Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Finally came kind Rita Glenister supporting tiny, tearful James Roffey, and then, in the last row of all, Fay George and Zachary. The colored boy dismissed Mary by taking one last puff of his imaginary cigarette and flicking away the butt. He turned his back and walked away with all the others, singing, toward a place that did not yet have a name. Mary watched him go. It was the first time she had broken a promise.

—

At dinner, at her parents’ house in Pimlico, Mary sat across from her friend Hilda while her mother served slices of cold meatloaf from a salver that she had fetched from the kitchen herself. With Mary’s father off at the House and no callers expected, her mother had given everyone but Cook the night off.

“So when are you to be evacuated?” said her mother. “I thought you’d be gone by now.”

“Oh,” said Mary, “I’m to follow presently. They wanted one good teacher to help with any stragglers.”

“Extraordinary. We didn’t think you’d be good, did we, Hilda?”

Hilda looked up. She had been cutting her slice of meatloaf into thirds, sidelining one third according to the slimming plan she was following. Two Thirds Curves had been recommended in that month’s Silver Screen . It was how Ann Sheridan had found her figure for Angels with Dirty Faces .

“I’m sorry, Mrs. North?”

“We didn’t suppose Mary would be any use at teaching, did we, dear?”

Hilda favored Mary with an innocent look. “And she was so stoical about the assignment.”

Hilda knew perfectly well that she had neither volunteered accepted the role particularly graciously nor survived in it for a week. Mary managed a smile that she judged to have the right inflection of modesty. “Teaching helps the war effort by freeing up able men to serve.”

“I had you down for freeing up some admiral.”

“Hilda! Any more talk like that and your severed head on the gate will serve as a warning to others.’

“I’m sorry, Mrs. North. But a pretty thing like Mary is hardly cut out for something so plain as teaching, is she?”

Hilda knew perfectly well that Mary was already suspected by her mother of dalliances. This was typical her: baiting the most exquisite trap and then springing it, while all the while seeming to have most of her mind on her meatloaf.

“I’m just jolly impressed that she’s sticking with it,” said Hilda. “I can’t even stick to a diet.”

With unbearable ponderousness, she was using her knife and fork to reduce the length of each of the runner beans on her plate by one third. With perfect diligence she lined up each short length beside the surplus meatloaf.

Mary rose to it. “Why on earth are you cutting them all like that?”

Hilda’s round face was guileless. “Are my thirds not right?”

“Just put aside one bean in three, for heaven’s sake. It’s dieting, not dissection.”

Hilda slumped. “I’m not as bright as you.”

Mary threw her a furious look. Hilda’s dark eyes glittered.

“We have different gifts,” said Mary’s mother. “You are faithful and kind.”

“But I think Mary is so brave to be a teacher, don’t you? While the rest of us only careen from parlor to salon.”

Mary’s mother patted her hand. “We also serve who live with grace.”

“But to do something for the war,” said Hilda. “To really do something.”

“I suppose I am proud of my daughter. And only this summer we were worried she might be a socialist.”

And finally all three of them laughed. Because really.

—

After dinner, on the roof terrace that topped the six stories of creamy stucco, with the two of them in white dresses flaming red as the sun set over Pimlico, Hilda was weak with laughter while Mary seethed.

“You perfect wasp’s udder,” said Mary, lighting a cigarette. “Now I shall have to pretend forever that I haven’t been sacked. Was all that about Geoffrey St John?”

“Why would you imagine it was about Geoffrey St John?”

“Well, I admit I might have slightly…”

“Go on. Have slightly what?”

“Have slightly kissed him.”

“At the…?”

“At the Queen Charlotte’s Ball.”

“Where he was there as…”

“As your escort for the night. Fine.”

“Interesting.’

“Isn’t it?” said Mary. “Because apparently you are still jolly furious.”

“So it would seem.”

Mary leaned her elbows on the balcony rail and gave London a weary look. “It’s because you’re not relaxed about these things.”

“I’m very traditional,” said Hilda. “Still, look on the bright side. Now you have a full-time teaching job.”

“You played Mother like a cheap pianola.”

“And now you will have to get your job back, or at least pretend. Either way you’ll be out of my hair for the Michaelmas Ball.”

“The ball, you genius, is to be held after school hours.”

“But you will have to be in the countryside, won’t you? Even your mother will realize that there’s nobody here to teach.”

Mary considered it. “I will get you back for this.”

“Eventually I shall forgive you, of course. I might even let you come to my wedding to Geoffrey St John. You can be a bridesmaid.”

They leaned shoulders sociably and watched the darkening city.

“What was it like?” said Hilda finally.

Mary sighed. “The worst thing is that I loved it.”

“But I did see him first, you know,” said Hilda.

“Oh, I don’t mean kissing Geoffrey. I mean I loved the teaching.”

“What are you cooking up now?”

“No, really! I had thirty-one children, bright as the devil’s cuff links. Now they’re gone it feels rather dull.”

The blacked-out city lay inverted. Until now it had answered the evening stars with a million points of light, drowning them in extroversion.

“Why not the kiss?” said Hilda after a while. “What was wrong with Geoffrey’s kiss anyway?”

WHEN WAR WAS DECLARED, Tom Shaw decided to give it a miss. It wouldn’t last in any case — the belligerents on both sides would pull back from the brink, as children did when encircled in the playground by a mob calling for a fight.

It took skill, at twenty-three, to be sad. The trouble was, he noticed things that made one melancholy. He noticed the way the West End players didn’t bother to remove their stage paint if the matinée was close to the evening show — so that when one went out in Soho one might see Rosencrantz drinking a half-pint, in a corner, in the indifferent afternoon light. He noticed the neat cropped circle achieved in grass whenever a horse was tethered on common land by a fixed length of chain — the circle being of invariant geometrical perfection notwithstanding the temperament of the beast: whether skittish or placid, obstinate or obliging.

His colleagues at the Education Authority had all left to join the Army, and his supervisor had ascended to the Ministry to help coordinate the evacuation. Tom seemed to be the only man in London who did not think the war an unmissable parade lap, and so he’d been given a school district to run instead. A man might celebrate the promotion if he didn’t have the gift for noticing that the schools were empty.

He took a walk at dawn. High up on Parliament Hill the blackberries were in season, bursting with the bright sweetness they gave only in the best years. In any other October, children would have got to these bushes first. Tom took off his hat and filled it.

He looked down on his new district as it awoke: the scholastic subdivision of Kentish Town and Chalk Farm. Marking his fiefdom’s northerly limit was the railway, steam rising even now as the day’s first batch of evacuees went west. The Regent’s Canal was his southern border, busy with barges lugging goods from the docks. Within these bounds no child would learn its letters, no teacher would receive her wages in a manila envelope with its tie closure sealed in red wax, no chalk would be brought forth from its Cretaceous slumber to be milled into rods and applied to blackboards, unless he himself ordained it. Glancing left and right to make sure he was alone, he raised an imperious arm.