Today was the worst it had been. In the bloodied light the men sweated and swore as the dust storm screamed above the moat. The parched earth would not submit to shovels and required to be loosened with picks before the lumps could be put into sacks and smashed against the stone walls of the fort. Only then did the stuff resemble soil. And when the precious seed potatoes were planted in their shallow drills and irrigated with the foul water from the kitchens and with the men’s own urine, the moisture was baked out instantly. It was difficult to believe that a crop would sprout from terra cotta.
With his rotten hand Alistair could offer no help. He made himself as useful as he could, bringing water from man to man and finding errands on which to send the weaker ones to give them some reprieve. A little before five, the men unearthed something. When Alistair saw a deep opening he called them off straight away and sent them back sixty feet.
The picks had broken through into a cavity, and the danger was the possibility of unexploded ordnance. The opening was around three feet square, and Alistair tiptoed to the edge. Lying flat, he looked over the lip of the hole and waited for his eyes to adapt. He could smell his hand, even with the wind.
The base of the hole became visible, and it wasn’t deep. He lowered himself in. His feet touched bottom while his head and shoulders were still above ground level. He motioned for the men to wait where they were, then ducked down out of the wind. He waited for the bile to sink back in his throat. His head pounded. Out of sight of the men, he allowed himself to close his eyes and recover for a moment.
He lit a match. Bones shone. The pit was small, five feet long by four broad. The bones were human, three skeletons aligned east-west with their feet toward sunset. They had neither skulls nor hands. Alistair was crouching on ribs that cracked under his shoes.
It was the fourth such pit they had found in the moat. There were no artefacts this time, nothing by which a layman might date the bones. In any case the story didn’t change. The island had been contested so many times, and the ground was so impenetrably rocky, that one did not have to dig for long in any patch of workable earth to learn what had happened to all the garrisons before one’s own.
He closed his eyes again. How nice it would be to lie down in these bones, and quietly die.
He struck another match. These men had got off rather lightly. With any luck they had lost their heads before their hands. In another pit, a week earlier, they had found a skeleton with every long bone broken and the rusty flakes of nails driven through the spine. Anyone might have done it—Malta was eight thousand years of nails. It was nothing one wanted the men to think about while they waited for the enemy’s paratroopers to arrive.
Alistair put his head and shoulders back out into the wind, gathered the last of his strength, and hoisted himself up on his good arm. He went over to the men and stood them down. He watched them disperse into dust, bent against the wind. Every bump of their spines was visible.
He kept Briggs back. The two of them said a few words over the remains, ran bayonets across some of the moat’s retaining sandbags, and filled up the burial pit with sand. When they were done it was after six and Alistair was exhausted. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He hauled his headache up to his room and took the bandage off his hand. It oozed yellow poison. He boiled water on his Primus, salted it, let it cool, and cleaned the wound.
Through the rifle port,the sun was setting. The scream of the wind fell slightly. He lit a lamp, reducing the wick so that it burned as little kerosene as possible. He propped the painting against the wall. Its gilt frame shone in the close glow of the lantern. The figures were best in such confidential light. He was so tired that he fell asleep sitting up. When he woke he found himself reaching out to the painting with his wounded hand, in fragile light as the kerosene exhausted itself. He stared at the dying hand before him, and for a moment he wondered which poor chap’s it was.
April, 1941
PALMER BROUGHT MORPHINE IN
a brown glass bottle with a pipette built in to the stopper. Mary thought it ingenious. Everything about the tincture delighted her—that its smell was soberly medical, that a few drops on the tongue were a remedy for feelings, and that Palmer seemed able to procure it without fuss. On her return from hospital he had taken to appearing at three-hourly intervals with the pewter tray—not the silver, since her father was still away at the constituency. From the tray he would set down the brown bottle and a glass of iced water, on pewter coasters backed with green felt, together with fruits in a porcelain bowl.
