Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (39 page)

Mary smiled. ‘It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work?”

“People stay if they can.”

He squinted up at her. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, thank you.”

The dark look boys gave to a pale answer. Years went by. Feelings almost came. The war ended, and saplings grew through the rubble.

Mary blinked. It was the morphine that sent time in these meandering rivers, orphaning a loop without warning and leaving it isolated, a little oxbow of memory with no clue of how it had got there. She was seeing the look with which Zachary had dismissed her, on the day of the evacuation. In his face as he flicked away his imaginary cigarette had been this same hint of a sadness evolved beyond consolation. As if misery, winged and pelagic, had left behind the doughy shore and its brood of flightless comforts.

She had the children wait in the alleyway while she flagged down a cab on the Strand. When the driver stopped she held the door and the children piled in. In his rearview mirror the driver’s face was a picture.

He said, “Where are we taking the piccaninnies?”

“To Piccadilly. Where else? The Ritz.”

“It’s your neck,” said the driver.

Molly put her head on Zachary’s shoulder and fell asleep. He looked out at the city. The driver watched them in the rearview mirror with an expression of perfect disgust. When it became tedious, Mary gave the man a bright smile and said, “They are from Timbuktu, you know. I got them for six strings of colored beads and a daguerreotype of the King. Didn’t I do well?”

The driver reddened. “I would of kept the beads.”

“I would
have
kept the beads,” said Mary, and now the man made them get out and walk the last half mile.

“I thought I was the stupid one,” said Zachary.

Mary gave him a wounded look. “Yes, but it is absolutely your fault for being as black as pitch, don’t you see?”

He smiled, for the first time that day. “Why did you come?”

She nodded in the direction of Molly, who was skipping ahead. “I was jealous of the attention you were getting.”

“But really?”

“I thought you might be lonely.”

“I’ve got Molly to look after.”

Fine,
she thought,
but would you mind awfully if I stuck around anyway?

At the Ritz her father’s name was good enough for a table, despite the unconcealed anguish of the staff from the headwaiter down. Mary and the children were seated for lunch as far from the other guests as the great dining room permitted, but even so a couple objected and required to be moved to a more distant table. Mary gave them a wave.

“They’re mine,” she explained loudly. “From different fathers, I think—one loses track.”

“Madam,” said the waiter, “I must ask you to consider our guests.”

“Waiter,” said Mary, “I must ask you to bring us Tamworth ham, cheeses of the mild sort, bread rolls, diced avocado pears with lemon so they don’t go brown, Cumberland sausages, hard-boiled eggs thinly sliced, scones with and without currants, fruit jams but please not peach, cocoa but not too hot, two large oranges, and two large apples in not too big slices.”

“Cox’s or Granny Smith, madam?” asked the waiter, recovering.

“As they come. Oh, and coffee. Oh, and an ashtray.”

“Very good. Will there be anything else?”

“That will depend,” said Mary, “on whether anyone is sick.”

“Very good, madam.”

The children watched with wide eyes as the waiter receded.

“Are we even allowed in here?” said Zachary.

“It’s this place that shouldn’t be allowed. Your only crime is hunger.”

Mary drank coffee, geeing up her third cup with a dozen drops of morphine. She managed half a scone. Her stomach was tight from sleeplessness, and the drug queered her appetite anyway. Across the dining room, a pianist was playing the “Blue Danube.” Mary watched the children eat everything on the table, beginning with what was nearest to them and finishing—when there was no more bread to spread it on—by licking the last of the butter from its dish. They passed it between them, without ceremony but with no imperfection of manners that Mary could detect. Zachary left a little extra for Molly, who was very small and frail. The girl laid her head on the perfect white tablecloth and fell asleep again, with her mouth open and her arms hanging vertically.

From their tables the other guests watched, over the tops of ironed newspapers. It would be minutes rather than hours, Mary realized, until the scene was relayed to Pimlico. With the morphine, it was possible to know that this was unfair on her mother, and also not to mind.

Zachary wiped his face on the tablecloth. “May I have a cigarette?”

“Not until you are thirteen. Tell me, do you like looking after Molly?”

