by Rafe Posey
Alec shakes his head, and Maeve’s eyes fill with disappointment. Regretfully he says, “I’d best not.”
“I understand,” she says quietly. She gets to her feet and takes his glass.
Alec frowns, sorry that he seems to have let her down and unsure how to navigate this confusing new space. He stands, too. “Well. Good night, then.”
“Good night, Alec.” She moves to the door, where she turns back to face him. “You’ll forgive me saying so but . . .” She gives him a small, rueful smile and speaks so softly he strains to hear. “What I wouldn’t give to be in June’s shoes.” And with that she disappears inside.
Alec lets out a whoosh of breath, overcome with feeling. An owl passes overhead, silent on its way to the pines across the way. He watches it go, trying to understand what’s just happened.
* * *
• • •
The last week of his time in Halifax races past, and Alec makes half a dozen fitful starts of a letter to June. He resents having to write it, having to ask her to hold off on a decision until he’s home, and he’s frustrated that he will likely be on the ship back to Britain by the time she gets the letter he finally composes. He needs to get back to Edinburgh and try to understand what’s happening. Or try to fix it, if there is something that can be fixed. He also struggles with the alarming, tangled threads of his ties to Maeve and Cullen. He can’t forget what it felt like to be held, or the words she said before she went inside the house, and the effort to quash his confusion and try to act as if nothing happened is exhausting. And even beyond that, he doesn’t know quite how to leave them, especially when he thinks about how much time he’s spent with Cullen, how much their routines have intertwined. And he needs to settle himself back into his real life, not this strange existence where he waits for Maeve to smile at him and then feels a rush of shame when she does.
Not that she is smiling as much as she had before that night on the terrace. She’s never mentioned it, but sometimes Alec looks up to find her regarding him pensively. He feels as though something has changed in how she talks to him even while he cannot pinpoint exactly what that difference is. Sometimes he feels as if she is avoiding being alone with him too, and he’s glad to have so much to do at Livingstone & Gray to tie up the loose ends and ready the project for its next stages; he can’t be at the house and see Maeve without his thoughts blurring into disarray.
* * *
• • •
His last morning in Halifax, the Carters join him in the dining room for a send-off. Cullen has got him a book on the pirates of the Atlantic coast, full of garish, lurid illustrations. And Maeve, who seems to remember everything he likes best, has made him a Victoria sandwich, laden with cream and raspberry jam. Even after all these weeks of Maeve’s baking, she can still surprise him, and it lights a discomfiting spark in his chest that he doesn’t quite want to extinguish.
“It’s not your birthday, of course,” she says, “but perhaps it isn’t always needing to be?”
“It’s perfect,” he says, tugged at by memories of Cook’s sponges at the vicarage and a thousand other bafflements and memories. “Utterly perfect.”
She pinkens gladly, but then her smile fades a bit. Her shoulders square as she takes a breath and pulls one of the flowery index cards she keeps in a tin on the kitchen windowsill from her apron pocket. “Thought I’d send the recipe along. For June.”
Alec falters just briefly before he takes the card from her. He understands all in a moment what this is, understands that Maeve is acknowledging—accepting—the way things are, the way they must be. He’s touched by her stoicism, and by her kindness. “Thank you,” he tells her, even as he knows very well June will never make this cake. “Thank you awfully much,” he says again. “For everything.”
Maeve ducks her head. “We’re going to miss you.”
“It’s been a pleasure to host you, Mr. Oswin,” Mrs. Carter says.
Cullen looks up, his eyes sad. “You were the best one we ever had.”
“It has been my honor to know you,” Alec says, his voice stiff. There is too much to say to this boy, and he’s not sure how to acknowledge the hole saying goodbye to Cullen is going to leave in Alec’s world. Or, worse, the hole he’s going to leave in Cullen’s. “You’re a grand lad, and I would not have enjoyed Halifax half as much without you.”
“Do you think you might come back?” Cullen’s eyes brighten with hope.
“Acushla,” Maeve says gently.
