The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘I’m ten now,’ she says, ‘ten last week. I’ll be able to get my own job soon.’

  ‘It’s all right, Bella,’ says Ani, holding her close as the men drive away. ‘We’ll work this out. Maybe you can come with me, or have tea with Mrs May. There’s always a way. Come on now,’ she soothes with a calmness, a certainty she doesn’t feel.

  There isn’t any other way it can be.

  Isabel rubs her eyes, stepping back. ‘I think I spilled tea on your birthday card,’ she says at last. ‘I was making it on the kitchen table this morning and I couldn’t get the teapot lid to go in properly.’

  ‘Shh,’ says Ani, pulling her in again. ‘You’re lovely for even remembering my birthday.’ They stand a moment, swaying back and forth. ‘I’d forgotten it myself.’

  From inside the hug, she hears Isabel say, ‘The trouble is, Dad was in charge of the present—and I don’t know where he’s hidden it, or even what it is. I wanted . . . I wanted . . . I thought I could use my Christmas money and ask Mrs May to get you something, but I couldn’t get the stopper out of my money box, and . . .’

  And Ani starts to laugh—the first time she’s laughed in days. ‘You’re lovely, Isabel Lachlan,’ she says, squeezing her so it almost hurts. ‘And a card is all I need, even if it is a bit splotchy. But come on, let’s see if we can think where your dad might hide a mystery present.’

  Because it must be here, somewhere in the house; maybe already wrapped, and tucked into or under something that Ani would never think of disturbing. Isabel darts into corners and cupboards—the back of the chiffonier where the special glasses are kept; under the sofa; behind the horsehair couch.

  ‘I know!’ she calls, running towards her parents’ bedroom, but Ani is already there. The tallboy’s doors make a squeaky protest, the drawers, always stiff, a little stiffer for not having been opened for a few days. She pulls out piles of underwear, socks, but there’s nothing in the first drawer, or the second; nothing tucked into the shelves; nothing pushed to the back under the rack of hanging shirts.

  She tries the closet, the nightstand, the low table beside the bed that still holds the book Mac was reading, its pages prised apart by the larger yellow-bordered shape of a National Geographic. A layer of dust has settled around them already: Ani watches as Isabel makes a line with her finger, then another perpendicular to the first, so that the two stripes form an X. But there’s nothing in the little table either.

  ‘No X marks the spot,’ Ani says. ‘Never mind. Maybe we’ll have an epiphany about it tomorrow. Now, we should have something to eat.’

  But she finds herself standing still and purposeless in the middle of the kitchen, her fingers patting the cover of her husband’s last book.

  ‘Will everybody know, Mum?’ says Isabel, breaking her reverie. ‘When I go back to school, will everyone know what’s happened? Will I have to talk about it?’

  Ani props the book against the teapot, like a marker or a shrine, and sits down with her daughter, taking her hands. ‘Of course people know—you know that, Bell. That’s why they’re bringing us all those stews, all that soup.’ The endless provisioning of their doorstep. ‘But mostly they’ll just want to say they’re sorry. Or they might ask you what happened, and you can say you don’t really know.’

  Opposite her, Bella pulls her hands free and picks up her pencil, working hard at the blue sky of her picture, her mother’s name spelled out in letters made of clouds. ‘I was thinking,’ she says at last, ‘how all the dads who died in the war will get their names carved into the war memorial. And I was wondering where my dad’s name will be carved.’

  ‘I think it’s up to us to remember your dad’s name, love,’ says Ani, reaching over for her daughter’s blunt blue pencil and whittling its end back to sharpness with a knife. ‘We’re his memorial, I suppose.’

  And she’s gone again, into that silent, timeless space of inertia, of loss, of dislocation.

  ‘Mum,’ says Isabel quietly. Ani has no idea how much time has passed. ‘Mum! You’ll hurt yourself—you’re chewing your lip.’

  And Ani feels herself blush, like a naughty child caught out.

  ‘Ah, Bella,’ she says then, ‘I shouldn’t be watching you make this card—it should be a surprise for the morning.’ She kisses her daughter once more on the top of her head, and goes back into the yard, to lie on the grass, and to wait.

