“I’m scared. Aren’t you?”
She brought his hand back and looked at him so tenderly that his heart caught. “Why did they send you here on your own?”
He looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Why don’t you go back to London?”
“When I write to my father he says I have to be patient.”
“So, you need to write a better letter.”
“Writing moves worse than reading. Like the words hate the pen.”
“I’ll write it down for you. Would you like me to do that?”
Zachary let his eyes drift out over the Back Acre. The sun had sunk below the rim of the valley now, and the shadow line was racing up its the eastern slope. He watched the blazing oaks cut down by the edge of darkness. He knew every animal on the hillside and how it moved: he learned fast, by careful sight. He knew the farmers’ bounds and the villagers’ feuds, constantly shifting. He stayed ahead of them, failing only when thought had to be halted and put into words, and the words immobilized on the page. He was incapable of understanding how things always moving were stilled: he was stupid.
Simone was tugging at his hand. “What would you say, if I could write it down for your father?”
“I’d say you were right. That I’m sad.”
She blinked. “Just that?”
He gave a worried look, anxious he’d said the wrong thing. She pulled his hand closer. “I like you. The others can say what they want.”
He dared a quick smile. She said, “Should I kiss you?”
He pulled his hand away. “No.”
“But why?”
“You don’t know what they’d do, the others.”
“I don’t care.”
He turned from her, his thoughts fluid, ranging across the darkening country. Every sound was enfolded in awareness, the running of the river, the cooing of the wood pigeons at roost, the crackling of sticks in the undergrowth nearby that must be a fox or a stoat beginning its evening round. He looked at Simone again, and in her face there was no anxiety, and it seemed to him that he should try to do what she asked.
He closed his eyes and moved his lips close to hers, and for a moment as she kissed him there was a stillness in his thoughts, and only the river ran, and only the sticks in the undergrowth cracked, louder now, rising almost into awareness but not wholly, because the kiss was his first and it was warm, and for a moment the sadness lifted and there was a stillness in him. Everything was still. And then a heavy flint caught him on the side of the head and he was stunned, and when he could see again there were more stones coming in through the dusk.
Simone was hit. Her tooth was knocked out and her eye was split wide and there was so much blood, and he wrapped his arms around her head to protect her but that only made the village children more furious. They were silent—and this was a terrible thing—they didn’t jeer or laugh, only sent stone after stone whipping in. The air hissed with riverbed flints. Simone began to scream.
The scream came again, and it was the long scream of the train’s whistle, and his eyes came wide open as he struggled up from sleep with his father’s hand on his arm.
“You all right, Zachary?”
He blinked. It was full daylight, with fields rushing past. A third-class compartment with four seats taken. Himself, his father, a woman writing a letter, a man reading the newspaper. On the back of the newspaper, on the funny page, Hitler in his boxer shorts: Let’s catch him with his Panzers down.
“Yes, I’m all right, I’m fine.”
“You were dreaming. It didn’t look like the best fun.”
Zachary blinked. Through the window, below a stand of beech on the top of a green hill, a doe crept out into barley.
“I’m fine.”
His father had a right eye that strayed while the left fixed you. When Zachary was little and asked why, his father used to say he was keeping one eye out for trouble. Their joke was to guess which one.
His father said, “I’m sorry I didn’t come for you sooner.”
“That’s all right.”
“They told us not to. They said to keep all the children where they were.”
“It’s fine.”
His father laced his fingers on top of Zachary’s head and stroked two thumbs along the lines of his eyebrows. It was something he’d always done, and for a moment Zachary felt that nothing had happened in between times. His mother hadn’t been lost, they’d never crossed the ocean, they’d never been pulled apart.
His father said, “Your old teacher warned me to fetch you home, back in the winter. I should have listened to her.”
“Miss North?’
“She said she was opening up that school again, and they couldn’t stop us bringing you home. But I thought she was trouble. And you know trouble is one thing for her, and another thing for us.”
“I understand.”
“But look at you. Your poor face.”
Zachary shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt. It looks worse.”
“I raised a liar. Are you hurt anywhere else?”
Zachary looked up at him. “When we get back to London can we go to the school, please?”
“I’m not sure it’s the best thing.”
“Please?”
His father sighed. “ ‘Well how can I say no to you now?”
Zachary looked back to the window. He wore the gray knee shorts and the gray duffel coat in which he had been evacuated from London, and he had nothing with him but his gas mask in its box. Two things you could do with the gas mask: you could put it on so your breathing made a nice pop-pop, the valves clicking on the inhale and the exhale so your breathing had an off-beat. Or you could run a stick across the ribbing of the pipe that led from the filter to the mask, and the zip-zip reverberated through the rubber straps and sounded like a washboard.
“What can I do for you?” said his father. “Need more cream on those cuts?”
“I wish it could go back to before.”
His father smiled. “Before what? You start wishing it back, at your age, soon you’re back in diapers.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but I’m serious too. Where are you going to take it back to? This life hasn’t worked out perfect, maybe I give you that, but it’s got you and me in it. I don’t see what you could change and still have us be. And I don’t see it can be bad so long as we’re here for each other.”
