Mary was drunk enough to touch Hilda’s scars. “What’s this on them? Healing cream?”
“It’s foundation, damn you.”
Mary drew her hand back. “I’m sorry.”
“Not that it does any good. I could wear a carnival mask and the scars would still show through.”
“And so? Damn these spivs and idlers. A million better men will come home from the war, and they shan’t want a girl who sat it out. When Simonson looks at your scars, he’ll see someone.”
“I’m afraid he won’t want to look. That he shan’t want to be reminded.”
Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. “What sort of a man do you want anyway?”
“Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees.”
“Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win—”
“Oh, I think we’ll win, don’t you? Now that the Americans are all-in?”
“Yes, but there’ll be such a mess to sort out. Not just all the rebuilding. We’ll have to put society back together, in some better configuration.”
Hilda snorted.
“What?” said Mary.
“Well, we want such different things from men. You earnestly want someone who will help you reform society.”
Mary smiled. “Whereas you . . . ?”
“. . . just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.”
Mary looked out over the tables, each white linen world orbiting the great central chandelier of the lounge, each world encircled in turn by its moons of women and men, laughing and drinking, occulting and eclipsing. How rudderless one was, in truth. How governed by unmastered forces.
Hilda touched her hand. “I haven’t upset you, have I?”
“Not at all,” said Mary.
But now her own heart faltered. For these long months she had held on to the idea of love so fiercely that she had not considered a daunting possibility: that she didn’t love Alistair after all—that his great merit was in having known her only before she fell apart, while her great cowardice was not to have admitted to him that she was diminished. She wasn’t the girl who had once walked in bombs as if they were drizzle. She had lost her exemption from the ordinary, and as soon as he realized it, he wouldn’t love her either.
She twisted her hands in her lap. How well did they know each other, after all? She and Alistair had never had the civilian progression into love by small and reversible steps, by increments of dancing and dinner in which joy was imperceptibly solemnized. All they had had was an air raid, and a moment at Waterloo Station, and two pounds by weight of aerogrammes that might one day be discovered, in a suitcase, in some attic being converted to a flat, and flung into a waste cart with old books and cups.
“But you look so glum,” said Hilda.
“Don’t be silly.”
“You’re getting cold feet, aren’t you?”
“It’s just . . . I mean what if—oh Hilda, I can barely remember his face.”
“You’re panicking, you silly fruit.”
“Do you think?”
“He’s a little late, that’s all it is, and you have altar nerves. I’ll bet Alistair’s just the same: he’ll be in a pub around the corner, getting up some Dutch courage. Breathe—that’s it! Take a really good deep breath.”
Mary felt a little better. Drinks came, magnifying the effect.
“Now listen,” said Hilda, licking gin from the end of her cocktail straw and jabbing it in Mary’s direction. “What you need is to take out his photo.”
Mary laughed. “I shan’t sit here mooning over him.”
“You know the trouble?” said Hilda, rummaging in Mary’s bag for her. “Your mother bred all the sense out of you. Now look,” she said, slapping the brownish vignette of Alistair down among the ash and the coasters. “Look at that and tell me you’re not in love.”
How many times Mary had stared at Alistair’s photograph. Once it had provoked a simple gladness.
“ ‘Oh, I don’t know,” said Mary. “What would you have me say?”
“That he is beautiful. That you love him. Only that.”
“But it’s been so long, and I’m such a mess. I hardly remember—”
“Then think: what was the spark? The hour you looked into those eyes and thought:
I want no one else
? God knows, I can remember.”
Mary stared at Alistair’s portrait. It didn’t seem kind to tell Hilda that it hadn’t been his eyes at all, but his back. She’d known with certainty that she needed him only when he had turned away from her on the platform at Waterloo. How her heart had dropped—as if there were no end to falling. When the hour had come for the war to take him away, that had been the first and last moment she had known without doubt that she loved him.
