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?”