She felt alternately distraught and euphoric. Sometimes she stumbled, and at other moments it seemed to her that she moved with no effort, gliding left and right to let the umbrellas pass, one-two-three, waltzing on the pavement while the cellars swung beneath her. London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once—the urgent and the always—each in earshot of the other.
She realized, with a cold sweat, that she probably ought not to go back to the garret alone and without the benefit of morphine. It was the same feeling she’d had by the river: not that she might harm herself, but that she might not know the difference if she did.
It was queer the way things crept: the night, and these feelings. One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless. It was patient and subtle, gauging the heart’s output of light. Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous, the great clash of music in an endlessly accelerating rush: on and on and on.
She came to, the steam from the nightclubs rising around her, surprised to find her cigarette only half smoked. She felt a fear that was close to panic and hurried off again. She didn’t stop until she reached the Lyceum. The minstrel show was going on in the auditorium and she went in through the stage door from the alleyway.
In the basement it was quiet except for the laughter and applause from above. The children were sitting on the low raised stage where the band had played during the worst months of the bombing. The nightclub had gone back above ground now. Zachary was at an upright piano while Molly and Charles argued and Ruth, a new arrival, moped in a corner.
When Zachary saw her, he stopped playing. “What happened?”
“I’m quite all right,” she said, giving the children a bright smile. “I think I might just sit down for a moment.”
She woke hours later, wrapped in blankets. Her body was wet with sweat and wracked with unsparing pain. Molly was holding her hand. Zachary was kneeling beside her, laying a cloth on her forehead.
“You fainted,” Molly said.
She sat and looked around. Her joints were packed with hot glass.
“Oh . . .” she said. “Oh . . .”
Zachary turned to Molly. “Go off and play.”
After she did, Mary collected herself. “Zachary,” she said in her teaching voice, “would you find whoever handles these things among the players, and fetch me just one dose of morphine?” Then she added with perfect cunning: “Say it isn’t for me.”
But his face! As though she had asked him to murder someone. It was too bad that she had taught him geometry but no sense of proportion.
“Do go, won’t you? There must be some around here.”
“I can’t.”
“But it is perfectly simple. Just put your shoes on, and go!”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Have a cigarette instead.”
He took them from her bag and lit one for each of them. She didn’t try to forbid him and so, without fuss, he passed from her power. She almost laughed. He watched the glowing end as if it contained lost summers, then stubbed out the cigarette half smoked—not crushing it but rolling the point until it was extinguished, to keep for later. Mary smoked hers till it blistered her lip.
“Please?” she said again.
He lifted a strand of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. His “no” the louder for going unspoken. Her mood—which had cooled to a pale despair—now boiling over again into furious irritation.
“After everything I have done for you! You act the man but you are an ungrateful child. I might have known your sort would never come right.”
He shrugged.
“But you are incorrigible!” she said, unable to stop a miserable grin curling at the corners of her mouth. “You are a lazy, unappreciative nigger who will not lift a finger to help.”
He said nothing.
She raised a warning hand. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m from a good family and if it weren’t for you I’d be with them now. I wish I’d never come looking for you. I wish I’d never come to this nasty jigaboo club.”
Zachary didn’t change his expression at all. The light seemed to be dimming and she did not know if they had any candles. She did not know if candles were still available. She was not convinced that light was still manufactured.
Her anger was gone. She did not remember ever being angry. There was only a feeling of dread: of the darkness finding its way. And here was the boy. She shivered in her blankets as his eyes became Alistair’s. She moaned and turned away.
Now, finally, the full gaze of the war came upon her. Her mind was fragments, each loud with its voices. She fought to keep one image of herself alive at the center. She was rushing across town with a willing heart, to a point marked with an X. She was wearing her alpine sweater. Yes, that was it. But war had been declared, and it was thrilling and then it was terrible. Life was all the heavier for starting with a lightness of heart.
“You mustn’t have any more morphine,” said Zachary.
Her eyes snapped open and she stared at him, wondering how it was possible that he was still here, unchanged, when she had gripped the blankets and shut her eyes tight through the terror of eternity.
“What?” she whispered.
“No more.”
“Just a little, don’t you see? Just to take the edge off.”
“No.”
“Please . . .”
“No.”
“You’re cruel because you don’t yet understand,” she said, and closed her eyes.
She slept, and when she woke her mind was clear. Alistair had arrived. She sat up, her heart soaring. He was just as she had last seen him, on the platform at Waterloo. He cupped her face in his hands and she let herself be kissed. Orange sparks floated on the night. The cold air of the basement made her shiver, and she held him for his warmth. Oh, the slow dances they used to play, back when needles could still be found for the gramophones. His eyes were electric bulbs, and as she stared back into them she realized that she was awake, and sitting alone.
“Oh . . .” she whispered, disintegrating again.
When she awoke she was in her blankets, shaking monotonously in the dim light of the bulbs. Zachary was at her side.
“Thank you for coming back. I’m so very sorry for what I said.”
Zachary produced something from his pocket. “I didn’t have the money. The manager says you can owe him.”
Just looking at the syrette of morphine flooded her with relief. She had forgotten how to be alive, that was all, and now she remembered the trick of it. She stretched out her hand. “Thank you.”
Zachary held out the syrette, balled in his fist. She watched his hand with rapt attention, the smooth brown skin and pink quicks. “Please . . .”
“Remember how you always said no, when I asked for a cigarette?”
“Don’t be like that. It wouldn’t have been appropriate.”
“This isn’t appropriate for you.”
She made herself smile. “No, darling. It’s only medicine. Like aspirin.”
“Aspirin didn’t call me a nigger.”
She looked from his hand to his face. “Please . . .”
