Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Mary hung her head. “You want me to stop coming.”

“It’s not anything I want, Miss North. We’re all partial to you. But you mustn’t think the children won’t get their schooling. I may not have your facility, but I can give them the language. And the manager he isn’t going to be teaching them any mathematical theorems but he has been known to balance the books.”

“What if I started coming less often?”

He pursed his lips and looked down on the stage. “Fine. What if you started today?”

And so here she was, leaving before she’d even had time to take off her raincoat. She wondered if the months of morphine had weakened her tendency to resist. Or else it was the solitude, in which the self hardened but also grew brittle.

It was always a lurch, coming out of the Lyceum into the crowd of white faces in the Strand. There was a period of acclimatization, until one stopped finding white skin strange. Until then it seemed unnatural and rather horrid, as if something medical or blanchingly industrial had happened to everyone. There was a moment before one understood that one belonged with them — a moment outside time, as if one had stood up too suddenly.

THE FOUR LOCAL MEN who brought Captain Braxton’s body back up the cliff to Fort St. Elmo had done the best they could to make it decent, straightening the limbs and wrapping a shirt around the ruined head. Simonson thanked them with a promissory note for kerosene, then had the surgeon decant the dead man into a coffin and nail it shut. The nails had to be extracted from the doorposts of the fort, and straightened on an anvil.

Simonson stubbed out something they were still calling a cigarette. He pawed at his tongue for the bitter tobacco fragments that had stuck there. His head pounded.

The battery under his command stood at seventy-seven men, with Braxton freshly subtracted. There were rations enough for thirty. It was a feature of the tactical situation that the more men he lost, the more the rest could eat. When a raid came, one didn’t know whether to send the men down to the shelters in their tin hats or up to the ramparts in their PT shorts. Occasionally an officer dealt with this and all other uncertainties forever, by taking a stroll at dawn and not stopping when he came to the sea cliffs.

Simonson supposed one should feel pity at a suicide, but he rather hated the dead man for it. Absent Alistair’s good humor, the island had become lethal to his spirit. It was as if an invisible bile seeped from the bomb craters. He loathed every yellow rock. Since there was nothing to eat, he smoked in an uninterrupted chain, until smoke seeped into the gaps between every cell of his body. Until it was only force of habit that caused the smoke, and not his person, to disperse.

All morning his subordinates plagued him. Captains Appleby and Fisk had fallen out over which of their guns ought to receive a new barrel that had been fought through. Simonson flipped a threepenny bit along the corridor and had them chase after it to decide. Lieutenant Spencer reported, assuming he would be captain now that Braxton had left the situation vacant. Five minutes later, Lieutenant Cooper dropped by to confirm — just as a nudge, between old Harrovians — that he, and not the overweening Spencer, was in line for the same promotion.

All afternoon it went on, while the enemy attacked. Down poured the rain of blood and sulfur, and up slunk these privateers from the underground parts of the fort. Here was Major Huntley-Chamberlain, hoping that it would be his favorite, Ives, who took the vacant captaincy. Here was Major Hall, lobbying for Williams.

At dusk, at last, Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton summoned him to his office. For the first time in weeks, Simonson felt something akin to gratitude. Having noticed how overstretched he was, Hamilton must finally be disposed to take some of the heat off. Simonson put on his cleanest shirt, blew the dust off his cap and hurried down to the ops room.

Hamilton glanced up from his papers when Simonson knocked.

“Too bad about Braxton.”

“Dreadful, sir.”

“Married?”

“No. Just parents.”

“Well, that’s something. ‘Killed in action,’ I suppose?”

“I’ll get the letter off tonight.”

“Fine. Do sit.”

Simonson did. He crossed his legs and put his cap on his knee. He supposed he was to be loaned to HQ for a spell. It didn’t do to think of it as a holiday — one ought to relish the added responsibility — but just now he felt only relief at the prospect of release from daily command.

Hamilton returned to his papers. He paged through the quartermaster’s weekly provisions report, and it seemed he intended to read the thing in its entirety. Simonson felt a snap of unease. The longer one was made to wait, the harder it was to like what one waited for. He kept his eyes on the wall map of the island, as if the siege might be lifted by further study.

Hamilton finished the report, took a red pencil and made careful annotations in the margins of several pages. This gross of biscuits to be issued; that ounce of aspirin to be allocated to sick bay. Finally he took off his reading glasses, lit a cigarette, and slid a typed sheet across the desk.

“Have you any explanation for this?”

He rocked back in his chair and watched Simonson read the document. It was a signed statement from a junior officer at Luqa, admitting to having moved Heath up the evacuation order under instructions from Royal Artillery.

Simonson looked up. “The poor man has completely misunderstood, of course. I brought no special pressure to bear, and I certainly issued no order.”

“He must be exaggeratedly stupid, then.”

Simonson gave a thin smile.

“Amused, Simonson?”

“I hoped you’d called me in for good news.”

Hamilton stood and went to the thin, barred window. With his back to Simonson he looked out over the darkening courtyard where four hundred men, following orders, were lying on the ground to save strength.

“I know you were friendly with Heath. You sunbathed. You sailed.”

“I try to be agreeable with all my fellow officers.”

“Don’t soft-soap it. You two were thick as thieves.”

“Not really, sir. Heath meant no more to me than the others.”

Saying it made him feel as close to ashamed as starvation permitted. How good it had been, back then, to chat with Alistair of this and that while the sun tanned them and the local beer softened their responsibilities. They had lain sprawled together like puppies, laughing till their sides ached. They had shared a grace that even the enemy sensed. Fighter pilots had stayed their hands on the firing switch. Mines had missed them by inches, by the gap between auguring stars.

“The word is important,” said Hamilton. “Are you quite sure the two of you weren’t friends?”

“If you must know, I thought Heath rather inferior. If I made an effort with him from time to time, it was because I felt sorry for him.”

“To be clear, you thought him socially inferior?”

“It’s hardly a man’s fault, but yes. I’m afraid it comes down to that. Anyway, he wouldn’t be the first who’d queered things to get off the island.”

“No, but he’d be the first from an honorable regiment. I hope you still appreciate the distinction.”

“I do, sir.”

“So you say Heath pulled strings, and you had nothing to do with it?”

“God damn it, yes.”

“And if I were to ask Heath the same question, no doubt he would say that it was you who pulled the strings, and that he had no hand in the affair?”

“If he has any sense at all, I hope that’s exactly what he’ll say.”

They watched each other while the old war turned through another minute of arc.