The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘Don’t say that.’ The other woman’s voice drops to a hiss. ‘Don’t say that they won’t all come back, the ones who lived. Don’t condemn us all to widowhood, now that you have to make sense of it.’

  Ani blinks. Is that what she does? Is this who she is? She flicks the switch and the sudden brightness of the bulb above startles them both.

  ‘I’ll send a note when Mr McKinnon’s books arrive,’ she says at last. And the poet’s sister turns and leaves without another word.

  Ani watches her go, and remembers, in an instant, a day in her own garden, Isabel fiddling with her first flowers, and Iris McKinnon naming each one as her daughter prised their petals apart. These losses, these slips: perhaps it took a larger one to notice all the other people you’d let get away. Perhaps it was only then that you wondered how they happened, if they mattered. But perhaps I used to be a better friend.

  Ani works the book box closer to the door and kneels down in front of it, checking its contents against its list for the last time, and making sure the books are packed neatly and secure. She wonders if Miss McKinnon has read Kangaroo and realises in an instant that any number of people she knows in this place might even have been here when it was written. They might have seen its writer. Ani would envy them that.

  But we were closer, Iris and me, she thinks then. I was the person who cut her brother’s poem from the magazine for her—I was the person who gave it to her so she could read it. Years after Bella was born, I was still the person who would think to do that. I should know what happened with her.

  Perhaps the poem didn’t matter to Iris McKinnon; perhaps, thinks Ani suddenly, she wishes he hadn’t written it. Perhaps she was embarrassed by it.

  Closing the box and securing it at last, she resolves to be nicer to the poet. And when she walks home, later in the evening, she recites the first two lines of what she’s already calling ‘Mac’s poem’ over and over in time to her footsteps, like a chant, or a spell, or a mantra.

  21

  ‘Look at this, love,’ Mac pushed the magazine across the kitchen table towards her, steering it around the mess she was making with some fruit. ‘Article about the northern lights, see. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw them, a little bairn out in the night with my gran, and all their colours snaking and swirling across the sky?’

  ‘You did, Mac, you did—weren’t you going to take me to see their show?’ Her reflexive reply, co-opting his fantasy of return.

  The house creaked a little, settling its shape in the evening’s cool, and Ani waited to hear if this had disturbed their sleeping daughter.

  ‘If we could get round the world, lass, see my gran, and the lights—and then a quick skate across the ocean to your da’s country and his people . . .’ He smiled. ‘And all that on a railwayman’s wage.’ The smile widening into a laugh.

  She slid the segments of fruit into the saucepan, wiping their bright mess from the brighter red laminate of the table’s top.

  ‘Maybe I could get a job,’ she said after a moment. ‘Add a few more shillings to our savings.’

  But he shook his head, his attention back on the pages in the magazine. ‘What would you want to do, Ani? And what jobs would there be now everyone’s back from the war?’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘That smells grand, what you’re making—what is it?’

  ‘Just fruit—just some peaches: I thought I’d stew them up so you could have your favourite pie later on.’ She supposed it didn’t matter about the money, and a job might be more trouble than it was worth. Iris McKinnon had been taken off the post round for some returning soldier, and was raising hell about being replaced, the grocer said. Still, thought Ani, secretly, she must prefer to have her time back to herself. Throughout the war, watching Iris heave her heavy satchel along the village’s streets, Ani had never thought she looked happy. She never made it look like a thing you’d want to do.

  ‘Preserving for the winter.’ He laughed. ‘You do take care of me.’

  She stood alongside him as he sat at the table, pulled him in towards her, ruffled his hair. ‘Doing my best,’ she said softly. ‘Doing my best.’ The house shifted again, and Ani paused, listening for Isabel.

  ‘She’s a big girl now, love,’ said Mac, noticing her stillness. ‘Reckon she’d sleep through an earthquake most nights. Remember when she was born and that plane came down on the beach, all engines and kerfuffle, and she didn’t even rouse?’ He worked his arm around his wife, his other hand smoothing the page he was reading.

