Hilda and I have applied to work on the ambulances. It might be exciting to drive an ambulance—although to listen to my father, my driving would be certain to cause further casualties. In any case, they will not let me teach. It is too bad, but perhaps they are right. It is my constant regret that my class would still be alive if I had not insisted on carrying on once the air raids began. We live, you see, and even a mule like me must learn. I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.
Unless you tell me otherwise, I shall keep up the rent on the garret. I thought you might like it to be there when you geot back. In your wardrobe you have three viable ties, four shirts of which two are almost serviceable, and a lounge suit in a style that I can only describe as conventional. Forgive me if you feel that “dull” is a better word. I have applied mothballs, though I was tempted to use something more flammable. You must let me know what you want to do about arrangements.
Sincerely,
Mary North
Alistair put down the letter and stood up. For a few minutes he looked out over the devastated port and the black harbor still sickly with oil. Then he sat back at his metal table and took up a stub of pencil and an airmail sheet.
Dear Mary,
Thank you for your kind letter. You must surrender the garret and let me know what you have paid in rent so I can reimburse you. As for my poor old clothes, surely there is some yokel in your father’s constituency who can hang them on a scarecrow. Furthermore
He hesitated. What had she meant by You must let me know what you want to do about arrangements? He read her letter through again, finding it impenetrable. If it was a simple request for instructions, perhaps there were too many crocuses in it. If it was something more, then perhaps there were not enough roses. He screwed up his page and began again.
Mary,
If you really do not mind, I hope you will keep the garret on, at least until I have a chance to come and say goodbye to the old dump. I would like a place to remember Tom by. Of course it is your place now, yours and his, so you must do what you feel is
He crumpled that page up too. Was she asking him to talk about Tom, or allowing him not to? She missed Tom, he missed Tom—but the living must live with the living, this was understood in her letter. Therefore, how boorish of him to bang on about Tom.
He rubbed his eyes. It was impossible. In the history of the world there was not one example of a man ever having written a satisfactory letter to a woman who mattered to him. How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks, when his letter would go straight out on the next available airplane. War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.
Mary,
Damn the garret and damn my old clothes, I wish I were there with you.
He stopped. Perhaps he was entirely misreading it. Now that he read her letter again, he was ashamed. She loved Tom, and Tom was dead, and her letter was a game attempt to buck herself up. She was a child talking herself into courage and she wanted a brotherly word from him, nothing more. She needed him to tell her that it was all right, that he felt hollow about Tom too—that this was simply how it was with the dead, and it did not mean that one had not loved them enough. And yet at the same time, her letter seemed to say, “I love you—can anything be done?” after only the mildest decryption.
He put his head in his hands and groaned. She had had this effect on Tom too—had driven his poor friend around the twist wondering if it could possibly be true that she liked him. If Alistair could believe that he felt Tom laughing at him from beyond the grave, it might make everything easier. But the truth, of course, was just as Mary had put it. One felt nothing at all from the dead. They died, and then they were gone, and one’s heart ached from the sudden absence of feeling more than from any surfeit.
He held Mary’s letter and breathed in the smell of it: soap and cigarette smoke. Here it was, in his hands, this hour of her life in London that he supposed had not been straightforward.
He picked up his pencil and began again.
Mary,
I do not mind what you do with the garret. I mind if you are happy. Do not keep the garret on my account. Keep it if you feel better there. Please consider not taking the ambulance driver position. You know that it is dangerous work in a raid, and you have lost quite enough already. What I find with my men is that they will rush into harm’s way after they have lost a friend. Partly it is the desire to avenge, but it is more than that. I tell them that the war is not their fault. I give my men permission to feel guilty if they die themselves, and not before.
Do not let them tell you that you cannot teach anymore. If you are good at it, then teach. Find a way—I do not think you are one to follow orders. We are all of us orphaned by this war—the world that bore us is gone and now we must be useful where we can.
Yours,
Alistair
He folded the aerogramme, addressed it, gave it to Briggs and collapsed back onto the cot.