He found a postbox, hesitated, and put the note for Tom back in his pocket. Perhaps he should make sure of a room at Robertson’s before he told Tom to meet him there. They usually did have rooms, but with the war, one never knew.
With his handkerchief he wiped away the sweat and the train soot. In the Strand, bodies careened off him. Everyone jostled and bumped. There was a new way of moving that he could not seem to weave himself into. The city was in a gasping hurry but it wasn’t the old surge of rush hour, in which the great press of bodies used to flow together like a tide. Now everyone seemed to be moving at cross purposes.
Alistair fought a rising perplexity. He couldn’t thread himself through the new crowds. There were so many people, all out of phase. It seemed to him that the unrung hours had lost their habit of strict separation and begun to overlap, to slide over each other like the scales of something serpentine and recursive. Day shifts and night shifts and swing shifts perplexed him, and as he ran his errands across the capital it seemed that whatever bus he caught was full of wan girls in overalls. They were as likely to be coming from work as going to it. He tried to talk with them, but apparently the language had changed. The English he spoke seemed to amuse them or to irk them. It was as if he had learned it abroad.
“Have you come far?” he asked a young man in a tin hat and tweed.
“What?” said the man, eyeing him warily.
Alistair was used to the battle-shocked look in his men. His own commanding officer had been killed at Saint-Quentin, when the enemy had found their range with mortars. Keen to move out and getting no answer on the field telephone, Alistair had jogged half a mile to ask for orders in the stone barn where their command position had been established. When he arrived, the place stank of meat and there was no one alive in it. A mortar round had gone through the roof and the stone walls had contained the blast. The air was still hot. All his senior officers lay rent and scorched. The colonel sat upright at a camp table, bloodless and gray, the line of his mustache expressing indignation, the handset of the field telephone still clasped in his hand. This is a dreadful hotel and I wish to complain about the incessant noise.
He jogged back to his position, assembled everyone who was still alive in the company, and led them to the coast. All the way he hoped to meet a senior officer with a better plan. He only stopped, after ten days, when he reached the main force at Dunkirk. Two of his sergeants were gone, along with five of the corporals. Most of the men were injured, and six would need to be carried to the boats. Alistair oversaw the construction of stretchers.
It relaxed him, working with the men on these practical and necessary tasks. It was only in such matters that he felt useful. He was good at restoration. If the task had been, say, to rebuild Europe rather than to blast it to pieces, Alistair might have worn his rank with more pleasure and felt less bashful about asking the men to follow him.
As it was, though, they seemed happy enough to take his lead. They marched when he asked them to march. They continued to fire their rifles at the enemy rather than at each other, even after a month with little sleep. They drank sandy tea, flinched at the worst bangs, and wrote letters to their girlfriends at home. When he made his rounds they called him sir, offered him brews and biscuits, and were glad when he dropped in to their dugouts. That his presence seemed to help them was reason enough to keep going. For their sake he hoped he would not be killed—the issue had ceased to interest him personally. He tried to do his best for them and to soothe them when they looked back at him with this wide-eyed stare.
The young man before him was alarmed. Alistair took the man’s arm, thinking to reassure him, but the fellow pushed him away and hurried off along the length of the bus. Alistair blinked. Of course: a bus. London.
He got off as soon as the bus slowed. In the street, nothing was right. The cigarettes smelled of burning farms. Passersby perplexed him with musk and naphtha. The bakeries, which had always operated at dawn, now seemed to be baking again in the late afternoon. He supposed all the new night workers must need feeding. The smell of warm bread filled Piccadilly as he walked to his bank. It was comforting and unsettling, both at once. The bakers on their shopwindow slates chalked the batch up as Resurrection Bread and when Alistair asked one of them why, the man told him: “Lo, it has risen again.”
Even at the Ritz the dining times had been doubled up to accommodate the new martial schedules. Alistair looked in through the tall windows and saw ladies laughing around cake stands and samovars, beside tables of men who were still finishing lunch. When port and macaroons were simultaneously visible in W1 then something dreadful was coming down the line, surely. Why did people seem so unconcerned?
Alistair loosened his tie in the heat and walked down to the Embankment, taking the side streets to avoid the bedeviling crowds. Now that his small tasks were done, he felt surplus and foolish. He sat on a bench and frowned at the Thames. An oily tide was coming in from the estuary, setting up a confused chop against the river’s flow. The white gulls lurched about on it, looking seasick and hot.
He had imagined it would take all afternoon to meet with his bank manager, his tailor and the family’s lawyer, but in the event he had only been a few minutes with each before he had been on his way again. They had all received him cordially, but with glances at the clock. He had the impression of being closely followed around town by some more important and indefinable presence that had made a proper appointment. Perhaps the war was good for business. Perhaps it would be even better if it weren’t for all these soldiers in the way.
