Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

No one cared if he drank, so he did. He slept under the bar and smoked like Bette Davis. He ate cocktail nuts, the glacé cherries from the bottoms of glasses — whatever he could get. Everyone was hungry. The new pianist discovered that if he waited a quaver of time after the beat and then hit down hard to give some heavy swing, then factory girls and airmen on leave could be made to dance even if they were weak from the rations.

Laying down drinks on the tables, Zachary picked up the gossip. Apparently so many souls were being lost every night that in the great mortuaries of Clerkenwell and Cheapside a dozen families would now claim any unrecognizable corpse as their cousin or mother or aunt. So now the morgue staff stripped the remains, tagged clothing and flesh with the same number, and had families identify the effects instead of the bodies. Zachary hadn’t been asked to identify a thing. Not a tie clip or a ring. He wondered if his father was in some grave, being mourned under a new name. He prayed for him under the old one.

They said that aboveground now, when only human fragments were recovered, the city assessed by weight how many bodies should be assembled. And if a few of the reincorporated dead had more than one left leg, then at least none of the coffins felt light. The drinkers caught him eavesdropping and they laughed and said: “ What do you think of that, Baby Grand?” He said, “It sounds fair.” But he thought of his father, who had so carefully washed off his whiteface at the end of every performance, hashed together with white bodies.

Zachary drank what was left in the glasses and the big band played for forty-five minutes in each hour, all night, and whereas in peacetime the horns and the piano always used to play around each other in fast eddies, it was now discovered that if they all united instead in big block chords at three a.m. and four a.m., with the air raid hot and heavy overhead and the dance floor jumping on its joists and dust pouring from the vaulted roof of the basement, then the slim Negro bandleader with his shirt soaked in sweat could lean in to his streamlined microphone as if into a great headwind and call at the crowded white dancers: “Check down at your feet, good ladies and gentlemen, for so long as you are still dancing you cannot yet be dead!” Zachary bused tables and the orchestrated city tapped its great stock of shrouds and cardboard caskets, releasing a precise number each night in expectation of casualties predicted from cloud cover and bomber concentrations. And according to the gossip, if a piece of a Londoner could be collected with dustpan and brush then it would be sent downstream on the barges with the rest of the city’s refuse to the great municipal middens at Durham Wharf, while all larger bodily phrases were composed into persons nameable and taken for classical burial. And the cavernous basement boomed. You were safe if dancing or dead. London remembered its oldest rhythm of putting the saints beneath it, and in the public cemeteries of Highgate and Nunhead and Kensal Green the old graves were dug up and the crotchety bones scattered to make room for new. The enemy enlarged its bombs from five hundred kilograms to one thousand and two thousand, and down in the basement the bandleaders put together two bands, and three bands, so that six colored men, and now nine colored men, all swung in line in the horn section, and two Negro drummers, and now three Negro drummers, sweated at their kits on the big raised dais at the back of the stage, and Zachary remembered how his father had used his heavy left hand to stamp out the colossal chords — boom, boom, boom — and the limitless suburban cemeteries opened up fresh ground and the commuter trains in the middle of the day took the coffins out into Metro-land and returned with a toot on the whistle and the conductor’s call of “Empties!” And all the murderous night the big-band drummers smashed out time while the stonemasons in their massed choir with their steel chisels in perfect orchestration tapped out the assumed names of the dead, in letters Zachary couldn’t read. How unbearable it was that his father’s name was lost. How thin his own limbs seemed. He heard the music and he heard the news from above, and it seemed to him now that the world above and the world below were playing the exact same tune.

Every morning when the club kicked out and the band put their horns back into velvet, he swept and put the stools up. The dawn left him deaf from the silence. No one had talk in them. Under the electric bulbs he ate with the band and the barmen, and then all of them went where they would, and Zachary curled up in his place under the bar where no one minded him.

If he woke before the crowd came back — if the stools were still up and the bombers far away — then he went to the piano. He played the quiet pieces the way his father had shown him: eyes closed, softly. He did what he could. His father hadn’t wanted him to be in the show, and he wasn’t, and yet there was this agony. He played the slow tunes and sometimes he almost had his father with him for an hour, and then the crowd flooded back and he smiled and fetched drinks for them.

When he played his father’s music, he was almost back home. But a tune had no fixed place in time. It was a city before the eternal. It was only ever a joint.

MARY SAT WITH HER mother and they read the morning’s post while they waited for lunch. The manager at the Lyceum had replied: Zachary was in good heath and being provided for, and Mary wasn’t to concern herself. She frowned and folded the letter back into its envelope.

“What is it?’ ” said her mother.

“Just Hilda,” said Mary. “The men she favors, the shops she doesn’t.”

“How dreary.”

“But it’s Hilda so she makes it fun, of course.”

“Then why the long face?”

“I worry for her. I wish she could meet someone nice.”

“Well, click your heels together three times when you wish.”

Mary wondered if the manager had meant it kindly when he wrote that she wasn’t to concern herself. There would be a natural wariness, she supposed, of whites. Perhaps she hadn’t made it clear in her own letter that she was one of the helpful kind.

Palmer’s footsteps were so delicate as to be barely audible when he brought in lunch at one. Cook had set a mixed shoal of shrimp and whitebait into clear aspic, using a mold in the form of a wave. The wave was encircled on its salver by a salad of fruits de mer, the whole resting on a bed of toasted golden seeds that made convincing sand.

Mary’s mother put on her spectacles to examine the production, then had Palmer hold it up to the window so that daylight shone through the wave.

“And the beauty is that none of it is on the ration. People make such a fuss about the hardships, but one need only be inventive. What do you think, dear?”

“I’m astonished the poor haven’t thought of it,” said Mary.

Her mother ignored her. “ ‘Of course it’s only a practice for the real thing.”

For a moment, before she understood that the dish was a prototype for the fully operational version of itself, Mary couldn’t think what her mother meant. She stared at the tiny creatures as they flashed in the afternoon light, and wondered what could be the real experience for which this was practice. (Drowning, perhaps? Quite close to the beach? In a well-stocked corner of the ocean?) She had stopped paying attention to the tireless campaign of dinners and cocktails through which her mother hoped to fight Father into Cabinet.

“Are you quite with us?” said her mother.

“Sorry,” said Mary. “I hardly slept.”

“Oh, who does? But you might at least have an opinion.”

Mary squinted into the wave. “The shrimp are rather sweet. Look at their little faces.”