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Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Cleave, Chris

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The instant New York Times bestseller from Chris Cleave—the unforgettable novel about three lives entangled during World War II, told "with dazzling prose, sharp English wit, and compassion…a powerful portrait of war's effects on those who fight and those left behind" (People, Book of the Week).London, 1939. The day war is declared, Mary North leaves finishing school unfinished, goes straight to the War Office, and signs up. Tom Shaw decides to ignore the war—until he learns his roommate Alistair Heath has unexpectedly enlisted. Then the conflict can no longer be avoided. Young, bright, and brave, Mary is certain she'd be a marvelous spy. When she is—bewilderingly—made a teacher, she finds herself defying prejudice to protect the children her country would rather forget. Tom, meanwhile, finds that he will do anything for Mary. And when Mary and Alistair meet, it is love, as well as war, that will test them in ways they could not have imagined, entangling three lives in violence and passion, friendship and deception, inexorably shaping their hopes and dreams. Set in London during the years of 1939–1942, when citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between Chris Cleave's grandparents. This dazzling novel dares us to understand that, against the great theater of world events, it is the intimate losses, the small battles, the daily human triumphs that change us most.

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Simon & Schuster

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Simon & Schuster eGalley Disclaimer    * * *    Do not quote for publication until verified with the finished book. This advance, uncorrected reader's proof is the property of Simon & Schuster. It is being made available for promotional purposes and review by the recipient and may not be used for any other purpose or transferred to any third party. Simon & Schuster reserves the right to terminate availability of the proof at any time. Any duplication, sale or distribution to the public is a violation of the law. This file will no longer be accessible upon publication of this book.      From the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Little Bee, a spellbinding novel about three unforgettable individuals thrown together by war, love, and their search for belonging in the ever-changing landscape of WWII London.      It's 1939 and Mary, a young socialite, is determined to shock her blueblood political family by volunteering for the war effort. She is assigned as a teacher to children who were evacuated from London and have been rejected by the countryside because they are infirm, mentally disabled, or—like Mary's favorite student, Zachary—have colored skin.    Tom, an education administrator, is distraught when his best friend, Alastair, enlists. Alastair, an art restorer, has always seemed far removed from the violent life to which he has now condemned himself. But Tom finds distraction in Mary, first as her employer and then as their relationship quickly develops in the emotionally charged times. When Mary meets Alastair, the three are drawn into a tragic love triangle and—while war escalates and bombs begin falling around them—further into a new world unlike any they've ever known.    A sweeping epic with the kind of unforgettable characters, cultural insights, and indelible scenes that made Little Bee so incredible, Chris Cleave's latest novel explores the disenfranchised, the bereaved, the elite, the embattled. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a heartbreakingly beautiful story of love, loss, ; and incredible courage.      -National advertising  • Author tour  • National print and online media campaign  • Advance reader's edition  • Reading group guide  • Author Q&A  • Promote via S&S Ed/Library Facebook & Twitter accounts  • Cross promotion with the author's website: ChrisCleave.com  • Cross promotion with author's Facebook page: Facebook.com/ChrisCleaveAuthor  • Cross promotion with author's Twitter account: @ChrisCleave  • Cross promotion with author's e-newsletter list  • Adult librarian e-newsletter feature  • Teach.SimonandSchuster.net feature  • SimonandSchuster.com monthly e-newsletter feature  • SimonandSchuster.com feature      Chris Cleave is the author of Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, Gold, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Little Bee. He lives with his wife and three children in Kingston-upon-Thames, England. Visit him at ChrisCleave.com or on Twitter @ChrisCleave.      Little Bee website  Follow Chris Cleave on Twitter  Chris Cleave's author website      		 			Dear Reader:  			I am thrilled to present you with an early copy of Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave.  			In this magnificent novel, Chris has created unforgettable characters and put them in unforgiving circumstances—just as he did in Little Bee.  			Everyone Brave is Forgiven begins in London in 1939, at the declaration of war, when a posh young socialite named Mary impetuously volunteers. Assigned a role teaching, Mary has barely memorized her students' names before they're evacuated to the countryside. But then some children return. The deformed, the disabled, the nonwhites. Mary fills her London classroom with a handful of children who were not welcomed into the homes of their countrymen even as the bombs begin to fall.  			Mary's relationship with a young black American boy named Zachary and her romantic entanglements—with her middle-class boss, Tom, and then with Tom's debonair roommate, Alistair, who returns from the battlefront a haunted man—fuel the plot of this page-turner. As the war rages on, these characters endure everyday horrors and small serendipities in equal parts.  			As with any Cleave novel, as you read you will laugh and you will cry, and you will find yourself immersed in a story that feels palpably real and important. I couldn't be more excited to share this novel with you. Thank you in advance—I can't wait to hear what you think.  			Best,  			Marysue Rucci  			Vice President and Editor-in-Chief  			Simon & Schuster, Inc.  			1230 Avenue of the Americas  			New York, NY 10020  			Voice 212 698 1234 Fax 212 698 7453  			marysue.rucci@simonandschuster.com      		 			Dear Reader:  			One day during the harrowing siege of Malta my maternal grandfather, Captain Hill of the Royal Artillery, was assigned to mind Randolph Churchill, the brilliant but dissipated son of the British Prime Minister. "Look after him, David," said the Major General who conferred this extraordinary duty, "and if at all possible keep him out of trouble."  			The novel began with me wondering what that instruction meant, exactly. The Axis had maintained a two-year stranglehold on the island of Malta, reducing garrison and islanders alike to a state of advanced starvation. Into this theatre poor Randolph was parachuted, groggy and overweight. It was hot and he wanted to go swimming, so my grandfather took him to the beach the officers used, where a thin strip had been left between the mines and the barbed wire entanglements.  			Randolph was visiting Malta to recruit for the fledgling SAS. The prospect on offer to the starving officers was hard to refuse: full rations and a ticket off the island, in exchange for becoming a commando. Having helped Randolph to shop this deal around, my grandfather felt it would be churlish not to volunteer himself, and was later dropped behind enemy lines in North Africa.  			Randolph was known to be fantastically brave, prone to strolling through gunfire to deliver orders. On Malta he might cheerfully get himself killed or—much worse—captured. In the pivotal phase of World War II, the Prime Minister's son would have made a hostage of some significance. My grandfather had been issued with a good education, a Webley Mk IV revolver and a delightfully ambiguous order.  			This novel, then, started out as a sort of stage play exploring the power dynamic between the two men. Yet in the end Randolph was the wrong central character. I found that I was more interested in my grandfather—a man who was brave despite his handicap of finding life full of opportunities to tell funny stories and build ice yachts and read Charlie & The Chocolate Factory to his grandchildren. In the novel something of Randolph found its way into the character of Simonson, but I leave the man himself—a great man in his way—to his excellent biographers.  			Instead I went to Malta and spent some time trying to understand my grandfather's experience. Elderly islanders were kind and answered my questions patiently and in detail—I belong to the last generation of writers who can still talk to people who lived through the Second World War. I switched off my mobile phone and slept only in places where my grandfather had been billeted.  			Both my grandfathers served in artillery. Wherever they were stationed one still finds the great concrete emplacements on which the guns were levelled, and the walls and crenulations that defended them. And so it was possible, when my grandfather told me that he was stationed in a certain spot on Malta, to go and find that exact place.  			I spent time in the military cemeteries, too. In a memoir my grandfather had recorded in pen the names of some of the dead who were known to him, and I had typed it up. Here were those familiar names carved into stone: I traced them with my hands. The sadness of the war came over me in a way that I have heard other people speak of in relation to such places. Still, it was surprising and overwhelming.  			I noticed that the cemeteries in Malta are different from Allied war graves elsewhere, in that four, five or even six men lie under each stone. I asked about it and was told with a grin to try digging a hole anywhere I liked on the island. I discovered that there is seldom more than six inches of topsoil above Malta's yellow rock. Men on starvation rations had simply done the best they could, breaking up the limestone with blunt picks. This was how I came to feel about writing the book. It would inevitably fall short of doing justice to its subject. But perhaps that is the work of a novelist after all—to dig one small hole that must host a great number of men.  			On my last day on the island I went to Bingemma, where my grandfather had been stationed for a while in an old Victorian fort, high on an escarpment overlooking a wide plain. I had my pad with me and I had envisaged the fort's ramparts as the place where I would begin writing the novel. But I found that the fort is private property now, crumbling and fenced off with barbed wire, guarded by dogs of the species that asks questions later.  			The wind made vortices of dust and carrier bags in the lee of the decaying walls. The drawbridge was blocked by fly-tipped rubble and kitchen appliances. The moat where my grandfather had raised a thin and desperate crop was overgrown—and not just by scrub but by mature trees now. There were syringes on the ground. It was a forsaken and desecrated place. I didn't start the novel there after all—I realized I still didn't know how to begin. Instead I picked up a small stone that had fallen from the crumbling walls and took it home for my grandfather. In the end I never gave it to him. I was worried it would sadden him to see the photos and to learn how derelict his fort had become. Probably I needn't have worried. There's every chance he would have been tickled to learn he had outlasted the place.  			My grandfather died while I was writing the novel—but, as he might have remarked, it wasn't necessarily my fault. I regret that he never saw the book. I had finished the third draft of what turned out to be five, but I had decided to wait until the novel was perfect before I gave it to him to read. What a fool I am. If you will forgive the one piece of advice a writer is qualified to give: never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself.  			David Hill really did sail a fourteen-foot dinghy between floating mines, for fun, in the sparkling seas off Malta. He really did verify St. Paul's account of his shipwreck in Acts 27 by reference to the relevant Admiralty chart. He really did volunteer on the day war was declared, and for reasons that remain mysterious he really did once go absent without leave for five weeks—and upon his return (for reasons equally obscure) his Colonel greeted him by glancing at his watch and asking "Why are you late?"  			Apart from these and the above-related facts, the character of Alistair in the novel has little in common with my grandfather, and certainly the book's plot is an invention. The novel is inspired by my grandfather and it would not exist without him, but it is not at all based on his true story.  			