by Rafe Posey
Alec says almost nothing else for the rest of the trip, as if he’s exhausted his store of conversation for now, and June stays mostly quiet too, trying not to overwhelm him further. She doesn’t want to prattle at him, but every few minutes she tells him something about the village—a new baby for the grocer’s daughter, an enormous eel found in a basket in a tributary of the Lark, Frank Burleigh taking over the smithy and expanding it into a proper garage. Little details to give him anchorage.
When they arrive in Fenbourne, she leads him out of the station, trying to avoid the curious eyes of the village even as she knows the task is hopeless.
“Shall I call the taxi?”
Alec looks down at her, then shakes his head. “Would you mind if we walked?”
“Not at all,” she says. In fact it is a relief; perhaps the even lines of horizon and dike will work on him as they have worked on her, orienting her to the familiar landscape. He nods and shoulders the battered rucksack again, and they set off, falling into step just as they used to before the war.
She had meant to walk the longer way around, following the curve of the Lark to their bridge, and then up the sluice road to the cottage, but Alec sets their course. Before she’s ready, they reach St. Anne’s and the shell of the vicarage.
Alec stops abruptly in the shadow of St. Anne’s, staring at the ruin.
June takes his arm again, and he shifts a step closer to her.
“I knew,” he says, glancing at her, “but I didn’t really. Not until now.”
“Yes,” June says. “It’s rather . . . I am still getting used to it myself. Sometimes I come around the corner and I’m thinking of something else and then it’s just . . . It’s just there, waiting for me.”
He frowns down at her, his eyes sad. “I’m sorry, June. I . . .” He trails off. “Well, I know it wasn’t my fault I wasn’t here, but I feel I ought to have been.”
“You mustn’t feel that way,” she says urgently, looking up at him, and squeezes his arm again.
He pulls away gently, moving to lay his hand against the oval of stones that still rings the front garden of the shattered building. “Sometimes I thought I’d never see Fenbourne again,” he says. “Or you, June. Everything is . . . It feels very unreal.”
June catches herself wanting to say something about the POWs she helped process at Anderson, liberated from Japanese camps. She knows their stories better than she knows Alec’s, which seems wrong on any number of levels. But of course there is no way to tell him any of this. Instead she says, “I expect so,” which feels inadequate, at best.
Alec looks at her and smiles, but the smile doesn’t come off quite right. Perhaps he feels the insufficiency of her words as much as she does.
* * *
• • •
By the time they reach the cottage, Alec seems more disoriented than ever. He had startled at the raucous calls of crows, looking at the sky as if it were too broad for him, or too low. June hangs his coat on the stag-headed iron coat rack in the front hall. Without it, he looks both taller and thinner, and it jars her. He prowls the parlor and the kitchen, drifting out into the garden and back again, and June follows quietly, trying to understand what he reminds her of. It’s not until he goes up the stairs, awkward and a little off-balance, that she realizes he’s all points and angles. Alec, but somehow not. Just like what’s left of the vicarage.
She listens to him pacing upstairs, wonders if he needs anything. Or if space is what he wants. Then the clunking, throttled sound of the bathtub tap and the old water heater. June relaxes, or tries to, turning to a crossword for distraction, willing herself not to invade him with her listening.
He comes back after a while, settles finally into the overstuffed sofa, still awkward, his hair damp and uncombed. “I didn’t mean to just disappear. When I saw the tub . . . It’s been so long.” The good fingers of his left hand stroke the scars on his right. June can’t tell if he knows he’s doing that, or if it’s some kind of check that has become habit.
June sits beside him, trying to stay close without hovering. “Would you like tea? Or something more to eat?”
Alec stares past her, his eyes roving about the room. “I . . .” He turns back, focuses. “I’m sorry. I feel very off-kilter. Like I can’t quite tell if this is a dream.”
“I know,” she says. How to tell him that she too has come back from an entirely different world to find Fenbourne shifted and wrecked in ways she cannot ever quite grasp? Reality has become as slippery as the darting of a swallow under the eaves, and she is alone in the vastness of trying to manage her own confusion. June sighs. She can share her mourning with Alec without sharing her story. She will have to. For the rest of their lives, she will have to.
* * *
• • •
They talk into the evening, Alec halting and slow. He is clearly not ready to tell her what has happened to him in the camps, and of course she can’t tell him about her war, either. When he tries to ask her about the bombing, June freezes. He undoubtedly believes she was in England when it happened, that she would have been home for the funerals, and even considering the infinite extra layers left behind by her clandestine life is exhausting. She tells him the closest she can to the truth—she had not been back in Fenbourne yet when the vicarage was bombed.
“Ah,” he says. “Foreign Office kept you busy, then?”
“Rather,” she says, trying to see ahead in the conversation so she can steer as needed.
He nods. “Fellow in Germany had a girl at home, a Wren, off at the Isle of Wight.” He shrugs. “Glad you were safe in London.” His brow furrows. “More or less, in any event.”
