“Yes?” asked Rosemary Spence, indicating the student at the back of her Shakespeare class, the boy’s eyeglasses opaque discs in the artificial light.
“Well, miss, it seems as if Lear only makes sense when he’s crazy. I mean, when he’s sane, he doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Normally Rosemary Spence would have pressed the student on why he thought that about Lear — was it his own or had he lifted it from Orwell’s essay, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”? But this afternoon her heart wasn’t in it, her attention waning as she worried about Robert.
On the night before he’d left Oxshott on his way back to Scotland, there had been antiaircraft missile fire all along England’s southeast coast — the Soviet air forces pounding the ports, all but destroying a convoy of forty ships that had made the long and dangerous three-thousand-mile voyage from Newfoundland only to come under the fierce bombardment of over five squadrons of Soviet fighter/bombers as the weary convoy approached the Southampton loran station. As the stalks of searchlights clustered like enormous celery sticks, separated, and closed again, trying to hold their Soviet targets, the explosions of iron bombs shattering the docksides of southern England, and the yellow tails and scream of air-to-air and ground-to-air rockets ripping the night sky asunder, she and Robert had made love. And now she held the memory close, it helping her get through the daily anxiety of wondering where he was, whether he was safe. She also tried to escape from the worry by burying herself in her work. But teaching Shakespeare always brought her back to the multitudinous calamities that befall even the most innocent, let alone those at war. To make matters worse, every day more and more countries were being drawn into the maelstrom — all the experts proven disastrously wrong as the war leaders, fearing a nuclear holocaust, held back from pushing the button, unleashing instead a conventional, albeit high-tech, war that was now three months old and showed no signs of letup as country after country, fearful of being caught alone in the storm, threw in its lot with either the NATO alliance or the Soviet armies.
The bell rang at 3:30 for the end of class, but no one could leave the shelter because a salvo of intermediate-range rockets launched from Hamburg batteries had penetrated the AA screen along the Channel, and the “all clear” had not yet sounded. Most of the students used the time to start their homework, but the new boy, Wilkins, who had guffawed at the other boy’s comment on Lear and who was also the manic class clown, began his repertoire of rude noises. It took all Rosemary’s effort to check him, a task that not only a week before she had felt herself more than equal to. Now she simply wished a bomb would fall on him.
Her anxiety about Robert, about everything, had grown much worse after their engagement had been officially announced a few days before he left. Till then, she had never believed herself to be superstitious, but now that their plan to marry was officially proclaimed, she found herself performing small ceremonies of obeisance to some higher order — God, whomever, whatever — as apprehensive, she realized, as those students she’d seen exhibiting obsessive behavior whenever exams were in the offing, their ceremonies of repetition insurance against malevolent forces.
While she and Robert had been together, she hardly knew the war existed, but with him gone to sea, and people congratulating her on the engagement, she suddenly felt more vulnerable, as if both of them, having publicly declared their love, were tempting fate. Then again, she wasn’t sure it was that at all which had driven her into her present and, for her, strange mood of melancholy. Perhaps, she thought, it had more to do with the death of her younger brother, William. After the convoy he was in had been attacked by acoustically detonated mines in the mid-Atlantic, William had been taken to Newfoundland, where the Brentwood connection had first been made with Robert’s sister, Lana, and where, despite an initial healthy prognosis, William died from complications.
“Complications.” In Rosemary’s lexicon, it was simply another word for the inexplicable. Her parents and her sister, Georgina, now a student at LSE, had all been so hopeful that young William would come home. The suddenness of his death had affected them in markedly different ways, but it colored everything they did. For Rosemary, the tragic passages of Shakespeare she had to teach offered no catharsis but rather intensified her awareness of the arbitrariness of one’s life, the dark hand of chance made at once more tangible and terrible during Robert Brentwood’s first visit. He had brought them William’s few trinkets, ID tags, the wrist-watch their father had given him, together with a long, touching letter from Lana Brentwood, William’s nurse. It was a letter so devoid of maudlin sentiment yet so uninhibitedly personal, so typical of Americans, Robert excepted, that the Spence family felt that Lana Brentwood had known William as well as any of them. It was Shakespeare again, Rosemary thought, for had it not been for the man-made Tempest that had destroyed most of the convoy on which William had sailed, she would probably not have met Robert Brentwood. A stranger who, with two weeks leave while the submarine he commanded was rearmed and her hull repainted in Holy Loch, had taken it upon himself — in a moment of boredom more than anything else, as he later confessed to Rosemary— to personally deliver Lana’s letter and William’s few remaining effects.
