Tom was unsmiling. “If I were you, I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”
“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”
Tom held up his hands. “I’m sorry, you’re losing me.”
Mary exhaled smoke. “Possibly I am.”
September, 1940
THE PACKED EIGHT O’CLOCK brought Alistair’s regiment to Waterloo from their Hampshire barracks. Into the sky the train disgorged vapors; into the capital, sixty officers and three hundred men. They had twenty-four hours’ leave, orders to rest and recuperate and a tendency to do neither.
In his new uniform of a captain in the Royal Artillery, Alistair stood on the platform to wish his men the best. Wills would be drawn up, he supposed, and mothers reassured of sons’ immortality, and fathers slipped letters to be opened in case of contradictory news. Blushing sisters would be introduced to suitable fellow officers, younger brothers issued with gobstoppers and wooden rifles. The enamored would be betrothed, the betrothed espoused. Entire human lives would be conceived, in unorthodox locations, by hurrying bodies cheerful with wine and still mostly clothed, at two thirty in the afternoon. The Savoy’s best spoons would be pocketed, things that were not cricket cricketed. He didn’t even like to think.
A pair of brother officers invited him to join them for breakfast but he declined. He invented some quick excuse—an aunt or an aneurism—which he forgot as soon as he had uttered it but which the others seemed to find sufficient. In any case they left without taking offense. Alistair was so adept at this now—at keeping to himself—that he did it without conscious effort. He might have bowed out of this leave entirely if Tom hadn’t insisted he come.
He watched his battery disperse. Each group of six or a dozen men ringed itself off from the others with laughter of its own particular key. Alistair knew the men well but he did not know how they formed their clans to go drinking in. He had ministered them all under fire, without making any more distinction than the bullets and the shells had done. By what unobservable law did they now divide themselves into these friendship groups that cut across the lines of their official units?
Of course the men were not cattle, and yet he did not understand how fierce could be the loyalty to this or that faction, while another merited only disdain. And yet that was men for you: there was always this counter-current, this Escheresque sleight that they performed without ever seeming to defy their orders. The Army made them into a flock of birds while the men made themselves into shoals of fishes, swimming in the contrary direction.
His men headed for the pubs on the back streets behind the station, where the licensing hours had been quietly surrendered. The soldiers would drink ale until dusk and then switch to whisky and fists. They would fight the Navy if available, other regiments if not, and the RAF as a last resort since it was not considered form to bother the afflicted. They would fight for the simple joy of doing so without 7.2-inch howitzers. Then they would return at dawn and call him “sir,” with their heels the regulation width apart.
Alistair knocked out his pipe on the heel of his shoe. If there was one thing the war had done, it was to change his mind about the class of people who never came into the Tate. Men and good paintings had a genius for escape from the frame.
He took a cab to Belgravia, where he had an appointment with the regimental physician. The fare was two shillings ha’penny and he handed over a half crown and told the driver to keep the change. The man blessed him, so Alistair tipped him another shilling. He thought: This might be the last bright blue morning, the last London taxi in its livery, the last quiet shilling with its lion and its crown. It occurred to him that no one who hadn’t been in battle could know what things were worth.
At the doctor’s offices they kept him waiting in a pink-carpeted anteroom with six Windsor chairs and a large framed print of the King. Looking up at him, Alistair began to feel that the King was an old chum. The King sat alone and rigorously upright in full ceremonial dress with what looked like ten pounds of medals and braid hanging off it. He rested one gloved hand on the pommel of a ceremonial sword. His expression suggested that he would not hesitate to use the sword on himself or others, should the portraitist require him to maintain the pose for one more damnable minute. Alistair’s knees jiggled up and down as he sat.
This was what he had not understood, until the war: that all men were of one blood, embedded from king to serf in a perfectly rigid formalism and all quietly abstracting themselves from it. The men did it with fighting and cheap women, the officers with theater and costly ones. Alone in his mind each man knew himself free as a king, while the King alone knew himself enslaved. Alistair felt euphoric. This was the great joke, and until the war he hadn’t got it.
These insights were coming to him continuously, and with terrific effervescence, after yesterday’s god-awful low. He laughed at himself. There was no reason to fret about it: why should one expect to feel the same every day, in a world that was rearranging itself by the hour? He was pleased with this formulation, and said so to himself. He was pleased with . . . in fact no, it was gone—his thoughts were coming so quickly—but no matter. He was pleased with . . . well, he was just pleased.
The doctor called him in after ten minutes. He was a portly man with side whiskers, in a white cotton jacket with gold insignia—the effect, to Alistair’s eye, falling somewhere between avuncular surgeon and cruise ship maître d’. The man remained seated behind his desk, not looking up when Alistair came in.
“Heath?” he said.
“Doctor.”
“Be seated. Nothing the matter, I hope?”
“Nothing,” said Alistair.
“No aches, pains, unscheduled loss of limbs?”
“I find I don’t much care for seafood.”
“Good man,” said the doctor, inking his rubber stamp.
