by Rafe Posey
Parvati regards him indulgently. “It’s a surprise.” As they move from the drawing room to the dining room, she leans close to June with a conspiratorial grin. “He is so easy to keep happy.” She shrugs encouragingly. “Your Alec is not so different. And, June . . . He is a canny touch with the little ones. He’ll make a fine father, that one.”
June forces a smile. Parvati is quite right.
All through dinner they talk about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Sanjay’s family has been split by the new border, and he’s hoping to bring more of his relatives to Edinburgh to join his mother in this household. June has never been as far north as Punjab or Kashmir, so it’s a relief not to have to pretend at not knowing. But as the conversation shifts from the northern mountains of India to a hill station both men remember closer to Bombay, her discomfort grows. June hasn’t been there, either, but she remembers Bombay itself, and the mountains all green and hazy in the distance. And even more than that she remembers Kandy and the hill station where she recovered from the attack on HMS Anderson.
The food itself only makes it worse. Part of June’s effort to build a wall between her secrets and Alec was to pretend that the spices and flavors of Indian food were completely new to her. Since the beginning, she has let herself “develop” a palate that is closer to her actual preferences. But sometimes the lingering effects of the earlier pretense catch up with her, and that can be galling, as it is tonight, when Parvati sets a simmering dark cauldron of dhaba-style chicken curry on the table. Sanjay plasters his hands over his heart with feeling. June’s mouth waters at the scent of it, the way the cardamom and masala sweep the room, and she wants nothing more than to take a bit of roti and scoop the curry into her mouth.
“I should warn you, it’s a bit spicy,” Parvati says, with an apologetic glance at June. She gestures at a second serving dish, a rich butter paneer. “But the paneer is quite mild.”
“Thank you,” June says. “They both look lovely.”
Parvati beams proudly, arranging the ceramic bowls so everyone will be able to reach the food. June reaches for the dish of chutney, adding some to her plate. She dips her spoon into it and takes just a bit into her mouth. The burst of mango and tamarind grabs at her, and she pauses as the memories rush in. Parvati leans in, heaping a plate with curry, roti, and chutney, and June smiles. Her pleasure fades when Parvati hands the plate to Sanjay, who rubs his hands together gleefully. While the others are talking about boating on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, she serves herself some of the curry and scoops a bit onto a piece of roti. The curry and the chilies it contains are hot enough to make her eyes well up, but God, the wealth of flavor. She closes her eyes, savoring the heat and richness.
When she opens them again, Alec is eyeing her indulgently. “Sure that’s not too hot for you?”
“Not at all,” she says. “It’s delicious.” Alec nods and asks Sanjay to pass along the curry.
“Funny, rather,” Alec says, “but when I was there, we mostly ate English food. And now here I am in Scotland eating curry.”
Parvati chuckles. “There have been curry houses here for a hundred years or more.”
“Rather a catchall term, though, isn’t it?” Alec carefully sets down the serving plate.
“It comes from a Tamil word,” June says. “Kari. It can be translated as ‘relish for rice,’ generally.”
Sanjay raises an eyebrow. “That’s right—good job!”
“June’s a whiz at crosswords,” Alec says to Sanjay. He grins at her, then turns back to Sanjay. “I can hardly understand a word of her dissertation—she’s brilliant, really. Quite a girl.”
June looks away. The pretending is hard enough on an average day, but this is all exhausting, the colors and smells and tastes taking her back to places she cannot say she’s ever been, and often misses. It’s been a long time since she felt so alone with the secrets.
After dinner, Parvati goes to check on the children and see if her mother-in-law, who has remained upstairs, needs anything. June stays with Alec and Sanjay, who retire to the drawing room, nattering on about airplanes and tugboats. She’s not sure that’s where she’s meant to be, but certainly Alec doesn’t expect her to join Parvati to look in on the children. It’s confusing, though, to parse what Alec believes their future holds. When Parvati returns, bringing in a tray of coffee and small sweets from the kitchen and setting it on the old teak sideboard, June finds herself watching the other woman’s meticulous attention to fixing a cup of coffee and a plate of sweets for Sanjay. Her own mother had been like that, fussing over June’s father’s tea until it was perfect. June stares down into her own coffee, missing her parents and trying again to identify where she should be, which role she should assume. How much of her own dreams she will be expected to give up to support Alec in his.
* * *
• • •
They’re quiet in the car on the way home, June ruminating on the waves of emotion, the food, the possible blight on her future.
Alec sighs happily. “They’re a grand bunch. The little ones are delightful, aren’t they?”
She almost flinches. What is there to say to that? Yes, of course? No, please stop asking about children? At last she says, “They’re certainly a handful.”
Alec glances at her. “I know three at a time is a lot for you to consider,” he says quietly, “but imagine how grand it will be when our children can play with theirs. They’ll be like cousins, nearly.”
June has neither siblings nor cousins, and, having found Alec when they were so young, she has never felt as though she needed them. “I suppose so,” she says at last. She’s starting to have a headache. “When it’s time. We have our whole future ahead of us, Alec.”
“Well.” He frowns. “Your degree will be finished this spring. And, if you’ll forgive me saying so, we’re in our thirties now. We don’t have all the time in the world.”
