The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  So that later, when it happened, he saw this, the omen of the bird. He saw his wife, her hair shining, stepping out of the sunrise; he saw her eyes closed and dreaming on the night of their wedding. He saw her dancing through pools of light at the end of the war, and twirling on the ice, around and around. He saw himself talking about writing a poem— maybe he’d meant to; maybe he would. He saw himself running for a football, running with his daughter, running across a wide, green pitch, and then he was running along the uneven surface of the line’s ballast. Running from this, whatever this was. Running from every accident he’d dodged and missed on every other day of his life. He saw all the things he wouldn’t know about the future—Ani alone in a quiet room of books; Isabel practising words on a page. He saw a man running along a railway line, running towards the sunrise. And then he was running along his own silver line of track, etched here between the ocean on one hand and the scarp high on the other.

  Running through this place.

  He saw all this in the blink of an eye, like fragments dislodged from his daughter’s kaleidoscope.

  After that, there was nothing but light, from white, through blue, and beyond.

  40

  On the first day of her first holiday, Ani is on the beach before the sunrise, watching its colours come up through gentle purples and silvers, and then a wide clear sky of perfect pale blue. She walks south along the sand, following the line of the tide so that her feet are brushed with the thinnest edge of the water’s foam as each wave flows and ebbs. The ocean’s still cold, although the year is touching summer, and she loves the slight shock of each ripple against her skin, the way her footprints disappear with each salty surge. Looking up from her feet a moment, she sees an albatross rise from the ocean—the power of it, and the majesty. The one bird Mac had always wanted to see on the coast. The one sight he’d always somehow missed.

  She stands facing the brightness: she loves this moment, when the sun appears, loves the feel of the earth’s ball rolling forward, rolling on, turning itself in space.

  Coming out of the grocer’s the day before, Ani had met Mrs Padman, one of the ladies from the church, and they’d stopped and talked a while, of this and that, a baby born two streets down and someone’s mother taken ill. There was a new roster being planned for the church’s flowers, Mrs Padman said, and she hoped she might be able to include Ani’s name on it—no mention of why Ani had stopped doing this, of how long it had been, of whether Ani was ready to return. And Ani had smiled and nodded and said there were so many flowers in her garden at the moment—it seemed a shame that only she and Isabel were enjoying them.

  Walking home with her flour and her sugar, a little bag of sweets for her daughter and her half a pound of tea, she realised it was the first meeting she’d had in the village streets where the weight of Mac, and what had happened, hadn’t hung over the moment—where his story hadn’t been there in the conversation, said or unsaid. Where she hadn’t been spotlit by its circumstance, and raised up somehow, like someone famous—or infamous.

  Now, under the first warmth of the sun, she feels light, and smiles. She thinks: How dare you die. But the force has gone out of the phrase, and the words lie across the top of her imagination, thought, registered, but powerless beyond that.

  In the pocket of her cardigan, she fiddles with an old library card on which she’s jotted a shopping list, the soft pads of her fingers pushing against the sharp prick of the card’s corners. Imagine me, a librarian, she thinks. Imagine me, in charge. All the things she’d never had to manage when there was Mac— bills and time and having coal delivered or the roof fixed and remembering which night the pan-man came; all the things she’d never wanted to have to think about. And here she was, doing it all, and doing fine. She wants to feel proud of it, but the thought feels too close to being grateful for its circumstances—Mac or a library; Mac or capability—which is always an unthinkable thing.

  Heading south along the beach, she scans the empty sand and then, before she can change her mind, runs forward and springs into a cartwheel. Another and another and another, although the last leaves her tumbled on the ground, gritty and laughing. She looks around again, not for any unwanted witnesses, but for wanted ones—Roy McKinnon is down here most mornings, and it’s always lovely to talk with him about the world. Even Frank Draper might have laughed at the silliness of it, if he’d been there. There’s some kind of busyness a way away, at the foot of the headland beyond the jetty; Ani peers across the distance and turns back for home, too far away to pick either the doctor or the poet among the fray.

