“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.