The thing is, Alistair, I am keener on her than she is on me. I know she wants me to give her a job, and I fear that as soon as she realizes I have no job to give her then she will be off. And then there is the issue of her social standing—
Alistair closed his eyes, thinking of their gramophone—the Columbia portable with its shabby leatherette case. When one opened it up, there was unannounced wonder: the burnished Plano-Reflecto tone arm, the plush red platter that the discs spun upon, glossy debs on a velveteen settee. It was perfectly built for peacetime: the balance of the tone arm assuming a stable foundation, the calm government of its rotation implying an excess of time.
—since she is of an entirely different social class, and I cannot help but think that her interest in me might have more to do with what her family will think than with what she feels. But perhaps I am underestimating her. Perhaps you are thinking that I simply ought to take my courage in both hands and—
Alistair let the letter fall. He wondered what they had danced to. Al Bowlly was the thing that season. “Hold My Hand,” if Tom had dared. Lying on his cot, Alistair heard the music quite clearly in his mind. Hold my hand / No matter what the weather / Just you hold my hand / We’ll walk through life together . . . He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.
The company stood around Alistair’s cot now. No one spoke. One man brought a blanket and laid it over him. Another took Alistair’s boots from the paraffin heater before they desiccated, and rubbed black polish into them and buffed them up and aligned them carefully on his locker. There was always an inspection at dawn.
March, 1940
AT BREAKFAST PALMER BROUGHT the post on a pewter tray. The silver was used only when Mary’s father was in residence—this being one of a hundred idiosyncrasies that might have originated in some long-forgotten instruction from the family, or arisen spontaneously from the coppery circuitry in Palmer’s internal machinery that gauged what was fitting. If Palmer were lost to them, along with the stock of method and lore of which he alone was the repository, then Mary felt sure the family would be obliged to disband—to screech apart from one another as atoms released from their bond. Palmer, then: with the morning post, on the pewter tray that lent the white envelopes an oysterish hue.
“Oh!” said Mary. “Here’s another one from Zachary.”
“But look here,” said Hilda, “you are hardly the nigger’s mother.”
“No, I daresay I would have noticed.”
Hilda, who hadn’t Mary’s facility for overlooking Palmer’s hovering presence, colored slightly. Mary took Zachary’s letter from the envelope.
“I hope you don’t encourage him by replying?” said Hilda.
“Darling, I wrote to him first. Anyway, must you call him ‘nigger’? It doesn’t seem entirely big-hearted.”
Hilda yawned. “I’ll say ten Hail Marys.”
“The Negroes are no viler than we, you know. In faculty, fitness and faith they are our perfect equal.”
“Hardly!” said Hilda. “But I’ve nothing against them. I might even prefer them to other foreigners, since at least one knows where one stands.”
“Does one?”
“Well, one really oughtn’t to write to one.”
“Stop it,” said Mary. “Anyway, this won’t be writing so much as marking the child’s work. Honestly, look at this!”
Deere Miss Northe, I doe note licke the villije the uthae chilrene are verie meene. I doe note licke the howse waire I am staeine the woemane is verie verie meene.
Hilda squinted at the pencil work. “How old do you say the child is?”
“He is ten.”
“And is this him writing with his fingers, or his toes? Only I’ve heard they have equal facility with both.”
“Oh, tosh. His fingers are used for the extraction of nasal mucus, or for counting when under duress. His feet are reserved for football. He is no different from any other boy, you see, except that his spelling is quite original. He is a perfect spark, only no one bothers to teach the Negroes properly.”
Hilda sniffed. “He spells as if he has picked up a job lot of letters ‘e’ on the cheap, and now is anxious to offload them.”
“But wouldn’t you? If I had never been taught to spell, I daresay I might chuck in an ‘e’ whenever reasonable doubt arose.”
“You’re saying you can’t blam him?”
Mary gave an approving look. “Now you’re getting it.”
The uthere childrene chaese me and whene theye catche me theye tacke offe my claothes and theye hurte me wythe styckes ore nyves plese helpe me.
Mary’s smile froze.
“Yes,” said Hilda, reading over her shoulder, “but children exaggerate, don’t they?”
And I am soe colde it is soe colde hiere plese helpe.
Mary put the letter down on the pewter tray.
“I’m quite sure it can’t be so bad as all that,” said Hilda. “With my nephews, one simply has to remind them to jolly well wear a jumper.”
“Perhaps I ought to go to him.”
“Yes, and perhaps you should knit him balaclavas, and bake him flapjacks iced with your tears, and send him woollen socks.”
“Oh, do put a woollen sock in it.”
“But he is in the Cotswolds, darling, not the Crimea.”
Mary ignored her. “I will go to see the child’s father.”
Hilda snorted.
“No, really. I will talk to him, and express my concerns.”
“But what good will that do?”
“He probably doesn’t understand our system. He most likely does not realize that he has a perfect right to bring his son back home.”