“I know,” she says.
“It’s been years, June. Years.”
“I know,” she says again, tersely, and leans her face to the window, hoping the cold will soothe the dull ache coming up between her eyes.
* * *
• • •
When they get home, he whistles Ursa to his side, clips on her lead, and goes out into the night.
Left alone, June pulls her arms tight around herself, as if she can pull herself away from the endless argument. Because it is endless, Alec pushing with various degrees of subtlety, and her responses never what he wants. Endless because she has known all along what he wants, what he believes family looks like. She may have agreed to marry him, to start a family with him, but he can’t expect her to become one of those women whose lives revolve around their husbands and children, can he? He knows very well what kind of woman she is. They can’t both win.
Perhaps Floss was right, all those years ago, before Alec came home, when he said she was meant for more than making babies. But how can it be that she and Alec can be so far apart on this issue, even after years of talking about—or at least around—it? They have been Alec and June, June and Alec, for a score of years and more. Despite her doubts in the darkest years of the war, when he was lost and she was not sure what there would be for either of them if he came home, they have ended up as a pair, a nearly matched set. And Edinburgh, for the most part, has supported that. They have found their way together, have they not, just the two of them?
That first year, they had been so busy, what with Alec starting at the shipyard and working with Captain Carnaby, and her own time filled with the thrilling crush of mathematics and schoolwork. They had not seen each other enough, but the time they’d carved out had felt so immediate and important. And now, with that hard year firmly in their past and both job and doctorate resolved, she almost wishes it back. When they’d become more established, there had been different pleasures—the ability to take time now and again to explore Scotla
nd, even a summer fortnight, once, delving into the dark green world around Inverness, all that water and mystery. The tall, ragged stones of Culloden Moor, redolent of grief and a fierce, devastating hope. Alec had been too quiet there, and for a while she had wondered if it had been a mistake to visit the old battlefield with him at all. But that night in their room in an inn looking out over the loch, starlight creeping up along the water into their bed, he had opened himself to her at last, finally beginning the process of telling her about his war.
* * *
• • •
When Alec comes back, he pours himself a whisky and joins her in the drawing room. She can hardly look at him. Nothing has happened; she has done nothing wrong, exactly. But these waves of feeling have her feeling unmoored and reactive. She needs time to think, but what, really, is there to think about? She is here, with Alec, the man she loves and wants to spend her life with. Sooner or later, she will give him the baby he wants so much. Sooner or later that will happen, despite her quiet efforts to prevent it thus far, and then, she imagines, Whitehall and the rest will be lost to her.
God. She has never meant to hurt him. What he wants must seem so simple to him—a matter of love and biology, but even more than that, tradition. Family. And, because he doesn’t know the truth about her war, that makes sense. He has no idea what she stands to lose or what she’s already given up. He will not give up because he doesn’t know why he should.
He has loved her so hard, since almost before she can remember. She longs again for the days when things were more immediate and less complicated. “Do you remember the stars?”
He looks up, startled, with a slow smile. “Under the bridge? Of course.”
“I was just thinking about them,” she says.
“I should make stars here in Edinburgh,” he says.
Through the pang in her chest, June smiles. “I like that idea.”
“Perhaps I’ll paint them in the nursery,” Alec says quietly. He regards her a bit diffidently, as if he’s wondering how she’ll react.
June takes a breath, quells the panic. “Perhaps so.”
1957, Edinburgh
Over the years, the ride to Leith and back has gelled into an agreeable bookend on Alec’s workday—the bus out, the city hazed with mist and the bustle of shops opening, Alec just another man on his way to work; the bus back, everyone considering the tasks completed or left undone, the shadows long in the streets. The tide of husbands returning to shore, as it were, as regular as the surge of flotsam that drives up against the shipyard docks.
He loves the familiar patch from the bus stop to Shakespeare Close, the newsagents and shopkeepers who know him by sight, the stripes of spring sunlight through the butcher’s awning. But what he loves most is the last bit, the last few steps that bring him home. Edinburgh has felt like home since the beginning, but since the birth of his daughter, Penny, four years ago in January, the house on Shakespeare Close has been numinous with the way his heart beats. His steps quicken as he turns the corner, especially on this Friday, the threshold of his too-quick weekends with his girls.
Penny is playing in the garden with Ursa, the pair of them digging in the soil while Mrs. Nesbit watches. Ursa hears Alec coming and pauses in her close observation of the little girl’s work, wagging her tail at Alec with a volley of barking. Alec joins Mrs. Nesbit, smiling. He loves watching the way Ursa shadows Penny. His affection for Mrs. Nesbit is a bit more ambivalent; although he’s damn grateful for her, there are days when her presence in his house, or, as today, in his back garden, reminds him too much of what—or who—is missing.
Penny looks up. “Daddy!”
“Hullo, princess,” Alec says. He bends and opens his arms to catch her, and she runs to him, flinging her tiny arms around his neck. Ursa trots companionably behind her.
“Daddy, Ursa ate flowers,” Penny says, wrinkling her nose as Alec picks her up.