Holding it poised over Alistair’s paper, he looked up for the first time. “And how’s morale?”
“Mine, or the men’s?”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
“Morale is fine,” said Alistair.
“France, wasn’t it, and then back across from Dunkirk?”
“Awful little town. Not one fish-and-chip shop.”
“No inflections of mood, no irritability, no anxiety?”
“No.”
“Any shell shock, jellification of the spine, malingering hottentottery?”
“Hardly.”
The doctor thumped down his stamp and slid the paper over. “First class. Give this to the C/O when you get back to barracks. I daresay you’ll be posted soon?”
“Looks that way.’
“Good luck. Take quinine if it’s Cairo, take salt if it’s the desert, take precautions if it’s a local girl. Avoid gin unless good tonic is available, smoke no more than one pack, and keep anything made of metal on the outside of your skin. Dismiss.”
“Thank you,” said Alistair, standing.
“Very good.”
Alistair hesitated in the doorway. “There is one thing.”
“Yes?’ The doctor was fanning the papers on his desk, looking for the next fellow’s.
“A few of the chaps I was friendly with . . . well, they didn’t make it back from France. And now . . . well, I do seem to keep myself to myself, rather.”
“Quite right,” said the doctor. “Take it steady until you feel brighter.”
But Alistair still hesitated, wondering if there was a better way to put it. The men were good at calling the war a bastard and laughing at the mess it made of one’s nerves. But it didn’t do to be familiar with the men, and with his brother officers he could not trust himself to keep within bounds. He would find himself coming to, as if from a trance, to hear himself saying something like, “. . . and I didn’t see him after that.” Which imposed on the oth
ers the burden of restoring the talk to a more pleasant level. People were good-humored and patient but of course one hated to be a weight, and so he tended to take himself away.
But now he was making a fuss. It was hardly a medical condition, was it? One could live with a little loneliness. Men lived with ruptured gonads, with missing limbs. Men lived with their mothers-in-law, for pity’s sake. He laughed, which was better.
The doctor glanced up at him and sighed. “Look, old man, it’s war. There isn’t a pill. Find a sweet girl and forget it.”
“Thanks,” said Alistair, and went down into the street rather pleased with his prescription. He really ought to pay more attention to the whole business of courting. Even in war you were still more likely to be struck by a woman than by a bullet.
It was noon, which meant he was already late to meet Tom for lunch. He headed for Hyde Park and found that he was hurrying, which was surely a good sign. He hoped he would seem his old self to Tom—that they could pick it up where they had left off. And he was intrigued to finally meet Mary, and this friend Hilda with whom he was to be set up.
Entering Hyde Park, he entertained himself by forming a mental picture of Mary. It was rather sweet that Tom had got himself a girl. She must be steady enough for both of them, and probably thoroughly sensible. Not a head-girl type, though—he couldn’t see a woman setting her sights on Tom if she were popular enough in that way. Tom was a fine catch, of course, but perhaps for a nice girl who was herself sometimes overlooked.
No, Mary would be a practical girl with the motivation to wage what must have been a patient campaign against Tom’s tendency to overthink. She would be pretty when she smiled, although perhaps less of a looker than his besotted friend painted her in his letters. She would be round-faced with round glasses, a little solid of leg, perhaps, and with a propensity for woolens and earnestness. Mary would be a terrific girl: game, good company, the daughter of a mother who also taught and a father who worked thirty minutes a day longer than his terms of employment strictly required. She would be as poor as Tom was, and all four of them would have a jolly lunch at the modest eatery Tom had proposed in his letter. Putting off the Ritz was how Tom had phrased it.
After lunch they would all go their separate ways: Tom and Mary to an eventual marriage, Hilda to her own future, and Alistair to a rendezvous with the massed armor of the Wehrmacht.
Thinking about his imminent deployment, everything about London now moved him as never before. These mannered planes of grass in the park, those calm stone facades that rose above the bordering oaks, the ironed creases in the uniform trousers of the policeman who stood at Hyde Park Corner directing the traffic with his immaculate white armbands. All these timeless things could be seen more clearly when one had so little time oneself. In twenty-two hours he would board the train and be gone.
Back at barracks he would oversee the packing of his regiment. Every item would be documented and boxed and cataloged by the quartermaster, from the greatest artillery piece to the smallest dress-shirt stud. Then there would be the troopship: Biscay and Gibraltar, deck quoits for the officers and physical jerks for the men. Then it would all begin again: the war, with its fantastic shocks that knocked London out of a man and left him as he found himself now, with no immunity to the wonder of it.
He realized that he was standing quite still, eyes moist, halfway across Hyde Park. His pipe had gone out. He was standing by a tree. No, apparently he had taken cover by its trunk. He sweated cold. Dear god: without any fuss, and by some instinct he had picked up in France, he had found a concealed position. While his mind strayed, his body—unpiloted—had taken cover on a Saturday afternoon, as the chimes of ice cream vans sounded. Pigeons paired. Squirrels did their mummery for sandwich crumbs and nuts. The Serpentine quivered as couples in rudderless love cooled their awkward oars in it. Alistair collected himself and walked on.