The story begins in London, of course. Mary North became its central character for the same reason Randolph Churchill did not: that bravery is more subtle when one has a great deal to live for. Also, I had learned by now that I should draw on my family's history rather than presume to know the world's. If I could dig only a small hole, then it might at least have careful edges. The character of Mary is inspired by my paternal grandmother, Margaret Slater, who drove ambulances in Birmingham during the Blitz, and by my maternal grandmother, Mary West, a teacher who ran her own school and kindergarten.  			Neither of my grandmothers could ever be persuaded to talk about the war, or if they did then it was simply to fend off our questions with a smile and a wave of the hand. Talking with them as children we got the impression that the war had been brief, uncomfortable and not worth wasting breath on—like a camping holiday that had been marred by rain. One would not guess that Margaret, an artist, had driven an ambulance through bombs. One would never suspect that Mary's first fiancé had been killed at her side in a cinema in an air raid on East London, which nearly killed her too and of which she always bore the scars.  			When the real-life Mary became engaged again, to my grandfather David in the blackout of 1941, her engagement ring had nine diamonds—one for every time they had met. Days later David boarded a troopship for Malta and they didn't meet again for more than three years. Theirs was a generation whose choices were made quickly, through bravery and instinct, and whose hopes always hung by a thread. They had to have enormous faith in life and in each other. They wrote letters in ink, and these missives might take weeks or months to get through if they made it at all. Because a letter meant so much they poured themselves into each one—as if there might be no more paper, no more ink, no more animating hand.  			We still have every letter that David sent to Mary. Of her replies to him we have none at all—the whole treasured bundle of them traveled from Malta on a different ship from David's, and halfway home they were sunk by a U-boat.  			When I was beginning the project I might have said that by writing a small and personal story about the Second World War, I hoped to highlight the insincerity of the wars we fight now—to which the commitment of most of us is impersonal, and which finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy. I wanted the reader to come away wondering whether forgiveness is possible at a national level or whether it is only achievable between courageous individuals.  			 As I wrote, though, I realized I was digging an even smaller hole than that. Now I hope that readers will see the book simply as the honest expression of wonder of a little man descended from titans, gazing up at the heights from which he has fallen.  			—Chris Cleave, September 2015      			The first picture is of my grandfather David Hill (standing on the right) with the SAS in Algeria, 1944. The second, also from 1944, is of my grandparents David and Mary. The photo was taken by a Polish RAF officer who was sharing their honeymoon hotel.      		 			ALSO BY CHRIS CLEAVE  			Gold  			Incendiary  			Little Bee      			Simon & Schuster  			1230 Avenue of the Americas  			New York, NY 10020  			This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,  real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters,  places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any  resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead,  is entirely coincidental.  			Copyright © 2016 by Chris Cleave  			All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions  thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster  Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020  			First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2016  			SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of  Simon & Schuster, Inc.  			For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949  or business@simonandschuster.com  			The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.  For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers  Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.  			Manufactured in the United States of America  			10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1  			Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  			ISBN 978-1-5011-2437-2  			ISBN 978-1-5011-2440-2 (ebook)      For my grandparents—Mary & David, NJ & M      PART ONE   			PRESERVATION      WAR WAS DECLARED AT eleven-fifteen and Mary North signed up at noon. She did it at lunch, before telegrams came, in case her mother said no. She left finishing school unfinished. Skiing down from Mont-Choisi, she ditched her equipment at the foot of the slope and telegraphed the War Office from Lausanne. Nineteen hours later she reached St. Pancras, in clouds of steam, still wearing her alpine sweater. The train's whistle screamed. London, then. It was a city in love with beginnings.   			She went straight to the War Office. The ink still smelled of salt on the map they issued her. She rushed across town to her assignment, desperate not to miss a minute of the war but anxious she already had. As she ran through Trafalgar Square waving for a taxi, the pigeons flew up before her and their clacking wings were a thousand knives tapped against claret glasses, praying silence. Any moment now it would start—this dreaded and wonderful thing—and could never be won without her.  			What was war, after all, but morale in helmets and jeeps? And what was morale if not one hundred million little conversations, the sum of which might leave men brave enough to advance? The true heart of war was small talk, in which Mary was wonderfully expert. The morning matched her mood, without cloud or equivalence in memory. In London under lucent skies ten thousand young women were hurrying to their new positions, on orders from Whitehall, from chambers unknowable in the old marble heart of the beast. Mary joined gladly the great flow of the willing.  			The War Office had given no further details, and this was a good sign. They would make her a liaison, or an attaché to a general's staff. All the speaking parts went to girls of good family. It was even rumored that they needed spies, which appealed most of all since one might be oneself twice over.  			Mary flagged down a cab and showed her map to the driver. He held it at arm's length, squinting at the scrawled red cross that marked where she was to report. She found him unbearably slow.  			"This big building, in Hawley Street?"  			"Yes," said Mary. "As quick as you like."  			"It's Hawley Street School, isn't it?"  			"I shouldn't think so. I'm to report for war work, you see."  			"Oh. Only I don't know what else it could be around there but the school. The rest of that street is just houses."  			Mary opened her mouth to argue, then stopped and tugged at her gloves. Because of course they didn't have a glittering tower, just off Horse Guards, labeled MINISTRY OF WILD INTRIGUE. Naturally they would have her report somewhere innocuous.  			"Right then," she said. "I expect I am to be made a schoolmistress."  			The man nodded. "Makes sense, doesn't it? Half the schoolmasters in London must be joining up for the war."  			"Then let's hope the cane proves effective against the enemy's tanks."  			The man drove them to Hawley Street with no more haste than the delivery of one more schoolmistress would merit. Mary was careful to adopt the expression an ordinary young woman might wear—a girl for whom the taxi ride would be an unaccustomed extravagance, and for whom the prospect of work as a schoolteacher would seem a thrill. She made her face suggest the kind of sincere immersion in the present moment that she imagined dairy animals must also enjoy, or geese.  			Arriving at the school, she felt observed. In character, she tipped the taxi driver a quarter of what she normally would have given him. This was her first test, after all. She put on the apologetic walk of an ordinary girl presenting for interview. As if the air resented being parted. As if the ground shrieked from the wound of each step.  			She found the headmistress's office and introduced herself. Miss Vine nodded but wouldn't look up from her desk. Avian and cardiganed, spectacles on a bath-plug chain.  			"North," said Mary again, investing the name with its significance.  			"Yes, I heard you quite well. You are to take Kestrel Class. Begin with the register. Learn their names as smartly as you can."  			"Very good," said Mary.  			"Have you taught before?"  			"No," said Mary, "but I can't imagine there's much to it."  			The headmistress fixed her with two wintry pools. "Your imagination is not on the syllabus."  			"Forgive me. No, I have never taught before."  			"Very well. Be firm, give no liberties, and do not underestimate the importance of the child forming his letters properly. As the hand, the mind."  			Mary felt that the "headmistress" was overdoing it, rather. She might mention it to the woman's superior, once she discovered what outfit she was really joining. Although in mitigation, the woman's attention to detail was impressive. Here were pots of sharpened pencils, tins of drawing pins. Here was a tidy stack of hymnbooks, each covered in a different wallpaper, just as children really would have done the job if one had tasked them with it in the first week of the new school year.  			The headmistress glanced up. "I can't imagine what you are smirking at."  			"Sorry," said Mary, unable to keep the glint of communication from her eyes, and slightly flustered when it wasn't returned.  			"Kestrels," said the headmistress. "Along the corridor, third on the left."  			When Mary entered the classroom thirty-one children fell silent at their hinge-top desks. They watched her, owl-eyed, heads pivoting from the neck. They might be eight or ten years old, she supposed—although children suffered dreadfully from invisibility and required a conscious adjustment of the eye in order to be focused on at all.  			"Good morning, class. My name is Mary North."  			"Good morning Miss North."  			The children chanted it in the ageless tone exactly between deference and mockery, so perfectly that Mary's stomach lurched. It was all just too realistic.  			She taught them mathematics before lunch and composition after, hoping that a curtain would finally be whisked away; that her audition would give way to her recruitment. When the bell rang for the end of the day she ran to the nearest post office and dashed off an indignant telegram to the War Office, wondering if there had been some mistake.  			There was no mistake, of course. For every reproach that would be laid at London's door in the great disjunction to come—for all the convoys missing their escorts in fog, for all the breeches shipped with mismatched barrels, for all the lovers supplied with hearts of the wrong calibre—it was never once alleged that the grand old capital did not excel at letting one know, precisely, where one's fight was to begin.      September, 1939   			MARY ALMOST WEPT WHEN she learned that her first duty as a schoolmistress would be to evacuate her class to the countryside. And when she discovered that London had evacuated its zoo animals days before its children, she was furious. If one must be exiled, then at least the capital ought to value its children more highly than macaws and musk oxen.  			She checked her lipstick in a pocket mirror, then raised her hand.  			"Yes, Miss North?"  			"Isn't it a shame to evacuate the animals first?"  			She said it in full hearing of all the children, who were lined up at their muster point outside the empty London Zoo, waiting to be evacuated. They gave a timid cheer. The headmistress eyed Mary coolly, which made her doubt herself. But surely it was wrong to throw the beasts the first lifeline? Wasn't that the weary old man's choice Noah had made: filling the ark with dumb livestock instead of lively children who might answer back? This was how the best roots of humanity had drowned. This was why men were the violent inbreds of Ham and Shem and Japheth, capable of declaring for war a season that Mary had earmarked for worsted.  			The headmistress only sighed. So: the delay was simply because one did not need to write a marmoset's name on a luggage tag, accompany it in a second-class train compartment and billet it with a suitable host family in the Cotswolds. The lower primates only wanted a truck for the trip and a good feed at the other end, while the higher hominidae, with names like Henry and Sarah, had a multiplicity of needs that a diligent bureaucracy had not only to anticipate but also to meet, and furthermore to document, on forms that must first come back from the printer.  			