Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (36 page)

Mary cranked the wipers to clear drizzle from the windshield, the better to indicate the rubble.

Hilda said, “If that is really the future, then what is the point in living?”

“We could have hobbies.”

“One of my hobbies is tea. Shall we go to the crypt and drink some?”

“Don’t you care about the future of civilization?”

“No,” said Hilda, “I care that Alistair still hasn’t replied to my letter.”

“Oh,” said Mary.

“I can’t stop thinking of him. Aren’t you the slightest bit sympathetic?”

Mary’s heart caught. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it isn’t your fault. Come on, let’s go for that tea.”

Soon the sirens howled up to their huge C-sharp and swooped down to A again to start their cycle. The first bombs fell and the night was underway, and they were sent out to the first casualties.

Clive was drunk before they even began. Huw was white with fatigue. They picked up two deceased and were halfway through their first run to the mortuary when Mary took a corner and both the bodies on the roof flew into the street. Clive and Huw had forgotten to strap the stretchers down. The men worked together to recover the first body, making a count of one, two, three,
lift,
but they discovered—after two attempts and a long interval of confusion in the slits of the ambulance’s headlights—that Clive had been lifting the arms of one corpse and Huw the legs of the other. Mary watched them curse and begin again.

As softly as she could, she said, “I’ve been writing to Alistair.”

Hilda looked straight ahead and said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” said Mary. “If that counts for anything.”

“You’re sorry . . .”

“I waited for what I thought was a decent time. I wouldn’t have written if I thought that you and he were hitting it off.”

Hilda still looked straight ahead. “Who wrote first? You, or him?”

Mary rested her forehead on the wheel. “I don’t blame you for being angry.”

“ ‘Angry’ isn’t the word. You’ve done this since we were children.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Hilda.”

In the useless headlights the men got one body back on its stretcher. They lifted it unevenly and the corpse rolled off again.

“At every party you left with the nicest man. And whatever second-choice boy I kissed was closing his eyes and thinking of you.”

“Well it won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Oh, so Alistair is the last one you’ll take from me?”

“I didn’t want it to happen.”

“When did you know?”

“When I took his bag to the station.”

“So you did kiss him.”

“No.”

“Did you hold hands?”

“No. I was with Tom, remember? You don’t know what it was like.”

“Why? Do you suppose I’ve never been in love? I feel these things, Mary. Hopeless as I am, I feel them. But you are always there—aren’t you?—to rescue me from love.”

Mary closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Hilda said nothing. A swing tune played at the edge of Mary’s awareness, somewhere in the white noise: a phantom melody. Nobody slept.

When the corpses were loaded again, Mary drove to the morgue. Now it took an age to get everything off the roof, since the men had made doubly sure with the strapping. Their cold hands struggled with the knots. With an effort Mary kept her head from drifting down to the wheel again.

“It’s getting harder,” said Hilda.

“What is?”

“To believe that this is endurable.”

Mary supposed she either meant their friendship, or the bombing. Tens of thousands were dead now, and everyone left was sickened. This was something about war that they did not warn one of: that death was an illness of the living, a cumulative poison.

When Clive and Huw had got the empty stretchers on the roof at last, Mary drove back to the church. They were all too weary to go down into the shelter. They listened to Tom’s wind-up gramophone, which Mary kept in the ambulance now. Clive passed a bottle around. They worked at getting drunk enough to be able to do the job, without being so drunk that they couldn’t. Through the windshield, in the orange glow of fires, the rubble stretched to the limit of sight.

“It’s all right for you,” said Hilda. “But I don’t have anyone.”

“You will. You’ll see.”

“Listen to yourself,” said Hilda.

The sadness calcified.

The ARP controller tapped on the ambulance window with a fresh address. Mary parked the gramophone’s needle and drove. Hilda rested her head against the passenger window and watched the ack-ack gliding up.

The incident was in Farringdon, past their usual patch, and when they got there the scene was already busy with ambulances and fire crews. An office building had come down on top of the shelter beneath it, and the wreckage was ablaze. The crews had worked an access route down into the shelter, and Clive and Huw joined them to bring out the wounded. The firemen played hoses on the steaming rubble around the access tunnel, and the stretcher parties were coming out drenched.

