“Sorry,” said Zachary, and threw the brown bottle into the Thames.
“Oh,” said Mary. It didn’t matter yet. Morphine dulled any feelings of despair at its disappearance. The worst imaginable eventuality—that of the morphine being gone—was the event for which it was the only cure.
What a perfect trap it was. And all her own work, too. Even Hilda could not have sprung it better. Now the air-raid sirens began. They soared up, and she was amazed at the thrill in her chest as they started their downward swoop.
May, 1941
BACK AT THE THEATRE Mary taught the children all afternoon. She invented a game for Zachary: the letters on a page were enemy soldiers he’d captured, and he had to interrogate them individually. If he never gave the letters a chance to compare stories, they couldn’t conspire to swirl and change and confound him. She had him use his thumbs to isolate each letter and sound it out. In this way he made quick progress at reading the commoner words, and she saw again his expression of mild disappointment when there turned out to be less sorcery in reading than he had imagined. They enjoyed themselves so much that she lost track of time in the windowless basement, and when the air raid began she was stuck underground with the children.
It was the worst night of bombing so far. The earth lurched and liquefied. London seemed to bleed. Mary watched, astonished, as red fluid streamed down the walls of the Lyceum’s basement and puddled on the dance floor. It seemed impossible that anyone would survive, and when the all-clear sounded it was the most unlikely flourish. It was as if a conjurer had flipped a coin one thousand feet into the air and made it land on its edge.
She left the children to sleep, and went to see if the garret was still there. It was, though its windows were blown in. She didn’t mind. What was important was that when she fished in the dustbin for the last discarded bottle of morphine, there were still a few drops in it. She took them, then ran water into the bottle, rinsed it around, and drank it. When she began to feel more domestic, she swept up. The window glass sounded lovely as it surrendered itself to the dustpan. This was what the best composers would write from now on: orchestral scores for broken glass and brooms. She threw the morphine bottle in with the shards. She smiled because this was so ingenious. By tossing it in with all the other spent glass, without ceremony, one would move on from the whole episode.
Withdrawal from morphine would be perfectly manageable. She placed it in that category of hardships over which the fainthearted made a terrific fuss but which could actually be borne quite readily by a person who had been brought up to put on a sweater, rather than complain of the cold. The withdrawal would be more of a melancholy than a suffering—like taking the train home after a holiday in Devon.
The May morning blew in unimpeded. It was a tonic after the stale air in the Lyceum basement, even if there was smoke. Mary couldn’t find the makings of tea. She looked out over London, but the city didn’t seem likely to furnish her with tea, either. It stood in stunned silence, with white ash upon it in a shroud. Flames crackled here and there in the ruins. The morning cast a directionless shade through the smoke.
She hoped she might find a café open somewhere. She put on an overcoat of Alistair’s, rolling up the sleeves. In the Strand the ancient sundial of St. Clements made no shadow. Nothing was open. She wandered to the river. The waves were anxious and pale. Tea, she thought, half remembering why she had come. The word sounded in her head without finding meaning—tea, eee—unrequited, like the bleating of herds in thick fog.
Mary sat on the wall of the Embankment, her back to the disheartening river. In the silence of the morning no traffic moved in the streets. Women with ash faces and charcoal eyes swept neat piles of glass and mortar, neat heaps of splinters and flint, neat barrows for all that was lost. Now Mary began to feel uneasy. The music no longer seemed delightful. The hissing of the brooms carried a whisper: that life was cracked and gone. That any life left behind was not the good kind, which stubbornly built on rubble.
Aside from the brooms there was silence. London was a stopped gramophone with no hand to wind it. It smelled of cracked sewers and escaping town gas and charred wood, wet from fire hoses.