MARY PUT ON HER mackintosh and sou’wester hat, stubbed her cigarette and went out into the morning. The cold weather had brought her limp back and she nursed it through Regent’s Park, skirting the deserted zoo. By the lake, its surface quick with rain, the rowboats were drawn up under canvas. The park wardens waited under the bandstand for the weather to pass. They smoked pipes, their clothes rolled and pinned where limbs were missing. The bare oaks with their ageless trunks held up the woebegone sky.
She carried on through Marylebone and Fitzrovia, which had never seen the worst of the bombing. Only a few gaps spoiled the Georgian terraces, and the rubble had been carted away. Where there were craters the rain had flooded them, so that the spaces between the houses mirrored the sky and made from each loss if not beauty, then at least a quiet neighbor.
Mary walked down to the Embankment and looked out over the broad sweep of the river from Parliament to Blackfriars. She no longer lingered here but it was not possible to lose the lover’s habit of looking downstream, to the sea. She tightened her mackintosh at the throat and hurried on to the Lyceum.
This was the best part of the day, looking forward to teaching her class. There were nine colored children living in the basement now. It had taken the war to reveal London’s heart, centrifugal for white children and gravitational for Negroes. When it was all over, she supposed, Miss Vine would bring her school back, and all her teachers would carry on quite deliberately as if nothing had happened. They would even make a virtue of it, in makeshift classrooms, thinking themselves the stoics. They would have no idea at all that life had been able to invent itself without them.
In the auditorium the minstrels were taking a break from rehearsal. They sprawled around the stage on boxes and folded drapes, smoking.
“Good morning, Miss North,” Bones called out.
Mary stopped at the foot of the stage. “Good morning, Mr. Bones. How goes the minstrelsy trade?”
“In its usual way—thank you for asking—which is to say, proportionate with your people’s kind purchase of tickets. How goes teaching?”
“In its customary manner, thank you, with two steps forward and one point five back, or half a step forward when expressed in net terms.”
He came to the front of the stage. “A minute of your time, Miss North? Which I believe is one sixtieth of an hour when expressed as a fraction?”
They climbed up to a high row in the auditorium and sat on the fold-down seats, leaving an empty one between them.
“This thing you’re doing for our children,” he said. “So kind. Though there’s been some talk that it might be better if you didn’t come every day.”
She smiled. “Children will say that, won’t they? But the truth is, letters and arithmetic come best through daily practice. I try to make it fun, but there’s no substitute for the weekday grind.”
Bones looked at his hands. “The talk that you might come less often. It isn’t from the children.”
“Oh. I see.”
“It isn’t that we’re not grateful. What you’ve done for them is terrific. I see kids who couldn’t read who are writing now. I see kids who wouldn’t talk, and suddenly they won’t quit nagging me for money.”
“Well, then . . .”
“It’s just that these things don’t always end well. See what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure I do. Surely it doesn’t harm them to learn? Quite the reverse: when their peers come back from the countryside, they’ll need to hold their own.”
“We’re not saying they shouldn’t be learning. We’re maybe asking, respectfully, if you’re the best one to teach them.”
Down on the stage the minstrels were rehearsing a slapstick piece, with a long plank and all its attendant physics. Mary had never realized how many men must be hit in the face before such a thing became funny.
“The fact is,” said Bones, “we’ve got our thing going on here, and people leave us alone. We have our trade, and this theater to work in, and a home of sorts for the children who’ve lost their people. While it’s just us, no one pays us mind. But if people thought we were mixing, they’d pay us more attention. Which for us is like daylight for vampires, you see what I’m saying? There’s an understanding between life and the colored entertainer. Your people give us a corner of the night, and we don’t darken your day.”
“But I hardly come and go with a fanfare. I use the stage door and I teach in the basement.”
“You may come discreetly into our place, Miss North, but I wonder how carefully you leave yours.”
“I don’t brag about what I’m doing, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do your friends know? Do your mother and father?”
“Yes, but—”
“And do they wholeheartedly approve?”