It had been an impossible way to meet Tom’s parents for the first time. In the church, Mary hadn’t known her place. It had seemed presumptuous to sit with the family so she and Hilda had gone to the back. Tom’s mother had fetched them and brought them wordlessly to the first pew. All through the service Mary had looked straight ahead, at Tom’s coffin beneath its lilies, wondering where they were from.
“They are lovely flowers,” Mary had said at the end.
“I went over to Cheltenham for them,” said Tom’s mother.
Tom was dead, and lilies were available, and to Mary these things were equally incomprehensible.
They had walked out into flurries of snow. Four men, too old or infirm for the war, had lowered Tom’s coffin into the ground on short ropes reserved for the purpose. The vicar had said, “Death, where is thy sting?” There was a consensus that one couldn’t feel a thing.
Three hours later, on the train, her body was still taut with the cold and the unreleased emotion. Yawing on warped rails, their train approached London Bridge. On either side of the line a thousand buildings were blown out.
“What do you suppose you’ll do?” said Hilda.
“I must find Zachary, first of all.”
“And then what? Take him home to your mother? She’d be thrilled.”
“I’ve a responsibility to him.”
“You’ve nothing of the sort!”
“He was in my class and—”
“And nothing. You were ordered to teach that class grammar, not to adopt any survivors.”
“Now you’re just being horrid.”
“Only because you’re being ridiculous. Where would it end, if you went after him? You’re not his family, or even his species. You can’t give him a home—that’s his people’s job. And you shan’t tell me he doesn’t have people, because there were dozens and dozens at that theater, conveniently color-coded.”
“The Negroes aren’t all related, you know.”
Hilda paused, the idea seeming to strike her for the first time. “Oh, they might be different tribes, but I daresay they put down the spears in times like these.”
“At least I should check that someone is taking him in.”
“Then make your inquiries if you must. But swear you won’t promise that boy something you could never make good on. I know what a mule you can be when you get a notion in your head. You’d make the boy an exile from his people, and you a pariah among yours. It would be miserable for both of you.”
“You’re right, of course. And yet—”
“And yet nothing. You must think only of yourself, and what you want to do. If you don’t get on with your own life, you’ll be no use to others at all.”
“I think I’d like to teach again.”
Hilda gave an exasperated groan.
“It would make Tom glad,” said Mary.
“You shan’t live your life to make Tom glad.”
Mary lit a cigarette and watched the devastation roll by. These had been the city: these clubs and churches, these ordered landmarks. London had fitted her so perfectly that she had mistaken its shape for her own. Now each bomb was a breach in the carapace, laying bare the living nerve.
She said, “It’s easy to say.”
“Because it’s true,” said Hilda. “You must live on your terms.”
The loosened rails rattled as the train crept along the Embankment. Steam billowed over the gray river. On both banks, facades were down and buildings gaped. Mary had always supposed that she could endure if London could, but here the great old nautilus lay gasping and cracked at the throat of the Thames, at the place where sweet water met salt.
“Let’s go for lunch at Claridge’s,” said Hilda. “You need a good feed.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“But you really must eat. You’re thin as a harlot’s excuse.”
“I think I shall go for a walk.”
“Then at least take me along. You’re in no state to be on your own.”
Mary took her hand. “You’ve done more than enough. You’ve always been good to me, and I know I don’t make it easy.”
Hilda nodded. “You’re like a bad gundog. One can either put it down or make it the family pet.”
“I’m only pleased you’ve found a use for me.”
“Just don’t pee on my rugs. And promise you’ll consult me before you even think about teaching again.”
As the train came in to the platform they took their bags from the rack and disembarked. They embraced, and Hilda dissolved into steam. Once she was gone, Mary leaned into a corner for a while. No one interrupted her. Half the city wept into walls now.
Afterward, she stood for a while on the empty platform. She pulled her gloves on and herself together, and walked out into the streets.
