Inexpressible Island Read online

  But despite this, or maybe because of this, he is determined to get Mia out of London. It’s hard not to take the bombing personally. Frankie died in the explosion at the Ten Bells. Liz didn’t die, but she was badly burned. He doesn’t want to point out to Mia the brutal reality, hoping she can see it herself, but there’s no one left to piece together the jigsaw that is Mia if the puzzle maker herself is dead. Most certainly Julian can’t tell Mia the unspeakable truth. If he dies before she does in one of these attacks, there is no chance for her. This struck him as he lay bleeding in the dust of Ten Bells. Their days are like grass. She will vanish as Wild has vanished, a dandelion fuzz in the passing wind, a lover like a flower. If Julian dies, he will never know what happens to her.

  As he tries to persuade her with fake persuasion, Mia uses on him the unassailable logic of those whose knowledge of the future is woefully and blessedly nil. “Trains are bombed, too, Jules,” she says. “And what about the cities the trains pass through? Everything’s bombed. Coventry’s been leveled. The entire cathedral is gone!”

  “We’re not going to Coventry,” Julian says. “We’re traveling north to Leeds. From there we’ll make a sharp left to Blackpool.”

  “Soon Blackpool will be leveled same as the others,” she says. “We have a better chance in London. It’s bigger. More places to hide.”

  “Where has our hiding gotten us?”

  “Are you here? Am I here? I’d say pretty far.”

  “What if I told you,” Julian says, “that Blackpool will never come under direct attack?”

  Mia is quiet. “What do you mean, never? You mean, not yet?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then I’m right, and there’s no reason it won’t be bombed tomorrow or the next day.”

  “It won’t be bombed tomorrow or the next day.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “How?”

  “I just know.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  She mulls. “You don’t think it will ever be bombed?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Oh, yeah? Where’s Wild, then?”

  “That I don’t know.” He may never learn of Wild’s fate. It cuts him up to think this, to say this. It’s an open wound.

  * * *

  And then there were three.

  Julian, Mia and Liz return to Bank. Liz has nasty burns on her legs that need to be cleaned three times a day.

  In the passageway that’s been Mia’s home since September, a dozen new people lie in their bunks. One exquisitely far-sighted young bloke with a pair of magnifying lenses for glasses, one lens cracked, says, “Sorry, mates, we in your spot? It was empty for days, the warden said we could . . .”

  Liz asks if anyone has seen a blond man without an arm. He’s easy to recognize. No one speaks up. “Let’s go sleep somewhere else,” Liz says to Julian and Mia after she collects her few things that have been thrown in the corner with the rest of the trash. “I have to go to work in the morning. The Evening Standard still needs me to proofread.”

  Challengingly, Mia stares down Julian, as if she believes Julian is too nice a guy to tell Liz they’re about to abandon her and run for the hills. Julian is about to open his mouth to prove to Mia just how wrong she is when he hears a familiar voice calling for them from the top of the station, coming down the escalator. The speed with which all three of them spin around would make a stone weep if a stone was watching them, and could weep.

  But it’s not Wild.

  It’s Nick Moore, unharmed and joyously ignorant.

  “What happened to your head, Ghost Bride?” he says, all chipper and jokey. “It’s a good look for you. Did you miss me, kids? I’ve been at the Ford plant!” he announces, as if it’s the most exciting news. “Well, it is exciting. We’re bombed every fugging day, yet look at me, not a scratch. Well, that’s not true.” He pulls up his pant leg to show them a cut on his shin. “A scratch.” He laughs. “I gotta show Dunk. Where is everybody?” He glances inside their passageway and frowns in disgust. “Fuck off, who are they?”

  “Javert told them they could bunk there,” Liz says.

  “Fuck off, why would he do that?” Nick still has a smile on. “Where’s our crew?”

  Mia shakes her head.

  Nick is still smiling but frozen. Like his mouth can’t catch up with what his brain is processing. “What, no one?”

  Mia shakes her head. “Sheila might be okay.”

  “Fuck off, I don’t believe you. Duncan?”

  “He broke his back. He’s at Royal London.”

  “Fuck off!” says Nick. The smile is gone. “Fuck off! Robbie? Kate? Frankie? Doc Cozens? Wild?”

  Mia shakes her head. Liz looks away.

  Nick stops saying anything else, just keeps repeating his two worn-out words over and over. A few minutes later he spins and leaves. They watch him stumbling up the motionless escalator, crying, “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!”

  Julian gets an idea. He tells Mia. They ask Liz to wait and run up the escalator after Nick. “Nick! Wait! Nick!”

  “Fuck off!” sobs Nick.

  * * *

  “Fuck off!” Nick says when Julian tells him of his plan.

  “Come on,” Julian says. “Liz can’t go to Birmingham. Her mother told her so. And we’re leaving for Blackpool . . .”

  “Jules insists.” Mia rolls her eyes.

  “We’ll leave today if you take her,” Julian says. “There’s no one to look after her here.”

  “So take her with you.”

