The quiet, too, was unsettling. Into this air multiplication tables had been recited, the changeless alphabet chanted, the four house songs sung in quadratic symmetry. The Lord’s Prayer had been intoned by impish voices with every imaginable variation and subversion. And now the unceasing hymn was struck dumb. If the war so far was a phony one, this silence was hostile and real.
She went from classroom to classroom, switching on the lights. She tried to brush off the solemn mood that was settling on her. Of course a school made one feel rather alone. The rows of desks in each room, the stacks of identical hymnals, the massed coat hooks lining the wall: the multiplicity of everything was bound to single one out.
She went first to the classroom—Kestrels Class—that had been hers in September. She realized it wouldn’t be suitable. It was robust enough, but it wasn’t close enough to a basement. She walked the corridors, opening doors until she found one that led down wooden stairs.
Belowground, the smell was older. She found superannuated atlases in tumbling piles, with the earth’s poles marked by whirlpools. There were the musty props of ancient school plays—Tuck’s staff, Banquo’s shroud, Peter Pan’s cap. A maypole lay askew, bound in its own ribbons. In the glow of her lighter’s flame the hoard stretched away into blackness. Fifty children could shelter down here if need be.
Mary knelt to sift the treasures. Here were cross-stitched samplers and moldering report cards with examination results for needlework and recitation. Here were handwriting exercises with passages dutifully copied: At the door on summer evenings sat the little Hiawatha Heard the whispering of the pine trees Heard the lapping of the water.
She felt five years old, and five hundred. Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy. She walked up into the corridor, trembling. The school was absolutely silent. How violent it was, this peace where children’s voices should be. The ache in her chest hardened to anger, until she shook with it.
Sparrows classroom was closest to the cellar. She gauged what needed to be done. The boards would have to come off the tall windows, for a start. If a raid came—well, that was what the cellar was for, but until then her classroom would be a place of light. And the dust would have to be swept, and the mustiness purged with vigorous airing. If a ladder and paint could be found then she would get the children to restore these walls to white.
This parquet floor would scrub up, these chairs would rediscover their élan after a once-around with screwdriver and sponge, and as for the desks with their intricate chronicle of graffiti, either they could be sanded bare, or the opinions of generations of pupils could be allowed to stand. Mary found that she didn’t much mind either way. Beyond the superficial errors of spelling there was little that she felt justified in correcting, after all, when she read the collective wisdom concerning Miss Vine.
At the front of the classroom the mice had got onto the teaching desk and eaten the carton away from the chalk, so that it lay splayed. They had eaten the bitter leather from the corners of the gym mats piled in the corner. They had taken the barren seeds from the beanbags used for throw-and-catch. They took what the war could give them.
Mary gathered the chalk and found a pot for it. She wrote her name on the blackboard: Mary North. Then, to see how it might look, she rubbed out “North” and wrote Tom’s surname, forming the letters slowly and carefully in the exemplary hand required for blackboard work. When her fingers gripped the chalk, the pink blood shrank from the knuckles so that something of chalk’s nature seemed to seep into her.
Mary Shaw.
To see how it might sound, as she turned from the board she said brightly to the room: “Hello, class. My name is Mrs. Shaw.”
She lifted her hands to her mouth. Tom was standing in the doorway of the classroom. His efforts to disappear were to his credit, but unsupported by a pitiless physics that refused to let him vanish. He squirmed and tried to shrink behind the door, and gave up on that and instead pretended to have been whistling a tune. He gave up on that too, since if he really hadn’t heard what she had said, then here it was, inscribed on the blackboard in the Marion Richardson script that was favored for the modern and unambiguous manner in which the letters were formed.
You silly girl, she thought. If he has any sense he will never speak to you again. And the worst thing about it, as she watched his resigned smile, was that she really did like him a lot. His awkwardness was gone, in this moment when it finally couldn’t matter anymore. There was something honest in his surrender to the situation. It was only now that she understood how difficult it must have been for him, to like her and to be petitioned by her at the same time. All he had needed was for her to understand that things should be taken carefully and slowly. She dropped her hands and mirrored his sad smile.
“Sorry,” she said.