Alistair watched the queasy gulls squabble and bob. In the hot afternoon he lurched in and out of time. He had telephoned and got a room at Robertson’s but he still held off posting his note to Tom, deciding to wait until he felt steadier. He didn’t much fancy seeing his old colleagues at the Tate, either. The only thing worse than finding the place depressing and empty would be to discover that they had brought the pictures back after all. He didn’t feel like seeing anyone he knew. The city had him on the back foot.
He watched the brown water swirl. On the way back from Dunkirk, crossing the Channel in a wet mist lit with flashes of white and red, they had picked up a downed RAF man in a tiny yellow rubber dinghy, waving. Alistair had helped him to climb up the netting into their little boat. Shivering, still in his parachute harness and Mae West, the man’s face and arms were black with oil. He gave a salute, which Alistair returned. Alistair found the man some blankets and a tarpaulin to keep the wind off. It turned out that between them they had the makings of a smoke—the airman’s pipe was undamaged and Alistair’s tobacco dry. They shared the pipe at the foot of the mast, without speaking.
After a while Alistair said, “How was the water?”
“Brisk,” said the RAF man. “How was France?”
“Crowded.”
Both men looked into the sun that was rising now through the mist.
Alistair got up from the bench, which he told himself was real, and walked to Soho. He had hours to kill before he could reasonably go to his hotel. Like the ball in a bagatelle he bounced from café to cabaret, while London continued to look him straight in the eye. As if it had battled the tanks itself, in its spiv hat and spats.
There was cold iron armor massing, just a few miles away across the Channel. Any other city would be chewing its knuckles and digging a hole to hide in. Alistair wanted to yell at people: The bullets actually work, you know! What they did not understand was that the city could be extinguished. That every eligible person could die with the same baffled expression that he had seen on the first dead of the war, in those earliest shocking days before the men had learned to expect it. I’m so sorry—I think I am actually hit.
Night came, and it was still hot. In the blacked-out streets Alistair mingled with the uniformed men. They sought each other out for the comfort of it but they did not speak. Some men, like him, walked aimlessly, while others pro
wled the midnight dances for the pale excitable girls who were out before their shift, or after it—the latter being considered the more waltzable proposition. With Mars and Saturn in the same heaven, the young women air-raid volunteers wore silk beneath their tunics, and hair spray under their tin hats. The uniformed girls winked at Alistair. Sick of himself, he found that all he could do was salute them.
He supposed he should go and see a show. But all the cinemas were showing patriotic movies and all the theaters were full of dislocated men like him, stretched too thin across time. There were musicals with Broadway stars and dancing troupes, set in Monte Carlo, Ceylon, and Siam. London was perfectly prepared to give him a night out anywhere on earth, and yet all he wanted from his city was the thing that didn’t seem to be on offer: the possibility of coming home.
At midnight, in the dark, in the silence that ought to have been filled with churches striking the hour, Alistair carried his duffel bag to Waterloo. He waited overnight on the platform and at dawn he caught the first train out to his parents’ home in Hampshire. It would be quiet out there. He would go for long walks. In the countryside, surrounded by the oaks and the marsh harriers and all the other singular things, he was sure he would feel himself again.
June, 1940
AT THE FIRST EVACUATION school things went bad, and they sent him to another village on his own. The new headmaster stood Zachary up in assembly and said there would be no detention for being a nigger but there would be a detention for bullying one.
It was a limestone village in a limestone valley, the people having traveled no farther than the stones of the houses they lived in. Beyond the last building but before the first quarry, the Back Acre buzzed with summer flies. Zachary was nervous because the field was overlooked from everywhere. There was a tractor, rusted down to engine block and axles. There were clumps of red valerian and tangles of rambling rose, but nothing you could really hide behind. It was the worst place for Simone Block to say she would meet him, but that wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know people.
Simone had said to meet her at eight and he had been waiting since eight in the morning, in case that was what she meant. It had seemed like the sort of thing he ought to understand, and he hadn’t wanted her to think him any more stupid than she already did. He had waited all day and now the sun was sinking over the western rim of the valley. Zachary narrowed his eyes. The slope was a wave and the yellowstone buildings of the village were fishing boats steaming up it, trawling with long black shadows. In the evening mist the church tower was a lighthouse, glowing red on its western parapet, guarding the fleet with its light. Everyone would be saved. He was a coastguard, looking out over a wild sea, and—
He made himself stop. This was how he always tripped up, seeing what wasn’t there and not what was: the foot outstretched to trip him, the spitball aimed at his head. Across the Back Acre the bees buzzed from bloom to bloom, smart in their striped jackets, heads in the game. The more he ought to concentrate, the more his thoughts wandered.
“What time does this say?” his class teacher would ask, pointing at the clock face on the blackboard. And Zachary would stare at the hands, trying to remember which way they spun, while tears began. And outside there would be a bull getting walked down the lane with its bell ringing, and Zachary would hear the brass edge of its chime softening as it dissolved in the summer air and made its tumbling ascent. The edge of the sound continually tucked under itself as it rose, a slow brass thunderhead, and he noticed it and noticed it and noticed it, and then suddenly everyone was staring at him, and the question was still: “Zachary, what time does this clock say?,” and he had no idea—no idea at all—and the whole class was jeering him and he hung his head.
