A man in a long military coat and a civilian hat had been walking up the hill behind the girls. He sat on the bench, with his back to them as they parted.
Halfway back to Rose’s, Clare noticed that the man was a block behind her. By the time she got home he had nearly caught up to her. She turned up the walk and climbed the front stairs, untroubled. The city was full of strangers these days. She turned to look over her shoulder just before she opened the door. He stood on the sidewalk, exactly where the figure of the man she had seen the night before had stood.
He began to walk towards her. A sensation, like a hand running lightly up her spine, tightened to the nape of her neck.
Despite the limp, he still carried himself in the same way — as if he was ready to spring in any direction. Her legs felt watery.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Clare.”
She lifted one arm, holding her palm out towards him, part greeting, and part gesture to push the shimmering image of him back. His voice had changed in some way she couldn’t define, yet it still had the same timbre, the same cadence of home.
He climbed the stairs and took off his hat. The flesh around his eyes and under his cheeks and jaws seemed to have drawn back, exposing the shape of the bones of his face. He smiled. He had lost an eyetooth and the space between his front teeth had begun to reopen slightly, as if he were aging into boyhood.
“Leo.” She drew towards him. “You’re alive.”
“Your eye …” he said. His face turned serious.
“I lost it,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you.”
She stepped into his arms and he pulled her head to his chest, burying his hands in her hair.
Clare leaned into him, her cheek on the rough wool of his coat. He smelled of coal smoke and tobacco. His heart was beating fast. She stayed that way for long moments, too astonished to laugh or cry.
He stepped back and examined her. “What happened?” he said.
“I was standing at the window.” She turned her face away. “The glass shattered. I was lucky I didn’t lose both eyes.”
She pulled away. “Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
“I wanted to. I was a prisoner.”
“And you were freed?”
“No, I escaped.”
She looked at his leg. “You were injured.”
“Yes. I was shot.” He shook his right foot. “It’s fine.”
“Does your father know you are alive?”
“Yes, he’s the only one who knows. I’m on my way home.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” She was shivering.
“We should go inside, you’re cold,” he said.
“No, I’m not cold.”
“I wanted to see you to tell you,” he said.
GERALDINE RAN UP THE STREET. “Isn’t it wonderful news?” she called. “I bought bacon!” She waved a package wrapped in butcher’s paper, then slowed when she saw that Clare was with a stranger, a thin, serious-looking man, who clasped her hand tightly.
Clare stared at Geraldine. She felt muddled, like she did when she was having her first visions, unsure what was real and what was apparition. She looked down at Leo’s hand around hers. She could feel its heat.
“It’s Leo,” she said.
56
THE MEN WERE TO REMAIN at the camp until transportation came for them. Meanwhile, they scrubbed the foundry, did laundry, raked the yard, and burned garbage.
The commander was anxious to get rid of the prisoners from the German ship. Trucks and vans began arriving to take them to Halifax, where they would fill the ships disgorging Canadian men for the trip back to Europe.
Ivrey hardly slept. When Fred woke in the night, he could hear his shallow breathing as he rocked.
The day he was to leave, the boy sat on his bunk, watching the other men packing their one small duffel bag and slapping each other on the backs.
“You need to get ready to go,” Fred said. “First, you must strip the sheet and blanket off the bed and leave them folded there.”
Ivrey got up nervously. He shoved his hand under his blanket and pulled out something at the end of the bed. It was a glass bottle. Inside, a perfect replica of the once famous Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, complete with its four funnels, sailing on a tranquil, painted sea. He handed it to Fred.
Fred turned it over. Ivrey had signed it on the base of the bottle, to Freidrich from Ivrey Katruk, 1918. “Thank you. I will keep it always.” Fred set it gently on his own bunk. “Nikola says you are from the same city. He has promised to see you get home safely. Perhaps you have other family?”
Ivrey looked at him blankly.
Fred went outside to watch him leave. The boy lingered at the back of the line of men restless to board the transports.
“Goodbye,” Fred said, shaking Nikola’s hand before turning to Ivrey and gripping the boy’s thin shoulder. “Good luck.”
The camp, which had been noisy and ripe with overcrowding, was drafty and lonely. Only the German-Canadians were left, men like Fred who had been imprisoned on suspicion of collaboration with the enemy. Some talked of returning to Germany on those ships.
FRED HEARD THE FOGHORNS before he saw the familiar silhouette of the citadel. The city below was wrapped in fog.
MRS. DEMPSEY’S DOOR FLEW OPEN as he climbed the stairs. “I wondered when you’d be back,” she said. “I notified the authorities when you didn’t turn up. They told me where you were. We can’t have tenants who have been in prison.”
“Mrs. Dempsey, I was not in prison. I was interned. For something I didn’t do.”
Her mouth set. “We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
“FRED!” Lismer wiped his hands on an oily cloth. “I’m glad those devils let you out. Arthur Barnstead and I tried to reason with the authorities but I’m afraid it was impossible to get them to change their minds. I hope you will be returning to classes.” He strode over to Fred and shook his hand.
