She remembered him like that now: transported from cares, his cheeks damp from the mist and flushed for once with something other than embarrassment. Was it love that she felt? Or did she just find him sweet for not allowing them to become lost on Hampstead Heath and only discovered years later, with her mackintosh in tatters and his beard down to his knees?
Mary hurried on and tried to pick out the landmarks. The worst of it was that people were still high on the intrigue of the war, and prone to suspicion if you asked them for directions. Such people, and they were not always joking, would ask you who was the Prime Minister—as if no enemy spy could possibly speak the name without combusting.
How much better it would be to ask her: If you are one of us then how—hypothetically—would you know if the trembling physical feeling you have for a man, say, five years your senior, handsome without being a knockout, and from a slightly inferior social background to your own but not in such a way that it was necessarily a problem provided that you remembered to show him the right way to hold a sherry glass before he met your father—how would you know if that feeling was love?
The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover—after one was taken—that it hadn’t been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn’t love, and then to discover years later—old and unconsoled—that it had been. No: the worst thing—the worst, worst thing—was this having to decide.
She sighed, and turned left into Hawley Street. She hadn’t had a moment to really look at the school until now. It was a grimly masculine building, red bricks set off in three frugal bands by courses of hard London yellows. The windows rose from wide sills to Gothic arches; the gables were decked out with barge boards and topped with lanceolate finials. Mary thought these the most fun bits of the building: these spikes aimed skywards, impalers of trespassing angels.
She stepped from the gloom of the street into the dark of the school and used her cigarette lighter to find the switch. The bulbs came on down the corridor. Mary wrinkled her nose. There was a lot of dust, thin in the center of the corridor and deeper at the skirting boards where the draft had piled it into drifts. There were the tracks of gnawing creatures, the serpentine lines swept by their naked tails, and a crusting and crumbing of the dust where their urine had soaked and dried. All this dust, and the shuttered-school smell of inkwells and spitballs and apple cores gone rotten in desks. What could she do about it all, alone, even with soap flakes and an optimistic outlook and three days to go until Monday morning?
The quiet, too, was unsettling. Into this air multiplication tables had been recited, the changeless alphabet chanted, the four house songs sung in quadratic symmetry. The Lord’s Prayer had been intoned by impish voices with every imaginable variation and subversion. And now the unceasing hymn was struck dumb. If the war so far was a phony one, this silence was hostile and real.
She went from classroom to classroom, switching on the lights. She tried to brush off the solemn mood that was settling on her. Of course a school made one feel rather alone. The rows of desks in each room, the stacks of identical hymnals, the massed coat hooks lining the wall: the multiplicity of everything was bound to single one out.
She went first to the classroom—Kestrels Class—that had been hers in September. She realized it wouldn’t be suitable. It was robust enough, but it wasn’t close enough to a basement. She walked the corridors, opening doors until she found one that led down wooden stairs.
Belowground, the smell was older. She found superannuated atlases in tumbling piles, with the earth’s poles marked by whirlpools. There were the musty props of ancient school plays—Tuck’s staff, Banquo’s shroud, Peter Pan’s cap. A maypole lay askew, bound in its own ribbons. In the glow of her lighter’s flame the hoard stretched away into blackness. Fifty children could shelter down here if need be.
Mary knelt to sift the treasures. Here were cross-stitched samplers and moldering report cards with examination results for needlework and recitation. Here were handwriting exercises with passages dutifully copied:
At the door on summer evenings sat the little Hiawatha / Heard the whispering of the pine trees / Heard the lapping of the water
.
She felt five years old, and five hundred. Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy. She walked up into the corridor, trembling. The school was absolutely silent. How violent it was, this peace where children’s voices should be. The ache in her chest hardened to anger, until she shook with it.
Sparrows classroom was closest to the cellar. She gauged what needed to be done. The boards would have to come off the tall windows, for a start. If a raid came—well, that was what the cellar was for, but until then her classroom would be a place of light. And the dust would have to be swept, and the mustiness purged with vigorous airing. If a ladder and paint could be found then she would get the children to restore these walls to white.
