“Wait for what? For children to forget their times tables? For H’s to be dropped in great mounds?”
He humored her with a smile. “I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“But I am quite all right. I am unharmed and able to return to duty.”
There was a long silence. “Must I spell out the sensitivities?”
“I’d rather you gave me a job.’
Cooper wouldn’t return her smile. He stood—apparently it was not so hard after all—and walked across the office. With his back to her and his hands clasped behind it, he looked out at the snow.
“My predecessor was very young, and decided to reopen some schools. I’m afraid the excitement of promotion got the better of his judgement.”
Mary shook her head. “His duty was to provide school places.”
Cooper gave her the tone reserved for a child who had got the answer jolly nearly correct. “Our duty, since you use the word, is to send the message that London under the circumstances is not the right place for the young.”
“And yet there are children the countryside won’t take.”
“But I don’t make the policy, and the policy is one of full evacuation.”
“Then what are we to do with the crooked and the colored and the slow? Are we to let them rot, simply because it is not policy for them to exist?”
“If you must split hairs, it is policy that such children exist but it is not politic for them to be schooled here.”
“Does it not seem that what you say is monstrous?”
Cooper turned from the window. “What is monstrous is that seven children and their parents are dead because my predecessor saw fit to let you play the pretty schoolmarm while the grown-ups were using the city for war.”
Mary blinked once, twice, then recovered herself. She fixed the man with a slight arch of the eyebrow as she lit a new cigarette.
He returned her gaze unsteadily. “I suppose we both wish we could undo it.”
Her hands shook. “We were hardly doing ballet on the roof. We were underground, in the shelter. People are killed in shelters every day.”
“Well it won’t happen in any school of mine.”
“Apparently not, if neither will any teaching.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “You’re emotional because you were so caught up. You are charming and young, and I don’t hold what happened against you. The one who should have known better is my predecessor.”
“Tom was my lover. It is well known. Won’t you stop speaking as if we weren’t both aware?”
“I am trying to protect your feelings, and the name of your family.”
“You might best serve both by letting me teach again. There are hundreds of children in this district, you know full well. One sees them on every street, poking around in the rubble.”
“I’m afraid there’s no position for you.”
“I apologize for becoming emotional. Please let me teach again.”
“Take a break,” he said gently. “God knows, I would if I could. Get out of town for a few weeks, blow away the cobwebs.”
She turned her back on him. In the little watercolor she had given Tom, the light was yellow and frisky. If you went at that light with an egg whisk, you could work up a froth to stand a spoon in. London stretched away beyond the heath. The landmarks stood. They had been so firmly attached back then that the artist had had to paint the sky around them.
She went to the window. “What can I do to change your mind?”
He said nothing. She moved closer, letting her arm brush against his as she smoked. “We needn’t put this city back the way we found it, you know.”
He gave an amused look that turned into something more serious. “Look,” he said, “it is overdue lunch. Why don’t you and I go for a bite and discuss it?’ ”
She tilted her head up to his, giving him the full benefit of her eyes. For a moment she let him drown himself.
“No, thank you,” she said brightly. “I’m not at all hungry.”
He stared at her, coloring slowly. He seemed inclined to strike her, then turned abruptly and left her alone at the window. She heard him banging drawers in the desk, collecting his coat and hat from the peg, slamming the door behind him.
She turned from the window and went to stub out her cigarette. The small painting of Hampstead Heath hung in the gray light, in its golden frame. She let her hand linger, for a moment, on the cold blue glass of Tom’s ashtray. She turned it on its axis—twice, three times—then left it where it was.
“I miss you,” she said to the empty office.
January, 1941
THEY CALLED THE NEW club the Joint. As if it weren’t a thing in itself but only a hinge between night and day. The bombers raised their tempo and the syncopated city matched the rhythm. When a raid interrupted the minstrel show now, the players rushed underground with the audience to join the big band that was already down there. They had cleared out the Lyceum’s great basement to make the club. There was a stage at one end, a bar at the other and alcoves in between where soldiers pushed their luck.
Zachary fetched drinks from the bar in exchange for coins and cigarettes. It was weeks since he’d last seen the sky. It suited him. If you couldn’t see the sky, it couldn’t see you. People patted him on the head when he fetched their drinks. They called him Baby Grand. Everyone was christened again now, sometimes two or three times, as if by this expedient every person might stay ahead of the war’s ability to call them by name.
No one cared if he drank, so he did. He slept under the bar and smoked like Bette Davis. He ate cocktail nuts, the glacé cherries from the bottoms of glasses—whatever he could get. Everyone was hungry. The new pianist discovered that if he waited a quaver of time after the beat and then hit down hard to give some heavy swing, then factory girls and airmen on leave could be made to dance even if they were weak from the rations.
Laying down drinks on the tables, Zachary picked up the gossip. Apparently so many souls were being lost every night that in the great mortuaries of Clerkenwell and Cheapside a dozen families would now claim any unrecognizable corpse as their cousin or mother or aunt. So now the morgue staff stripped the remains, tagged clothing and flesh with the same number, and had families identify the effects instead of the bodies. Zachary hadn’t been asked to identify a thing. Not a tie clip or a ring. He wondered if his father was in some grave, being mourned under a new name. He prayed for him under the old one.
