Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(98)
“I’ve got Molly to look after.”
Fine, she thought, but would you mind awfully if I stuck around anyway?
At the Ritz her father’s name was good enough for a table, despite the unconcealed anguish of the staff from the headwaiter down. Mary and the children were seated for lunch as far from the other guests as the great dining room permitted, but even so a couple objected and required to be moved to a more distant table. Mary gave them a wave.
“They’re mine,” she explained loudly. “From different fathers, I think—one loses track.”
“Madam,” said the waiter, “I must ask you to consider our guests.”
“Waiter,” said Mary, “I must ask you to bring us Tamworth ham, cheeses of the mild sort, bread rolls, diced avocado pears with lemon so they don’t go brown, Cumberland sausages, hard-boiled eggs thinly sliced, scones with and without currants, fruit jams but please not peach, cocoa but not too hot, two large oranges, and two large apples in not too big slices.”
“Cox’s or Granny Smith, madam?” asked the waiter, recovering.
“As they come. Oh, and coffee. Oh, and an ashtray.”
“Very good. Will there be anything else?”
“That will depend,” said Mary, “on whether anyone is sick.”
“Very good, madam.”
The children watched with wide eyes as the waiter receded.
“Are we even allowed in here?” said Zachary.
“It’s this place that shouldn’t be allowed. Your only crime is hunger.”
Mary drank coffee, geeing up her third cup with a dozen drops of morphine. She managed half a scone. Her stomach was tight from sleeplessness, and the drug queered her appetite anyway. Across the dining room, a pianist was playing the “Blue Danube.” Mary watched the children eat everything on the table, beginning with what was nearest to them and finishing—when there was no more bread to spread it on—by licking the last of the butter from its dish. They passed it between them, without ceremony but with no imperfection of manners that Mary could detect. Zachary left a little extra for Molly, who was very small and frail. The girl laid her head on the perfect white tablecloth and fell asleep again, with her mouth open and her arms hanging vertically.
From their tables the other guests watched, over the tops of ironed newspapers. It would be minutes rather than hours, Mary realized, until the scene was relayed to Pimlico. With the morphine, it was possible to know that this was unfair on her mother, and also not to mind.
Zachary wiped his face on the tablecloth. “May I have a cigarette?”
“Not until you are thirteen. Tell me, do you like looking after Molly?”
“It’s all right.”
“You’re good with her.”
“I’m no good at anything.”
“Nonsense. You’re a fine musician and a champion paste eater.”
“Everyone should be able to read and write. You said it yourself.”
“I was wrong,” she said. “I have buried a man who could read, you see, killed by people who can write.”
She tried to light a cigarette, but the flame and the end of the cigarette wouldn’t converge. Zachary had to guide her wrist.
“Thank you,” he said.
“What for?”
“For coming to find me.”
She supposed she must have. And here she was, apparently, in the Ritz, with Negro orphans. Diners stared back at her, stiff with condemnation. And here she was—oh, here she still was, yes—even now, with no clear idea, just for the moment, of how one might have got here.
May, 1941
THE WIND PUSHED A raft of cloud over the island, and the bombing stopped for six days. Alistair rotated with the battery, back from the highlands to Fort St. Elmo. It was cooler by the sea, and the officers found a sharpness in themselves again. When the wind blew some Sicilian fishermen into Grand Harbour—their engine had thrown a piston—Alistair hatched a plan that Simonson liked enough to take to the lieutenant colonel.
The Sicilians were hauled up on the dock and invited in exchange for their lives to spit on a photograph of Mussolini. This done, they were treated to a feast. They had roast meats and fancy breads, a gramophone and brandy. The officers of the Royal Naval Dockyard, dressed in their parade-best uniforms and whistling airs from Gilbert and Sullivan, repaired the fishermen’s engine, not neglecting to fasten a portrait of the King to their cabin’s central bulkhead using star-headed brass screws that could not be undone except with a particular issue of Royal Navy screwdriver.
The work being finished and the wind falling calm, the combined brass bands of the various regiments defending Grand Harbour were assembled on the quayside in tropical dress, with folded blankets secreted beneath their tunics where their bellies ought to have been. They shouldered their tubas and played an extended medley of Vaughan Williams and Elgar while the fishermen were escorted back out through the harbor’s mine cordon by the polished mahogany launch of the Admiral of Her Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet Andrew Browne Cunningham, the First Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, flying the white ensign. Thus the enemy’s fishermen carried home the intelligence that the island was doing very much better than the enemy had imagined, and ought not to be invaded just yet.