Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(76)

Inside, in the labyrinthine fort, everything had been shaken from its shelf, or taken to the wrong place in the chaos, or stolen or eaten or sublimated. It was a mercy that every unit of the British Army came so fully documented that it could be reassembled from its constituent parts by men who had hardly slept. Alistair and Simonson worked their battery back up to readiness using the technical manuals and the quartermaster’s equipment list. If they had happened to pick up the wrong instructions at the beginning of the day, it seemed to Alistair that they might just as easily have ended up with a bus company, or a small dairy farm.

At nightfall there was still so much fuel oil in the sea that Alistair half expected the setting sun to ignite it. He was too tired to think straight. He stumbled up the stone staircase to his room and sat down on his cot. Airmail had come during the day—a Wellington had slipped in through the lull in the enemy’s air cover—and a letter was waiting for him on his desk. He slit the envelope open, not recognizing the hand.

Alistair,

I hope you shan’t mind if I write. You must feel as rotten as I do without Tom. I was going through his things when I found a letter you wrote to him, asking forgiveness for the night you and I met. I do not know whether he managed to reply.

I thought it might do you good to know that Tom often spoke of you. He looked up to you. He was never reconciled to staying in London while you put your neck on the line. So if Tom seemed distant in his letters toward the end, you mustn’t think that he meant to be. Some days he could seem a thousand miles from me, even though we would be sitting at the same table.

Everyone is tired here, after so many months of bombing. There is a distance between all of us now. I do not mean to be maudlin, only to tell you how it is in London. After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled—shan’t we?—as we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.

Tom wouldn’t want us to be sad. The crocuses are out now in Regent’s Park, and I picked some this morning and took them to his grave. I arranged them as best I could, and then I came home. On the way home the train was crowded. I was hungry. There was a man in my compartment with an irritating laugh. One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. In the end I suppose we lay flowers on graves because we cannot lay ourselves on them.

Hilda and I have applied to work on the ambulances. It might be exciting to drive an ambulance—although to listen to my father, my driving would be certain to cause further casualties. In any case, they will not let me teach. It is too bad, but perhaps they are right. It is my constant regret that my class would still be alive if I had not insisted on carrying on once the air raids began. We live, you see, and even a mule like me must learn. I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.

Unless you tell me otherwise, I shall keep up the rent on the garret. I thought you might like it to be there when you geot back. In your wardrobe you have three viable ties, four shirts of which two are almost serviceable, and a lounge suit in a style that I can only describe as conventional. Forgive me if you feel that “dull” is a better word. I have applied mothballs, though I was tempted to use something more flammable. You must let me know what you want to do about arrangements.

Sincerely,

Mary North

Alistair put down the letter and stood up. For a few minutes he looked out over the devastated port and the black harbor still sickly with oil. Then he sat back at his metal table and took up a stub of pencil and an airmail sheet.

Dear Mary,

Thank you for your kind letter. You must surrender the garret and let me know what you have paid in rent so I can reimburse you. As for my poor old clothes, surely there is some yokel in your father’s constituency who can hang them on a scarecrow. Furthermore

He hesitated. What had she meant by You must let me know what you want to do about arrangements? He read her letter through again, finding it impenetrable. If it was a simple request for instructions, perhaps there were too many crocuses in it. If it was something more, then perhaps there were not enough roses. He screwed up his page and began again.

Mary,

If you really do not mind, I hope you will keep the garret on, at least until I have a chance to come and say goodbye to the old dump. I would like a place to remember Tom by. Of course it is your place now, yours and his, so you must do what you feel is

He crumpled that page up too. Was she asking him to talk about Tom, or allowing him not to? She missed Tom, he missed Tom—but the living must live with the living, this was understood in her letter. Therefore, how boorish of him to bang on about Tom.

He rubbed his eyes. It was impossible. In the history of the world there was not one example of a man ever having written a satisfactory letter to a woman who mattered to him. How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks, when his letter would go straight out on the next available airplane. War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.

Mary,

Damn the garret and damn my old clothes, I wish I were there with you.

He stopped. Perhaps he was entirely misreading it. Now that he read her letter again, he was ashamed. She loved Tom, and Tom was dead, and her letter was a game attempt to buck herself up. She was a child talking herself into courage and she wanted a brotherly word from him, nothing more. She needed him to tell her that it was all right, that he felt hollow about Tom too—that this was simply how it was with the dead, and it did not mean that one had not loved them enough. And yet at the same time, her letter seemed to say, “I love you—can anything be done?” after only the mildest decryption.