  ‘The aeroplane on the beach? The mail plane in the storm?’ Ani frowned. ‘That was 1936, Mac; that was just after we came, well before Bella was born. Don’t you remember Luddy setting out that line of flares to make a kind of runway?’

  ‘It was cars, wasn’t it, a row of cars parked along the beach with their headlights on to show him how to come in—and I’m sure Bella was born; sure we brought Mrs May in to sit with her while we ran down to help.’ Mac was rubbing at his own hair now, frowning and perplexed.

  Ani pushed the pan of fruit to the back of the stove, watching as its bubbles settled into a low simmer. ‘I’ll get my daybook,’ she said. ‘That’ll fix your lousy memory, Mackenzie Lachlan.’

  ‘Your daybook, your daybook,’ he called after her. ‘I’m sure it’s just a little fallible now and then, Mrs Mackenzie Lachlan—sure a bit of poetic licence creeps in.’

  Coming back into the kitchen, leafing through the old diary, she raised her eyebrows in mock affront: ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir. I am a mere scribe of events around me . . .’ And she ducked as he threw a tea towel at her. ‘All right, once or twice, I might have exaggerated . . .’

  ‘You had us sliding down the scarp in a tropical monsoon in your telling of our first bushwalk, Anikka Kalm, when it was the lightest shower of rain imaginable.’

  ‘Well it felt heavier, and wetter, and it made for a better story with a bit of thunder and lightning—which I’m sure we did have. But I’d never change the year a plane landed on the beach, or whether our daughter was born or not when it did, or whether it was brought home by a line of flares lit by young Luddy or a line of parked cars.’

  Her fingers leafed through the book’s pages, and she paused, reading random lines from its months.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘One aeroplane coming down through thick fog and rain, March 1936, with a line of makeshift flares pushed into the sand—we’d only been here a month or so, and it felt like the whole village came out to help . . .’ She paused. ‘Or were we all just sticky-beaking?’ She held the book out to Mac, tapping its date with her finger.

  He hardly read the page, his eyes moving across it so quickly while he said, ‘All right then, all right,’ and then looked across at the page opposite, the day before. ‘See this, though, Ani love:’ Mac’s finger traced the words. ‘And we talked about sailing north, sailing up to see Grannie Lachlan, and how we might find so much money for that.’

  She tilted her head, reading over his shoulder. ‘I always thought we talked about going later, when we had Isabel, so Grannie Lachlan could meet her. And you see, we could use some extra money—we even said so then.’

  Mac smiled, tapping at the page. ‘Yes we did, love: here it is. Written fast in ink.’ He squeezed her into a hug. ‘Stories are always changing, aren’t they, although I could have sworn I remembered that line of cars—would’ve told you who’d driven them onto the sand, if you’d asked me. And what do you want with the bother of a job, Ani?’ This talk of employment; if she wanted it, he supposed, she should do it, but he didn’t want her turning into some hectoring harridan like Iris McKinnon. His Ani, she’d be better than most men at anything she turned her hand to—he couldn’t imagine she didn’t know this herself.

  Ani shook her head, stirring the softening peaches as the sound of a train braking hard cut through the night. ‘We’ll never get north on a railwayman’s wage,’ she said, but she was only teasing, and he knew it—although he felt it underlined by the train’s noise.


  ‘She’s late tonight,’ he said. ‘And in a hurry to make it up too. Shall we get to bed then, Anikka Lachlan? Shall we read a little in the warm?’

  And she lay beside him in the dim light of the lamp, listening as he read to her from the famous book about this place:

  Then the train came out on the sea, lovely bays with sand and grass and trees, sloping up towards the sudden hills that were like a wall. There were bungalows dotted in most of the bays. Then suddenly more collieries, and quite a large settlement of bungalows. From the train they looked down on many pale-grey zinc roofs, sprinkled about like a great camp, close together, yet none touching, and getting thinner towards the sea. The chimneys were faintly smoking, there was a haze of smoke and a sense of home, home in the wilds.