"I see," said Mary. "Thank you."  			Of course it was that. She hated being eighteen. The insights and indignations burned through one's good sense like hot coals through oven gloves. So, this was why London still teemed with children while London Zoo stood vacant, with three hundred halfpenny portions of monkey nuts in their little twists of newspaper waiting unsold and forlorn in the kiosk.  			She raised her hand again, then let it drop.  			"Yes?" said Miss Vine. "Was there something else?"  			"Sorry," said Mary. "It was nothing."  			"Oh good."  			The headmistress took her eye off the ranks of the children for a moment. She fixed Mary with a look that was not without charity. "Remember you're on our side now. You know: the grown-ups."  			Mary could almost feel her bones cracking with resentment. "Thank you, Miss Vine."  			This was when the school's only colored child, sensing an opening, slipped away from the muster and scaled the padlocked main gate of the zoo. The headmistress spun around. "Zachary Lee! Come back here immediately!"  			"Or what? You'll send me to the countryside?"  			The whole school gasped. Ten years old, invincible, the Negro boy saluted. He scissored his skinny brown legs over the top of the gate, using the penultimate and the ultimate wrought-iron O's of LONDON ZOO as the hoops of a pommel horse, and was immediately lost to sight.  			Miss Vine turned to Mary. "You had better bring the nigger back, don't you think?"  			—  			It was her first rescue work of the war. Coppery, coltish Mary North searched the abandoned zoo using paths that were still well tended. On her own, she felt better. She sneaked a cigarette. She massaged her brow with the other hand, confident that frustration could be persuaded not to settle there. All downers could be dispatched, as one might flick ash off one's sleeve, or pilot a wayward bee back out through an open window.  			She had already checked the giraffes' paddock and the big cats' dens. Now, hearing a cough, she tiptoed into the great apes' enclosure through a gate that swung unlatched. She kicked through the straw, raising a scent of urine and musk that made her heart rattle with fright. But she hoped it was not easily done, for a zookeeper to miss a whole gorilla when he was counting them into the evacuation truck.  			"Come on out, Zachary Lee, I know you're in here."  			It was eerie to be in the gorilla house, looking out through the smeared glass. "Oh do come on, Zachary darling. You'll get us both in trouble."  			A second cough, and a rustle under the straw. Then, with his soft American accent, "I'm not coming out."  			"Fine then," said Mary. "The two of us shall rot here until the war is over, and nobody will ever know what talent we might have shown in its prosecution."  			She sat down beside the boy, first laying her red jacket on the straw to sit on, with the rosy silk lining downward. It was hard to stay glum. One could say what one liked about the war but it had got her out of Mont-Choisi ahead of an afternoon of double French, and might yet have more mercies in store. She lit another cigarette and blew the smoke into a shaft of sunlight.  			"May I have one?" said the small voice.  			"Beautifully asked," said Mary. "And no. Not until you are eleven."  			From the muster point came the sound of a tin whistle. It could mean that heavy bombers were converging on London, or it could mean that the children had been organized into two roughly matched teams to begin a game of rounders.  			Zachary poked his head up through the straw. It still amazed Mary to see his brown skin, his chestnut eyes. The first time he had smiled, the flash of his pink tongue had delighted her. She had imagined it would be—well, not brown also, but certainly as antithetical to pink as brown skin was to white. A bluish tongue, perhaps, like a skink's. It would not have surprised her to learn that his blood came out black and his feces a pale ivory. He was the first Negro she had seen up close—if one didn't count the posters advertising minstrelsy and coon shows—and she still struggled not to gawk.  			The straw clung to his hair. "Miss?' he said. "Why did they take the animals away?"  			"Different reasons in each case," said Mary, counting them off on her fingers. "The hippopotami because they are such frightful cowards, the wolves since one can never be entirely sure whose side they are on, and the lions because they are to be parachuted directly into Berlin Zoo to take on Herr Hitler's big cats."  			"So the animals are at war too?"  			"Well of course they are. Wouldn't it be absurd if it were just us?"  			The boy's expression, suggesting that he had not previously taken the matter under consideration.  			"What are two sevens?" asked Mary, taking advantage.  			The boy began his reckoning, in the deliberate and dutiful manner of a child who intended to persevere at least until he ran out of fingers. Not for the first time that week, Mary suppressed both a smile and a delightful suspicion that teaching might not be the worst way to spend the idle hours between breakfast and society.  			On Tuesday morning, after taking the register and before distributing milk in little glass bottles, Mary had written the names of her thirty-one children on brown luggage labels and looped them through the top buttonholes of their overcoats. Of course the children had exchanged labels with one another the second her back was turned. They were only human, even if they hadn't yet made the effort to become tall.  			And of course she had insisted on calling them by their exchanged names—even for boys named Elaine and girls named Peter—while maintaining an entirely straight face. It delighted her that she could make them laugh so easily. It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.  			"Is it twelve?" said Zachary.  			"Is what twelve?"  			"Two sevens," he reminded her, in the exasperated tone reserved for adults who asked questions with no thought to the expenditure of emotion that went into answering.  			Mary nodded her apology. "Twelve is jolly close."  			The tin whistle, sounding again. Above the enclosures, seagulls wheeled in hope. The memory of feeding time persisted. Mary felt an ache. All the world's timetables fluttered through blue sky now, vagrant on the winds.  			"Thirteen?"  			Mary smiled. "Would you like me to show you? You're a bright boy but you're ten years old and you are miles behind with your numbers. I don't believe anyone can have taken the trouble to teach you."  			She knelt in the straw, took his hands—it still amazed her that they were no hotter than white hands—and showed him how to count forward seven more, starting from seven. "Do you see now? Seven, plus seven more, is fourteen. It is simply about not stopping."  			"Oh."  			The surprised and disappointed air boys had when magic yielded so bloodlessly to reason.  			"So what would be three sevens, Zachary, now you have two of them already?"  			He examined his outstretched fingers, then looked up at her.  			"How long?" he said.  			"How long what?"  			"How long are they sending us away for?"  			"Until London is safe again. It shouldn't be too long."  			"I'm scared to go to the country. I wish my father could come."  			"None of the parents can come with us. Their work is vital for the war."  			"Do you believe that?"  			Mary shook her head briskly. "Of course not. Most people's work is nonsense at the best of times, don't you think? Actuaries and loss adjusters and professors of Eggy-peggy. Most of them would be more useful reciting limericks and stuffing their socks with glitter."  			"My father plays in the minstrel show at the Lyceum. Is that useful?"  			"For morale, certainly. If minstrels weren't needed I daresay they'd have been evacuated days ago. On a gospel train, don't you think?"  			The boy refused to smile. "They won't want me in the countryside."  			"Why on earth wouldn't they?"  			The pained expression children had, when one was irredeemably obtuse.  			"Oh, I see. Well, I daresay they will just be awfully curious. I suppose you can expect to be poked and prodded a little, but once they understand that it won't wash off I'm sure they won't hold it against you. People are jolly fair, you know."  			The boy seemed lost in thought.  			"Anyway," said Mary, "I'm coming to wherever-it-is we're going. I promise I shan't leave you."  			"They'll hate me.'  			"Nonsense. Was it minstrels who invaded Poland? Was it a troupe of theater Negroes who occupied the Sudetenland?"  			He gave her a patient look.  			"See?" said Mary. "The countryside will prefer you to the Germans."  			"I still don't want to go."  			"Oh, but that's the fun of it, don't you see? It's a simply enormous game of go-where-you're-jolly-well-told. Everyone who's anyone is playing."  			She was surprised to realize that she didn't mind it at all, being sent away. It really was a giant roulette—this was how one ought to see it. The children would get a taste of country air, and she . . . well, what was the countryside if not numberless Heathcliffs, loosely tethered?  			Let us imagine, she thought, that this war will surprise us all. Let us suppose that the evacuation train will take us somewhere wild, far from these decorous streets where every third person has an anecdote about my mother, or votes in my father's constituency.  			She imagined herself in the country, in a pretty village of vivid young people thrown into a new pattern by the war. It would be like the turning of a kaleidoscope, only with gramophones and dancing. Just to show her friend Hilda, she would fall in love with the first man who was even slightly interesting.  			She squeezed the colored boy's hand, delighted by his smile as her bright mood made the junction. "Come on," she said, "shall we get back to the others before they have all the fun?"  			They stood up from the straw and she brushed the child down. He was a bony, startle-eyed thing—giving the impression of being thoroughly X-rayed—with an insubordinate crackle of black hair. She shook her head, laughing.  			"What?"  			"Zachary Lee, I honestly don't know why we bother evacuating you. You look as if you've been bombed already."  			He scowled. "Well, you smoke like this."  			He gave his impression of Mary smoking like Bette Davis, as if the burning Craven "A" generated a terrific amount of lift. The cigarette, straining to rise, straightened the wrist nicely and lifted the first and second fingers into the gesture of a bored saint offering benediction.  			"Yes, that's it!" said Mary. "But do show me how you would do it."  			Slick as a magician palming a penny, Zachary flipped the imaginary cigarette around so that the cherry smoldered under the cup of his hand. He cut wary eyes left and right, drew deeply and then, averting his face, opened a small gap in the corner of his mouth to jet smoke down at the straw. The exhalation was almost invisibly quick, a sparrow shitting from a branch.  			"Good lord," said Mary, "you smoke as if the world might tell you not to."  			"I smoke like a man," said the child, affecting weariness.  			"Well then. Unless one counts the three Rs, I don't suppose I have anything to teach you."  			She took his arm and they walked together—he wondering whether the lions would be dropped on Berlin by day or by night and she replying that she supposed by night, since the creatures were mostly nocturnal, although in wartime, who knew?  			They rotated through the exit turnstile. Mary made the boy to go first, since it would be too funny if he were to abscond again, with her already through to the wrong side of the one-way ratchet. If their roles had been reversed, then she would certainly have found the possibility too cheerful to resist.  			On the grass they found the school drawn up into ranks, three by three. She kept Zachary's arm companionably until the headmistress shot her a look. Mary adjusted her grip to be more suggestive of restraint.  			"I shall deal with you later, Zachary," said Miss Vine. "As soon as I am issued with a building in which to detain you, expect to get detention."  			Zachary smiled infuriatingly. Mary hurried him along the ranks until they came to her own class. There she took plain, sensible Fay George from her row and had her form a new row with the recaptured escapee, instructing her to hold his hand good and firmly. This Fay did, first taking her gloves from the pocket of her duffel coat and putting them on. Zachary accepted this without comment, looking directly ahead.  			The headmistress came to where Mary stood, twitched her nose at the smell of cigarette smoke, and glanced pointedly heavenward. As if there might be a roaring squadron of bombers up there that Mary had somehow missed. Miss Vine took Zachary by the shoulders. She shook him, absentmindedly and not without affection. It was as if to ask: Oh, and what are we to do with you?  			