Palmer would then dematerialize, leaving Mary to dispense the morphine at her convenience. This was proper, since it placed the stuff in the category of remedies, which were taken in private, and not of tonics, cocktails, or pick-me-ups, which were mixed to order and then taken while the butler hovered in case the blend was found to want celery salt, or bitters. The little bowl of fruit was appropriate too, since fruit was something—just like morphine—that one could easily take or leave.
Mary thought Palmer so painstakingly humane that she felt unable to disturb his sleep by ringing for him at three in the morning when she awoke in a sweat from nightmares that wouldn’t release her. Instead she sat up in bed with the covers pulled tight, wide-eyed while hallucinations of her dead children scratched away at the inside of the wardrobe doors. Kenneth Cox whispered behind the fire screen, behind the cheval mirror, behind her head so that she had to keep looking around.
It was a horribly long time until Palmer came in at seven with the tray, and then it was difficult to wait while he opened the curtains and laid out the newspaper and unfolded the newly issued day. Only when he vanished could she fall on the morphine and squeeze the red rubber bulb to draw up the seven trembling drops that the doctor had prescribed, and the further ten drops by which the doctor had underestimated things.
Mary lay back on the bed and dissolved into the immaculate morning.
At nine, finding her fingers still too relaxed for fine work, she needed her mother’s help to dress.
“You will want to quit that stuff as soon as you can,” said her mother, buttoning Mary’s blouse. “I don’t know what you plan to do with the day, but I cannot see it involving successful interactions with objects or persons.”
“You know the morphine is only till my wound is healed.”
Her mother picked up the brush and began on Mary’s hair. “It has been a whole month, darling. If you had cut something actually off, one might not begrudge you the paregoric. But you are a North, Mary. We don’t go south over flesh wounds.”
“The doctor says I shall have a limp.”
“Then live the rest of your life seated, if you must, but please do it sober.”
Mary stared out of the window, bracing her head against the tug of the hairbrush. She watched the freshly laundered clouds dissipate and resolve. The eye was an extraordinary instrument. How mysterious that it could be brought to bear on that tiny, distant pigeon—there—and then refocused in an instant on an object that existed only in memory. She watched herself at the same window, aged five, sucking on an orange boiled sweet, popping it out of her mouth from time to time to check how much remained and to peer at the slowly resolving city through the translucent glass of the candy.
“Mary!” Her mother set down the hairbrush with a bang. “I won’t have you go to pieces like this. Tell me your plan for the day, and I shall expect an update over supper. Why don’t you write to that man of yours?”
“To Alistair? Oh no. I haven’t written to him since I was hurt.”
“Why ever not? The poor thing must be frantic.’
“I no longer enjoy any happiness I have taken from Hilda. I hope Alistair will understand.”
“But you were so serious about him!”
Mary tried to bring her mother’s face into focus. “You have always insisted that I am not a serious person.”
“Then won’t you go for a walk, at least? Take an umbrella for the showers, and call on Hilda.’
“Hilda will be sleeping. We work nights, as you know.”
“Enough of this ‘we.’ You are not to go back to the ambulances. If you’d only listened to me . . .”
‘Then I’d be Mrs. Henry Hunter-Hall by now, in Gloucestershire, berating the keeper for displaying poachers’ heads on the railings.”
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe and Thrupp?”
“I should rather die.”
“You nearly did.”
“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.”
“Well I blame you for getting in their way. There are a dozen ways of serving, for a young woman of your abilities, that are safer and more beneficial to the cause. Do you think less of your father, for example, that he serves in the House rather than in the street?”
“Of course not. But I let the War Office decide how I was to serve, and they made me a schoolteacher. Everything else has followed from that.”
Her mother looked away. “All the other mothers wrote letters to Whitehall, of course. But at your father’s level one must be so careful about the exercise of influence. I feel awful about it now. I never imagined the War Office would be so obtuse as to assign you to the ordinary lottery.”
Mary kissed her cheek. “I really don’t mind in the least.”