  Who’d have thought, she wonders, what those two would be in my year? Almost twelve months ago, they were newcomers in her world, slightly awkward at her Christmas lunch. This year, there was no question that they’d eat anywhere else. And I will show him my poem, she thinks, the first time she hasn’t tagged it as Mac’s. It’s such a beautiful thing.

  Walking on, Ani’s foot scuffs something hard beneath the sand, and she leans down to work free a strange white shape, curled and twisted, turning it one way and then another until she realises what it is—teeth! a little set of jaws!—and throws it away from herself, far out and into the ocean. Her hands rub furiously against her trousers, trying to erase the texture of the skeletal bone. There’s a horrid taste in her mouth too, and she bends forward, spitting and spitting again to try to clear whatever it is.

  Teeth; jaws: she can’t begin to imagine what kind of creature they’ve come from—an animal? A fish? Some strange, snapping reptile? She shivers, wringing her hands in the sharp, salty water. That’s why she hates Isabel’s idea of Mac stuck under the water. There are too many things that can bite down there—bite him, tear at his body, and sever that lifeline that runs between them. Even the pretty-sounding stargazer her daughter mentioned turned out to have a horrible mouthful of teeth.

  She washes her hands once more, rubbing them dry in her pockets. Her lightness has evaporated with the morning’s haze: she’s Ani Lachlan again, a widow, fixed and alone. It’s never-ending, after all. She should go home and make her daughter her breakfast.

  Climbing the cliff near the famous writer’s house, she pauses, staring in at its deep, shaded verandah. If he hadn’t happened on this village, if he hadn’t happened on this house, what story would he have invented in those winter months instead—and would it have had anything to do with her?

  A curtain flicks open at one of the house’s windows and Ani turns hurriedly to give the appearance of looking out to sea. A man comes onto the verandah, and she thinks, for an instant, that it’s Lawrence himself, come back to life and come back to see what other story has been going on in this place in the space after his novel’s last page.

  A seagull shrieks, startling Ani as she comes on up the stairs. The man leans out towards the vastness of the sea, waving at Ani as she passes.

  ‘A beautiful morning—we’ve got some view.’

  Ani waves back, nodding. ‘Perfect, isn’t it? Bound to be a perfect day.’ She takes the last steps at close to a run, her lightness recovered again and flooding through her limbs.

  She runs to the end of the street, around the corner, and back along to her own gate, bounding over its low fence and up the front stairs two at a time. She unlocks the front door and steps inside, closing it quietly and standing a moment in the reflected rose and blue of its two glass panels.

  It’s quiet in Isabel’s bedroom, and dark, the blinds still drawn. Ani rests her hands on the high frame of the bedstead. Isabel is sleeping on her stomach, as she always has, her head turned slightly, and her hands up on her pillow.

  Eleven years, thinks Ani. I have stood and watched this baby sleep eleven years. Isabel stirs a little, and Ani creeps away, listening as her daughter coughs once, and settles. She opens the French doors onto the front verandah, letting in the first of the morning’s sun. She’ll make tea; she’ll take it outside—it’s the first day of her first holiday, and there’s no rush. No rush. The sun snea
ks across the boards of the verandah’s floor: by the time she boils the kettle and soaks the leaves, it will have warmed the place where she can sit and gaze out at the ocean.

  Which is where she is and what she’s doing when the car turns into the street and draws up near her gate. When Frank Draper comes into her yard, and climbs her stairs, his hands held out towards her.

  ‘Anikka,’ he says—he’s never used her first name before— ‘I’m so sorry to be coming like this on such a gorgeous morning.’ And he sits down on the floor, before she can stand; sits down, cross-legged, facing her.

  She wonders about the dust marking his nice suit. And she wonders, the question looping inside her head, what news he can possibly have brought, because Isabel is safe inside; Isabel is asleep.

  As if nothing else mattered in the world.

