by Rafe Posey
She’s too restless to sleep, and sits up, trying not to disturb the cat. After a moment she lights the gas fire and flicks on a light, then sits down at the table with a sheet of paper and a pencil, going back to the old childhood tools she’d used to soothe herself, building lists and maps. Her father had bought her an immense atlas of the world, its pages wide and perfectly smooth, the whole world laid out before her. She had been six, perhaps, or seven. Before Alec. She had fallen into it then too, page after colorful page of the loops of road and rail, the legends full of symbols, the pink of Siam and the pale yellow of Argentina. Her mother had regarded the sprawling maps without much comfort, as if she’d wondered even then what such an interest might suggest in her young daughter. But decades later, concentrating on those images is the same balm for June it had always been.
Austria had been a pale blue, and Vienna had sat on a page of its own, a splash of city with the Danube winding across like a ribbon. Another ancient city, wrecked by bombs and the loss of generations of its men, and perhaps, suddenly, astonishingly, a new place in which she can make a difference.
By the time she’s ready to fall asleep, the cat curled quietly beside her, she wishes she had some kind of equation to help her find her answers—a map, as it were, for finding her way through the questions. Still and all, she feels a shivery silver hope somewhere deep inside her, and perhaps that is enough.
1960, Edinburgh
The new year arrives in a curl of Hogmanay smoke, salt on the sills and bits of holly, rowan, and mistletoe tacked to every sash in the house. Mrs. Nesbit is stolid and true to her Presbyterian roots, but there are other roots that run deeper and, like a good Presbyterian Scot, Mrs. Nesbit is practical enough to appease those gods and spirits as well. Alec admires the way she hedges her bets, but perhaps that’s to be expected in a city where pagan rites like saining the house with juniper smoke and first footing the houses of your friends with gifts of fruitcake and whisky had filled the gap left by the centuries-old half-banishment of Christmas.
Alec had not missed Christmas when he and June had first come to Scotland. The absence of Christmas and Boxing Day as holidays had been puzzling, to be sure, but it had helped as well while the two of them had made their transition into this new life, away from Fenbourne. In Fenbourne Christmas had been nearly unbearable after the war—with his aunt gone, the cottage on the sluice road had never come to feel quite the same. And all through the village there were too many ghosts, too much looking over his shoulder for the dead and gone, hearing their lost, familiar voices in the tolling of the bells. There had been no way to attend the Christmas sermons in their beloved St. Anne’s, with the remnants of the vicarage looming so close, and the new cleric no match for June’s father. And it wasn’t as though not going had felt much better, honestly. Hearing the bells across the frozen fens, the rolling notes skating along the ice and the low clouds . . . It had felt like invitation and banishment both.
In every particular, the fire festivals and ritual cleaning of Scotland’s solstice had made for a much clearer rebirth for the pair of them. Alec has liked Hogmanay since that first winter here, although he and June had only joined the torchlit masses on their trek through the cobbled streets once, early on. Once had been enough for the half-drunken, wobble-voiced chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” that marked the start of the year. The throngs had bested him—all those people crowded together and making the best of the cold, every breath punctuated by the writhing crackle of bonfires popping through the night . . . It was hardly a German barracks, but the clamor and jostle had hit too close to home. It was still too soon after his return from that vile time in Odessa and Stalag Luft I, and it had left him shuddering with revenant fears, and eager for the celebratory drams on offer across the city. And even when he couldn’t hear the fires, the inescapable smoke had reminded him of his last days in India, of Bombay, and the impossible stench of the cleansing flames that had taken his parents from him, smoke rising blackly behind the Gateway as his ship pushed out and away.
But still, despite the echoes, despite all of it, something about Hogmanay and its conflagrations appeal to him. He had tried to explain it to June, but even she, knowing him all the way through, had regarded him, perplexed by the seeming contradiction. Perhaps, in the beginnings of his mother’s Tennant blood, there is some ancient Pict or Viking swimming quietly through him, waiting to welcome the lengthening days with fire. Or perhaps the pyres that had cleansed Bombay had left an unexpected mark, a handhold of sorts—the stain of it terrible but familiar.