“I … need to work out what to do,” Fred said. “I am afraid I won’t be going back to the glassworks.”
“Yes, I heard from Barnstead that they weren’t very helpful.”
“I doubt they would hire me back and I’m not sure I want to go back. Things are different. I think I need to go somewhere new, start over. As my father did when he came here from Germany.” He smiled wryly.
Lismer pulled the studio door shut. “You’re right, Fred. The war has changed everything, mostly for the worse, but there are new ideas coming, as well as a return to the fine work of craftsmen. Good artists will be needed.” He looked out the window at the foggy streets. “Perhaps just not here. I thought that after the explosion, Halifax would be shaken a little from its lethargy but putting on shows is still much unappreciated. The work is worthy of the effort but it is an unsympathetic, stubborn field to hoe here.” He sighed. “I am flagging. And I miss the companionship of other artists. I’m thinking of leaving too.”
Fred waited for the day students’ lunch break but Clare was not among them.
“She’s not been here for a few days,” Mary said.
“She’s not ill?” Fred said. There were rumours of more deaths from the flu.
“No,” Mary hesitated. “She has had something come up. She is taking a few days off.”
GERALDINE ANSWERED FRED’S KNOCK. She ushered him in the door, shutting it against the cold fog. “Fred, what a relief you are free.”
Celia came flying down the stairs. She took his hands. “Oh dear, you are so thin!”
“I’m fine,” he said, surrendering to Celia’s efforts to pull off his coat.
“Mother,” Celia shouted up the stairs, “Fred is back!”
Rose rang the bell she kept beside her sofa in greeting.
IN THE KITCHEN, Celia chattered happily about the pieces she had been working on and what she and Fred might play together next. Geraldine busied herself fixing tea and setting shortbread on a plate.
“Was it terrib
le?” Celia asked.
Fred looked into his cup, remembering Nikola stirring his tea into his cold porridge. He thought for a moment. “It was as if life got stopped in its flow, frozen for a time.” He smiled. “But now, it is as if the ice has thawed and life will flow on.” He looked around. “Clare?”
“She is … out,” Geraldine said.
“It’s quite a story,” Celia chirped. “Her fiancé showed up. Turns out he’s alive.” She looked triumphant.
Geraldine looked apologetically at Fred. “I’m sure she will want to tell you about it herself.”
“PROMISE TO COME BACK SOON,” Celia said at the door. “Mr. Devon says I will do so much better in my exam if we can practise together.”
Fred walked, head bent, lifting it only when he had to cross Gottingen Street. There on the corner, a block away, stood Clare with a man in a military greatcoat. They leaned towards each other as if on the verge of stepping into each other’s arms.
Fred stepped back from the curb to the shadow of a lamppost. He could not make out the fine details of Leo’s face but he could see how he held himself, his vigilance, the slight tremor in his resting hand: things Fred had seen in men at Amherst.
Clare turned away from the man and began walking towards Fred, looking down at the sidewalk, lost in thought. She had almost passed him when she looked up and into his face without recognition. They stared at each other. “Fred,” she said. “Oh, Fred.”
“Clare.”
“You are free,” she said. “I am so very glad to see you.”
“And I am happy to see you,” he said. He felt dull-witted, unable to form his next words, as he did when he first came to Canada and English was like a stone in his mouth.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I am coming from Rose’s.”
“Ah, Celia will have been beside herself.”
“Yes,” he laughed quietly. “Where am I going? Well, that is a good question.”
She was hatless, her hair damp with fog.
They were near the tea shop where they had first talked at length. And where Fred had hoped to take her the day he was arrested.
“Would you like to dry out?” he said.
The tea room was crowded with soldiers and the girls who had come to meet them, or who they had swept up since arriving in town. The waitress with the white hair looked flustered.
“I had a letter from Arthur Barnstead. He wrote that you came to him to try to help get me out of Amherst,” Fred said. “Thank you.”
“He tried very hard,” Clare said.
The waitress took their order and hurried off.
“Celia told me about Leo,” Fred finally said. “That was him you were with just now?”
“Yes.” Clare looked away. “I am still getting used to it. It was a … shock.”
“How is he?” Fred said.
Her cheeks coloured. “He was shot in the leg, but he has healed. He has a limp.”
Fred was silent.
“He’s the same in some ways. And different in others,” she said.
“The war has changed him?” Fred said.
“Yes,” Clare said. “And you, are you changed? Being in Amherst?”
Fred said, “I value my freedom more. But I still feel the same way I did before I was interned. I still want the same things.”
“And what are they?” Clare said cautiously.
The waitress set down their teapot and cups, without looking at them.
“To continue to make glass as I have always done, but also to work as a designer.” He looked up, his eyes moving over her face, as if memorizing it. “And what about you?” he said. “What do you want?”
“I want to be an artist,” she said.
“And Leo?”
“For now he wants to return to Grafton,” she said.
Fred pulled a small package from his pocket and laid it on the table between them. “I was working on a new glass technique last summer before I was interned.”
“What is it?” she said.