“It’s all right.”

“You’re good with her.”

“I’m no good at anything.”

“Nonsense. You’re a fine musician and a champion paste eater.”

“Everyone should be able to read and write. You said it yourself.”

“I was wrong,” she said. “I have buried a man who could read, you see, killed by people who can write.”

She tried to light a cigarette, but the flame and the end of the cigarette wouldn’t converge. Zachary had to guide her wrist.

“Thank you,” he said.

“What for?”

“For coming to find me.”

She supposed she must have. And here she was, apparently, in the Ritz, with Negro orphans. Diners stared back at her, stiff with condemnation. And here she was—oh, here she still was, yes—even now, with no clear idea, just for the moment, of how one might have got here.

May, 1941

THE WIND PUSHED A
raft of cloud over the island, and the bombing stopped for six days. Alistair rotated with the battery, back from the highlands to Fort St. Elmo. It was cooler by the sea, and the officers found a sharpness in themselves again. When the wind blew some Sicilian fishermen into Grand Harbour—their engine had thrown a piston—Alistair hatched a plan that Simonson liked enough to take to the lieutenant colonel.

The Sicilians were hauled up on the dock and invited in exchange for their lives to spit on a photograph of Mussolini. This done, they were treated to a feast. They had roast meats and fancy breads, a gramophone and brandy. The officers of the Royal Naval Dockyard, dressed in their parade-best uniforms and whistling airs from Gilbert and Sullivan, repaired the fishermen’s engine, not neglecting to fasten a portrait of the King to their cabin’s central bulkhead using star-headed brass screws that could not be undone except with a particular issue of Royal Navy screwdriver.

The work being finished and the wind falling calm, the combined brass bands of the various regiments defending Grand Harbour were assembled on the quayside in tropical dress, with folded blankets secreted beneath their tunics where their bellies ought to have been. They shouldered their tubas and played an extended medley of Vaughan Williams and Elgar while the fishermen were escorted back out through the harbor’s mine cordon by the polished mahogany launch of the Admiral of Her Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet Andrew Browne Cunningham, the First Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, flying the white ensign. Thus the enemy’s fishermen carried home the intelligence that the island was doing very much better than the enemy had imagined, and ought not to be invaded just yet.

When the signals officer on the ramparts of Fort St. Elmo put down his binoculars and reported that the fishing boat had gone out of visual range, the brass bands were stood down. Officers and men folded their parade uniforms and put on the frayed and malodorous battle dress that they had lived in these many months. The admiral’s launch was returned to its mooring and covered with the stained tarpaulin that made it look, from the air, like any of the harbor’s little boats. Its tank was drained of diesel oil, which was needed for the electric generators in the forts. The admiral himself, who was on the same rations as the men, found that he could barely lift his arm to return the salute when his subordinate came to report that the operation had been a success.

The scraps of food that the fishermen had left were collected into a basket, covered with a cloth, and taken to the central stores to be allocated to one of the batches of soup that would be distributed to the starving garrisons.

“Well,” said Simonson, his feet up on Alistair’s metal desk, “you are not a handsome man, but I will admit that your plan went off well.”

“The men were magnificent, weren’t they?”

“I daresay they needed it. Nice to be the ones dishing it out for once.”

Alistair lurched, sat down on his cot and closed his eyes.

“All right?” said Simonson.

“Give me a moment. I’ll be fine.”

Simonson lit a cigarette, rocked back on his chair, and exhaled. “I don’t think you will be fine, Alistair.”

“No, I don’t suppose I will.”

“Do you think we might get that arm taken off for you now?”

“The surgeon still feels I can keep it.”

“We wouldn’t be keeping the surgeon if we had any choice. He is a sawbones and I’ll bet he learned medicine at the Army Veterinary College.”

“Then be glad he hasn’t put me down.”

“But he is killing you, isn’t he, in his way? Letting your arm fester like this? Look at you—it’s up to your shoulder.”

Alistair tried to think, through the nausea. “We haven’t had much luck, have we, with the men who’ve gone into his theater?”