  9

  ‘What will it be for your birthday then, lass?’ The two of them, at work in the garden, on a warm spring afternoon.

  ‘Oh, nothing, Mac. Nothing now.’ October 1945, two months of peace. What could you ask for on top of that?

  ‘There must be something we can get you, something we can try to find now that the world’s supposedly back to normal.’ Mac laughed at the hollowness of it.

  ‘There is one thing I’d like,’ said Ani at last, twisting at the tight root of a dandelion, ‘but I think it will stump even you, Mackenzie Lachlan.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’d like to see snow, like my father talks about. I’d like to see white mountains and I’d like to feel their cold.’ And she wiped the sweat from her forehead, laughing.

  Mac leaned on the shovel. ‘No challenge at all,’ he said promptly. ‘I know just the thing—and Bella’s going to love it.’

  Look at her, Anikka Lachlan, swirling around on the silky-smooth ice of the Glacie, her husband surging ahead of her holding one hand, her daughter behind her, holding the other. The air was cold from the ice on the floor and the great cold iceworks in the basement below. And at the front of the giant hall, the walls were bright with a huge mural—an alpine scene, high craggy mountains, vast cerulean sky.

  Around and around, gliding and gliding; wanting to put her arms out to fly. Her husband in front of her, her daughter behind. Around and around through a whole afternoon.

  At the end, as they stood on the street with cups of hot chocolate, the air exploded with the sound of bells—‘The carillon, at the university I think, up along George Street,’ said Mac.

  And Ani laughed. ‘There should always be bells.’ Bells for celebration; bells for jubilation. ‘Happy birthday to me.’

  Happy birthday.

  10

  The morning of Mackenzie Lachlan’s memorial is clear and bright, capped by an impossibly vast sky. The ocean is calm, its blue as consistent as a wide watercolour wash. A breeze plays with the shapes of the grass, of petals and leaves, and it must be up on the mountain too, because when Ani tries to focus on the trees that mark the escarpment’s edge, they’re blurred, furry, as if they’d been drawn by a thick lead pencil and then half rubbed out. Yet the air feels still, stable, she thinks, like something against which she might test her weight. Her hand moves for milk, for sugar, as it has these past days to add to her tea, but she draws it back and so takes her tea black, weak and black, the way she used to drink it. The way Mac would know to make it. This morning, for the first time, she woke facing the window, her body turned towards the light, as she always used to, rather than facing the empty space in the bed beside her. This morning, she thought about staying away from the service, as if avoiding its memorial might make Mac more alive.

  ‘You could borrow this, Mum.’ Isabel is at her side, offering her the brass tube of her birthday kaleidoscope. ‘You said it was good for seeing things differently.’

  And Ani smiles, taking it from her and training it on the view over Thirroul. ‘Perhaps we can share it,’ she says as the view she’s been studying rearranges itself into repeated lozenges of colour. She knows she’s looking for Mac in the corners of its movement.

  And what would Isabel think of staying away from the church?

  ‘What was the last thing Dadda saw before he left Scotland? What was the first thing he saw when he came here?’ Isabel asks her questions without pause, and Ani smiles again, but faintly. These are not things she ever thought to ask, and now, of course, she can’t.

  ‘Your dad said goodbye to his grannie up in
the highlands, and walked away without turning back to wave—he’d promised her that. He took a ship from Glasgow, and went through the canal at Suez. Do you remember the stories he used to tell when you were tiny and sitting on the beach together? He’d bank the sand up along one side of you, fold up a little paper boat, and sail it through the sand. That was Suez, he said. Do you remember that?’

  Isabel shakes her head, picking at a scab on her knee. ‘I remember he said he was seasick for a week and that the first night he went up onto the deck he nearly keeled over from the number of stars. And that he sat there and tried to count them all.’

  This is not a story Ani has heard. ‘Did he say how many he counted?’ She herself has sat with Mackenzie Lachlan, counting the stars, and it feels strange to feel jealous, now, at the thought that he might have counted more on his own, somewhere earlier, somewhere else.

