In her classroom on Hawley Street, Mary chalked an outline of Europe on the blackboard and marked Paris with an Eiffel Tower. She topped off the tower with a beret and tucked a little baguette under its arm, since that was the only way the thing ought to be drawn.
“Who can tell me who built the Eiffel Tower? Yes?”
“Was it Napoleon?” said Maud Babington.
Mary smiled. “Nearly.”
Betty Oates was waving her hand in anguish, as if the answer’s continuing presence within her body were causing unbearable pain.
“Yes, Betty?’
“Gustave Eiffel!’
“Very good. The Eiffel Tower is made of ferrous metal and it has a magnetic field that generates romance within a mile of it.”
George Hampton, who was simple, became flustered at the word “romance.” He was fifteen and handsome. Young women dropped their purses in front of him to start a conversation, until they realized what was the matter. Now he pressed both palms to his temples and made the noise of a door hinge wanting oil.
Betty, ever diligent, was writing in her exercise book:
Eiffel Tower.
Magnetic field.
Romance < 1 mile
. George was still agitated. Poppy Brown, the mongol, climbed down from her desk and shuffled over to his place. She took his hands by the wrists and clapped them together until George forgot what had upset him. He wiggled his fingers, which to his great delight responded with pleasing undulant motions. “Pop-pop-pop,” he said, forming an accidental spit bubble with every bilabial. Poppy, who was five, clambered back up to her seat and stared at the blackboard with her slanted brown eyes that squinted outward, her bottom teeth protuberant over the upper lip.
Mary said, “Thank you, Poppy.”
Poppy pointed at the blackboard—her hand had a thumb and five fingers—and said, “That?”
“Is the Eiffel Tower, darling.”
Poppy made the shape of it with two steepled index fingers, then stuck one up each nostril.
“Don’t do that, please.”
Poppy withdrew her fingers and inspected a strand of mucous that had followed them out, pea green and fabulous. She ate it.
“Ewww!” said Kenneth Cox. “That! Is! Dis! Gusting!”
“Nevertheless,” said Mary, “it is not yet rationed, and I don’t suppose we must blame Poppy for making the most of it.”
The class settled. “All right, children. Some of you have heard the news about Paris, and I daresay you are worried.”
Zachary said, “What’s happened in Paris?”
“The Germans have arrived there.” She made her tone disapproving, as if the Germans had arrived at an inconvenient moment, or with too much luggage.
She was glad Zachary had spoken up. Naturally he was timid, after everything that had happened. If she could get him to put up his hand for one question a day, it was a small victory.
She drew a swastika on the blackboard beside her Eiffel Tower. “Who can tell me what this nasty symbol is?”
Thomas Essom, the cripple, gripped the push rims of his wheelchair. “Swastika,” he whispered.
“It’s all right, you know. You won’t drop dead just from saying the word.”
Thomas tried again. “Swastika,” he said, hardly louder.
He had been sent with another London school on a train to the West Country. They had wheeled him in to the village hall where the evacuees were being chosen. He had waited all night. No one had wanted a polio boy, twelve years old and pimpled. They had not wanted him in the next village either, and finally his mother had gone out to bring him home.
It had been this way for half her class: the countryside had not wanted them. The others had been brought back to London simply because their parents missed them, and this too was an affliction—an oedema of sentiment or a hypertrophy of the heart—unpatriotic in a way that could not be formally censured. This was the situation of Maud, Betty and Kenneth. Only Beryl Waldorf, the beauty, fell outside the pattern. She had returned a month ago and not spoken since. She stared out of the window and hugged her arms tight around her. Something had been off—the parents had sensed it in her letters. The countryside had liked her too much.
These eight, then, were Mary’s class so far. They were London’s remainder, the residual air in its lungs.
She said, “Well done, Thomas.” His lip trembled and he looked down at his desk. Children blamed themselves for what had happened to them. This was why she took pains, in this lesson every Friday, to give them the news of the war. At least she could set out before them, with chalk and modest redaction, the great currents that had washed them up here.