“You won’t let them split us up again?”
“I won’t.”
It was better, from there. Low hills whistled by, woodland verse and field chorus, the rails in rattling tempo. His father fell asleep. London came closer. The other passengers divided their time between staring at the Negroes and pretending they hadn’t been. When they weren’t looking, Zachary licked his fingertips and ate crumbs from the gaps between the seat cushions. The woman in the seat beside him was writing a letter, pressing on the cover of a book to do it. She paused to think, looking out of the window. Finally she fell asleep with the letter loose on her lap, and Zachary ate it. It was one page, written on one and a half sides, and the blue ink tasted of Simone’s note. When the woman woke she looked at her lap and then around the floor of the compartment. Then she looked at him.
“Have you seen a letter I was writing?”
“Why are you asking me?” said Zachary. “Why not ask one of the others?”
His lips and tongue were blue. The woman looked at him thoughtfully, then blinked and began writing all over again. At Reading, where she was alighting, she gave him a Mint Imperial.
At Marylebone the locomotive pulled up and vented steam as if the stuff had been hurting its belly. Zachary and his father stepped down from the carriage. On the station concourse the crowd seethed, harried here and there by its own urgent need. London absorbed them entirely.
Z
achary leaned against an iron column. He was weak with hunger, though he wasn’t about to make his father feel worse by admitting it. The blood drained from his head and he had to wait until the color came back into the world and the ringing in his ears stopped. Dying might be like this, an infinite losing of balance, like looking at yourself in the mirror, only with time instead of light.
They left the station to walk home. There were no smoldering craters. He had been evacuated for nine months, and the Germans hadn’t attacked at all. It made no sense to him, but he didn’t even know how to begin asking his father why. It must be obvious. If there weren’t something wrong with him, he would be able to see some particular meaning in London’s undamaged streets and say: “Ah, so that’s why they had to send us away.”
His mind drifted again. If there were bomb craters, you could see whatever was underneath London. You could climb down into the holes and come back up with your pockets full of it. Fossils, gold, instructions.
“You really want to go straight to the school?” said his father. “You don’t want to get cleaned up first?”
“I want to go.”
“But why? Haven’t those people done enough to you?”
He didn’t know how to explain it, how he was so weary of never understanding, so worn down and sad from it, and how a part of him dared to hope that Miss North might know the trick of making him less stupid.
“I just want to see,” he said.
“All right. But if you get a hard time, I’ll get you out. From now on they don’t split us.”
They walked through Regent’s Park, past the boating lake where soldiers in khaki were rowing women in dresses. The men rowed badly, the women laughed and splashed water. Zachary’s father pulled him up with a hand on his shoulder. “You see them in their boats? You know what’s crazy?”
Zachary looked, wondering what his father might mean, but he could see nothing. He had to assign it to that great category of words and clocks, of mysteries. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”
His father laid a hand on the nape of his neck. “It’s the water. It’s only a foot deep. We could walk right across that lake if we wanted to. Take off our shoes and hang them round our necks.”
Zachary gave a small laugh, since this seemed to be what was wanted.
“But see,” said his father, “they don’t know they could just get out and walk. Like I didn’t know I could just come and fetch you home.”
“It’s fine,” said Zachary. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s no one else’s. I’m happy for you, wanting that schooling. Maybe you won’t finish dumb like me.”
Zachary looked out over the little lake. “You’re not dumb,” he said. It looked deep.
He held his father’s hand and they took the canal towpath out of the park and on toward Hawley Street.
The heavy door of the school porch stood open. Singing came from inside. Zachary blinked. Had the rest of them come back? He wouldn’t be surprised by anything. It must have been written somewhere, and he had just sat there and blinked at it. He could hardly think at all, he was so hungry. He looked around at the orderly, clean street. He looked down at his ripped shorts and his muddy legs and shoes. He did not completely understand the trick that had been played on him, but he was ashamed.
Inside the school, they were singing “When a Knight Won His Spurs.” He hung on to the railings, feeling faint.
His father held him up. “Still want to go in?”
Zachary nodded. The corridor was dark. He looked through the doors of the first classrooms. They were empty and dark too. All the windows were boarded up. They followed the sounds of the voices along the corridor, past more empty classrooms.
No charger have I, and no sword by my side / Yet still to adventure and battle I ride. Somewhere, in the heart of the school, one class was singing. They found the classroom and stood outside. Zachary eased the door open and blinked in the sudden light.
Though back into storyland giants have fled . . . The singing tailed off as the children noticed Zachary standing there. There were only seven of them, not a whole class, and they were not all the same age. He recognized only two of them: most were not children he had been evacuated with. The older ones stopped singing first, and soon the little ones fell silent too. Last to stop was the teacher, who stood conducting the children with her back to the door. She carried on singing as she swept out the time in the air.
“ . . . And the knights are no more and the dragons are . . . Oh, do come along, children, what on earth is the matter, why don’t you sing?”
