Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“Maybe my taking a weekend off would do everyone good. You and I have met people on fire who made less fuss than children being forced to learn reading.”

“You’re a dreadful teacher anyway.”

“Thanks. And you’re a useless nurse.”

“So, you’ll come to stay?”

“Thanks, I should love to.”

They walked east and north toward Hilda’s flat, the undamaged streets giving way to the general destruction. The sleet came harder now. As they approached Regent’s Canal only a thin path had been cleared between the mounds of rubble.

“Don’t mind the mess,” said Mary. “I shall build cottages along here for you — little thatched things such as one sees in Lowestoft — and I shall arrange for a handsome and unattached man to be installed in every one.”

“Tall?”

“You’ll need a ladder to kiss them. One of those two-step efforts you get in libraries.”

“Dark?”

“I shall organize them by street for you. Dark, blond, funny, rich. If you want more than one quality, you just knock near an intersection.”

‘Uniform?”

“Any you like. Soldier, sailor, engine driver. Every house will have a dressing-up box.”

“I believe I will like your new London very much.”

“Then you shall be mayor of it,” said Mary, sweeping an arm in a magnanimous arc.

“I suppose it should be me. You’ll be too busy with Alistair.”

Mary saw the twitch in her friend’s smile. “I’m sorry, Hilda.”

“Don’t be. You’ll be married, I suppose?”

“He’s in prison, in Gibraltar.”

Hilda stopped. “What for?”

“He left Malta before he should have.”

Hilda looked miserable. “I sent him a letter, you know. I told him you were gone to the dogs.”

Mary considered it. “I can’t say you were wrong.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t right. It’s no wonder I’m alone.”

“Stop it. You’ll meet someone soon.”

“But how? There aren’t any parties anymore. Either that or there are parties everywhere, and no one tells me.”

“Yes, I should think it’s that. You’ve always struck me as a charmless and unpopular girl.”

“But it’s these scars,” said Hilda. “They’re the only known antidote to me.”

“Then we’ll find you a man with scars that match.”

Hilda smiled.

“See?” said Mary. “You’re pretty when you do that.”

“I don’t suppose I have done it much, since we fought.”

“Me neither. From now on let’s remember the trick of not fighting, shall we? Why do you suppose we ever forgot?”

Hilda sniffed, turned her face up to the gray sky, and caught sleet with her tongue as it fell.

“Hard to tell,” she said. “Perhaps it’s something they put in the bombs.”

MARY PUT ON HER mackintosh and sou’wester hat, stubbed her cigarette and went out into the morning. The cold weather had brought her limp back and she nursed it through Regent’s Park, skirting the deserted zoo. By the lake, its surface quick with rain, the rowboats were drawn up under canvas. The park wardens waited under the bandstand for the weather to pass. They smoked pipes, their clothes rolled and pinned where limbs were missing. The bare oaks with their ageless trunks held up the woebegone sky.

She carried on through Marylebone and Fitzrovia, which had never seen the worst of the bombing. Only a few gaps spoiled the Georgian terraces, and the rubble had been carted away. Where there were craters the rain had flooded them, so that the spaces between the houses mirrored the sky and made from each loss if not beauty, then at least a quiet neighbor.

Mary walked down to the Embankment and looked out over the broad sweep of the river from Parliament to Blackfriars. She no longer lingered here but it was not possible to lose the lover’s habit of looking downstream, to the sea. She tightened her mackintosh at the throat and hurried on to the Lyceum.

This was the best part of the day, looking forward to teaching her class. There were nine colored children living in the basement now. It had taken the war to reveal London’s heart, centrifugal for white children and gravitational for Negroes. When it was all over, she supposed, Miss Vine would bring her school back, and all her teachers would carry on quite deliberately as if nothing had happened. They would even make a virtue of it, in makeshift classrooms, thinking themselves the stoics. They would have no idea at all that life had been able to invent itself without them.

In the auditorium the minstrels were taking a break from rehearsal. They sprawled around the stage on boxes and folded drapes, smoking.

“Good morning, Miss North,” Bones called out.

Mary stopped at the foot of the stage. “Good morning, Mr. Bones. How goes the minstrelsy trade?”

“In its usual way — thank you for asking — which is to say, proportionate with your people’s kind purchase of tickets. How goes teaching?”

“In its customary manner, thank you, with two steps forward and one point five back, or half a step forward when expressed in net terms.”

He came to the front of the stage. “A minute of your time, Miss North? Which I believe is one sixtieth of an hour when expressed as a fraction?”

They climbed up to a high row in the auditorium and sat on the fold-down seats, leaving an empty one between them.

“This thing you’re doing for our children,” he said. “So kind. Though there’s been some talk that it might be better if you didn’t come every day.”

She smiled. “Children will say that, won’t they? But the truth is, letters and arithmetic come best through daily practice. I try to make it fun, but there’s no substitute for the weekday grind.”

Bones looked at his hands. “The talk that you might come less often. It isn’t from the children.”

“Oh. I see.”

“It isn’t that we’re not grateful. What you’ve done for them is terrific. I see kids who couldn’t read who are writing now. I see kids who wouldn’t talk, and suddenly they won’t quit nagging me for money.”

“Well, then…”

“It’s just that these things don’t always end well. See what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure I do. Surely it doesn’t harm them to learn? Quite the reverse: when their peers come back from the countryside, they’ll need to hold their own.”

“We’re not saying they shouldn’t be learning. We’re maybe asking, respectfully, if you’re the best one to teach them.”

Down on the stage the minstrels were rehearsing a slapstick piece, with a long plank and all its attendant physics. Mary had never realized how many men must be hit in the face before such a thing became funny.

“The fact is,” said Bones, “we’ve got our thing going on here, and people leave us alone. We have our trade, and this theater to work in, and a home of sorts for the children who’ve lost their people. While it’s just us, no one pays us mind. But if people thought we were mixing, they’d pay us more attention. Which for us is like daylight for vampires, you see what I’m saying? There’s an understanding between life and the colored entertainer. Your people give us a corner of the night, and we don’t darken your day.”

“But I hardly come and go with a fanfare. I use the stage door and I teach in the basement.”

“You may come discreetly into our place, Miss North, but I wonder how carefully you leave yours.”

“I don’t brag about what I’m doing, if that’s what you mean.”

“Do your friends know? Do your mother and father?”

“Yes, but—”

“And do they wholeheartedly approve?”

“No, but that hardly—”

“And so they talk to people, and people talk. Are we licensed for the number of shows we do? Are we allowed to sell drink? Did any of those orphaned children come with adoption papers and ration cards? And yet we are afforded the comfort of our small community because it would take wearisome paperwork to scatter us. We are forgiven our skins, you see, so long as no one — officially — notices.”