She supposed she ought to go home. At least as one went west the streets would become clean and undamaged. One could always imagine that one’s life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.
She took the long way home along the Embankment. The Thames was black with oil. Sickly foam gushed up wherever the deep current of the river was forced to the surface by obstructions—crashed bombers, buses blown off bridges—who knew what was down there now? The old and changeless river was suddenly uncharted. She stared down into the black water, scorched in patches by little pools of burning oil that whirled and eddied in the current. Flaming barges, their mooring ropes burned through, were drifting upstream on the flood tide. She wondered how far upriver the barges would get. If they kept on burning then it would be a furious light they cast on Pimlico, where Palmer, even now, must be readying tea to serve at four.
December, 1940
SNOW WAS FALLING OUTSIDE the window of Tom’s office at the Education Authority. A secretary brought him a manila envelope containing a letter from the Royal Air Force. He gave a silent prayer of thanks. He had volunteered after that terrible night in the basement of the Lyceum, and held his breath ever since. Now he stubbed out his cigarette in the blue glass ashtray on his desk, took a deep breath and tore the letter open.
These were the facts: he had achieved an excellent pass on one hundred verbal and spatial exercises to be completed in ninety minutes. He had seen the numbers nine and four in a field of dots that would have seemed numberless to men who could not perceive color. He had surrendered into glass vials 1 (one) fluid ounce of urine and 1 (one) of venous blood, and both had been assayed and found to be as suitable as such fluids could be.
Under the supervision of a mustachioed man from Bristol he had stripped to his smalls and completed fifteen push-ups and eight pull-ups, then climbed a rope eighteen feet in height and two inches in diameter. Using the check boxes provided he had affirmed that he was neither an atheist nor a conscientious objector, and that his allergies were nil. A nurse had cupped his scrotum while he coughed, though the letter did not mention this.
It went on to confirm that he had performed well at interview. The recruiting officer had liked Tom’s use of the RAF’s published battle losses. Twenty men per day were being killed: Tom had framed it as one good man each hour. When viewed in that way, he had told the interviewer, one understood a life’s value concretely. One saw the hours as a chain joining peacetime to peacetime, with oneself as a willing link. The recruiting officer had found his answer very satisfactory.
Tom couldn’t wait to show Mary the letter. There had been such a distance between them since the raids began. Nothing was said but he missed the way they used to walk—as they had after their first night together—through a world made anew. He missed the way they had made rain hilarious, and passersby mysterious, and bridges cross more than the river.
Of course there was the bombing, which kept them apart every night, she in the Anderson at her parents’ home and he in the public shelter on Prince of Wales Road. But even alone together at the weekend in the garret, there was a certain hesitation. Their lovemaking felt like politeness.
But now here was the letter, to remake him in Mary’s eyes and his own. Life had finally arrived and been released from its manila envelope.
In the final paragraph the recruiting officer regretted to inform him that his application had been vetoed by the War Office, who considered his current role essential. He read the thing through again, and there was no ambiguity. It was a feature of the authorities that they could exempt one’s profession from service without sparing one’s feelings. Tom sat in his empty office, laid his head on the desk and closed his eyes.
When he could no longer stand it he crossed the road to the public house and drank three doubles in a row. He went out into the snow, walked for a while without purpose and then headed for Mary’s school. When he got there he knocked the snow from his shoes and coat, sat on a tiny chair at the back of her classroom and watched her taking the children through the dress rehearsal for their nativity play.
A savior was born for all mankind: this seemed to be the gist of it. Everyone would be excused, for everything they’d done. It sounded neat. His hands still shook from the cold, so he clasped them to his knees.
Mary mouthed to him: Are you all right? He smiled back at her across the children’s heads while his awareness broke into fragments and each nerve vibrated with the high note of a cable approaching its maximum tension.