Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  * * *

  ONCE THEY WERE HOME Sholto wheeled out the push-mower to mow the lawn. This was usually his Saturday afternoon chore.

  Canny asked him why he was doing that now and he told her to go upstairs, take off her uniform, and unpack her bags. “Put your laundry in the basket,” he added.

  She went upstairs and did everything he asked. Then she came and sat on the porch.

  Sholto was kneeling on the newly mown grass, his shirt off and the sun already reddening his shoulders. He was using clippers to trim the grass left around the legs of the immovable outdoor bench.

  Canny saw that there were a couple of long, thick canvas bags leaning on the porch railing. “What are these?”

  “They’re tents,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Camping.”

  “Who for?”

  “That depends.”

  One bag was bigger than the other—both smelled of damp and the dust of basements.

  Sholto scattered the clippings back into the lawn. He rinsed the clippers at the outdoor tap and came to sit beside her. He told her that her mother and the Professor were going on a trip. When he was speaking to Canny, Sholto often called his father “the Professor.”

  Canny was trying to imagine her mother camping, putting up a tent, building a fireplace, boiling a billy. “It’s the holidays,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

  “They crept up on you.”

  The study break before her exams had felt like a holiday. The exams were quite easy, except in English comprehension and French dictation where she was resigned to disappointing results. With those subjects, no amount of study helped. She’d sat University-level mathematics and already had a start on her degree. Biology and chemistry were rote learning, and easy for her. She did well in history even though she knew she was only a solid history student, but her teachers were dazzled by the name Mochrie. Canny finished early in every exam and would sit looking at the back of the head of the boy or girl in front of her, or at dust motes in the light coming through the stained glass of the war memorial window. It seemed to Canny that the exams were over before she’d even gotten into the swing of them. Other seniors went on to plan the senior ball and leavers’ dinner. Canny hadn’t gone to the ball. Nor did she intend to go to the dinner. She’d had her rite of passage—the math competition.

  Now, suddenly, tomorrow was the last day of school.

  During the break the previous summer Canny and Marli had met every day at the saltwater baths near the ferry terminal. They’d swim and sunbathe, or huddle in their towels on blustery days. They were together all day, every day. Every day but Christmas, which Sisema would insist was a day for family only. Canny’s family hadn’t gone away because the Professor was finishing a book. In midsummer the saltwater baths closed because of the polio epidemic. Marli and Canny had taken to catching the ferry to Westbourne, where they swam off the shingle beach. February came, and the primary schools stayed closed. All the little children had red sun bonnets—the disease was said to mind the color red. In mid-February Canny had a stomach bug. She phoned Marli, who said she felt unwell too. Two days later Canny was eating again, and Marli’s big brother phoned to say that Marli was in the hospital, in the isolation ward. She had polio, and it was touch and go.

  Canny hadn’t considered yet what she was going to do to fill her time this summer. Study maybe—the Professor had insisted she do at least two arts subjects. She’d chosen Middle English and Shakespeare. She’d need to do a bit of reading. And she’d visit Marli of course. Spend longer on the ward every day. Perhaps they could embark on a series of books together—there was a horse series Marli was interested in. My Friend Flicka. Thunderhead. The Green Grass of Wyoming. The equinoctial gales might keep blowing till late December. The city would be dusty; the rain warm. Last summer seemed perfect now, and sealed away, with everything that belonged to it—the smell of wet bodies on hot concrete, a steamy scent seasoned by dust; the sight of Marli’s rat-tailed hair, her gleaming back; the smell of the sun-struck butter in the apple pastries sold at the Westbourne kiosk; and the taste of lemon ice. Last summer was preserved like an everlasting daisy in a glass paperweight. Or perhaps like Marli’s body in that steel box.

  “Canny?” Sholto said. He put a hot, grassy hand on her foot and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I was just—” Remembering. But it had felt more active than that. “I was feeling for cracks,” she said.

  Sholto tilted his head and looked expectant.

