Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(84)
In any case, whether or not you wish me to proceed to the rest of your wardrobe (and perhaps you had better let me know), your dreadful blue shirt is mended.
Affectionately,
Mary
Since Mary’s letter had got through the blockade, Alistair had not minded at all about the millions of tons of material that hadn’t. The island was without fuel oil, electric bulbs, aspirin and margarine. His regiment was without new barrels for the artillery pieces. The magazines were down to five days’ worth of shells at the present rate of usage. Islanders and soldiers alike were beginning to eat dogs, starting with the kind without collars.
Alistair cared little. He roared with laughter when Simonson read out his own letters from his duplicitous girlfriends. The two captains aped the Knightsbridge voices together. The stews grew leaner, the meat giving way to bones that were used and reused until the marrow was gone and they leached more good than they gave.
Alistair didn’t mind. The bread became one eighth sawdust and then three sixteenths and then one fifth. He took it with a shrug. He felt a solidarity with the wood-boring insects, and cheered his men by performing impressions of the bugs. Soon they were all eating insects in any case. Alistair organized beetle hunts and commissioned an engraved trophy—the Cup of Plenty—for the man who collected the most bugs each day. Fruit could not be found at all. Men’s teeth worked loose. The local children in their black church trousers with their knees yellow from dust began to have the restless eyes of cardsharps or poets. Alistair sneaked them crackers in his pockets.
Mary,
I do not know what you have against my shirt. It will be fashionable again, one must simply take the long view.
It is inconvenient that I cannot rush home to London to thank you in person, but the oddest thing has happened. The Axis, who disapprove of sentimentality, have encircled Malta with the greatest concentration of warplanes and shipping ever seen, in order to prevent me from coming to see you. I expect they are doing the same sort of thing at your end? I suppose we must be flattered.
Please do your worst with my wardrobe. In return I shall make good such treasures as you may condemn to my care. As a conservator I am trained to repair all kinds of damage invisibly. Expect me at around five past the end of the war. My shirt will have come in to its own by then, I assure you.
Warmly,
Alistair
Alistair could not lose his smile, though the bombers were wicked and rapacious. Sometimes there was only an hour in each day for the civilians to swarm up from the shelters, to throw out the night soil, to queue for kerosene, and to take in the new ridges of rubble where the ageless streets had stood. Then the bombers came again and everyone fled back underground. The surface became foreign, the underworld familiar.
Sometimes Alistair was caught in a raid and he had to go to ground with the islanders. In the neolithic burial chambers where the old bones had been pushed to one side, in the Roman catacombs reconsecrated with miniatures of the Virgin, in the cold and dripping new tunnels gouged deep in the yellow rock, the fathers of the crammed-together families met his eyes while the walls shook. The children whimpered and the mothers rocked them, and Alistair joined them to pray: “Heart of Jesus, heart of Mary, make the bombs fall in the sea or in the fields.”
Alistair,
I cannot imagine what you are moaning about—a blockade by the enemy is nothing. Think of what I go through in Pimlico, entirely encircled by the inferior types of Chelsea and Belgravia. It is hell.
There is opportunity here for your restorative talents, if you have the heart for it. You should report to me at your earliest convenience. In uniform, for heaven’s sake, as you clearly cannot be trusted to dress yourself.
Insightfully,
Mary
Whenever the airmail made it through, Alistair forgot the hunger. At all other times he was obsessed with it. One early morning he put the jar of Tom’s blackberry jam into the bright slit of light from the arrow loop in his room. The aperture commanded a field of fire across the harbor approaches. Conversely, it drew in the full brightness of the rising sun and fired it through the jam jar. The color rose with the sun, from venous to arterial. Every tiny pip, suspended in its matrix, cast a black light of shadow.
Sharpness flooded his mouth. How far had he carried this jar? How many different tents and barracks and forts had he shared with it? Once he had hoped to eat it with Tom at war’s end; now he hoped only to take it to Tom’s grave. Surely he wouldn’t crack now. And yet his mind, unsolicited, came up with endless helpful reasons why it would be sensible to open the jar.
These mornings were the hardest, just after waking, when one splashed the well water on one’s face and drank a bitter yellow glass of it to fill the stomach. The water tasted of Malta itself, ancient and recessive, steeped in cordite and blood. The stone was porous, the hunger insatiable. Alistair put his hands to the jar and began to twist the lid. He stopped himself, and picked up a pencil instead.
Mary,
As usual, you are delusional. The uniform is far worse than the civilian wardrobe—even mine. This you would see if you were not blinded by the sheer glamor of this war. One sports a Sam Browne belt (which I am sure you would carry off better than I) and a cap with a polished leather peak. If it were not for the legitimizing effect of guns, enemy, etc., then the outfit would suggest nothing more nor less than the presence, within the psyche of the wearer, of perversion of the most florid stripe. Your handwriting conveys the same to me, by the way.