“You’d live your life in terrible confusion,” she said gaily, taking his arm.
He slowed to a stop under the scant shelter of a grocer’s awning. The shopwindow was crosshatched with tape, and behind it the bacon slicer and the cheese wire and the black iron scales stood on the empty shelves, the vocabulary of a language with no remaining speakers.
“Tom? Darling?”
He realized he was still staring into the hungry shop.
“I think you should leave me,” he said.
The wind whipped wet snow at their legs. Engines raced as motorcars’ tires spun in the slush.
Mary said, “Shall we go somewhere warm?”
They found a café, two tables wide, with empty sugar shakers and a bare Jacob’s-biscuit display case on the counter. They were the only customers. They took off their gloves but kept their coats and hats on.
“I don’t suppose you’ve anything to eat?” said Mary to the waitress.
“There’s only tea.”
“Splendid,” said Mary. “Let’s have some, shall we?”
It came in a brown glazed teapot. Looking into it as it was stirred, one could cultivate the hope that the tea was strong. One hoped, as one had hoped all through these gradually diluted months, until one poured it out over the quarter inch of thin white milk and saw that it was practically clear. The leaves were used to exhaustion.
Tom rattled a teaspoon around his cup. “I tried to join the Air Force.”
She put her hand on his. “No . . .”
“I thought I might have it in me to shoot at the Germans’ bloody airplanes, now that it’s self-defense. But the War Office won’t let me.”
“Oh Tom . . .”
“I thought you might be proud of me in uniform.”
She took his face and angled it up to look at her. “Do you really think so little of me?”
“You are a sweet, loyal girl. But we both know it isn’t how it was.”
“Of course it isn’t, you silly man. We are a thousand years older.”
“I sometimes imagine what it would be like for you if you were with a man like Alistair. Someone fighting the real war.”
They stirred the pale tea. The wet snow blinded the window.
“I don’t imagine it,” she said.
‘But you’ve thought about it.’
He waited. Her teaspoon clinked against the cup.
“I don’t suppose I was meant to love a man like that, his heart made so heavy by war.”
“But he has had to become like that.”
“Well, we don’t have to.”
“Don’t we, though? I feel worse every day I stay behind. One knows one won’t be killed, but that’s hardly the same as living.”
“Please . . .”
He held his head in his hands. “I’m no use, you see.”
“Don’t,” said Mary. “We’ll get you back on your feet. A glass of my father’s Christmas wine will do the trick. It’s so ghastly, I promise it will make you forget these blues and pray for simple death.”
It made it all the more awful that she was so indestructible. “Please,” he said. “You’d be so much happier without me.”
“But it wouldn’t be my life, don’t you see? You’re the one I’ve chosen, and I love you even more for being good enough to ask me not to choose you.”
A ghost of a smile rose in him. “You are quite mad, I think.”
“Mother just calls me stubborn.”
Tom felt utterly spent, as weak as the tea. It was terrifying, how close one came to cracking up. “God, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “We must take turns, don’t you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.”
They sat for a few minutes in the empty café, finishing the tea while there was still warmth in it. Another couple came in and stamped the slush off their shoes, she in a long hooded cape and he in the uniform of a naval officer. The waitress served them biscuits from under the counter.
Mary laughed and took Tom’s hand. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Out in the snow they drew their coats tight at the throat and walked hand in hand. Although the winter storm was bitter there was comfort in it, since it meant there would be no raid that night. Later they would sleep together—this was understood—and if there was less heat in it than there had been at the start, then perhaps there might be more warmth.
As the dark afternoon sank into night they made their way in silence through the blind city. Their footsteps were softened by the snow. The incalculable damage was hidden, the mounds of rubble turned by the drifts into the shapes of clouds or waves—forms that might naturally be expected to blow through when kinder weather came.
As the light and the sound faded to nothing, all that was left was the two of them. Underneath everything lay the colossal buried city—the patched-up pipes and the improvised lines of communication and the subterranean refuges from the great disincorporating influence of bombs. With the snow it was possible to forget it.