The Children of the King (26 page)

“I started screaming in reply. In the dark, in the panic, I wasn’t myself anymore. I felt as if I had no body, only a mind and a whirlwind of feeling. I wasn’t frightened. I was enraged. I was enraged at myself, because those people were right: I’d come to save them but I couldn’t do it, and now they would die. I was lowly, I was nothing, I’d imagined myself someone special yet all I was was a wretch who couldn’t even open a door. I yelled and yelled for help, and I hauled and hauled at the door, but it didn’t budge, and then a terrible thing happened: water seeped out past the bottom edge of the door. I noticed it instantly, as if I’d searched my whole life to see it. It sputtered out at first, then started to leak steadily. I wasn’t certain, but I guessed it meant the flooding was at least up to the shoulders of someone like the oak-man. I imagined children in that watery death-crawling darkness; I thought of you, Cecily, and you too, May. And I thought — and this shows how mad I must have been, to be thinking something like this at a time like that — of those two boys in the Tower, the princes. I saw, in my mind, all these children behind doors, and I wanted to scream, and perhaps I did. And a voice in my head started saying,
You’re not the first. You’re not the first who couldn’t open a door,
and although that could have been consoling, it wasn’t. I didn’t want to be another boy behind a locked door. I
had
to set these people free. I
could not
let this awful thing happen over and over again. I
could not
let wrongness and cruelty and greed and —
power
— win.”

He halted his telling and chewed his lip, as if the telling had got away from him and he had to reel the tale in. He looked at his uncle, smiled weakly. “That’s exactly what I thought:
I could not let power win
. As if power is an enemy with arms and eyes and legs, capable of carrying a gun or throwing a grenade — capable of bending a steel door until it jammed shut.
Get away from here, you wicked thing:
that’s what I wanted to say to power.
You bring nothing but despair, as if you utterly despise everyone, even the smallest and most innocent.
This is what I really thought, standing in a blown-up yard in the middle of the night, wrestling useless as a flea at a door while the people behind it drowned. Talking to power as if power could hear me and cared the least for what I had to say. I tell you, I was mad. I was insane. I had lost my mind.

“The water was leaking past the door in a wide thin river now. My shoes were wet, I left wet footprints on the metal when I kicked the door. I glanced up and saw some men at the end of the lane. I yelled to them but they didn’t see me. There was so much mess, so much smoke, so much noise. The oak-man was hollering, and pounding at the door, and even though I wasn’t listening to what he was saying, I also knew I would never stop hearing it.
Even when I am an old man,
I thought,
I will hear the sound of fists on closed doors.
And that thought was like a ton of bricks coming down on my shoulders. It made me stagger and fall over in the dust. And when I was lying there on the glass and concrete, I had another funny thought. I thought about those princes again, who’d died before they’d hardly lived. I thought about the Duke. I thought, The Duke was a king, but it was those boys who ruled him, and have ruled him for five hundred years, and will always rule him. I thought,
You think a child has no power, but you’re wrong.

“And so I stood up, and I took hold of the door, and I pulled against it as I had been doing all along — and it opened so easily that I fell again. It
threw
me aside, and I fell down on my behind, and water rushed out of the cellar, and so did the people. Seven people came running into the dark, three of them children still being carried high as if their parents couldn’t trust the grey air not to turn to black water. I couldn’t tell which was the oak-man. All of them were shadows, all of them were soaked to the skin. Not one stopped or looked about. They came out like animals from Noah’s ark, like souls rushing up from a grave. They were crying. They were screaming. They didn’t notice me. They just ran and ran, into the lane, into the night, into somewhere that wasn’t where they had been.”

Jeremy stopped; he seemed weary now. His dark eyes searched the pattern on the rug. “I wasn’t sure what to do then,” he sighed. “I lay in the muck, panting and looking at the sky, waiting for someone to find me, or cheer for me, or lift me up. But no one even saw me, and after a while I realised that no one had to. Something remarkable had happened, seven lives had been saved, three children would grow up, grow old — but that was already in the past. Other remarkable things had to happen now, a whole string of remarkable things, one after another until the war was won. I was small, and I’d only done one small thing, really: but still it was a mighty thing. Mightier than what power was doing, with its bombs and guns. It was something great. It was . . . enough.”

He looked at his audience, and smiled in the hesitant but certain way in which he would always smile, from this moment until the end of his long and well-lived life. Byron, stretched out on the carpets, waved his flag of tail.

There were things to be done: Jeremy wanted to return to school, he wanted to start readying himself for the future right away, he was happy to go abroad if his mother and father thought it necessary. It was high time Cecily and May were also sent to school — the village school would suffice for the time being, but if the war dragged on then Cecily, at least, must be sent somewhere more suited to a girl of her class and degree of laziness. Cecily’s shoulders slumped: it was typical that her brother should run away and throw the household into chaos, but that it should be she, an innocent party, who bore the severest punishment.

All this would be arranged over the days to follow: for now it was time for the children to take their baths and go to bed. “I’m very relieved to have you home.” Heloise smoothed her boy’s hair. “I’m going to try to forget this unpleasantness ever happened.” Jeremy said nothing, only smiled at her; but in his eyes was a pity that would never wear away.

Peregrine’s legs were clearly hurting him badly after the stress of the last few days, but he stood and offered his nephew his hand. “I’m glad to have you home,” he said, “but I’m also glad you went.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve caused you trouble, Uncle. But I had to go.”

“I know it,” said Peregrine.

The girls tailed their returned soldier up the everest of stairs. They followed him all the way to his bedroom, where new linen had been laid on the bed, and fresh pyjamas and slippers, a clean towel and a face-cloth were set out on the chair. The girls stopped in the doorway, jostling each other. “Jem,” said Cecily, “can we ask you something?”

