The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘The hours are pasted by the door,’ says Ani, wishing she could think of something more cutting or retaliatory. ‘I’m sorry I don’t remember you much from before the war, Dr Draper. Mrs Lacey tells me you were a fine dancer—and I think I remember you dancing with Iris McKinnon and laughing with her brother. It would have been lovely to have met you more properly then.’

  And it is satisfying, she thinks, to watch the colour drain from his face, to watch his fingers reach again for his wrinkled handkerchief. ‘That was a long time ago, Mrs Lachlan, a long time ago now.’ In the room’s quietness, they regard each other, level. ‘I don’t think I’m much good for dancing or laughter these days.’

  ‘Do come, if you think the library might have anything you need. The hours, as I said, are pasted up.’ And she watches as he walks away towards the platform, disconcerted to hear him whistle, and wishing she could rinse his conversation out of her mouth.

  Glancing up at the clock, she sees that its hands have finally reached the end of her first shift. Pulling the windows down and the door closed—the lock checked twice, three times—she realises she’s never felt more tired in her life. And she hasn’t read a single page.

  17

  She recognises him at once, the man who balanced on the high, weathered pole, his gaze fixed beyond the white line of breakers, the wavy line of horizon. Roy McKinnon, Iris’s brother, the man who wrote the poem during the war. He is tall, she sees, taller than his sister, and his hair is more grey than the colour she took it for outside, from a distance, on the beach. Inside, closer up, he looks a little more stooped and weathered. She is scanning the lines on his forehead, around his eyes, and when she realises he is studying her in turn, she blushes.

  ‘I’m so sorry—was there something . . .’

  ‘Do you keep a poetry section, Mrs Lachlan?’ As soon as he begins to speak, he looks away from her, studying his shirt cuffs, his shoes.

  She shakes her head, startled by his directness and fearing another conversation like the doctor’s the day before.

  ‘No, no, I don’t think we get a lot of poetry through the shelves. Is there something I can request for you?’

  He draws in such a deep breath she expects the papers on her desk to shift a little towards him.

  ‘No, perhaps, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just thought there might be something I could take with me now.’ He’s pulled a pen from his pocket and is fiddling with its cap, snapping it on and off, on and off, as he gazes at the shelves. ‘I’d take Kangaroo if you had it.’

  ‘For poetry?’ she asks, stepping around the barrier of the table, pulling D.H. Lawrence from his place.

  ‘No, just for something that comes from here. Can I use my sister’s card?’

  She nods. ‘I admired your poem very much, Mr McKinnon,’ she says, opening the ledger to Iris McKinnon’s record. ‘And your sister was thrilled when she saw it in the magazine.’ She knows this is a stretch, perhaps even a lie. Iris McKinnon had never even acknowledged the verse as far as Ani knew— it’s one clear memory she has, handing the cut-out sheet to her through her front doorway, watching her take it without so much as a glance, put it on the table beside her and say that if there was nothing else, she had things to get back to, and close the door. Ani wonders, watching him, if her brother knows any of this.

  He says, ‘You’re very kind,’ and smiles at her, a warm and proper smile.

  She wants to say she’s never met a poet before, wants to say she saw him perched on the old jetty’s pylon, and to ask how he jumped down without drenching himself, or whether he sat through a full turn of the tide.

  But instead she says: ‘It’s no trouble to check the book out to your sister’s card,’ and she writes the details into her ledger. She says: ‘Will you stay with Miss McKinnon long?’

  He’s balancing the book on one hand as if to guess its weight. ‘Long enough to read this and work out how it sprang from here.’

  ‘You don’t like it here, Mr McKinnon?’ And she braces herself for a shrug. ‘My husband gave me this to read when we were travelling to the coast. I loved the idea that such a story could come from such a pretty seaside town. It felt incongruous, or—I don’t know—dangerous somehow.’ It’s the first time she’s mentioned Mac this casually since—since; she nearly falters—and she likes the ease of it, the sense that it gives him some currency. Immortality: she risks thinking the word.

  ‘You didn’t grow up here?’

