“No, but that hardly—”
“And so they talk to people, and people talk. Are we licensed for the number of shows we do? Are we allowed to sell drink? Did any of those orphaned children come with adoption papers and ration cards? And yet we are afforded the comfort of our small community because it would take wearisome paperwork to scatter us. We are forgiven our skins, you see, so long as no one—officially—notices.”
Mary hung her head. “You want me to stop coming.”
“It’s not anything I want, Miss North. We’re all partial to you. But you mustn’t think the children won’t get their schooling. I may not have your facility, but I can give them the language. And the manager he isn’t going to be teaching them any mathematical theorems but he has been known to balance the books.”
“What if I started coming less often?”
He pursed his lips and looked down on the stage. “Fine. What if you started today?”
And so here she was, leaving before she’d even had time to take off her raincoat. She wondered if the months of morphine had weakened her tendency to resist. Or else it was the solitude, in which the self hardened but also grew brittle.
It was always a lurch, coming out of the Lyceum into the crowd of white faces in the Strand. There was a period of acclimatization, until one stopped finding white skin strange. Until then it seemed unnatural and rather horrid, as if something medical or blanchingly industrial had happened to everyone. There was a moment before one understood that one belonged with them—a moment outside time, as if one had stood up too suddenly.
January, 1942
THE FOUR LOCAL MEN who brought Captain Braxton’s body back up the cliff to Fort St. Elmo had done the best they could to make it decent, straightening the limbs and wrapping a shirt around the ruined head. Simonson thanked them with a promissory note for kerosene, then had the surgeon decant the dead man into a coffin and nail it shut. The nails had to be extracted from the doorposts of the fort, and straightened on an anvil.
Simonson stubbed out something they were still calling a cigarette. He pawed at his tongue for the bitter tobacco fragments that had stuck there. His head pounded.
The battery under his command stood at seventy-seven men, with Braxton freshly subtracted. There were rations enough for thirty. It was a feature of the tactical situation that the more men he lost, the more the rest could eat. When a raid came, one didn’t know whether to send the men down to the shelters in their tin hats or up to the ramparts in their PT shorts. Occasionally an officer dealt with this and all other uncertainties forever, by taking a stroll at dawn and not stopping when he came to the sea cliffs.
Simonson supposed one should feel pity at a suicide, but he rather hated the dead man for it. Absent Alistair’s good humor, the island had become lethal to his spirit. It was as if an invisible bile seeped from the bomb craters. He loathed every yellow rock. Since there was nothing to eat, he smoked in an uninterrupted chain, until smoke seeped into the gaps between every cell of his body. Until it was only force of habit that caused the smoke, and not his person, to disperse.
All morning his subordinates plagued him. Captains Appleby and Fisk had fallen out over which of their guns ought to receive a new barrel that had been fought through. Simonson flipped a threepenny bit along the corridor and had them chase after it to decide. Lieutenant Spencer reported, assuming he would be captain now that Braxton had left the situation vacant. Five minutes later, Lieutenant Cooper dropped by to confirm—just as a nudge, between old Harrovians—that he, and not the overweening Spencer, was in line for the same promotion.
All afternoon it went on, while the enemy attacked. Down poured the rain of blood and sulfur, and up slunk these privateers from the underground parts of the fort. Here was Major Huntley-Chamberlain, hoping that it would be his favorite, Ives, who took the vacant captaincy. Here was Major Hall, lobbying for Williams.
At dusk, at last, Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton summoned him to his office. For the first time in weeks, Simonson felt something akin to gratitude. Having noticed how overstretched he was, Hamilton must finally be disposed to take some of the heat off. Simonson put on his cleanest shirt, blew the dust off his cap and hurried down to the ops room.
Hamilton glanced up from his papers when Simonson knocked.
“Too bad about Braxton.”
“Dreadful, sir.”
“Married?”
“No. Just parents.”
“Well, that’s something. ‘Killed in action,’ I suppose?”
“I’ll get the letter off tonight.”
“Fine. Do sit.”