by Rafe Posey
During the week, he takes the trolleybus to the waterfront and the alcove he shares with a gruff pipe-smoking Quebecois whose blueprints and sketches litter the room like palm leaves. Most days, Alec takes his lunch at the Everard, a shabby little diner not far from the wharf. It’s the kind of place that must once have catered to stevedores and shipwrights, now more likely to feed men like him stepping away from the office for an hour in the middle of the day. He finds a certain comfort in the worn banquettes in the booths, and the nicks in the long countertop that runs the length of the building. They remind him of the pubs near the shipyard at Leith, the scores of lunches and pints with Sanjay and the other men from the office, and there is a quiet joy in being somewhere familiar.
Today, though, he and Armand, the draftsman, are meant to be settling the question of Livingstone & Gray’s next build, which has been a slow process at best. But now, after weeks of forms carved into paper with a T square and a thick black wax pencil, Armand’s fragrant pipe smoke thick in the air, they’ve found the gem they’re looking for: a sloop that will race along the cresting waves like a Thoroughbred.
At lunchtime, Alec makes his way to one of the creaky wooden benches that sit along the docks, waving off the pigeons and gulls hoping for a prize. He regards the birds warily—Maeve has packed him a lunch of leftover meat pasties, their crimped edges a rich brown, all of it flaking away in his hands. If he were a bird he would want this too, but he’s made the mistake before of throwing something to the gulls. They’ll grant no quarter and make a dreadful racket besides.
As with so much else Maeve has done in the past weeks, the pasties make Alec a bit homesick, if that’s the word. It’s less missing Edinburgh, or even his family, and more a nostalgic longing for his mother, or for those quiet afternoons with Cook and June at the vicarage. Of wondering what would have been without the war, or without his particular war, without the loss of the vicarage and his and June’s families, all of it contained in the way a layer of crust peels away when he bites it. It’s a form of magic, really, the conjuring, the spells woven through Maeve’s baking, as if she were a wisewoman of old, or a benevolent sorceress.
He finishes his lunch, the gulls swooping and screaming overhead, barking back at the breeze. Alec pauses and looks out over the water, where a seal is bobbing in the light current between two fishing trawlers in their berths. He watches until the seal dives again, and then Alec packs up to go back to the office.
1959, Edinburgh
It’s inevitable, really, that Penny should be so enthralled by Wojtek, the famous Syrian bear now living out his “retirement” from the Polish Army at the Edinburgh Zoo. Nearly every weekend this summer, June has taken Penny for her pilgrimage to see Wojtek wave to the crowd and eat biscuits. Penny is convinced the bear is under an enchantment, and so she tells him stories about her family, a patchwork of fact and fiction. All of this June watches with her heart alight, even while it reminds her of the ways that Penny is so much more like Alec than like her.
When Alec had first floated the idea of his being gone for so long, it had alarmed June. And truth told, the first few weeks had been hard. It’s embarrassing to admit, even to herself, how much she has come to rely on Alec and Mrs. Nesbit to manage nearly everything about the household. Even when Alec sailed for Canada, she had not filled the vast space he’d left behind as she ought to have done; she had asked more of Mrs. Nesbit. Worst of all, it had taken a calamity to make her see what she was doing—a loose stone in the garden, and Mrs. Nesbit catching her foot on it and taking a tumble. She hadn’t been badly injured, thank God, but a sprained ankle was nothing to scoff at, and June, though anxious about taking on the household by herself, had of course told the older woman to stay off her foot and rest at home.
But with Alec in Canada and Mrs. Nesbit with her family in Oxgangs for the past fortnight, June has had more opportunities to spend time with Penny on somewhat different terms than Alec’s presence allows for. They’ve found more small bonds—the strolls through Morningside to the market, the shared excitement when they come to the bookshop halfway between home and the teashop, even the way Penny has started taking just one lump of sugar in her tea, emulating June.
Today, with the midsummer sun still aloft in the late afternoon, and a breeze coming down off the crags and stirring the leaves of the sycamores and rowans that fill the zoo’s landscape, June feels as relaxed as she has in a while. Even in summer her work at the university has been more of a trial than usual—after months of rumors, a Reader position had finally opened in the department, and she and her colleagues had fallen headlong into the scrum of competition, scrambling to publish more research, line their ducks in a row . . . Next week the chips will fall as they may, and despite knowing quite well how the department operates, an old boys’ club as stolid and conservative as any thickly carpeted, pipe-smoke-clogged gentlemen’s establishment in London, June is cautiously optimistic. She has better, deeper research than anyone else in Edinburgh—in Scotland, for that matter—and years of building her reputation in Fourier series expansion and the Basel problem.
“Mummy, can we go and see the lambs next?”
June looks down at her daughter, who beams up at her. “Certainly, if you’ve had enough time with Wojtek.”
Penny turns her jacket pockets inside out, looking a bit put upon. “I don’t have any treats for him. And last time Uncle Floss said he would bring me a special biscuit, but then he didn’t come today.”
