The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  “Rather,” June says. “Shall we see if it stops raining, or slows at any rate, and go after lunch?”

  “Perfect,” Alec says.

  “Yes, perfect,” Penny echoes.

  Alec opens his arms, and Penny scoots into a hug. “That was brilliant,” he says. “Absolutely marvelous. And Lucky was terrific.”

  Penny glances back at the dog with a proud smile. “He’s awfully clever.”

  Alec grins over her shoulder at June, who looks as bemused and astonished as he feels, and for just a moment the world feels less on the edge of disaster.

  * * *

  • • •

  The rain clears in the early afternoon, and the three of them take the tram to the zoo. As they alight at the gatehouse on Corstorphine Road, Alec catches a glimpse of their reflection in one of the puddles gleaming along the cobblestones: the two of them as tall as church towers, Penny the portals and facade between them. He smiles to himself—if Lucky were here, would he be the clerestory or the nave?

  June catches him smiling, returns it tentatively. “What’s funny?”

  “It’s nothing,” he says, and her smile loses its balance. He hadn’t meant it to sting, but perhaps everything they say to each other will be laden like this from now on, weighted for one in ways the other can’t hear.

  It has turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, and they are joined at the zoo by what feels like half the city. But while most of the families mill about and try to organize themselves, Penny takes her parents by the hands and tugs them up the hill toward Wojtek’s enclosure. They are nearly there when an elephant’s trumpeting burnishes the afternoon, and Penny stops in her tracks.

  “Sally!” She hovers for a moment, undecided, then changes course. “We must see Sally, Daddy. Maybe you can have an elephant ride for your birthday!”

  “I think I’m a bit larger than her usual sort,” Alec says mildly.

  Penny rolls her eyes. “Well, yes, but you’re not bigger than four children, are you?”

  “You make an excellent point,” he says, “but I think I’ll take a pass if it’s all the same.”

  “Okay,” Penny says. She comes to a halt outside the elephant’s home, the sun steaming out of the acrid hay. June wrinkles her nose, but Penny digs in her pocket and pulls out another bit of scone. She tosses it to the elephant, who flaps her massive ears before delicately taking the morsel from the ground with her trunk.

  “I see Sally likes the scones as well as Lucky does,” Alec says.

  “May I have an elephant ride?” Penny regards them plaintively. “I haven’t in ages.”

  “Of course,” Alec says.

  Penny pauses again. “Have you ever ridden an elephant, Daddy? When you were small?”

  “Yes,” he says after a moment. “When I was just about your age, I suppose. My parents knew an old mahout, and one morning they let him take me out on his elephant, up in the hills. Indian elephant, of course, much smaller than Sally.” Almost unconsciously his hand steals out in front of him as if the rough gray-and-pink forehead might still be within reach. “He said that when his elephant was young he’d smelled like honey.”

  Penny looks up at him, her face dubious. “Sally doesn’t smell a bit like honey.”

  June chuckles. “No, it’s just the young males that smell sweet. Once they get a little older . . .” She gestures at Sally. “Well, you know. Rather much, aren’t they?”

  “I didn’t know you knew about elephants, too,” Penny says, regarding June curiously. “Did you ever ride one, like me and Daddy?”

  June looks out over the zoo, sloping away toward the city below them. Beyond Sally, giraffes sway across a paddock thick with grasses, and for a moment Alec thinks she’s staring at them, until he realizes that she’s gazing off toward something he and Penny can’t see. The elephants of her past, presumably. At last, June turns back to Penny with a too-bright smile. “I’ve never ridden an elephant, no.”

  Alec doesn’t know what to think. Is she telling the truth? She wouldn’t just lie, would she? Not now, not after everything that’s come out in the last week. But even if she hasn’t ridden an elephant, surely she’s seen one. Surely.

  What is he meant to do when the truth is couched as unbearably as the omissions and untruths that led them to this point, and everything his wife says is laced with doubt? How is he meant to be part of this?