Hilda took her medical bag and went down without a word. After a minute Mary couldn’t bear it and went down after her. The tunnel began under a bowed steel lintel and tended steeply down a stairway that had been filled by rubble when the building collapsed. It had been excavated sufficiently to permit passage if one doubled over. Freezing water poured from the roof of the tunnel.

The dim light from the flames outside surrendered to a darkness broken by battery lamps every few yards. Mary’s knees scraped on the sharp rubble and her tin hat slammed against a beam, so hard that she was stunned for a moment. Shouts were coming up from the darkness. She forced herself to continue.

The tunnel opened out into what Mary took to be a large water tank, in which for some reason the men of the rescue crews were wading thigh-deep by the bewildering light of torches.

“Where’s the shelter?” she asked a rescuer.

“This is it.”

She must have looked blank, because he said: “It’s water from the fire hoses. Flooding.”

The survivors seemed all to have been brought out—the people down here were rescuers—and Mary saw them going down into the black water, plunging in and staying under for long moments before surfacing with gasps.

Hilda came over to her. “They’re only looking for bodies, I’m afraid. Let’s go back up.”

Mary took a step forward and a heavy weight came down on the back of her legs, pushing her down. She knelt, chest-deep. Hilda took her arm to help her up. Mary tried to stand but found that she couldn’t. In the cold water her breath came in gasps.

Hilda held her under both arms. “Oh do get up, won’t you? We’re all exhausted, you know.”

Mary felt down her legs with her hands. A heavy beam—it felt like metal—was pressing into the angle of her knees. Her kneecaps were pinioned to the uneven rubble of the floor. She strained against the metal. It wouldn’t move at all. There was no effect except to grind her knees into the rubble, which hurt. She reached down and felt along the beam, left and right, but it stretched away farther than the span of her arms.

A rescuer splashed up and shone his torch on Mary. “All right here?”

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I seem to be stuck.”

She smiled, which was all one could do when embarrassed.

The rescuer had Hilda hold the torch while he knelt beside Mary and tugged along the length of the beam. “It’s good and stuck, isn’t it? Are you in pain?”

“Only when I try to move. Which is silly, isn’t it?”

“Well you just stay calm, darling, while we get this sorted out.”

“Thank you very much,” said Mary. Until the man told her to stay calm, it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be reasons not to.

Hilda held her hands. More rescuers came and began to duck under, bringing up a brick here and a piece of bar there, but whatever was trapping her was too heavy to shift. Mary gathered that the beam was set in concrete at both ends, and the concrete lodged under obstructions. She took in the men’s nervous voices and the efforts they made not to alarm her.

They became more methodical, searching underwater obstructions with their fingertips, trying to understand how to dislodge the beam. The sound of pouring water was loud in the sudden calm. Hilda undid her hair clips and fixed Mary’s hair back to stop it going in her mouth.

“Be a dear and do my lipstick next,” said Mary, her teeth chattering.

Hilda said, “You’re doing very well.”

The water was rising in the basement—now Mary understood this—at about an inch a minute. While she had been kneeling the water, which had been up to her sternum, had risen to the base of her throat. It poured down from the ceiling, faster now that the rubble above was saturated. Some of the rescuers left and Mary stared after them, wild-eyed, until someone told her they had gone to rig pumps.

“What can we do?” Mary said.

Hilda looked at her strangely. “This.”

Now Mary began to struggle. She heaved against the beam as hard as she could, not minding the pain as the metal cut into her calves. She thrashed and bucked, and when the rescuers held her arms to keep her still, she began to fight against them. Water gushed from the ceiling in torrents.

When the level reached her mouth, Mary tilted her head back to keep her face clear of it. The water rose to her earlobes.

Hilda squeezed her hands until she was calm again. In the wavering light of the torches, Mary saw the look in Hilda’s eyes. Now she understood that the most awful thing was going to happen to her. Grief came. Its level rose. The water was over her eardrums now, muting the splashing of the rescuers as they made their last, frantic attempts.