“He’s very busy,” June says. “I’m sure he’ll bring some another time.” She takes Penny’s hand, and together they take their leave of Wojtek.
* * *
• • •
Mrs. Nesbit returns on Monday, and June watches Penny fall back into their old routines with a bit of a pang. June has done her best with the house itself, but Mrs. Nesbit looks around and sighs once, gently, before setting after the place with her duster and rags. Even Ursa seems to mind the Hoover less when Mrs. Nesbit is running it. And although June has vague misgivings about whether Mrs. Nesbit should be back on her feet and running full tilt, the housekeeper insists she’s right as rain.
On the Tuesday June meets with the maths chair, it isn’t until she steps back out into the evening, heartsick and frustrated, that she really understands how much she had pinned all her hopes on the new position. She’s been climbing the ladder from her days as a graduate assistant and post-graduate fellow until now—Senior Lecturer at the Department of Mathematics, prominent publications and important research in her dossier, years of commendations and favorable notices filed away carefully with an eye toward this next level. And they should have chosen her for the one Reader post, rewarded her efforts with the freedom to focus more on research than instruction, a passel of graduate students at her beck and call . . . But that door is closed, the whole idea abruptly terminated by a single apologetic sentence from the department chair—You’ve got everything we want in a Reader, June, but there’s your family to think of.
So Mark Larimer will be the new Reader. He’s a boor even at the best of times, and inclined to use his brilliance lazily, riding other scholars’ coattails. They’ve jostled each other for position for a decade. And now he’s won.
She glances at her watch—perhaps she’s taking a bit of advantage of Mrs. Nesbit’s return, but she’s got plans for an early dinner with Floss, and he should be here to collect her any moment now. She had hoped it would be a celebratory dinner, but it’s just as well Floss will be the first person to whom she vents her frustration. He will understand without all the other layers that Alec would bring to it, all the years of marriage and the decades before that, his ideas about what kind of family they are or are not meant to be.
A silver-blue Bentley glides gently to the curb, and Floss rolls down his window as if she’s conjured him. He’s smiling, until he sees her face, and then it’s as if he’s seen the whole situation writ large. His smile vanishes
as he opens the door for her. “You look as though you could use a drink.”
“I could,” she says, climbing in and settling beside him. “Today has not been all I had hoped.”
He nods sympathetically, leaning forward to give the driver an address off Leith Street, close to the New Town. As they drive, the familiar gray-green city unfolding alongside the car, June tells him about her meeting. About the chair’s decision, and his rationale, her own argument regarding the work she’s done, the efforts she’s made, the time she’s dedicated to the university. By the time they pull up in front of a café, she’s run through the whole story. Floss’s frown deepens, but he doesn’t respond until they’re seated at a table in a shadowed corner not far from the front window. Trust Floss to find a table from which he can see everything happening outside but still remain nearly invisible himself.
“Well,” he says at last, after he’s ordered his usual bottle of Champagne, “I wish it had gone rather differently. Unfortunate they can’t see what they’ve got in you, but one door closes, another opens, all that.”
“I’m not sure there are other doors in Edinburgh, just now.” She shakes her head. “I really did think they thought better of me than this.”
“It’s a shame, truly,” Floss says, “but of course one can’t deny your chair has a point.”
June glances at him sharply, startled and a bit dismayed. Floss is the one person she would have expected to always be on her side.
“I’ve been telling you for a dog’s age what I thought you ought to be doing—could be doing—and you’ve always told me you can’t because of your family. And now someone else tells you the same thing . . .” He takes out his cigarette case, selects one, and taps it on the table. “Honestly, Attwell, what did you think would happen, if you kept to the middle of the road like this? For someone like you, the middle can never quite work. You’re meant to be committing to something—that’s how you are, not someone happy with half measures.”
The words feel like a slap, but the worst of it is knowing that he’s right. But to admit that means facing reality and putting away the past she misses. All the roads taken or not, the innumerable impossible futures, may as well be smoke and mirrors.
“June, darling,” Floss says, his voice conciliatory, as if he’s realized how he must sound to her. He reaches across the table, pats her hand like an ancient uncle. “Come with me to Berlin when I go back. It’s just getting better, now the Soviets have stepped up their space program.”
The rush of excitement is palpable—past or not, that work has an undeniable claim on her. But it’s not possible. “Floss—”
He cuts her off. “We could make it work. What if we were to put you on staff at the embassy, bring the family along . . .” The waiter returns and uncorks the bottle, and June and Floss sit quietly while he pours. When the waiter is out of earshot, Floss says, “We need you out there, and you’ve got the language background. Berlin, Vienna, wherever you like. I expect we could find something for Oswin to do. Be good for the little girl as well, don’t you think? Broaden her world a bit?”
She looks down at the table, at the weave of the damask tablecloth, the perfectly aligned silverware. There are patterns everywhere, and nobody sees them better than she does. She takes a breath. “It seems nearly impossible.”
