He moved his face close to hers. “When I said ‘I love you’ before?’
“Yes?”
“I didn’t mean it. But now I think I do.”
“Oh yes. Oh, me too.”
Tom understood why the good actors in the movies never said it with a smile. To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one was ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.
Afterward, she laid her head on his chest and yawned. Her copper hair spilled over him. They shared a cigarette and her face, with its sheen of perspiration, shone orange.
He said, “Do you want to sleep?”
She considered the question as if the idea were new, then shook her head. It was raining and a gray light loomed in the garret, threatening to return all things to their quotidian form. Tom felt the grip of an unnameable fear but Mary lit another cigarette and smiled at him so impishly that it restored his faith. The bright sexual smell of her, her slightly comical frown of concentration, her breasts quivering as she worked the wheel of the lighter. Her slim belly as she sat up in bed to find the ashtray. The rain came in squalls, hard as handfuls of rice against the window.
He made them both tea, in the jam jars they used for cups, and climbed back into bed. They sat against the headboard and leaned shoulders. They were tired, their eyes cast inward. They forgot to sip the pale tea. The steam condensed on the inner rims of the jars.
He said, “Have you ever been . . . you know. In bed with anyone before?”
She blinked. “Oh yes.”
As if it were nothing. Tom’s fear returned. He supposed he had been perfectly prepared for her answer to be yes or no, but this third possibility had not even slightly occurred to him: that perhaps it really was nothing. It had seemed the most important thing that had ever happened to him. But of course he had been a fool. He felt as if he could easily cry.
He wouldn’t let himself. He would set his face just like this: in this worldly grin. And when their conversation naturally picked up again he would engage in the new topic with all levity. As if yes, this were nothing, and that therefore this feeling he had—that he had been struck through like the clumsy first draft of a letter—were nothing, too. And still . . . and still.
He realized that he did not mind if she had slept with five men or even a dozen: he just wanted Mary—who had trembled in his arms and crushed her face into his neck—to speak about what had happened as if it were something. Tears threatened again and he stopped them.
She was digging him in the ribs.
“Darling?” he said, keeping his tone light.
She prodded him again and he turned to look. She was watching him strangely and he didn’t understand. There was so much, he now realized, that he did not understand. He had lost his virginity—sailed to a place where land had been marked on the chart—and yet here was just more open sea.
He could not decipher her eyes. An anxiety came over him that she wanted them to make love again. He didn’t know if he could. Then he worried that perhaps making love was not what she wanted at all, and that maybe this strange and terrible look she was giving him was something else, a prelude to the sort of conversation where in which she would be serious and kind. She would speak softly, noticing the lateness of the hour, and saying that perhaps they should sleep after all. And then, as soon as the time was decent for young women to take to the streets, she would excuse herself and leave.
He stroked her cheek. How pathetic he was. She had seen his reaction, and she must think him ridiculous. Now that she was certain to leave, he understood that he did not even care if she felt nothing for him, or for any of the men she had slept with. What he could not bear was to be without her. How dreadful the days would be from now on. How empty.
She smiled.
“What is it?” he said.
“I haven’t slept with anyone else.”
“So why . . . ?”
She took his hand. “I wanted to see if it counted for you.”
Above them the dawn sounded with engines. Tom drew the blanket around them. He held Mary close in the improvised darkness. How bedclothes would protect them, he didn’t know. The engine noise drew nearer and increased in volume until it was directly overhead, rattling the windows. Then it faded away to the east. Aircraft were being delivered, or pilots trained—that was all—and afterward they laughed at their own fear.
At sunrise, with the rain blown over and the wet pavements gleaming, they went for a walk. They wore the clothes they had worn to the dance the night before, since Mary had no others and Tom saw no need to let her be the only one. They strolled easily together, holding hands and swinging their arms and making no strenuous effort to avoid the puddles, being both of them protected by love against discomforts of any kind.
The streets were still nearly empty—London was theirs alone—and if from time to time it pleased the lovers that a bread van should drive past on its rounds, or a policeman walk by on his beat, or the last fox of the night nose for scraps in an alley, then they caused it to be so. They strolled until the sidewalks grew busy around them and the traffic began to clot in the streets. They walked and they did not need anything at all, until very suddenly they needed everything. They understood that they were famished and so they ran into a café and ate like wolves. They drank dark stewed tea that made their teeth buzz in their sockets. Afterward he decided that he must absolutely buy her a book, and she decided that she must absolutely buy him a paper knife, and they went in and out of shops until these things were done, and then they were calm again.
They sat together on a bench in Trafalgar Square, holding the new things in their hands and being delighted with them, while Tom also felt solemn in a way that had no limiting degree. They watched the grubby pigeons flock.
She yawned and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Are you tired?” he said. “Shall we go back to the flat and sleep?”
“I ought to get home. Palmer will fret.”
“Your dog?”
