“I don’t care.”
He turned from her, his thoughts fluid, ranging across the darkening country. Every sound was enfolded in awareness, the running of the river, the cooing of the wood pigeons at roost, the crackling of sticks in the undergrowth nearby that must be a fox or a stoat beginning its evening round. He looked at Simone again, and in her face there was no anxiety, and it seemed to him that he should try to do what she asked.
He closed his eyes and moved his lips close to hers, and for a moment as she kissed him there was a stillness in his thoughts, and only the river ran, and only the sticks in the undergrowth cracked, louder now, rising almost into awareness but not wholly, because the kiss was his first and it was warm, and for a moment the sadness lifted and there was a stillness in him. Everything was still. And then a heavy flint caught him on the side of the head and he was stunned, and when he could see again there were more stones coming in through the dusk.
Simone was hit. Her tooth was knocked out and her eye was split wide and there was so much blood, and he wrapped his arms around her head to protect her but that only made the village children more furious. They were silent—and this was a terrible thing—they didn’t jeer or laugh, only sent stone after stone whipping in. The air hissed with riverbed flints. Simone began to scream.
The scream came again, and it was the long scream of the train’s whistle, and his eyes came wide open as he struggled up from sleep with his father’s hand on his arm.
“You all right, Zachary?”
He blinked. It was full daylight, with fields rushing past. A third-class compartment with four seats taken. Himself, his father, a woman writing a letter, a man reading the newspaper. On the back of the newspaper, on the funny page, Hitler in his boxer shorts: Let’s catch him with his Panzers down.
“Yes, I’m all right, I’m fine.”
“You were dreaming. It didn’t look like the best fun.”
Zachary blinked. Through the window, below a stand of beech on the top of a green hill, a doe crept out into barley.
“I’m fine.”
His father had a right eye that strayed while the left fixed you. When Zachary was little and asked why, his father used to say he was keeping one eye out for trouble. Their joke was to guess which one.
His father said, “I’m sorry I didn’t come for you sooner.”
“That’s all right.”
“They told us not to. They said to keep all the children where they were.”
“It’s fine.”
His father laced his fingers on top of Zachary’s head and stroked two thumbs along the lines of his eyebrows. It was something he’d always done, and for a moment Zachary felt that nothing had happened in between times. His mother hadn’t been lost, they’d never crossed the ocean, they’d never been pulled apart.
His father said, “Your old teacher warned me to fetch you home, back in the winter. I should have listened to her.”
“Miss North?’
“She said she was opening up that school again, and they couldn’t stop us bringing you home. But I thought she was trouble. And you know trouble is one thing for her, and another thing for us.”
“I understand.”
“But look at you. Your poor face.”
Zachary shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt. It looks worse.”
“I raised a liar. Are you hurt anywhere else?”
Zachary looked up at him. “When we get back to London can we go to the school, please?”
“I’m not sure it’s the best thing.”
“Please?”
His father sighed. “ ‘Well how can I say no to you now?”
Zachary looked back to the window. He wore the gray knee shorts and the gray duffel coat in which he had been evacuated from London, and he had nothing with him but his gas mask in its box. Two things you could do with the gas mask: you could put it on so your breathing made a nice pop-pop, the valves clicking on the inhale and the exhale so your breathing had an off-beat. Or you could run a stick across the ribbing of the pipe that led from the filter to the mask, and the zip-zip reverberated through the rubber straps and sounded like a washboard.
“What can I do for you?” said his father. “Need more cream on those cuts?”
“I wish it could go back to before.”
His father smiled. “Before what? You start wishing it back, at your age, soon you’re back in diapers.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but I’m serious too. Where are you going to take it back to? This life hasn’t worked out perfect, maybe I give you that, but it’s got you and me in it. I don’t see what you could change and still have us be. And I don’t see it can be bad so long as we’re here for each other.”
“You won’t let them split us up again?”