“Bully for you. So?”
“So, will you think less of me if I leave the same way?”
“I’d be furious if you didn’t.”
Alistair hesitated. “Then I believe I will take up your kind offer.”
“Very sensible. The food on this island really isn’t as advertised.”
Alistair made to shake Simonson’s hand. His right arm surprised him again by not being there, and the lurch almost toppled him. Simonson held him steady.
“I shall pick you up at midnight,” he said. “Do try not to fall off the floor in the meantime.”
—
They left the fort on foot, under extravagant stars. A raid came in after they went, and they made their way southwest while the flashes sent their shadows flickering before them on the road. It was five miles to the airstrip at Luqa, and they said nothing on the way. Though they walked together they were distant. Alistair supposed this was the only possible end for a war: when men and women, who had thronged together to join it, made their way home alone.
On the airstrip the Wellington was already running its engines. An orderly hurried across the field to meet them. Alistair felt sick.
“Well,” said Simonson, “goodbye.”
They shook hands, with the left.
“Goodbye,” said Alistair. “I can’t even begin to—”
“Then don’t. Don’t begin.”
“I shall miss you, Douglas.”
Simonson wiped his eyes. “Yes, well, let’s just hope the enemy does.”
They embraced. The orderly helped Alistair up the steps and into the belly of the aircraft. They put him in the companionway, forward of the rear gunner, on top of the mound of mailbags. They loaned him a sheepskin coat and told him not to go anywhere the airplane wasn’t going. The engine noise swelled, the airframe shuddered over the uneven runway, and Malta dropped away into the night.
Alistair lay back on the sacks. As soon as the aircraft door closed, the war was over. The hot, thyme-scented air of Malta was sealed outside. In here in the cold, with the smell of sacking and oil, London was already close. They would land at Gibraltar, and decant him into a convoy for England. There would be children and women and food, and clothes that weren’t all brown. Alistair slept until fifty miles from Gibraltar, when the pilot put the airplane down on the sea.
Alistair came awake in a frenzy of shouting and spray. The incredible deceleration shunted him and all the mailbags up to the navigator’s position. Water rose through the rips in the canvas skin of the fuselage. They all got out through the astro hatch.
The five of them who had survived the ditching clung to two small rubber rafts. On a warm and glassy sea, they watched as the engine fire that had downed them extinguished itself with a prolonged hissing. A plume of steam rose in the moonlight, and the aircraft sank by the nose. After that it was quiet.
It was a long, chilly predawn, drifting on a flat silver sea beneath a flat silver sky, the weld between the two watertight and seamless. For hours nothing happened and there was nothing to be done. Then, as the sun rose huge and bloody, a breeze got up from the west. The wind blackened the wide red band that the rising sun made on the water.
There was not enough room for them all on the little yellow rafts so they took turns, two men at a time, to have fifteen minutes out of the water. Alistair was given half an hour, his missing arm making it more tiring to tread water.
He got his shoes off and let them sink. It occurred to him that this might be the farthest point offshore at which a British Army officer had ever lost a pair of the standard-issue brogues. They could add it to the crimes on his charge sheet.
By nine the sun began to contribute a little warmth, but the wind was increasing. For the men on the rafts the motion was sickening, and for the men in the water it was hard to hold on. For Alistair, with only one hand, it was a struggle. From time to time he choked on salt water when he couldn’t keep his mouth high enough. The others helped him where they could, but they were tiring too.
In his next turn on one of the rafts, a gust came and he toppled into the water. This time he went several feet under, and if he managed to kick back up it was only because the navigator swam down to help. On the surface he gasped, and only just managed to cling on.
He tried not to imagine the odds now. As his strength failed, little things began to amuse him. He thought of the great chain of consequence that had brought him to here, at the end, bobbing in a vast empty sea with four strangers. After everything, a simple engine fire had brought them down. It had happened with no enemy help. Perhaps there was a tiny victory, in wartime, in not being killed by the war. He laughed, and could not understand why the others looked at him so soberly.