  “Sometimes it’s as if there are cracks in things. Seams in unexpected places. Like that join in Grandma’s Japanese cabinet, that one that isn’t really a join, but a secret compartment, with a spring mechanism.”

  Sholto said, “I like it when you bother to explain things to me. Though usually it’s math concepts I haven’t a hope of understanding.”

  She said, “This is the opposite of math.”

  “Math has an opposite?”

  “Maybe ‘opposite’ isn’t the right word. The Professor is right about me needing more English. So, what I mean is that sometimes it’s like if only I can get my fingernails in the right place things will crack open and reveal a secret compartment, and inside the compartment there will be something, some new language just as descriptive as math.”

  “I don’t think of math as descriptive.”

  “Well, it is. For example, in cartography numbers describe objects with real dimensions—oceans, continents, islands.”

  “What about dates?”

  “Calendars are just agreed-on systems. Ours has a year zero—the birth of Christ. Other people’s calendars start counting from different dates. In math and physics, numbers are precisely descriptive.”

  “In law, words are precisely descriptive.”

  “But only of agreed-on systems.”

  “What about poetry?” Sholto quoted: “‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time…’ That’s precise, and ambiguous.” He added, “Those lines are from Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’”

  Canny didn’t know the poem, but she’d seen Greek earthenware in the antiquities room at Founderston’s museum—plates decorated with pictures of boys playing pan pipes and girls in pleated gowns garlanded with vine leaves. At Canny’s school, they were taught to write business letters, but only how to “appreciate” poetry. Sholto’s two lines of Keats sounded better than the poet her class had to “appreciate” this year—Walter de la Mare. “Those words have cracks and secret compartments,” she said, then frowned. “Sholto, why did the poet call the Grecian urn a bride and a foster child? I mean, marriage is a contract, and fostering is too. It’s an undertaking, not a blood fact. Someone undertakes to look after someone else’s child.”

  “Like the Professor and you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the urn’s ‘blood facts’ would be the potter, the clay, and the fire?” Sholto said.

  Canny touched her own face and said, “I wonder what I’m made of.”

  Sholto looked at his own hands, which were grass-stained. He wiped them on the legs of his pants. “When you go to University you should pick up at least one poetry paper. I don’t think you’re going to find any cracks in the math.”

  “If they’re not there, then they’re nearby,” she said dreamily.

  “It’ll turn out you mean love,” Sholto said. “At the moment math is the only thing that excites you, so you’re nosing around numbers as if numbers are life. But in two years you’ll be telling me about some boy.” He scrambled up. “And speaking of love—I’d better jump in the shower. Susan’s coming to dinner.”

  * * *

  THE PROFESSOR WAS CARVING THE ROAST. It was Wednesday and they usually had roast only on Saturday—itself a departure from the traditional Sunday roast. The Professor was a vocal and principled atheist, but wasn’t going to let that stop him enjoying a weekly leg of lamb. When Canny asked why they were
having their roast midweek, her mother said, “The Professor and I are going on a trip.”

  “You’re really going camping?”

  The Professor said, “Camping? What an odd thought, Agnes. No, we’re going to the Shackle Islands. Your mother is getting a medal.”

  When Canny was small it seemed that only a few people knew what her mother had done. Now, though the War was longer ago, more fuss was made of Sisema Afa’s war story. A couple of years back Canny had been surprised (and embarrassed) to find her mother in an illustration on her school stationery—part of the “Heroes and History Makers of Southland” series. (In other years Canny had had stationery featuring the navigator Vasco da Gama, who first mapped Southland, and Scott of the Antarctic, and the dreamhunter Tziga Hame.) Canny remembered the murmuring in the school stationery room as her class filed through gathering their exercise books, pens, and slide rules. The murmuring got louder, and then Jonno from her math team thrust his notepad under her nose. On its cover was a picture of a girl not much older than Canny was then. A dark-skinned girl with sleek black hair and bare muscular arms, wearing only a lavalava. The girl was paddling an outrigger. In the outrigger, lying top to tail, were two men from the Southland Air Force, their faces pale under bloodstained bandages. The outrigger was on rough dark blue water, the white line of breakers behind it.

