Everyone Brave Is Forgiven Read Free Page A

hundred halfpenny portions of monkey nuts in their little twists of newspaper waiting unsold and forlorn in the kiosk.
    She raised her hand again, then let it drop.
    “Yes?” said Miss Vine. “Was there something else?”
    “Sorry,” said Mary. “It was nothing.”
    “Oh good.”
    The headmistress took her eye off the ranks of the children for a moment. She fixed Mary with a look that was not without charity. “Remember you’re on our side now. You know: the grown-ups.”
    Mary could almost feel her bones cracking with resentment. “Thank you, Miss Vine.”
    This was when the school’s only colored child, sensing an opening, slipped away from the muster and scaled the padlocked main gate of the zoo. The headmistress spun around. “Zachary Lee! Come back here immediately!”
    “Or what? You’ll send me to the countryside?”
    The whole school gasped. Ten years old, invincible, the Negro boy saluted. He scissored his skinny brown legs over the top of the gate, using the penultimate and the ultimate wrought-iron O’s of LONDON ZOO as the hoops of a pommel horse, and was immediately lost to sight.
    Miss Vine turned to Mary. “You had better bring the nigger back, don’t you think?”
    —
    It was her first rescue work of the war. Coppery, coltish Mary North searched the abandoned zoo using paths that were still well tended. On her own, she felt better. She sneaked a cigarette. She massaged her brow with the other hand, confident that frustration could be persuaded not to settle there. All downers could be dispatched, as one might flick ash off one’s sleeve, or pilot a wayward bee back out through an open window.
    She had already checked the giraffes’ paddock and the big cats’ dens. Now, hearing a cough, she tiptoed into the great apes’ enclosure through a gate that swung unlatched. She kicked through the straw, raising a scent of urine and musk that made her heart rattle with fright. But she hoped it was not easily done, for a zookeeper to miss a whole gorilla when he was counting them into the evacuation truck.
    “Come on out, Zachary Lee, I know you’re in here.”
    It was eerie to be in the gorilla house, looking out through the smeared glass. “Oh do come on, Zachary darling. You’ll get us both in trouble.”
    A second cough, and a rustle under the straw. Then, with his soft American accent, “I’m not coming out.”
    “Fine then,” said Mary. “The two of us shall rot here until the war is over, and nobody will ever know what talent we might have shown in its prosecution.”
    She sat down beside the boy, first laying her red jacket on the straw to sit on, with the rosy silk lining downward. It was hard to stay glum. One could say what one liked about the war but it had got her out of Mont-Choisi ahead of an afternoon of double French, and might yet have more mercies in store. She lit another cigarette and blew the smoke into a shaft of sunlight.
    “May I have one?” said the small voice.
    “Beautifully asked,” said Mary. “And no. Not until you are eleven.”
    From the muster point came the sound of a tin whistle. It could mean that heavy bombers were converging on London, or it could mean that the children had been organized into two roughly matched teams to begin a game of rounders.
    Zachary poked his head up through the straw. It still amazed Mary to see his brown skin, his chestnut eyes. The first time he had smiled, the flash of his pink tongue had delighted her. She had imagined it would be—well, not brown also, but certainly as antithetical to pink as brown skin was to white. A bluish tongue, perhaps, like a skink’s. It would not have surprised her to learn that his blood came out black and his feces a pale ivory. He was the first Negro she had seen up close—if one didn’t count the posters advertising minstrelsy and coon shows—and she still struggled not to gawk.
    The straw clung to his hair. “Miss?’ he said. “Why did they take the animals away?”
    “Different