They said that aboveground now, when only human fragments were recovered, the city assessed by weight how many bodies should be assembled. And if a few of the reincorporated dead had more than one left leg, then at least none of the coffins felt light. The drinkers caught him eavesdropping and they laughed and said: “What do you think of that, Baby Grand?” He said, “It sounds fair.” But he thought of his father, who had so carefully washed off his whiteface at the end of every performance, hashed together with white bodies.
Zachary drank what was left in the glasses and the big band played for forty-five minutes in each hour, all night, and whereas in peacetime the horns and the piano always used to play around each other in fast eddies, it was now discovered that if they all united instead in big block chords at three a.m. and four a.m., with the air raid hot and heavy overhead and the dance floor jumping on its joists and dust pouring from the vaulted roof of the basement, then the slim Negro bandleader with his shirt soaked in sweat could lean in to his streamlined microphone as if into a great headwind and call at the crowded white dancers: “Check down at your feet, good ladies and gentlemen, for so long as you are still dancing you cannot yet be dead!” Zachary bused tables and the orchestrated city tapped its great stock of shrouds and cardboard caskets, releasing a precise number each night in expectation of casualties predicted from cloud cover and bomber concentrations. And according to the gossip, if a piece of a Lond
oner could be collected with dustpan and brush then it would be sent downstream on the barges with the rest of the city’s refuse to the great municipal middens at Durham Wharf, while all larger bodily phrases were composed into persons nameable and taken for classical burial. And the cavernous basement boomed. You were safe if dancing or dead. London remembered its oldest rhythm of putting the saints beneath it, and in the public cemeteries of Highgate and Nunhead and Kensal Green the old graves were dug up and the crotchety bones scattered to make room for new. The enemy enlarged its bombs from five hundred kilograms to one thousand and two thousand, and down in the basement the bandleaders put together two bands, and three bands, so that six colored men, and now nine colored men, all swung in line in the horn section, and two Negro drummers, and now three Negro drummers, sweated at their kits on the big raised dais at the back of the stage, and Zachary remembered how his father had used his heavy left hand to stamp out the colossal chords—boom, boom, boom—and the limitless suburban cemeteries opened up fresh ground and the commuter trains in the middle of the day took the coffins out into Metro-land and returned with a toot on the whistle and the conductor’s call of “Empties!” And all the murderous night the big-band drummers smashed out time while the stonemasons in their massed choir with their steel chisels in perfect orchestration tapped out the assumed names of the dead, in letters Zachary couldn’t read. How unbearable it was that his father’s name was lost. How thin his own limbs seemed. He heard the music and he heard the news from above, and it seemed to him now that the world above and the world below were playing the exact same tune.
Every morning when the club kicked out and the band put their horns back into velvet, he swept and put the stools up. The dawn left him deaf from the silence. No one had talk in them. Under the electric bulbs he ate with the band and the barmen, and then all of them went where they would, and Zachary curled up in his place under the bar where no one minded him.
If he woke before the crowd came back—if the stools were still up and the bombers far away—then he went to the piano. He played the quiet pieces the way his father had shown him: eyes closed, softly. He did what he could. His father hadn’t wanted him to be in the show, and he wasn’t, and yet there was this agony. He played the slow tunes and sometimes he almost had his father with him for an hour, and then the crowd flooded back and he smiled and fetched drinks for them.
When he played his father’s music, he was almost back home. But a tune had no fixed place in time. It was a city before the eternal. It was only ever a joint.
January, 1941
MARY SAT WITH HER mother and they read the morning’s post while they waited for lunch. The manager at the Lyceum had replied: Zachary was in good heath and being provided for, and Mary wasn’t to concern herself. She frowned and folded the letter back into its envelope.
“What is it?’ ” said her mother.
“Just Hilda,” said Mary. “The men she favors, the shops she doesn’t.”
“How dreary.”
“But it’s Hilda so she makes it fun, of course.”
“Then why the long face?”
“I worry for her. I wish she could meet someone nice.”
“Well, click your heels together three times when you wish.”
Mary wondered if the manager had meant it kindly when he wrote that she wasn’t to concern herself. There would be a natural wariness, she supposed, of whites. Perhaps she hadn’t made it clear in her own letter that she was one of the helpful kind.
Palmer’s footsteps were so delicate as to be barely audible when he brought in lunch at one. Cook had set a mixed shoal of shrimp and whitebait into clear aspic, using a mold in the form of a wave. The wave was encircled on its salver by a salad of fruits de mer, the whole resting on a bed of toasted golden seeds that made convincing sand.
Mary’s mother put on her spectacles to examine the production, then had Palmer hold it up to the window so that daylight shone through the wave.
“And the beauty is that none of it is on the ration. People make such a fuss about the hardships, but one need only be inventive. What do you think, dear?”
