Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“I think I should warn you—” said Mary.

“I ought to let you know—” said Alistair.

“You go,” said Mary.

“Please, you first.”

Someone dimmed the chandelier further, until it seemed to cast a light that was darker than its absence. The high notes scattered from the piano. They glittered in that thin register where one heard the strings and hammers.

“What were you going to say?” said Alistair.

“Oh, it was nothing. You?”

“Only that… oh, it can wait.”

Drinks came. The pianist played some nocturnes of Chopin. Black-coated waiters appeared out of the black background to light Mary’s cigarettes. One had only to think of fire and fire came, as if the incendiary thought scorched the air. One had only to need a drink, and the pull of the need itself caused the drink to arrive on a heavy tray in a glass that had been handled with white cotton. It might carry on all night, Mary supposed: this matching of an equal and opposite solution to every resolvable human need — done with this exquisite precision that extended to the fullest extremity of the possible and therefore only made one ache all the more despairingly with doubts that could never be soothed by lackeys. It was the perfect antithesis of the war, this torment of solicitude. How strange, that the struggle and its absence should leave one equally afraid.

“Mary, are you quite all right?” Alistair had his hand on her arm.

“Thank you, darling, I am fine.”

And she would be fine, of course: she would make conversation when the air seemed the right shape for it, and she would laugh when laughter seemed a better fit. It was nice that the drinks kept coming, since the glow they gave was terrific.

He took his hand away. “What would you like us to do now?”

“Well, they do a nice dinner here — although it’s getting rather late — or we could go to one of the cafés on Haymarket, or if you’re not hungry we might even still make the cinema.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I suppose what I meant was, what would you like now, for us?”

Mary gripped the table. The room revolved around the chandelier. Their white planet spun through the plush black smoky space.

“I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “I’m ahead of myself. Ignore me — this is what I was like after France. That’s what I was trying to warn you about earlier on.”

“It’s all right. I’ve so looked forward to seeing you again. I thought I would know just what to do when you came. I’m sorry.”

He nodded and looked away, to the other tables where guests glowed in firmer orbits.

“On Malta, with the blockade, one doesn’t imagine that people live like this at home. It is hard to imagine how hungry everyone is on the island.”

“I can imagine it,” she said, feeling even as she said it what a foolish thing it was to blurt out.

He smiled kindly enough, but now she saw herself as he must. In the bright light of the chandelier, before he arrived, London’s circle had seemed quite equal to the earth’s equator. Now she saw the smallness of it. How vain she had been in her nest, feathering it with mirrors. She was a teacher nobody needed, a daughter whose parents despaired. And now here was Alistair, this man who had stood up to the enemy while she had been so proud of standing up to her mother. Did she really sit at this table, even now in her new feathered hat, wondering if she loved him?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His face was pale with concern. “Whatever for?”

“Forgive me,” she said, standing abruptly so that the chair fell to the carpet. “Please, darling, forgive me…”

She fled into the blacked-out night, into the ruined city beyond the consolation of chandeliers.

For a moment Alistair thought to go after her, but he was afraid that he could not have understood the situation. There must be something monstrous about him that had made her run. He was even more ruined than he had thought.

He sat in his uniform at the empty table while a waiter righted the overturned chair without irritation or comment. The pianist played without interruption. Mary’s place was cleared: the glass and its coaster removed on an electroplate tray, the tablecloth swept of ash until there was no sign she had ever been there. How abruptly people were taken. His body grieved, while his thoughts struggled to recall how he had got there. He had carried her body all the way back to barracks, and collapsed unconscious in the guardhouse. No, that wasn’t it. He had not opened the jar she had given him, carrying it instead to war’s end.

No, that wasn’t it at all. He had loved her.

—

It had been the tiniest chance that he would still be sitting there, and when Mary saw him she cut corners between the other tables, not minding the diners’ indignation. When she appeared by Alistair, out of breath, it seemed to startle him. He looked up from a drink that couldn’t still have been his first.

“Mary?”

“This place,” she said. “It isn’t me. Think what you like of me, but I wanted to tell you that.”

He stood, needing the table for balance. “What place is more you?”

“I don’t have a place anymore.”

“Is there somewhere you might feel better, at least?”

“I like the river,” she said. “I went there, sometimes, when you were missing.”

“Should we go there now?”

“I don’t know. It’s late.”

He checked his watch. “What time do they switch the Thames off?”

“Are you furious at me?”

“No. I thought you were disappointed.”

A waiter had been hovering, uncertain whether to bring cognac or coats.

“What would you like to do?” Mary asked Alistair.

“I’ll walk, if you’d like to. We don’t have to go anywhere in particular.”

“I’m slow on my leg, I should warn you.”

“I’ll do the sprinting, then, if you’ll do the handstands.”

Outside, an unused moon was rising. It shone along the axis of Piccadilly and sent their shadows west. As they walked down to the Embankment, Mary’s mood — which had lifted for a moment — began to sink again. Alistair could take her arm only with his left, and since her left side was the one needing support, they tended to separate. The awkwardness leached into the silence between them. The Thames, when they reached it, was no help. With its silvered crests in the soft night air it should have seemed dear, but she saw the slick blackness of the troughs, and felt on her skin the sobering drop in temperature.

They walked south along the river. Parliament seemed indigo in the light. The plane trees of Millbank had limbs splintered here and there by the bombing. They spoke of these small things, grateful when they presented themselves.

When they reached the Tate they saw that the bombing had blown its roofs off. Alistair was shaken and wanted to look. Inside, the mosaic floors were wrecked and the rain had washed their tiles out. Ten thousand colored marble chips, blued by the moonlight, lay in a mound at the foot of the stairs.

Alistair went ahead into the galleries and Mary hung back, poking at the mess with her toe. It seemed redundant to follow him, now that he had seen her as she was. She had only ever been an imprint in the London clay, of inherited money and looks. How pleased she had been with the impression she made, thinking it her own. But there were thousands of her stamp, and thousands more would come, each imagining they escaped the pattern. There would be countless small rebellions, numberless mothers defied. After the war these tiles would all be picked up and stuck back where they’d fallen.

She stood beneath the shattered central dome of the gallery. Above, between the bare iron hoops, a halo had formed around the moon. She lit a cigarette. The sound of the lighter rang in the empty space and sent pigeons clacking up through the dome.