“Yes,” she said, and wondered why she had. The distance between them was nothing—and simultaneously it was so huge that, in the moment, she had not found the heart to speak of it. She felt a heavy sadness.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“How glad I am. What are you thinking?”
He was considering the idea of her having a home, a pet, two parents. He had not given any thought at all to the concept that she hadn’t simply materialized in the world, at eighteen, in perfect crimson lipstick, laughing, at the exact spatial coordinates and the exact time at which he had first met her. She was so perfectly unique that the idea of her being made ordinary by friends—oh, and worse, by family—made his chest sink unbearably.
He said, “The same. So glad.”
She kissed him. “I should go.”
“Oh . . . yes. Yes, of course.” He gave her an anxious look. “What do you suppose you should tell your family?”
She stroked his cheek. “I shall tell Father I stayed overnight with my friend Hilda. I shall tell Mother you are lovely.”
“You will tell her?”
“Women share everything. It’s the blessing we received when we turned down muscles and mustaches.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’ll walk you to the Tube.”
She did not tell him that she never caught the Tube. (She wondered whether one bought a ticket beforehand, or whether there was an inspector who came through the carriage.). They got up from the bench and walked back across Trafalgar Square, breaking into a run to scare the pigeons. They ran, breathless and laughing and desperately sad, with their hands clasped tight and the pigeons clattering up before them. The pigeons flocked and swirled and ascended through the city’s blanketing cloud, emerging into the sky. A life unmoored from the embattled earth, a thi
ng begun again, looping and wheeling in the pacific air.
Mary, looking up at the pigeons, held tight to Tom’s hand and thought it heartless that the two of them had to stay below, in London.
She said, “I’ll be fine from here.”
“I wish you hadn’t to go.”
“Just until Monday. Come and pick me up after work.”
“But will you be all right?”
She said, “Why would I not be all right?”
He thought about her question. In fact there were so many reasons. Of course there was the war, which he increasingly believed might bring death from the sky at any time despite his own insistence that the thing would fizzle out. Then there were orders which could come quite arbitrarily, posting either of them to another city, or another country, where distance would begin to work its curse of transforming a lover’s hand into handwriting.
There were mechanical accidents: machinery was well known to be full of spite for slim bodies such as the one he now clung to. Bearings lived to seize, axles to shear, cables to snap. Accidents of the heart were a worry, too. She was beautiful: other men could see this as well as he. She was bright and unconventional and her faithfulness could not be assumed. There would come suitors who were taller, or richer, or—most dreadful of all—who could make her laugh. How he feared men who could make her laugh.
Next there was disease: less of a threat than good humor but still not to be entirely discounted. Influenza came once in each generation and was overdue in theirs. Cancer or consumption might take her. A scratch on her finger might fester, a cold sore give ingress to a greater chill. There was a whole category of mishaps inseparable from physics—the tumble, the slip and the choke; collision, combustion and shock. And he could not even begin to quantify the risks posed by third parties. Friends might queer her affections. Fiends in alleyways might murder her or worse. Her parents, picking from a list of his faults, might seize on his pacifism or his impecunity. They might set about dissuading their daughter, using all the tricks of their art. It was not a level playing field where parents were concerned: they had known her in every year of her life, he not yet in every season of the year.
Finally there were the imponderables of memory and the psyche. She could wake up tomorrow with no recollection that she had ever known him. Or she could walk past a café and stop dead in her tracks, overcome by desire for the waiter. And worse than all of these things, because so much more likely, were the mundane human dissatisfactions that absence would allow to incubate. What if he had said something to unsettle her—a single word could be enough—and she, brooding on it, came to decide that he did not truly love her? Or what if he had been unsatisfactory in bed? The more he thought about it, the more he worried that there was something he should have done but had not—or, worse, something he had done too much of. At times they had moaned like animals. Surely this was monstrous? Surely in solitude she would now reflect with shame, and not wish to see him again?
These were only the first thoughts that came. The more he considered it—oh god, her lovely face with that mocking little grin—the more causes there were for anxiety. Separation was air in the lungs of fate, and so when it was time for them to part after their first night together and he asked her, “Will you be all right?” and she replied, “Why would I not be all right?,” in fact so many reasons presented themselves that it immediately began to seem fantastically improbable, if he let go of her warm hand now and allowed her to walk away into this gray morning that smelled of spring, that they would ever see each other again.
It seemed so much safer to stay close and let the great disintegrating power of the world do its work on other lovers instead. But since he did not know how to put all of this in a way that would not seem pathetic, he simply said: “All right, I shall see you on Monday.”
It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail- gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman’s hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But to have faith—that a lover would be constant and life clement—this required courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations.
As she walked away from him he turned his back, to show that he could.
For her part, Mary did not find it at all difficult to walk away from Tom. She simply walked for a while, wearing yesterday’s clothes. Yes, the war was a blind roulette. Yes, the city was full of beautiful women who might tempt him: some of them more thrilling than she was, a few already wearing summer dresses. It all weighed less heavily on her, since weightlessness was in her nature and in any case one simply had to live. Oh, and yet—
“Darling?” she called, spinning round, suddenly unsure.
