Aside from the brooms there was silence. London was a stopped gramophone with no hand to wind it. It smelled of cracked sewers and escaping town gas and charred wood, wet from fire hoses.
How hadn’t she noticed this? The ageless mechanism of the city’s renewal had faltered. Women only waited now, and swept. Rope cordons ringed unexploded ordnance. Chalk crosses marked the doors that the rescue crews had not yet opened. Mary thought of the mortuaries with their unclaimed dead lying in senseless paragraphs, line after line with an X against each body in the ledger. The point to which she had hurried at the start of the war was gone now, along with all fixed points. Now X marked only the unexploded, the unexamined, the unconsoled. One waited—with the shuffling rhythm of brooms—for some inexplicit resurrection.
It overwhelmed her. Every sense was scoured raw by the retreating grit of the morphine. The Thames was the issue of all the world’s wounded hearts, the billions. The pale brown flow was unending. Oh—she half remembered—I came out to find tea. The Thames was before her, infinite and inexplicable. How brown it was. Oh, she thought, I came to find tea. The Thames was . . . oh.
—
Hilda answered the door in her nightdress. The left side of her face was bandaged and taped, the eye covered. Blood showed through.
“What happened?” said Mary.
After a pause, Hilda said, “I think it’s my cheek.”
“Goodness, Hilda . . .”
“Oh Mary, your face! Do I look dreadful?”
Mary made herself smile. “It always looks worse than it is.”
“Well come in, won’t you?”
Hilda moved with care, her neck painfully straight. Mary followed her through to the little kitchen. She ran water into the kettle and put it on the stove. The pressure was feeble and the gas made a minuscule flame.
Mary said, “I hope you like your tea slow.”
Hilda slumped at the kitchen table. Mary hugged her. “What happened?”
“New driver. Stupid little thing. We dodged bombs all night and then she put us straight through a UXB cordon. The crash set the horrid thing off.”
Mary’s stomach turned. “Oh Hilda, I’m so sorry.”
“How bad do you suppose my face is? They wouldn’t let me look.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Awfully. Like it’s still being cut.”
“Do you have morphine?”
Hilda gave her a look. “Are you asking for me, or for you?”
Mary closed her eyes for a moment. “Both.”
“I’m trying not to use morphine, unless it gets desperate.’
“You’re shaking enough to bring down the building.”
“But they need it for the soldiers. We really have been so thoughtless.”
Mary took her hand. “But how else can one live through this?”
“As ordinary people do. We must learn to live, with no help, on our own.”
Mary said nothing. After a while Hilda said, “Sorry.”
Mary shook her head. “Do you have bandages, at least? You’re bleeding through.”
Hilda swallowed. “In the cupboard over the sink.”
Mary fetched bandages and antiseptic. She had Hilda sit back in her chair while she undid the pins.
“Does this hurt?”
“Only horribly.”
“I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
The bandage came off, dragging clotted blood and saffron-colored serum. Hilda yelped. “Sorry,” said Mary. “I’m so sorry.”
Hilda was shaking so hard that Mary couldn’t hold her. “Try to keep your hands off your face. Please, you mustn’t touch it.”
Mary clasped Hilda’s hands together and held them. Dabbing a clean bandage in the antiseptic, she cleaned the wounds. It was hard to do it properly—she was shaking almost as much as Hilda. When she was finished, she took a careful look at Hilda’s face.
“Now you must tell me where the morphine is.”
Hilda whimpered. “Is it as bad as that?”
“Tell me where it is, darling, and then I will bring the mirror.”
Hilda hesitated. The left side of her face was gore, the right was fear.
“Be brave,” said Mary.
Hilda closed her eyes and said, “Handbag.”
“Good girl.” Mary took two syrettes and they used one each.
Hilda took a deep, shuddering breath. “You were quite right, of course.”
“Cigarette?” said Mary, offering.
“Rather.”
Mary tuned the wireless. The Kentucky Minstrels played “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” The sharp midday light softened into afternoon.
“Fix your hair?” said Mary after a while.
No answer. Hilda’s cigarette, forgotten, drooped a sadness of ash.
Mary fetched Hilda’s hairbrushes and got to work. Hilda was sleepy and loose, and she kept coming toward the brush so that Mary had to nudge her head upright again. With the wireless they sat in warm silence while Mary worked, and once Hilda’s pompadour was restored Mary used hair spray to put it out-of-bounds for physics.
“How is it looking?” said Hilda.
“Fine. I’ll fetch the mirror, shall I?”
“Oh yes, do.”
When Mary brought the mirror, and set it on its stand on the little Formica-topped table, they held hands and looked together. There were three cuts, all beginning on the left cheekbone. The deepest ran back, toward the ear. The longest curved down, almost to the point of the jaw. The cruelest ran toward the eye, missing the eye itself but resuming on the other side of the socket to cut through the eyebrow and end in a nasty bifurcation on the forehead. The cuts had been stitched, but not very well. Mary imagined the scene at the hospital: the worst night of the bombing, the floors streaked with blood.