“Sorry to nitpick,” said Hilda, “but you see, there’s a war.”
“Yes, but do you really think there’ll be bombing? This beastly thing has droned on for how long now?”
“Seven months.”
“And the only pasting we’ve had is with posters urging valor.”
“Even so, you’re hardly going to tell the father to bring the boy home.”
“Surely it is my duty to tell him that he could. This is the thing, you see: unless one more or less lives with the authorities, as I do, one probably doesn’t understand that one can simply say ‘no thank you’.”
“So you are planning to walk into a Negro family’s house—”
“I was planning to knock.”
“—and tell them what they should do with their child.”
“What they could usefully do, yes.”
“Notwithstanding your belief that they are just as intelligent as us.”
Mary frowned. “You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs.”
Hilda beamed. “I use you for practice. One day I’ll have a husband.”
Mary took a second envelope from the tray. “God help the poor man.”
“God will take my side,” said Hilda. “He is only human, after all.”
“Oh!” said Mary, blushing slightly. “This one’s from Tom.”
“Come on, read it out.”
Mary drew Tom’s letter closer. “I think I might rather . . .”
“Oh, go on! Don’t be such a prude!”
“It’s just that I’d . . .”
A cough came from the end of the breakfast room, by the double doors, which had swung open soundlessly. Palmer’s cough had the twin qualities of apology and watershed. Mary thought him the very best.
“Miss Hilda?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I have taken the opportunity to stop a cab for you.”
Hilda blinked. “Oh. Yes. Well, thank you, Palmer.”
The imperceptible nod. The dispassionate eyes, already fading from memory. Palmer’s face had the property of oneness with the crockery and the dado rails, while his structuring of the day had the feature of seeming contiguous with one’s own desires—so that Hilda, even as she stood, must already be convinced that she had somehow wanted the taxi. Mary supposed that an asset like Palmer would be a supreme unguent in these times of heightened stress at the ministries. She felt a twinge of apprehension at the thought that he might be requisitioned.
She kissed Hilda on both cheeks, waved her off down the steps into the drizzling morning, and opened Tom’s letter in the hallway.
Dear Miss North,
So: Tom was ‘Miss North’ing her, on headed notepaper from the Education Authority. Mary thought she might fall down. She leaned against the hall stand with its cut-glass jar of peonies. She hadn’t thrown wine over Tom at their last dinner. Nor had she gone the other way, undressing over dessert. All she had done—and this hardly seemed to merit the official stationery treatment—was to have drunk slightly too much and to have asked him, quite politely, if he wouldn’t mind kissing her.
Dear Miss North,
From the records of this office I see that following your release from your posting to Hawley Street School you have no current role with the Authority.
Mary felt that she might cry. It wasn’t as if she had hidden it.
I note also your several requests to this office to be allowed to resume your war service in teaching.
Oh—perhaps she had slightly nagged him. But she had been quite fun about the whole thing—or at least she had tried to be—and the awkward truth of it was that she really did want to teach, and she really did like him. Perhaps she had been clumsy in asking to have both. She read Tom’s next line through splayed fingers, in case it was too awful for words.
I am therefore pleased to inform you of your selection by this office for a new position that has been created at Hawley Street School. You are to report to—
Mary read no further until she was already in a cab.
You are to report to these offices to collect keys and then make the building ready. You are to prepare one classroom of robust construction with access to basement or cellar in case of air raid. You are to make arrangements in anticipation of a class of mixed ages and abilities.
If Tom’s intention had been to avoid any appearance of impropriety by keeping the communication official, then she rather subverted it by rushing to his office, dragging him out to the café over the road, and drinking only three sips of tea before kissing him on the cheek. He touched his face as if her lips might have left a tangible remainder: a smoking impact crater, or an epistolary X with the ink still wet below the signature.
Later, when she was alone in the raw wet wind, strangers smiled at her in the street. It was eerie. The raindrops were champagne bubbles bursting on her skin. The iridescent spills of fuel oil on the wet tarmac of the road were tiny proofs of the covenant.
She supposed she must be in love. That Tom was slightly infuriating, and that she didn’t mind in the slightest, might be proof of it. And of course it would be nice if he were more daring about the whole thing, but she could be patient. Soon Tom would realize that there was nothing more important than Mary North—that it was only her sorcery causing the planets to stay aligned and preventing the milk from curdling.
Almost as strange as being in love was being in it with someone she liked: someone her mother would not countenance nor Hilda even consider. Without the war, how would one ever meet an ordinary man like Tom?