This parquet floor would scrub up, these chairs would rediscover their élan after a once-around with screwdriver and sponge, and as for the desks with their intricate chronicle of graffiti, either they could be sanded bare, or the opinions of generations of pupils could be allowed to stand. Mary found that she didn’t much mind either way. Beyond the superficial errors of spelling there was little that she felt justified in correcting, after all, when she read the collective wisdom concerning Miss Vine.
At the front of the classroom the mice had got onto the teaching desk and eaten the carton away from the chalk, so that it lay splayed. They had eaten the bitter leather from the corners of the gym mats piled in the corner. They had taken the barren seeds from the beanbags used for throw-and-catch. They took what the war could give them.
Mary gathered the chalk and found a pot for it. She wrote her name on the blackboard:
Mary North
. Then, to see how it might look, she rubbed out “North” and wrote Tom’s surname, forming the letters slowly and carefully in the exemplary hand required for blackboard work. When her fingers gripped the chalk, the pink blood shrank from the knuckles so that something of chalk’s nature seemed to seep into her.
Mary Shaw
.
To see how it might sound, as she turned from the board she said brightly to the room: “Hello, class. My name is Mrs. Shaw.”
She lifted her hands to her mouth. Tom was standing in the doorway of the classroom. His efforts to disappear were to his credit, but unsupported by a pitiless physics that refused to let him vanish. He squirmed and tried to shrink behind the door, and gave up on that and instead pretended to have been whistling a tune. He gave up on that too, since if he really hadn’t heard what she had said, then here it was, inscribed on the blackboard in the Marion Richardson script that was favored for the modern and unambiguous manner in which the letters were formed.
You silly girl,
she thought.
If he has any sense he will never speak to you again.
And the worst thing about it, as she watched his resigned smile, was that she really did like him a lot. His awkwardness was gone, in this moment when it finally couldn’t matter anymore. There was something honest in his surrender to the situation. It was only now that she understood how difficult it must have been for him, to like her and to be petitioned by her at the same time. All he had needed was for her to understand that things should be taken carefully and slowly. She dropped her hands and mirrored his sad smile.
“Sorry,” she said.
He watched her in the half-light of the electric bulbs.
“No,” he said. “It’s I who should apologize, Mrs. Shaw—it seems that I am late to this class. Have you already taken the register?”
She hesitated, then beamed. “Oh! I mean . . . well, as it happens, you are in time. I was just about to do it.”
He gestured at the rows of desks. “So may I . . . ?”
“Yes . . . oh, yes, sit anywhere. No, actually—sit down here at the front where I can keep an eye on you.”
She invested her face with the appropriate severity. He took a desk in the front row. His knees came halfway to his chin when he sat in the tiny chair. He laughed. She frowned. “Settle down.”
From the drawer of the teacher’s desk she took a pencil and the register book, blew off the dust, and opened it to the first clean page. At the top she wrote:
Sparrows Class, Spring Term, 1940
. She wrote Tom’s name on the first ruled line.
“Tom Shaw?”
“Present.”
“Splendid,” she said, looking at his name on the clean page. “Well, you are my first.”
April, 1940
“I’M QUITE SURE YOU’RE
doing it wrong,” said Hilda, wincing as Mary dug the comb into her scalp.
“This preposterous hairdo is wrong. I’m following the instructions exactly.”
“Oh do give it here,” said Hilda, snatching American
Vogue
and jabbing at the illustration of Step 3. “See? It says to tease. And you are back-combing.”
“I am teasing.”
“You aren’t,” said Hilda. “And I should know.”
“Oh, do it yourself then, if you’re so good.”
Mary threw the comb onto Hilda’s dressing table, where it clattered against the china pigs she kept there. She lit a cigarette and flopped on the end of Hilda’s bed.
“All right,” said Hilda. “I’m sorry. Perhaps it just wants more lacquer.”