“I’m astonished the poor haven’t thought of it,” said Mary.
Her mother ignored her. “ ‘Of course it’s only a practice for the real thing.”
For a moment, before she understood that the dish was a prototype for the fully operational version of itself, Mary couldn’t think what her mother meant. She stared at the tiny creatures as they flashed in the afternoon light, and wondered what could be the real experience for which this was practice. (Drowning, perhaps? Quite close to the beach? In a well-stocked corner of the ocean?) She had stopped paying attention to the tireless campaign of dinners and cocktails through which her mother hoped to fight Father into Cabinet.
“Are you quite with us?” said her mother.
“Sorry,” said Mary. “I hardly slept.”
“Oh, who does? But you might at least have an opinion.”
Mary squinted into the wave. “The shrimp are rather sweet. Look at their little faces.”
“But darling, don’t you notice something?”
Mary noticed that Palmer was trembling with the strain of holding up the salver to the light. The vibration caused a pulsation in the wave, as if it might crest at any moment and break into streaks of mannered foam.
“I think Cook has dyed the aspic, hasn’t she? It’s a very subtle green.”
Her mother made an exasperated sound. “Yes, but the shrimp—don’t you see? Half of them are swimming upside down. And they would hardly be scattered throughout the wave like that, willy-nilly. Shrimp would be down near the seabed, feeding.”
“It’s almost as if Cook has forgotten her marine biology.”
“You mock me, but this is why we have a practice run. Oh Palmer, you may put the damned thing down now, and let’s see how it slices.”
While Palmer set to with a serving knife, Mary’s mother briefed her on the next evening’s table plan.
“Father will be here on the left, giving the Minister the head of the table. Anderson will sit here with you on his right to make him laugh, which you are awfully good at. And you must try to show off your figure a little. You have worn nothing but sackcloth since . . . well, since you know when.”
“I am not entirely clear on my role. Am I to seduce Anderson, or to render him well disposed toward Father?”
“Would a little of both be beyond you? Anyway, you mustn’t look at me like that. I have invited Henry Hunter-Hall just for you, and he will be sitting here, directly opposite. You may bother each other with your toes, or whatever it is that young people do since the art of conversation was lost.”
“It is too soon. I was in love with Tom—I think you know that I was.”
“Dear, you are twenty years old. We all have our practice runs.”
“You are relieved that Tom died.”
“Oh, not at all. I am dreadfully sorry when anyone is killed, doubly so if it is someone you were fond of.”
Mary smiled.
“What?” said her mother.
“ ‘Well you make him sound like a pony, or a Labrador.”
“It’s only that he was never someone I thought of as a grown-up match for you.”
“He was killed trying to save one of my pupils. I thought it grown-up.”
“It is heartbreaking, I know, but one advances through such trials.’
“And hence Henry, to be seated opposite me, and in whom with your blessing I am to find consolation. Tell me, should I write out the place cards in Tom’s blood, or would you prefer me to use my own?”
“Must you be like that? I am only anxious that you should get straight back on with life. Henry is a likeable boy, from a very good family, and you shan’t tell me he isn’t handsome.”
There was a sadness in her mother’s eyes. Mary wondered wheth
er it had always been there, becoming visible only now that she was attuned to sorrow’s frequency.
“Mother,” she said, “were you ever in love with Father?”
Her mother looked toward the salver where Palmer—before dematerializing—had carved the pristine wave into slices.
“We were very lucky to find each other,” she said.
“Yes, but were you?”
“Yes, we were very lucky.”
“Sometimes, Mother, I don’t know whether you’d be glad if I went along with you, and attended your functions and married some outrageously suitable Henry, or whether you wouldn’t secretly be much happier if I just said ‘hang it all’, and flew as close to the sun as I jolly well dared.’
“Yes, you are quite right, you don’t know that.”
A gray wind blew snowflakes past the windows. When the silence got too much, Mary said, “Hilda thinks we should volunteer for the ambulances.”
“Hilda is jolly public-spirited.”
“You know as well as I do that she only covets the uniform.”
“I’m glad it is you who said it.”
“So, do you think we should?”
“Should what?”
“Join the ambulances.”
Her mother fetched the cigarette case from its place on the mantel. She took a cigarette and slid the case over to Mary. Palmer appeared and disappeared, in such a way that he left behind him two lit cigarettes, an onyx ashtray and no lingering image on the back of the eye.
It was the first time Mary had smoked with her mother. They said nothing. They tended their cigarettes while the sliced aspic, untouched, melted slowly in the heat of the dining-room fire, releasing fish and shrimp by ones and twos into an uncertain future.
January, 1941
ALISTAIR GUESSED THAT THE arithmetic might not be encouraging if worked through to its conclusion. Malta was eight miles wide by eighteen long—as large as London, only with less to do in the evening. From this unpromising rock—their best remaining possession in the Mediterranean—the starving garrison had orders to hold out against the combined forces of Germany and Italy. Alistair tried to count the enemy’s available armies, but he ran out of fingers.