She said, "You young ones have no idea of the difficulties."  			Mary supposed that she was the one being admonished, although it could equally have been the child, or—since her headmistress was still looking skyward—it might have been the youthful pilots of the Luftwaffe, or the insouciant cherubim.  			Mary bit her cheek to keep from smiling. She liked Miss Vine—the woman was not made entirely of vipers and crinoline. And yet she was so boringly wary, as if life couldn't be trusted. "I am sorry, Miss Vine."  			"Miss North, have you spent much time in the country?"  			"Oh yes. We have weekends in my father's constituency."  			It was exactly the sort of thing she tried not to say.  			Miss Vine let go of Zachary's shoulders. "May I borrow you for a moment, Miss North?"  			"Please," said Mary.  			They took themselves off a little way.  			"What inspired you to volunteer as a schoolmistress, Mary?"  			Pride would not let her reply that she had not volunteered for anything in particular—that she had simply volunteered, assuming the issue would be decided favourably, as it always had been until now, by influences unseen.  			"I thought I might be good at teaching," she said.  			"I'm sorry. It is just that young women of your background usually wouldn't consider the profession."  			"Oh, I shouldn't necessarily see it like that. Surely if one had to pick a fault with women of my background, it might be that they don't consider work very much at all."  			"And, dear, why did you?"  			"I hoped it might be less exhausting than the constant rest."  			"But is there no war work that seems to you more glamorous?"  			"You do not have much faith in me, Miss Vine."  			"But you are impossible, don't you see? My other teachers are dazzled by you, or disheartened. And you are overconfident. You befriend the children, when it is not a friend that they need."  			"I suppose I just like children."  			The headmistress gave her a look of undisguised pity. "You cannot be a friend to thirty-one children, all with needs greater than you imagine."  			"I think I understand what is needed."  			"You have been doing the job for four days, and you think you understand. The error is a common one, and harder to correct in young women who have no urgent use for the two pounds and seventeen shillings per week."  			Mary bristled, and with an effort said nothing.  			"All the trouble this week has come from your class, Mary. The tantrums, the mishaps, the abscondments. The children feel they can take liberties with you."  			"But I feel for them, Miss Vine. Saying goodbye to their parents for who knows how long? The state they are in, I thought perhaps a little license—"  			"Could kill them. I have no idea what these next few weeks or months will bring, but I am certain that if there is violence then we shall need to have every child accounted for at all times, ready to be taken to shelter at a moment's notice. They mustn't be who-knows-where."  			"I am sorry. I will improve."  			"I fear I cannot risk giving you the time."  			"Excuse me?"  			"At noon, Mary, we are to proceed on foot to Marylebone, to board a train at one. They have not given me the destination, although I imagine it must be Oxfordshire or the Midlands."  			"Well, then . . ."  			"Well, I am afraid I shan't be taking you along."  			"But Miss Vine!"  			The headmistress put a hand on her arm. "I like you, Mary. Enough to tell you that you will never be any good as a teacher. Find something more suited to your many gifts."  			"But my class . . ."  			"I will take them myself. Oh, don't look so sick. I have done a little teaching in my time."  			But their names, thought Mary. I have learned every one of their names.  			She stood for a moment, concentrating—as her mother had taught her—on keeping her face unmoved. " 'Very well."'  			"You are a credit to your family."  			"Not at all," said Mary, since that was what one said.  			Noon came too quickly. She retrieved her suitcase from the trolley where the rest of the staff had theirs, and watched the school evacuate in rows of three down the Outer Circle Road. Kestrels went last: her thirty-one children with their names inscribed on brown baggage tags. Enid Platt, Edna Glover and Margaret Eccleston made up the front row, always together, always whispering. For four days now their gossip had seemed so thrilling that Mary had never known whether to shush them or beg to be included.  			Margaret Lambie, Audrey Shepherd and Nellie Gould made up the next row: Audrey with her gas-mask box decorated with poster paint, Nellie with her doll who was called Pinkie, and Margaret who spoke a little French.  			Mary was left behind. The green sward of grass beside the abandoned zoo became quiet and still. George Woodall, Jack Taylor and Graham Brown marched with high-swinging arms in the infantry style. John Cumberland, Harry Rogers and Carl Richardson mocked them with chimpanzee grunts from the row behind. Henriette Wisby, Elaine Newland and Beryl Waldorf, the beauties of the class, sashayed with their arms linked, frowning at the rowdy boys. Then Eileen Robbins, Norma Reeve and Rose Montiel, pale with apprehension.  			Next went Patricia Fawcett, Margaret Taylor and June Knight, whose mothers knew one another socially and whose own eventual daughters and granddaughters seemed sure to prolong the acquaintance for so long as the wars of men permitted society to convene over sponge cake and tea. Then Patrick Joseph, Gordon Abbott and James Wright, giggling and with backward glances at Peter Carter, Peter Hall and John Clark, who were up to some mischief that Mary felt sure would involve either a fainting episode, or ink.  			Finally came kind Rita Glenister supporting tiny, tearful James Roffey, and then, in the last row of all, Fay George and Zachary. The colored boy dismissed Mary by taking one last puff of his imaginary cigarette and flicking away the butt. He turned his back and walked away with all the others, singing, toward a place that did not yet have a name. Mary watched him go. It was the first time she had broken a promise.  			—  			At dinner, at her parents' house in Pimlico, Mary sat across from her friend Hilda while her mother served slices of cold meatloaf from a salver that she had fetched from the kitchen herself. With Mary's father off at the House and no callers expected, her mother had given everyone but Cook the night off.  			"So when are you to be evacuated?" said her mother. "I thought you'd be gone by now."  			"Oh," said Mary, "I'm to follow presently. They wanted one good teacher to help with any stragglers."  			"Extraordinary. We didn't think you'd be good, did we, Hilda?"  			Hilda looked up. She had been cutting her slice of meatloaf into thirds, sidelining one third according to the slimming plan she was following. Two Thirds Curves had been recommended in that month's Silver Screen. It was how Ann Sheridan had found her figure for Angels with Dirty Faces.  			"I'm sorry, Mrs. North?"  			"We didn't suppose Mary would be any use at teaching, did we, dear?"  			Hilda favored Mary with an innocent look. "And she was so stoical about the assignment."  			Hilda knew perfectly well that she had neither volunteered accepted the role particularly graciously nor survived in it for a week. Mary managed a smile that she judged to have the right inflection of modesty. "Teaching helps the war effort by freeing up able men to serve."  			"I had you down for freeing up some admiral."  			"Hilda! Any more talk like that and your severed head on the gate will serve as a warning to others.'  			"I'm sorry, Mrs. North. But a pretty thing like Mary is hardly cut out for something so plain as teaching, is she?"  			Hilda knew perfectly well that Mary was already suspected by her mother of dalliances. This was typical her: baiting the most exquisite trap and then springing it, while all the while seeming to have most of her mind on her meatloaf.  			"I'm just jolly impressed that she's sticking with it," said Hilda. "I can't even stick to a diet."  			With unbearable ponderousness, she was using her knife and fork to reduce the length of each of the runner beans on her plate by one third. With perfect diligence she lined up each short length beside the surplus meatloaf.  			Mary rose to it. "Why on earth are you cutting them all like that?"  			Hilda's round face was guileless. "Are my thirds not right?"  			"Just put aside one bean in three, for heaven's sake. It's dieting, not dissection."  			Hilda slumped. "I'm not as bright as you."  			Mary threw her a furious look. Hilda's dark eyes glittered.  			"We have different gifts," said Mary's mother. "You are faithful and kind."  			"But I think Mary is so brave to be a teacher, don't you? While the rest of us only careen from parlor to salon."  			Mary's mother patted her hand. "We also serve who live with grace."  			"But to do something for the war," said Hilda. "To really do something."  			"I suppose I am proud of my daughter. And only this summer we were worried she might be a socialist."  			And finally all three of them laughed. Because really.  			—  			After dinner, on the roof terrace that topped the six stories of creamy stucco, with the two of them in white dresses flaming red as the sun set over Pimlico, Hilda was weak with laughter while Mary seethed.  			"You perfect wasp's udder," said Mary, lighting a cigarette. "Now I shall have to pretend forever that I haven't been sacked. Was all that about Geoffrey St John?"  			"Why would you imagine it was about Geoffrey St John?"  			"Well, I admit I might have slightly . . ."  			"Go on. Have slightly what?"  			"Have slightly kissed him."  			"At the . . . ?"  			"At the Queen Charlotte's Ball."  			"Where he was there as . . ."  			"As your escort for the night. Fine."  			"Interesting.'  			"Isn't it?" said Mary. "Because apparently you are still jolly furious."  			"So it would seem."  			Mary leaned her elbows on the balcony rail and gave London a weary look. "It's because you're not relaxed about these things."  			"I'm very traditional," said Hilda. "Still, look on the bright side. Now you have a full-time teaching job."  			"You played Mother like a cheap pianola."  			"And now you will have to get your job back, or at least pretend. Either way you'll be out of my hair for the Michaelmas Ball."  			"The ball, you genius, is to be held after school hours."  			"But you will have to be in the countryside, won't you? Even your mother will realize that there's nobody here to teach."  			Mary considered it. "I will get you back for this."  			"Eventually I shall forgive you, of course. I might even let you come to my wedding to Geoffrey St John. You can be a bridesmaid."  			They leaned shoulders sociably and watched the darkening city.  			"What was it like?" said Hilda finally.  			Mary sighed. "The worst thing is that I loved it."  			"But I did see him first, you know," said Hilda.  			"Oh, I don't mean kissing Geoffrey. I mean I loved the teaching."  			"What are you cooking up now?"  			"No, really! I had thirty-one children, bright as the devil's cuff links. Now they're gone it feels rather dull."  			The blacked-out city lay inverted. Until now it had answered the evening stars with a million points of light, drowning them in extroversion.  			"Why not the kiss?" said Hilda after a while. "What was wrong with Geoffrey's kiss anyway?"      October, 1939   			WHEN WAR WAS DECLARED, Tom Shaw decided to give it a miss. It wouldn't last in any case—the belligerents on both sides would pull back from the brink, as children did when encircled in the playground by a mob calling for a fight.  			It took skill, at twenty-three, to be sad. The trouble was, he noticed things that made one melancholy. He noticed the way the West End players didn't bother to remove their stage paint if the matinée was close to the evening show—so that when one went out in Soho one might see Rosencrantz drinking a half-pint, in a corner, in the indifferent afternoon light. He noticed the neat cropped circle achieved in grass whenever a horse was tethered on common land by a fixed length of chain—the circle being of invariant geometrical perfection notwithstanding the temperament of the beast: whether skittish or placid, obstinate or obliging.  			His colleagues at the Education Authority had all left to join the Army, and his supervisor had ascended to the Ministry to help coordinate the evacuation. Tom seemed to be the only man in London who did not think the war an unmissable parade lap, and so he'd been given a school district to run instead. A man might celebrate the promotion if he didn't have the gift for noticing that the schools were empty.  			He took a walk at dawn. High up on Parliament Hill the blackberries were in season, bursting with the bright sweetness they gave only in the best years. In any other October, children would have got to these bushes first. Tom took off his hat and filled it.  			