Alec grins at her and looks down at the dog with her tail waving happily back and forth. “Did she really?”
Penny nods. “That one.” She points to a somewhat trampled patch of gerbera daisies.
“I see,” Alec says. He leans down, dipping Penny ostentatiously as she squeals and clings to him. “I can’t imagine why she thought that was a good idea.”
Mrs. Nesbit chuckles. “I don’t believe it was the dog’s idea, exactly.”
Alec laughs. “Yes, I expect not.” He sets Penny back on her feet and shakes Ursa’s jaws in his hand the way he has since she was a puppy. She’s eleven now, the first spread of gray and white starting to salt her muzzle and toes. Sometimes in just the right light Alec can see where the white will continue to spread into rings around her eyes, and at those times he has to steel himself against the inevitable loss. But now, in the bright spring evening, she looks much as she always has, mahogany and chestnut gleaming through her coat.
“Good dog,” Penny says, thumping Ursa’s side with the palm of her hand. “No flowers.”
“Yes,” Alec says to both of them, “no flowers.” Penny giggles, and she and Ursa go back to the patch of soil where they’d been “gardening” before.
“Mrs. Oswin rang,” Mrs. Nesbit says. “She said she’d be back by Penny’s bedtime, but to go on and eat without her.”
Alec tries to keep his smile steady. “I see.” His shoulders sag, just a bit. He had hoped to talk to June sooner rather than later about his ideas for a summer holiday. He’s done the work already of coaxing June into taking time away from the university—it’ll be summer, after all, no students to manage, and surely whatever she’ll be working on by then will be able to spare a few days. There are innumerable holiday parks within a few hours’ drive of Shakespeare Close, but putting his finger on just the right one is proving more complex than he had anticipated. Part of the problem, of course, is that there is part of him that will never quite understand why he’s not taking Penny and June on holiday to Kerala or Srinagar. It’s an odd incomprehension—the logical part of him understands it perfectly, and yet there is something in the back of his mind that doesn’t quite grasp the reality. His own summer holidays when he was Penny’s age seem magical in his memory, his parents young and healthy, lit by the Indian sun against a backdrop of mountains or ocean or sweeping green hillsides.
There is nothing like that here, of course. If there were more time he would take June and Penny to Portugal or even Corsica, from which Mr. Livingstone has recently returned with his face taut and pink with sun. So Blackpool or Skegness, probably, or perhaps a holiday camp in the north of Wales.
Mrs. Nesbit smiles gently. “Would you like me to fetch you anything before dinner?”
“Thank you, no.” What he really wants, Mrs. Nesbit can’t get for him—June here, present, watching their child grow from a baby into a little girl. Penny is blond like him, but she has June’s marvelous eyes, and the older she gets, the more that same intelligence shines forth. He adores her, adores the way his heart stretches when he sees her, the way she likes to trace her stubby fingers along the loops and whorls of the carved doors of the cabinet in his office. He has loved her since before she was real.
Penny fills his heart; it is that simple. He had thought by now there would be another baby, but it had taken a long time for Penny to come. And now the years keep passing, and it seems ever more likely that Penny, like him, like June, will be an only child. There are days he feels as if something is being held back from his life, just beyond his reach.
* * *
• • •
Upstairs, Alec changes and sits on the edge of the bed, considering the evening. He had hoped to have a few more minutes in the garden with Penny and Ursa, given the weather, which has been quite mild for March in Scotland. But he’s spent his week clambering awkwardly around the frame of a nascent ship, up and down ladders or perched on a scaffold, and it’s left his hands tired and sore. Perhaps tonight he’ll soak them i
n Epsom salts, before he spends his weekend doing garden work outside.
The sun catches the stained glass and casts dapples like poppies through the room. Poppies for Remembrance, not that he needs any aid in remembering the Great War, let alone his own war. Nobody does—in some neighborhoods in London and Birmingham, or throughout most of Coventry, there are still ruins standing. Sometimes when they’re rebuilt or repaired the new construction seems more like a scar than a home—he has heard from George Cowan that work has finally begun on rebuilding the vicarage, which Alec can’t quite imagine.
He frowns, considering the village—there’s a holiday camp on the beach at Skegness, affordable, lots of activities, and only an hour or so from Fenbourne. They could go to the seaside, the three of them, and then show Penny where her parents had grown up. She’s not even five years old, but it would be good, wouldn’t it, for them to start to build a sense of history for her?
He stands and goes to the window as if staring out into the evening will conjure June home. It doesn’t work; it never does. It seems as if she’s at the university more often than not, although most likely that is not objectively the case. But he feels her absence all the way through him, just as he always has. The distance that wells up between them, fed by her work and his confusion, is a wound he doesn’t know how to heal. There will always be more work for June, more pressure to create a proof or move up the professorial ladder. It had been jarring, but not really a surprise, when she had moved seamlessly from writing her dissertation to accepting a fellowship in the maths department as Dr. June Oswin.
He sighs, steps away from the window. They can talk later that evening; the extra hour or so won’t make a difference in their planning. It’s just that he likes the idea of the three of them at the table together, eating and sharing their days. It’s important to him that Penny knows she’s part of a unit. Part of a family.