Cullen glances at her and looks away again, picking at his cake. “Will you write, at least?”
“Of course,” Alec says. “You as well, I hope. And perhaps one day when you’re having your adventures I’ll see you again, yes?”
The boy nods tightly. Maeve watches her son, her brow furrowing with concern, and reaches along the table to take his hand in hers.
Alec leans back in the chair that’s been his for so long now, watching these people for whom he has come to care so deeply. It’s time to go home—well past, if June’s letter is any indication—but the idea of leaving Maeve and Cullen behind colors the relief of homecoming. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out a parcel wrapped awkwardly in brown paper, then slides it across to Cullen. “I had hoped this would come sooner, so we could build it together, but . . .”
Cullen reaches for the parcel and pulls out a small plastic-wrapped Beaufighter kit. His eyes widen. “Where did you find it?”
The gladness in Cullen’s face warms him, but it does nothing to soothe the ache of leaving. “Took a bit to track it down, certainly. Let me know how it turns out, will you?”
“I will,” Cullen says. He turns the model over in his hands, and Alec grins, recognizing the excited glint the boy gets in his eyes when he’s planning a build.
Maeve smiles at Alec, her eyes glistening.
Alec puts his palm to the boy’s thin shoulder. For a moment he’s lost in the memory of Roger squeezing his shoulder this way, a lifetime ago in that stormy night coming from India, the rain lashing into his face. Out front of the house a taxi is sounding its horn. Alec gets reluctantly to his feet. It never would have occurred to him, all those weeks ago, that at the end of his time in Halifax he would feel this way. The pain of goodbye is persistent and unavoidable, and being the one who is leaving feels no better, it transpires, than being the one who’s left behind.
1959, Oxford
Snow has laced the mullions, and in the quad below her window June can see Potiphar, the illicit tomcat who prowls House as if he owns it, mincing carefully through the dusting that has stuck to the tired winter grass. His feathery fawn tail lashes against the weather as he stops to sniff something—a tiny bit of red in the white—a poppy left fallen from Remembrance Day, perhaps. June brushes idly at her own poppy, still pinned to the woolen folds of her muffler where she’s hung it near the gas-flame hearth to dry.
The flower makes her think of Alec more than usual; November 11 has been a hard day for him as long as she’s known him, because of his father’s service, and more recently because of his own history. Immersed at Oxford and surrounded by students roughly the age Alec was when he went to the RAF, June can’t help wondering what he would have become, if the war had not come and scooped him out of university. He had been flying already at Cambridge, but she can imagine him easily out of uniform, a regular undergraduate in the jaunty pullover and cap of a Cambridge sportsman with a full cricket Blue. Perhaps he would have given up the RAF. Or perhaps the skies would have been his home for longer, under his own terms, as the cricket pitch had been.
Alec’s particular interruption, infinitely more than her own, feels oppressive sometimes, and grossly unfair. As if any of it is fair to anyone. She looks back out at the cat, who is now emerging from beneath the hedge like a small blue-eyed lion, a perfect example of a life well-lived on one’s own terms. June envies him a bit, although she
knows his life is rougher around the edges than she would ever wish for herself. Too, Potiphar reminds her of Box, not least when he appears in the evening with a gift for her—a mouse, sometimes, or a vole. Just as well it’s winter, or who knows what he might bring in. Potiphar stalks the quad and corridors alike, keeping order according to his nature—no wonder the students and scouts of Somerville College have named him for the captain of Pharaoh’s palace guard.
She gives him one last glance, then sits again and turns her attention back to the spread of papers strewn carefully about the table before her. June has spent the Michaelmas term studying Hodge manifolds with an eye toward connecting Kodaira and Calabi. It seems possible, nearly, although a proof for the Calabi conjecture hovers just out of reach. She can almost see it, the unfolding of those elegant lines of Calabi’s theory, the way they underpin something greater. But a proof doesn’t happen at speed, not unless one is prodigious indeed, and she will have to be patient. Next week she will give a lecture on bilinear forms and the Kähler manifold to whichever of Somerville’s girls wish to attend. She expects the audience to be slight, at best. Still, though, it’s a luxury to have the time to follow the threads of the proof she hopes to find.