He looked down on his new district as it awoke: the scholastic subdivision of Kentish Town and Chalk Farm. Marking his fiefdom's northerly limit was the railway, steam rising even now as the day's first batch of evacuees went west. The Regent's Canal was his southern border, busy with barges lugging goods from the docks. Within these bounds no child would learn its letters, no teacher would receive her wages in a manila envelope with its tie closure sealed in red wax, no chalk would be brought forth from its Cretaceous slumber to be milled into rods and applied to blackboards, unless he himself ordained it. Glancing left and right to make sure he was alone, he raised an imperious arm.  			"Learn, little people! I command it!"  			His mouth was full of blackberries, the effect rather undermined. He let his arm drop and wondered what he ought to do with the day. The only school-age children who remained were the frankly unappealing: the crippled and the congenitally strange, those the country folk wouldn't accommodate. The Negro children, too, of course—only a few had been evacuated, and those were already staring to trickle back. The evacuation was a beauty contest in which the little ones were lined up in church halls and the yokels allowed to pick the blonds.  			Tom was left with twenty mothballed schools and a light scattering of the children who were either too complicated to educate, or too simple. To cheer himself up he practised the trick of flipping a blackberry from his hand to strike his elbow and bounce into his mouth. He was no good at it at all—he didn't get it once in six attempts—but he was sure he would improve with time. It was the great folly of war that it measured nations against each other without reckoning talents like these.  			He lifted his eyes. Beyond his zone, London sprawled away to the rank marshes in the east and the white marble walls in the west. Along the line of the Thames they were testing a flock of miniature zeppelins. Tethered on cables, these were supposed to offer a variety of protection, albeit of a vague and unspecified stripe. The balloons' snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.  			Tom took his hatful of blackberries with him down the hill, back into the furious city with its mushrooming recruitment posts. Strangers met his eye, anxious to nod the new solidarity. YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION, read the billboards that used to hawk soap.  			It was still only eight—too early for the office—so he went back to his garret. Home was a sitting room with two bedrooms attached, in the converted attic of a town house off the Prince of Wales Road. The attic had been converted—as his flatmate Alistair Heath put it—in the same way the Christians had converted the Moors. It seemed to have been done at the point of a sword, leaving the continual threat of reversion. Winter brought leaks and bitter drafts, summer a canicular heat from which slight relief could be obtained by running one's head under the tap of the little corner kitchen.  			Tom found Alistair sitting on the bare floorboards in his pajama bottoms, smoking his pipe and stuffing shredded newspaper into the pelt of a ginger cat. The head and shoulders were done, the empty eye sockets bulging with newsprint.  			"My god," said Tom, "is that Julius Caesar?"  			Alistair did not look up from his work. "Grim times, old man. The taxidermist sent him back unfinished. Tea's in the pot, if you're interested."  			"Why didn't they finish him?"  			"Perhaps he was incurable."  			"Insatiable, more like. Remember how he used to strut back in here after a big night out?"  			Alistair grinned around his pipe stem. "I miss the randy old bugger. Came in the first post—landlady brought him up just now. Tanned and neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper. Not his usual entrance."  			"Feeling a little flat."  			"I'm stuffing him with editorials. He'll be full of himself."  			Tom offered his hatful of blackberries. "Going to make jam. Try one?"  			Alistair did. "Good god, forget jam. You could make claret."  			Tom tipped the blackberries into a pan, stooped to retrieve the ones that had missed, and ran in a cupful of water. "Was there a note with Caesar?"  			"An apology. Shop closing down, regrets etcetera, we herewith return all materials. I can't imagine there'll be much call for taxidermy until the war is over."  			"They should just call it off," said Tom.  			He set the pan to simmer, and turned to watch Alistair sewing up the cat's belly. He was handy at it, putting in a row of small, neat stitches that would disappear when the fur was brushed over them. Tom had always admired Alistair's hands, strong and unfairly capable. Alistair could mend their gramophone, play piano—do all of the things that made Tom feel like a Chubb key in a Yale lock—and he did them without seeming to worry, as if the hands contained their own grace. Alistair rather overshadowed him, though Tom supposed his friend didn't notice. Blond and robust, Alistair had the stoic's gift for shrugging off war and broken plumbing with the same easy smile, as if these things were to be expected. He was good-looking not by being ostentatiously handsome but rather by accepting the gaze affably, meeting the eye. It was Tom's experience of Alistair that women sometimes had to look twice, but something drew the second look.  			Alistair tapped out his pipe. "I shan't be home tonight. I'm taking Lizzie Siddal to the countryside."  			"Oh? Which painting?"  			"The 'kiss me, I can't swim' one."  			"Ophelia?" Tom mimed the gaze and the pious hands.  			"We've built a box for her, and we're driving her to Wales in an unmarked truck."  			"I didn't know there was such a thing as a marked truck, in this situation. Is there actually a fleet of government lorries labeled PRICELESS ART TREASURE?"  			"Do leave it out," said Alistair. "You take all the romance out of mundane logistical operations."  			"Anyway, if it's so secret, should you even be telling me?"  			"Why? You won't tell Hitler, will you?"  			"Not unless they give me back my secret radio transmitter."  			"It is all rather evil and sad," said Alistair. "I spent five months restoring the frame on Ophelia—just the frame—and now we're boxing her up and burying her in some old mine shaft for who knows how long."  			Tom poured the whole of their tea sugar from its Kilner jar into the pan, brown lumps included.  			"I wouldn't mind," said Alistair, "only I hate to think of it down there in the dark. It makes one think: what if we lose the war?"  			Tom stirred the sugar into the fruit. "There won't be a real war."  			"What if all of us are swept away and no one remembers Ophelia, and she remains there for all eternity, in the dark, under a mountain?'  			'They'll always have Caesar. They can reconstruct our aesthetics from that. Even if you have overstuffed him."  			Alistair eyed the cat critically. "Have I? No. The old man always had to be careful about his weight. This is him in one of his especially sleek periods."  			"It's not an entirely terrible fist you're making of it. You really might consider being a conservator or something of that ilk."  			"You should see the Tate now," said Alistair. "The light is boarded out, the great gallery echoes, and the paintings are all dispersed."  			"Well, sign it and call it Modern. Anyway, damn you. I have a dinner date with an actual woman this evening. Marriage is a certainty and you should prepare a best man's speech forthwith."  			Alistair lifted the half-stuffed cat to his ear and listened to what it whispered. "Caesar decrees that you tell all, without leaving anything out."  			"Well, she's called Mary North and—"  			"God in heaven, Tom Shaw, are you actually blushing?"  			"It's this jam. It's the heat of the pan."  			Alistair stuffed paper into the cat's hindquarters. "Caesar assumes she is beautiful, brighter than you, and unable to cook?"  			"Caesar knows my type."  			"Then you'll pardon me if I don't wear down my quill with a wedding speech right at this minute. This one will end where all of your romances do, Tommy: with you gazing wistfully at the receding figure of a nice girl who has grown fond of you but has reluctantly concluded that you are neither wealthy nor gifted at dancing."  			Tom turned up the heat under the pan. "It's different this time. I have already talked with Mary quite a bit. We have things in common."  			"Such as?"  			"Such as our attitude to children, for example."  			"The two of you have discussed it already? I don't believe I've even told you where babies come from."  			"Not having them, you fool. Educating them."  			"You haven't been talking shop at her?"  			"She came to talk to me, if you must know. I couldn't get a word in."  			"And what was the gist?"  			"That teaching has to change. That the teacher must be an ally of the pupil, and not just a disciplinarian."  			Alistair yawned. "Caesar proclaims that Mary gives him a headache."  			"Caesar pronounces before learning that Mary is jolly attractive."  			"Then why is she interested in you? I'm surprised you show up on her retina."  			"She came to the office, to ask me for a job. Apparently the War Office assigned her to teaching and we found her a post at Hawley Street School, but she got the boot for being incorrigible. She wants a new class to teach."  			"I didn't think you had any classes left."  			"That's what I told her, and yet she insisted. I said, 'I'm sorry, but we've already evacuated everything with two legs and one head,' and she said, 'Well I'm afraid that's just not good enough.' Hands on her hips, and deliciously pink. So naturally I asked her what she damned well expected me to do about it, and she said: 'I think you should damned well take me to dinner.' "  			Alistair stared at him.  			"What?" said Tom.  			"Where to start? As I perceive it, you have three immediate problems. The first is one of professional impropriety. The second, personal ugliness."  			Tom raised two fingers. "And the third?"  			"Is that your jam is looking punchy, old boy."  			"Damn it!"  			The pan was at a murderous boil, spitting hot lava in all directions. Tom advanced on it, using the pan lid as a shield, spoon extended to the limit of his reach to turn off the heat. The boil faded to an aggrieved hiss and then to an occasional vindictive pop as a captured pocket of air escaped.  			"Think you caught it in time?"  			Tom prodded it. "It will set, I can promise you that. It could be jam, or it could be brittle."  			"We all know a girl like that."  			Tom ignored him. "Meeting Mary is the first thing to make me feel that this war might not be completely awful."  			"Oh, Tommy, just because the grown-ups have left you alone in the nursery for a little while, it doesn't mean you can draw on the wallpaper."  			"Oh, come on. This isn't kids' stuff. I'm taking her to Spencer's tonight."  			He'd tried for a worldly tone, but it came out sounding shaky. Maybe Alistair had a point. And he thought, my god, she is only eighteen. And the worst thing was that he knew her age only because he had gone straight from his office to the personnel department and pulled her file from the records.  			"Sorry," said Alistair. "Don't mean to be discouraging. I suppose I'm just envious of your dinner."  			"No, that's quite all right. I mean, now that I come to think, I can't be sure what she meant by it. Maybe she does just want to talk about a job."  			Alistair raised an eyebrow and returned to his taxidermy.  			"What?" said Tom.  			"Nothing."  			"No, what?"  			Alistair snapped a length of cotton with his teeth and threaded his needle again. "Only you could fret about what 'dinner' meant."  			"Yes, but what does it mean, in this context? Is she implying that she sees me as more than a job opportunity? Or is she demonstrating that I am so evidently merely that, that she can safely invite herself to dinner with no possible danger of misconstrual"  			Alistair stared into space for a moment. "No, I'm afraid you've lost me. Could you do me a diagram, with different-colored pencils?"  			"Or even," said Tom, "could she be ambivalent about her feelings with regard to me, or unsure about my intentions with regard to her, and therefore, since she is very bright, could she have been making the suggestion in a deliberately obtuse fashion in order to observe the sense in which I construed it? You know, to see how I would react?"  			"And how did you react?"  			"I might have become slightly tongue-tied."  			"Oh, perfect. Fortunately she is unlikely to eat you for breakfast, since dinner will be the occasion."  			"Go to hell. But seriously. What do you think? You're an experienced man."  			