  Alec looks down at Penny again, trying to fix his smile. He knows the answer lies with her, and someday perhaps he will be able to see it more clearly. For today, he turns and looks back at Sally, the leisurely switch of her tail.

  “Let’s get you a ticket,” he says to Penny, “and I’ll tell you more about the mahout and his elephant while we wait.”

  1963, Vienna

  The path to the restaurant runs as straight as a Fenlands lane, the pale gravel walkway lined with horse chestnut trees with leaves as bright as tigers. June walks slowly through the Stadtpark, listening to the rattle of crows lighting on the iron fence, their wings mahogany in the setting sun. An elderly couple crosses not far in front of her, a fat white dog pulling them along through the gloaming. The woman’s left elbow loops through the man’s right; his own left arm is just a sleeve pinned tidily up to the shoulder. June pauses to let them pass, wondering about the old man’s war.

  She gazes around her, shaking off the momentary disquiet before she continues on her way. There are people everywhere, but it’s not noisy; Vienna is a staid old city, a dowager on the banks of an ancient river. Although quiet is relative, isn’t it? There is the crunch of her footsteps on the gravel, the wind in the branches of a linden tree where a squirrel runs headlong down the trunk to chatter her away, the trill of a sparrow somewhere off in the distance.

  And, at the end of the walk, a meowing gray cat who arches against June’s calf and presses its forehead to her palm when she stoops to pet it. She makes a note to tell Penny about the small cat later, and the relief catches at her again that Penny is well, that the fever that raged through her over the summer has gone away, that her daughter is healing and gaining back her strength. It had been terrifying, to say the least. Alec had aged visibly through the course of the illness, and June has no illusions that she is any more unscathed than he. Even once Penny had turned the corner and started to recover, it had been a hard road, and for a while it had seemed that June would be unable to accept the invitation to the mathematics symposium that’s brought her to Vienna.

  She forces herself back to the present and straightens up to regard the restaurant. Tucked between two old stone edifices, it might have been a stable once. Or perhaps this place with the low yellow walls and the guttering gaslit lantern over the doorway has been serving Vienna since the Turks were here, or the Romans. Café Leo looks like something out of an old story, the kind of place where travelers might have stopped and exchanged tales on a stormy night. But truly, everything on this visit has felt like a fairy tale, all castles and swans and light dappling through trees.

  But fairy tales never come to good ends, do they? The cost is always too high, the dragons too strong, the obstacles too mighty. Her time with the Foreign Office had been like a fairy tale as well, and she the heroine counting seeds or spinning straw to defeat the enemy. And she had been damn good at it, too. But the cost . . . The cost had been calamitous; she had almost lost Alec, and although, in the end, he had stayed, and their life had evened out, he had never looked at her quite the same again.

  June steps inside and pauses, letting her eyes adjust to the way the fading light appears in pockets through the deep-cut windows. Most of the oaken tables are full, old men, mostly, sitting in clusters with heavy jugs of wine. Smoke from cigarettes and heavy pipes curls through the air, the fug of it thick and autumnal. The men glance up curiously at her and then away again. For just an instant, June shivers—some of these men may have served in the first war, but what of the ot
hers? Are there former soldiers or sailors here whose fates she held in her hand? Are there pilots here who confronted Alec in the midnight skies over the Channel? She can’t help but think of that awful moment, years ago now, when Alec bridled against the idea of living in a German-speaking world. She had understood enough, then, to change her own trajectory forever. But now, standing here on the thick wooden planks of the café’s old floor, listening to a young waitress chat in German with one of the patrons, she understands the long reach of Alec’s war differently.

  Across the room, Wendy Fairchild rises from her seat by the fireplace and raises a hand to catch June’s eye. “Over here,” she says, her voice carrying through the hubbub. June smiles and makes her way to the table, and Wendy comes around and embraces her. “God, it’s good to see you. You had me worried, Attwell.” She steps back and eyes June critically. “You look good. Better than last time.”

  June smiles. “Thank you.” The last time she’d seen Wendy had been, what, two years ago? Wendy had been on her way to Vienna in some capacity, nominally connected to the embassy, and had come through Edinburgh as part of her leave. “You as well, though. Vienna agrees with you.”