“You’ve done a much better job than last time,” said Hilda.
“Oh, thanks.”
“The trick is really to get a good tight curl from the start, isn’t it? And then the rest looks after itself.”
“So long as one doesn’t spare the spray.”
“It isn’t on the ration, is it? The way I see it, hair spray is proof that the War Office wants us to be happy.”
“They want us to be upstanding. Hair spray is their talisman.”
“By the way,” said Hilda, “did I tell you that poor Huw was killed?”
“Oh dear,” said Mary, the morphine making it no more serious than a bun that had rolled off downhill.
“And Clive, at the same time.”
“ ‘What a shame,”’ said Mary, wondering if Hilda was dead too and then realizing that of course she couldn’t be, since here she was now. It was hard to keep up with who was and who wasn’t.
Hilda watched herself in the mirror. Softly at first and then rising to a piercing scream, the kettle finally boiled.
“Oh,” said Mary, who had forgotten.
Outside the kitchen window, the city tended to evening. Mary looked out and remembered there was a war. She made tea in the brown glazed pot, with leaves that had been used before. Oh, that’s right, thought Mary. I came out for tea.
Something had changed in the set of Hilda’s shoulders. The stiffness had come back to her neck. There was a brittle edge—in Hilda, and also in how Mary understood Hilda’s mood. Mary found it hard to explain to herself. The morphine had levels, visible from below but not from above.
Without taking her eyes from the mirror, Hilda said, “I expect I shall hate you, once this wears off.” Her own thought seemed to surprise her, and she followed it by saying, “Oh.”
Mary poured them each a cup, in which neither of them had the slightest interest, then set to work to redo Hilda’s bandages.
Hilda said, “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d been driving.’
?
??You know the ambulance was too much for me. I had to stop.”
“I only carried on because I thought you’d come back. You’ve taken it all from me now. Every man I ever liked, and now my looks.”
Mary fastened the bandage with a pin, though it spoiled the hairdo a bit. “I’ve tried to make it up to you for Alistair. You know I’ve stopped writing to him.”
“ ‘Well now you might as well. He won’t want me now. No one will.”
“You mustn’t say that.”
“But you must see it.”
“Please,” said Mary, not really knowing what she asked for.
Hilda said nothing. The wireless crackled and jived.
Mary finished off the bandage and pinned it. “It will heal, you know.”
“As if anything does.”
They snagged eyes in the mirror then, and Mary caught something bleaker than she could bear in Hilda’s face. The whole world was shattered, the pieces falling away from each other. The morphine was hardening as it cooled. Soon it would shatter too.
Outside, it was looking like dusk. “I should go,” said Mary. “The raids . . .”
Hilda emptied her handbag on the table. Lipstick and keys clattered out. Identity card, ration book, hat pins, a dozen syrettes of morphine.
“What are you doing?”
“If you care about me at all,” said Hilda, “take all these doses away.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to live with yourself.”
Mary tried to take Hilda’s hand, but Hilda wouldn’t let her. “Please . . .”
“Just go. Before this one wears off completely and I tell you what I think of you.”
Mary cast down her eyes. “I suppose you rather have.”
“Please go,” said Hilda. “I don’t think I can stand you anymore.”
Mary looked at the syrettes on the table, knowing she must leave them where they were but also that it was impossible. She picked up six of the doses, turned, and left the flat without speaking. The last she saw of Hilda was her slim back and the armored black curve of her hair.
PART THREE
RESTORATION
July, 1941
ALISTAIR HAD BRIGGS WRAP the painting in blankets and take it to the fort’s central courtyard. He followed him down. A month on, Alistair still found it hard to balance without his arm. One had never realized how quietly an arm just got on with the business of equilibrium—counterbalancing here, giving a little nudge there. One hadn’t suspected that life was a circus trick, requiring exquisite balance and grace.
“All right, sir?” said his subaltern.
“Quite, thank you Briggs.”
“You’re not though, are you sir?”
“No,” said Alistair. “Go and find the quartermaster, will you, and have him issue me a new right arm, salutes for the execution of.”
“Gives you much pain, does it?”
“Think how much pain it will save me. I can never hit my thumb with a hammer again. It’s you chaps I feel sorry for.”
“Thank you, sir. Help you with anything else, can I?”
“Left pocket of my jacket. Pillbox. Take two out, would you, and find me a drink of water?”
The man fished out the pills and brought Alistair a canteen. The truth was that the pain was a bore, worse than it had been before the amputation. The phenacetin helped only a little, and in the meantime his evacuation number was taking forever to come up. He was still only eightieth in the queue, with a mail flight leaving the island every day that enemy action permitted. Often one’s number rose up the queue only to fall down again when some brass hat pulled strings for a favorite of theirs. And the mail plane carried only two casualties home at a time, sometimes one. It depended whether the island’s garrison had found much to write home about.
“Anything else?” said Briggs.
His subaltern was skin and bone, painful to look at. Alistair supposed he might not look any prettier himself. He nodded at the painting.
