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  Later, much later, when she is back home in England, she will write what will become the first of what she comes to call her descriptions.

  For hours, for no reason that I could imagine, I drew black swans. Hunched over a piece of cardboard on the floor of the hotel room, the coal softening to dust on this surface beneath me.

  What I wanted was the simple pleasure of seeing you again. But you didn’t come, couldn’t come. I don’t know how to make you return to me.

  But I did come to know the black swan. I knew the long snake flex of its neck, knew that the shape of the body was a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. I fastened these images to paper, called them swan. And then I rose, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walked out through broken streets feathered with shadow—darkness lifting me home.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1940

  Harriet Marsh is certain of very few things. As she washes the front hall of her building, she takes an inventory. She used to believe in love, but she has worn that down to nothing. Every time she visits the memory of Owen it is foggier, farther away. She used to believe her writing was a way to stay connected to her dead husband, but years of typing up her descriptions after work in the cold offices of Bartlett’s Coal Merchants have left her emptied out of feeling. She is tired of trying to hammer a moment shut with words. All she has left is the outdoors, and most days this is a noon-hour head-down tromp through the muddy farmers’ fields that surround Coventry, where she tries desperately to be moved by a single dog rose or the flower of the black-thorn hedge.

  Nothing holds its truth for long enough. Home leaves us, not the other way around, she thinks. And what are we meant to do when we come to know that?

  Harriet is disappointed by the new war but not devastated by it. She won’t suffer as she suffered in the first war. This war does not have the power to do that to her. She sullenly capitulates to the rationing, doesn’t mind eating the horse meat—although the yellow fat that rivers through it is disgusting. She has even eaten the new meat product called snook, which is a rather horrifying cross between Spam, corned beef, and rubber. It has a grey appearance and smells like fish gone off.

  Harriet endures the talk of raids and bombardments, listens to Wendell Mumby’s endless fantasies of saving the entire nation single-handedly from enemy capture. She has sewn blackout curtains for the flats in her building, painted her bicycle black, helped her neighbours dig a three-foot pit in their back garden for an Anderson bomb shelter. As if that would save them.

  But this war, although not equipped to cause emotional pain to Harriet, is more dangerous to her physical well-being. The Germans are intent on flattening London and other major British cities. Having recently conquered Holland, they can use airbases there and in France to fly back and forth across the Channel, carrying their deadly cargo of bombs. Since September 7, there have been bombing raids against London for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Churchill, instead of being persuaded by these attacks to negotiate peace, has appealed to the British public to stand firm against the onslaught. Everyone is trying to be courageous. The most common thing Harriet sees in the boarded-up shop windows is the hastily scrawled sign Business as usual.

  The RAF is countering with raids against Berlin and other German cities, but it is no match yet for the steady wave of German bombers. The RAF targets are too far inland. The most it can hope for, at this point, is to engage with the enemy planes over the Channel, when the Luftwaffe is on its way to bomb England.

  Harriet admires Churchill’s stubborn refusal to admit defeat, but she also fears privately that the Germans are win ning the war, and that it won’t be long until London is com pletely destroyed, although she dares not say this to anyone. And, if London is destroyed, England will fall.

  “Bomb!” yells the boy on the chancel roof.

  Harriet hears the drop and sizzle, can see that the object that has fallen from the sky to the roof is too small to be a bomb. It looks no bigger than a rubber ball. She can smell the singe of it from her roof.

  “It’s not a bomb,” she says, and the boy turns back toward her voice from where he had skittered off in the direction of the ladder.

  “You’re a woman,” he says.

  Harriet Marsh coughs and lowers her voice. “No, I’m not,” she says hopelessly. “I’m Wendell Mumby.”

  The boy laughs, then he crouches on the chancel roof.

  “What is it?” says Harriet.

  “It’s a bird, Wendy,” he says. “It’s a bird, and it’s fully cooked. It must have flown through the fire.” He nudges the charred body of the swallow with his foot until it rolls off the edge of the roof.

  Perhaps the fire on the horizon is so great that the flames reach right up into the sky, as high as the flight of a bird. This is what Harriet thinks but does not say. She also thinks the glow of the fire is brighter, closer than it was mere minutes ago. All these autumn nights Wendell Mumby has fire-watched on the roof of this cathedral and never had to deal with a fire. He assured Harriet she would have the same experience. She feels angry at Wendell for misleading her; and then she realizes she is feeling angry so she won’t have to feel afraid. But it’s no use. She feels afraid anyway.

  As if to give voice to her fear, the air-raid sirens start to wail. The thunder of the German bombers rolls across the sky.

  The first incendiary bomb falls on the chancel roof. It is long and cylindrical, like a firecracker, and the moment it makes contact with the roof it blossoms into flame.

  “Sand. Use the sand,” yells the fire-watcher on the south chapel roof.

  The boy douses the fire with his bucket and kicks the extinguished flare off the roof.

  An incendiary drops on the roof of the south aisle, above where the massive pipe organ sits. A firebomb hits the roof above the nave. This one burns through the lead tiles. Men are climbing from the ground, up the ladders, and onto the roof of the cathedral with extra buckets of sand and water. Someone splits the roof with an axe and someone else pours sand onto the burning wooden rafters below. The stirrup pumps are married to the buckets of water. The water falls in veils above the flames.