"I'm an experienced man who is currently stitching a dead emperor's arsehole shut."  			"Yes, but even so."  			Alistair let his needle and cotton drop and looked up in exasperation. "There are two kinds of dinner and two kinds of women. There is only one combination out of four where both will be rotten."  			"But how awful if that was the case!"  			Alistair said nothing. He finished stitching, snapped the thread and set the cat up on its paws. The balance was off at first, and he splayed the limbs until the creature held steady. "There," he said. "Caesar bows to no man."  			He filled his pipe, lit it, and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at the cat. There was something awry in his own posture, in his stiff back, and it saddened Tom. Sometimes it was no longer altogether funny, this double act they played in which he was the boy to Alistair's man of the world. They had fallen into the roles in some primordial conversation in their friendship—something that must have raised a laugh at the time—and the joke had been good enough to bear a few cycles of elaboration and eventually to become a habit between them. And now here they were, two finches evolved to feed on a fruit that was probably becoming extinct.  			Tom lit a cigarette and tried to make himself enjoy it. He took the empty Kilner jar, chipped out the last brown encrustations of tea-soaked sugar, rinsed it, and set it to boil in a pan of water. While the jar sterilized he took a spoonful of the jam and blew to make it cooler.  			In the bright morning wash from the garret's single skylight, the jam glowed in the metal spoon. Its center, where it was deepest, was indigo. At its shallow edges the color thinned to a limpid carmine. He closed his eyes and tasted it. By luck he had arrested it on the verge of caramelization, between honeyed and bitter. The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that crackled in his mouth like bereaved punctuation.  			He stood with his eyes closed for a full minute before he took another spoonful. He was absolutely uncertain. Perhaps it was the most exquisite thing that had ever been cooked, or perhaps it was perfectly ordinary blackberry jam, on an averagely bright October morning, in an unexceptional attic in which two typical young bachelors were putting off the real duties of the day in pursuits at which they did not excel. Perhaps it was only average jam and perhaps Caesar, corpulent and lumpy and with his empty eye sockets spewing shreds of the newspaper, was only a poor stuffed cat.  			Tom poured the jam into the hot boiled jar, snapped the lid shut and ran the glass under the cold tap to let the vacuum make the seal. He dried the outside of the jar, licked a bookplate label to activate the gum, stuck it onto the flat roundel on the jar and wrote: London, 1939.  			"Well?" he said. "And so what if she does only want a job? Teaching is important work, and I think she might be good at it."  			"You've lost me again. Did you want to marry her, or hire her?"  			"I haven't the budget for either. I was just grateful for a civilized conversation. Honestly, she might be the only person in this city apart from you and me who understands that there are many ways to serve. That one isn't being unpatriotic by declining to rush off like a schoolboy to fire popguns at the Germans."  			"The Germans did rather start it."  			"Yes, but you know what I mean."  			Alistair tried to smile.  			"What is it?" said Tom.  			"I suppose all of us have to look at our job and ask how it now serves the cause. I suppose one is lucky if a simple answer presents itself."  			"But it's hardly us, is it?" said Tom. "Me with my district and you dashing all over these isles stashing our heirlooms into caves. The question would be more pointed if one were—I don't know—a speculator or a thief.'  			Alistair tweaked the cat's tail, pointing the end skyward the way Caesar had worn it in life. "I walk past a recruitment post every morning—on Regent Street. You overhear the damnedest conversations in the queue. I think the fear of going to war is less than the shame of admitting that your country can get along quite well without whatever-it-is that you have been up to. In the end, of course, the conclusion of the man is the same as that of the military—that getting killed is the least one can do in the circumstances—except that the two parties reach the same conclusion by different routes."  			"You've thought about it, haven't you?"  			"I've had nothing better to do. The Turners went weeks ago. We have a few Romantics left to move out of the side galleries, then half a dozen Surrealists. Soon we'll be down to the paintings I could have done myself."  			"But you've said it often: we can't let them make us into barbarians. Someone must stay behind who understands how to put it all back together."  			Alistair looked at his hands. "Well, the thing is, that someone shan't be me.'  			Tom felt the shock of the words before he understood their meaning. A constriction in the veins, a sense of imminence, time clenching like a sphincter. A half second's diminution of the hearing, so that he felt his ears roar for one heartbeat. "God, you haven't . . ."  			Alistair looked up. "I'm sorry. I did it yesterday."  			Tom stood with the jam jar still gripped in his hand. "It's all right," he said. "It's all right. There's bound to be something we can do. There will be a procedure for people who have signed up by mistake. It must happen fifty times a day. There will be some kind of system for it."  			"The whole point of the system is that one cannot go back, surely. I signed a solemn contract. In any case, it was the right thing to do. I'm going, Tom."  			"When?'  			"They didn't say. They gave me three days' pay and told me to await instructions. There will be recruit training and an officer cadet course, then I suppose I go wherever I am needed."  			"This isn't some horrible joke?"  			"I'm afraid not."  			Tom sat down on the floor beside his friend and stared around at the place. The garret changed as he looked. Its devil-may-care medley of bric-a-brac was transformed now into banal juvenilia. As he watched, each carefully cultivated eccentricity—from the unswept floor to the carelessly scattered library books—shrugged off its enchantment until all that was left was an attic flat in an unexceptional borough of London. The flat would revert to the landlady, their life to the world.  			Oh, thought Tom, so it finishes as quickly as this. All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.  			"I'm sorry for what I said, about running off like schoolboys."  			"That's all right. A lot of them practically are. You should have seen the recruiting line. I'm twenty-four, and I felt like the old man."  			Tom swallowed. "Do you think I should volunteer too?"  			"Good god. Why?"  			"Well, I mean I honestly hadn't thought about it until now."  			Alistair threw a balled-up sheet of newspaper. "You're made to be an educator, you old fool. Find a way to do your job again, and then do it. If one could stash schoolchildren down a disused mine in Wales then I'd insist you enlisted with me, but until then I'd say that war isn't on your curriculum."  			Tom was silent for a minute. "Thank you."  			"I thought you might take it harder."  			"I will miss you."  			"You certainly will. You'll have no one to tell you to cheer up. That's why I'm giving you Gaius Julius Caesar. Every time you look at him, I want you to imagine him saying: 'Tom, for god's sake cheer up!' "  			Alistair whipped the cat around when he said this, so that it addressed Tom directly. He had sewn two large coat buttons over the sockets for eyes and they were pearlescent and exuberantly mismatched, so that the effect was of a startling and demented supervision.  			"Well, I want you to have this," said Tom, giving Alistair the jar of jam.  			Alistair peered at the label. "A crude etiquette but a famous vintage, the '39. I believe I shall lay it down. We shall open it together at war's end, yes?"  			Tom looked at him. "Will you be all right?"  			"How should I know?"  			"Sorry."  			"Christ," said Alistair. "I'm sorry."  			He lay on his back on the floor, holding the jam up to the skylight.  			"Tea?" said Tom after a while.  			"If you're making."  			"There's no more sugar, I'm afraid."  			Alistair said nothing. Tom watched the scarlet and the purple light across his friend's face.      October, 1939   			SINCE MARY MUST NEITHER bump into her mother nor anyone who conceivably might, she had a day to fill on her own. Autumn had come, with squalls of rain that doused the hot mood of the war. She walked along the Embankment while the southwesterly blew through the railings where children used to rattle their sticks. In the playground at Kensington Gardens the wind scoured the kiteless sky and set the empty swings rocking to their own orphaned frequency.  			How bereft London was, how drably biddable, without its infuriating children. Here and there Mary spotted a rare one whom the evacuation had left marooned. The strays kicked along on their own through the leaves, seal-eyed and forlorn. When she gave an encouraging smile, they only stared back. Mary supposed she could not blame them. How else would one treat the race that had abducted one's playmates?  			The wind that buffeted her had already blown through half of London, accruing to itself the pewtery, moldering scent of all missing things. Mary drew her raincoat tight and kept walking. In Regent's Park the wind wrenched the wet yellow leaves from the trees. Horse chestnuts lay in their cases, grave with mildew. She supposed that nature had no provision for conkers beyond the earnest expectation that boys in knee shorts would always come, world without end, to take them home and dangle them on shoe laces and invest each one with brash and improbable hope.  			Mary found a café where she was not known and sat at the back, away from the steamed-up window. Over stewed tea she took paper and pen from her bag to write to Zachary.  			Just writing the address made her fret. It was one of those villages in the faraway England that London never called to mind unless some ominous thing happened—a landslip, or the birth of a two-headed foal—that brought its name into the newspaper. She did not know how parents could bear to ink such addresses onto letters for their children. Corfe Mullen, Cleobury Mortimer, Abinger Hammer: these, surely, were places of obfuscating mist and sudden disaster, from whence one knew nobody, and of which one knew nothing. Places full of country folk: eerie and bulb-nosed, smeared with chicken blood on full- moon nights.  			Dear Zachary, I feel dreadful that I was not able to keep my promise to come with you, but I hope that you do understand the need for the evacuation.  			She gnawed at the top of her pencil. Now that great solid London was blacked out and sandbagged and dug in, here was this awful silence that the wet wind couldn't disguise. Autumn had come but the Germans hadn't, after all.  			I trust you have found a good family to take care of you.  			The wind rattled the café's windows, and in the absence of shrill voices she could hear the cutlery scrape as the couple by the window chased peas around their plates. They were parents, of course they were: there was no other way to accrue such intricate worry lines. Are we quite sure we have done the right thing?  			On every corner Mary had passed that day there had been posters explaining that the children should remain evacuated—that the greatest Christmas gift to Herr Hitler would be to bring them home into harm's way.  			I am sure you are being jolly fearless  			Mary frowned and rubbed this out. The authorities imagined that the individual was a glove, requiring only the animating hand of a slogan. She could almost see her father, in some windowless room of the House, penning the script in committee. All morning the damp southwesterly had caught at the corners of the new slogans and sent them flapping against the billboards, exposing the fossil seams of earlier imprecations in their sediment of paste.  			Even though I was your teacher for only a week, I should like you to know that you are a blazing creature despite being an absolute knave, and that I slightly miss teaching you. I trust things are going well for you, but just in case they are not—and if you can bear to hold your nose and make a promise to a silly woman who has already broken her promise to you—then please guarantee me that you will write to let me know.  			She signed the letter "Miss North," tucked it into its envelope, and went out into the rain for a postbox.  			She was home at five, as dusk fell. The front door swung open when her foot fell on the first of the steps that rose to it.  			"Thank you, Palmer," she said, giving him her raincoat to hang.  			"How was teaching?" called her mother from the drawing room.  			