Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Next there was disease: less of a threat than good humor but still not to be entirely discounted. Influenza came once in each generation and was overdue in theirs. Cancer or consumption might take her. A scratch on her finger might fester, a cold sore give ingress to a greater chill. There was a whole category of mishaps inseparable from physics — the tumble, the slip and the choke; collision, combustion and shock. And he could not even begin to quantify the risks posed by third parties. Friends might queer her affections. Fiends in alleyways might murder her or worse. Her parents, picking from a list of his faults, might seize on his pacifism or his impecunity. They might set about dissuading their daughter, using all the tricks of their art. It was not a level playing field where parents were concerned: they had known her in every year of her life, he not yet in every season of the year.

Finally there were the imponderables of memory and the psyche. She could wake up tomorrow with no recollection that she had ever known him. Or she could walk past a café and stop dead in her tracks, overcome by desire for the waiter. And worse than all of these things, because so much more likely, were the mundane human dissatisfactions that absence would allow to incubate. What if he had said something to unsettle her — a single word could be enough — and she, brooding on it, came to decide that he did not truly love her? Or what if he had been unsatisfactory in bed? The more he thought about it, the more he worried that there was something he should have done but had not — or, worse, something he had done too much of. At times they had moaned like animals. Surely this was monstrous? Surely in solitude she would now reflect with shame, and not wish to see him again?

These were only the first thoughts that came. The more he considered it — oh god, her lovely face with that mocking little grin — the more causes there were for anxiety. Separation was air in the lungs of fate, and so when it was time for them to part after their first night together and he asked her, “Will you be all right?” and she replied, “Why would I not be all right?” in fact so many reasons presented themselves that it immediately began to seem fantastically improbable, if he let go of her warm hand now and allowed her to walk away into this gray morning that smelled of spring, that they would ever see each other again.

It seemed so much safer to stay close and let the great disintegrating power of the world do its work on other lovers instead. But since he did not know how to put all of this in a way that would not seem pathetic, he simply said: “All right, I shall see you on Monday.”

It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail- gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman’s hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But to have faith — that a lover would be constant and life clement — this required courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations.

As she walked away from him he turned his back, to show that he could.

For her part, Mary did not find it at all difficult to walk away from Tom. She simply walked for a while, wearing yesterday’s clothes. Yes, the war was a blind roulette. Yes, the city was full of beautiful women who might tempt him: some of them more thrilling than she was, a few already wearing summer dresses. It all weighed less heavily on her, since weightlessness was in her nature and in any case one simply had to live. Oh, and yet—

“Darling?” she called, spinning round, suddenly unsure.

The crowd had taken him, though. She had imagined that he would still be standing there, watching her. And now she felt a brand-new sadness, and a dreadful uncertainty about love.

VAPOR TRAILS TWISTED HIGH above Alistair’s train from Dover. He angled his head out of the window, into the warm slipstream bitter with coal smoke. He knew the RAF was milling rings with the enemy up there, but from where he watched, the airplanes were invisibly small, and it seemed as if the steam from his own locomotive rose up into those thin and tortured contrails. As if nature had congealed, and gases no longer dispersed but only bifurcated and twisted around themselves: as if there were no more forgetting.

The train’s whistle screamed. London was close now, with an ominous gravity that clutched at his cells. He had meant to visit Tom straight away — that was the point of coming to town — but now that it was so near, he felt he ought to settle himself first. He would fire Tom a quick note for the afternoon delivery, use the day for some errands, and see him in the evening.

Dear Tom,

They have given the regiment leave, which we have surely earned with our magnificent display of backwards marching all the way through northern France.

He put the pen down for a moment, reaching for the right tone. The enemy had run them ragged, from the first failure in the Ardennes to the final evacuation at Dunkirk. The Germans had had more concentration, more conviction, more force. When one thought of the enemy it was with a queer mix of fear and admiration. It was absurd that one could not simply hold up one’s hand and say: “Look here, well done, I think that will do for now.”

I am slightly injured in the arm, but still surely a better batsman than you. Also they have made me Captain. You are to think of me as a blazing comet, inbound, in an officer’s uniform with a wound medal.

Splinters of glass were still working themselves out of him — he had got the arm up just in time to shield his face when a window had blown out in Mont-de-Piété. It was nothing. More than pain, it produced an unwelcome feeling of separation from the people around him. He supposed he ought not to be surprised. The product of war was solitude, after all — the lover bereaved, the conversation truncated — so it was hardly amazing if a near miss left one feeling a little disconnected.

As for you, I trust that Caesar is a vigilant chaperone and…

In a group of poor positions dug into the beach at Dunkirk, less than a week ago, Alistair had huddled with his men. Shells had screamed down and exploded on the beach at unpredictable intervals. Smoke blinded everyone: a sharp amalgam of black soot from ships that were stricken, and white chemical smoke that the British destroyers were laying in a screen. It made a lachrymose fog that reddened the men’s eyes and left their throats raw.

Alistair stood above the lip of his dugout. “How do you like this weather?” he called to his senior sergeant, Blake.

“Very seasonal, sir,” the man shouted from the next dugout. “With your permission, I might take a few of the men along the beach for ice creams.”

“Very good,” called Alistair. “See if you can pick up some deck chairs while you are at it. We could rent them out here quite tidily.”

“Captive audience, isn’t it sir?”

Alistair nodded. “Get HQ on the radio and have them send us a Punch and Judy booth. If you behave, I shall let you be Judy.”

He waited for Blake’s comeback, but Blake collected shrapnel to his body and crumpled sideways without fuss. Alistair tensed his muscles and readied himself to jump out of his dugout and help Blake. But here he was, sitting in a train carriage, writing a letter to Tom. He rubbed his temples, coaxing himself back into the present.

… that Caesar is a vigilant chaperone and that…

Alistair’s men had been on the beach for two days. Mingled with the smoke was the stink of feces and urine. There was no possibility of establishing proper latrines, so they used their own dugouts. Bombs hit the beach fifty to the hour, whistling down through the haze from bombers unseen. At longer intervals the yellow-nosed Messerschmidts burst over the coastal dunes with no warning — so low that one could make out the rivets — and tore up the beach with their cannon. Sand lifted in gouts, to fall again in an endless fine rain. Men died with their gaze open to heaven and sand accruing on their eyes.