And here was what she wanted to know (now that she had left the café, and London closed around her with its smell of coal smoke and truck exhaust and Tube ventings and railway grease and frying and horse droppings and wet masonry and exhaled cigarettes and damp worsted overcoats and quick brown water coursing in the gutters and slow brown water infusing with disintegrating newsprint in the puddles, along with the butts of everything that had already been smoked, in anarchic and listing flotilla)—here was what she wanted to know (as the clouds made the day dark and she pulled her mackintosh tight and crossed Chalk Farm Road between the cars with their slotted headlights that made them look as if they had just arisen after a heavy night and were fumbling for the tin of aspirin)—here was what she wanted to know: was one meant to feel certain, about love?
She carried on down Chalk Farm Road, lighting a cigarette and exhaling a little of her buoyancy. Her feet seemed to touch the pavement again, and it was wet, and she noticed the water stains on the mid-tan leather of her oxfords.
After their last dinner—the slightly-too-much-wine dinner—they had gone for a walk on Hampstead Heath, in a mist so thick as to have been almost a paste. You could have lost your gloves in the fog and found them half an hour later, suspended in the air at wrist height. She had tried to get them lost in the vapors but he, misreading the situation entirely, had piloted them back to safe streets with a quiet and unerring skill. If it had rather irked her that she must contrive to produce in Tom the behaviors her mother insisted held primacy in all men, then she had forgiven him on the spot when he gave her a shy, proud smile. Her heart had lifted in her chest, as the magazines insisted it must.
She remembered him like that now: transported from cares, his cheeks damp from the mist and flushed for once with something other than embarrassment. Was it love that she felt? Or did she just find him sweet for not allowing them to become lost on Hampstead Heath and only discovered years later, with her mackintosh in tatters and his beard down to his knees?
Mary hurried on and tried to pick out the landmarks. The worst of it was that people were still high on the intrigue of the war, and prone to suspicion if you asked them for directions. Such people, and they were not always joking, would ask you who was the Prime Minister—as if no enemy spy could possibly speak the name without combusting.
How much better it would be to ask her: If you are one of us then how—hypothetically—would you know if the trembling physical feeling you have for a man, say, five years your senior, handsome without being a knockout, and from a slightly inferior social background to your own but not in such a way that it was necessarily a problem provided that you remembered to show him the right way to hold a sherry glass before he met your father—how would you know if that feeling was love?
The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover—after one was taken—that it hadn’t been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn’t love, and then to discover years later—old and unconsoled—that it had been. No: the worst thing—the worst, worst thing—was this having to decide.
She sighed, and turned left into Hawley Street. She hadn’t had a moment to really look at the school until now. It was a grimly masculine building, red bricks set off in three frugal bands by courses of hard London yellows. The windows rose from wide sills to Gothic arches; the gables were decked out with barge boards and topped with lanceolate finials. Mary thought these the most fun bits of the building: these spikes aimed skywards, impalers of trespassing angels.
She stepped from the gloom of the street into the dark of the school and used her cigarette lighter to find the switch. The bulbs came on down the corridor. Mary wrinkled her nose. There was a lot of dust, thin in the center of the corridor and deeper at the skirting boards where the draft had piled it into drifts. There were the tracks of gnawing creatures, the serpentine lines swept by their naked tails, and a crusting and crumbing of the dust where their urine had soaked and dried. All this dust, and the shuttered-school smell of inkwells and spitballs and apple cores gone rotten in desks. What could she do about it all, alone, even with soap flakes and an optimistic outlook and three days to go until Monday morning?
The quiet, too, was unsettling. Into this air multiplication tables had been recited, the ch
angeless alphabet chanted, the four house songs sung in quadratic symmetry. The Lord’s Prayer had been intoned by impish voices with every imaginable variation and subversion. And now the unceasing hymn was struck dumb. If the war so far was a phony one, this silence was hostile and real.
She went from classroom to classroom, switching on the lights. She tried to brush off the solemn mood that was settling on her. Of course a school made one feel rather alone. The rows of desks in each room, the stacks of identical hymnals, the massed coat hooks lining the wall: the multiplicity of everything was bound to single one out.
She went first to the classroom—Kestrels Class—that had been hers in September. She realized it wouldn’t be suitable. It was robust enough, but it wasn’t close enough to a basement. She walked the corridors, opening doors until she found one that led down wooden stairs.
Belowground, the smell was older. She found superannuated atlases in tumbling piles, with the earth’s poles marked by whirlpools. There were the musty props of ancient school plays—Tuck’s staff, Banquo’s shroud, Peter Pan’s cap. A maypole lay askew, bound in its own ribbons. In the glow of her lighter’s flame the hoard stretched away into blackness. Fifty children could shelter down here if need be.
Mary knelt to sift the treasures. Here were cross-stitched samplers and moldering report cards with examination results for needlework and recitation. Here were handwriting exercises with passages dutifully copied: At the door on summer evenings sat the little Hiawatha / Heard the whispering of the pine trees / Heard the lapping of the water.
She felt five years old, and five hundred. Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy. She walked up into the corridor, trembling. The school was absolutely silent. How violent it was, this peace where children’s voices should be. The ache in her chest hardened to anger, until she shook with it.