One knew how one felt only when things ended. And yet here was the world of white tables, insisting on beginnings. And here was Alistair now, with a footman throwing open the door of the lounge. Here was Alistair, tall and gaunt, the chandelier showering him with light. Here he was in his uniform, smiling and unsteady, his right sleeve empty and pinned. Here was Alistair, meeting her eye.
Mary stood, knocking over her drink. Gin sluiced over the tablecloth and deepened the red plush of the carpet.
“Alistair,” she said, so overcome that she forgot to embrace him and instead offered her hand to shake. It was ridiculous—and even worse since she offered her right, which he had to take with his left.
“Hello, Mary.”
They disengaged. He raised and then dropped his good arm, helplessly. “Sorry I’m late. There were Germans.”
Mary managed a laugh; Alistair too.
“Hello Alistair,” said Hilda. “Gin all right with you?”
“Gin? Fine. Hello, Hilda, how are you?”
“Back in a jiffy,” said Hilda, giving them the table.
“Her poor face . . .” said Alistair as Hilda curved to the ladies’ room.
“Shrapnel,” said Mary.
Gin came, and Alistair took a sip. He grimaced and widened his eyes.
“Nice?” said Mary.
“I’d almost forgotten what we were fighting for. And you only look more beautiful.”
“You’re very kind. But it’s the war, I’m afraid. I’m so much older.”
Alistair gave her a look so tender that she thought she might dissolve. The two of them might be all right, she realized. She must make more effort to take it slowly this time, that was all. Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.
“You haven’t missed the weather,” she said. “It’s mostly rained since you left.”
Alistair took in the Ritz’s lounge—the laughter, the crystals of light that flattered the crowd. He said, “I thought I wouldn’t make it back to all this. I was sinking by the time the Navy pulled us out. I was going down and there was this great roaring noise, which was the sound of the rescue launch’s engines, but I thought it was the end. They had to pump my chest.”
The words struggled to connect, and Mary found herself already saying, “And of course it snowed a lot in January.”
Hilda appeared back at the table, all purpose and powder. “Well,” she said, “I shall leave you lovebirds to it.”
Mary took her arm. “You mustn’t go.”
Mistaking her terror, Hilda kissed her on both cheeks. “Don’t be silly, I’ll be fine. I shall call at the garret tomorrow to catch up on all the news.” She gave Mary a look of tipsy significance. “But I shan’t arrive before noon.”
“Oh Hilda, you really don’t need to—”
“Nonsense. Now be good, you two, and if you can’t be good, be a warning to others.”
She was gone with a wave of the fingers, weaving between the tables. A waiter dimmed the chandelier. The pianist took a break.
“In Malta it was mostly sunny,” said Alistair. “But there could be a terrible wind.”
“I was so desperate when I heard you were missing,” said Mary at the same time.
Their hands, a foot apart on the tablecloth, could not seem to make the junction.
The pianist sat back down and played “La Campanella.” More drinks came. Alistair packed his pipe—not making too bad a fist of it with one hand, Mary thought. A waiter arrived to light it from a cut-glass lamp. The staff at the Ritz had the quality of apologizing with a murmur for each of their perfect actions. They smelled of nothing and had faces that made no demands on the eye or on the heart. They melted into shade, not allowing themselves to be silhouetted against the chandelier. They eluded cognition entirely, like sorcerers, or fathers. At the tables all around them the guests chattered away as if life were not on the meter, while the waiters took away ash.
“I think I should warn you—” said Mary.
“I ought to let you know—” said Alistair.
“You go,” said Mary.
“Please, you first.”
Someone dimmed the chandelier further, until it seemed to cast a light that was darker than its absence. The high notes scattered from the piano. They glittered in that thin register where one heard the strings and hammers.
“What were you going to say?” said Alistair.
“Oh, it was nothing. You?”
“Only that . . . oh, it can wait.”
