Tom’s Last Night at the Heppners

It was going to be impossible to sleep. There could be no doubt of that. Tom lay in his little room. It was neither hot nor cold.

One thought seemed unalterable, inescapable, and depressing beyond words.

I can never return to England.

Oh, he could go back. He would go back. As soon as possible. But his England, the England before Germany, before Hitler, the England of a little room and a lot of books, of napping and thinking and watching the slow sway of sunlight against his window – why that England was dead and gone. Worse than that – it was a fairy tale, or Santa Claus, which had never been real except in his imagination. His fantasy, more like.

But – and he had to be honest with himself about this – there was a certain measure of relief. The foreboding he had felt – from when exactly? – well, for a long time, certainly – had broken at last. News anticipated is always worse than news delivered. He could not act in the face of uncertainty, of ambivalence, of fears without clear or traceable causes.

But now the world is acting upon me, and my choices are no longer what they were. They are, perhaps, what I always thought they would be.

Some part of him said: but perhaps there will not be war.

And of course, there might not be. Nothing was inevitable in a world without God, the world he had inherited from his mother. Nothing was inevitable to British rationalism, not in the same way as German mysticism. He thought that Renata was really railing against God, the God who had allowed Hitler into power. She was railing against an inevitability, against something foreordained. She railed against it, but could never fight it. One does not pit oneself against the infinite. All she could do was rail against her son, imagining that God might not have punished them with Hitler if he had fought against Nazism more. But now that Hitler was here, they had to accept God’s will…

Tom reached around, plumped up his tough little pillow, propped it up against the headboard, and sat up, turning to look out the narrow window.

The countryside was dark; there only a tiny sliver of a moon. Tom imagined, for a moment, that the moon was finally showing its dark side, and that silver would never return to its face. But then he almost snarled at himself. The time for bad poetry is past. Fuck metaphors. Their day is done, for the foreseeable future at least. The moon is just the moon. We must not sing its praises, but arm and hunt under its simple light. It is not the face of a lover, but a rock which reflects the sun. It does not illuminate our hopes, but our prey…