There were mechanical accidents: machinery was well known to be full of spite for slim bodies such as the one he now clung to. Bearings lived to seize, axles to shear, cables to snap. Accidents of the heart were a worry, too. She was beautiful: other men could see this as well as he. She was bright and unconventional and her faithfulness could not be assumed. There would come suitors who were taller, or richer, or—most dreadful of all—who could make her laugh. How he feared men who could make her laugh.
Next there was disease: less of a threat than good humor but still not to be entirely discounted. Influenza came once in each generation and was overdue in theirs. Cancer or consumption might take her. A scratch on her finger might fester, a cold sore give ingress to a greater chill. There was a whole category of mishaps inseparable from physics—the tumble, the slip and the choke; collision, combustion and shock. And he could not even begin to quantify the risks posed by third parties. Friends might queer her affections. Fiends in alleyways might murder her or worse. Her parents, picking from a list of his faults, might seize on his pacifism or his impecunity. They might set about dissuading their daughter, using all the tricks of their art. It was not a level playing field where parents were concerned: they had known her in every year of her life, he not yet in every season of the year.
Finally there were the imponderables of memory and the psyche. She could wake up tomorrow with no recollection that she had ever known him. Or she could walk past a café and stop dead in her tracks, overcome by desire for the waiter. And worse than all of these things, because so much more likely, were the mundane human dissatisfactions that absence would allow to incubate. What if he had said something to unsettle her—a single word could be enough—and she, brooding on it, came to decide that he did not truly love her? Or what if he had been unsatisfactory in bed? The more he thought about it, the more he worried that there was something he should have done but had not—or, worse, something he had done too much of. At times they had moaned like animals. Surely this was monstrous? Surely in solitude she would now reflect with shame, and not wish to see him again?
These were only the first thoughts that came. The more he considered it—oh god, her lovely face with that mocking little grin—the more causes there were for anxiety. Separation was air in the lungs of fate, and so when it was time for them to part after their first night together and he asked her, “Will you be all right?” and she replied, “Why would I not be all right?,” in fact so many reasons presented themselves that it immediately began to seem fantastically improbable, if he let go of her warm hand now and allowed her to walk away into this gray morning that smelled of spring, that they would ever see each other again.
It seemed so much safer to stay close and let the great disintegrating power of the world do its work on other lovers instead. But since he did not know how to put all of this in a way that would not seem pathetic, he simply said: “All right, I shall see you on Monday.”
It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail-gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman’s hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But to have faith—that a lover would be constant and life clement—this required courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations.
As she walked away from him he turned his back, to show that he could.
For her part, Mary did not find it at all difficult to walk away from Tom. She simply walked for a while, wearing yesterday’s clothes. Yes, the war was a blind roulette. Yes, the city was full of beautiful women who might tempt him: some of them more thrilling than she was, a few already wearing summer dresses. It all weighed less heavily on her, since weightlessness was in her nature and in any case one simply had to live. Oh, and yet— “Darling?” she called, spinning round, suddenly unsure.
The crowd had taken him, though. She had imagined that he would still be standing there, watching her. And now she felt a brand-new sadness, and a dreadful uncertainty about love.
June, 1940
VAPOR TRAILS TWISTED HIGH above Alistair’s train from Dover. He angled his head out of the window, into the warm slipstream bitter with coal smoke. He knew the RAF was milling rings with the enemy up there, but from where he watched, the airplanes were invisibly small, and it seemed as if the steam from his own locomotive rose up into those thin and tortured contrails. As if nature had congealed, and gases no longer dispersed but only bifurcated and twisted around themselves: as if there were no more forgetting.
The train’s whistle screamed. London was close now, with an ominous gravity that clutched at his cells. He had meant to visit Tom straight away—that was the point of coming to town—but now that it was so near, he felt he ought to settle himself first. He would fire Tom a quick note for the afternoon delivery, use the day for some errands, and see him in the evening.
Dear Tom,