He feels hopeful, stepping into this new decade, although he can’t say why exactly. The household feels marginally more stable since June’s return from Oxford, although not quite as steady as he would like. Losing Ursa has created a dreadful void in his days. It would be so much easier if nobody went away, if things could just stay the same for a moment. His hand drops sometimes from the arm of his chair as it always has, but now there is that jarring sense of free fall, as if the engines have stalled out, when there is no sleek dark head to lay his palm against.
And it’s not just Ursa’s absence that leaves him feeling so unsettled. As long as he’s known her, June has withdrawn a bit when she’s trying to work something out, and although she’s back, although the family feels whole once more, there are days when June seems further away than ever. Sometimes it is a more genial distance—one he recognizes from their early days, when she would lose herself in maps and timetables—and he has no way to know what she is charting behind those ocean-glass eyes. But other times it feels different, more pressing, especially when it comes on the heels of a letter from one of her overseas friends. At Christmas, when he had a letter from Cullen and Maeve, that longing and confusion in his chest had opened up again as he’d fallen into remembering, just for an instant, how close he had felt to them, and that low hum of guilt. And this is June, for God’s sake, his lodestar.
Of course when the spring term starts, much too soon, it will gall her to have to work with Larimer again, particularly in the wake of what sounds like a grand Michaelmas term indeed at her old college. Still, she has a place at the university here, support for her research. And she’s home, the two of them finding their way back to each other after all those months of separation—when he’d come back from Canada, his head full of model airplanes and fresh-baked pasties and cakes, he’d been angry and hurt, half-choked with the feeling of having been blindsided by that letter of June’s. By the time he’d made his way from Liverpool to Edinburgh, he’d chewed so long on the idea of her going to Oxford that it had taken on the immense weight of a line in the sand, a gauntlet thrown.
And yet. When he’d come up the front walk last summer, and Penny had run down the steps to fling herself upon him, he had looked up at the front door and seen June standing there, that small smile gilding her face, and his heart had leapt despite the hurt. He had been so relieved to see his girls again. The next weeks had been hard, to be sure. His confusion and resentment hadn’t gone away, and there had been days in her absence when the anger had come back, when he had missed her so much his skin had hurt, when he had taken Penny to the zoo or Loch Lomond and it had felt as though the world was just the pair of them. But his future should have June woven through it, shouldn’t it? In the tapestry of his life, she is the golden thread that runs through everything, fundament and fabric at once. Without her, the center cannot hold, and the warp of the loom has nothing to weave.
But today, on a cold Twelfth Night afternoon with a sky the color of newsprint, Alec can almost believe that the bewilderment is behind them. Almost. He hovers in the foyer, feeling rather at loose ends. Livingstone & Gray are closed for the Christmas holidays, and he’s anxious to get back into the traces there, continuing the work in Leith that he’d begun with Armand in Halifax.
He moves into the drawing room and fiddles with the wireless, but the Home Service offerings today seem either excessively choral—reasonable for the Fea
st of the Epiphany, but not what he wants—or melodramatic narratives about nurses and soldiers. This is such a disorienting day, not least because he can remember how Twelfth Night felt at the vicarage when he was a boy, he and June each hoping to find the lucky bean in the special crumbly fruitcake Cook had baked each year. It had always seemed like such a triumph to find the bean and wear the crown, to spend the day with his aunt and the Attwells, and now and again Uncle Roger too, to sit next to June in the front pew of St. Anne’s and listen to her father’s Epiphany sermon. The church had always had a glossy, gray smell to it despite the incense and smoky, melting candles, as if the Fens had come to listen, too. In the winter there had been the smell of dogs and wet wool as well, and the peat smoke from the fires that warmed so many of the area’s homes. It could not be more different here on Shakespeare Close, where today the whole house smells of the scones Mrs. Nesbit is making, a farthing concealed in one to give luck to the finder.
