Finally she drew Britain, being generous with the width of the English Channel and giving the British Isles three times the area on the blackboard that they merited. She thought it unfair to expect children to understand that it was possible to resist, from an island the size of her hand, a tyranny that stretched the whole width of the blackboard from Brest to Białystok.
“And so you see, the enemy has moved into France, but that, you may be perfectly sure, is as far as he will come. Who can tell me why that is?”
Betty had her hand up again, but Mary wasn’t buying. “What do you think, Zachary?”
His eyes came back into focus. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“You mustn’t be.”
He sighed. “Sorry.”
She knelt by his desk. “Anything in the Germans’ way? Any water?”
His eyes brightened. “Oh, the sea. The Channel.”
She smiled. “You see? It’s fine to raise your hand and say these things.”
“I thought it was something difficult.”
“You can trust a dunce like me, you know. If it was hard I wouldn’t know the answer myself, and I shouldn’t ask in case you showed me up.”
He held her eyes, his chin up for once. She hoped it was not too much to ask, that he should trust her. But then again it was not she who had been starved and stoned out of her evacuation village. It was not she who had needed a week in the Royal Free Hospital, with bed rest and vitamin shots, to recover from a trip to the countryside.
She stood to address the class again. “And if they do somehow cross the Channel, we’ll put up a ferocious resistance and they’ll never get inland.”
The inscrutable looks children gave when they understood everything or nothing. In all likelihood they were simply tired. Mary decided to call it a day. She wound the Columbia gramophone that Tom had loaned her, and put Thomas in charge of choosing the discs. It was not officially recommended, an afternoon of light jazz and dance tunes—but neither was it explicitly stated that one ought to bore one’s class to death on a Friday afternoon.
Thomas had turned out to be a handy gramophone operator. He had brought some recordings from home—Maurice Chevalier and Cole Porter—and since the children had been good all week she allowed those whom the mood took to dance. While the music played she opened the heavy hymnal in which the class had pressed summer flowers. The children who wanted to do collage came and took some. The others danced to the gramophone or went out to the corridor for hopscotch, which was another thing Mary permitted on a Friday afternoon to any child who could prove beyond reasonable doubt that the war had not been their idea.
Only Zachary sat alone at his desk, eating the paste he should have been sticking flowers with.
“Zachary, is there nothing you won’t eat?”
His thoughtful chewing suggested he had taken her question under advisement.
“How are things at home?”
He grinned pastily. “My father says I can go to the shop. He’s giving me a ha’penny and I already have a ha’penny, so I can get eight pear drops at eight for a penny, or four barley sweets at four a penny, I haven’t decided.”
It was a solemn choice. Mary nodded. “Supposing you bought two barley sweets, how many pear drops could you still buy?”
“Four,” said Zachary.
“And what is one, minus two quarters, times eight?”
He eyed her as if astonished by the cruelty. “Don’t.”
“But it is the exact same question, don’t you see? Mathematics is only life with the word ‘sweets’ removed.”
He shrugged. “Can I have a cigarette now?”
“Not until you are twelve.”
“But you said I could have one when I was eleven.”
“That was when you were ten. The rule is: no cigarettes until cigarettes are shorter than your fingers.”
He scowled. “I hope the Germans invade and shoot you.”
“Your new German teacher would be even stricter. They are famous for it, I’m afraid.”
“Will they come?” he said, with such unheralded anxiety that it caught her off guard. The music had stopped; Thomas was changing the disc.
Since all the children were listening, Mary laughed. “Of course not!”
But of course the Germans would come. The reality was there on the blackboard and in the ache of her forearm. It was all very well listening to patriotic speeches on the wireless. It wasn’t until one had used the whole board to map the great sweep of the Blitzkrieg that one realised how little extra chalk would extend the onslaught to London.
“What if they come at night?” said Zachary. “When nobody’s expecting?”
She shook her head. “We have whole ministries full of people whose only job is to expect. They have plans for if the moon goes square and plans for if the sun loses his trilby. Trust me, children, we will be ready.”
Zachary tried a smile. But of course the Gestapo would murder him, after the Germans won. London would hold, and fight—it wouldn’t be like Paris. There would be a siege, with horrifying hunger. The pigeons would be eaten, and then the rats, using trapping techniques that would be disseminated in illustrated pamphlets, and finally when the pigeons and the rats and the family pets were gone, the dead would be cannibalized in a systematic, orderly and documented fashion according to a protocol that doubtless already existed in the contingency files of one of the more tight-lipped ministries. Those left alive would be grateful for death by the time the city fell.
“So everything will be fine?” said Thomas.
“Yes, children, everything will be fine.”
