But what ought he to tell her? None of it was suitable to relate. The Germans had swooped on them in stiff airframes with bull whistles screaming. Under the hardened sky they had squared off the undulant plain with gray armor. They always held the direct line. They scorned roads that had wound for millennia. People and animals were spooked—the land had no natural resistance to the pure black method.
How could one speak of it over lunch? After the hard planes and the hard tanks had come hard men in hard formations, banging their black boots in adamant time. A terrible hardness was how it had seemed to Alistair: a preternatural hardness that ordinary men had fled from and exceptional men had dashed themselves against and been ground into the soft French mud, the perfectly regular imprint of the hard iron tracks making no distinction between corpse and clay. He saw his friends’ faces crushed and flattened. He saw Tom’s, and Hilda’s, and Mary’s faces crushed and flattened. Good god—he was gripping his wineglass. Good god.
He made himself take a breath. “The Germans were just well organized. The next time we tangle with them, we’ll be organized too.”
Mary said, “You’re just like my father.”
Alistair was relieved to move on. “And what does your father do?”
“He’s a politician,” said Mary, stubbing out her cigarette and holding his eye with an irony that she might be inviting him to share—he couldn’t tell.
“He’s MP for the Wensum Valley,” said Tom.
Alistair said, “Well then I’m sure you know more than I do about the war picture.”
Mary inspected her nails. “I’m afraid they only tell us girls what we need to know: come here, look lively, bunk up, dig in.”
Alistair laughed, and Mary flashed him a prankish grin. How quickly she could turn in conversation.
Hilda, who seemed slightly at sevens with the whole exchange, shook their third wine bottle and proclaimed it empty. She stood, slightly unsteadily and with a clattering of cutlery to the floor.
“Oh come on, you lot, let’s jilt this dump and go somewhere with music.”
Alistair took care of the bill—it was true what they said: you couldn’t take it with you—and then they were out in the hot blue Saturday afternoon, in Hyde Park, Mary and Tom up ahead, arm in arm, and he bringing up the rear with Hilda, who shrugged her cardigan down off her shoulders and smiled up at the sun with half-closed eyes.
“Isn’t this grand?” she said, taking his arm. “It was stuffy in there.”
“Yes,” he said. “Grand.”
“Don’t you love the feeling you get when the sun comes out in London?”
“Are all the questions this easy?”
She laughed and leaned her head on his shoulder as they walked. The feeling of her at his side was pleasant, and now that they were outside and the first overpowering blush of her perfume had mellowed, she smelled warm and rather nice. Up ahead, Mary in her summer dress and white straw hat threw her head back and laughed at something Tom had said. Alistair felt unbearable anguish.
They bought ices from a kiosk and ate them as they walked. Mary slipped along with the carefree, long-limbed swing of someone on whom the present hour was neither too tight nor too loose.
Hilda was saying, “Can’t you just tell straight away, sometimes, when a person is all right?”
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“And you’re noticing again, so we’re even.”
“Isn’t it fun to keep score?”
She poked him in the ribs. “See? Now you’re getting it.”
Over the streets, the barrage balloons bobbed nicely against a few small cotton-puff clouds. Hilda chatted happily. Wherever they were headed, Alistair guessed, it was likely to have wine.
The four of them wondered what they might do, since it was too early for dancing and too hot to keep strolling in the sun. A show would be the thing, but in theaterland nothing seemed to be beginning—it was four in the afternoon—and they bumped from place to place until Mary said they should go to the Lyceum. The minstrel troupe was playing there, as it had since forever, and she had a pupil, Zachary, whose father was a performer.
The hoardings had men in frock coats and hats, in blackface, cakewalking across the theater’s facade in their white spats and sticks. A fat white man in cork paint was calling the crowd in: “Come in dere, fine masters, you never seen such a show in all your life, you never heard such a fine music.”
“Must we?” said Tom. “The whole coons-with-canes thing?”
“Oh, but it’s done in a knowing way,” said Mary. “It’s a clin d’oeil.”
Tom looked to Alistair. “What do you say? It’s your leave, after all.”
Alistair, who had hardly been concentrating, understood that they were waiting on him. The caller, noticing the party’s hesitation, stepped up to them with an encircling, ushering gesture that made it seem rudeness not to let him escort them to the box office. His cork paint was unconvincing, a line of sunburned pink skin glistening between the blacking and his collar.
“Forget your cares for an hour,” he said, “as we transports you back through de magic of music an’ laughter to de peaceful world of de plantation, where dat good old darkie humor lifted spirits an’ lightened hearts.”
“Must you do that voice?” said Mary.