He gives up on the wireless and goes to the sofa with the newest issue of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. It’s never too early to plan spring planting, and he likes the RHS’s tone, which, in addition to avoiding the overbred sound of so many other garden magazines, lauds the gardens as much as the gardeners.
Alec is basking in the scents of Mrs. Nesbit’s work and thumbing through the journal’s pages when Penny skips into the drawing room with her stuffed bear, humming a tune he doesn’t recognize.
“Daddy,” she says, stopping and laying a palm against the wireless, “I want to listen to Jim Starling.”
Alec lowers the magazine and regards her affectionately. The Jim Starling series is not at all the kind of thing he would have expected a little girl to love, centered as it is on the adventures of a working-class lad and his group of friends in the north of England, but one of Sanjay’s boys had showed her the first book, and she’d been off to the races. And now that the BBC have added a six-part Jim Starling radio show to its afternoon programming this week, she’s fallen into that, as well. He glances at his watch. “Children’s Hour comes on at five. What if I read to you while we wait?”
Penny weighs this carefully. She’s already a strong reader, and sometimes the independence asserts itself as a somewhat stubborn pride, even while she is still a little girl who likes to hear a story. She’s considering his offer when June comes downstairs.
“I have something for you, Penny,” she says, holding out a sheet of graph paper and a worn copy of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Penny goes to her mother and takes the book and the paper, regarding them curiously. June continues. “I thought I would make you a puzzle.”
Penny settles herself onto the sofa beside Alec. “This is my favorite book.”
“Yes, that’s why I chose it,” June says. “I thought it might be rather a lark if we had a way to talk to each other. Our own secret language, if you will.”
Alec smiles at her over Penny’s head, pleased by the endeavor. It’s true that Penny is in many ways very much her father’s daughter, but her intellect comes from June. Marvelous, then, that June is looking to build this connection.
Penny regards her doubtfully. “Like a code?”
“More or less,” June says. “A code is slightly different, though. This is a cipher.”
Hoping to be helpful, Alec says, “How are they different?”
June smiles at him. “A cipher uses one symbol for another,” she says. “In this, for example, there’s a key word in the book, and once you know that, you can use that word to find out which letter is substituted for which. In a code, it’s more . . . conceptual. The word ‘osprey’ might be a warning that something is going to happen.”
Penny says, “What if we called Daddy another name so people wouldn’t know who we meant?”
“Yes,” June says, beaming at her. “That is a very good example of a code.”
Penny’s face lights up. June’s praise is hard to come by. “I bet Jim Starling and his friends have a code.”
“So the key word . . .” Alec trails off.
June raises an eyebrow. “That’s half the fun, finding that.”
“Oh,” Penny says. “That sounds hard.”
“Not at all,” June says. “Here.” She sits on Penny’s other side, taking the book in one hand while she points at the paper with her other. “This one is fairly simple—the key word is the same number of letters as this block here, you see? And you see, here, how the block of letters in our cipher has a letter repeated? So one thing you can do is look through the book and find a word with repeated letters in the same spots.”
“Spots,” Alec repeats. “Funny, in a book about Dalmatians.”
June smiles at him before turning back to Penny, the two of them falling into the puzzle together. Alec sits back and watches them gladly before returning to his newspaper.
When he hears the rattle of the post being delivered, Alec gets to his feet and goes to collect it—bills, mostly, and a circular announcing a flashy new department store opening in Tollcross in the spring, but in with the rest a thick, creamy envelope embossed with the government’s golden lion and unicorn, addressed to June. And, in nearly illegible print above the lion’s head, a single word: Corbett. Alec regards it unhappily.
“Letter for you,” he says, taking it in and handing it to June. She takes it, her brow furrowed; he’s heartened when she looks as puzzled and wary as he feels. “From Corbett, I gather.”
June nods, turning the letter over in her hands. “Yes, he’s been in Vienna for some time, I told you that. Cultural attaché at the embassy, something like that.”