Mary smiled for her class. But only the previous afternoon, over ice creams in Hyde Park, she and Hilda had discussed what they would do if the enemy came. The problem with an education was that one knew perfectly well what soldiers did when they sacked a refractory city—it was all there in Virgil and Gibbon.
“I should think the soldiers will ravish us until they are weary from it, don’t you?” said Hilda, yawning.
Mary licked her ice cream. “It might not be awfully fun.”
“Selfish, I know, but we probably ought to kill ourselves first.”
Mary said, “Is your ice cream melting, too?”
“Your problem is that you don’t eat it fast enough.”
“Because vanilla goes straight to the hips. It is well known.”
“Give me yours as well, then. I intend to become as fat as a bus—then the Germans will jolly well rape you first.”
“I thought you wanted us to do away with ourselves.”
Hilda gave a worried look. “I might not manage it.”
“I can shoot you with my father’s gun if you like. You know, the pretty one with the geese on the stock.”
“I’d hate for you to go to any trouble.”
“Oh no, really. It would be my absolute pleasure.”
“And you? I’d hate for you to be left out.”
“I can have Palmer shoot me. I’m sure he’ll have a way of doing it discreetly, so that one hardly notices.”
“Oh good—let’s have Palmer shoot both of us, shall we? I trust he has a Sunday firearm that he favors if your father is in residence, and a workaday gun if not?”
“I should be disappointed to find it were otherwise.”
“Have him shoot me in the heart, will you? This hair took all morning.”
“Consider him advised. But what shall we really do, if they come?”
Hilda dabbed at her ice cream. “It would have to be the river. Weigh ourselves down with stones and wade in.”
“Very well,” said Mary. “But nowhere downstream of Westminster.”
“Good god, no! One hopes for death, not mortification.”
Mary realized her class was looking up at her. She clapped her hands and smiled. “Come
along, then! Shall we have another disc?”
Thomas started up the gramophone with a Charleston from the Piccadilly Players. It was Tom’s—one of the first discs he’d played her. Zachary went to the piano and played along. He found the key first time, showering playful notes on the off-beat. So long as a thing was not perfectly simple to learn, the boy was good at it. Searching for the key to him she had read his reports from the three years of schooling he’d had since arriving from America. In every one of them his teachers had written: Must try harder.
“Miss?” said Zachary, looking up from the keyboard. “Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what happened to you.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“Yes, but . . . we did it.”
A shrug, a few chords. Then: “Miss, would you like to dance?” He grinned, fingers spritzing the keyboard.
She laughed. “Oh good lord, stop it!”
He held out his left hand while his right still played along. “Well?”
On the disc the band sang “Sunny Skies.” She said, “I shouldn’t.’
“Why?”
“I mean, I don’t know if . . . we . . . should.”
He gave a quick smile and looked back down at the keyboard. “All right.”
Mary’s chest ached, which was unfair of it, since of course she was only being sensible. One oughtn’t to dance with the children—of any stripe—and especially not a colored one. Word would reach all of the parents by sundown, and there would be no end of unpleasantness.
But the ache deepened as she watched him play. And she thought: But so what? There might be a sniffy letter, even an official reprimand. But perhaps one ought to set one’s own transgressions against the enemy’s, these days. When one considered that the Germans would establish air superiority before bringing in a spearhead of tanks backed up by infantry in phased echelons, and follow up with collective reprisals against civilian elements that continued to resist, to dance seemed quite inoffensive.
“On second thought, thank you,” she said. “I’d love to dance.”
She took his hands. The gramophone rang brassy through its horn. And there, at the point marked on the map in her original orders, in the small space of parquet floor she had scrubbed clean herself between the front row of desks and the blackboard, Mary danced the Charleston with Zachary and it seemed to her that both of them were rather good at it.
August, 1940
TOM SAID, “I HAD a letter from Alistair. His mob is due to ship out again and they’re giving them leave beforehand.”
Mary propped herself on the pillow and lit a cigarette. “He’s your friend, you should get him up to town.”
“You know I’ve tried. I wonder if we might go to see him instead.”
“To the provinces? Hay wains and bigotry? I can’t say I’m tempted.”
“You know it isn’t like that.”
“Unless one is colored or otherwise vulnerable, darling.”
“And since we are neither of those things?”
“ ‘Then of course the provincials would doff their caps to us, the lambs.”
“Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you.”
“You see?” said Mary, tapping ash. “You are brighter than you look.”
“I do miss Alistair, though. I worry something’s happened to his head.”
“Shell shock, do you mean?”
“Oh god,” said Tom, “not as bad as that. His letters are perfectly fine. For a start, they are letters. They’re not—oh, you know—poetry.”
“At least there is that.”
“I can see it might feel queer, though, coming back to town after battle.”
Mary frowned. “Is Alistair good-looking?”
“How should I know?”
“Well, is he tall?”
