Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“I’m afraid he won’t want to look. That he shan’t want to be reminded.”

Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. “What sort of a man do you want anyway?”

“Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees.”

“Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win—”

“Oh, I think we’ll win, don’t you? Now that the Americans are all-in?”

“Yes, but there’ll be such a mess to sort out. Not just all the rebuilding. We’ll have to put society back together, in some better configuration.”

Hilda snorted.

“What?” said Mary.

“Well, we want such different things from men. You earnestly want someone who will help you reform society.”

Mary smiled. “Whereas you…?”

“… just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.”

Mary looked out over the tables, each white linen world orbiting the great central chandelier of the lounge, each world encircled in turn by its moons of women and men, laughing and drinking, occulting and eclipsing. How rudderless one was, in truth. How governed by unmastered forces.

Hilda touched her hand. “I haven’t upset you, have I?”

“Not at all,” said Mary.

But now her own heart faltered. For these long months she had held on to the idea of love so fiercely that she had not considered a daunting possibility: that she didn’t love Alistair after all — that his great merit was in having known her only before she fell apart, while her great cowardice was not to have admitted to him that she was diminished. She wasn’t the girl who had once walked in bombs as if they were drizzle. She had lost her exemption from the ordinary, and as soon as he realized it, he wouldn’t love her either.

She twisted her hands in her lap. How well did they know each other, after all? She and Alistair had never had the civilian progression into love by small and reversible steps, by increments of dancing and dinner in which joy was imperceptibly solemnized. All they had had was an air raid, and a moment at Waterloo Station, and two pounds by weight of aerogrammes that might one day be discovered, in a suitcase, in some attic being converted to a flat, and flung into a waste cart with old books and cups.

“But you look so glum,” said Hilda.

“Don’t be silly.”

“You’re getting cold feet, aren’t you?”

“It’s just… I mean what if — oh Hilda, I can barely remember his face.”

“You’re panicking, you silly fruit.”

“Do you think?”

“He’s a little late, that’s all it is, and you have altar nerves. I’ll bet Alistair’s just the same: he’ll be in a pub around the corner, getting up some Dutch courage. Breathe — that’s it! Take a really good deep breath.”

Mary felt a little better. Drinks came, magnifying the effect.

“Now listen,” said Hilda, licking gin from the end of her cocktail straw and jabbing it in Mary’s direction. “What you need is to take out his photo.”

Mary laughed. “I shan’t sit here mooning over him.”

“You know the trouble?” said Hilda, rummaging in Mary’s bag for her. “Your mother bred all the sense out of you. Now look,” she said, slapping the brownish vignette of Alistair down among the ash and the coasters. “Look at that and tell me you’re not in love.”

How many times Mary had stared at Alistair’s photograph. Once it had provoked a simple gladness.

“ ‘Oh, I don’t know,” said Mary. “What would you have me say?”

“That he is beautiful. That you love him. Only that.”

“But it’s been so long, and I’m such a mess. I hardly remember—”

“Then think: what was the spark? The hour you looked into those eyes and thought: I want no one else ? God knows, I can remember.”

Mary stared at Alistair’s portrait. It didn’t seem kind to tell Hilda that it hadn’t been his eyes at all, but his back. She’d known with certainty that she needed him only when he had turned away from her on the platform at Waterloo. How her heart had dropped — as if there were no end to falling. When the hour had come for the war to take him away, that had been the first and last moment she had known without doubt that she loved him.

One knew how one felt only when things ended. And yet here was the world of white tables, insisting on beginnings. And here was Alistair now, with a footman throwing open the door of the lounge. Here was Alistair, tall and gaunt, the chandelier showering him with light. Here he was in his uniform, smiling and unsteady, his right sleeve empty and pinned. Here was Alistair, meeting her eye.

Mary stood, knocking over her drink. Gin sluiced over the tablecloth and deepened the red plush of the carpet.

“Alistair,” she said, so overcome that she forgot to embrace him and instead offered her hand to shake. It was ridiculous — and even worse since she offered her right, which he had to take with his left.

“Hello, Mary.”

They disengaged. He raised and then dropped his good arm, helplessly. “Sorry I’m late. There were Germans.”

Mary managed a laugh; Alistair too.

“Hello Alistair,” said Hilda. “Gin all right with you?”

“Gin? Fine. Hello, Hilda, how are you?”

“Back in a jiffy,” said Hilda, giving them the table.

“Her poor face…” said Alistair as Hilda curved to the ladies’ room.

“Shrapnel,” said Mary.

Gin came, and Alistair took a sip. He grimaced and widened his eyes.

“Nice?” said Mary.

“I’d almost forgotten what we were fighting for. And you only look more beautiful.”

“You’re very kind. But it’s the war, I’m afraid. I’m so much older.”

Alistair gave her a look so tender that she thought she might dissolve. The two of them might be all right, she realized. She must make more effort to take it slowly this time, that was all. Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.

“You haven’t missed the weather,” she said. “It’s mostly rained since you left.”

Alistair took in the Ritz’s lounge — the laughter, the crystals of light that flattered the crowd. He said, “I thought I wouldn’t make it back to all this. I was sinking by the time the Navy pulled us out. I was going down and there was this great roaring noise, which was the sound of the rescue launch’s engines, but I thought it was the end. They had to pump my chest.”

The words struggled to connect, and Mary found herself already saying, “And of course it snowed a lot in January.”

Hilda appeared back at the table, all purpose and powder. “Well,” she said, “I shall leave you lovebirds to it.”

Mary took her arm. “You mustn’t go.”

Mistaking her terror, Hilda kissed her on both cheeks. “Don’t be silly, I’ll be fine. I shall call at the garret tomorrow to catch up on all the news.” She gave Mary a look of tipsy significance. “But I shan’t arrive before noon.”

“Oh Hilda, you really don’t need to—”

“Nonsense. Now be good, you two, and if you can’t be good, be a warning to others.”

She was gone with a wave of the fingers, weaving between the tables. A waiter dimmed the chandelier. The pianist took a break.

“In Malta it was mostly sunny,” said Alistair. “But there could be a terrible wind.”

“I was so desperate when I heard you were missing,” said Mary at the same time.

Their hands, a foot apart on the tablecloth, could not seem to make the junction.

The pianist sat back down and played “La Campanella.” More drinks came. Alistair packed his pipe — not making too bad a fist of it with one hand, Mary thought. A waiter arrived to light it from a cut-glass lamp. The staff at the Ritz had the quality of apologizing with a murmur for each of their perfect actions. They smelled of nothing and had faces that made no demands on the eye or on the heart. They melted into shade, not allowing themselves to be silhouetted against the chandelier. They eluded cognition entirely, like sorcerers, or fathers. At the tables all around them the guests chattered away as if life were not on the meter, while the waiters took away ash.