Floss lights his cigarette and shrugs philosophically. “The same was said about many far greater obstacles. And there’s always a place for the best. Think about it, will you?”
June nods. It is such a boon to hear, but it hurts too, having what she wants almost within reach like this. Floss grins and raises his glass in a toast. “To your glorious future, whatever it entails.”
“Thank you,” June says. She clinks her glass to his, and they drink.
“Lovely stuff,” he says, eyeing the bubbles. “At any rate, how is Oswin liking Canada?”
“He seems very settled in,” June responds. Floss raises an eyebrow, but she doesn’t elaborate.
“Speaking of the New World, I expect you remember Wendy Fairchild?”
“Of course,” June says, with the usual pang of missing Wendy and the work they did together for so long. She takes refuge in another sip of her drink.
“She’s been in Hong Kong for an age,” he says, “but she’s just been transferred to Buenos Aires, our embassy there. Must keep track of the Peronists and runaway Nazis and whatnot.”
With the university feeling much less now like somewhere she might ever belong, the lure of everything Wendy is experiencing—and everything Floss has ever offered June—tugs hard at June’s sense of purpose and her need to be doing something. “I expect she’s brilliant there,” she says, trying not to let the new layer of resentment and confusion show.
Floss nods with a smug smile. “Quite.”
“I’m glad,” she says. She takes another sip. With any luck the evening can be salvaged, and to that end she asks Floss if he’s read the latest responses to Kolmogorov’s solution to the Hilbert problems. It’s a relief when he leans in seamlessly to her change of topic.
* * *
• • •
June wakes the next morning disoriented and tired, and that overcast feeling sticks with her all day, even when her return to the maths department is less jarring than she had feared. One of the junior lecturers gives her a sympathetic Hard luck, June, when she passes his office, but for the most part everyone seems not to even notice. And, while the lack of fuss makes some of this easier, it also makes her wonder how she ever thought they would choose her. When did she start having stars in her eyes and believing in impossible dreams? She misses Alec, misses the familiar, stable hum of him in her world. She knows Alec misses her too, but over the course of his trip his letters have sounded less urgent, in some ways. More focused on the work in Halifax, or on the family he’s living with while he’s there. But now, with only a few weeks left, and this feeling she has that Edinburgh has turned on her, somehow . . . She misses him more.
* * *
• • •
By the middle of the next week, just over a fortnight before Alec is due to board the ship that will bring him home, June feels stretched thin by her competing desires to be part of this family and part of Floss’s world at the same time. And worse, there is a part of her that resents giving up Berlin, and then feels guilty for that as well.
That Friday brings a letter from Sybil de Cler. June is almost reluctant to open it—it’s been years since she’s heard from Sybil, and it feels like a bit much that her past insists on remaining front and center. Still, she’s curious about what Sybil is up to after all this time.
But the letter is much more than anything she would have expected: Sybil is at Oxford now, teaching at June’s old college, where the faculty are looking to bring in a visiting research fellow for the Michaelmas term. I know this is not much in the way of notice, Sybil writes, and I’m terribly sorry, but the post has only just come vacant. When they asked me if I knew anyone who might be suitable, you were the first person I thought of. You’ve made quite a name for yourself, and anyway, wouldn’t it be brilliant to work together again?
June stares at the letter, trying to take it in. Before she knows quite what she’s doing, she’s flipped through the pages of her calendar, eyeing the Michaelmas term. Four months at Somerville College, maybe five, building proofs and immersing herself in the life of the mind she’s been working toward her whole life. Somerville means more girls like her, girls too clever by half, and Sybil there, someone she could actually talk to sometimes about the old days. She looks at the letter again—all that research, a lecture twice during the term, rooms in the college with a view of the river. Nothing to do but maths. Guilt snakes through her when she thinks of stepping away for those months. But Oxford is hardly Australia; there are trains and motorways, weekend holidays halfway.
She looks up and finds Penny watching her patiently. Wit
h a pang, she realizes Penny is waiting to walk with her to the fish and chips shop to pick up their supper. “I’m sorry,” June says. “I had a letter from a friend.”
“I like getting letters,” Penny says. “Like the ones from Daddy. Maybe Ronit and Rakshan will write me letters when they go to India again.”
“Quite possibly,” June says. Penny is only six, but the way she connects ideas reminds June of herself at the same age. As they walk, Ursa ambling slowly beside them on her lead, Penny chatters about the flowers they pass, or the birds that flit high overhead. June smiles to herself. Penny is so like Alec.
After the fish and chips are gone and Penny has had her bath, June sits at her bedside to read Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” one of Penny’s favorite stories. She tucks Penny in with her worn stuffed bear and opens The Jungle Book, flipping through the familiar pages to the tale of the valiant mongoose.
“‘This is the story,’” June reads, “‘of the great war that Rikki-Tikki-Tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment.’”