  ‘The wilds,’ she murmured, ‘I never thought of it as the wilds. But home, yes, and the only home Bella has had, compared to our beginnings.’

  He watched as her eyes closed, as she burrowed her head into his side for the rest of the reading, as she slipped further away from the book in whose subsequent chapters, the ones unwritten beyond the narrative’s end, she’d always suspected she was living.

  22

  They meet in the door of the co-op—Anikka coming out with sugar, tea, flour, and Roy McKinnon going in, his hands in his pockets. Her eyes fail in the sunlight after the dimness of the shop; his strain to see anything in the shadows after the brightness of the day; and for an instant neither can see the other.

  They step awkwardly—she to her left, he to his right—so that the doorway remains impassable, and at the moment Ani laughs and Roy’s eyes adjust to the gloom so that he can see her, and where he’s going, and everything on the busy shelves of the shop, in more minute detail than usual. He’s struck by the way she emerges, coming into focus, and by the patterns made by the different bits of produce tucked into their little bays and buckets on the wall behind the shop’s counter. There’s something to be said, he thinks, about what’s available, what’s plentiful in this place, in this world, about the great extent of what might be found here. But as he thinks this, he looks at her again, and sees that her laugh is distracted, uneasy, in this no-man’s-land of space.

  She used to love it, the gathering, the provisioning. Now, she rushes through the shops she needs to enter, hating the whispers, the stares. Here comes Anikka Lachlan, her basket swinging and her eyes still down—the women pause in their talk as she moves past them, her shopping list tight in her hand. From the counter, they hear her ask for her butter ration, and her tea. ‘She looks tired,’ says one. ‘Tired and pale—Mrs May says her light’s on late these days.’

  ‘And that job in the library,’ says another. ‘Good of the railways to offer it but it must be hard to keep the house going as well.’

  ‘They used to play cards with us, her and Mac, sometimes. I miss that. She was always so bright.’

  They pause as she counts the coins from her purse, pushes them over the counter. And they smile and murmur a greeting as she goes by again. Anikka Lachlan, still in the shadows, not yet found the light. She’s cooked meals for most of the widows in this town—now most times she comes home there’s another dish, mostly anonymous, set waiting on her porch.

  She’s no appetite for any of it.

  ‘Mrs Lachlan.’ Roy takes another half-step towards her and shakes her hand. ‘I wanted to thank you again—the Sassoon, “Everybody Sang”: just what I needed. That light, that hopefulness, that continuity.’

  A lady with a broad basket tries to squeeze past them clicking her tongue, perhaps over their obstacle, perhaps over the exuberance of the poet’s words.

  ‘The singing will never be done,’ says Roy McKinnon, still clutching Anikka’s hand. ‘The singing will never be done.’

  And she smiles at last. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it,’ she says. ‘We should—’ gesturing backwards towards the shop, forward towards the road, as another lady tries to squeeze past. They step as one into the full sunlight, Ani rearranging her parcels, Roy rearranging his hat.

  ‘I was struggling,’ he says, dropping into such a long pause that she thinks perhaps that’s all he wants to say, until, ‘with trying to write, I think I told you, even all this time after the war, and even somewhere as beautiful as this.’ His hand, sweeping up towards the escarpment, the sky, loops back to include her in its gesture. ‘The Sassoon— I don’t know, but it helped, and I’m sure I’m closer now to the beginning of something. A new poem.’ He bows a little with a stately gratitude that belongs in another time, another place.

  ‘I’m glad the library could help,’ says Anikka, and her smile stretches wider than she can remember. ‘Poetry is—it’s a sort of extremity, isn’t it?’ she says after a breath. ‘So whether the extremity comes from an extremely horrific place, or an extremely beautiful one’—she retraces his arc across mountain, sky—‘maybe both are possible.’