"Well," said Mary, "you know children."  			"I only know you, darling, and I daresay they aren't all so maddening."  			Mary popped her head through the drawing room door. "I am fond of you too, Mother."  			"Fortunately I had Nanny whenever it got too realistic."  			"Where's Hilda? I saw her coat in the hall."  			"I made her go through to the scullery. I don't care how much good these cigarettes do your chests, they are ruinous for the curtains."  			"They are slimming."  			Her mother lowered her voice. "They are slimming you, darling. They must do the opposite to Hilda."  			"Perhaps she lights the wrong end."  			"Her life is a carousel of torpid men and toffee éclairs. I tell her she should volunteer for war work, like you, or at least find a man who will."  			"She is fond of Geoffrey St. John."  			"As tripe is fond of onions, darling, but what a fright they look together in the pan."  			"Don't be mean about Geoffrey, Mother—he kisses rather well."  			Her mother treated her to a knowing expression that Mary felt sure was pure bluff. It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with.  			Mary breezed from the drawing room, blowing a kiss on the way out.  			In the hallway the familiar air of the house closed around her—the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso that burnished the stair rods. A hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far within, crockery clacked as a maid addressed the detritus of afternoon tea. Coal rumbled as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium. That evening, it seemed, the fires would be lit for the first time since March.  			In the scullery Hilda was smoking by the small window.  			"And what of wild intrigue?"  			Mary grinned. "I'm working on Tom. I shall telephone him again today. I'm sure he'll find me a post. I keep reminding him there are scads of children who haven't been evacuated."  			Hilda mimed a hunchback with the twisted face of a lunatic.  			"Oh stop it," said Mary. "I see no reason why they shouldn't all be given a chance to learn. I just need to persuade Tom."  			"He seems a drip, if you ask me. You go for dinners, you practically beg him to kiss you, yet he offers you neither his lips nor his patronage. I should move on, if I were you."  			"Yes but he is a man though, don't you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.'  			"Move on, darling, before the drip-drip leaves you soaked."  			"All it is, is that Tom is rather shy. When I'm with him . . . well, it's nice."  			Hilda offered an eyebrow.  			"No, really! Tom is lovely."  			"What's he like?"  			"Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate."  			"These are English words for ugly."  			"Not at all. He's tall with soft brown eyes. He's quite gorgeous and I don't think he has any idea, which is sweet."  			"Don't forget you only care because he can offer you a job."  			"Which I need, thanks to you dropping me in it."  			"Well it's your own fault if you won't tell the truth to your mother."  			"Oh, but who does? You punish me too hard over one little kiss."  			Hilda affected puzzlement. "Kiss?"  			"No! Oh, Hilda, don't say you are over it already. I just spent the whole beastly day in the rain doing my penance for the Geoffrey Indiscretion."  			Hilda yawned. "Have Geoffrey, if you wish. He still flatly refuses to volunteer for the war."  			"As do you."  			"Which is why I need a man I can nobly support."  			"In absentia, though."  			"Oh, in furs."  			"Tom won't sign up and I admire it. He . . . well, it's just not him."  			Hilda widened her eyes. "Mary North!"  			Mary smiled. "Well, and so what?"  			"You are actually soft on the man!"  			"No, no, but he has—oh, you know, eyes, and he is tall, and . . . well, I think it's lovely that he thinks teaching is important, because I think so too."  			"Since when?" said Hilda.  			"Since the moment they said I couldn't. Why must we do what we're told?"  			"To keep life pleasant and convivial?"  			"Says the girl smoking in the scullery! Why not say to Mother: 'I shall smoke in your drawing room, and if you must replace those curtains then do let me pick you out a pattern that is not so exquisitely vile.' She'd respect you for it."  			"She'd never let me visit again."  			"Which might force you to widen your circle of friends."  			Hilda blinked.  			"Oh," said Mary, "I didn't mean it like that. It's just that you're the way you are, and I'm the way I am."  			"And you are determined to fall in love with Tom, apparently, just because it goes against all available grains."  			"One dinner, one lunch and three telephone calls. I hardly call it love."  			"What do you call it? Do you want him to give you the teaching job, or do you want, you know, him?'  			Mary bit her lip. "Are both allowed?'  			"If I said no, wouldn't you only go and do it?"  			Mary took her arm. "And we need to find you a nice soldier, do we?"  			"An airman would do in a pinch. I draw the line at navy blue."  			"Nice girls do. I shall keep a lookout for you. Of course it is quite ridiculous in any case. There is no actual fighting, is there?"  			"God no," said Hilda. "They're nice in uniform, not battle dress."      November, 1939   			AN ARTILLERY SHELL ROSE high over Salisbury Plain and slowed in the rain at the zenith of its arc. Beneath it the wide grasslands moved in a green blur, resolving around the azimuthal rim into the still marshes of Somerset and the unchanging hills of Dorset. With the scream of a fresh start the shell dropped from the sky and buried itself shallowly under the meadowland turf of the plain.  			There was a deficiency in the impact fuse, and the shell did not explode. It lay in its pocket of black soil in the bed of a shallow ravine. Its mechanism trembled. The thing could barely contain itself.  			Three miles distant, Alistair Heath stood in driving rain while a sergeant major screamed at him.  			"WHAT MAKES MY GRASS GROW?"  			"Blood, blood, blood!" the men replied.  			"WHOSE BLOOD?"  			"The enemy's!"  			"WHOSE ENEMY?"  			"The King's enemy!"  			Alistair joined in the bayonet drill without enthusiasm. He had heard the shell falling—a stray from the gunnery range. The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.  			He could not help thinking of shells as things he had always collected, with his sisters, on the beaches at Lulworth and Bracklesham. When the instructors spoke of firing them, he could not help seeing the dumpy 3.7-inch howitzers projecting cockles and scallops in looping trajectories over a blue horizon. Invariably the scallops, when he visualized them, were the jaunty little things from Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.  			"HEATH!"  			"Yes?"  			"PERHAPS YOU BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE ABOVE ALL THIS? ARE YOU GIVING THIS VITAL DRILL, MR. HEATH, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF YOUR GRACIOUS CONCENTRATION?"  			"Oh yes, absolutely."  			"OH YES ABSOLUTELY WHAT?"  			Alistair could not think what the man was driving at.  			"Yes, I am giving it my full attention."  			"YES I AM GIVING IT MY FULL ATTENTION WHAT?"  			The man was retarded. The wind blew over the wide miles of Salisbury Plain—hateful and blasted, pocked with the charred metal twisted in the violent shapes it had cooled to. It was a southwesterly wind, wet with brine from the Channel, sharp from the numb Purbeck Hills. It had passed through no city and picked up nothing of the scent of men and their consolations. It slowed Alistair's brain and took the feeling from his fingers. And here the sergeant major stood infrangible in the wind and the rain—as he had stood the whole fortnight—with his chest puffed out and his stomach sucked in and his face vermilion with fury. Now he was staring at Alistair and still waiting, apparently, for him to say something.  			"Oh!" said Alistair. "I mean, sir."  			The other men laughed. After a month, one shouldn't forget the word.  			"WHAT, SIR?"  			"I'm sorry?"  			"WHAT IS THE MESSAGE THAT YOU ARE COMMUNICATING TO SIR, SIR?"  			"Oh I see," said Alistair. "Sorry. I am giving this exercise one hundred percent of my attention, sir."  			"THAT IS BETTER," said the sergeant major.  			Alistair was glad the man felt that way. The bayonet drill resumed.  			"WHAT MAKES MY GRASS GROW?"  			"Blood, blood, blood!"  			"I CAN'T HEAR YOU, LADIES! WHOSE BLOODY BLOOD?"  			"The enemy's blood!"  			"WHOSE ORRIBLE NARZI ENEMY?"  			"The King's horrible Nazi enemy!"  			"THEN KILL THE ENEMY! WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE THE POINTY END IS FOR? DO IT TO HIM BEFORE HE DOES IT TO YOU!"  			The men roared and the sand oozed in clotted clumps from the bags they stuck with their bayonets. Every wound Alistair drove into the wet sacking opened a corresponding rent in his morale. How he hated this—the indefatigable tyranny of the sergeant major, and the insidious Salisbury chill that grew inside one like an infection after two weeks camped out under dripping canvas. Most of all, he hated the flicker of warmth that hatred gave you. You imagined the sergeant major on the point of your blade, and felt a horrid little twitch at the thought of driving it home.  			He executed the bayoneting to the minimum standard that left the King's enemy eviscerated, and when it was over and the sergeant major blew the whistle, he took his rifle and walked off a little way. He unstrapped his helmet and let the rain wash the sand off his face. He threw his pack down on a tussock to keep it off the sodden ground, and ducked into its lee to light his pipe. The damp tobacco shivered in the bowl. The matches failed one by one. In bleak exhaustion, Alistair watched the last one stutter.  			"Nuh . . . need a light, Huh . . . Heath?"  			It was Duggan, the only man on the course from that indeterminate age the other side of thirty. He was the one who used the standard-issue folding knife and fork to skin and bone the sardines from their ration tins, as if he were taking tea at Fortnum & Mason. He held his rifle slightly away from his body when they marched, the way one might carry a child that had wet itself.  			"Thanks," said Alistair.  			With Duggan's cigarette lighter it was easier. His pipe caught and the mild blue smoke was a comfort. It blew, he supposed, toward London.  			"In the muh in the muh in the mood for company?" said Duggan.  			Alistair eyed his pipe bowl. "I'm stuck for conversation, after that drill."  			Duggan sat on his own upturned pack. "If the wuh . . . wisdom of age may guide you, I pretend that the suh . . . sandbag is just a suh . . . sandbag."  			Alistair looked up. "It bothers you too?"  			"The way I see it, all the bloodthirsty sh . . . shouting is more for the benefit of the muh . . . men. You'll be an officer, I take it?"  			"I hope so. I'm to begin a conversion course, assuming I get through this one without bayoneting the sergeant major."  			Duggan got a cigarette lit. "I shouldn't think they'd necessarily muh . . . mark one down for that. Anyway, I dare say officer training will be a more suh . . . civilized business."  			Alistair nodded. "They'll assemble us around a cheese board. The CO will ask, 'What do we serve with this?' and as one we shall reply . . ."  			"Port! Port! Port!"  			"Whose port?"  			"The King's port!"  			Alistair grinned. "We are officer material."  			Duggan gave a wire-thin smile and used the hot end of his cigarette to trace the undulations of the plain. "Don't you luh . . . loathe this vile place?"  			Alistair puffed at his pipe. "It was a paradise before the Army took it over. Full of little hamlets bursting with cheerful cottages, every one of them with a roaring hot fire and a unicorn tethered outside."  			"Suh . . . sounds like Peckham."  			"Is that where you're from?"  			Duggan shivered. "In the suh . . . sense in which the human suh . . . soul is eternal, no one is actually from Peckham. Some of us are living there pro tempore, suh . . . so help us."  			"I'm north of the river. Camden."  			"Oh, the guh . . . glamour. And what did you do up there before you began doing whu . . . whatever the Army tells you?"  			"I was a very junior conservator at the Tate. I made tea and reminded the night cleaners not to use Vim on the actual canvases."  			"One wonders how the nation will muh . . . manage without you."  			"Oh, and I suppose you were the archbishop of Canterbury?'  			"I'm an actor. Oh, the stuh . . . stammer disappears on the stuh . . . stage."  			"And you signed up for this?"  			"I was suh . . . sick of being Second muh . . . Murderer. And so here I am. Rehearsing to be the fuh . . . first."  			"And how are you finding it?"  			"Costumes are rather drab but there aren't many luh . . . lines to learn."  			"It's the one show you hope will never make it to the West End."  			"Amen."  			