“This dive still won’t get a gramophone,” Hilda said, tapping out a menthol cigarette. Alistair lit it for her. She cupped her hands around the lighter, holding his for a moment. It was not an unpleasant feeling. He watched her face as she drew against the flame. She was a warm, likable, undramatic girl. He had twenty-one hours left in the world.
“What kind of music do you like?” said Hilda, exhaling.
“Tell us about the war,” said Mary in the same moment, and then, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” said Hilda.
Alistair smiled from one to the other with modest neutrality. “I’m ashamed to admit I’m no expert on either. I’m afraid you’ll think me rather a bore.”
“Not at all,” said Hilda.
“Yes, rather,” said Mary at the same time.
She fixed Alistair with a look that was, he felt, principally comic. If there was a certain sharpness to it, the wine took the edge off. He took another sip.
“I like the big bands,” he said, struggling to name one. “Something with a bit of zip.”
“Oh, I
adore
the big bands,” said Hilda. “Bert Ambrose! Harry Roy!”
“Harry Roy,” said Alistair. “Now, there’s a man who knows music.”
He hoped Harry Roy was a bandleader and not a monkey mascot or a new kind of dance. Hilda seemed delighted, so it was probably all right. Her dimples were nice. He understood that he was seducing her, which it seemed would be achieved simply by remaining in the uniform of a captain in the Royal Artillery until such a time as it became appropriate to remove it.
“We only know what we read in the papers,” said Mary, lighting a cigarette.
Alistair’s nerves sparked when he looked at her. He hoped the jolt wasn’t visible in his eyes. How ordinary Hilda was, beside Mary—and how shabby his own need for warmth.
He took some more wine. “You probably all know more than I do, about the overall situation. I’m afraid they only tell us chaps what we need to know: come here, look lively, bunk up, dig in.”
“Tom tells me you fought the Germans in France,” said Mary.
He looked down at his glass. “Briefly, yes.”
“What was it like?”
In her face there was a simple anxiety that he could hardly bear. It made her so tender. He found he couldn’t speak.
“Darling . . .” said Tom, putting a hand on her arm.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.
“Oh no, that’s quite all right,” Alistair said quickly.
She blushed, and he realized that perhaps she was a little drunk too. He was a swine for making the moment awkward. He wondered what he could say: show a temperate reply that her question had not been out of place, and also to answer her honestly.
But what ought he to tell her? None of it was suitable to relate. The Germans had swooped on them in stiff airframes with bull whistles screaming. Under the hardened sky they had squared off the undulant plain with gray armor. They always held the direct line. They scorned roads that had wound for millennia. People and animals were spooked—the land had no natural resistance to the pure black method.
How could one speak of it over lunch? After the hard planes and the hard tanks had come hard men in hard formations, banging their black boots in adamant time. A terrible hardness was how it had seemed to Alistair: a preternatural hardness that ordinary men had fled from and exceptional men had dashed themselves against and been ground into the soft French mud, the perfectly regular imprint of the hard iron tracks making no distinction between corpse and clay. He saw his friends’ faces crushed and flattened. He saw Tom’s, and Hilda’s, and Mary’s faces crushed and flattened. Good god—he was gripping his wineglass. Good god.
He made himself take a breath. “The Germans were just well organized. The next time we tangle with them, we’ll be organized too.”
Mary said, “You’re just like my father.”
Alistair was relieved to move on. “And what does your father do?”
“He’s a politician,” said Mary, stubbing out her cigarette and holding his eye with an irony that she might be inviting him to share—he couldn’t tell.
“He’s MP for the Wensum Valley,” said Tom.
Alistair said, “Well then I’m sure you know more than I do about the war picture.”
Mary inspected her nails. “I’m afraid they only tell us girls what we need to know: come here, look lively, bunk up, dig in.”
Alistair laughed, and Mary flashed him a prankish grin. How quickly she could turn in conversation.
Hilda, who seemed slightly at sevens with the whole exchange, shook their third wine bottle and proclaimed it empty. She stood, slightly unsteadily and with a clattering of cutlery to the floor.
“Oh come on, you lot, let’s jilt this dump and go somewhere with music.”
