Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(60)

A ghost of a smile rose in him. “You are quite mad, I think.”

“Mother just calls me stubborn.”

Tom felt utterly spent, as weak as the tea. It was terrifying, how close one came to cracking up. “God, I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “We must take turns, don’t you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.”

They sat for a few minutes in the empty café, finishing the tea while there was still warmth in it. Another couple came in and stamped the slush off their shoes, she in a long hooded cape and he in the uniform of a naval officer. The waitress served them biscuits from under the counter.

Mary laughed and took Tom’s hand. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Out in the snow they drew their coats tight at the throat and walked hand in hand. Although the winter storm was bitter there was comfort in it, since it meant there would be no raid that night. Later they would sleep together—this was understood—and if there was less heat in it than there had been at the start, then perhaps there might be more warmth.

As the dark afternoon sank into night they made their way in silence through the blind city. Their footsteps were softened by the snow. The incalculable damage was hidden, the mounds of rubble turned by the drifts into the shapes of clouds or waves—forms that might naturally be expected to blow through when kinder weather came.

As the light and the sound faded to nothing, all that was left was the two of them. Underneath everything lay the colossal buried city—the patched-up pipes and the improvised lines of communication and the subterranean refuges from the great disincorporating influence of bombs. With the snow it was possible to forget it.

Perhaps, thought Mary, they really would rescue each other in turn. Perhaps the city would stand. For now, though, she could only hold Tom’s hand. The snow settled. One settled.

The searchlight beams rose from their rooftop installations, up through the swirling snow, and played in blue-white circles on the base of the clouds. One could follow the elegant line of a beam up into the whiteness of the storm that spanned all of Europe in its vortex. One could take in the vast sweep of the winter and follow a thin searchlight beam down again into the vigilant city and understand how very fragile it was: a woman and a man holding hands, on streets made nameless by snow.

“I love you,” she said.

“Do you?”

She smiled. “Oh, let’s not go to my parents’. It isn’t far to your place.”

There was an urgency now in the heat of their hands as they clung to each other. This snow would thaw. These winds would blow the clouds away. The next night might see a bomber’s sky.





December , 1940





ALISTAIR SAILED THE BOAT while Simonson—one of two other captains attached to 200 Battery, 10 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery—fished for tunny with a trawling line. In a fourteen-foot sailing dinghy, half a mile off the east coast of Malta, with a breeze blowing in off the immaculate Mediterranean and with two bottles of the local beer in a string bag trailing in their wake to cool, the war seemed improbable and excessive.

“No, I’m afraid you will have to run it past me again,” said Alistair, nudging the tiller with his toe. “There’s a man called . . . ?”

“Something Hitler,” said Simonson. “Axel? Albrecht? German chap.”

“And he wants . . . ?”

“To take over the running of the world.”

“What, all of it?”

“So I hear.”

Alistair frowned. “With all its tedious responsibilities along with the evident perks?”

“One imagines the fellow has weighed it up and decided to press on regardless.”

“Has he considered how vexatious it would be to find oneself in charge of us? Or how independent-minded the Americans are? I should think it would be frowned upon to turn up in Manhattan and start directing the traffic. As a European, I mean.”

“My dear boy, these are questions we Brits have thrashed out over centuries. One cannot expect a Hun to have quite the same level of insight.”

Alistair got his pipe alight while steering with one foot, trimming the jib with the hand he held the match in. He puffed white smoke that the wind scooped away prettily over the russet cloth of the mainsail.

He said, “This German fellow sounds like a card.”

Simonson gave the trawling line an experimental tug. “He has only one testicle, you know.”

Alistair raised an eyebrow.

“Oh yes,” said Simonson. “It is well known.”

One thousand miles to the west lay Gibraltar; one thousand miles to the east, Alexandria. Though it was nearly Christmas and the water too chilly for swimming, it was pleasant in the sun and the two men were comfortable in white shirts and civilian slacks. Simonson pulled in the trawling line to check that the spinner was not tangled.

He spat in disgust. ‘Two hours and not a single bite. Fish are Nazis.”

“Maybe you’re using the wrong lure.”

Simonson shook his head. “The fish are mocking me. They know I’m famished and they’re swimming six inches behind the spinner, in their silvery lederhosen.”

“They are goose-swimming,” said Alistair, using a hand to approximate the motion.