It’s six weeks to Christmas, hardly a month until her time at Somerville ends. She will be glad to get back to Edinburgh in time to spend the holidays with Penny and Alec, the quiet traditions they’ve built over time. Although: this year will be different—it’s only the second Christmas in hundreds of years that the day itself will be a public holiday, although nothing like Hogmanay, a week later.
In Fenbourne, when she was small, they had hung holly and bunting round the vicarage, hosted carolers with mulled wine and tiny cakes. And the bells . . . The bells of St Anne’s had rung out at midnight every Christmas Eve to call the faithful to the midnight service. June’s father had rung the bells until that last Christmas, not long before the lethal bombing. The bells at St. Anne’s had been a constant. Every year they had broken the silence of midnight in the Fens on Christmas Eve in a ceremonial refrain she had loved. But that last year in Fenbourne, with Alec missing and her parents dead, the bells had been nearly unbearable.
On Shakespeare Close, as at the vicarage, there will be holly and bunting, a tree and a mound of parcels waiting beneath it, and Mrs. Nesbit, as she has every year, will prepare a Sowans Nicht meal for the family on Christmas Eve. For a moment, June can almost smell the acrid smoke of a rowan branch burning, someone in the neighborhood trying to turn their luck for the better. She almost laughs, though ruefully: perhaps when she gets back she should ask Alec to burn one for them this year.
She has missed them, although the idea of leaving Oxford brings with it a considerable measure of regret. At Oxford she’s doing something she loves, with people she likes; she has basked in the respect she’s found in this temporary post at Somerville, and all in all it gives her the sense she was right to step away from her post at the University of Edinburgh, however temporarily. Still, she wishes she had handled all of it more smoothly with Alec—she had tried to explain, when he returned from Halifax, to help him see how she was drowning, how the need to change the world around her became overwhelming and urgent. June had felt as though she might lose herself, and perhaps it had been a mistake to say so to Alec, given how he’d looked at her and looked at his hands, as though suggesting that he had suffered losses she could not imagine. When she goes home, she will try to mend the rift she caused between them.
Her choice to leave Alec and Penny in Edinburgh, no matter how necessary Oxford and this time would be to her own survival, has hurt them, Alec perhaps especially. He has sent perfunctory letters, almost entirely narrating Penny’s activities and endeavors, leaving his own daily life out of it. On the very rare occasions she’s been able to phone them, he has been pleasant enough, but that distance is always there. She had hoped he would come to terms with this better, or sooner. That after all these weeks there would have been a letter that felt right. But no. And soon she will be back in Edinburgh, where she will have to face her choices head-on—and how is it possible to know you made the right decision and still feel the taste of the wrong in the back of your throat?
But no matter her ambivalence about her return to Edinburgh and her increasingly unsatisfying work there, her sojourn in Oxford has given her an anchor for her sense of self. Perhaps that will help her be a better member of her family. Still, it’s impossible to look at the proof she’s developing and not know how much she will miss this sort of work, the focus on research rather than teaching. It lacks the life-or-death urgency of codebreaking, but there is something about the way the language of algebra unfolds that lights her mind, and her heart, the same way.
If only it were possible to have a real post at Oxford. Sybil has hinted that her own spot may be coming open in the not-distant future—not something she can talk about just now, all very hush-hush—which has served to light a fire in June’s imagination. Perhaps Sybil is going back to codes or one of the new, postwar, semi-secret intelligence offices? There’s no way to know, given Sybil’s discretion, and the curiosity niggles at June. She is intrigued by the idea of filling Sybil’s post if it becomes available—it’s more teaching than research, more like Edinburgh than this visiting research fellow post at Oxford, but still a continuation of her time at Somerville. Which, despite the occasional sniff of cronyism she feels about her position here, she loves.