On the blackboard she marked the countries that, for now, belonged to the enemy. She was careful to make the swastikas small in relation to the other things she drew: a skier with a flowing scarf in Norway, a windmill in Holland. She loathed the way the newspapers printed maps with the stark Nazi symbol on a field of plain white, as if Hitler had sent armies of erasers. Better to crowd the swastikas in, to have them jostle for space. She drew them deliberately crooked. Her swastikas were degenerates that leaned at sickly angles and resembled one another vaguely, the offspring of first cousins who had married against the family’s advice.
Finally she drew Britain, being generous with the width of the English Channel and giving the British Isles three times the area on the blackboard that they merited. She thought it unfair to expect children to understand that it was possible to resist, from an island the size of her hand, a tyranny that stretched the whole width of the blackboard from Brest to Białystok.
“And so you see, the enemy has moved into France, but that, you may be perfectly sure, is as far as he will come. Who can tell me why that is?”
Betty had her hand up again, but Mary wasn’t buying. “What do you think, Zachary?”
His eyes came back into focus. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“You mustn’t be.”
He sighed. “Sorry.”
She knelt by his desk. “Anything in the Germans’ way? Any water?”
His eyes brightened. “Oh, the sea. The Channel.”
She smiled. “You see? It’s fine to raise your hand and say these things.”
“I thought it was something difficult.”
“You can trust a dunce like me, you know. If it was hard I wouldn’t know the answer myself, and I shouldn’t ask in case you showed me up.”
He held her eyes, his chin up for once. She hoped it was not too much to ask, that he should trust her. But then again it was not she who had been starved and stoned out of her evacuation village. It was not she who had needed a week in the Royal Free Hospital, with bed rest and vitamin shots, to recover from a trip to the countryside.
She stood to address the class again. “And if they do somehow cross the Channel, we’ll put up a ferocious resistance and they’ll never get inland.”
The inscrutable looks children gave when they understood everything or nothing. In all likelihood they were simply tired. Mary decided to call it a day. She wound the Columbia gramophone that Tom had loaned her, and put Thomas in charge of choosing the discs. It was not officially recommended, an afternoon of light jazz and dance tunes—but neither was it explicitly stated that one ought to bore one’s class to death on a Friday afternoon.
Thomas had turned out to be a handy gramophone operator. He had brought some recordings from home—Maurice Chevalier and Cole Porter—and since the children had been good all week she allowed those whom the mood took to dance. While the music played she opened the heavy hymnal in which the class had pressed summer flowers. The children who wanted to do collage came and took some. The others danced to the gramophone or went out to the corridor for hopscotch, which was another thing Mary permitted on a Friday afternoon to any child who could prove beyond reasonable doubt that the war had not been their idea.
Only Zachary sat alone at his desk, eating the paste he should have been sticking flowers with.
“Zachary, is there nothing you won’t eat?”
His thoughtful chewing suggested he had taken her question under advisement.
“How are things at home?”
He grinned pastily. “My father says I can go to the shop. He’s giving me a ha’penny and I already have a ha’penny, so I can get eight pear drops at eight for a penny, or four barley sweets at four a penny, I haven’t decided.”
It was a solemn choice. Mary nodded. “Supposing you bought two barley sweets, how many pear drops could you still buy?”
“Four,” said Zachary.
“And what is one, minus two quarters, times eight?”
He eyed her as if astonished by the cruelty. “Don’t.”
“But it is the exact same question, don’t you see? Mathematics is only life with the word ‘sweets’ removed.”
He shrugged. “Can I have a cigarette now?”
“Not until you are twelve.”
“But you said I could have one when I was eleven.”
“That was when you were ten. The rule is: no cigarettes until cigarettes are shorter than your fingers.”
He scowled. “I hope the Germans invade and shoot you.”
“Your new German teacher would be even stricter. They are famous for it, I’m afraid.”
“Will they come?” he said, with such unheralded anxiety that it caught her off guard. The music had stopped; Thomas was changing the disc.
Since all the children were listening, Mary laughed. “Of course not!”