At noon the wind died down and the wave tops sparkled. They all took their clothes off and let them sink. Alistair drifted in and out of sleep. He would come to, again and again, with his arm hooked through the encircling rope of the raft. Each time he wondered where he was. When the sun set, he didn’t notice. He woke up as usual, shivering violently, but this time it was dark. Lightning blazed above. Around him the men spoke in soft voices.
“When we get to Brighton Pier I think we should just tie up and have fish and chips, don’t you?”
“A pint of beer with mine.”
“Tom?” said Alistair. “Is that you?”
No one replied. The lightning gave them the coldest eyes, he thought.
Between the peals of thunder he heard voices shouting. He strained to hear. Men were calling his name, but he could not tell what they wanted. He called back but they didn’t hear. Their voices resolved into individual shouts that he recognized. He thought it might be his men, needing orders.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “Just hold on!”
They called louder, and he felt the terror in their voices. He shouted to the men to hold on to the rubber raft with him, if they could, and to pull themselves up out of the sea. He couldn’t see them but he heard their voices, and he comforted them and begged them to pull themselves aboard.
There was no moon and there were no stars. He yelled out that he was sorry, and after shouting for a long time he noticed that Duggan was clinging to the raft beside him. Alistair was glad, since Duggan would help him now. Duggan would help his men too, and Alistair closed his eyes tight and drifted into sleep.
In his sleep a deeper roar sounded beneath the surging of the waves. The roar increased in volume and broke into his dreams until he came awake with Duggan shaking his shoulder. “Come on, Huh . . . Heath, look luh . . . luh . . . lively!”
Alistair looked, through eyes blinded by salt. Searchlights were coming, over the sea. They came from the same place as the roaring. The lights turned the black sea silver. Spray gleamed, visible whenever the little rafts climbed to the top of a wave, then disappearing from sight in the troughs. The roaring sound grew enormous.
His men began calling to him again, and he watched their gray backs plunging all around, and he called out to them as they changed from men to dolphins and back to men again in the shifting beam of the searchlights. Nothing stayed still. The sea heaved, voices yelled all around him, and Alistair felt an immeasurable sadness for his men, to be lost in such a lonely place, so far from the kindness of sight. He murmured the words he had used at so many burial details.
Comfort us again now after the time that Thou hast plagued us: and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity
. Spray filled his mouth and he choked. He lost his grip on the raft and he was alone in the sea, naked and sinking.
Under the waves there were still the lights, cold and holy, cutting the surface above. Simonson was sinking with him. They watched the lights together. Mary was there too, and Tom, and the enemy airman, and Briggs, and all the men Alistair had lost. Everyone was restored. As the lights and the roaring noise faded, they all sank together through the warm and ageless sea.
Duggan took his hand. “Come on Huh . . . Heath. Let’s get you huh . . . home.”
September, 1941
IT WAS SIX WEEKS
since Mary had finally written to Alistair again, and a month since she had received a reply from his commanding officer, a Major Simonson. Alistair was missing in action over the sea, presumed killed. The major conveyed his regrets and wished her to know that Captain Heath had been a courageous officer who had spoken of her in the gladdest terms.
Morphine helped. It threw sorrow over the wall, into London where everyone’s tragedies multiplied. One could leave it out there for the time being, in the city of stopped clocks, pending the day when.
Mary took to walking. Her leg was improving, though the limp returned if she went too far. She liked to rest on the steps of the National Gallery and look down on Trafalgar Square. It had been months now since the last serious air raid. The square was full of courting couples. How they laughed! As if the blackened world were new already. Every sight was agreeable to them, every diversion gay. Mary had not remembered that there was so much entertainment in watching pigeons squabble in the fountains.