The crowd had taken him, though. She had imagined that he would still be standing there, watching her. And now she felt a brand-new sadness, and a dreadful uncertainty about love.
June, 1940
VAPOR TRAILS TWISTED HIGH above Alistair’s train from Dover. He angled his head out of the window, into the warm slipstream bitter with coal smoke. He knew the RAF was milling rings with the enemy up there, but from where he watched, the airplanes were invisibly small, and it seemed as if the steam from his own locomotive rose up into those thin and tortured contrails. As if nature had congealed, and gases no longer dispersed but only bifurcated and twisted around themselves: as if there were no more forgetting.
The train’s whistle screamed. London was close now, with an ominous gravity that clutched at his cells. He had meant to visit Tom straight away—that was the point of coming to town—but now that it was so near, he felt he ought to settle himself first. He would fire Tom a quick note for the afternoon delivery, use the day for some errands, and see him in the evening.
Dear Tom,
They have given the regiment leave, which we have surely earned with our magnificent display of backwards marching all the way through northern France.
He put the pen down for a moment, reaching for the right tone. The enemy had run them ragged, from the first failure in the Ardennes to the final evacuation at Dunkirk. The Germans had had more concentration, more conviction, more force. When one thought of the enemy it was with a queer mix of fear and admiration. It was absurd that one could not simply hold up one’s hand and say: “Look here, well done, I think that will do for now.”
I am slightly injured in the arm, but still surely a better batsman than you. Also they have made me Captain. You are to think of me as a blazing comet, inbound, in an officer’s uniform with a wound medal.
Splinters of glass were still working themselves out of him—he had got the arm up just in time to shield his face when a window had blown out in Mont-de-Piété. It was nothing. More than pain, it produced an unwelcome feeling of separation from the people around him. He supposed he ought not to be surprised. The product of war was solitude, after all—the lover bereaved, the conversation truncated—so it was hardly amazing if a near miss left one feeling a little disconnected.
As for you, I trust that Caesar is a vigilant chaperone and . . .
In a group of poor positions dug into the beach at Dunkirk, less than a week ago, Alistair had huddled with his men. Shells had screamed down and exploded on the beach at unpredictable intervals. Smoke blinded everyone: a sharp amalgam of black soot from ships that were stricken, and white chemical smoke that the British destroyers were laying in a screen. It made a lachrymose fog that reddened the men’s eyes and left their throats raw.
Alistair stood above the lip of his dugout. “How do you like this weather?” he called to his senior sergeant, Blake.
“Very seasonal, sir,” the man shouted from the next dugout. “With your permission, I might take a few of the men along the beach for ice creams.”
“Very good,” called Alistair. “See if you can pick u
p some deck chairs while you are at it. We could rent them out here quite tidily.”
“Captive audience, isn’t it sir?”
Alistair nodded. “Get HQ on the radio and have them send us a Punch and Judy booth. If you behave, I shall let you be Judy.”
He waited for Blake’s comeback, but Blake collected shrapnel to his body and crumpled sideways without fuss. Alistair tensed his muscles and readied himself to jump out of his dugout and help Blake. But here he was, sitting in a train carriage, writing a letter to Tom. He rubbed his temples, coaxing himself back into the present.
. . . that Caesar is a vigilant chaperone and that . . .
Alistair’s men had been on the beach for two days. Mingled with the smoke was the stink of feces and urine. There was no possibility of establishing proper latrines, so they used their own dugouts. Bombs hit the beach fifty to the hour, whistling down through the haze from bombers unseen. At longer intervals the yellow-nosed Messerschmidts burst over the coastal dunes with no warning—so low that one could make out the rivets—and tore up the beach with their cannon. Sand lifted in gouts, to fall again in an endless fine rain. Men died with their gaze open to heaven and sand accruing on their eyes.
. . . is a vigilant chaperone and that your dancing is improving.
He leaned his forehead against the train window, breathing hard. He watched the green fields rush by. Only this was real, he told himself: this ripening wheat, that flint-walled barn, those ewes. What he had not understood, before battle, was that time could become a ribbon to be looped and pinned back to its center, the petals of a black rosette.
I won’t cramp your style with that girl of yours, so I shan’t stay at the garret. I shall stay at Robertson’s—that little hotel on Shooter’s Hill Road. Call for me there when you get this.
The train hissed into Charing Cross. Alistair folded the note for Tom into its envelope, took his duffel bag from the rack, and stepped down onto the platform.
It was hot in London. He walked north from the station—at noon, by his watch—but no clocks struck. The bells were blanketed in their belfries, to be rung only if the enemy invaded. Such plans were a comfort to civilians, he supposed, although having met the Germans in their present humor, Alistair felt it unlikely that bells would make much difference whether silenced, rung or melted down and made into metal plates for tap shoes.