Alistair took care of the bill—it was true what they said: you couldn’t take it with you—and then they were out in the hot blue Saturday afternoon, in Hyde Park, Mary and Tom up ahead, arm in arm, and he bringing up the rear with Hilda, who shrugged her cardigan down off her shoulders and smiled up at the sun with half-closed eyes.
“Isn’t this grand?” she said, taking his arm. “It was stuffy in there.”
“Yes,” he said. “Grand.”
“Don’t you love the feeling you get when the sun comes out in London?”
“Are all the questions this easy?”
She laughed and leaned her head on his shoulder as they walked. The feeling of her at his side was pleasant, and now that they were outside and the first overpowering blush of her perfume had mellowed, she smelled warm and rather nice. Up ahead, Mary in her summer dress and white straw hat threw her head back and laughed at something Tom had said. Alistair felt unbearable anguish.
They bought ices from a kiosk and ate them as they walked. Mary slipped along with the carefree, long-limbed swing of someone on whom the present hour was neither too tight nor too loose.
Hilda was saying, “Can’t you just tell straight away, sometimes, when a person is all right?”
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“And you’re noticing again, so we’re even.”
“Isn’t it fun to keep score?”
She poked him in the ribs. “See? Now you’re getting it.”
Over the streets, the barrage balloons bobbed nicely against a few small cotton-puff clouds. Hilda chatted happily. Wherever they were headed, Alistair guessed, it was likely to have wine.
The four of them wondered what they might do, since it was too early for dancing and too hot to keep strolling in the sun. A show would be the thing, but in theaterland nothing seemed to be beginning—it was four in the afternoon—and they bumped from place to place until Mary said they should go to the Lyceum. The minstrel troupe was playing there, as it had since forever, and she had a pupil, Zachary, whose father was a performer.
The hoardings had men in frock coats and hats, in blackface, cakewalking across the theater’s facade in their white spats and sticks. A fat white man in cork paint was calling the crowd in: “Come in dere, fine masters, you never seen such a show in all your life, you never heard such a fine music.”
“Must we?” said Tom. “The whole coons-with-canes thing?”
“Oh, but it’s done in a knowing way,” said Mary. “It’s a
clin d’oeil
.”
Tom looked to Alistair. “What do you say? It’s your leave, after all.”
Alistair, who had hardly been concentrating, understood that they were waiting on him. The caller, noticing the party’s hesitation, stepped up to them with an encircling, ushering gesture that made it seem rudeness not to let him escort them to the box office. His cork paint was unconvincing, a line of sunburned pink skin glistening between the blacking and his collar.
“Forget your cares for an hour,” he said, “as we transports you back through de magic of music an’ laughter to de peaceful world of de plantation, where dat good old darkie humor lifted spirits an’ lightened hearts.”
“Must you do that voice?” said Mary.
“Do let’s go in,” said Hilda. “It’ll be just like on the wireless.”
“Indeed it will be finer,” said the caller. “The BBC’s troupe ain’t got nothin’ on ours. Here you will hear ballads too bawdy for broadcast, airs too ’airy for the airwaves, an’ of course all of dis comes”—he addressed himself to the gentlemen of the party, and dropped the accent—“with your first drink on the house, from a selection of beers, wines and spirits that are not commonly available under the present circumstances.”
“Oh what the hell,” said Alistair.
“Oooh!” said Hilda, clapping her hands.
Tom gave them both a sardonic look.
“Oh Tom,” said Mary. “Must you spoil today?”
There was an edge in her voice that made Alistair look. He hadn’t noticed Tom spoiling anything, but perhaps he had lost the skill of noticing when days were spoiled by anything subtler than shrapnel. He wondered if another drink might help.
The theater was set out with tables in the stalls, and they took one close to the stage. It was agreeable down there, in front of the red velvet curtain, with the gilded columns of the proscenium catching warm glints from the curtain lights. Laughter from a dozen other tables rattled around, and above them conversation buzzed in the high circle.
