Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave Read Free Book Online

different routes.”
    “You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”
    “I’ve had nothing better to do. The Turners went weeks ago. We have a few Romantics left to move out of the side galleries, then half a dozen Surrealists. Soon we’ll be down to the paintings I could have done myself.”
    “But you’ve said it often: we can’t let them make us into barbarians. Someone must stay behind who understands how to put it all back together.”
    Alistair looked at his hands. “Well, the thing is, that someone shan’t be me.’
    Tom felt the shock of the words before he understood their meaning. A constriction in the veins, a sense of imminence, time clenching like a sphincter. A half second’s diminution of the hearing, so that he felt his ears roar for one heartbeat. “God, you haven’t . . .”
    Alistair looked up. “I’m sorry. I did it yesterday.”
    Tom stood with the jam jar still gripped in his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right. There’s bound to be something we can do. There will be a procedure for people who have signed up by mistake. It must happen fifty times a day. There will be some kind of system for it.”
    “The whole point of the system is that one cannot go back, surely. I signed a solemn contract. In any case, it was the right thing to do. I’m going, Tom.”
    “When?’
    “They didn’t say. They gave me three days’ pay and told me to await instructions. There will be recruit training and an officer cadet course, then I suppose I go wherever I am needed.”
    “This isn’t some horrible joke?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    Tom sat down on the floor beside his friend and stared around at the place. The garret changed as he looked. Its devil-may-care medley of bric-a-brac was transformed now into banal juvenilia. As he watched, each carefully cultivated eccentricity—from the unswept floor to the carelessly scattered library books—shrugged off its enchantment until all that was left was an attic flat in an unexceptional borough of London. The flat would revert to the landlady, their life to the world.
    Oh, thought Tom, so it finishes as quickly as this. All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.
    “I’m sorry for what I said, about running off like schoolboys.”
    “That’s all right. A lot of them practically are. You should have seen the recruiting line. I’m twenty-four, and I felt like the old man.”
    Tom swallowed. “Do you think I should volunteer too?”
    “Good god. Why?”
    “Well, I mean I honestly hadn’t thought about it until now.”
    Alistair threw a balled-up sheet of newspaper. “You’re made to be an educator, you old fool. Find a way to do your job again, and then do it. If one could stash schoolchildren down a disused mine in Wales then I’d insist you enlisted with me, but until then I’d say that war isn’t on your curriculum.”
    Tom was silent for a minute. “Thank you.”
    “I thought you might take it harder.”
    “I will miss you.”
    “You certainly will. You’ll have no one to tell you to cheer up. That’s why I’m giving you Gaius Julius Caesar. Every time you look at him, I want you to imagine him saying: ‘Tom, for god’s sake cheer up!’ ”
    Alistair whipped the cat around when he said this, so that it addressed Tom directly. He had sewn two large coat buttons over the sockets for eyes and they were pearlescent and exuberantly mismatched, so that the effect was of a startling and demented supervision.
    “Well, I want you to have this,” said Tom, giving Alistair the jar of jam.
    Alistair peered at the label. “A crude etiquette but a famous vintage, the ’39. I believe I shall lay it down. We shall open it together at war’s end, yes?”
    Tom looked at him. “Will you be all right?”
    “How should I know?”
    “Sorry.”
    “Christ,” said Alistair. “I’m sorry.”
    He lay on his back on the floor, holding the jam up to