“I’ve used half the can already. It’s against nature.”
“You’re jealous I thought of it first.”
“Hardly, Hilda. What we see laid out in these instructions is not a hairdo. It is a folly.”
“Then it is a folly everyone’s wearing this season.”
“And therefore you suppose that officers will be attracted to it.”
“With all this hair spray, they’ll be lucky if they don’t become part of it.”
“You should carry emergency solvent, in case you need to unstick one.”
Hilda made a pleading face in the dressing-table mirror. “Don’t leave me half done like this. I look like Frankenstein’s mistress.”
“It’s an improvement.”
“Charming. Is this how you are with the children in your class?”
“Oh no, as Miss North I am sweetness and light. That’s why I have all this frustration to take out on you.”
“Have you any more pupils yet?”
“Still only four. One mongol, one cripple and two who barely speak.”
“He has done you proud, that man of yours.”
Mary stubbed out her cigarette. “It will take time. More will come once the parents realize that there isn’t to be any bombing.”
“Still, if it were me I shouldn’t bother. It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to, opening a school for the sake of four no-hopers.”
“That’s the difference between us. I want a better world, you want better hair.”
“Hardly as an end in itself. I want the hairdo so I can get a man in uniform.”
Mary sighed, stood, and picked up the comb again. Hilda smiled at her in the mirror, and Mary returned the favor. “Your face is not entirely dreadful to behold, you know,” she said, angling Hilda’s head. “You might almost pull off this look, in conditions of very low light.”
“Sadly your flaws as a friend would be visible in pitch dark.”
“You are indolent and asinine,” said Mary.
“You are obstinate and self satisfied,” said Hilda.
Mary worked as well as she could, segmenting the hair on the top of Hilda’s head into bands, front to back, and pushing each band in turn down to its roots with the comb until it developed sufficient body to bolster itself. It was rewarding work, what with gravity being such a bully and hair so plainly the underdog. Hilda’s scalp was warm and the air in her room pleasantly fogged with lacquer and cigarette smoke, while a fresh rain lashed the window and ran down the pane and caused Pimlico to warp and swim.
“And your mother?” said Hilda, after a while.
“Barely seen her in days. I had hoped to show her the school, now that I am no longer pretending, but she is too busy whoring for Father. He is set on becoming a Cabinet minister, and of course there are luncheons and functions.”
“I’d murder to have your mother. If mine has ambition then it is somewhere at the back of a drawer.”
“Yes but here is the war—don’t you see?—shaking everything up. Father’s world seems so small now. All those closed committees of men who were at school together. All the beaming wives competing. All of us daughters racing for husbands when the trap opens. Glossy fillies that we are, keeping dutifully in our lanes.”
Hilda fixed her in the mirror. “Just so long as you stay out of mine.”
“Careful, Hilda—remember who has the hairpins.”
“Well don’t come crying when you grow out of your little pauper.”
“Tom is hardly poor.”
“He lives in an attic, for pity’s sake. You told me so yourself.”
“Yes, but—”
“An
attic,
Mary. I’m sure you don’t love him at all. You only love the idea of your mother’s face when she meets him.”
Mary ignored her. She layered the bands of aerated hair, starting at the back and working toward the forehead to make a gratifying mound.
“It’s the same reason you write to that Negro,” said Hilda. “It’s to say to your mother, ‘Look at me!’ If I were you I would simply go to her lunches and dinners. Smash the teacups if you must. Kiss the Minister of Aircraft Production. But at least do it when your mother is jolly well watching.”
Mary fixed her with a pitying look. “I write to Zachary because he is a human being.”
“Is that what you told his father? He must have been impressed.”
Mary turned Hilda’s head left and right in the mirror, a little more sharply than was absolutely necessary. “I told him that he might consider bringing his child home. And that I could assure him of a school place, with a shelter in the event of any raid.”
“Did he look at you like this?” said Hilda, making a rubbery grimace and widening her eyes to make saucers of incomprehension.