He had meant to stay only overnight, caught out by the disrupted train schedule, but had stayed in Surrey with the Spences for the remainder of his leave. Rosemary’s father had been taken aback by the rapidity of the romance, but her mother, who Rosemary knew would voice any parental objection if any were to be made, had surprised everyone by instantly accepting the situation. Though grief-stricken by her son’s death, Anne Spence encouraged them both, taking it upon herself, in another act that took her husband, Richard, and two daughters by surprise, to make all the arrangements for the wedding, which would take place during Robert’s next leave. It was, in fact, Anne Spence’s salvation. There was so much to do, so much initiative called for to overcome the scarcities of wartime rationing — a lack of everything from sugar for a wedding cake to paper — that the attention she had to give to all the details for the wedding filled her hours and kept a nervous breakdown at bay.
Richard retired now and then to his study, with the little available brandy he could afford, to calm himself after seeing what she was doing to their savings account. At one point he had seriously considered writing a letter to the local manager of Barclay’s Bank, in Oxshott, to cancel their credit card. But as fall ended, the NATO forces still reeling from the juggernaut and sheer brute strength of the Soviet forces, Richard Spence let his wife spend. It was quite possible that within a year or two they would all be dead. Besides, after William’s death, nothing was the same anymore. Even Rosemary, whom Richard had thought the steadiest and most sensible of them all, had confided to him that she, too, felt adrift; all her own beliefs — her once steady vision of the universe, of cause and effect — no longer held. For her the mere thought that she and Robert — that all of them — were no more than flotsam on the wild sea of the world was terrifying. Her once powerful sense of optimism seemed to have been swept away forever. She was lost, and only in Robert’s arms had she felt safe. She wondered whether she’d agreed to marry him too hastily, more from the fear of a loveless world than the hope of a loving one.
The “all clear” began its wail, as mournful as the earlier air raid warning had been, and as she waited for the students to file out of the shelter, she thought again of how easily she and her class — the entire school, for that matter — could become entombed at any time. It would take only one of the high-explosive iron bombs — as deadly to a shelter as a depth charge to a submarine. She said a prayer — but was anyone listening?
She heard a tearing noise — and laughter. Wilkins, his eyes bright with mischief, was making farting sounds. She was sure that if the school received a direct hit, everyone would die save Wilkins. What she couldn’t stand was his stupid, bovine optimism. She doubted he even knew where most of Europe was, let alone the fact that, except for western France and Spain, it had been all but overrun by the Soviet armies. At the beginning of the war, before Wilkins had shown up, she had encouraged her pupils to keep an up-to-date situation map on the shelter wall. But as the enemy armies smashed through NATO’s central front around Fulda Gap and to the south along the Danube while simultaneously wheeling with thousands more tanks across the North German Plain to Hamburg and Bremen on the way to secure the NATO ports, the students had finally given up on the map.
To make it even more discouraging, the media coverage of the battles was confusing. Unlike the two previous world wars, when newspapers could broadly indicate the ebb and flow of battle, now the battles within the larger battlefields were impossible to follow at times. In the course of a morning, a NATO counterattack with A-10 Thunderbolts — the tank-killing American aircraft — seemed to have the better of it. Then, by midafternoon, the dust was so thick that friend and foe were indistinguishable in satellite photos. In one place it was a raging war of movement. In other zones, with combatants more quickly exhausted in the strain of high-tech combat than in previous, conventional wars, whole companies, especially those of NATO, were reported digging in, either in an effort to catch their breath in the frenzy of retreat or to play for time against the attacking echelons. Here, parts of the crooked front crisscrossed with barbed concertina wire resembled the moonscapes of World War I, which the experts had predicted could never happen, as beleaguered NATO troops anxiously waited for urgently needed refit for then-savaged armored divisions and infantry reinforcements, which, despite being mobile, had to renegotiate overextended supply lines under constant air attack.