She’s relieved when he doesn’t pursue it, relieved when she doesn’t have to obfuscate or make up stories. But it stings, just a bit. It rankles that he thinks she was here in England, a flower to be protected, her work not even worth asking about. As soon as she thinks it, though, she’s angry with herself—he is just back from nearly three years as a prisoner, and already she is expecting him to be his old self. When clearly he no longer is.
If only he didn’t look so haunted, it would be easier to let him chew his secrets at his own pace. But June can see it all gnawing at him. She pauses, trying to feel her way through the conversation.
“I’m grateful you were able to get word to me,” June says.
“I wish I could have managed more often.” He glances down at his hands. “And I wish I’d been able to write you myself.”
“But we all did as well as we could, didn’t we?” She pauses, trying not to drift too close to topics she mustn’t broach. “In any case,” she says brightly, “it was just always such a relief to hear from you.”
He almost smiles, but then his face closes off. “There was a priest, a chaplain. An American. Smasher, we called him. He was the fellow who helped me.” The ghost of the smile is gone, and when he looks up again, his gaze goes straight through her.
“Perhaps we can talk about him another time,” she says carefully. “If you like.”
“Perhaps,” Alec says. He focuses on her for just a moment before he gets to his feet and goes back to scrutinizing the room.
One step forward, two back, it seems. June stands, thinking to embrace him. She loops her fingers around his too-bony wrists. She can feel something between them, perhaps more memory than want, but something. A current. When their eyes meet, she feels their past as a jolt in her belly, and something in his face says he feels it, too. For a moment, the world seems to shift back into place. But then Alec looks down at his hands, sighs, and gently pulls away.
“I think I might need a bit of time to myself,” he says. “I don’t know how . . .” He makes a gesture that seems to include her, the cottage, perhaps all of England. “I’m sorry.”
“All right,” she says, working to keep her voice even. “There’s no rush, Alec.”
“Thank you,” he says. His shoulders sag a bit. “Good night, June.”
He goes up the stairs, stumbling a bit on the uneven carpet that he used to step over without a second thought, and June is left alone on the sofa. She can hear him moving upstairs, his boots treading heavily across the boards, and the creak of springs as he settles onto the bed. She doesn’t know if he’s going to sleep—it seems early, although she supposes he must be feeling as though it’s later, and the dark has come sooner than she’s used to. Perhaps he’s just sitting quietly by himself in his old room. She doesn’t know quite what she had expected for this first day together, but now she realizes it was far too much.
She stands, looks around. They can make a life here, for now, although there is not much holding either of them in Fenbourne as far as she knows. Not any longer. But first there is the matter of helping him be here, helping him recover, as much as that’s possible, from whatever his captors did to create that distance in his eyes and between the two of them.
She doesn’t know what to call it, even for herself. It’s not merely that he is more changed than she expected, more damaged. She feels as though there has been a shattering, a sundering of sorts, in what they had, and now they are in the dawn of rebuilding something new. What that new life is, she can’t quite say. His bedroom door is shut when she goes upstairs, and she tries not to feel it as a slap. Instead she lays her fingertips against the heavy wood and whispers a quick good-night to him.
By the time June falls asleep, her room lit by a waxing moon and the low fenland stars, her door slightly ajar in case he needs her in the night, she has convinced herself that she can fix this. Everything is different, but they are together now. She must believe that they are still them, although their configuration has shifted. But that is a puzzle she can solve. She believes that the boy she knew is still in there, cloaked in the layers of captivity and war, and that somewhere in those layers is a man who still loves her with his whole heart. The pressing thing now is that he needs her. She knows enough, and the rest will come.
1946, Fenbourne
The clock ticks away the night; outside, the moon has risen in a clear sky. Alec sits on the edge of his bed trying to work through everything he’s feeling—bewilderment, to be sure, and the same disorientation that has plagued him since that terrible day over the Mediterranean. And June . . . He had not expected to see her at the docks, had not known how to talk to her, except in those confusing, awkward bursts like some other version of himself. He had not known how to reach out with these dreadful appendages and bring himself back to her. She must be hurt by the distance between them, but what is he meant to do? So much has changed since last he was in this room, on this bed, that it’s hard to understand how the room has not changed like everything else. How many places has he slept since he last slept here? Twenty? More? And with each transition, something else vanished or was left behind, although never the ghosts of the friends he’s lost. Those follow him as loyally as hounds.
And to find himself living here, in Constance’s cottage, with June . . . He has dreamed his whole life of being with her, of a life like this, but now that he has it, he has no idea how to navigate the reality. And how is it that his aunt is dead? It hadn’t felt quite real before, but now her absence is everywhere. It would have been dreadful to be here without June, knocking around the house by himself. What would it feel like to be alone? How claustrophobic might all that empty space become? Even this single room is nearly too big for him. But he doesn’t know how to ask June if she’s staying, if this is how they live now. If this is the first in a series of moments he can count as real, as the beginning of their life.