  Wendy gives her a toothy grin. “Grand old city, really.” She gestures at the table. “Here, I’ll get us some wine.”

  They sit, the fireplace beside them raked clean and cold of the prior night’s ashes. A sleek black-and-tan Doberman lying in the shadows beneath the table looks up and regards June with mild interest before lowering his head back to his paws. Wendy drops a hand to his head. “That’s a good boy, Jaeger.” The dog pushes his face against Wendy’s palm. There had been Dobermans at Anderson near the end, when the Americans joined them with their solid, clever war dogs. Wendy had wanted one then; it was no surprise when she’d got a puppy soon after her transfer to Washington.

  “He’s your third, is that right?”

  Wendy nods. “I’d just lost Blaze before I transferred here, and then there was a chap we worked with at the, ah, embassy, whose bitch had a litter, and it seemed like the time.”

  “He looks so intelligent,” June says.

  “Rather,” Wendy says, regarding her dog proudly. She pats him again and turns to the waitress hovering nearby. “Ein Flasche rot, Greta, bitte sehr.” The waitress nods, her coiled blond braids bobbing, and vanishes through the doorway into the next room.

  “Really, though,” Wendy says to June, “you’re well now?”

  “More or less,” June says. “It wasn’t as bad as all that, honestly, after the beginning. And I got used to it.” She shrugs, and lays her hand flat on the table, the fingers quivering lightly. Alec said once that it reminded him of a hibernating dormouse, and now she can’t think of it otherwise, although it has also seemed a softer, less brutal echo of Alec’s injuries. The tremor never really stops these days, the dormouse’s lungs forcing motion like a bellows, but she’s found ways to work around it, especially since there has been no further deterioration, nor a clear diagnosis beyond the suspected consequences of that long-ago head injury. The endless therapy has helped as well. And Alec. Always Alec.

  “I’m glad, June. Gosh,” Wendy says with a shudder. “I thought you were done for that day. Always admired the way you came back to the work at Anderson. You and Lucy Kent both. A lot of people would have copped a Blighty and gone home, but not our Attwell.”

  June glances down at the table, pleased and a bit embarrassed. “It was a long time ago,” she says. “Things were different then. But you’re right, I couldn’t wait to get out of hospital and get back to the wireless.”

  “I’m sorry you had to give it up in the end.” Wendy shakes her head with an affectionate smile. “Never thought you’d turn out one of those family girls, like old Pamela.”

  June forces a smile. She would never in a million years have compared herself to someone like Pamela Glynn, so determined to leave the Foreign Office and marry her officer fiancé at the first possible opportunity, but here she is, isn’t she? Not Pamela, but something else, without so clear a category.

  Wendy’s smile fades as she seems to realize what she’s said. “Oh, gosh, June, don’t look like that. It’s just . . . you were always the best of us. That’s all.”

  Whatever she is, June’s not here working with Floss and Wendy in Vienna. She knows Wendy meant no harm, but the other woman’s words leave a hollow spot nonetheless.

  Wendy goes on in a rush. “And Alec’s a good man, isn’t he? A good father?”

  June sighs. “A splendid father, yes. He makes everything work as well as can be expected.”

  A silence falls between them. June doesn’t want to talk about the schism between her and Alec, which has never quite healed, and doesn’t know what she would say even if she did. It was a long while before Alec came back to their shared bedroom, and even then they were awkward together until they each learned to negotiate the new landscape. And, while June hates to admit it, Penny’s illness had brought them closer as well. But even so, they are still not the same as they were before she had told Alec about Ceylon. Three years now, and it still creates ripples in their lives like a stone skipping across a pond.

  The waitress returns with a carafe of dark red wine, and there’s a moment of spirited conversation between her and Wendy. June’s German is more technical, less . . . Well, less like this. Less like the German of someone who lives and works and orders food in Austria. And like everything else, it’s a bit discomfiting, another echo of the life June might have had. Finally Wendy thanks the girl, who vanishes again. Wendy pours wine for June and then for herself.