  ‘Two thousand and fourteen,’ says Isabel. ‘More than Dad and I counted when it was the war and all the lights had to be off. Remember that, Mum? Remember how late I was allowed to stay up?’ Ani shakes her head, as Isabel frowns. ‘But you were there—you must have forgotten. You did have that horrible cold.’ She takes the kaleidoscope from her mother and points it at her scabby knee, grimacing at the repeat of its image.

  ‘There’s an anxious space,’ says Ani, stilling her daughter’s fingers as they worry again at the scab, ‘between not knowing if you’ve forgotten something, or if you never knew.’ They will eat their breakfast, put on their best clothes. They will go to this service for a husband, a father. I do not want to be fifty or eighty or a hundred, wondering if I’ve forgotten my husband’s memorial or if I never knew about it. ‘Come on, Bell. Let’s have some porridge—“It’ll stick to the ribs,” as Dad would say. Let’s get ready to face the day.’

  The white wooden church is mostly full and the organ is wheezing when Ani and Isabel arrive. The two Lachlan women, their blonde heads caught by sun as they walk along the aisle towards the space where a coffin should be but isn’t. It hasn’t occurred to Anikka, until now, how awful that emptiness will be. He has been cremated a week. She makes herself think it as flatly as she can. His body is burned, his self gone. They’re injurious statements, like Isabel picking at her scab to keep it weeping.

  Walking between the rows of pews, Ani feels the tight freeze of her face’s expression, somewhere above a smile, she hopes, but she’s tricked herself into thinking she was smiling before and seen her mouth set hard and unwelcoming in a mirror or a window. She looks through the women she passes: Mrs Padman, Mrs Bower, Mrs Floyd—all war widows. Ani remembers how Marjorie Floyd had howled when the news of her husband’s death came, howled in the darkness, and then rocked, back and forth, singing him a lullaby. How strange, thinks Ani, that we’re here together to mourn my husband.

  She has met each woman, and many others, in the village in the past days, required each time to deliver a telling of Mac’s accident, of hearing its news. Three, she discovered, three was the magic number: by the third telling each day she could hear the phrases that worked, the ones that moved the narrative fastest. By the third telling the story felt more like a story, rather than something she was being required to live.

  On the end, sitting slightly apart, Iris McKinnon, whose brother, the poet, was the man on the pylon. ‘It’s never what you think,’ she says, reaching up to touch Ani’s arm as if to brush at a speck of dust. ‘But the living goes on, it always does.’ And she smiles as Ani ducks her head and blinks.

  Once, long ago, she’d described her mother’s death to Iris McKinnon—described herself as four years old, uncertain of why her mother had gone away, or where, or for how long. And Iris had leaned forward and patted her arm. Time heals all wounds, she’d whispered, and Ani had found herself pulling away so fast her body almost shuddered. No, she’d thought, so loud she wondered she hadn’t shouted it. No no no. Not all of them, not always. There were some things you carried and carried; and now, she is willing for this to be one of them.

  The organ’s notes rearrange themselves from the Twenty-Third Psalm to ‘Rock of Ages’ as Ani follows Isabel into the front pew, thinking about the supposed balm of Iris McKinnon’s time. She feels a hand on her shoulder and glances around: the stationmaster, Luddy. She sees shopkeepers, train drivers and engineers and firemen—even Bella’s teacher, tucked away at the back. There’s a man sitting next to him, obscured as he reaches down for his hymnbook. But as he straightens up, Ani catches a glimpse of strong shoulders in a dark suit, a ruddy cheek, and speckled-blond hair. It’s Mac, she thinks quickly, and, so good that he could get away from work and be here after all. And her mind lets her hold the illusion for almost a second before she realises where she is, and why, and that the man she can see is nothing more than a random approximation of familiar shapes and colours. She tries again to smile.

  Along the church’s north-facing wall its windows are set with panels of coloured glass—rose, blue, yellow, alternating along the length of the building. And as the minister speaks, as the readings are read, as the hymns are sung, as heads are bowed and raised again with Amen, Ani keeps her eyes on a patch of sunlight coming in through one yellow pane. It inches closer and closer to the place where the coffin should stand, solid and definite. She registers her own name, and Isabel’s, in the minister’s eulogy. She registers the reading from Corinthians that she loves—For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. She registers the thin-sounding congregation voices that sing, never quite coming into a hymn at the right moment, and with one female voice always rising above the others, trying for a descant. In all her years of sitting with Mac and Bella in this church, she’s never identified that aspirant soprano.