  ‘No, no, miles inland, on the plains, dry as a biscuit. I didn’t see the ocean until I was married, until I’d read Kangaroo. Were you and Iris children here? I mean,’ she blushes, despite herself, ‘I remember you visiting a little, when we came, in ’36, but I don’t remember if your family . . .’

  He puts the book down on the corner of her desk, the very corner, repositioning it until its edges match the edges of the wood precisely. The silence beyond her words grows and grows, and she’s on the edge of repeating the question when he says: ‘We came for holidays when we were kids, for weekends, when we were older. Later, then, our parents died, and Iris came to stay.’ And then immediately, ‘And I’ll take another novel, to keep me going,’ so that she knows the other exchange is over. She watches as he moves along the shelves, tilting a spine towards him here and there, pulling out one or two volumes to skim through their pages, his nose pressed close, before he reshelves them—carefully, gently. Then, ‘I haven’t read this for years,’ and he slides Jane Eyre across the desk.

  ‘One of my favourites,’ she says. ‘But I expect a lot of people say that. That scene where Rochester talks of sending Jane to Ireland—the cord he thinks connects them, from his heart to hers—’ She stops, blushing. Mac had told her early in their friendship it was his favourite book: it was a large part of how she remembers falling in love. And here she is, on the edge of talking about this with a man she hardly knows, just for the sake of bringing Mac into the room.

  ‘I only like reading it now I know how it ends,’ Roy McKinnon says as if she hasn’t cut herself off, and she watches, appreciative, as he flicks to the last page, as if to check that its sentences still tell the right story. ‘The first time—all that suffering, all that separation; it’s a terrible thing to confess but I think I skipped ahead just to make sure it turned out all right.’

  ‘My daughter does that sometimes,’ says Ani, recovering herself. ‘I like that it matters so much to her that a book’s characters end up happy and well.’

  And he smiles again, tucking a book in each of his coat’s pockets and turning for the door. Where he stops, scuffs one foot a little on the mat, and turns again. ‘It was nice to meet you, Mrs Lachlan,’ he says carefully, his fingertips up towards the brim of his hat. ‘I was sorry to hear—’

  ‘It was nice to meet you, too,’ she says quickly, across the condolence, and he blushes in turn. He’s shy, thinks Ani. I wouldn’t have expected that. Wouldn’t it take a certain courage to write a poem? Didn’t people talk about his bravery during the war? ‘And I’ll see what I can do about the poetry. There are some new books due to come down next week.’

  He waves his thanks, and goes, and she listens as his feet crunch across the gravel, disappearing under such a sudden rush of a train passing that she jumps.

  She pulls a blank sheet of paper towards her, uncaps her pen. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem. Mac could do doggerel for Isabel, or funny limericks for birthday cards. But a real poem, a proper poem: Ani stares at the blank sheet. How would you know what to do?

  She smoothes the page, writes the day’s date at the top, writes the library’s designation, and drafts the request for some poetry, if possible, in the next dispatch of books. ‘For Mr Roy McKinnon,’ she writes, ‘a published poet, who lives locally in these parts.’

  18


  In the bar of the Ryan’s Hotel, Roy McKinnon and Frank Draper sit down for their first beer together after the war, the glasses cold against their fingers, the room dim and quiet around them. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, a nothing time, when men should be working. But here they are, drinking.

  ‘To making it home,’ says Roy, raising his glass. But Frank, rather than replying, simply drains his drink, and signals for another.

  ‘Impossible, isn’t it?’ he says, etching a pattern into the glass’s frost.

  ‘I never let myself imagine it might happen,’ says Roy quietly. ‘Never let myself think about being back.’

  ‘What was the worst of it?’ They are sitting close, each with his nose near his glass; each with his head slightly bowed. There is something supplicatory about it, as if they were receiving some sort of communion.

  ‘The worst of it?’ Roy asks. ‘The constant expectation of death—killing or being killed.’

  ‘Did you kill anyone?’

  Roy’s fingers tighten around his glass, then he picks it up and drinks it dry. ‘I can’t tell you that; you can’t ask me.’

