Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Tom blew smoke at the ceiling. Mary curled her foot around his. He held back a laugh.

“What?” said Mary.

“Nothing.”

“Tell or be sorry.” She plucked at the hairs on his chest.

“Ow! I was just thinking how different it feels.”

She looked wistful as she tapped ash from her cigarette. “You won’t love me anymore, now that we’ve done it.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What, then?”

“Actually,” he said, “I was thinking how much more I love you.”

In truth, this is what he had been thinking: that from now on — at work, on the bus, in the park — he would have more fellow feeling with dogs who were sexually experienced than with men who were still virgins.

“And what are you thinking?” he said.

Mary was thinking how much she was enjoying the war. The passions, which had been confused against the general glare, could flicker in the blackout. With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now she could feel as she did — happy — as the ancients evidently had and her mother probably hadn’t. The capital’s heart had moved from Pimlico to Piccadilly, where the loud circus of electric bulbs was silenced and Eros, unsighted and teetering on his pedestal, now loosed his arrows into the dark. London lit her up from the inside. The great diurnal city learned the language of the night.

She said, “I was thinking I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“But you’re a man. You’ll move on, to plunder the next settlement.”

He nodded. “Primrose Hill.”

“Or Hampstead.”

“Can’t I plunder you a bit more first?”

She inspected her nails. “From time to time, I daresay. If I have nothing on.”

“I like you best when you’ve nothing on.”

She flicked his thigh. “Dirty old man.”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Yes. It’s indecent.”

He worried that it was. “I do love you, you know.”

“But do you really?”

“Yes.”

“But do you really, Tom?”

“Absolutely. I’d show you the readings on my dials, but we would have to open the inspection hatch in my chest.”

“Could we? I should like to be sure.”

“I didn’t bring the right tools.”

She rolled onto her back and blew smoke in a slow blue jet. “I hate you.”

He frowned. “You can’t prove it.”

“I haven’t got dressed for you. I won’t even get out of bed for you.’

“Not even if I do… this?”

“Especially not if you do that.”

She put the cigarette to his lips again and he drew on it. The flare lit up two pale discs in the darkness of the garret: Caesar’s button eyes, watching from the top of the piano. For god’s sake cheer up, Tom told himself involuntarily. His muscles tensed.

“What’s wrong, darling?”

“Nothing,” he said, but the moment was broken. She rolled onto her stomach to stub out the cigarette.

Tom realized, with a guilty ache, that he hadn’t thought about Alistair in days. Lately his friend’s letters made him miserable. Of a long march with heavy packs Alistair had offered: The trick is to wear two pairs of socks, one thin and one thick . Of life in barracks he had written: It is gayer if one takes the view that it is Butlin’s with guns . There was no substance. The last really personal letter had come months ago, in December, when Alistair had written rather rawly about a soldier who had been blown up in training. Since then, the distance between them had started to show in the letters.

Tom tried to put Alistair out of his mind. It was four o’clock on Saturday morning. The wine was nearly finished. They had another hour of darkness before the daylight came. Mary rolled onto her back and lit up again, and he put his hand between her thighs.

She blew a smoke ring. “This war is amazing. Is that terrible to say?”

“Well, I shouldn’t go writing it on the blackboard.”

“I’m nineteen and I have a school of my own. I can teach the children however I like, and I can hug them when they graze their knees.”

Tom thought it was lovely that she was so happy, but it was a shame that she was still talking, given that his hand was where it was.

He said, “You’d have found something terrific even without the war.”

“You and I wouldn’t have been thrown together. Thinking about it makes my head spin. Imagine how many there are like us, at this moment, lying in bed because the war has brought them close. In Cairo. In Paris.”

“Yes.” He moved his hand between her legs.

She said, “In Germany, too, I suppose.”

This caused his hand to stop. The continuation should have been natural. There should have been bliss, and instead here were the Germans.

“Steady on,” he said. “The Hun do not go to bed with one another.”

“ ‘Well then, and how do they make little Hun?”

“In factories on the Ruhr. According to detailed blueprints. I don’t know.”

He wished she would leave it. Beyond the four posts of the bed, the world could go to hell and seemed determined to exercise that privilege. To speak of it was to bring it under the covers with them, into the warmth and the darkness. And now he couldn’t stop thinking of it. Far out there in the night somewhere, his best friend was shivering in a bunk, with bromide in his tea and postcards of Betty Grable. Tom felt guilty again, and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” said Mary.

“It’s just that I feel such a shit.”

“Whatever for?”

“For not joining up. For being here when the world is there.”

Mary stubbed out her cigarette. The movement set the bedsprings quivering. His hand, between her legs, could neither sensibly advance nor retreat now but simply cupped her, foolishly, with its own instinctive tenderness.

She said, “You aren’t meant to be a soldier.”

“Why not? I could fight.”

“You couldn’t shoot someone.”

She stroked his face. It seemed to him that her touch traced his limits.

“I could kill if I had to.” Immediately he felt the absurdity of it as a boast.

She smiled. He flushed. “Well perhaps you don’t believe it, but I could.”

He took his hand from between her legs, propping himself on one elbow in the dark. She flicked on her cigarette lighter. In the provisional light it made between them, she looked at him so calmly that he was ashamed.

“God,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

She snapped the lighter shut, and in the quick darkness he saw the bright negative of the flame. She rolled onto her side and took his hand and put it back between her legs. “If they call you up for the war, go. Until then, don’t spoil it.”

“Mary, I—”

“Shh, darling. Let’s not let the war win.”

He moved his face close to hers. “When I said ‘I love you’ before?’

“Yes?”

“I didn’t mean it. But now I think I do.”

“Oh yes. Oh, me too.”

Tom understood why the good actors in the movies never said it with a smile. To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one was ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.

Afterward, she laid her head on his chest and yawned. Her copper hair spilled over him. They shared a cigarette and her face, with its sheen of perspiration, shone orange.

He said, “Do you want to sleep?”

She considered the question as if the idea were new, then shook her head. It was raining and a gray light loomed in the garret, threatening to return all things to their quotidian form. Tom felt the grip of an unnameable fear but Mary lit another cigarette and smiled at him so impishly that it restored his faith. The bright sexual smell of her, her slightly comical frown of concentration, her breasts quivering as she worked the wheel of the lighter. Her slim belly as she sat up in bed to find the ashtray. The rain came in squalls, hard as handfuls of rice against the window.