Mary felt unbearable misery that Kenneth Cox was gone. His voice was still alive—this was the terrible thing. The boy never would be told to hush and now he yelled away, somewhere in the impossible music that was flooding her. Grief poured down from fire hoses.

“It’s all just a dream,” said Hilda. “Shh, just a dream.”

“SHHUSSSSSHH!” shouted Kenneth. “It! Is! Just! A! Dream!”

It was agony that he was gone, agony that pretty Beryl Waldorf had died mute and unconsoled, agony that Betty Oates still smiled, even now, when Mary shut her eyes. She arched her body back and forth. She wrenched against the beam that pinned her, and it was more than she could bear, it was really far too much, and it was so clear now that one had not believed in death at all—neither how quickly it came up one on, nor how fathomless its sadness was—until this moment when it was suddenly here.

She groaned in the darkness, and then she felt the sharp scratch as Hilda punctured her arm, through the fabric of her jacket and blouse, with the needle of a morphine syrette. Hilda was looking down at her calmly. “Shhh now. Just . . . a . . . dream.”

After a minute Mary’s breathing came under control and the chill of the black water was gone. A glow spread through her belly and up her spine. It was unfamiliar and yet perfectly native and good. She felt Hilda’s hands on her face, holding her up. “There now.”

Mary was still aware of what was about to happen to her, but only in the same way that one was aware of the crossword. It was something difficult that one might pick up, or might not. The relief of the morphine was upon her and she understood that the drug was a simple and merciful thing, no less appropriate than a bandage for a cut.

“Better?” said Hilda.

Mary supposed there was an answer. The water was almost up to her lips. How pretty Hilda was, how luminous and constant in the fickle light of the torches. Mary watched her friend, this debutante who had learned the habit of going out among bombs with no more protection than a tin hat and an armband to bring home the bodies of strangers.

It seemed to Mary that Hilda had asked a perfectly simple question. Certainly she should respond. The water, when the first trickle entered her mouth, tasted rather strange. How cold it was, and how sharp with soot and brick dust and yellow clay. How odd that London wanted to trickle into her. She smiled, but the water poured in and she supposed that she ought to close her mouth and breathe through her nose while she could.

How lovely was each breath. How peculiar that one had never noticed.

She felt certain that Hilda had asked her a question.

Morphine was the discovery—and it seemed obvious now—that every breath was perfect. The knowledge had been there all along, unnoticed and perfectly straightforward. How strange that one had never seen it. Was it an incapacity, a specific blindness of the mind? Or was it a mannered oversight? It would hardly be polite to go around noticing that every breath was lovely. She giggled, and water flooded in until she closed her mouth again.

The agony of her children’s deaths still sounded in an undiminished cacophony—yes, she was perfectly aware of it—but the anguish was no longer particular to her. It simply was: one could hear it clearly, and listen to it calmly, picking out its individual timbres and notes, distinguishing its great themes and minor phrases. She grieved for every quiet sigh Beryl Waldorf had made. Her heart broke for each timid inflection in Thomas Essom’s voice. She heard every harmonic in the screech of the chalk on the blackboard when she had written Tom’s surname after her own. Of course: nobody ever really died. Life lingered. Every breath would persist forever, written in the clay of the city. And given that this was so perfectly obvious, it suddenly seemed imponderable that the enemy would make the effort to pack high explosive into a metal casing, fight it through the defending fire, and drop it from twenty thousand feet over a city of immortals.

Hilda was watching with her eyebrows raised in a question, and Mary realized that this had been the case for some time, and possibly forever. “Better?” said Hilda again, or perhaps it was still the first time she had asked: the word dissolved into the groundwater of the city, the word without end.

She strained to place her mouth into air. “Yes, thank you. Much.”

Hilda seemed ready to cry.

Mary said, “I am sorry I wasn’t kinder to you.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry, it’s . . .” Hilda looked up at blackness. “It’s . . .”

Mary watched the incomplete phrase float up into the night and come to rest there, glittering in bright points at the farthest extremity of the sky. This was how the stars had been made, after all: each the end of an unfinished thought, each an answer that one had known all along. She realized, of course, that this was not the sky and the stars—only the torches of the rescuers and the black roof of the basement—but she also understood that it was the same thing.