Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(71)
He patted her on the shoulder. “You’re emotional because you were so caught up. You are charming and young, and I don’t hold what happened against you. The one who should have known better is my predecessor.”
“Tom was my lover. It is well known. Won’t you stop speaking as if we weren’t both aware?”
“I am trying to protect your feelings, and the name of your family.”
“You might best serve both by letting me teach again. There are hundreds of children in this district, you know full well. One sees them on every street, poking around in the rubble.”
“I’m afraid there’s no position for you.”
“I apologize for becoming emotional. Please let me teach again.”
“Take a break,” he said gently. “God knows, I would if I could. Get out of town for a few weeks, blow away the cobwebs.”
She turned her back on him. In the little watercolor she had given Tom, the light was yellow and frisky. If you went at that light with an egg whisk, you could work up a froth to stand a spoon in. London stretched away beyond the heath. The landmarks stood. They had been so firmly attached back then that the artist had had to paint the sky around them.
She went to the window. “What can I do to change your mind?”
He said nothing. She moved closer, letting her arm brush against his as she smoked. “We needn’t put this city back the way we found it, you know.”
He gave an amused look that turned into something more serious. “Look,” he said, “it is overdue lunch. Why don’t you and I go for a bite and discuss it?’ ”
She tilted her head up to his, giving him the full benefit of her eyes. For a moment she let him drown himself.
“No, thank you,” she said brightly. “I’m not at all hungry.”
He stared at her, coloring slowly. He seemed inclined to strike her, then turned abruptly and left her alone at the window. She heard him banging drawers in the desk, collecting his coat and hat from the peg, slamming the door behind him.
She turned from the window and went to stub out her cigarette. The small painting of Hampstead Heath hung in the gray light, in its golden frame. She let her hand linger, for a moment, on the cold blue glass of Tom’s ashtray. She turned it on its axis—twice, three times—then left it where it was.
“I miss you,” she said to the empty office.
January, 1941
THEY CALLED THE NEW club the Joint. As if it weren’t a thing in itself but only a hinge between night and day. The bombers raised their tempo and the syncopated city matched the rhythm. When a raid interrupted the minstrel show now, the players rushed underground with the audience to join the big band that was already down there. They had cleared out the Lyceum’s great basement to make the club. There was a stage at one end, a bar at the other and alcoves in between where soldiers pushed their luck.
Zachary fetched drinks from the bar in exchange for coins and cigarettes. It was weeks since he’d last seen the sky. It suited him. If you couldn’t see the sky, it couldn’t see you. People patted him on the head when he fetched their drinks. They called him Baby Grand. Everyone was christened again now, sometimes two or three times, as if by this expedient every person might stay ahead of the war’s ability to call them by name.
No one cared if he drank, so he did. He slept under the bar and smoked like Bette Davis. He ate cocktail nuts, the glacé cherries from the bottoms of glasses—whatever he could get. Everyone was hungry. The new pianist discovered that if he waited a quaver of time after the beat and then hit down hard to give some heavy swing, then factory girls and airmen on leave could be made to dance even if they were weak from the rations.
Laying down drinks on the tables, Zachary picked up the gossip. Apparently so many souls were being lost every night that in the great mortuaries of Clerkenwell and Cheapside a dozen families would now claim any unrecognizable corpse as their cousin or mother or aunt. So now the morgue staff stripped the remains, tagged clothing and flesh with the same number, and had families identify the effects instead of the bodies. Zachary hadn’t been asked to identify a thing. Not a tie clip or a ring. He wondered if his father was in some grave, being mourned under a new name. He prayed for him under the old one.
They said that aboveground now, when only human fragments were recovered, the city assessed by weight how many bodies should be assembled. And if a few of the reincorporated dead had more than one left leg, then at least none of the coffins felt light. The drinkers caught him eavesdropping and they laughed and said: “What do you think of that, Baby Grand?” He said, “It sounds fair.” But he thought of his father, who had so carefully washed off his whiteface at the end of every performance, hashed together with white bodies.
Zachary drank what was left in the glasses and the big band played for forty-five minutes in each hour, all night, and whereas in peacetime the horns and the piano always used to play around each other in fast eddies, it was now discovered that if they all united instead in big block chords at three a.m. and four a.m., with the air raid hot and heavy overhead and the dance floor jumping on its joists and dust pouring from the vaulted roof of the basement, then the slim Negro bandleader with his shirt soaked in sweat could lean in to his streamlined microphone as if into a great headwind and call at the crowded white dancers: “Check down at your feet, good ladies and gentlemen, for so long as you are still dancing you cannot yet be dead!” Zachary bused tables and the orchestrated city tapped its great stock of shrouds and cardboard caskets, releasing a precise number each night in expectation of casualties predicted from cloud cover and bomber concentrations. And according to the gossip, if a piece of a Londoner could be collected with dustpan and brush then it would be sent downstream on the barges with the rest of the city’s refuse to the great municipal middens at Durham Wharf, while all larger bodily phrases were composed into persons nameable and taken for classical burial. And the cavernous basement boomed. You were safe if dancing or dead. London remembered its oldest rhythm of putting the saints beneath it, and in the public cemeteries of Highgate and Nunhead and Kensal Green the old graves were dug up and the crotchety bones scattered to make room for new. The enemy enlarged its bombs from five hundred kilograms to one thousand and two thousand, and down in the basement the bandleaders put together two bands, and three bands, so that six colored men, and now nine colored men, all swung in line in the horn section, and two Negro drummers, and now three Negro drummers, sweated at their kits on the big raised dais at the back of the stage, and Zachary remembered how his father had used his heavy left hand to stamp out the colossal chords—boom, boom, boom—and the limitless suburban cemeteries opened up fresh ground and the commuter trains in the middle of the day took the coffins out into Metro-land and returned with a toot on the whistle and the conductor’s call of “Empties!” And all the murderous night the big-band drummers smashed out time while the stonemasons in their massed choir with their steel chisels in perfect orchestration tapped out the assumed names of the dead, in letters Zachary couldn’t read. How unbearable it was that his father’s name was lost. How thin his own limbs seemed. He heard the music and he heard the news from above, and it seemed to him now that the world above and the world below were playing the exact same tune.