BUT THAT’S IN MYTHOLMROYD, AMID THE HILLSIDES AND slopes and steep-sided valleys of the British moorlands, amid a rolling landscape in the open country, near woodlands and country houses, above the waterlogged soil that has frozen in the winter. Julian sleeps and dreams of purple summer heather blanketing the uplands for stretched-out scenic miles.
In the morning, they sit downstairs with a small breakfast and a hot tea, and afterward she walks to buy the paper while he waits for her by the river. He watches her limp downhill to him, lit up by the sun, her shining face beaming at him from across the street. He can’t help it. He smiles back. And then on the train, he sits with his eyes closed, trying to imprint the image of her full of hope and happiness onto the wretched lens with which he sees the known world.
Before they get to Blackpool, there is Blackburn, and in Blackburn there is a parachute mine that had fallen some time ago and burrowed, and which detonates in the rumble of the passing locomotive, breaking the tracks and derailing the front of the train. The train, traveling slow, skids in the snow. The engine and the first two cars tip over. The rest of the train pops off the tracks and pitches against the trees and the snow banks. Julian and Mia, sitting close to the front, suffer primary blast injuries. Her ear drum bursts. She bleeds from her ears and nose. A sandbag rips open, and the sand flies through the air and lodges in Julian’s eyes.
“What did you say to me in the rubble at the Ten Bells?” the irrepressible Mia asks him, swaying and bumping him in the medical van, having lost with the burst drum not only all sense of how loudly she is speaking but her balance, too. Despite the injuries, her tone is peppy.
“I don’t remember.” Julian can’t see.
“You said we’re not going to make it, are we, you and me. Well, aren’t you sheepish now, mister, to see how wrong you were.”
He can’t see her, but he sure can hear her.
“We made it pretty far since then, haven’t we?” Mia says, kissing his head, ruffling his hair. “It’s been almost three weeks since you were Mr. Gloomy Gloomerpants. And look at us.”
“I would,” Julian says. “But I can’t see.”
“You’ll be fine,” she says at top volume, rubbing his stubbled cheek. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere. That was a joke. I’m going to find something I can shave you with. You’ve got a 5 p.m. shadow that’s weeks old.” She nuzzles his cheek, kisses his face. “That was also funny, Jules. I was funny there.”
“Ha.”
A sliver of metal got stuck in the cornea of Julian’s bad eye, and though the medic pulled it out, it nicked his pupil and now he can’t see. The sand grit has scraped the sclera and cornea and irises in both eyes. He hopes that will at least be temporary and his right eye will regain some vision. For now he’s bandaged around both eyes and is blind.
Mia shaves him, and feeds him, and reads to him, and brings him drink. She remains by his side for two dark days in a room at a small tavern near the station in Blackburn until the scratched cornea heals and he can dimly see out of one eye. Once again, they walk away from the blast on their own two feet. Julian’s left eye remains patched and sightless. Mia makes a substantial number of jokes at his expense. “What did the one-eyed pirate say to his fake wife? ‘I have no eye dear.’”
“Always be yourself,” Julian says in return. “Unless you can be a pirate. Then always be a pirate.”
They manage to get on a packed-to-the-gills daily train from Blackburn to Preston. Mia is excited when they arrive at Preston, and why not? Only twenty more miles until Blackpool! But in Preston they learn there are no more civilian trains. It’s too close to Christmas, there are not enough engineers, and the military trains get priority. “Maybe in 1941, there’ll be a train for you,” says the station master in Preston. “Come back then. Happy New Year.”
“Come on, Jules, we can walk twenty miles, what do you say?”
With his one eye he appraises her, her still-bandaged head wound, busted ankle, swollen knees, cracked clavicle. He doesn’t bother to appraise himself, his injuries too numerous to count.
“Don’t give me your evil eye, Long John Silver.” She smiles. “It will take us three days. Four if we dog it.”
“Christmas Eve is tomorrow,” Julian says. What he doesn’t add is, it’s the 47th day. He tries not to even think it. Whether or not he thinks it, the fact of it doesn’t change. Tomorrow is the 47th day.
“I know. Do you have a better plan? Or are your plans only about fooling around with susceptible women?” She is always smiling.
He stares at her, at his own reflection in the station window, chews his lip. He is about to go talk to the station agent, to beg him for mercy. He is about to offer the man what he offers everyone who has something he wants. A barter. An Elizabethan coin that will feed the man’s family for a year in exchange for opening the doors of a cargo hold on a military train. But before he can do that, Mia nods to someone behind him. It’s the station agent.
“There’s a train coming through on its way to Blackpool North in about an hour,” the man says. “If you’re quiet, and ready, and standing where I tell you, I will open the hold. The train will be at the station for ten minutes. So if you’re not on the platform, you aren’t getting on.”
“Thank you,” Mia says, because all other words are inadequate.
Julian asks her to wait and follows the agent.
“What?” the man snaps, grim and overworked.
“I want to give you something,” Julian says. In the palm of his left hand, he holds out one of the gold coins.
“What’s this?” the agent says with suspicion.
“It’s a present for your family,” Julian says. “Don’t lose it. Find a coin dealer as soon as you can and sell it. Don’t accept anything less than four hundred pounds. Shop around. Auction it if you have to. If you’re patient, you may be able to get six hundred for it.”
“How much did you say?”
“You heard me.”
The station agent looks disbelievingly at the coin in his hand. “Well, crikey, thanks a million,” he says gruffly. “It’s really not necessary.”
“I know.”
“Not necessary,” the agent adds with the body tremor of a man having encountered a miracle, “but deeply appreciated.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Yes, Happy Christmas to you, too.”
The agent opens the hold for them, gives them two blankets, half a bottle of cheap whiskey and a Brodie hat full of bread and potato stew. “Left over from me dinner earlier,” he says. “The wife made it. Cooking is not her strong suit, but the hungrier you are, the better it’ll taste.”
It tastes like bouillabaisse at the Savoy. By the time the train terminates at Blackpool North an hour later, Julian and Mia have never been so full or so drunk.
It’s still three miles to her house.
They stumble in the dark like vagrants, their arms around their sore bodies, holding each other up, hobbling down the streets, slurring the words to “The Land of Hope and Glory.”
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!
“We ain’t so mighty,” Julian says.
“Are you joking?” she says. “Half-blind, you brought me home for Christmas. With two working arms between us, one working leg, three ears and three eyes, we traveled across a war-torn country and lived to tell about it. We are invisible, Jules. Alone, not so great maybe, but together, we’re fucking invisible.”
“You mean invincible?”
“That’s what I said. Invisible.”
He wishes he could marry her and carry her in his arms.