Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

What good was she to him? And yet days still came, and had to be faced. Perhaps she should go back home. As soon as an occasion presented, her mother would invite the Hunter-Halls. Mary would seat herself as instructed, which she supposed would decide everything else. Society was not complicated, after all. One had only to follow one’s name from table plan to wedding banns and all the way through to the headstone.

She stubbed out her cigarette and edged through the gloom in the direction Alistair had gone. In the galleries a damp line had risen from the floor, a pale fungus in numberless dots marking the creeping edge of it. On the ashen walls a thousand lighter rectangles showed where each painting had hung, and to where it would be restored. How foolish she was, still to hope that Alistair could love her. And yet she followed him, into the dark, even though she knew that each step took her no further from who she was. When the war was over the evacuees would return. The zoo animals would be put back on trucks and returned to their old labeled cages. The world could not wake from its pattern.

The tarnished brass title plaques were still screwed into the gallery walls. In the moonlight they glowed dully. Precisely here and here had been the Constables and the Turners. Here had been Ophelia, and here she would be again, chanting snatches of old tunes.

Footsteps came, and she turned.

“Why did you run out?” said Alistair.

“I couldn’t bear myself. You, with everything you’ve been through. And then me, and my small miseries and the Ritz.” She put her face in her hands. “The Ritz.”

He looked around. “This place doesn’t feel like me either. I don’t think I’m anxious to fix it.”

“Do you think, if you can stand it… we might try to find a place for us?”

His face hardened a little and he said nothing.

“Alistair?” she said, her heart racing.

“I don’t know. Do you think you’d even be happy?”

“Oh,” she said miserably. “My mother thinks that isn’t even a word, in wartime.”

“I don’t mind what your mother thinks.”

“I would try to be happy. I can be fun, you know. I hope we can be that way again.”

“I might let you down,” he said. “I don’t sleep. My mind isn’t right.”

“But we do let each other down — don’t we? — and it isn’t the end.”

“I don’t know. You might have been right when you ran out.”

She dropped her hands to her sides. “But you might have come after me! I only needed one kind word, you know. I don’t know how to begin, now that we finally might.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t let you go.”

“And I wish I hadn’t run. But this is us from the start, don’t you think? We get so close each time. Darling, we get so close.”

“Were we wrong from the start?” said Alistair. “To pretend that we weren’t in love?”

“I was wrong. I was a coward not to tell Tom. Do you despise me for it?”

He shook his head. “I should have said I loved you. Would that have been the difference?”

‘It’s the difference now. Do you think you might tell me if you still do or if you don’t? It’s all right, you know. I’m sure now that it’s braver to say it.”

He got his pipe lit and leaned back against the wall of the gallery. She leaned beside him, an arm’s width away, and they looked at the pattern of the absent paintings.

“I don’t know how to answer you,” he said. “I don’t have feelings as I used to. These pictures used to move me.”

“I used to move you.”

He took her hand. “I went so far down before they pulled me out. I’m sorry.”

She looked at her hand in his. “You still care, at least.”

“I care that your leg must be aching. I care that I must be making you sad. I care for a thousand things I would like to make better for you.”

“Then might you still try, Alistair? Could you love me again, with time?”

“I’m so afraid in case I won’t.”

“And I’m so afraid in case I always will.”

She kissed him and they stood for a time without speaking. Mary felt the weight of their silence but there was no sadness in it because the silence had not yet found its moment to slip from the heart and lodge itself in the ordinary. Perhaps, if the two of them were careful, then it never would. Perhaps the real work of lovers was to hold themselves apart from theaters and train stations, from jam jars and picture frames, from all the bellicose everyday things that sought to beat one with time. Even to hope for love was a trap, Mary supposed, if when one said love one only meant armistice. Maybe it was foolish to imagine any more definite thing — since the heart, after all, did not declare victory. The heart declared only forgiveness, for which there was no grand precedent and no instrument of surrender.

Her leg was giving out, and she sank to the floor. Alistair joined her. In the empty gallery they sat a little distance apart — not so far that life could easily get between them, but not so close that it couldn’t if it tried. They stared into the pattern of lighter gray shapes where the paintings were supposed to be. Through the holes in the roof and the cracks in the walls the city grew lighter around them — their ancient city with its ordered tides reverting to the sea.

And now from the river in the east rose a vivid red sun, surprising Mary. She hadn’t meant to sleep. The day had got in through the broken dome and flooded the gallery wall. It blinded her and she blinked until the world was restored. Beside her in the ruins Alistair lay with his eyes closed, without a mark on him. The quick bright shock of the light between the cloud and the eastern horizon: an unimagined thing, thought Mary, a life. It was an unscrewing of tarnished brass plaques. It was one tile lost to the pattern. It was a world one might still know, if everyone forgiven was brave.