  Susan began to gush. “An investiture! That’s marvelous, Mrs. Mochrie. You must be so proud of your wife, Professor.”

  The Professor looked a little startled. “Naturally,” he said.

  Sisema was making her demure face, her lips pursed and eyes cast down.

  Susan turned to her again. “Do you feel that you’re still the same person as the girl who did those things?”

  Canny’s mother liked to tell her story. She enjoyed her fame, but Canny knew that Sisema intensely disliked questions of this sort. Her eyelids lifted, but only to half-mast. “What a silly question—how can someone be another person?”

  “Oh dear, of course I didn’t mean literally,” Susan said, and laughed.

  Canny held her breath. She’d once overheard Susan talking to Sholto about her folklore studies and “sophisticated and unsophisticated approaches to story.” Canny guessed that Susan thought her mother was having an unsophisticated reaction to the idea that people change over time and are more “a series of identities than a person,” which was also something Canny had overheard Susan saying. Canny watched her mother and waited to see Susan punished.

  “You are very young,” Sisema said, cold.

  The Professor went pink, then said, simpering, “Yes. You young people must have trouble imagining how we keep our youthful ideals alive in our practical middle-aged bodies. Well, let me tell you, Susan dear, we middle-aged people like to think we haven’t changed at all.”

  “I was only being curious,” Susan said. She sounded wounded.

  “Where is the ceremony?” Canny asked, to change the subject.

  “Calvary, on the South Shackle,” said the professor. “We’ve booked a berth on the Pacific Queen. She sails the day after tomorrow.”

  “I remembered to have your tuxedo dry-cleaned,” Sisema told her husband. “And I bought myself a new hat.”

  “Capital.” The Professor passed the meat plate to Sholto, who helped himself to four slices, then glanced around the table, making the calculations of quantity that even dogs can. He put one slice back.

  For the next little while everyone dedicated themselves to their food. Canny could see that Susan was upset—and that Sisema was pleased to have had an opportunity to make Sholto’s girlfriend feel her power. During the remainder of the dinner Sisema spoke once or twice to Sholto’s girlfriend, but only in response to questions, and never looked at her.

  Sholto bolted his food and then looked bilious. Susan kept throwing him fiery glances. Her looks said, “Do something to defend me!” After a time Canny remarked that Sholto would have to give her a lift to Grandma Mochrie’s because she had a lot of books she wanted to take with her.

  Sisema said, “You won’t be staying with your grandmother.”

  The Professor explained. “Grandma has an ulcerated foot. The doctor has instructed her to keep off it.”

  “Couldn’t I help her?”

  “How?” said Sisema, skeptical. “She has her housekeeper. And a nurse comes daily.”

  “I could keep her company. Read to her.” Canny experienced a spurt of panic. “Where are you going to send me?”

  Susan began smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of the tablecloth.

  “You’re going with Sholto and Susan to Massenfer,” said the Professor.

  Massenfer was a coal-mining town on the Peninsula. Thirty years ago there had been an explosion in Massenfer’s Bull Mine. The Professor was writing a book about the changes in labor laws that resulted from the disaster.

  Sholto said, “I’m doing some research for Da. Actually I have a proper research assistant’s position, with pay.”

  “Sholto is doing interviews for an oral history,” Susan said. “And there’s some work I can do in the area. Some stories I’d like to collect. The history department has borrowed the anthropology department’s recording equipment. Sholto and I are to share it.” She put her hand on his. “Plus it’s a summer holiday.”

  “Then you can’t want me with you,” Canny said.

  Susan carefully maintained her cheerful expression.

  “We are very grateful to you young people,” the Professor muttered. “It’s wonderful that you’ve been able to adjust your plans at such short notice.”

  “Akanesi will not be any trouble,” Sisema said to Sholto. “And, by the way, the Professor and I are telling people that you and Susan are engaged to be married.”