  “Nick, Dagenham is five miles away,” Julian says. “Blackpool is half a country away. She is not safe with us. In the spring, the British Museum will reopen. She has a job. She’ll move back to London. It’s just for a little while.”

  “Well, I can’t look after her! Are you daft? Fuck off!”

  “Come on, mate,” Julian says. “Just take her with you.”

  “And where will she live, may I ask?”

  “You must have an aunt, a grandma, a spinster cousin she can bunk with, no?”

  “Fuck off,” says Nick, but quieter.

  “And Duncan still needs you to visit. Shona, too. And maybe when spring comes and London gets quieter, you and Liz can look for Wild.”

  “Fuck off,” whispers Nick.

  Only once Nick agrees, does Julian give Nick a gold sovereign to help with Liz’s expenses. He didn’t want to offer it until he knew for sure Nick would take her. Because otherwise, what would happen to Liz when the money ran out?

  They return to the platforms below, sit Liz down in a chair near the makeshift stage by the escalator where Mia had put on so many shows, where Julian and Mia entertained the troops, where Julian and Finch fought to the death, and talk to her about their plan. Go, Liz. It’s only for a little while, until things get better. Be safe. Safer. Go with Nick.

  Liz cries. She wants to hug Mia, but Mia’s broken collarbone prevents physical displays of farewell. “Will you come back?” she asks.

  “Of course,” Mia replies. “After the holidays. Maybe in March when the weather gets better. I promise.”

  Julian says nothing. The 49th day is like the 49th parallel. Either the victorious armies push through, or they’re vanquished. And the 49th day is 14 days away.

  All four walk up the long escalator, three of them painfully slowly. Before they leave Bank for good, Julian turns and casts one last look below, catching a sideways glimpse of the tunnels where he and the Ten Bells crew lived and slept and sang and drank, casts one last look on their igloo and remembers the words Edgar Evans said to him about his own confinement on Inexpressible Island. “There was no light in the sky. And yet every night when we made it through another day alive, we felt so happy. We drank, and read aloud to one another, we mocked each other, told jokes, sang songs. I got closer to those men than I ever got to anyone. Because we weren’t alone. We were in it together.”
r />   Julian and Mia walk Nick and Liz to Liverpool Street, and by the old Great Eastern Hotel watch them take the stairs down to the trains. Liz carries her purse, her Bible, and her mother’s favorite blanket, the only things she cared to salvage from her life in London.

  “I got my first telegram, Nick,” Liz says to him tearfully.

  “Fuck off. How was it? Was it everything you dreamed of?”

  “Yes. It was a life and death thing.”

  “This way, Lizzie, and mind the gap.” Nick puts his arm on her back. “You don’t want to trip.” Turning around, he looks up and waves goodbye to Julian and Mia, mouthing to them, “Fuck off.”

  22

  A Girl Named Maria

  AND THEN THERE WERE TWO.

  Before they go to King’s Cross and leave London, Julian asks the cab driver to take them to Baker Street. Julian wants to show Mia a café. Of course, it’s not warm; it’s terrible out, there’s snow on the ground, and she’s not wearing a summer dress, and the red beret is gone, gone, gone, but there’s a café on Baker Street that looks . . . well, if not quite right, it looks familiar. He wants to show it to Mia, to see if it jogs her memory. To see if her standing on that street nudges something well-known in his own heart. He wants to see if there’s a small glimpse of the fading dream he can catch with her in their all too real life.

  The café is shuttered. The golden awning is pulled up. The large glass window has been blown out and plywood is nailed in its place. The sidewalk is mush and black mud and ice. Mortar dust melts into the water, covering their boots and the hems of their coats in granite glue.

  “This is what you wanted to show me?” Mia says.

  “I had a dream that I waited for you at a table outside a café like this one,” Julian says. “Not quite like this.”

  “I should hope not. This is the pits.”

  “There was sun, and a bus, and cabs. Does it look familiar?” He hangs his head. It’s unrecognizable even to him.

  “It doesn’t and let’s go,” she says, taking his good arm. It’s hard for her to stand, to walk. “I don’t want to miss the train because we’re gawping at some non-existent thing.”

  “It’s not non-existent,” Julian mutters inaudibly. “It’s just invisible to the naked eye. Like time.”

  At King’s Cross, there’s one train headed to Leeds. It’s not a direct train, there are several stops and a change in Sheffield. Great, Julian thinks. Sheffield comes under heavy attack sometime in December 1940. He wishes he could remember the day. But if it hasn’t happened already, they’re fast running out of December days. Which means it’s still up ahead. No one can say for sure how long it will take to get to Leeds. No one can even say how long it will take to get to Sheffield, a hundred and seventy miles away. The civilian train must stop and wait for the military trains to pass before proceeding. No trains run past eight p.m., not even military. It’s not safe. They stop on the tracks to wait out the darkness in case of an attack. If there is bombing and the tracks get broken, they need to be fixed before travel can resume. Track engineers are few and far between.

  When Mia hears the litany of assault on British Rail, she stares at Julian interminably, as if something is happening here that she doesn’t understand and is afraid to ask about. Why would you be taking me into the war zone, the mute question in her eyes reads. Why would you think this is a good idea? He doesn’t return her gaze.

