuel!”

“Speak up,” said Mary. “There are a few Chinese who mightn’t have heard you.”

“Emmanuel,” whispered Kenneth.

His wings, which were of papier-maché, slipped down to his waist. Poppy, who was dressed as a lamb, went behind him to hold the wings up to his shoulders. Together, they made a hybrid creature that had not been needed in any of the myths. Tom laughed, but tears prickled at the same time.

He supposed he was only exhausted. The bombing kept everyone awake. At the office one had become accustomed to colleagues making a sudden break for the lavatory. Everyone knew it was only to weep, and yet it would seem to outsiders as if the city were in the grip not of war but of some great bellicose incontinence.

He tried to concentrate on the play. Thomas, dressed in a toga and with a laurel crown on his head, propelled himself to center stage in his wheelchair, which had been clad with gold boards to make it into a Roman chariot.

Betty said, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus.”

Thomas said, “All the world shall be taxed!”

Maud came to the front with Zachary, both in robes and tea towels, with halos wobbling. Maud was a timid girl, rather a good casting for the virgin mother. Tom felt that Zachary was an inspired choice for Joseph, and he wondered if Mary had meant it as a joke. It would be easy to verify the divine provenance, the deity being white and the husband as dark as Herod’s heart.

Now he worried that he didn’t know whether she had meant it to be funny. He knew her less than he had at the start. The enemy dropped payloads of doubt.

He wished he had Alistair for advice. Alistair, old man, he might say. I am beside myself. I am spent. But Alistair was in Malta now, and his letters came infrequently. When they did, they had no substance. Everything operational was omitted, anything sentimental avoided, until only their old jokes remained. Perhaps the friendship was over. Perhaps it was not possible, after all, for a man who had gone to war to abide a man who had stayed.

Tom gripped his tiny chair and ground his teeth in misery.

Betty said, “But in Bethlehem, there was no room for them anywhere.”

The children lined up to sing. They stood in order of diminishing glory, angels to lambs. Beside Poppy were two more lambs in white jumpers with cotton wool twists. There was little Beryl, the beauty with her fixed smile and disconcerting stillness, and there was the idiot George, whose size was alarming amid the diminutive cast but who followed Poppy with great docility. The lambs lined up beside Caesar, the holy spouses, the angel and the narrator. As Mary struck up the tune on the piano, they sang.