Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

It was half dark and the hot air was sharp with smoke. Alistair scanned the sky, listening to the bombers and the anti-aircraft guns. Searchlights cut the crimson base of what might have been smoke or might have been cloud. From the noise and the angle of the beams, the main body of the attack was a fair way off: a mile, maybe two. Underground, with that awful resonance, it had seemed closer.

He went back into the theater and nosed around by the light of the flashes until he found wine on one of the tables. He leaned back into the scoop of the baby grand, took a long drink and stared up at the theater. The gun flashes glinted on the gold columns and the high proscenium arch.

“I’m to tell you to come back down immediately.”

He turned. Mary had come from the basement and now stood watching him. The occulting light lit her up, her cigarette smoke flashing silver.

“You probably ought to go back down yourself,” he said.

She said nothing, only stood with her arms crossed.

“Did the others send you to fetch me?’

“Hilda is a wonderful girl. We’ve been friends since we were six. She is mischievous and loyal, and very funny until a man walks into the room, whereupon her IQ immediately halves. But it is only shyness, you see. I’m sure the phenomenon would vanish as you got to know her.”

He filled his pipe in the stuttering light. “Would you like some wine? I’m afraid I was drinking from the bottle.”

“Ugh. You see, this is why I prefer civilians.”

“Do you have a lighter?”

She came to the other side of the baby grand and slid him the lighter while he slid her the bottle. She took a short drink. Outside, the anti-aircraft guns let off a salvo, making them both flinch.

“You really should go back down,” he said.

“I shall be glad to. Right behind you.”

“Look, Hilda is lovely. It’s me. I am really not myself at the moment.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, who is? You’re an army officer. I’m a schoolteacher. The whole world is in fancy dress.”

“I just need a bit of time.”

“Fine,” said Mary, “I shall wait here with you.”

“I meant… Oh, never mind.”

“I know what you meant,” said Mary. “But Hilda is a hoot. She likes parties, and big bands, and subterfuge. You shan’t tell me you don’t like such things? She plays tricks on me, and runs rings around my mother, and she once set fire to a baronet’s motor car because he lent it to Oswald Mosley.”

“Forget romance. We ought to parachute her behind enemy lines.”

Mary sighed. “I wish you would kiss her, first.”

Alistair drank some wine. The flashes through the open stage door left green afterimages of the bottle glass. He said, “Tom is a good man, you know.”

“Oh, I know. I hope you didn’t read too much into—”

“It’s just that the two of you seemed a little—”

“ ‘Well, it’s the war, isn’t it? It’s one thing for you, being out there in the action. Cooped up in town, we get snippy.”

“Tom really believes in teaching, that’s the thing. I suppose he can’t bear to have it all interrupted.”

“I liked it about him straight away. Men usually bleat about one’s looks, but Tom had to know exactly what I thought about the new Education Act.”

Alistair smiled. “And he is a useful cook, of course. He can take thoroughly demoralized ingredients and give them back their will to live.”

“And he has taken great risks for me. It does his career no good to let me have my school.”

“But that is just like Tom, isn’t it? Thoroughly unselfish.”

“Yes, thoroughly.”

“I rather resent having to surrender him to you.”

“Blame Hitler,” said Mary.

“Oh, I do. I will seduce his flatmate the moment we capture Berlin.”

“I hope you and Hitler’s flatmate will be jolly happy together.”

“Well I’m glad that you and Tom are.”

“Oh, we are.”

“Well, that’s fine,” said Alistair.

“And look, Hilda is terrific. You shouldn’t judge her just because she—”

“Oh, of course not. Nobody is brave, the first time in an air raid.”

Mary took a longer drink of the wine. “It’s much better up here, isn’t it? The bombs aren’t nearly so close as one imagines when one is down below.”

“I expect they’re attacking the docks.”

Mary slid the bottle back to him. “Should we go and look? I mean, there mightn’t be another air raid. I’d hate to think I missed the one chance.”

Alistair said nothing.

“What?” said Mary.

“You make it sound like the jubilee fireworks.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes, and so should you be.”

“I’m a grown-up.”

“Still, I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“Let’s not get hurt then. Let’s just go a little way.”

He hesitated. ‘All right.”

“As close as we can, just to see what it looks like.”

Outside, the sky was lurid. The sound of the bombs seemed distant, and it was hard to make out the direction while the echoes rolled up the white marble canyon of the Strand. Light came in all colors and from all directions. Smoke, or cloud, hung at a few thousand feet, looming blue-white when searchlights cut in on it from below, flashing yellow when exploding anti-aircraft shells lit it from above. It was seven-thirty in the evening and the sun seemed to be setting in the west and the east simultaneously. Alistair stood a yard from Mary and they looked from one sunset to the other.

“What is that in the east?”

“I don’t know,” said Alistair. “Some new kind of searchlight.”

“So red?”

“Could it be lithium? I didn’t know we had anything that bright.”

“I wish we could see over those buildings.”

“Come on,” said Alistair. “We should go back.”

Mary craned her neck. “But we haven’t seen anything. Let’s at least go as far as the river.”

“The wardens won’t like it.”

“So? They can give us a good telling-off. You won’t cry, will you?”

He grinned. “All right. Just as far as the river, and then we’ll go back.”

They reached the Thames and walked out onto Waterloo Bridge. Now, near the center of the bridge while the sun set over the water behind them, they had a clear view to the east. They stopped. Where the bombing was concentrated, flames rose hundreds of feet into the air. From time to time high above, the pale underside of an aircraft would glow for a moment as it twisted through the light. The whole scene was inverted in the river, bent and shattered in the oily wavelets. As they watched the fires reaching down into the black depths, they felt the breeze on their backs as the distant flames drew air in. They stood gripping the parapet, an arm’s length apart. They listened to the roaring of the distant fires.

“Good god,” said Alistair at last.

Mary said nothing, only stared at the conflagration.

“Mary, are you all right?” He moved a foot closer and then stopped, dropping the hand he had been about to put on her arm.

She looked up at him, took half a step forward, then hesitated. “We shouldn’t go any farther.”

He smiled. “No.”

She gave him a grateful look. “We ought to go back. To be safe.”

“Yes. We really should.”

They stood at the center of the bridge and she said, “I’m glad we went as far as we could.”

They walked back. The lacerated sky faded in the west and brightened in the east. When they reached the Lyceum they stopped at the stage door.

Mary said, “You aren’t coming in, are you?”

“I should find my regiment. The men get in a state without orders.”

She looked away. “You must do the right thing, of course.”