  ‘All right.’ Frank signals across the bar for another drink for them both. ‘Then the best of it. Was there a best of it?’

  And Roy laughs. ‘I met a bloke who gave his address, on his papers, his enlistment papers, as Thirroul Beach—not just Thirroul, not the village, not anywhere in the streets, but the beach itself, the very sand. “That’s where I belong,” he said, “and that’s where I’ll go back to.” Dunno if he made it. Don’t even know if I’d recognise him if I saw him.’

  ‘Not bad,’ says Frank. ‘I like that. My best was a garden of roses blooming a mile or so beyond one of the camps— so normal, so beautiful. They looked right, you know, and they smelled right. They smelled like they belonged in the real world, not those pits of death and misery. Everything else, even after the war ended, everything else was panic and rush— sending people home who could be sent home, the way they clamoured and panicked for the trucks, as if someone was going to snatch away their one chance of getting out of there. And just over the hill, this patch of roses was going through the normal course of a normal year. They were blooming as usual, and they smelled so good, I could have eaten them.’

  They sit a while, sipping now and then. Roy McKinnon’s fingers tap out a rhythm on the bar. Frank Draper rubs his hand through his hair every so often, and lets out a sigh that sounds like anyway, anyway.

  ‘So what do we do now we’re here?’ Roy asks at last. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘All falling into place, isn’t it?’ The doctor’s voice is hollow. ‘You must be working on your first book of verse, my poet, and here I am ready to usher in life and death for this village’s patients. Just as we always planned.’

  Roy shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what to write about, now that I’m here. I don’t even know how to write.’ His fingers circle the top of the glass, the friction between its wetness and his skin making the sailors’ curse ring out. He stills himself. ‘I stand in this beautiful place, on glorious days, and the only images that come are from over there, back then. Not that some of those weren’t beautiful, or glorious. One night, there was a tiny island and no moon; you know those nights you thank God that you’re covered in pitch? We were buzzing ashore in some little boat, looking for the enemy in some new messy swamp, and the whole ocean was lit up with phosphorescence—the way it churned and turned behind the boat, it was like a carpet had been thrown over the sea. I sit and look at the ocean here, and I think of that, on a good day. Other days, I think of other oceans, of what it sounds like when the voices of drowning men finally stop.’ He takes a long drink. ‘I should write to someone about that bloke from Thirroul Beach—find out if he made it, find out who to tell about seeing him, if he didn’t. That matters, doesn’t it, Frank? Those messages must matter?’

  He shifts his head, trying to find his friend’s gaze, but Frank’s eyes stay down, so low they might as well be closed. ‘I don’t know, mate,’ he says at last. ‘I don’t know. They’re not going to bring anyone back to life, are they? Nothing can do that. And that’s all anyone wants in the end, isn’t it? To change that; to bring someone back. A message—well I never did set much store by words, you know.’

  He means it as a joke, and tries to laugh, but no sound comes out of his mouth, and they sit a while longer, silent, their shoulders almost touching.

  ‘Lawrence the poet, and Yeats’s doctor,’ says Roy quietly. ‘Do you reckon we still have a chance of filling their shoes?’ Their younger selves had set much store by any available precedents, leaning against village memories of renown, a writer from Notts and a doctor from Dublin: if two such men could find their way to this speck in an atlas and do something here—well, the young Roy, the young Frank, had told each other, their own opportunities in these fields might be limitless.

  ‘Don’t care whose shoes we fill, Royston, my friend,’ Frank says now. ‘It would just be a blessed relief not to be walking around in my own all the time.’ The doctor pushes back from the bar, shifts his hat on his head. ‘At least I can sleep,’ he says at last. ‘At least I don’t tremble, or stutter. I mean, my memory’s gone, but I’d rather forget than remember—the war at least, and I can’t remember when there was anything before that. Saw a bloke interviewed by doctors just last year—that’s two years after this is all supposed to be over, and they still can’t discharge him from hospital. You know what he kept saying, over and over? “I was a solid man before this; I was a solid man.”’ He shakes his head, wiping at his eyes. ‘And Iris? How’s Iris?’