  The fire-watchers know that the cathedral roof is really two roofs. There is an inner ceiling of panelled oak and an outer wooden roof covered in lead tiles. There is a space of eighteen inches between the two roofs, and if a fire catches and burns in this space, there will be no way to extinguish it.

  Harriet helps haul the buckets of sand and water up onto her roof. Her tin helmet knocks against her forehead and tips down over her eyes. She pulls it off and lays it on the roof by her feet. A shower of incendiaries falls on the cathedral and Harriet can see smoke pouring from the holes where the axe has split through the tiles.

  There are more men on the roof. There is a rush of buckets, a spray of sand. The smoke seems to be diminishing and Harriet thinks that perhaps the fire is under control.

  And then another cascade of incendiaries hits the roof.

  “Get off. Get down,” the men are yelling to one another.

  “Call the police. Call the fire brigade,” they shout to the waiting crowd at the base of the church. “The cathedral’s on fire.”

  There is no sound of approaching fire trucks, only the yelling of the fire-watchers and the crackle of the fire on the church roof. And above that, the surge of bomber engines as the planes continue coming.

  Harriet has lost sight of the boy from the chancel roof during the fire-fighting, but she finds him on the ground when she scrambles down the ladder. He’s by himself, a little way away from the building, watching the fringe of flame feather along the roofline. He seems frozen, but his hands are trembling.

  “What can we do?” he asks. “How can we stop it, Wendy?” He rubs his head nervously.

  The job of a fire-watcher is to alert the rescue services to fires and to extinguish any fires in their area. There is no procedure for what happens after the fire is raging out of control.

  A
ll around them Coventry is slowly catching fire. The incendiary bombs are falling not just on the cathedral but on all the buildings around the cathedral, all the buildings in the old section of town.

  Harriet’s flat is away from the centre of Coventry and she is wondering how she will get back there. She is afraid for Wendell and for her cat, Abigail, whom she left curled up contentedly in the armchair by the airing cupboard. But as to her own safety, she is surprised at how little she cares.

  “I’m Harriet,” she says. “Not Wendy.”

  “James,” says the boy. “James Fisher. But everyone calls me Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy Fisher, like the frog?”

  “My mother used to read me that story,” says the boy. “When I was young.”

  He still seems like a boy, has the quick, skittish move ments of a child, but his voice is the voice of a man, and when Harriet looks at him she sees that he is as tall and broad as any man.

  Perhaps if she talks to him he will stop trembling. “I always thought the Jeremy Fisher story was a little sad,” says Harriet. She likes the Beatrix Potter stories herself and is too ashamed to admit that she dips into them regularly. She finds the escapades of the small animals comforting. Jeremy Fisher goes fishing for minnows and then is almost eaten by a trout. But the trout spits him out. He doesn’t like the taste of the frog’s mackintosh.

  “There’s that drawing of Jeremy Fisher crawling up the riverbank, his mackintosh in tatters,” says Harriet. “This is the awful moment when he realizes his life is not what he thought. He has been operating in the world as a predator and now he understands that he is really prey.” What a strange conversation to be having, but he seems to be calmer now.

  The boy is quiet for a moment. “I hope my home hasn’t been hit,” he says.

  “I’m sure it hasn’t.” Harriet is astonished to find that she wants to protect him, this young man with the name of a frog in a children’s story. She thinks again of Wendell Mumby, home in front of the fire with his leg elevated. He has been waiting all autumn for some action and now he will miss everything.

  But the factories of Coventry are right beside the housing districts. The bombs falling on Triumph Engineering, Daimler, Rover, and Singer Motors are also falling on the streets next to them—streets full of houses, and the houses full of people at this time of night, unless they have managed to reach the shelters. It is only a matter of time, thinks Harriet, before the centre of the city is on fire. The ground that she and Jeremy stand on, here at the base of the burning cathedral, is no safer than the factories on the edge of the city.

  Maeve tries not to drink her pint too quickly. She hasn’t eaten anything this evening and she doesn’t want the beer to go to her head.

  It’s dark in The Coachman, the blackout curtains stretched tight across the front window. Even during the day, with the curtains open, the window glass is taped so it won’t blow out in a blast. There is so much tape across the window that it might as well be a curtain, so little light gets through. But the regulars are there, as usual, at the same tables. There’s the familiar shuffle of chairs and voices.

  Maeve is sitting at a small table in a nook by the fireplace. The only real light to see by is the firelight, and it is unreliable. She looks down at her sketchbook, at the drawing she has started and stopped half a dozen times now. It would have been wiser to stay home this evening. She would have had a better chance of getting this done.

  All around Maeve are bubbles of conversation, the slap of glasses against the wooden tables, the loud voice of the publican as he shouts down the length of the bar to alert a patron to the pint he has just poured. If Maeve had stayed home, she may have been able to execute her sketch, but she would have been alone. On the nights when her son is on duty, Maeve likes to come to the pub. It feels better to be around other people in case the air-raid sirens go off, even if she never feels like talking to anyone while she’s there. Maeve just likes to sit quietly and listen to the laughter and chatter around her. It makes her feel less isolated.