“You can have it if you want. But if you do, then don’t come back here. It’s not like we can’t live without you.”
“It’s not
as if
.”
‘It’s not as if we can’t live without you telling us it’s ‘as if.’ ”
He held his hand out, his grip seeming to loosen. She gasped. She needed the syrette more than she had ever needed anything.
“Do you want it?” said Zachary.
“No, thank you,” said Mary, and tried to smile, and burst into tears.
—
All through that day and night Zachary watched as she lay between wakefulness and sleep. Once she sat up and told Poppy Brown not to eat the blackboard chalk. She shouted at Kenneth Cox for never sitting still. Around noon she spoke in French, then fell asleep. Later there was a long, muttered conversation. She whispered that she was sorry, over and over. Zachary left her bedside and went to see what was the matter with the other children. Ruth was tearful, and Charles and Molly weren’t helping. Zachary got her to come and sit with Mary. He warmed water on a primus stove and had Ruth wash Mary’s face and hands while she lay, half conscious. Ruth still wept.
“What’s wrong?” said Zachary. “Is it because the others pick on you?”
She shook her head, her braids flailing.
“Are you hungry?”
Ruth shook her head again. He took her hand but she pushed him away. A roar of laughter came from the theater overhead. It must be the matinee already. He squeezed his temples to push away the exhaustion. He lit a cigarette and wished he knew what to say. He wished an older child would come to the Lyceum, so he wouldn’t have to be in charge. He wished someone would come who didn’t need looking after.
“You like sweets?” he said. “I could get you some.”
Ruth shrugged and said nothing.
“What about that doll you had? You want me to fetch your dolly?”
Ruth only crumpled again. Zachary supposed he ought to know what to say, but he could find no comfort in himself to transmit to her. It was just as the players said: it was a war, and they were Negroes, and even their side wasn’t on their side. All they had was themselves: nineteen minstrels, nine musicians and four stray children, besieged in a city besieged. If he’d still had his father he might have felt strong about it—proud, even. The players were kind to him, but however close they drew, he felt that he didn’t belong.
His father had wanted more for him than minstrelsy, and now that his father was gone he felt no ties to it. Life held him in this place, that was all, like a scream trapped in a jar. There wasn’t even a grave he could visit, a fixed place to start his own life from. So long as his father was lost, he was lost with him. All he could do was hug Ruth and tell her everything would be all right. It was the same thing the government posters were claiming.
When he went back to Mary, she was awake.
“Zachary . . . can you get me something?”
His chest went tight. He knew she was going to want morphine.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so hungry.”
He brought her coffee, bread and margarine. He played piano
for her. In the evening the fever came again and she talked for hours to a man named Alistair. She argued with her mother, sometimes angrily, sometimes tearful and pleading. When her fever finally broke, she slept. He brought the other children over, and they took turns to watch her through the night.
When morning came and Mary still slept peacefully, Zachary smoothed her hair on the pillow. He stood and stretched away the night’s cramps. Then he ate all the biscuits he could find, played some piano, injected the syrette of morphine into his shoulder out of pure curiosity, and went up from the basement into the Strand. He laughed out loud while the great rebuildable city glowed in the sunrise, and the old London stones in the rubble piles breathed in and out with a slow rhythm that seemed, without question, to swing.
December, 1941
AT DAWN RAIN BEAT
on the garret roof and leaked here and there in drips. Mary reached out a hand and tasted it. Now that the morphine was long gone from her system, the clarity of sensation was extraordinary. Things no longer shifted and warped. Until now she had never understood how much one could love this dignified stillness of still things.
There had been no major raids since May. It might all start again, of course—Mary found that she knew less of the war the longer it went on. Certainly it was still growing, drawing countries in, and when it reached sufficient size perhaps it would come back for London. The newspapers had stopped printing situation maps, which suggested that the picture was dispiriting. She kept her anxieties to those she could do something about. Zachary had still to learn his times tables beyond six. Charles must be encouraged not to use the geometry compass as a weapon. The war expanded and the world shrank to what one knew.
Memory retreated to its old boundaries and renounced its incursions into sight. Emotions submitted to the authority she had learned in childhood to exercise over them. Pleasant sensations she allowed their effervescence, dark thoughts she quarantined. Rain drove against the skylights and streamed down the panes in sheets. It was a steady and confident rain from a vast and somber sky that seemed installed for the duration.
A knock came in the early morning: the landlady, with the post. Mary thanked her and went back to bed to slit the envelopes open. The first was a begging letter from her old finishing school, inviting her to help a fresh batch of girls to—well, to finish, she supposed. The second was an aerogramme from Major Simonson.
Dear Miss North,
I am sorry to write again. I assume the Army has told you that Alistair is safe but I imagine it has exercised discretion in communicating the details.
Mary put the letter down on the blanket and stared at it. It was too early in the morning to cry, the day having not yet delivered enough venom to be expelled. She leaned back on the headboard and closed her eyes tight. Her fingers scratched at the sheets. It was as if her body wanted to burrow.
When it was finished, she sat for a while in a daze.
I do not know how things stand between you and I do not wish to pry, but I am informed that Alistair is forbidden from sending or receiving letters. I do not know if you have been made aware of this and I write to apprise you.
Following the loss of his arm in May, Alistair was to be invalided home but there were perhaps irregularities in the repatriation list. These came to light after Alistair reached Gibraltar, where he was taken by the Navy having been recovered when his aircraft ditched.
The upshot is that Alistair has been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for absence without leave. He is to serve this time in Gibraltar. I have tried to get the sentence set aside, emphasizing Alistair’s selfless record and his wound. My efforts have been unsuccessful, and I pray you will both forgive me. Though Alistair was under my command, it is as his friend that I write.