“A gift.”
She picked up the package, untied the ribbon, and opened the cloth wrapping. Stared at the eye in her hand uncomprehendingly. Then held it up, to examine it more closely, a look of wonder on her face.
“You have saved me. Again.”
“You don’t need saving,” he said.
“I need this. More than you can know,” she said.
Fred laughed. “I had it with me the day I was arrested. I imagined that giving it to you over this table would be the perfect moment. It has been in my pocket since that day.”
Clare slipped off her eye patch. “Help me put it in.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
He remembered watching his father inserting glass eyes when he was a child. He took the eye from her lovingly. He would miss it. “First, you should moisten it.” He poured a little milk into his saucer and rolled the eye in it. “Lean closer,” he said.
He held her upper eyelid gently and slipped the glass eye under it, and then he pulled the lower lid out and over the eye. “Now push on it a little to set it into place,” he said.
Clare bent her head and touched her eyelid, and then looked up at him, blinking, a milky tear tracking down her cheek. The people at the table beside them, an older woman with a young soldier who looked like her son, were staring at them.
“Don’t worry, your new glass eye is resistant to tears.” Fred wiped the droplet away gently.
“How do I look?” Clare asked.
Fred took her chin in his hand tenderly and tilted her head in the light, one way, then the other. “Beautiful.” He kept his hand there, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “You must know how I feel,” he said. “That has not changed.”
“What will you do?” she said softly.
“I am leaving Halifax. I’m not sure yet where I will go. Maybe Vancouver. Dominion Glass is opening a factory there.”
“So far?” Clare said, her throat catching. “Celia will be heartbroken.”
“I am sorry for that. She is young and will recover.”
“And you?”
“I need time to think.”
“Yes, me too,” Clare said. “Don’t go without saying goodbye.” She took his hand in hers and held it for a long moment, studying his long fingers, the fine gold hair on the backs of his hands, the frayed shirtsleeve resting on the bones of his wrist.
Before they left, Clare made her way through the crowded tables to the small washroom at the back. She leaned towards her image in the foxed mirror. The eye was perfect. Unless you looked closely you wouldn’t know it wasn’t real. A wave of relief and gratitude swept her. And yet, when she looked again, she could see Fred walking away from her, she could see she was in disguise.
57
THE GIRLS WERE TO DRAFT their still life, a precarious tower of corn with dried husks, pumpkins, and apples, in paint onto canvas, while Mary worked at her desk. Clare watched Mary out of the corner of her eye, feverishly writing page after page, with determined concentration, even though several of the students needed help. Some had not made an easy transition from drawing to painting, becoming frustrated, as Clare had at first, with the demands of mixing colour to create depth and value. When Mary finally looked up it was after noon and the students were glancing restlessly at the clock.
“Oh, it’s lunch time. You may finish up this afternoon or continue tomorrow.” Mary waved them off with her hand.
The rest of the girls dashed away while Clare cleaned up her paints.
“You must be happy to have your new eye,” Mary said, her head still bent over her papers.
“Yes.” Clare touched the corner of her eye unconsciously. At first she had stopped to look at her image in every window, every mirror, still amazed that the ugly eye patch was gone. She watched the grocers and the druggists to see if they looked too long at her eye. But so perfect was it, she came to understand, no one even noticed it was glass. To strangers, she was
as she had always been.
“I hear that Fred Baker made it for you,” Mary said.
Clare looked up. “He should never have been locked up!”
She put the turpentine back in the cupboard, looking over Mary’s shoulder to see if she could catch a glimpse of the papers.
“It’s an application form, if you must know,” Mary said.
Clare looked at her guiltily. “It must be important.”
“It’s for the War Amputations Society. They’re offering money for projects related to veterans. I’m applying for funds to paint the battlefields. I need to start next summer. I must paint them before they grow over.”
Clare leaned her work on the counter with the rest of the morning’s paintings.
Mary looked them over. “You are the only one who has bothered to work out how to use paint. One must learn to take instruction but also to work on their own if they want to become an artist. Of course most of the girls don’t really care to become artists. They will be teachers and then mothers.” She looked down at the pages on her desk. “The baby’s father was my drawing teacher in Berlin. In those days I thought art was the highest calling. When I gave him up I went to France.”
“He was German,” Clare said. “What happened to him?”
“It wasn’t only our blood that spilled on those battlefields.” Mary’s face stiffened. “My son would have been eighteen when the war started. After I gave him up I never learned what happened to him. If I’d kept him I would know.”
“And you still may have lost him,” Clare said.
“I’ll try to find him when I go to Europe,” she said.
Mary picked up one of Clare’s paintings to look at it closely. “How is our Jane? Eleanor Biggs came to see me,” she said. “She told me what had happened. And that you had been to see Jane in Mount Hope.”
“Yes,” Clare’s left eye pricked with tears, insisting as always in having its say. “I’m worried she’ll never get out.”
“She will probably recover — she has in the past,” Mary said. “But she will never be like you and me.”
“And she will never go to Paris,” Clare said.
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