“If you like.”

Cecily bumped May with her elbow. “Ask him.”

May went to speak, but hesitated; Jeremy looked at her. “What is it, May?”

The girl took a steadying breath and said, “When you were walking around the city, did you — see anyone strange? Maybe — feel anything strange?”

“Everything was strange. What do you mean?”

“Did anyone come near you, or speak to you? Two boys?”

“Two boys?” He frowned. “No. No one spoke to me. No one took any notice of me.”

“What about when you were trying to open the cellar door? Did you feel anything — helping you? A voice telling you to keep going, or some strange strength inside you — something that wasn’t you?”

Jeremy, sitting on the bed to unlace his shoes, paused. “Do you mean like God, or an angel?”

“Yes,” said May, “angels. That’s what I mean.”

Jeremy slipped the shoe from his foot, let it drop bluntly to the floor. He thought about the question for some moments, long enough to raise the expectations of the girls. Then he said, “No. I didn’t feel anything like God or angels. All I felt was anger. I was angry that things happen which shouldn’t happen. I was angry that
might equals right.
Because it doesn’t. It never does. And being angry gave me strength. That’s what told me to keep going. Not a heavenly thing — a human thing.”

“Hmm,” said May.

Cecily asked, “What did you do after the people ran from the cellar like animals out of the ark?”

Jeremy began work on the knotted lace of his other shoe. “I picked myself up. I dusted myself off. I should have stayed to help, I suppose, but somehow I knew I’d done everything I was meant to do and that if I stayed I would just be getting under the rescuers’ feet. So I started to walk. I was wet and dirty and worn out. It must have been close to midnight. The sirens were stopping and starting. The sky was still red, and the planes were still coming, but they weren’t near where I was anymore. I hadn’t had much to eat, and I suddenly started thinking about food. I thought about roast-beef sandwiches — you know how Mrs Potter always makes them for us, Cec, with the top slice of bread dunked in gravy.”

“Oh!” Cecily clapped her hands to her face.

“Suddenly roast-beef sandwiches were all I could think about. I was miles from home, but I started running, almost flying, as if the thought of a roast-beef sandwich was a magic carpet. I just swooped all the way home. It must have taken an hour, but it seemed like minutes. I wasn’t tired or puffed at all. In the blink of an eye, I was home.”

“Daddy.” Cecily whispered it between her fingers.

“The house looks exactly as it did when we left it. No bombs have fallen on the neighbourhood. The windows were still blacked, the streetlights were switched off. But there was a gap in the curtains of Father’s study, and a line of light was shining through it. I knew he’d left that gap in the curtains, that light burning, for me.”

With muffled joy Cecily said, “Ah!”

“I knocked on the door, and Mr Mills let me in. We didn’t say much to each other, he said he would fetch some tea and ask Mrs Potter about the sandwich. It felt odd to be home again. Everything was the same, but I felt like a visitor seeing things for the first time. Everything felt as if it had been placed there for me to admire, but that if I touched it I would discover it was all made of cardboard, like props built for the stage.”

Cecily frowned; she didn’t want May getting the impression she lived in a house decorated by cardboard.

“I went upstairs to Father’s study. I was nervous, I tell you. I knew I looked a mess. I knew I would be in strife. I’d been wilful and caused trouble, when everyone had enough to worry about. Fa might be interested to hear my story, he might even be proud of what I’d done: but I knew I was in for a talking-to, at the very least. So I was nervous, but also happy. I was looking forward to seeing him, and having him to myself for a while. We could talk seriously, like men, about my plans. About his work. About the war.”

He had untied and taken off his other shoe and now let it slide from his fingers to the floor, where it landed with a bump beside its twin.

“I knocked on the door, and there was no answer, so I turned the handle and walked in. I expected Father to be at his desk, wearing that expression he always has when we interrupt his work — very cross, but also very pleased, as if he’d been interrupted on the verge of some decision he didn’t want to make. So my face was turned to the desk as I walked into the room. And he wasn’t there — his chair was empty — papers and pens were there, and the typewriter and a coffee cup, and the chair was pushed away from the desk, and the lamp was burning — but Father wasn’t there. So I turned to leave, and that’s when I saw him, lying on the couch at the other end of the room. Stretched out in his socks and braces, sound asleep on the couch.”

“Daddy,” sighed Cecily. “Poor old Daddy.”

“Poor Daddy?” said her brother. “That is not what I thought. I thought,
Who are you? What are you doing there, asleep?
Bombs are dropping all over the city, houses are being blown to pieces, people are being buried alive. In battlefields across Europe men are holed up in darkness, listening to the enemy marching closer and closer. Men are shooting each other out of the sky, languishing in war camps, bleeding to death in no-man’s-land. Old people are huddled in train stations, children are hiding under kitchen tables listening to the scream of sirens and the whistle of bombs and wondering if it’s the last thing they’ll ever hear. Women are lifting their neighbours off the road and into morgue trucks. Men are climbing into aeroplanes that they know can’t fly faster than their enemy’s. All of it was happening as I stood there in the doorway. Yet here was Fa, asleep on his couch. Never going near a battlefield, never living among the rats and the wreckage. Never queuing for rations. Never laying out blankets on a platform. Never finding a baby orphaned in its cradle. Never writing a letter to a mother, telling her her son was dead. No. There he was, collar unbuttoned, sound asleep.”

“Jem,” said Cecily quietly.

He ignored her. “So that’s what I thought:
Who are you, Father?
I thought you were grand. I thought you were good. But you’re not those things. I thought you were noble, majestic: but you’re just a coward, like all those who stand behind the suffering of others. Sleeping while other people’s lives come to an end at your command.”