Everywhere there was rubble. Bathtubs lay exposed, their yellow ducks icebound. Beds in which women had been conceived and born and then conceived in and labored in themselves—those brass theaters of involuntary dialogue—lay silent and bent, seesawing on bisected floors, weeping duck down into the street. The feathers swirled with the snow. It was too much for her—how easily she was discouraged now!—and she fled into a café and drank straw-colored tea. She wrote to the manager at the Lyceum, asking if Zachary’s whereabouts were known. When it was done and folded, the flat taste of the sealing gum lingered.
In the maps in the newspaper they brought her, the enemy’s swastikas were pressed up against the neighboring coasts—so close that one could look up from the page and almost smell the diesel and the sweat. In the Atlantic the U-boats completed the encirclement. On the inside pages of the paper were endless notices. London’s districts had been divided and subdivided as the lines of communication shrank. There were ten new rules if one lived here; twelve if one lived there. This was the place she had grown up in, whose singular law had recently applied from Bombay to Belize. Her great extrovertive city was besieged. Slowly the feeling returned that had come over her when she first took charge of her school. What one felt toward the enemy, finally, was fury.
She pushed the cold tea away and walked through the snow to Tom’s old office at the Education Authority. In the lobby she knocked the snow off her boots and told the receptionist that she wouldn’t leave until she was seen.
They let her up to see the new man, who was called Cooper. As he rose to greet her, he seemed to become blocked between his chair and the desk. He straightened ineffectually.
“Please,” said Mary. “No need to get up.”
He sank back down, apologizing with a vague gesture for what Mary took to be a bad back, or limited physical grace, or apathy.
Cooper was older than Tom—she put him in his mid-thirties. He was fair and slightly overweight. He had a mustache growing in. Behind him on the wall of the office was a small watercolor of Hampstead Heath that she had given to Tom in the summer. She had laughed until she gasped for breath as she watched Tom hang it there, one evening when his colleagues had all gone home. He had needed three nails and seven profanities. Afterward they had been quite indiscreet, and a great deal of paperwork had fallen from the desk to the floor. Tom had always kept his desk in such a mess.
Cooper saw her looking at the picture. “It’s Hampstead Heath.”
“Is it?” Mary caught herself saying, quite automatically.
How soon one became diminished. The man made a gesture that was imprecisely dismissive—whether of her or the heath or the watercolor, she couldn’t judge. “Dreadful, I’m afraid,” he said.
Mary felt a sadness as weary as his manner. Of course the poor man dismissed the painting. Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to. She sat, folded her gloves in her lap, and lit a cigarette. He clasped his hands on the immaculate desk and looked down at his cuffs, as though she might have asked his permission. There was an ashtray—Tom’s, the heavy blue glass with the ambiguous inclusion in the heart of it that Mary had always rather hoped was an eyeball. Since Cooper made a point of not sliding the ashtray across the desk toward her, she made a point of using the carpet.
She said, “I should like to be assigned a new school. My preference is for primary, but if the only vacancies are at secondary then I can teach French, Latin and composition, as it says in my file. I am available immediately.”
“Do you not think,” said Cooper after a moment, “that under the circumstances it might be better to wait a while before you go back to work?”
“Wait for what? For children to forget their times tables? For H’s to be dropped in great mounds?”
He humored her with a smile. “I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“But I am quite all right. I am unharmed and able to return to duty.”
There was a long silence. “Must I spell out the sensitivities?”
“I’d rather you gave me a job.’
Cooper wouldn’t return her smile. He stood—apparently it was not so hard after all—and walked across the office. With his back to her and his hands clasped behind it, he looked out at the snow.
“My predecessor was very young, and decided to reopen some schools. I’m afraid the excitement of promotion got the better of his judgement.”
Mary shook her head. “His duty was to provide school places.”
Cooper gave her the tone reserved for a child who had got the answer jolly nearly correct. “Our duty, since you use the word, is to send the message that London under the circumstances is not the right place for the young.”
“And yet there are children the countryside won’t take.”
“But I don’t make the policy, and the policy is one of full evacuation.”
“Then what are we to do with the crooked and the colored and the slow? Are we to let them rot, simply because it is not policy for them to exist?”
“If you must split hairs, it is policy that such children exist but it is not politic for them to be schooled here.”
“Does it not seem that what you say is monstrous?”