And amid all this, Wilkins. Rosemary tried to imagine the parents of such a boy, but she knew that one was inevitably wrong. Some of the most disruptive in class had iron discipline at home, and at the other extreme, well, some of the parents were really worse than the students. She thought his card had said his mother was an accountant in Leatherhead, his father something to do with insurance.
Going up in the lift from the shelter, one of the girls squealed and jumped as if stung. Everyone laughed afresh except the girl, face red as beet root. Wilkins was grinning, his callow expression infuriating Rosemary. “Wilkins!”
“Yes? Me, miss?”
“Was that you?”
“Me, miss?”
“Saturday morning for you. Three hours.”
He was still grinning. She had to stop herself from making it four hours. And when she got home, Georgina, who had come down for the weekend from LSE, was all-knowing, at dinner full as usual of sociological theory, claiming that such a boy was “society’s fault.” The boy’s acting up, she told Rosemary, was “quite clearly a cry for attention.”
“Well, he’ll get it,” Rosemary replied tartly. “I’ve given him a Saturday morning.”
“You see?” responded Georgina, pausing as she reached over a textbook opened ostentatiously to the left of the bread rolls. Georgina’s new habit of reading at the table was, Rosemary had no doubt, another of her younger sister’s defiances of bourgeois manners. Besides, reading while you were eating was something Rosemary had never mastered. For the moment their father was either keeping out of it behind his newspaper or simply wasn’t paying attention.
“See what?” demanded Rosemary, glaring across at Georgina. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“This boy Wilkins,” replied Georgina, breaking a stale ration roll, buttering it with nonchalant grace. “I think he wants you all to himself.”
“Don’t be absurd, Georgina. He’s a recalcitrant yobbo.”
“I mean,” said Georgina, astonishing Rosemary with her ability to have broken the roll without a fall of crumbs onto the pressed white linen tablecloth, “he probably has a thing for you.”
Rosemary’s face turned beet red. She glanced at their father, but he was hidden behind the Daily Telegraph. Anne Spence, who’d just entered the dining room from the kitchen as the exchange between her daughters was heating up, looked wearily down at her younger daughter. “Don’t be ridiculous, Georgina. Rosemary’s old enough to be his mother.”
“Exactly,” countered Georgina knowingly.
A rush of exasperation came from behind the Telegraph, Richard Spence lowering the newspaper, breaking its back, folding the broadsheet to a quarter its size. “That fool Knowlton’s at it again!”
“Who?” asked Georgina. Her father peered over his reading glasses, unsure of whether she knew or not. “Knowlton — Guy Knowlton. That idiot professor who keeps taking out ridiculous advertisements.”
“Oh,” said Georgina, “the man who wants to collect all our hair dryers to save energy.”
“Yes. That’s him.”
“He sounds like a harmless enough eccentric to me, Father.”
“That’s not the point, Georgina. I was telling your mother — you were here, weren’t you, Rosemary?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Here we are, desperately short of all kinds of things, paper not being the least of them, and yet they persist in allowing this, this madman to waste space in—”
“It’s a free country, Daddy,” said Rosemary, tired of his constant harping about the dotty professor. For Richard Spence, Dr. Guy Knowlton, the author of a text on archaeology, continued to represent all that was self-indulgent and wasteful in a country that was fighting for its life and yet in which old fools like Knowlton were allowed to squander valuable resources.
“Do you really think so?” asked Georgina, looking at Rosemary.
Rosemary lifted the teapot lid, seeing it pointless to try to squeeze any more out of the exhausted tea leaves. “Think what?”
“That it’s a free country,” continued Georgina, taking the last of the milk for her tea.
Anne Spence pointedly left the room.
“Don’t upset her like that,” said Richard. “You know how quarrels upset her.”
“It’s not a quarrel, Daddy,” replied Georgina. “I’m merely stating a fact. Just because we’re at war doesn’t mean we can’t question whether we’re really living in a free—”
“Georgina!”