  It’s three in the afternoon by the time the train pulls out of King’s Cross, traveling slow. There is no first class or coach. There is only train. She sits on his left by the window, looking desperately forlorn. Julian wants to put his arm around her, but they’re both so injured.

  Be careful with your body. Flesh is mortal. It can and will perish.

  “It’s been so blitzy the last few weeks, hasn’t it?” Mia says, as if reading his mind.

  “It has.” Julian helps her light a cigarette with the lighter that says sad girls smoke a lot.

  “I’m a little bit down today,” she says, her eyes welling up. “I’m not as beautiful when I’m not happy, right?”

  “Still more beautiful than anyone,” he says, stroking her bandaged head. “The sadness levels the playing field slightly.”

  “Is there any food?”

  They didn’t bring much. They can’t carry much. Julian has a bottle of whiskey in his coat, cigarettes for her, old bread, and a bar of chocolate. She eats the bar of chocolate by the time they stop for the night, somewhere near Stevenage. They’re barely out of London.

  She closes her eyes. He watches over her. God above, help her. Mia, once I saw you holding a baby. All of it a mirage. The sight, the baby, you. Do you remember? We sat in Grey Gardens and held baby Jacob on our laps and pretended he was ours. It was summer. We were warm, you made jokes. We thought the worst thing that could happen to us was those hateful Pye women trailing us through the halcyon London streets.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, the train resumes its sclerotic pace across the wintry British countryside. They’re traveling north to Sheffield by taking the more easterly route through Cambridge, to get as far as possible from the continuously assaulted Coventry. From the restaurant car, Julian gets them some fresh bread, hot tea, a pat of rationed butter, and some rationed cheese, and he and Mia pass the time, reading the names of the towns outside their windows and imagining living in them.

  They manage to get past Cambridge and then stop for nearly half a day. The tracks have been blown up. While they wait for them to be fixed, the conductor turns off the engine because it’s unpatriotic to waste coal, even though human beings might freeze. The train stands forsaken between a field and a forest, somewhere between Biggleswade and Bulby. Mia says she’d like to live in Bulby. Julian prefers Biggleswade.

  Hours later, the tracks are fixed, and the train moves on, traveling barely twenty miles before darkness falls. But this time they’re between two open fields and no cover. The engineer comes through and tells everyone to disembark for their own safety. If the Germans fly overhead and see the train laid out and exposed on the main tracks, it will be the first thing they’ll bomb. The conductor recommends finding shelter in the woods, half a mile away, or three miles down the road in a town called Over. Maybe they could find some shelter there, but they must be back at the train by seven a.m. tomorrow . . .

  It snowed, and a white film covers the earth. The temperature dipped right before freezing, and the film has turned to ice. The train turns off its lights. No one leaves. Staying on the train may be more dangerous, but it’s blackout in the countryside, and the train is still a few degrees warmer than out there.

  Julian asks the conductor for some blankets. The man doesn’t have enough blankets for everyone and can’t be seen favoring Julian. He’ll have a mutiny on his hands. But for ten pounds, the conductor takes pity on them, and allows them to sneak into the luggage car, away from prying eyes. He brings them some blankets, a candle, and even some bandages. “Her head gash needs to be cleaned,” the conductor says, handing them a bucket of snow. “I’ll lock you in here but don’t get so drunk that you burn the place down.”

  “We make no promises,” says Mia.

  Julian washes out Mia’s scalp wound with the melted snow water and whiskey and then rebandages her. He takes off his coat and vest and shirt, and shivers in the cold while she cleans his back and rebandages him with the gauze that’s left.

  “Look at us fussing over each other like monkeys at Regent’s Zoo,” she says. “And we’re locked in a cage like monkeys, too.”

  Before she helps him put on his shirt, she holds out his left arm and studies the tattoos upside down. She sits next to him on a steamer trunk and reads the inky names to herself, running her finger over each one, from his wrist to the crook of his elbow, as her mouth forms the words.

  “How have I not noticed these before?” she says.

  “How hard were you looking?”

  “At the Savoy I didn’t see them.”
/>   “How hard were you looking at the Savoy?”

  They glance at each other ruefully. “Time for a drink,” she says, helping him with his shirt and vest.

  “Just one?”

  They drink; they count their days. It’s the 14th of December. What should we drink to?

  They’re not for want of things to drink to. Soon they’ll be for want of drink.

  To London!

  To Blackpool!

  To Churchill!

  To Christmas!

  To Bank!

  To the stage!

  To Finch!

  To their friends!

  God bless them, Mia says. Finch was a good guy. You would’ve liked him.

  I already liked him, Julian says. He was funny.

  Not on purpose, Mia says.

  That’s why he was funny.

  They drink to their wounds, she drinks to his missing fingers. She kisses the nubs, one, two, three, and drinks to them again. This is how you know we can’t get married for real, she says. You’re missing your ring finger.

  He raises his left hand—with all the fingers.

  Oh, yeah. She giggles.

  They wonder if they’ve had enough to drink.

  Heartily they conclude they haven’t.