Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“Learn, little people! I command it!”

His mouth was full of blackberries, the effect rather undermined. He let his arm drop and wondered what he ought to do with the day. The only school-age children who remained were the frankly unappealing: the crippled and the congenitally strange, those the country folk wouldn’t accommodate. The Negro children, too, of course — only a few had been evacuated, and those were already staring to trickle back. The evacuation was a beauty contest in which the little ones were lined up in church halls and the yokels allowed to pick the blonds.

Tom was left with twenty mothballed schools and a light scattering of the children who were either too complicated to educate, or too simple. To cheer himself up he practised the trick of flipping a blackberry from his hand to strike his elbow and bounce into his mouth. He was no good at it at all — he didn’t get it once in six attempts — but he was sure he would improve with time. It was the great folly of war that it measured nations against each other without reckoning talents like these.

He lifted his eyes. Beyond his zone, London sprawled away to the rank marshes in the east and the white marble walls in the west. Along the line of the Thames they were testing a flock of miniature zeppelins. Tethered on cables, these were supposed to offer a variety of protection, albeit of a vague and unspecified stripe. The balloons’ snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.

Tom took his hatful of blackberries with him down the hill, back into the furious city with its mushrooming recruitment posts. Strangers met his eye, anxious to nod the new solidarity. YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION, read the billboards that used to hawk soap.

It was still only eight — too early for the office — so he went back to his garret. Home was a sitting room with two bedrooms attached, in the converted attic of a town house off the Prince of Wales Road. The attic had been converted — as his flatmate Alistair Heath put it — in the same way the Christians had converted the Moors. It seemed to have been done at the point of a sword, leaving the continual threat of reversion. Winter brought leaks and bitter drafts, summer a canicular heat from which slight relief could be obtained by running one’s head under the tap of the little corner kitchen.

Tom found Alistair sitting on the bare floorboards in his pajama bottoms, smoking his pipe and stuffing shredded newspaper into the pelt of a ginger cat. The head and shoulders were done, the empty eye sockets bulging with newsprint.

“My god,” said Tom, “is that Julius Caesar?”

Alistair did not look up from his work. “Grim times, old man. The taxidermist sent him back unfinished. Tea’s in the pot, if you’re interested.”

“Why didn’t they finish him?”

“Perhaps he was incurable.”

“Insatiable, more like. Remember how he used to strut back in here after a big night out?”

Alistair grinned around his pipe stem. “I miss the randy old bugger. Came in the first post — landlady brought him up just now. Tanned and neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper. Not his usual entrance.”

“Feeling a little flat.”

“I’m stuffing him with editorials. He’ll be full of himself.”

Tom offered his hatful of blackberries. “Going to make jam. Try one?”

Alistair did. “Good god, forget jam. You could make claret.”

Tom tipped the blackberries into a pan, stooped to retrieve the ones that had missed, and ran in a cupful of water. “Was there a note with Caesar?”

“An apology. Shop closing down, regrets etcetera, we herewith return all materials. I can’t imagine there’ll be much call for taxidermy until the war is over.”

“They should just call it off,” said Tom.

He set the pan to simmer, and turned to watch Alistair sewing up the cat’s belly. He was handy at it, putting in a row of small, neat stitches that would disappear when the fur was brushed over them. Tom had always admired Alistair’s hands, strong and unfairly capable. Alistair could mend their gramophone, play piano — do all of the things that made Tom feel like a Chubb key in a Yale lock — and he did them without seeming to worry, as if the hands contained their own grace. Alistair rather overshadowed him, though Tom supposed his friend didn’t notice. Blond and robust, Alistair had the stoic’s gift for shrugging off war and broken plumbing with the same easy smile, as if these things were to be expected. He was good-looking not by being ostentatiously handsome but rather by accepting the gaze affably, meeting the eye. It was Tom’s experience of Alistair that women sometimes had to look twice, but something drew the second look.

Alistair tapped out his pipe. “I shan’t be home tonight. I’m taking Lizzie Siddal to the countryside.”

“Oh? Which painting?”

“The ‘kiss me, I can’t swim’ one.”

“ Ophelia ?” Tom mimed the gaze and the pious hands.

“We’ve built a box for her, and we’re driving her to Wales in an unmarked truck.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a marked truck, in this situation. Is there actually a fleet of government lorries labeled PRICELESS ART TREASURE?”

“Do leave it out,” said Alistair. “You take all the romance out of mundane logistical operations.”

“Anyway, if it’s so secret, should you even be telling me?”

“Why? You won’t tell Hitler, will you?”

“Not unless they give me back my secret radio transmitter.”

“It is all rather evil and sad,” said Alistair. “I spent five months restoring the frame on Ophelia —just the frame — and now we’re boxing her up and burying her in some old mine shaft for who knows how long.”

Tom poured the whole of their tea sugar from its Kilner jar into the pan, brown lumps included.

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Alistair, “only I hate to think of it down there in the dark. It makes one think: what if we lose the war?”

Tom stirred the sugar into the fruit. “There won’t be a real war.”

“What if all of us are swept away and no one remembers Ophelia, and she remains there for all eternity, in the dark, under a mountain?’

‘They’ll always have Caesar. They can reconstruct our aesthetics from that. Even if you have overstuffed him.”

Alistair eyed the cat critically. “Have I? No. The old man always had to be careful about his weight. This is him in one of his especially sleek periods.”

“It’s not an entirely terrible fist you’re making of it. You really might consider being a conservator or something of that ilk.”

“You should see the Tate now,” said Alistair. “The light is boarded out, the great gallery echoes, and the paintings are all dispersed.”

“Well, sign it and call it Modern. Anyway, damn you. I have a dinner date with an actual woman this evening. Marriage is a certainty and you should prepare a best man’s speech forthwith.”

Alistair lifted the half-stuffed cat to his ear and listened to what it whispered. “Caesar decrees that you tell all, without leaving anything out.”

“Well, she’s called Mary North and—”

“God in heaven, Tom Shaw, are you actually blushing?”

“It’s this jam. It’s the heat of the pan.”

Alistair stuffed paper into the cat’s hindquarters. “Caesar assumes she is beautiful, brighter than you, and unable to cook?”

“Caesar knows my type.”

“Then you’ll pardon me if I don’t wear down my quill with a wedding speech right at this minute. This one will end where all of your romances do, Tommy: with you gazing wistfully at the receding figure of a nice girl who has grown fond of you but has reluctantly concluded that you are neither wealthy nor gifted at dancing.”