But of course the Germans would come. The reality was there on the blackboard and in the ache of her forearm. It was all very well listening to patriotic speeches on the wireless. It wasn’t until one had used the whole board to map the great sweep of the Blitzkrieg that one realised how little extra chalk would extend the onslaught to London.
“What if they come at night?” said Zachary. “When nobody’s expecting?”
She shook her head. “We have whole ministries full of people whose only job is to expect. They have plans for if the moon goes square and plans for if the sun loses his trilby. Trust me, children, we will be ready.”
Zachary tried a smile. But of course the Gestapo would murder him, after the Germans won. London would hold, and fight—it wouldn’t be like Paris. There would be a siege, with horrifying hunger. The pigeons would be eaten, and then the rats, using trapping techniques that would be disseminated in illustrated pamphlets, and finally when the pigeons and the rats and the family pets were gone, the dead would be cannibalized in a systematic, orderly and documented fashion according to a protocol that doubtless already existed in the contingency files of one of the more tight-lipped ministries. Those left alive would be grateful for death by the time the city fell.
“So everything will be fine?” said Thomas.
“Yes, children, everything will be fine.”
Mary smiled for her class. But only the previous afternoon, over ice creams in Hyde Park, she and Hilda had discussed what they would do if the enemy came. The problem with an education was that one knew perfectly well what soldiers did when they sacked a refractory city—it was all there in Virgil and Gibbon.
“I should think the soldiers will ravish us until they are weary from it, don’t you?” said Hilda, yawning.
Mary licked her ice cream. “It might not be awfully fun.”
“Selfish, I know, but we probably ought to kill ourselves first.”
Mary said, “Is your ice cream melting, too?”
“Your problem is that you don’t eat it fast enough.”
“Because vanilla goes straight to the hips. It is well known.”
“Give me yours as well, then. I intend to become as fat as a bus—then the Germans will jolly well rape you first.”
“I thought you wanted us to do away with ourselves.”
Hilda gave a worried look. “I might not manage it.”
“I can shoot you with my father’s gun if you like. You know, the pretty one with the geese on the stock.”
“I’d hate for you to go to any trouble.”
“Oh no, really. It would be my absolute pleasure.”
“And you? I’d hate for you to be left out.”
“I can have Palmer shoot me. I’m sure he’ll have a way of doing it discreetly, so that one hardly notices.”
“Oh good—let’s have Palmer shoot both of us, shall we? I trust he has a Sunday firearm that he favors if your father is in residence, and a workaday gun if not?”
“I should be disappointed to find it were otherwise.”
“Have him shoot me in the heart, will you? This hair took all morning.”
“Consider him advised. But what shall we really do, if they come?”
Hilda dabbed at her ice cream. “It would have to be the river. Weigh ourselves down with stones and wade in.”
“Very well,” said Mary. “But nowhere downstream of Westminster.”
“Good god, no! One hopes for death, not mortification.”
Mary realized her class was looking up at her. She clapped her hands and smiled. “Come along, then! Shall we have another disc?”
Thomas started up the gramophone with a Charleston from the Piccadilly Players. It was Tom’s—one of the first discs he’d played her. Zachary went to the piano and played along. He found the key first time, showering playful notes on the off-beat. So long as a thing was not perfectly simple to learn, the boy was good at it. Searching for the key to him she had read his reports from the three years of schooling he’d had since arriving from America. In every one of them his teachers had written:
Must try harder
.
“Miss?” said Zachary, looking up from the keyboard. “Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what happened to you.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“Yes, but . . .
we
did it.”
A shrug, a few chords. Then: “Miss, would you like to dance?” He grinned, fingers spritzing the keyboard.
She laughed. “Oh good lord, stop it!”
He held out his left hand while his right still played along. “Well?”
On the disc the band sang “Sunny Skies.” She said, “I shouldn’t.’
“Why?”
“I mean, I don’t know if . . . we . . . should.”
He gave a quick smile and looked back down at the keyboard. “All right.”
Mary’s chest ached, which was unfair of it, since of course she was only being sensible. One oughtn’t to dance with the children—of any stripe—and especially not a colored one. Word would reach all of the parents by sundown, and there would be no end of unpleasantness.