  ‘You should see for yourself—’ It’s harder than Roy means it to sound, so he swallows the end of the sentence with his drink, fixes his own hat and stands. ‘I mean, I think she’s waiting—I think she’s . . .’ He shrugs. ‘You work it out, you two. It’s been too many years.’

  ‘And you? What do you need to work out, now you’re here?’

  The two men stand on the kerbside, looking along the main street towards the railway line, towards the ocean.

  ‘I need to work out what kind of chump finds poetry in the middle of mud and blood, and can’t string a sentence together about this mountain, this sunshine, this sky and this place. Nothing to do beyond that.’

  The doctor grips his friend’s shoulder, holding him in an embrace for just a moment. ‘Find yourself something new to think about. It’ll work itself out after that.’

  ‘Fine advice from you.’ Roy McKinnon laughs. But it’s good to laugh—and Frank, after all, is a doctor; his statements arrive with the authority of prescription. Roy grabs his friend’s hand and shakes it, holds it, as a bus rattles southwards and an old horse and cart clatter north. ‘You were right to come back here—it’ll be all right, I reckon.’

  ‘Nothing will ever be all right, mate,’ says Draper, stepping away. ‘But if I’m going to come to terms with that, I may as well do it somewhere I’ve someone to drink with.’

  They walk along the main street together. Frank’s face is hard and dark—catching sight of it in a window, Roy doesn’t want to know what’s happening inside his friend’s imagination, or who is there with him. For himself, as he nears the railway station and glances along towards its buildings, he finds that he’s thinking about a tall woman with light hair, standing silent among a landscape of books, and the ocean wild and vast beyond.

  He waits for a sentence to form.

  19

  ‘This is how it was the first time I saw you.’

  When Mackenzie Lachlan butted up against the side of Australia, he was twenty-five years old with nowhere in particular to go and no one in particular to be. Walking up from his ship’s anchorage on the too-bright, too-blue harbour, he turned at the sound of a Glaswegian accent—more angular than his northerly Scots, but still friendly for being familiar—and found himself talking to a rosy man called Ewan who’d been ashore a month and found a job on the railways. ‘It’s way away, laddie,’ he’d said t
o Mac Lachlan, ‘out in the space where your family must be from,’ and he punched at his shoulder and laughed as Mac frowned. ‘A river called Lachlan, man; I’m taking engines out there, to the plains.’ And Mac Lachlan, who liked a good story, thought he’d like to see the river that ran along in his name.

  At the yards the next day, with Ewan still punching and pummelling his shoulders, he was told there were no jobs for the minute, but—a nod, a wink—he might as well travel out with his mate. ‘Off we go, lad,’ Ewan boomed as he took a train—and Mac—out through the city’s suburbs on their first run. ‘But y’picked a lousy place to come looking for work, or a lousy time.’ They left the coast the next day, the engine hauling them south and west through green space, blond space, dust-dry space and white space that seemed to hold pure emptiness. ‘But you’ll see your family’s river,’ Ewan boomed again and again, and Mac laughed too, the vast landscape and its potential blossoming inside him. He’d dreamed of places this open, this flat, this inviting. This warm.

  The ranges and the hills, the slightest inclines and hummocks behind them, he could feel himself stretching out—wider, wider and wider—trying to see not just this intoxicating stretch of open land, but the very curve of the earth he could make out at its edge. He saw birds high in the air; he saw animals bounding along beside the line. He saw mirages and shadows that loomed where there was nothing to throw them, and strange figures that seemed to rise out of the tiny gap where the dirt met the sky, that ran with the train a while, and then folded themselves back into that liminal rut. He saw different shapes picked out in stars, and different colours marking the phases of dawn, day and dusk. And when he arrived, he rode out to see this river that was somehow his, its water khaki, its edges soft with the khaki leaves of gum trees. He even passed a tiny place that bore his grandmother’s Christian name, Maude, to match the river that marked her surname, Lachlan. And he took all this to mean that this was the place, in all of Australia, that he was supposed to have found.