Too, it has been a boon to see Sybil nearly every day. She hadn’t realized how tired she was of the secrets, and how lonely she’d grown within them, until suddenly she no longer had to keep them. Even if the endless reach of the Official Secrets Act kept them from telling each other what they’d done in the years after Bletchley Park, before the end of the war, it was enough to be able to talk about the work they’d had in common, and the people they’d known. About the ghastly old manor and the geese and all the rest of it. After all the years of quiet, it’s been almost too easy to fall into the habit of that connection again. And tonight it will only strengthen, with drinks planned for the evening with Portia Wallace, whom June hasn’t seen in nearly two decades. But Sybil and Portia have met up the Friday after Remembrance Day every year since the war ended to toast those they lost to the enemy, and tonight June will join them.
* * *
• • •
The next time she looks up, Oxford is well into the gloaming. It’s after five, and June is going to be late if she doesn’t leave soon. Sybil’s terraced Victorian house isn’t far, just off the Banbury Road, but although it’s stopped snowing, neither the temperature nor the slick surfaces are going to make it an easier walk. She makes sure she’s got the key to her room and a few pound notes in case of an emergency, then heads out into the cold.
Until Oxford, it had been a long time since June had had much time to herself, and still, after just more than two months, she is not quite accustomed to the raw relief of that freedom. She has no one to leave a note for, nobody who will wait up for her, except Scroggs, the Somerville porter. Nobody interrupts her when she’s head down in working through a proof or consolidating her notes. Sometimes she looks up from her papers and wonders, just for a moment, how the house is so quiet—where everyone has gone.
But crossing the lamplit quad, sharing space with undergraduates racing back to their rooms and then the dining hall, brings June a sense of peace. Somewhere out there is Potiphar, making his way through the evening, and against the low, dark sky she can hear the jackdaws that roost in the college’s smokestacks and chimney flues. Her joy, still fresh on these Oxford evenings, is a startlement of sorts.
She steps out through the porter’s lodge, nodding to Scroggs, and turns onto the Woodstock Road, shuddering at the wind coming down from the north. Ever since Sybil’s invitation to join her and Portia this evening, June has been mildly fretful—she and Portia hadn’t had all that much in common when they’d known each other at Bletchley Park; Po
rtia had been much more caught up in her fiancé and her eventual return to her wealthy Mayfair lifestyle. Sybil has kept June up to date, over the years, as Portia has been widowed and remarried, her family growing in a postwar life in London, as far from their exciting past as possible.
Not for the first time, June wishes she could talk to either of them about her fracture with Alec, but Sybil has stayed away from domestic life, and Portia is too much in it. Besides, Sybil has already listened patiently to June’s screed about Edinburgh and Mark Larimer, the asinine thorn in her side. It would have been galling enough to be Larimer’s also-ran, but to be left out of it entirely . . . Well. That had hurt, and so she had asked for and been granted a short sabbatical.
And such a good respite it has been, too. Walking through the cold, letting the rhythm of her footsteps push away the endless annoyance at Larimer and his acolytes, she feels as at home in Oxford as Potiphar, and smiles to herself at the comparison. He is very much Kipling’s Cat that walked by himself, and she thinks again of Box, and reading “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” to Penny.
When she reaches Sybil’s house, she climbs the stairs and rings the bell.
Sybil throws open the door a moment later with a cheery “Attwell!”
“Darling June,” Portia says, coming up behind Sybil. “It’s been an age!” She embraces June, kissing her cheek.
June returns the embrace, handing her coat and muffler to Sybil, and follows them into the drawing room. She hadn’t quite realized how much the chill had got to her and settles herself in a chair near the fireplace.
Portia takes a seat on the sofa, neatly crossing her legs. “Tell me everything,” she says eagerly. “All about Alec and your daughter. Mine are all boys, of course, but little girls are such a delight.”
“Well,” June says, already feeling clumsy and insufficient in the face of Portia’s interest, and knowing she needs to express an interest of her own. “We live in Edinburgh, the three of us, where I’ve been at the university for some time.”