Wine arrived just in time to stop everyone turning to gore. Another bottle followed, and the four of them relaxed in the soft pink glow of the table lamp. Alistair understood that his chair and Hilda’s must converge a little with every glass, as Tom’s and Mary’s were doing on the other side of the table, until without any particular moment having been marked they found themselves arranged as two couples. Hilda’s hand migrated to his knee, Alistair’s arm curled around her waist, and there was something sweet and attentive in the way they carefully ignored each other while their bodies achieved all of this on their own.
Instead they laughed especially hard at a joke Mary made, and brought fascinated interest to bear on a long anecdote that poor Tom was struggling to make go nowhere, until finally, as the house lights dimmed and all eyes turned to the stage, Hilda’s body was nestled against his. This thrilled and dismayed him at once. Through his uniform jacket Alistair could feel her quick heart. Its fluttering made him sad: such a tiny pump, the heart, and such an endless flood, life.
The audience fell silent and the curtain came up on darkness. Behind the stage a red spotlight made a thin sliver of light that rose until it became the uppermost part of a disc, and then a half circle, and then a whole circle rising over the stage. This was the sun, and as it rose it brightened from red to orange to white. The stage lights came up with it and illuminated the backdrop: a view out over London from the top of a hill, with spires gleaming and barrage balloons tethered above the sweep of the familiar city.
There was the Tower with its medieval walls, there St Paul’s aping Rome, and there St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the sober Greek temple impaled from beneath by that hysterical Georgian spire. Alistair brimmed with pleasure to see it spread out in the warm glow of the stage lights. Dear old London—the conflator of all centuries, the pigeon-feeding tramp wearing all of her clothes at once.
As the sun rose over the painted city, a chorus of blackface minstrels processed from the wings. A dozen came in from each side and arranged themselves in a semicircle open to the audience. In a whisper at first, rising in volume as the sun rose, they sang.
Bless this house, O Lord we pray,
Make it safe by night and day.
Whether it was the wine and the woman by his side, or the city he had missed, or the seventeen hours he had left, Alistair found himself overcome as the voices swelled.
Bless these walls so firm and stout,
Keeping want and trouble out.
After the hymn, a Negro made up as a white man took to the stage in top hat and tails and introduced himself as Mister Interlocutor.
“That’s him!” whispered Mary. “That’s Zachary’s father.”
The Interlocutor leaned in to the microphone. “In these times of threat and anxiety, when our enemy besets us and we are weighted down with cares, it does the heart good to remember old times, when life—though it was hard—was familiar, and the Negroes gathering together would lighten their heavy labors with song and with levity.”
One of the chorus men stepped forward, large crimson lips painted over his black face. “Well Mistah Interloculator, I wouldn’t be knowin’ about no leviditty, excuse my ignorimiddy.”
The audience laughed and applauded, and Alistair laughed with them. It was a kick, after the poignancy of the hymn.
“Ah, Mister Bones,” said the Interlocutor with affection. “I might have known it would be you.”
“Allus does seems to be me, Mistah Intercalculator, every time I check. Try as I might, I can’t seems to wake up looking like you.”
Everyone roared. Alistair lit Hilda’s cigarette and she snuggled a little closer.
“And tell me, Bones, what have you been up to lately?”
“Well, Mistah Innoculator, I have been out and about in de night.”
“In the night, Bones? Out?”
“Yes sir, why else do you suppose dey call it a blackout?”
Thump of a drum, crash of a cymbal. The audience cheered, the Interlocutor waved his cane like a baton and the whole chorus came forward to launch into an upbeat swing of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”
“Aren’t they marvelous?” said Hilda, close to Alistair’s ear.
“Tremendous,” said Alistair.
“How many of them do you suppose are actually colored?”
“I daresay that fellow Bones is, and at least half of the chaps in the chorus line. Hard to tell, under all that war paint.”
“Aren’t they marvelous?” said Hilda again, across the table.
“Terrific,” said Tom.
“Terrible,” said Mary, laughing. “I mean, don’t you think?”
“But it’s only a
clin d’oeil,
” said Tom. “Or at least that’s what you said.”
“I know, but the
lips,
darling. The . . .” She popped her eyes wide.
“Oh come on,” said Tom. “Actually it’s funnier than I thought.”
“But so humiliating! I’m sorry I dragged you all to see this.”