In Odessa, he had shared his quarters with three other men. There had been clothes and bedding, and the Russians had made an effort to combat sickness and infestation. They had had plumbing and cheap calico towels, rations heavy on root vegetables and light on grains and decent meat. They had been prisoners still, despite the end of the war, and the relative comfort had been balanced always by the fear that at any moment one of them could vanish onto a train to the Gulag. But. Better than Germany. He tries not to think about the men still there, waiting to be sent home, or the officers who had acted as their keepers. The Red Navy fellow in charge of him had been so serious, though he’d seemed so young. In the end he had turned out to be older than Alec, but his relative innocence had blurred everything. Alec had liked him, but now, with weeks on the sea and most of a continent between them, he can’t help but wonder how much of that fondness had been a misplaced gratitude.
The light beneath his door shivers as June comes upstairs and pauses just outside on her way to the room beside his. He feels so far away. In Odessa there had been music at night, winging its way down the corridors from the lush quarters of their Soviet captors, and sometimes the music had slipped into his fetid dreams and left him dizzy and confused. Here there is no music, but the sounds of the fens are better, though perhaps equally confusing. A fox barks at the night, and somewhere far off in the distance the defensive double-noted call of a tawny owl answers. He goes to the window, looks out in case he can see anything alive out there. Beneath the moon, the black peat expanses stretch out as silver as a badger.
And, standing, he feels that pull again toward June. He feels so powerless—he is right here, she is right there—but he is helpless to bridge the gap. There is too much space between the way she looked at him tonight, with love and hope, and his fear that she will not want him. That the way he sleeps, or doesn’t, will frighten her; that his hands are too rough and broken for her skin; that whatever he has become after all the years of war and captivity is not the man she deserves.
* * *
• • •
Alec wakes at dawn to the rich songs of siskins and mistle thrushes. The realization that he has finally escaped the horrors and come home brings a thick, blasted fire of guilt with it, and he has to lie still until it goes away. What little sleep he’d managed had been full of the cats of Stalag Luft I, and the host of dead who travel through his dreams and infest his sleep—Cobber, Tim, Charlie, Smasher . . . All the men who died while he survived. The men whose fates he doesn’t know prey on his dreams as well—is Sanjay one of the lost? In Odessa, the Russians had been generous with their vodka, and it had sometimes helped him care less about the dreams. He had never liked the stuff, but it had been a damn sight better than the lethal booze some of the men had distilled from God only knew what in Germany. He had never been sure whether drinking that had been intended to help them forget their circumstances or just kill them outright.
He gets to his feet, rubs and tugs at his hands to ease the stiffness that comes with sleep, and goes to the window, trying to orient himself to the view of the winter-burned fields out the window. Alec has wanted to be back in Fenbourne with June for as long as he can remember, and now that he is . . . Well. Before the war, he had mostly come to feel at home in the Fenlands. He knew the people of the village, and their dogs, and sometimes their cows. He had overheard Cook gossiping with Miss Laflin, the postmistress, over the back fence at the vicarage a thousand times, or the teachers at school whispering about the headmaster, Mr. Shotley. In the ten years between Alec’s arrival in Fenbourne and the morning he’d sauntered off to Cambridge and Clare College, he had come to terms with its habits and mores, finding his place.
And before that, India. Bombay and Srinagar and the rest, places that felt as much like home to him as England ever had. Could a man ever really let go of the colors and landscapes that had meant home from the beginning? June has shown him so much here in Fenbourne, but even she had never been able to make Fenbourne quite replace that other life she had never known, full of elephants and temples.
The truth is, war has peeled away all sense of home from anywhere, even here.
Alec knows he should be grateful. He is alive and reunited with the woman he’s loved his whole life. He is going to have to try harder than he had
last night, if he hopes to make it right with her.
“One step at a time,” he mutters to himself. He picks up his towel and a change of clothes and goes to the bath. The night before he had bathed in water nearly too hot for him, scalding away the thick, stale film of ship and stress. During the passage from Odessa to London he had washed himself as well as he could, standing in his cramped cabin with a rough cloth, a crust of bad soap, and a basin of cold water. It had hardly been enough, but compared to the miserable shared tap of Odessa, and the horrors of Germany, it had been adequate. But now . . . The extravagance of being able to settle himself into the deep tub here, letting it warm his hands and the rest of him, is an immeasurable glory. He had nearly wept, but he had been so self-conscious, aware that June would be downstairs wondering what he was doing. But there will be other baths, as many of them as he and the ancient water heater can stand. He can be clean all the time now. His hands tremble as he fumbles with the tap, and again he nearly cries.
* * *
• • •
Downstairs, June is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the telephone directory. He had smelled the coffee from upstairs, his senses lighting up with want, but the directory throws him. For a moment, he wonders if she means to memorize it, the way she has always memorized everything.