A crowd was out in the park. Men in uniform nodded to him in nonchalant fraternity. Pretty things swished by in dresses, giving him warm looks from under the brims of their hats. A girl smiled at him, a knockout girl in a WAAF uniform, and it was such a companionable smile that he grinned back, and just as he was thinking of some nice way to introduce himself, her skin took on the uneasy suggestion of bubbling and scorching and her hand—reaching up to touch her hair—seemed for a moment to be splintered bones that made jagged egress through the white cotton fingers of her gloves.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, and hurried on.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, long after she was too far away to hear.
It happened from time to time. It was just a maddening tic, like getting a popular jingle stuck in one’s head. How one wished that all the gore had never got in there. Still, in this as in all other things, he felt certain that he would recover. The psyche, after all, could catch its breath again, as one recovered on the landing before tackling the next flight of stairs. In the meantime one could cheer oneself up, as he did now, by shooting one’s cuffs and whistling “Sleepy Lagoon.” He was still sweating cold, though, and the feeling took several minutes to pass and wasn’t entirely gone even at lunch.
The place Tom had booked was at Lancaster Gate, and it was busy. Waiters addressed corks in a good-humored frenzy and banged down the dish of the day with no more ceremony than it merited: it smelled brown, looked brown, cost one and six with a choice of dessert, and wasn’t on the ration.
Tom rose and waved from a spot by the back wall. Alistair waved back and got so involved with piloting himself and his duffel bag through the tight press of diners that he didn’t notice his friend’s companions until he reached the table. Alistair smiled his introduction to them, then nodded politely at his friend.
“Excuse me, chum,” he said. “You wouldn’t have seen a bright-looking chap, about your height, only with a sorry excuse for a beard?”
Tom stroked his jaw. “It has grown in rather obligingly, don’t you think? And look at you! You look . . .”
“I know!” said Alistair. “At least twenty years younger. It’s the fresh air.”
They shook hands, and Alistair snatched another look at the women while he hung his jacket on the back of his seat. He had been right about Mary: she was a little slimmer than he had guessed, but there were the glasses—round, just as he had pictured them—and here was the button nose in the pretty round face that smiled at him now, under nice black hair in a modish pompadour that was fun if a bit over the top. She seemed a charming girl, and he was delighted for Tom.
The other woman was a knockout, a redhead with peppy green eyes and a reckless, puckish stamp. Her hands fussed with her napkin. This must be Hilda. She smiled at him gaily, and he realized with a kick of nerves that he didn’t entirely mind it. He saw now how it would all happen: after lunch someone would casually suggest the theater, and naturally he and she would be seated together, and then afterward they would all go to the dances.
She held his eye, nicely and without flirtation, and yet he felt that an acknowledgment was passing between them.
But now his stomach fell. He could not explain to himself the awful ache of melancholy that her simple, chummy smile provoked in him. A man ought to be glad. But her freckled face burned to bones before his eyes. Even when he blinked and her beauty was restored, his morale was left in ashes. In twenty-one hours he would be gone, and he guessed now—by the leaden sadness that her beauty provoked—that he would never return. He broke off the glance, steadied himself, and looked to Tom.
“I’d like you to meet Mary,” Tom said, putting his arm around the woman Alistair had just been felled by.
Alistair smiled gamely while the universe splintered and re-formed itself into this different configuration with a concussion that none of the other diners seemed to feel.
“How do you do?” said Mary.
“How do you do?” said Alistair, since that was what one said.
“And this i
s Hilda,” said Tom, nodding to the girl with the pompadour.
“Delighted,” said Alistair.
“I hope you don’t mind a gate-crasher,” said Hilda, managing to smile effervescently and look perfectly worried both at once. It was a feat that in another time Alistair knew he would have found endearing.
“Tell me if a gate-crasher turns up, and I’ll tell you if I mind.”
Hilda laughed, and they shook hands. “Tom said you were funny.”
“Did he also mention that I’m rich and a world-renowned dancer?”
“Behave!” said Tom, and Alistair clicked heels and gave him a deferential salute that set both women giggling.
White wine came, and Tom filled their glasses. “This stuff is actually Champagne,” he said, “only the bubbles have been requisitioned to give buoyancy to our submarine fleet. You will see that there have been a lot of changes while you’ve been away playing soldiers.”
“Apparently the girls have become lovelier,” said Alistair, flashing a grin at the women and intending to grace them both equally. His eyes snagged on Mary’s, though, and in his embarrassment he almost blushed.
She handled it calmly.
“Hilda is my loveliest friend,” she said. “We were at school together.”
“I was the frumpy one,” said Hilda.
“Not at all,” said Alistair, coming gratefully back to her eyes.
A waiter put down four dishes of the day, in such a manner that nearly all the gravy stayed on the plates. “Lamb,” he claimed, and took himself off.
Mary prodded at hers with a fork. “Whatever it may have been, its suffering is over now.”