“I need us to take this back to a church near the Bingemma Gap. I want you to persuade the quartermaster, using all the arts at your disposal, to issue us with a truck and a ration of petrol. Note that I have spent three months restoring this painting. It is the best work I have ever done, and it means everything to me to get it back. I don’t suppose you can help the QM not to be a bore about it?”
Briggs thought for a moment. “I shall tell him it’s maps for the anti-invasion plans, sir. If that doesn’t work, I’ll tell him I know what he does with His Majesty’s Vaseline.”
“Thank you Briggs, you are wicked in a way that is thoroughly expeditious. Bring me the QM’s chit and I’ll sign it. Don’t speak a word of this. In return, I shall issue orders for all bombs and shrapnel to miss you by at least two hundred feet from now until the day of our victory.”
“Thank you, sir. Very handy indeed.”
When Briggs brought the Bedford up and loaded the painting into the truck bed, Alistair got the cab door open and struggled into the passenger seat. Briggs drove them across the drawbridge, the fort’s gates swung closed behind them, and they were out in the blue morning.
Alistair closed his eyes, too weary for chat. At least the nausea of the infection was gone. In its place he felt a sort of grief. He must have loved the arm, in a way. He didn’t know what had become of it—whether it had been incinerated or buried. There had been no words to mark its demise. There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.
The surgeon had given Alistair a briefing that lacked no medical detail. Disarticulation of the elbow with amputation through the joint, pronator and dermal flaps to be folded over, stitches to effect closure, the whole to be done under anesthesia induced by intravenous barbiturate. Sound about right to you, old man? Any questions?
None, Alistair had said, since the obvious one—how will I possibly bear it?—seemed unwelcome. The operation would have seemed less daunting if the surgeon had been able to acknowledge, even tangentially, that it was an awful thing to happen to a person. Perhaps there were simply certain procedures, such as wielding a scalpel or firing a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft piece, that were always going to affect the subject more than the operator.
The truck lurched and swayed on the ruined roads. Briggs whistled. In the intervals between the deepest potholes the motion was soothing.
“Isn’t it something, sir?”
Alistair opened his eyes. Briggs was indicating a sweep of countryside beyond the walls of Valletta.
“Oh, you like it?” said Alistair. “Me, too.”
“The people can’t do enough for you. It’s like Liverpool, only with beaches.”
“Think you’ll come back on holiday?”
“After the war I’ll bring my wife here and we’ll open a pub.”
“Good show. Germanic or traditional, do you think?”
“I think the English style might be more of a hit with the locals, sir, at least for the next thousand years or so.”
“You have it all worked out.”
“Don’t you, sir?”
‘Oh, I don’t know what I’ll do after the war. But that’s officers for you, isn’t it? Each pip on these epaulettes represents a point we are missing.”
“I’m glad you said it, sir. I couldn’t possibly.”
They drove a little way further and then a twenty-millimeter shell from an enemy 109 shattered the windshield, punched through Briggs’ chest at the level of the sternum and continued through the driver’s seat. Four more shells followed, two piercing the cab and two coming through the canvas canopy. On impact with the truck bed the shells disgorged hot phosphorous into the wood. Fragments pierced the fuel tanks and lit them up. Alistair was out of the cab immediately, the battle instinct delivering him to the roadside ditch. He watched the truck roll slowly off the
road and take fire. Briggs made no sound as he burned. The truck went up with an orange roar and clouds of back diesel soot.
Alistair scanned the sky but saw no sign of the fighter. He scrambled from the ditch and went as close as he could, holding his left hand before his face to shield against the heat. The truck’s canvas back was burned away, the metal hoops arching over a bed of embers. He went up to the cab, looked at Briggs, and wished he hadn’t. Up and down the road for thirty yards he searched both ditches, hoping that by luck the painting might have been thrown clear.
The road snaked away in both directions over low hills, its yellow gravel losing its distinctness in the yellow grass of the verges and the yellow stones of the walls. He couldn’t get his pipe lit.
After an hour a local man came by in a donkey cart. They said prayers for Briggs, and Alistair rode back on the tailgate of the cart. At the fort he reported the incident and stayed on his feet as far as the stone staircase, where he sank to his knees before he found the resources to climb up to his room. He only wanted to close his eyes for a few minutes—to collect himself—but the fort’s bells began almost immediately.
The fresh attack came in, the bombers dragging their shadows across the cerulean sea. Alistair took the jar of Tom’s jam from the arrow loop and put it safely on the floor. He sat on his cot and got out the phenacetin. He almost called for Briggs to make coffee.
After the raid, Simonson came up with an aerogramme. He flipped it onto Alistair’s desk, took off his cap and threw that at Alistair.
“Damned if I know why anyone would write to you. I got two letters, by the way, in case you were wondering which of us was the more popular.”
Alistair stretched for the letter. Simonson slouched in Alistair’s chair.
“You know what worries me about the enemy? It’s the violence. It is almost as if he thinks he can solve every problem this way. I sometimes feel we shall have trouble rubbing along.”