“Because you are intoxicated, darling. But I mind, very much. What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?”
“But I am happy. Isn’t that what matters?”
“You aren’t ready to make your own choices. Look where it’s got you.”
“Where has it got me? Here I sit, in the very same room as you.”
“And yet you are miles away. It kills me to see you so dissolute.”
“You kill me, Mother. You hate my choices but make none of your own. We tiptoe on our carpets, deferring some imagined joy to a hoped-for day when Father will do some good for people. And in the meantime we do not live among people at all. We swim in aspic.”
The quick April clouds sent white and gray shades through the room.
“Your father was my choice. You were my delight. You may despise my life for its smallness—it may seem as nothing to you—but please do not think it is nothing to me. And the smaller it becomes, the more frightening I find it, because all that is left is so dear.”
Her mother had tears in her eyes, but Mary could not feel a thing.
April, 1941
MARY WALKED TO THE
Lyceum, limping on her left leg. The craters in the Strand were a bore, but the wags had put up signs beside the deepest:
GRAND CANYON
, and
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE
. London slipped by with no trouble, parting its late-morning crowds around her. It smelled of all the smokes promiscuously: cigarette, pipe, locomotive, house coal, and roof joist. At the theater the huge portico was pocked by shrapnel but otherwise unharmed. The manager told her that Zachary was out, but Mary went down to the basement anyway, since she supposed he could not stop her. He would hardly lay hands on her.
Underground, the empty dance floor was sticky with sweat and beer. The electric bulbs—their array much degraded—interfered with the fraying light of the morphine. She had a small jolt of feeling, but it didn’t have to last. She picked her way between the unmatched tables and chairs. The basement was deserted but there were children’s voices coming from the bar on the far side. She made her way over.
The bar was of rough wood and everywhere reinforced, a certain amount of dancing upon it being inevitable. In their racks the glasses were of the indestructible variety. She missed the lightness of things—the jeu d’esprit in which the stuff of the world had once been made as finely as possible, in anticipation of forces falling within a mannered range. She put down her bag and dug out a bottle of morphine. She took a dozen drops and lit a cigarette, listening to the children’s voices. She peered over the bar top.
“Can’t a person get any service around here?”
Zachary’s head emerged over the counter.
He gave her a cautious look. “Are you angry?”
“Not at all. Did you get my letter?”
He shook his head. “I thought you hated me.”
“Should I? You probably saved my life.”
A colored girl’s head appeared over the bar. She was seven if Mary had to guess, with gapped teeth and a minor squint. “I’m Molly.”
“I know,” said Mary.
“How?”
“Because you just told me.”
Molly grinned. “Do you want to wobble my tooth?”
“Thank you, I should love to.”
It was a premolar in the lower jaw and it did have a good wobble to it. It was immensely satisfying to nudge it to and fro.
Sound the air-raid warning,
thought Mary.
We are losing our milk city
. Molly chattered away. Mary gathered that she had lost her parents, and that the minstrels were supporting her and Zachary. Both children seemed to accept this as natural.
“How many ration books do you have between you?” said Mary. “Really? None at all?”
“We eat down here,” said Zachary.
“What, exactly? You’re both awfully thin.”
“Biscuits. Bread. Whatever they’re selling.”
“Really? People come in here and take money from children for food?”
“And milk and sweets.”
“When was the last time you ate eggs, meat, or fruit?”
Molly’s lip began to tremble. “Are we in trouble?”
“Only from scurvy.”
She grabbed each of them by an arm and marched them up to the alleyway. The children blinked and screwed up their eyes against the light. Zachary had on a stained white shirt and a black bow tie. He needed seven kinds of haircut.
“You mustn’t tell Molly I can’t read and write,” he whispered.
Mary looked over at her. The girl wore a purple dress with white bows. She was staring at the sky as if it might be ordered away.
“Would she mind?” said Mary.
“I told her I was clever. You know—so she’d stay.”