Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(65)

Mary sat beside Tom on the end of a bench. “Feeling Christmasy?”

“As an elf in rum butter.”

She put her head on his shoulder. “Like it down here?”

He gave the basement a critical eye. “It could use a woman’s touch.”

She dug him in the ribs. “I hate you.”

“This school is yours now, you know. I mean, after the war, everyone will come home and I daresay you’ll have to hand the place back, but you and I will know who held the line when it mattered.”

“Oh, I’ll be glad to give the key back. It’ll be a relief not to be in charge.”

“I don’t see you, somehow, taking orders from Miss Vine. Not after this.”

“No?”

“I don’t see any of it being as it was. Just look at us, down here in the dark. Coloreds and cripples and cranks—but we’re the ones holding on. When the rest get back they’ll have to respect what happened here.”

Mary yawned, and stretched out her legs alongside his. “I just want to get through. I must say I don’t frightfully care who feels good once this is over, so long as it isn’t the Germans.”

He grinned. “I don’t care about anyone at all, apart from you. If there is one person who—”

Three huge detonations came, knocking the breath from their lungs and blowing out the candles. Children and parents screamed. Mary found herself stunned, lying on top of Tom, both of them struggling to get up. She fumbled in her pockets until she found her lighter.

Zachary was staring back at her, eyes wide with terror.

“It’s all right,” she mumbled, her tongue pasted with brick dust. She was slow from the concussion. “It is quite all right. Quite safe down here.”

Another explosion came, huge and even closer, knocking the lighter from her hand. When she felt for it and flicked it back on, Zachary was gone. His footsteps banged up the wooden stairs that led up from the basement.

“No! Wait!”

She made to go after him but Tom pulled her back. “I’ll get him.”

He went, leaving her to bring order to the tangle of parents and children. She got the candles alight in their jars, then checked on the injuries. Zachary’s father was badly concussed, swinging his head in confusion. Thomas’s father had dislocated a shoulder and sat on the floor with his back against the wall, green-faced. The children had got away with bruises.

Once she had them all calm, she took stock. Her ears rang—she must have struck her head harder than she had thought—but at least the bombing seemed distant, for now. She didn’t know how long Zachary and Tom had been gone—five minutes, perhaps. She went up into the corridor, stumbling on uneven legs—it seemed she had lost a shoe—and decided to take a quick look outside. She swung open the heavy front door and was amazed to find that it was still daylight. The street was deserted, with rubble strewn across it. A house was down in the middle of the row.

She looked up and saw no bombers. She took a few steps into the street, thought better of it, and hurried back into the shelter of the porch. It was ridiculous—it was bombs that threatened, not rain—and yet in the corner of the porch a wooden box held the parents’ furled umbrellas, and a sensible part of her mind realized that she ought to take one, since it must be better than nothing. She was reaching for one when she saw, through the open door, the child at the end of the street. He was Zachary’s build, but white, in a white sweater and shorts, and she yelled at him to come into cover. The child stared at her, backed away two paces, and fled.

It was five streets before she caught him, with bombs beginning to fall again close by. When she finally got hold of Zachary, his eyes were blank with fright. She dragged him into an angle behind a wall, and gasped to get her breath. He cowered, arms raised as if she might strike him, and she wondered how it had come to be that he was white, and she also wondered why he was afraid of her. He was crying tears of a brown liquid, and she would not understand until later that they were ordinary tears, cutting through the white dust.

“Why?” she managed to say. “Why is it always you who runs off?”

He howled, chest heaving. “I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry . . .”

She shook her head. “You have to come back. We can’t stay out here.”

“I’m not going back in the basement.”

“Oh yes you jolly well are.”

She half dragged, half led him back through the air raid, which was all around them now, and in the mouth of a side street she saw that Tom was lying on the pavement, asleep in the snow with the winter sun slanting over him. It was a stress reaction she had read about—the mind shutting down when it all got too much. She would have to go back for him as soon as she had delivered Zachary to the shelter. (How extraordinary that she was the one who was calm in this situation; who could take in everything clearly and without panic.) She hauled Zachary back to Hawley Street, with the bombing seeming distant again, and here there was an interesting phenomenon. (How glad her father would be to know that his daughter could be cool in a crisis.) This was how it sounded in her mind, as she held Zachary by his thin wrist and felt the pulse in it while the drone note of the bombers faded away into the east: I am witnessing a phenomenon related to the bombing.

The thing was that Hawley Street was there but the school was gone. She walked up and down the length of the street, twice, calmly but briskly, pulling Zachary by the wrist and looking for the school. Because of course the phenomenon would have a simple explanation: perhaps that someone unfamiliar with the area had taken the building and put it back in slightly the wrong place. She started laughing because it was silly that one couldn’t find something so big and stolidly Victorian as Hawley Street School. All she could find was an enormous pile of red bricks, dotted with decorative London yellows. What a ridiculous place to leave bricks. And this was when her stomach fell and she understood that the problem was a perceptual one: that her concussion was worse than she had supposed, that she was hallucinating. It was frightening but at least it all made sense now: Zachary turned white, Tom fast asleep, the school absent without leave. How funny the mind could be. She sat in the thick white dust and laughed.