  Susan’s eyes flew wide.

  The Professor began fluttering his hands—they looked like a pair of butterflies blown out over a wide lake by a great gust of wind.

  “Please don’t do that, Mother,” Sholto said. “Our friends might decide to throw us a party. Think how embarrassing that would be.”

  “The Professor and I think it’s important for you to maintain some appearance of decency.”

  “Sholto told me that you both have very liberal outlooks.” Susan sounded puzzled.

  “Maybe. But we understand that other people don’t.” Sisema was imperturbable.

  “I would have thought that you of all people—” Susan began, and Canny saw Sholto jab his girlfriend with his elbow.

  Sisema continued. “While you are in the southwest sharing a tent you will be engaged to be married. You can break the engagement once you come home to Castlereagh, if that’s what suits you. Sholto, I don’t know why you can’t just manage people by telling them what they expect to hear. It would make your life easier.”

  When Sisema insisted that people do things her way, the insistence usually came with some advice on how to get on in the world.

  Sholto and Susan gazed at Sisema, their mouths open.

  Sisema turned to Canny. “I think we’re ready for dessert. Could you bring in the trifle, dear? It’s in the refrigerator.”

  * * *

  AFTER COFFEE SHOLTO WALKED SUSAN HOME, forty minutes each way in the blue dusk, by way of the zigzag steps and pedestrian pathways that linked the streets winding around University Hill.

  Castlereagh was all hills, ridges around the harbor, and steep-sided valleys where the desirable houses were built up high to catch either the morning or afternoon sun. Much of the inner city dated from the time when cars were rare, so roads were narrow and steep and many lacked footpaths. Instead there were dozens of these official and unofficial shortcuts, steps and paths, some with safety rails, some without. The citizens of Castlereagh had strong hearts and big calf muscles.

  Susan complained to Sholto whenever she could spare the breath. What had she done to get on the wrong side of Sholto’s stepmother? Didn’t Sisema understand that they were doing her a big favor by taking Canny? “Does she not want us to enjoy
ourselves, or get to know each other better?”

  “I don’t really like to speculate about people,” Sholto said. “What they’re thinking and so forth.”

  “Come on, Sholto! You can’t say that. You want to be a historian.”

  Sholto thought of telling Susan that, actually, historians weren’t supposed to speculate. But she did have a point. “Look, it’s just convenient for them that we take Canny with us. She’d be staying with Grandma if Grandma was on her feet.”

  Susan subsided. Then, at her gate, she kissed him, her lips lingering and being generally clever.

  Sholto moaned.

  “Ha!” said Susan. “Take that.” She went through the gate, closed it between them, smirked, and went on up her front path.

  * * *

  SHOLTO TRIED TO RETIRE WITHOUT TALKING to anyone, but Canny came and knocked on his door.

  He opened it and stood barring it. “No, you’re not coming in.”

  “What can we do, Sholto? We have to think of something.”

  “Okay—you think.”

  Canny’s brows pulled together so that a tiny rumple formed between them—this, for Canny, was an expression of great perplexity. “I can’t come up with anything.”

  “There you go then,” he said. “You can’t think of anything because we’re out of alternatives. Anyway, it’ll be fine. We have two tents. We can pitch them far apart. The car journey isn’t too long. And I promise we’ll make room for plenty of books.”

  Canny clutched the doorframe and leaned in so that her nose was nearly touching his chin. “You could just pretend to take me,” she said. “You could drive me over to Marli’s house. Marli’s family would be happy to have me.”

  Sholto thought of the Vaiu household in Congress Valley. The Vaius’ front path was edged with river stones painted red, yellow, teal, and white—the family’s idea of a garden. There were two old cars up on blocks on the lawn. Marli’s brothers were cannibalizing the wrecks for parts for the one car that worked. Sholto said, “Do you think I have a death wish?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Psychology. Freud. A useful idea.” He spread his hands. “If I left you at the Vaius’, Sisema would kill me.”