Alistair tapped out his pipe on the side of his boot. "Miss London?"  			Duggan shook his head. "I duh . . . didn't get through the bathing-suit round."  			Alistair smiled. "I miss being allowed to mind my own business."  			"I muh . . . miss it too."  			"Are you married?"  			Duggan held up his cigarette and let the wind whip the ash away. "You ruh . . . really are young, aren't you?"  			In the southwest the horizon was gone now, lost in a flat zinc mist. Above them the base of the cloud was dropping, black cords of rain dragging it down. As the weather closed, the men occupied a shrinking remainder of the plain between the grass and the falling sky. The company exchanged the blackly comic looks of men about to be engulfed by worse of the same.  			The sergeant major blew his tin whistle. "MIST COMING IN! TAKE NOTE, YOU HOPELESS BASTARDS! TAKE NOTE!"  			Duggan frowned. "Take note of whu . . . what exactly? Will that awful man never tire of being unhelpful?"  			Alistair blew on his hands to warm them. "What do you suppose he thinks we should be doing?"  			"About the mist? Well we can hardly shh . . . shoot it, can we? And yet they have issued us th . . . these." Duggan flicked the barrel of his rifle with a fingernail, making the dead note of a stopped bicycle bell.  			"Do you suppose he means we should put on more clothes?"  			"I'm wuh . . . wearing everything they gave us. Aren't you?"  			"Should we eat something, then? To keep our energy up?"  			"Did the suh . . . sergeant major order us to eat anything? I don't think I could bear being bawled at again."  			"We could use our initiative."  			"Did he spuh . . . specifically order us to use our initiative?"  			"I have some jam in my pack.'  			Duggan threw him a look. "You've been lugging jam around? Isn't the stuh . . . standard-issue suffering heavy enough for you?"  			"I've been saving it for when I needed bucking up."  			Alistair opened his pack and fished out the Kilner jar of Tom's blackberry jam. "There. I don't suppose you've anything we could put it on?"  			Duggan looked around. "You won't luh . . . laugh?"  			Alistair shook his head. Somewhere close, the sergeant major was yelling again, the words snatched and broken in the wind.  			Duggan said, "I have some biscuits my duh . . . dear mother baked."  			He took them carefully from his pack, wrapped in a blue linen tea towel and tied with parcel string.  			Now with a silent rush the mist washed over the company and the plain vanished entirely. Nothing was visible outside the tight globe each man crouched in. They sprawled on their packs, smoking and talking in low tired voices, answering the encircling grayness with the blank orbs of their eyes.  			Alistair's thoughts stalled. After a fortnight of this sour cold and this enervating wind and this incessant sergeant major, his fatigue ran so deep that only the sight of the wide plain had convinced him of his own residual magnitude. Now he felt snuffed and extinguished. He blew on his hands and waited for the whistle to sound and an order to be given that would invest him once more with purpose.  			Duggan was working at the knot that tied the biscuits in their blue cloth. His fingers stopped as the light gained a darker inflection. Two boots sank into the mud between Alistair and Duggan. The two men looked up.  			"OH, WELL ISN'T THIS DELIGHTFUL! THESE TWO LONDON GENTLEMEN HAVE COME TO THE COUNTRYSIDE FOR A PICNIC!"  			Gray forms converged in the mist. They turned into men Alistair recognized, their faces variously animated by apologetic solidarity or leering glee. He stood. Duggan drew himself up more slowly, first placing his parcel carefully on top of his pack.  			"SATISFIED, DUGGAN?"  			Duggan nodded. "Yes, Suh . . . Sergeant Major."  			"THAT PARCEL POSITIONED ENTIRELY TO YOUR LIKING, IS IT?"  			"Qu. . . Quite, thank you, Sergeant Major."  			Without breaking eye contact with Duggan, the sergeant major nudged the package off its perch and smashed it into the ground with his boot. He ground it under his heel until it was half submerged in the mud.  			"AND NOW?"  			Duggan looked down at the muddy tea towel and the shattered biscuits dissolving in the rain. He raised his eyes to the sergeant major's.  			"Now your wuh . . . wife will have to bake me some muh . . . more buh . . . biscuits, Sergeant Major. I can pick them up next time I'm wuh . . . with her."  			The company sucked in its breath. The sergeant major rocked back on his heels and smiled, slowly, in a leer that exposed the teeth to their roots. The wind whipped at the men's rain jackets.  			"Very good, Duggan," said the sergeant major finally. It was the first time any of the company had heard him use a normal speaking voice. He retreated and crouched beside his own pack, downwind, to communicate with parties unknown over the field radio.  			Now the company clustered around Duggan. Once they were sure the episode was over and the sergeant major's attention otherwise engaged, a few of them shook his hand. A cigarette was offered, and lit for him when it was clear that his own hands were shaking too badly to do it.  			Alistair watched how the men acted with Duggan: chummily, though ready to disperse if the sergeant major should return in wrath. They did not yet know the ways of the Army—whether a besting once acknowledged was forgotten, or whether grudges were held over things like this. There were nervous laughs. No one attempted a reenactment of the incident. They waited nervously in the fog: a chance agglomeration of greengrocers and machinists and accounting clerks, rifles slung.  			From a little way off, Alistair watched them with a tired apprehension. His pipe was far beyond relighting now, his fingers stiff and unfeeling. He retrieved Tom's jam from the mud, wiped the jar off and replaced it in his pack. (He should be at the garret now, eating the damned jam with a spoon.) It was a struggle, with one's body shivering right down into the deep muscle, to concentrate on staying as dry as one could and not simply bursting into tears.  			Dusk came, and with it the rumble of an engine. A canvas-backed truck, its slotted lights throwing a demure downward glance in the mist. It drew up, engine running. An orange glow from the cab, the driver smoking. The sergeant major jumped up on the hood to address them.  			"RIGHT, YOU LUCKY LADS! THIS WEATHER ISN'T LOOKING TOO CLEVER AND SINCE I AM A BENEVOLENT GOD, I AM TREATING YOU ALL TO A NICE WARM NIGHT IN BARRACKS! PACKS ON, HOP IN NOW, AND DON'T SAY DADDY ISN'T GOOD TO YOU!"  			The men cheered. Alistair wrestled his stiff limbs over the tailgate and collapsed into the laughing crush of men on the benches in the back of the truck. The man to his left slapped him on the back and offered him a dry cigarette. Alistair smoked it wolfishly. With an ache so terrible that it was funny, the feeling returned to his hands and feet.  			All around him now the company bent to the task of complaining. Their faces lit erratically in the drawing glow of cigarettes, the men named the plain an evil place and enumerated the bodily modifications and inventive sodomies they would vest upon the person of Adolf Hitler, at war's end, for causing them to have spent winter weeks on Salisbury, when after all they were handsome young men with important peacetime work to do, such as drinking and philandering and sleeping both of those things off.  			They called the Army an arse hat and its brass hats brass arseholes. They denounced the ice wind blowing through the canvas canopy, and they cursed the hardness of the truck's metal benches. They articulated the opinion that the optimal stowage location for those benches would be up the arse of the truck driver, to whom it was pointed out that the small effort of bringing seat cushions with him from barracks might have been a nice touch.  			Next they insulted the boot-makers who had made the boots they all wore, which were constructed entirely of hate and which kept the freezing water in but not out. These boots were to be shoved up the boot-makers' arses.  			Now the men expressed the hope that the designers of the Lee-Enfield MkIII rifle might experience, when urinating, defecating, or ejaculating, a blockage of the same unshiftable cussedness that the men had experienced when prone in the frozen mud of the firing range and trying with numb fingers to persuade the magazine to surrender a bullet to the breech. It was decided that all of the boot-makers (with the boots already in situ up their arses) should be put up Lee and Enfield's arses: the left-boot-makers up Mr. Lee's and the right-boot-makers up Mr. Enfield's. Finally Lee and Enfield should be inserted headfirst up each other's arses, since they were so very keen on breech loading.  			There was nothing the military had that the men did not believe would be more properly stowed within the concavities of other personages, animals or objects. There in the budding warmth in the back of the truck, while their wet clothes steamed and a canteen of spirits was passed from hand to hand, the men squared away the whole Army, calibrating every one of its tyrannies and stowing it like a Russian doll up the arse of the next-smallest tyranny, until the whole great apparatus of war seemed certain to find its inevitable resting place, deep within the German Führer's fundament.  			In short, the men were happy. From the litany of their grievances only the sergeant major was absent, since it was his intervention that had gifted this sudden warmth and this freeing of tongues. Alistair had to hand it to the magnificent bastard: he was not without genius. Over two frightful weeks he had driven the company to the brink and then, sensing desertion or mutiny, he had sidestepped like a matador. Now, as the wind outside rose to gale force, the sergeant major sat aloof in the cab with the driver, letting the company vent, his power over them doubled by his act of magnanimity.  			Alistair made himself comfortable on the bench and drank from the canteen when it was passed to him. The men were all right. They had been pushed to their limit, and if there had been nothing particularly exalting about how they had reacted, then his own behavior had been unexceptional too. They passed him the drink with no distinction. Maybe this was more than he had a right to expect.  			As the warmth spread through him and they all waited for the truck to drive off, Alistair let himself relax. Now that the need for alertness was gone, he was drowsy. He hadn't realized, until now, quite how exhausted he had become. His eyes closed. The cheerful complaining voices lost their distinctness. They merged with the idling note of the engine and the roar of the wind without.  			He snapped awake when the tailgate of the truck banged open. From the startled expletives of the company, he understood that some of them had drifted off too. A cold blast blew in as a flap of canvas was drawn back. The sergeant major shone a torch. The men winced and screwed up their eyes as the beam danced over them and came to rest on Duggan.  			"Out you hop, Duggan, there's a good chap," said the sergeant major.  			"Excuh . . . cuse me?" said Duggan.  			The only sound was the soft chugging of the truck's engine.  			"HARD OF HEARING? I SAY AGAIN, MR. DUGGAN: PAUSING ONLY TO GATHER UP THE KIT WITH WHICH HIS MAJESTY THE KING IN HIS GENEROSITY HAS SEEN FIT TO ISSUE YOU, MAKE LIKE A BUNNY RABBIT AND HOP HOP HOP OUT OF THIS LOVELY TRUCK!"  			"Wuh . . . what?"  			"YOU WILL MAKE YOUR WAY TO BARRACKS ON FOOT DUGGAN! NIGHT NAVIGATION EXERCISE, YOU LUCKY MAN! PULLED YOUR NAME OUT OF THE HAT AT RANDOM SO HELP ME GOD!"  			Duggan did not move.  			"WELL COME ON, DUGGAN! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? EVERY MINUTE YOU SIT THERE ON YOUR ARSE IS A MINUTE YOU ARE KEEPING THESE SOLDIERS FROM THEIR STEAK-AND-ALE PIES AND THEIR HOT BATHS AND THEIR BEDS!"  			"Buh . . . but I don't know how to get to buh . . . barracks."  			"BARRACKS IS IN WARMINSTER, DUGGAN, EXACTLY WHERE WE LEFT IT!"  			"I know where buh . . . barracks is. I don't know whu . . . where we are."  			The sergeant major leered. The loose flap of canvas set up a volley of sudden claps as a gust caught the truck, rocking it on its springs.  			"DO YOU OR DO YOU NOT MR. DUGGAN HAVE IN YOUR POSSESSION ONE BRACKETS ONE COPY OF THE MAP WITH WHICH YOU WERE ALL ISSUED MR. DUGGAN HIS MAJESTY'S ORDNANCE SURVEY SIX INCH TO ONE MILE ENGLAND DASH WILTSHIRE COLON ZERO FIVE TWO?"  			"Yes buh . . . but I don't know whu . . . where we are on it."  			"DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT MR. DUGGAN WHEN I WARNED YOU THAT THE MIST WAS CLOSING IN USE THE LAST VISIBILITY TO TAKE BEARINGS WITH YOUR MARK TWO HAND-BEARING COMPASS AND LANYARD THEN TRANSFER T

Source: https://b-ok.cc/book/4518820/751ec5

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