  June lifts her glass and watches the wine move in the light. It glints purple, the liquid clinging to the sides of the glass, and she pauses to breathe in the dark fruity scent before taking a sip. “This is marvelous.”

  Wendy grins at her. “The drink is not the worst part of being posted here.” June nods, regarding her friend more closely. For decades Wendy has seemed practically ageless, but suddenly now when she smiles there are new lines around her eyes, and her coppery hair is heavily threaded with silver, as if this new war is somehow harder than the last one, despite its lack of obvious battlefields. June falters, viscerally aware in a way she can usually quash that this war is not hers to fight. Whatever those challenges are . . . She is free to speculate all she likes about what it is to work against the Russians from this strange old city just at the border between East and West, how the scares in Cuba and other places might have affected what Wendy does here. June would love to know more, but she cannot ask. She doesn’t even know where Wendy works, or if she rattles its corridors with her deck of playing cards like she always had in Scarborough and Ceylon.

  “Is there a worst thing?” She smiles with an effort. “Everything I’ve seen of Vienna so far has been lovely, and I imagine there are all sorts of benefits to working at the embassy.”

  Wendy’s gaze roves around the restaurant, looking anywhere but at June. “Yes,” she says, “but everything is a mixed bag, isn’t it? In any event,” she says too brightly, finally meeting June’s eyes, “academic life seems to be treating you all right these days. I read your piece on linear inequalities. Hardly understood a bit of it.”

  With a shock, June recognizes the tactics she’s used herself for years to steer conversations away from secrets. Disoriented and trying to recover, June smiles an acknowledgment of Wendy’s comments and raises her glass in a toast. “To old friends,” she says, “in new places.”

  “Old friends,” Wendy echoes, and they clink their glasses. The waitress comes back, laden with plates she sets down on the table between June and Wendy. Jaeger raises his head again, scenting the air with interest. June leans forward, breathing in the rich scents of onion and paprika steaming up from the dishes.

  Wendy regards the plates happily. “Thing I like about Café Leo, though, is one of the cooks—Greta’s aunt, I think,” and she pauses, gestu
ring at the waitress, “she came across from Budapest right after the first war. So you’ve got your schnitzel and whatnot, can’t very well come to Vienna without getting that, but also a grand goulash.” She points at the deep bowl full of thick, bricky soup with its chunks of beef and potato.

  “It looks delicious,” June says, taking another deep breath of its earthy aroma.

  Wendy beams, as proud as if she’d cooked it all herself. “I figured you’d like some real food after two days of conference, and I know there are a thousand places we could have gone that would have been more posh, but . . . This seemed more our speed.” Her face lights up. “Remember that pub we used to haunt in Scarborough, by the harbor?”

  “The Scarlet Hen.” June laughs, relieved to be able to talk about their mutual past, and as they tuck into the food, she and Wendy drift into memory. It’s so much easier to talk about days long past than about the present, and June, caught as she is in a life where so much of the past is encoded and locked away, is glad to find her footing here. The absence of the present is a different issue, a pinprick that won’t let up, but she’s known Wendy a very long time now. There are enough old stories to fill some of the glaring empty spaces left behind by topics that are suddenly, jarringly taboo.

  After a while, as the plates and the carafe of wine empty, the stories taper out as well. Wendy slips a last bite of schnitzel to Jaeger, who takes it more gently than June would have expected from such a large dog.

  “Penny’s dog is gentle like that, too,” she says. “Of course, she makes him do tricks for his treats.”

  “Fair enough. They certainly seemed well-matched when I last saw them, though. Pair of cleverboots.” She finishes the last sip of her wine. “I expect she’s not looking forward to not having Lucky about when she goes off to school, eh?”

  “Ah,” June says. The happy mood feels dampened suddenly, her real life too real. “After last summer . . . Well, it’s a lot of things, really. But we’re going to keep her at home a bit longer. She’s got a lovely grammar school in Edinburgh, and Alec never thought she should go away even before she took ill.”