Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave Read Free Book Online Page A

the skylight.
    “Tea?” said Tom after a while.
    “If you’re making.”
    “There’s no more sugar, I’m afraid.”
    Alistair said nothing. Tom watched the scarlet and the purple light across his friend’s face.

October, 1939
    SINCE MARY MUST NEITHER bump into her mother nor anyone who conceivably might, she had a day to fill on her own. Autumn had come, with squalls of rain that doused the hot mood of the war. She walked along the Embankment while the southwesterly blew through the railings where children used to rattle their sticks. In the playground at Kensington Gardens the wind scoured the kiteless sky and set the empty swings rocking to their own orphaned frequency.
    How bereft London was, how drably biddable, without its infuriating children. Here and there Mary spotted a rare one whom the evacuation had left marooned. The strays kicked along on their own through the leaves, seal-eyed and forlorn. When she gave an encouraging smile, they only stared back. Mary supposed she could not blame them. How else would one treat the race that had abducted one’s playmates?
    The wind that buffeted her had already blown through half of London, accruing to itself the pewtery, moldering scent of all missing things. Mary drew her raincoat tight and kept walking. In Regent’s Park the wind wrenched the wet yellow leaves from the trees. Horse chestnuts lay in their cases, grave with mildew. She supposed that nature had no provision for conkers beyond the earnest expectation that boys in knee shorts would always come, world without end, to take them home and dangle them on shoe laces and invest each one with brash and improbable hope.
    Mary found a café where she was not known and sat at the back, away from the steamed-up window. Over stewed tea she took paper and pen from her bag to write to Zachary.
    Just writing the address made her fret. It was one of those villages in the faraway England that London never called to mind unless some ominous thing happened—a landslip, or the birth of a two-headed foal—that brought its name into the newspaper. She did not know how parents could bear to ink such addresses onto letters for their children. Corfe Mullen, Cleobury Mortimer, Abinger Hammer: these, surely, were places of obfuscating mist and sudden disaster, from whence one knew nobody, and of which one knew nothing. Places full of country folk: eerie and bulb-nosed, smeared with chicken blood on full- moon nights.
Dear Zachary , I feel dreadful that I was not able to keep my promise to come with you, but I hope that you do understand the need for the evacuation.
    She gnawed at the top of her pencil. Now that great solid London was blacked out and sandbagged and dug in, here was this awful silence that the wet wind couldn’t disguise. Autumn had come but the Germans hadn’t, after all.
I trust you have found a good family to take care of you.
    The wind rattled the café’s windows, and in the absence of shrill voices she could hear the cutlery scrape as the couple by the window chased peas around their plates. They were parents, of course they were: there was no other way to accrue such intricate worry lines. Are we quite sure we have done the right thing?
    On every corner Mary had passed that day there had been posters explaining that the children should remain evacuated—that the greatest Christmas gift to Herr Hitler would be to bring them home into harm’s way.
I am sure you are being jolly fearless
    Mary frowned and rubbed this out. The authorities imagined that the individual was a glove, requiring only the animating hand of a slogan. She could almost see her father, in some windowless room of the House, penning the script in committee. All morning the damp southwesterly had caught at the corners of the new slogans and sent them flapping against the billboards, exposing the fossil seams of earlier imprecations in their sediment of paste.
Even though I was your teacher for only a week, I should like you to know that