His men began calling to him again, and he watched their gray backs plunging all around, and he called out to them as they changed from men to dolphins and back to men again in the shifting beam of the searchlights. Nothing stayed still. The sea heaved, voices yelled all around him, and Alistair felt an immeasurable sadness for his men, to be lost in such a lonely place, so far from the kindness of sight. He murmured the words he had used at so many burial details. Comfort us again now after the time that Thou hast plagued us: and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity. Spray filled his mouth and he choked. He lost his grip on the raft and he was alone in the sea, naked and sinking.
Under the waves there were still the lights, cold and holy, cutting the surface above. Simonson was sinking with him. They watched the lights together. Mary was there too, and Tom, and the enemy airman, and Briggs, and all the men Alistair had lost. Everyone was restored. As the lights and the roaring noise faded, they all sank together through the warm and ageless sea.
Duggan took his hand. “Come on Huh . . . Heath. Let’s get you huh . . . home.”
September, 1941
IT WAS SIX WEEKS since Mary had finally written to Alistair again, and a month since she had received a reply from his commanding officer, a Major Simonson. Alistair was missing in action over the sea, presumed killed. The major conveyed his regrets and wished her to know that Captain Heath had been a courageous officer who had spoken of her in the gladdest terms.
Morphine helped. It threw sorrow over the wall, into London where everyone’s tragedies multiplied. One could leave it out there for the time being, in the city of stopped clocks, pending the day when.
Mary took to walking. Her leg was improving, though the limp returned if she went too far. She liked to rest on the steps of the National Gallery and look down on Trafalgar Square. It had been months now since the last serious air raid. The square was full of courting couples. How they laughed! As if the blackened world were new already. Every sight was agreeable to them, every diversion gay. Mary had not remembered that there was so much entertainment in watching pigeons squabble in the fountains.
She still thought that Alistair might have survived. The authorities might presume a man killed, but that was the authorities for you. To presume was always vulgar, while life was sometimes gracious. In the meantime she watched the lovers in Trafalgar Square, so as not to forget how it was done. In the bright square the couples clung, continually adjusting their grip. Now their fingers entwined, now their arms encircled the other’s waist as if life was not at all on their side, as if it might place the tip of its lever into any distance they allowed to open up between them. Watching them, Mary supposed the odds were against her. It was lovers who trusted luck least.
She marveled at the ease with which the young women moved. She watched them laugh and flush. They were all hope and helium, lovely to watch. Two years ago it had been her.
When it got too much, she walked down to the Embankment and sat on the granite wall. She ran her fingers over the iron dolphins that swam around the lampposts. Beneath her the brown water churned with all that was lost, and today she had no more morphine. It had been harder and harder to come by, and now it was gone. As the last of it wore off, she realized that she had no idea how to get more.
One often saw bodies at low tide, on the mud spits by the pontoons of Waterloo Bridge. Whether they were long dead and only now surrendered by the mud, or whether they were the newly despairing, Mary couldn’t tell. Bodies didn’t lie cleanly on the ground, the way they did in the cinema. In real life they appeared not to have been strewn, but sown. The dead were filthy, half buried, sometimes barely distinguishable from the mud or the rubble they lay in. One didn’t understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one’s hands and face and clothes clean. The world’s surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.
Above the mud spits, the lovers never looked down at the dead. Mary watched them clinging tight, their gaze on the horizon. It was a rule that lovers looked east toward the sea. She made herself look that way too.