  Maeve has not lived long in Coventry. She came north because there were jobs on offer, and because it had seemed unlikely, at the beginning of the war, that there would be any threat to the northern cities. Now, after endless raids, it is clear that Coventry is a prime target for the Germans. The motor and armament factories that lured Maeve and her son north have lured the enemy across the Channel as well. Still, they are relatively settled here, and travel is increasingly difficult in wartime, so Maeve is prepared to wait out the war in this town that she has visited before but where she never meant to live.

  Maeve doesn’t remember her childhood in the south of England very well. Her early life seems broken into vivid tableaux, each one seemingly unconnected to any of the others. She has trouble thinking chronologically anyway, never thinks, When I was seven but rather That colour blue is the same colour blue as the sky out my nursery window that morning I woke up to the dogs barking. She is caught on these small hooks of the past all the time, has difficulty untangling herself from them.

  The soft green of the grass in her front garden this evening, shining in the moonlight, is the same green as the leaves Maeve used to post through her grandmother’s letterbox at the country house. She picked them from a plant in the front garden, after she’d been turned out of the house to play, following tea. The leaves were as soft as bunny ears. Maeve rubbed them against her face before shoving them through the heavy steel flap of the letterbox. The eld erly golden retriever that she’d been sent out to play with watched her disapprovingly from the open garage door. After a while Maeve was discovered and got into lots of trouble for decimating the front garden, but in the moments before that, when she was reaching up on her tiptoes to push the leaves through the metal slot, there was an immense feeling of sat isfaction as she completed the task. Maeve can still recall that feeling.

  “What are you drawing?” asks the old man at the table opposite. He has been watching Maeve since she first sat down, and she has been careful to avoid eye contact with him so she won’t have to make idle chit-chat.

  “Nothing,” she says, which is a stupid answer, so she says, “Nothing much.”

  “What then?”

  “A bird.” Maeve looks down at the wings, the small smooth head, the scissored tail. “A swallow. There was one flying about in my street today.”

  “Impossible,” says the man. “Swallows are long gone by now.”

  “It was a swallow,” says Maeve. She is distracted by this man, whom she never wanted to talk to. She is tired of England’s population being made up now almost entirely of women, children, and the elderly. Old men in particular are too convinced of themselves, she thinks.

  The swallow had sliced through the air outside her kitchen window, and she had followed it outside, watching the bird’s sweet slide over her garden’s stone wall. She had always liked the flight of the swallow. It was such a graceful bird. It made so many interesting shapes in the air.

  “It was most likely a sparrow,” says the man opposite, and before Maeve can respond with indignation, the air-raid sirens begin to wail. This is the eighteenth raid on Coventry since the middle of August and there is a weariness in the patrons as they rise from their tables and follow the publican down the cellar stairs.

  When Maeve was young, she’d had a book with a painting of Lady Godiva on a white horse, her hair carefully arranged to cover her naked body. The hair was so unnaturally long it suggested another creature. The woman, the horse, and the hair, all of these fascinated a young Maeve Fisher. This was her entire knowledge of Coventry.

  But it was the visit in 1914 that had stayed with her, and she had been happy to move here this year, when there seemed to be no jobs anywhere else in the country. The time with the irritating Charlotte had seeded in her an appetite for independence. It took four more years to root, but she had been preparing herself the entire time for that glorious day when she would be free from expectation, from duty, from her parents’ plans for her
. It didn’t quite happen the way Maeve had imagined it, but it happened all the same.

  After her parents found out she was pregnant and she refused to divulge the name of the father so he could do the decent thing and marry her, Maeve’s father told her to leave the family home. For years, her parents disowned her, and it is only recently that her father has decided he wants to see her again, and only because he is getting on in years and is worried about his place in the afterlife if he hasn’t satisfactorily tidied up all his business here on earth before he dies. But Maeve isn’t sure she wants to co-operate.

  Those first months, the months after Maeve had left home but before Jeremy was born, were the worst of her life. Her friends, most of whom still lived with their parents, were unable to take her in. She had little money and no employment. She was too proud to beg for charity. Eventually, out of desperation she took a gamekeeper as a lover so she could stay with him in his cottage on an estate.

  The gamekeeper’s cottage was shrouded in ivy. Some of the windows were completely covered over and the inside of the cottage glowed green when the sun was shining. It was like being underwater. Maeve moved through the space that way, drifting from pool to pool, being borne along by a current of need or mood, whatever was strongest at a particular moment.

  Her baby slept in a dresser drawer on the floor by the bed, and sometimes, when Maeve woke to the green light at the window, her son’s cries sounded like the birds outside. The gamekeeper complained about the noise the baby made and the attention he demanded from Maeve.

  She was always disoriented in that cottage. The inside was outside, and the outside was inside. The gamekeeper would leave dead rabbits flung down on the kitchen table for Maeve to prepare. Their legs would be tied together, but otherwise they still looked alive, lying there in the morning when she came down, their eyes open and watching her as she came into the kitchen. Even the dead rabbits were judging her and finding her wanting.