Drinks came. The pianist played some nocturnes of Chopin. Black-coated waiters appeared out of the black background to light Mary’s cigarettes. One had only to think of fire and fire came, as if the incendiary thought scorched the air. One had only to need a drink, and the pull of the need itself caused the drink to arrive on a heavy tray in a glass that had been handled with white cotton. It might carry on all night, Mary supposed: this matching of an equal and opposite solution to every resolvable human need—done with this exquisite precision that extended to the fullest extremity of the possible and therefore only made one ache all the more despairingly with doubts that could never be soothed by lackeys. It was the perfect antithesis of the war, this torment of solicitude. How strange, that the struggle and its absence should leave one equally afraid.
“Mary, are you quite all right?” Alistair had his hand on her arm.
“Thank you, darling, I am fine.”
And she would be fine, of course: she would make conversation when the air seemed the right shape for it, and she would laugh when laughter seemed a better fit. It was nice that the drinks kept coming, since the glow they gave was terrific.
He took his hand away. “What would you like us to do now?”
“Well, they do a nice dinner here—although it’s getting rather late—or we could go to one of the cafés on Haymarket, or if you’re not hungry we might even still make the cinema.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I suppose what I meant was, what would you like now, for us?”
Mary gripped the table. The room revolved around the chandelier. Their white planet spun through the plush black smoky space.
“I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “I’m ahead of myself. Ignore me—this is what I was like after France. That’s what I was trying to warn you about earlier on.”
“It’s all right. I’ve so looked forward to seeing you again. I thought I would know just what to do when you came. I’m sorry.”
He nodded and looked away, to the other tables where guests glowed in firmer orbits.
“On Malta, with the blockade, one doesn’t imagine that people live like this at home. It is hard to imagine how hungry everyone is on the island.”
“I can imagine it,” she said, feeling even as she said it what a foolish thing it was to blurt out.
He smiled kindly enough, but now she saw herself as he must. In the bright light of the chandelier, before he arrived, London’s circle had seemed quite equal to the earth’s equator. Now she saw the smallness of it. How vain she had been in her nest, feathering it with mirrors. She was a teacher nobody needed, a daughter whose parents despaired. And now here was Alistair, this man who had stood up to the enemy while she had been so proud of standing up to her mother. Did she really sit at this table, even now in her new feathered hat, wondering if she loved him?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
His face was pale with concern. “Whatever for?”
“Forgive me,” she said, standing abruptly so that the chair fell to the carpet. “Please, darling, forgive me . . .”
She fled into the blacked-out night, into the ruined city beyond the consolation of chandeliers.
For a moment Alistair thought to go after her, but he was afraid that he could not have understood the situation. There must be something monstrous about him that had made her run. He was even more ruined than he had thought.
He sat in his uniform at the empty table while a waiter righted the overturned chair without irritation or comment. The pianist played without interruption. Mary’s place was cleared: the glass and its coaster removed on an electroplate tray, the tablecloth swept of ash until there was no sign she had ever been there. How abruptly people were taken. His body grieved, while his thoughts struggled to recall how he had got there. He had carried her body all the way back to barracks, and collapsed unconscious in the guardhouse. No, that wasn’t it. He had not opened the jar she had given him, carrying it instead to war’s end.
No, that wasn’t it at all. He had loved her.
—
It had been the tiniest chance that he would still be sitting there, and when Mary saw him she cut corners between the other tables, not minding the diners’ indignation. When she appeared by Alistair, out of breath, it seemed to startle him. He looked up from a drink that couldn’t still have been his first.
“Mary?”
“This place,” she said. “It isn’t me. Think what you like of me, but I wanted to tell you that.”
He stood, needing the table for balance. “What place is more you?”
“I don’t have a place anymore.”
“Is there somewhere you might feel better, at least?”
“I like the river,” she said. “I went there, sometimes, when you were missing.”
“Should we go there now?”
“I don’t know. It’s late.”
He checked his watch. “What time do they switch the Thames off?”
“Are you furious at me?”
“No. I thought you were disappointed.”
A waiter had been hovering, uncertain whether to bring cognac or coats.
“What would you like to do?” Mary asked Alistair.
“I’ll walk, if you’d like to. We don’t have to go anywhere in particular.”