“Do let’s go in,” said Hilda. “It’ll be just like on the wireless.”
“Indeed it will be finer,” said the caller. “The BBC’s troupe ain’t got nothin’ on ours. Here you will hear ballads too bawdy for broadcast, airs too ’airy for the airwaves, an’ of course all of dis comes”—he addressed himself to the gentlemen of the party, and dropped the accent—“with your first drink on the house, from a selection of beers, wines and spirits that are not commonly available under the present circumstances.”
“Oh what the hell,” said Alistair.
“Oooh!” said Hilda, clapping her hands.
Tom gave them both a sardonic look.
“Oh Tom,” said Mary. “Must you spoil today?”
There was an edge in her voice that made Alistair look. He hadn’t noticed Tom spoiling anything, but perhaps he had lost the skill of noticing when days were spoiled by anything subtler than shrapnel. He wondered if another drink might help.
The theater was set out with tables in the stalls, and they took one close to the stage. It was agreeable down there, in front of the red velvet curtain, with the gilded columns of the proscenium catching warm glints from the curtain lights. Laughter from a dozen other tables rattled around, and above them conversation buzzed in the high circle.
Wine arrived just in time to stop everyone turning to gore. Another bottle followed, and the four of them relaxed in the soft pink glow of the table lamp. Alistair understood that his chair and Hilda’s must converge a little with every glass, as Tom’s and Mary’s were doing on the other side of the table, until without any particular moment having been marked they found themselves arranged as two couples. Hilda’s hand migrated to his knee, Alistair’s arm curled around her waist, and there was something sweet and attentive in the way they carefully ignored each other while their bodies achieved all of this on their own.
Instead they laughed especially hard at a joke Mary made, and brought fascinated interest to bear on a long anecdote that poor Tom was struggling to make go nowhere, until finally, as the house lights dimmed and all eyes turned to the stage, Hilda’s body was nestled against his. This thrilled and dismayed him at once. Through his uniform jacket Alistair could feel her quick heart. Its fluttering made him sad: such a tiny pump, the heart, and such an endless flood, life.
The audience fell silent and the curtain came up on darkness. Behind the stage a red spotlight made a thin sliver of light that rose until it became the uppermost part of a disc, and then a half circle, and then a whole circle rising over the stage. This was the sun, and as it rose it brightened from red to orange to white. The stage lights came up with it and illuminated the backdrop: a view out over London from the top of a hill, with spires gleaming and barrage balloons tethered above the sweep of the familiar city.
There was the Tower with its medieval walls, there St Paul’s aping Rome, and there St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the sober Greek temple impaled from beneath by that hysterical Georgian spire. Alistair brimmed with pleasure to see it spread out in the warm glow of the stage lights. Dear old London—the conflator of all centuries, the pigeon-feeding tramp wearing all of her clothes at once.
As the sun rose over the painted city, a chorus of blackface minstrels processed from the wings. A dozen came in from each side and arranged themselves in a semicircle open to the audience. In a whisper at first, rising in volume as the sun rose, they sang.
Bless this house, O Lord we pray,
Make it safe by night and day.
Whether it was the wine and the woman by his side, or the city he had missed, or the seventeen hours he had left, Alistair found himself overcome as the voices swelled.
Bless these walls so firm and stout,
Keeping want and trouble out.
After the hymn, a Negro made up as a white man took to the stage in top hat and tails and introduced himself as Mister Interlocutor.
“That’s him!” whispered Mary. “That’s Zachary’s father.”
The Interlocutor leaned in to the microphone. “In these times of threat and anxiety, when our enemy besets us and we are weighted down with cares, it does the heart good to remember old times, when life—though it was hard—was familiar, and the Negroes gathering together would lighten their heavy labors with song and with levity.”
One of the chorus men stepped forward, large crimson lips painted over his black face. “Well Mistah Interloculator, I wouldn’t be knowin’ about no leviditty, excuse my ignorimiddy.”
The audience laughed and applauded, and Alistair laughed with them. It was a kick, after the poignancy of the hymn.
“Ah, Mister Bones,” said the Interlocutor with affection. “I might have known it would be you.”
“Allus does seems to be me, Mistah Intercalculator, every time I check. Try as I might, I can’t seems to wake up looking like you.”