Cooper turned from the window. “What is monstrous is that seven children and their parents are dead because my predecessor saw fit to let you play the pretty schoolmarm while the grown-ups were using the city for war.”
Mary blinked once, twice, then recovered herself. She fixed the man with a slight arch of the eyebrow as she lit a new cigarette.
He returned her gaze unsteadily. “I suppose we both wish we could undo it.”
Her hands shook. “We were hardly doing ballet on the roof. We were underground, in the shelter. People are killed in shelters every day.”
“Well it won’t happen in any school of mine.”
“Apparently not, if neither will any teaching.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “You’re emotional because you were so caught up. You are charming and young, and I don’t hold what happened against you. The one who should have known better is my predecessor.”
“Tom was my lover. It is well known. Won’t you stop speaking as if we weren’t both aware?”
“I am trying to protect your feelings, and the name of your family.”
“You might best serve both by letting me teach again. There are hundreds of children in this district, you know full well. One sees them on every street, poking around in the rubble.”
“I’m afraid there’s no position for you.”
“I apologize for becoming emotional. Please let me teach again.”
“Take a break,” he said gently. “God knows, I would if I could. Get out of town for a few weeks, blow away the cobwebs.”
She turned her back on him. In the little watercolor she had given Tom, the light was yellow and frisky. If you went at that light with an egg whisk, you could work up a froth to stand a spoon in. London stretched away beyond the heath. The landmarks stood. They had been so firmly attached back then that the artist had had to paint the sky around them.
She went to the window. “What can I do to change your mind?”
He said nothing. She moved closer, letting her arm brush against his as she smoked. “We needn’t put this city back the way we found it, you know.”
He gave an amused look that turned into something more serious. “Look,” he said, “it is overdue lunch. Why don’t you and I go for a bite and discuss it?’ ”
She tilted her head up to his, giving him the full benefit of her eyes. For a moment she let him drown himself.
“No, thank you,” she said brightly. “I’m not at all hungry.”
He stared at her, coloring slowly. He seemed inclined to strike her, then turned abruptly and left her alone at the window. She heard him banging drawers in the desk, collecting his coat and hat from the peg, slamming the door behind him.
She turned from the window and went to stub out her cigarette. The small painting of Hampstead Heath hung in the gray light, in its golden frame. She let her hand linger, for a moment, on the cold blue glass of Tom’s ashtray. She turned it on its axis—twice, three times—then left it where it was.
“I miss you,” she said to the empty office.
January, 1941
THEY CALLED THE NEW
club the Joint. As if it weren’t a thing in itself but only a hinge between night and day. The bombers raised their tempo and the syncopated city matched the rhythm. When a raid interrupted the minstrel show now, the players rushed underground with the audience to join the big band that was already down there. They had cleared out the Lyceum’s great basement to make the club. There was a stage at one end, a bar at the other and alcoves in between where soldiers pushed their luck.
Zachary fetched drinks from the bar in exchange for coins and cigarettes. It was weeks since he’d last seen the sky. It suited him. If you couldn’t see the sky, it couldn’t see you. People patted him on the head when he fetched their drinks. They called him Baby Grand. Everyone was christened again now, sometimes two or three times, as if by this expedient every person might stay ahead of the war’s ability to call them by name.
No one cared if he drank, so he did. He slept under the bar and smoked like Bette Davis. He ate cocktail nuts, the glacé cherries from the bottoms of glasses—whatever he could get. Everyone was hungry. The new pianist discovered that if he waited a quaver of time after the beat and then hit down hard to give some heavy swing, then factory girls and airmen on leave could be made to dance even if they were weak from the rations.
Laying down drinks on the tables, Zachary picked up the gossip. Apparently so many souls were being lost every night that in the great mortuaries of Clerkenwell and Cheapside a dozen families would now claim any unrecognizable corpse as their cousin or mother or aunt. So now the morgue staff stripped the remains, tagged clothing and flesh with the same number, and had families identify the effects instead of the bodies. Zachary hadn’t been asked to identify a thing. Not a tie clip or a ring. He wondered if his father was in some grave, being mourned under a new name. He prayed for him under the old one.