She still thought that Alistair might have survived. The authorities might presume a man killed, but that was the authorities for you. To presume was always vulgar, while life was sometimes gracious. In the meantime she watched the lovers in Trafalgar Square, so as not to forget how it was done. In the bright square the couples clung, continually adjusting their grip. Now their fingers entwined, now their arms encircled the other’s waist as if life was not at all on their side, as if it might place the tip of its lever into any distance they allowed to open up between them. Watching them, Mary supposed the odds were against her. It was lovers who trusted luck least.
She marveled at the ease with which the young women moved. She watched them laugh and flush. They were all hope and helium, lovely to watch. Two years ago it had been her.
When it got too much, she walked down to the Embankment and sat on the granite wall. She ran her fingers over the iron dolphins that swam around the lampposts. Beneath her the brown water churned with all that was lost, and today she had no more morphine. It had been harder and harder to come by, and now it was gone. As the last of it wore off, she realized that she had no idea how to get more.
One often saw bodies at low tide, on the mud spits by the pontoons of Waterloo Bridge. Whether they were long dead and only now surrendered by the mud, or whether they were the newly despairing, Mary couldn’t tell. Bodies didn’t lie cleanly on the ground, the way they did in the cinema. In real life they appeared not to have been strewn, but sown. The dead were filthy, half buried, sometimes barely distinguishable from the mud or the rubble they lay in. One didn’t understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one’s hands and face and clothes clean. The world’s surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.
Above the mud spits, the lovers never looked down at the dead. Mary watched them clinging tight, their gaze on the horizon. It was a rule that lovers looked east toward the sea. She made herself look that way too.
A boat was unloading onto the Embankment steps—for Parliament, the longshoremen were saying. A case broke open and there were oranges, the first she had seen in months. They rolled across the gray granite and bounced down the mud-brown steps. They splashed into the brown river and sank from sight and bobbed up again, so vivid that she gasped. Tears came to her eyes because she understood how drab the world had become, how gray-brown, how close to fading entirely. She put her hands to her mouth and watched the oranges floating upstream on the tide. They were so . . . so . . .
orange
.
A confusion crept up on her. The waves rose and fell. The oranges were lost from sight. Was Alistair dead, while life continued? It was too startling. She could not remember whether she had received the letter from Major Simonson, or whether she had dreamed it. One dreamed so many things. Morphine was utterly convincing, that was the trouble—while life carried on blithely as if it had no competition in the business of conviction, and in consequence seemed less real. And meanwhile here were all these lovers, legions of them, strolling on Waterloo Bridge in the hot September sun. Was it possible that she was not numbered among them? The confusion grew worse until it was terror. Mary covered her eyes.
A golden retriever put its paws on the wall where she sat, and licked her face. Mary looked up to find it nose to nose with her. The dog was hopelessly high on life, as if it had taken forty-five times the recommended dose. It inclined its head, blinked at her, and trembled with unguarded joy.
“Hello you,” said Mary.
A man appeared—tall, uniformed, RAF. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why, what have you done?” said Mary, producing by instinct a small grin.
The man laughed. “The dog, silly. Oh look here, are you all right?”
“It’s nothing. Please don’t worry. I’ll be fine in just a moment.”
“But you’re upset. Can I do anything? Can I stand you a cup of tea?”
Mary stared up at the man. Of course he was ablaze with consolations. But when she opened her mouth to say something in her usual vein, Mary simply couldn’t. His looks made her ache, his kindness left her miserable. She felt his negative image, the absence a man left.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, just go.”
“But you’re upset,” he said again, his head inclined to the same angle the dog had adopted, as if all degrees of upset might very simply be cured—perhaps by throwing a stick.
How nice it would be to link arms with him—to go to a café.
If only I weren’t dead,
she thought.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and fled.
Her limp was worse, and pains shot through her body. Several times she became confused once more and had to stop. It had started raining without her noticing, and now the blacked-out night crept up on her too. Music rose from the dancing cellars. The swing beat boomed and a hot steam of exhaled smoke and body vapors rose through the air vents and grilles, as if the city were formed from the magma of such rhythms, cooled to a provisional solidity by the sober English rain.