  The sun inches forward, marking out a perfect rectangle on the carpet. There he is; there’s his resting place. She swallows hard. I should have gone to see the flames and the smoke. I should have insisted they take me. She winces at this and feels Isabel’s hand on her knee.

  ‘. . . And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship . . .’

  And then she is a little girl, four years old, watching her father watch her mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground. She will never forget the hollow sound of dirt hitting wood when her mother was buried, the look of shock, of distaste and revulsion, that shot across her father’s face.

  Somewhere close by, she hears Mrs May talking quietly to Isabel as her daughter moves up the aisle with their neighbour. She hears voices on the porch, and outside, which fade a little as people take their leave or move over to the hall. She hears the rustle of the minister in the vestry. She hears a bus rattle past on the road. Standing carefully, she kneels down and touches the floor’s wood where the sun has warmed it.

  ‘Mrs Lachlan?’ The minister is crouching beside her. ‘Anikka?’

  She nods, her fingers moving slowly across the wood as if she was picking out a scale on a piano, or counting a clock’s chime.

  ‘There are refreshments in the hall, when you . . .’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I think Mrs May has already taken Isabel.’ She looks up carefully. ‘I will come—I just wanted . . .’

  ‘Take your time, Mrs Lachlan. No rush, there’s no rush at all,’ he says, patting her lightly on the shoulder as the stationmaster had.

  This is how you touch grief, she thinks, watching as a single tear hits the floor and sits domed on its shiny surface. How long before it soaks in? How long before it disappears? She has no idea how long she stays there, wondering. She has no idea how often such stillness will come.

  ‘Ani, love? I’ve brought you this.’ Mrs May is holding a cup of tea, a huge scone wedged onto its saucer. ‘You don’t have to do this all on your own.’

  Ani takes the tea, staring at the size of the floury scone. ‘Thanks for taking Bella,’ she says. ‘I’ll come in a minute—I just . . .’ She shrugs.

  ‘You take your time, love; I’ll keep her busy with the sausage rolls. Always good t
o have something hot after a funeral—I’ll try to keep a couple by for you.’

  Breaking the edge off the scone, Ani winces at the flurry of crumbs that fall like snowflakes on the pew and the floor beyond. She eats a little—it’s still fresh from someone’s oven—and then a little more. Mrs May is right about hot food. Gulping the tea, she tries to sweep up her mess, kneeling down on the floor in front of the pew and brushing at the crumbs with her hanky. Her other hand touches the sunlit space again, and she feels its warmth against her skin, wiggling her fingers in its brilliance.

  The magic of light through glass: when Mac got his job on the railways they sat with his guard’s lamp lit between them on the table in her father’s kitchen, flicking the lens from red to green and back again.

  ‘A shame you can’t get other colours,’ Ani had said. ‘Blue would be nice—it’s how I imagine looking up through the ocean to the sky.’

  He’d flicked the light back to green so the room glowed with strange, arboreal shadows. ‘That’s how it is, lass, that’s how it is,’ he’d said. ‘And now I’ve a beacon for you to find me by.’

  In the church, remembering this, Ani watches as the sunlight traces the earth’s turn to fold over the altar steps, across the communion rail, and on towards the pulpit.

  ‘Where are you, Mackenzie Lachlan?’ she whispers. ‘Where can I find you now?’

  11

  ‘What’s the last thing you see before you sleep at night?’

  Ani’s voice wavered as a sheet of lightning breached the room’s curtains and lit its furniture into stark shapes—the pub’s bed, the pub’s wardrobe, the pub’s washstand, the pub’s chair. In the morning, they’d leave the wide Hay Plains and take a train away to the coast together—the first time Ani would see coast or ocean. In the morning, they’d take a train, the new Mr and Mrs Lachlan, away from this place where Ani had lived all her life, its grasses as blonde as her hair. Now, in the night, their faces close, noses almost touching, her right hand held his left. Here they were, lying with their heads on the same pillow, in the same bed, for the first time.