“I suppose so. Six-one, six-two?”
“Good. And his eyes?”
“I can’t say I’ve ever noticed them.”
“I despair. But he is a full captain? Own teeth, no visible Nazi insignia?”
“Confirmed on all counts.”
“Then he’ll do for my friend Hilda. Invite him for a double date. Tell him Hilda is pretty, and comfortably off, and disinclined to chastity. If that doesn’t prise the poor man out of the countryside then perhaps it’s best if he stays.”
“You really won’t come to visit him there?”
Mary stubbed out her cigarette. “Not till perdition congeals.”
“You shouldn’t damn the whole of England, you know, over what happened to one boy.”
“I shall damn as I please. What is the use of coming from a good family, if one cannot damn as the need arises?”
“It’s just that you seem rather soft on Zachary.”
“No softer than on any of my other children.”
“But last month—don’t you see? Don’t you think one crosses a line, slightly, when one actually dances with a nigger?”
“Must you bring it up again? And don’t use that word. It’s cheap.”
“It’s only an endearment, isn’t it? Like ‘Taffy’ or ‘Jock.’ If the child were Welsh and I called him ‘Taffy,’ you wouldn’t blink.”
“But the child is American. His father moved them here ages ago. Call him a Yank if you must.”
“And that would be better because?”
“Because ‘Yank’ is a proper noun and it takes a capital and it has a capital too, whereas ‘nigger’ has neither. The day we allow the child his own country and lodge our ambassador in its principal city is the day I shall let you call him ‘Nigger,’ and even then I shall jolly well expect to hear the capital N when you enunciate.”
Tom held up his hands. “I didn’t know he was American.”
“Half the black entertainers are. Where did you think they were from?”
“I assumed they were supplied by some ministry, in support of morale.”
Mary softened. “You see! My Tom is still in there somewhere.”
“I suppose I’m just jealous.”
She kissed his cheek. “He’s eleven years old, darling.”
“Just . . . you know. Try not to dance with him again.”
She drew away under the covers. “I shall dance as it pleases me.”
He grinned. “But you don’t want to make waves, do you?”
“We make pressed flowers. We make decorations with poster paint and glue. Waves don’t come into it.”
“But you must see what I’m telling you.”
“I’m not entirely sure I do.”
“Please, Mary. Must we talk about work?”
“Oh, are we talking about work?”
“I suppose we are, now.”
“Fine, then I suppose I shall get out of your bed, now.”
She stalked across the garret, put on his discarded dressing gown, sat at the piano and struck an ironic discord.
He groaned. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, please, never apologize for being professional.”
He said nothing.
Mary sighed. “What?”
“Well, you don’t seem to see the trouble you could make.”
“For my teaching career? It could hardly get worse. I am on half-pay and I have half a class of retards, cripples and pariahs. If I were to be sacked I might consider it a promotion.”
“You wanted that job.”
“So what would you have me do? Bow to you in gratitude?”
“Look, you know I’m in a spot. I want the schools open as much as you do, and yet the policy is to maintain the evacuation. I have a little leeway but I’m walking a tightrope. You do understand the delicacy?”
“No, Tom, it never once occurred to me. I suppose it is because you are a man with weighty responsibilities and I am just a
foolish young girl.”
Tom held his head and was silent for a minute. “All right. Fine. Please may I have Mary back now?”
She went to ruffle his hair. “Not until you’ve apologized to Miss North.”
Tom took her hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry. I am. It’s just that keeping the school open is harder than you know, and it’s only really doable at all so long as no one, you know . . . notices.”
“Do give me some credit. I’m running a school, not a jive club. The children worked all week, and this was half an hour on a Friday afternoon.”
“Friday, Saturday or Judgment Day. You dance with a n . . . with a Negro boy, and people will talk.”
Mary pulled her hand away and lit a cigarette. “Don’t you suppose they have bigger things to listen to? You know, what with the Germans being so vocal?”
“But you know how people gossip. It’s a comfort, isn’t it, to fall back on the old prejudices when everything else is in flux.”
“Are we talking about other people’s prejudices, darling, or yours?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s just that no one else has complained, have they? I might have expected a note from a parent or some busybody. But hardly from you.”
“Mary, please.”
“Don’t Mary me.”
“Sorry. But it isn’t for us to change how things are. I’m just an administrator. You’re just a teacher.’
“Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”
He stared at her as if he had only just noticed she was real. She was angry, she supposed, at more than just him. Even as she railed, a hollow feeling grew that perhaps life would turn out to be like this. Not, after all, the effortful ascent to grace that she had imagined, but rather a gradual accretion of weight and complexity—and not in one great mass that could be shouldered as Atlas had, but in many mundane and antiheroic fragments with a collective tendency to drag one down to the mean. Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else’s report.