  A shiny black car purrs along the road, pushing Ani back into the memory of the night she heard about Mac, pushing Roy McKinnon into his own memory of official visits, important men.

  ‘Are you following the trials, Mrs Lachlan?’ she hears Roy say at last, his voice quiet. ‘The Japanese ones, the German ones, the trailing detritus of this unending war?’

  She had expected war to operate like a tap: on—as it happened; off—immediately it stopped, like life, or like breath, she realises now. Now she seesaws between feeling that she can never know enough about its aftermath and entrails, and wishing not only to know no more about it, but to somehow forget so much of what it has already left lodged and jammed across the wide space of her memory and imagination.

  And so the world still arrives folded into a newspaper in her front yard, and is carried up her front stairs, and she sits every night after work, after Isabel is asleep, after the housework is done, obediently reading some part of it as if she might be examined. There’s a new president in the United States, and Mr Eliot has won the Nobel Prize for literature— she knows this, if anyone asks. An American pilot is dropping chocolates and other sweets into West Berlin for its children, and seven Japanese men have been sentenced to death for their roles in the war. Yes, she’s following the reports. She reads as much as she can in the evening; she cuts a strip from here, a story from there, to stick into her daybook. And then she sets the rest in the combustion stove, putting the world out of Isabel’s way.

  All this she says to Roy McKinnon—but the words are too much and come too fast, as if she hadn’t spoken like this for a long time and is afraid she might have forgotten how. ‘It’s to do with wanting to know what happens next,’ she says, ‘with feeling like something could be rounded off, or made better, although I don’t know how it can be. There was a man who danced through Martin Place when the war stopped—I saw him on a newsreel; he danced and danced for joy. But what were we celebrating? The awfulness of its finishing? All these articles about war that still leach out into the newspapers now, three years later: there wasn’t a full stop, was there? The story just keeps unfolding.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with seeing it all as a kind of continuity,’ says the poet. ‘There is no beautiful now, no terrible then, just these trails of things going on and on. Which perhaps means there are some things you can write about, and some you have to leave alone.’ He watches the slow progress of the local bus as it draws in, collects its passengers and pulls out, heading south. ‘There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.’

  His hand moves to wave as the bus passes and Anikka, turning, sees the face of Frank Draper, sees his hand wave in return. She looks away, shifting the weight of a small bag of sugar against her arm, wanting to make no acknowledgement of his gesture.

  ‘He was there, you know,’ says Roy, over the chug of the bus’s motor. ‘He went into one of those G
erman camps with the British. Did you know that?’

  ‘Dr Draper?’ She shakes her head. ‘No. Mrs Lacey said he’d stayed in service well beyond the war’s end. She didn’t mention anything else.’

  ‘He was one of the first men in—went into one of the worst of them, I think, if you could designate any better or worse. We hung round together, years ago: Frank, me, my sister, dances and the beach. Frank and me would have a beer and spin our dreams: he’d do his medicine; I’d start to write. And we’d end up here, somehow, when we were old and practised.’ The bus hauls itself up the hill to cross the railway bridge, and disappears around the bend, taking its labouring engine with it. ‘Hardly recognised him when I first saw him. But then I wonder if he had the same trouble recognising me.’

  ‘I remember seeing you, before the war, but I didn’t recognise the doctor. And he’s become quite . . . abrupt,’ says Ani, taking care with the word. ‘But no, I didn’t know where he’d been.’ Dr Draper would know what a body starved, a body shot, a body hanged looked like. And probably a body mashed and squashed by something huge and powerful. She winces, and the poet sees the edge of it in her shoulders, her widened eyes.

  ‘I’ve been puzzling at memory myself, Mrs Lachlan,’ he says, trying for something that will bring her out of whatever dark place she has slipped into, ‘and how it is that I can remember your husband here before the war, but not you, never you. You’ll forgive me,’ he says gently, ‘but you’re someone who would have been memorable.’