“It’s not as if.”
‘It’s not as if we can’t live without you telling us it’s ‘as if.’ ”
He held his hand out, his grip seeming to loosen. She gasped. She needed the syrette more than she had ever needed anything.
“Do you want it?” said Zachary.
“No, thank you,” said Mary, and tried to smile, and burst into tears.
—
All through that day and night Zachary watched as she lay between wakefulness and sleep. Once she sat up and told Poppy Brown not to eat the blackboard chalk. She shouted at Kenneth Cox for never sitting still. Around noon she spoke in French, then fell asleep. Later there was a long, muttered conversation. She whispered that she was sorry, over and over. Zachary left her bedside and went to see what was the matter with the other children. Ruth was tearful, and Charles and Molly weren’t helping. Zachary got her to come and sit with Mary. He warmed water on a primus stove and had Ruth wash Mary’s face and hands while she lay, half conscious. Ruth still wept.
“What’s wrong?” said Zachary. “Is it because the others pick on you?”
She shook her head, her braids flailing.
“Are you hungry?”
Ruth shook her head again. He took her hand but she pushed him away. A roar of laughter came from the theater overhead. It must be the matinee already. He squeezed his temples to push away the exhaustion. He lit a cigarette and wished he knew what to say. He wished an older child would come to the Lyceum, so he wouldn’t have to be in charge. He wished someone would come who didn’t need looking after.
“You like sweets?” he said. “I could get you some.”
Ruth shrugged and said nothing.
“What about that doll you had? You want me to fetch your dolly?”
Ruth only crumpled again. Zachary supposed he ought to know what to say, but he could find no comfort in himself to transmit to her. It was just as the players said: it was a war, and they were Negroes, and even their side wasn’t on their side. All they had was themselves: nineteen minstrels, nine musicians and four stray children, besieged in a city besieged. If he’d still had his father he might have felt strong about it—proud, even. The players were kind to him, but however close they drew, he felt that he didn’t belong.
His father had wanted more for him than minstrelsy, and now that his father was gone he felt no ties to it. Life held him in this place, that was all, like a scream trapped in a jar. There wasn’t even a grave he could visit, a fixed place to start his own life from. So long as his father was lost, he was lost with him. All he could do was hug Ruth and tell her everything would be all right. It was the same thing the government posters were claiming.
When he went back to Mary, she was awake.
“Zachary . . . can you get me something?”
His chest went tight. He knew she was going to want morphine.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so hungry.”
He brought her coffee, bread and margarine. He played piano for her. In the evening the fever came again and she talked for hours to a man named Alistair. She argued with her mother, sometimes angrily, sometimes tearful and pleading. When her fever finally broke, she slept. He brought the other children over, and they took turns to watch her through the night.
When morning came and Mary still slept peacefully, Zachary smoothed her hair on the pillow. He stood and stretched away the night’s cramps. Then he ate all the biscuits he could find, played some piano, injected the syrette of morphine into his shoulder out of pure curiosity, and went up from the basement into the Strand. He laughed out loud while the great rebuildable city glowed in the sunrise, and the old London stones in the rubble piles breathed in and out with a slow rhythm that seemed, without question, to swing.
December, 1941
AT DAWN RAIN BEAT on the garret roof and leaked here and there in drips. Mary reached out a hand and tasted it. Now that the morphine was long gone from her system, the clarity of sensation was extraordinary. Things no longer shifted and warped. Until now she had never understood how much one could love this dignified stillness of still things.