He had been alone since September, until a week ago when Simone had brushed past him. He had braced himself for the scratch or the slap, but instead she had turned and given him a quick half-smile right there in the classroom, where anyone might notice.
The next day she had touched his hand at morning break.
“Zachary? Don’t be sad.”
He was surprised three ways. One, to realize he was sad. Two, that someone had noticed it before he did. And three, that someone had talked to him. He had stood there, perfectly still, watching her walk away.
He thought about her now: her dirty brown hair and chipped teeth. Her skin, lighter than the other children’s. The villagers freckled and bronzed in the summer but she stayed white. The girls in the class left her out of jump rope and hide-and-seek. He let his thoughts go away with it for a while: imagining being so white that people teased him.
She was from far away, like him. He worried he should know. For others, probably, as simple as looking at the hands of a clock and saying “five to nine” would be to look at Simone Block and say “She is from France” or “She is from Holland.” He didn’t even know what he was supposed to know.
She was late. He worried she wouldn’t arrive. Also, he worried she would. He hid at the edge of the field, where foxgloves and wood anemones gave cover. The country children’s eyes were always ranging, spectacular with sight. In the schoolyard he had seen a boy stoop during football, pick up a stone and throw it into a hedge where Zachary had seen only shadows. A thickening of the silence, a closing in of children: a stunned and bloodied rabbit dragged out by the tail to have its neck cracked. Before the creature’s legs had finished twitching, the game had restarted from a throw-in.
Though the evening was warm, Zachary was cold from hunger. His host family gave him nothing, and it was hard to go around the farms looking for windfalls without bringing sight on himself. Better to be hungry and hidden. He watched where the rabbits and the deer went. He saw with the eyes of a prey animal, looking for gaps to slip through. He was better at it than the village children were. He had kept himself to himself until, in the schoolyard, Simone had let a scrap of paper fall beside him. He had put a foot over it until it was safe to pick up. He’d unrolled it, read it and eaten it in one smooth motion. I like you, the note had said. She didn’t know what they could do.
From his pocket he pulled stalks of green wheat and rolled onto his front to eat the soft parts at the base of the stems. The mist was thickening with the sunset. He rolled a rotten stump, caught wood lice as they fled, and ate them. They balled themselves up at the end—the fools, the half-men, the easily scattered tribes from the books near the start of the Bible— you could crunch them like silvery pills. He ate an octave of them, humming. They tasted of summer rain.
He had wanted to write a note back to Simone but he had been ashamed. He didn’t know whether he likked, likede or lyked her, to, too or two. Instead he had slowed by her desk, just for a moment, when he came into class the next day. He had dared a glance at her, and she had responded with a smile so warm that he had almost forgotten himself and grinned back.
The light reddened. A lacewing touched down on his arm and he pinched its head and ate it. When he looked up, Simone was pushing her way through the long grass toward the center of the field. In her white shirt and black pinafore she strode between the thistles, making no effort at all to hide. His heart jumped. He hesitated, then rose above the foxgloves just high enough to catch her eye and beckon her over.
When she was safely in the cover of the field border he brushed a place clean for her on the dry moss.
“Show me behind your ears,” she said straight away.
He angled his head for her and she folded each ear forward to look behind it. “It’s not done by the sun, then. Or else you’d be paler here.”
“It’s the same all over.”
“Did you start off normal and go that color?”
“No. I was like this since I was born.”
She gave a sympathetic nod. “Then it’s your parents’ fault.”
“I don’t think—”
“Shh. Does it hurt?”
“Does what hurt?”
“Your skin.”
“No, it doesn’t hurt.”
“It doesn’t feel burned at all?”
“No.”
“I don’t mean like agony, like arrrrrgh! I mean like when you get too close to the fire and your hairs curl up and it’s sore.”
“It’s not sore.”
“And it’s your father who’s a cannibal?”
“He’s a musician.”
“Then it’s your mother?’
“She’s dead, but she was a singer.’
Simone folded her arms. “It has to be either the mother or the father.”
“Who what?”
“Who eats people. Otherwise the baby comes out white.”
He couldn’t think what to say. “We came from America.”
Simone looked skeptical. “And are all the others ignorant like you?”
“All the other what?”
“All the other coloreds.”
He shook his head. “I’ve always just been stupid.”
“I didn’t say stupid, I said ignorant.”
“Same thing.”
“Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.”
“Well, I’m stupid. You’ve seen when it’s my turn to read in class.”
“Why don’t you just sound out the letters?”
“They won’t stop for me. I don’t know how you make the letters still.”
“They just are still, stupid.”
“Not for me.”
She took his hand. “You’re shaking.”
“I am not.”
“Why are you shaking?”