She spun around and Zachary flinched. Then her face softened. She nodded to his father, took a step toward Zachary and folded him into her arms. He collapsed against her, too weak to talk.
“Zachary Lee,” said Mary. “You are frightfully late, as usual.”
July, 1940
PARIS FELL, THE GRANDFATHERS manning the pissoirs as Hitler in his Mercedes cabriolet rutted the lawns of the Champ de Mars. The invaders marched behind his car with polished boots while the old men with their brandy headaches pissed venom against the zinc. The thing was to resist. It did not matter that it splashed back on their shoes.
In her classroom on Hawley Street, Mary chalked an outline of Europe on the blackboard and marked Paris with an Eiffel Tower. She topped off the tower with a beret and tucked a little baguette under its arm, since that was the only way the thing ought to be drawn.
“Who can tell me who built the Eiffel Tower? Yes?”
“Was it Napoleon?” said Maud Babington.
Mary smiled. “Nearly.”
Betty Oates was waving her hand in anguish, as if the answer’s continuing presence within her body were causing unbearable pain.
“Yes, Betty?’
“Gustave Eiffel!’
“Very good. The Eiffel Tower is made of ferrous metal and it has a magnetic field that generates romance within a mile of it.”
George Hampton, who was simple, became flustered at the word “romance.” He was fifteen and handsome. Young women dropped their purses in front of him to start a conversation, until they realized what was the matter. Now he pressed both palms to his temples and made the noise of a door hinge wanting oil.
Betty, ever diligent, was writing in her exercise book: Eiffel Tower. Magnetic field. Romance < 1 mile. George was still agitated. Poppy Brown, the mongol, climbed down from her desk and shuffled over to his place. She took his hands by the wrists and clapped them together until George forgot what had upset him. He wiggled his fingers, which to his great delight responded with pleasing undulant motions. “Pop-pop-pop,” he said, forming an accidental spit bubble with every bilabial. Poppy, who was five, clambered back up to her seat and stared at the blackboard with her slanted brown eyes that squinted outward, her bottom teeth protuberant over the upper lip.
Mary said, “Thank you, Poppy.”
Poppy pointed at the blackboard—her hand had a thumb and five fingers—and said, “That?”
“Is the Eiffel Tower, darling.”
Poppy made the shape of it with two steepled index fingers, then stuck one up each nostril.
“Don’t do that, please.”
Poppy withdrew her fingers and inspected a strand of mucous that had followed them out, pea green and fabulous. She ate it.
“Ewww!” said Kenneth Cox. “That! Is! Dis! Gusting!”
“Nevertheless,” said Mary, “it is not yet rationed, and I don’t suppose we must blame Poppy for making the most of it.”
The class settled. “All right, children. Some of you have heard the news about Paris, and I daresay you are worried.”
Zachary said, “What’s happened in Paris?”
“The Germans have arrived there.” She made her tone disapproving, as if the Germans had arrived at an inconvenient moment, or with too much luggage.
<
br /> She was glad Zachary had spoken up. Naturally he was timid, after everything that had happened. If she could get him to put up his hand for one question a day, it was a small victory.
She drew a swastika on the blackboard beside her Eiffel Tower. “Who can tell me what this nasty symbol is?”
Thomas Essom, the cripple, gripped the push rims of his wheelchair. “Swastika,” he whispered.
“It’s all right, you know. You won’t drop dead just from saying the word.”
Thomas tried again. “Swastika,” he said, hardly louder.
He had been sent with another London school on a train to the West Country. They had wheeled him in to the village hall where the evacuees were being chosen. He had waited all night. No one had wanted a polio boy, twelve years old and pimpled. They had not wanted him in the next village either, and finally his mother had gone out to bring him home.
It had been this way for half her class: the countryside had not wanted them. The others had been brought back to London simply because their parents missed them, and this too was an affliction—an oedema of sentiment or a hypertrophy of the heart—unpatriotic in a way that could not be formally censured. This was the situation of Maud, Betty and Kenneth. Only Beryl Waldorf, the beauty, fell outside the pattern. She had returned a month ago and not spoken since. She stared out of the window and hugged her arms tight around her. Something had been off—the parents had sensed it in her letters. The countryside had liked her too much.
These eight, then, were Mary’s class so far. They were London’s remainder, the residual air in its lungs.
She said, “Well done, Thomas.” His lip trembled and he looked down at his desk. Children blamed themselves for what had happened to them. This was why she took pains, in this lesson every Friday, to give them the news of the war. At least she could set out before them, with chalk and modest redaction, the great currents that had washed them up here.
On the blackboard she marked the countries that, for now, belonged to the enemy. She was careful to make the swastikas small in relation to the other things she drew: a skier with a flowing scarf in Norway, a windmill in Holland. She loathed the way the newspapers printed maps with the stark Nazi symbol on a field of plain white, as if Hitler had sent armies of erasers. Better to crowd the swastikas in, to have them jostle for space. She drew them deliberately crooked. Her swastikas were degenerates that leaned at sickly angles and resembled one another vaguely, the offspring of first cousins who had married against the family’s advice.