“I remember,” he says, although that’s only partway true. He remembers her telling him that Corbett had gone off to do something on the Continent—he’d been glad the man would be farther away than usual—but hadn’t really paid enough attention to the details, such as they were. “Couldn’t pay me to live in Vienna.”
She looks up again. “Whyever not?”
“Live among . . .” He pauses; Penny is paying attention again. “Be hard to adjust to the new language,” he says, instead of saying what he’d started with, about living with the enemy. Even thinking of it makes him feel like the walls are closing in, and for just an instant his mind freezes like a broken reel of film on Smasher’s last minutes, the soldier yelling at him with those bloody harsh consonants. No. Thank God he’s free of all that, and here instead.
Penny says, “Where’s Vienna?”
“On the Continent,” June says. “It’s the capital of Austria.”
“Oh,” Penny says. “Daddy, is Jim Starling on yet?”
He forces himself to smile. “It will be very soon, darling.”
“Okay,” she says. She lays the cipher and her book neatly on the end table. “What do you think will happen to Jim and the gang today?”
Alec beams with delight. “I suppose we’ll have to wait and find out.” He sits beside her, listening while she reminds her bear what had happened in the previous episode. The wireless warms up, and then the familiar notes of the Children’s Hour sound.
June stands. “I may go lie down a bit before supper. Penny, love, will you tell me what happened with Jim, later?”
Penny nods, already engrossed in her radio show, and Alec follows June into the hallway. “Everything all right?”
“Can’t seem to shake this headache,” June says, her face drawn. She glances down at the unopened envelope. “It could be such an adventure, living abroad. Imagine the opportunities.”
Appalled, Alec stares at her. “A bloody adventure?”
June’s brow furrows. “But, Alec—”
“No,” he says, frustrated and upset, and struggling to keep his voice low so Penny won’t hear. “Imagine—those people carrying on in German all the time?”
There’s a beat of silence, and then the flash of comprehension in her eyes. “Of course,”
she says quietly then. She puts a hand to her forehead for a moment. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
* * *
• • •
As winter fades and the days lengthen, Alec’s worry gives way to hope. Whatever June has been gnawing at in her solitary way seems to have resolved, and he feels the determination of her return like the bright gleam of clouds opening after a storm. It has been a long time since she felt so present. And as he feels closer to June, the blur of Halifax recedes into memory, and Alec’s horizon clears for the first time in ages, as if the stars are guiding him true again at last.
With spring, the city explodes into bloom. Sometimes, to his surprise, Alec misses the marsh flowers and willows of the Fenlands, but that small ache is soothed when he walks through the city with Penny, who has never known any home but Shakespeare Close. She and Alec are in the habit of meandering over to Blackford Pond and looking for the foxes they have sometimes glimpsed in the filigree of thickets or climbing all the way up the hill to the ancient fort that sits at the summit. Alec is glad to have had the winter to get used to being without Ursa.
At midsummer, they take a weeklong holiday at an old croft cottage at the base of the Cairngorms in Scotland’s wild north. The cottage is gray and white stone, two rustic bedrooms and a kitchen warmed by an elderly stove that reminds Alec of the cottage in Fenbourne, and an old oaken table where he sits and writes postcards for Maeve and Cullen, Roger, and Sanjay. It’s not quite a hundred yards up the hill from the shores of Loch Morlich, and in the mornings Alec and June take their coffee sitting on the narrow slate terrace and watch the high summer clouds scud across the clear surface of the loch. The cottage is surrounded by trees, juniper and oak and ash teeming with wildlife; on their second day, Penny spots a badger trundling through the blackthorn scrub and a pair of otters frolicking in the loch’s shallows. At night, Alec lies next to June with the skein of stars visible through the window, listening to her breathe. The aurora comes once, gleaming waterfalls of blue and gold and green parading the night sky. That night, Alec turns on his side to find June awake too, and when he lays his fingers along the tender bones of her wrist, she smiles and puts her palm to his belly, smiling when he trembles.