“We’d get you a Navy surgeon. They’d pipe you aboard, whip the arm off, and send you away with rum. We’d just have to watch they didn’t issue you with a hook hand and a parrot—you know the Navy.”

Alistair cradled the arm. “I’m not sure.”

“Think of that girl of yours. She’d put you straight.”

“She still doesn’t write.”

“But I shall still have to write to her, if you die from this infection. You know how I hate writing those letters.”

“Drop it, won’t you? It makes me nervous when you’re tedious.”

“It makes me tedious when you’re dying. Be a good chap, won’t you, and get the arm taken off? Then I can have you evacuated. There’s an orderly queue of cripples and grotesques. As soon as your number comes to the top of it, they fly you home on the mail plane.”

“I’d rather stay and help.”

“You’re no help dead.”

The sirens sounded. Simonson stood wearily.

“Enjoy every moment,” said Alistair.

“Will you think about what I said, and let me have your answer?”

Alistair turned away, then nodded.

“Good man.” Simonson put on his cap and left, and the garrison crept back into its shell to take another beating.

Alistair looked out over the harbor. He heard the aircraft before he saw them. They came in as they always did, from the north, and he steadied his field glasses to watch them. They were Heinkels, lined up along the horizon with their fighter escort larking above. The RAF had nothing to put up against them and so there was nothing for the German fighters to do. Alistair imagined they practised aerobatics and scored the others’ maneuvers for aesthetics and technical difficulty, while far beneath them the grubby Heinkels laid their turds of high explosive.

Through the glasses one could sometimes catch a glimpse of a bomber pilot through the frontal glass of his aircraft. They still wore jackets and ties to the fight. Alistair tried to make out the pilots’ faces, but they were too distant. He would have liked to know how the enemy looked as he approached the Maltese coast.

Alistair tracked the bombers until they were almost overhead and the stonework blocked his view. The fort’s Bofors guns and 3.7s opened up. It was not the ceaseless barrage it had been a year ago. Now, having little ammunition, the gunners did their best. The bombs began to fall. Alistair was too weak to go down to the shelters and he sat on an empty ammunition box, took up the brushes with his left hand and worked at the restoration. The explosions made dust. Grit got into the thinners.

He had cleaned every part of the painting now, making good around twenty square inches a day. The Madonna, now that she was freed from her soot, was a catch. She made Alistair forget the hunger and the nausea of his infection. He had long ceased to make any distinction between his own Mary and the one who was restored, inch by inch, as he worked. Bombs hammered down, falling all around the fort, cratering its great courtyard. Alistair ignored them. He hardly worked, simply looked back at Mary. The poison from his arm slowed his mind.

He had started with the hem of her dress, working up the lines of the obscurest folds, perfecting the mix of the thinners and learning the minimum pressure required to shift the grime and soot. Next he had moved on to the dress’s salients, revealing profane shifts of red. Her hair came next, imperfect, tangled here and there, swept back from the face but otherwise scarcely tamed. After two months he had trusted his technique sufficiently to expose her hands, and finally her face.

He looked from Mary to the Christ child, for whom he had developed a fraternal affection. The painter clearly hadn’t liked the boy—Alistair supposed no artist had ever much cared for the child whose presence was only an excuse to frequent the model. So here was Christ the awkward, Christ the inconvenient, Christ the pint-size chaperone. Sooty, pug-faced Jesus, wanting a feed. Alistair had worked on the painting for days before he noticed that while Mary had been provided with a halo, the child had only the benefit of a pot on a table in the background, its rim catching the incidental light. The table was in such deep shade and the pot so very nearly matched to its background that one would have to be the painter, or the painting’s restorer, to see the trick. Alistair’s heart went out to the boy. Maybe that was the point.

The bombing tailed off and Alistair dragged himself back to watch the enemy bombers departing. He was glad when they got away now. He raised his glasses and watched them fleeing above the waves, the tail-enders yawing desperately and trailing long streaks of soot. Well, it had been a long war, and everyone was trailing smoke. He was surprised at how easy it was to excuse the enemy. They had never promised fraternity, only bombs. What Alistair had done to Tom was worse. Mary must have come to feel the same for her part in it. He supposed it was why she didn’t write.