In the strained silence that followed her father’s rebuke, Georgina returned to her book and Rosemary could hear the steady, heavy ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, recalling that the last time she had been so aware of its presence was after she and Robert had made love, when— ironically — at the height of the Soviet rocket attack, she had felt so safe in his arms.
Georgina finished the bread roll and, licking her fingers, ran them around the bread-and-butter plate to gather up the remaining crumbs.
“My God, Georgina,” exclaimed Richard. “Is that what they teach you up there—?”
“It’s very proletarian, Daddy,” said Rosemary. “Didn’t you know?”
Georgina poured herself more tea as if squeezing the pot. “This is a bit weak, isn’t it?”
“We have to use the leaves over again,” said Rosemary. “Rationing. Or don’t you have that in London?”
“I don’t know why you’re so shirty, Rose,” retorted Georgina.
“She’s worried,” said her father.
“We all are,” said Georgina. “This wretched war has mucked everything up. It’s the same old story. Big capital against—”
“Not at the table,” said Richard.
“I would have thought,” put in Rosemary, “that the war suited you very nicely. Liberating women from the bourgeois apron strings. Kitchen to factory. Manpower shortage and all.”
Georgina’s cup stopped in midair and she replaced it on the saucer without having sipped the tea. “Why didn’t I think of that? Rosey — that’s quite brilliant.”
“Thank you,” said Rosemary. “I’m glad we poor country folk occasionally think of—”
“Still,” cut in Georgina, “I bet I’m right about Willie.”
“Who?” asked Richard, looking up from his newspaper. He had thought she said, “William.”
“That boy-Williams.”
“Wilkins,” Rosemary corrected her.
“He’s got the hots for you, Rosey.”
Richard Spence’s paper shot away from him. “What a vulgar expression. Insulting people, is it? Is that what you’re learning up there?”
“Oh really, Daddy. It’s just an expression—”
“Yes, and I don’t care for it.”
There was another long, strained silence.
“Well,” said Georgina finally, “and how about this Robert Brentwood? Bit sudden, Rosey, you sly fox. When do I get to meet him?”
“Excuse me,” said Rosemary, pushing her chair back from the table, brushing her lips quickly with the napkin.
“I only wanted to—” began Georgina. Richard Spence folded the newspaper neatly, ran his hand down the crease, and taking his reading glasses off, rubbed his eyes. “I thought you had grown out of it, Georgina.”
“Out of what?”
“Don’t be obtuse. Your willful aggressiveness. You’re not happy until you push people to the edge. God knows where you get it from.” He looked hard at her. “Why do you do it?”
Georgina said nothing, holding her teacup like a communicant’s chalice, staring ahead.
“Is it because,” Richard said, “you think we don’t — care for you?”
“Care?” said Georgina, her tone defensively hostile as she turned on him. “You can’t even say the word, can you?”
“Your mother and I have never made any distinction—”
“The word’s love, Daddy. Or was that just for William?”
“You astound me.”
“Really?”
“What, pray, is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve always known it, of course,” she said bitterly, putting the cup down hard.
“Known what?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Father,” she said, vigorously folding and refolding her napkin on the table. “Rosey’s always had your heart.”
“Do you think—”
“I know,” cut in Georgina. “Ever since we were children. I’m not being churlish about it. It’s merely an observation anyone could—”
“I’ve always cared for you. Your mother and—”
“If,” said Georgina slowly, a tension clearly crackling in her voice, “you say cared once more, I’ll scream!”
The phone was ringing, and as Richard Spence got up to answer it, Georgina avoided his distracted gaze, her eyes brimming with tears. She heard her father only vaguely, yet despite her hurt, could tell that something was terribly wrong.
“I’ll tell her,” she could hear him say. “Yes. Yes. Thank you for calling.” He put down the receiver slowly and, turning, called for Rosemary.
“She’s gone out,” said Georgina, holding her teacup in both hands, elbows on the table, something Richard Spence could not abide.
“Where?” he asked her.
“I’ve no idea,” said Georgina.
Richard Spence went to the hall and opened the closet, taking out his mackintosh and gum boots. “If your mother asks, tell her I’ve gone looking for her.”
“What’s wrong?”
Her father scooped the keys from the hall stand, put on his deerstalker, and was gone.