  ‘I’ve just come from Iris McKinnon’s,’ he says at last. ‘I thought you’d want to know. There was an accident, and Roy McKinnon . . .’ He ducks, his face working silently. ‘Roy McKinnon has been drowned.’

  Watching him closely, watching the way his mouth twists at the end of the sentence, the way tears come into his eyes, Ani feels like some part of her is standing up, tall, looking down at him and looking down at herself as well. She’s leaning towards Frank Draper, patting his hand, saying ‘there’ and ‘shh’ and ‘it’s all right’, like she used to say to Isabel when she was tiny and woke herself with the unknown trembling of a dark, bad dream. She sees herself doing this; she sees Frank Draper grab onto her hand and hold it, tight. She sees their heads close, his dark, and hers bright.

  She sees them sit like this as the cicadas begin to sing.

  The first man’s hand I’ve held, she thinks from somewhere far away. She has never imagined it would be his. I don’t know what to think; I don’t know what to do.

  But as she sits and grips the doctor’s hand with hers, she remembers the minister, the hot sweet sugary drink he made her. And, ‘I’ll get you some tea,’ she says, easing her fingers away. And she makes it hot and strong and sweet—makes it in the chipped cup the minister had given her, as if that might be some important part of the ritual.

  He drinks it in four or five scalding mouthfuls, blowing his breath out, and wiping his hand across his eyes. ‘I thought you’d want to know,’ he says again, looking at her properly for the first time.

  And she nods—of course—and says, ‘Poor Iris. I’ll go down later. I’ll take her some food.’ The commotion on the beach, she thinks suddenly, but doesn’t want to ask. It feels discourteous somehow, or even cowardly, to have turned and walked away.

  ‘No,’ says the doctor, ‘I don’t think—no . . .’ He’s holding a large envelope out towards her; she opens it and sees a magazine, a strip of paper marking one page, and ‘Lost World’—a new poem by Roy McKinnon.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Ani slowly, her fingers rubbing at the page. ‘I mean, I knew he was writing again—he seemed pleased with what he was doing—and how awful to be stopped—’ She strokes the paper a while. ‘Such a curious title; I wonder how he came by it.’

  And then she looks at the poem’s lines:

  Let this be her.

  A fold of light . . .

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she says again, her face pale and her fingers unsteady.

  ‘He wrote it after Christmas.’ Frank Draper’s voice is distant, somehow muffled. ‘I read it then—I told him it was good. He said he would show it to you. I mean, it’s obviously about you.’

  ‘No.’ Ani closes the magazine, shaking her head. ‘No, my husband wrote this poem. Mac wrote this poem for my birthday before he died—he left it in a book for me; I found it on my shelf months later. Mr McKinnon must have taken it; he must have copied it. Because they can’t both have written the same poem, can they?’

  There’s a sudden movement in the yard, and Ani and the doctor both turn to see a magpie swoop in and settle. Ani holds fast to the magazine and its shockingly familiar verse, her eyes fixed on the bird, while Frank Draper worries at the skin around his thumbnail, pushing and chipping until the quick begins to bleed.

  ‘Roy wrote it after Christmas,’ he says again. ‘He was anxious about showing you, but he said he thought he might leave it somewhere where you’d find it. I thought he’d probably slip it into one of his library books, see if you happened on it when you were packing them up. But he must have brought it up here—maybe one night after the pictures, I don’t know.’ He pauses, touches her hand. ‘Roy McKinnon wrote it, Ani, you know that. Your husband was a railwayman; he wasn’t a poet.’

  Opening the magazine again, Ani follows the familiar words, a little less familiar, somehow, among the precise reportage of other articles, other words. ‘Mac told me once he wanted to write a poem,’ she says defensively. ‘And so I thought maybe he’d tried. It was beautiful, so beautiful.’ She watches a single tear—which must be hers—splash down onto the paper, darkening its colour. ‘And it was mine.’

  The doctor leans forward, takes her hands again. ‘It’s still yours, Ani. It’s just from someone else—that’s all.’

  ‘But I thought it was from Mac—I thought it was from him. What business does Roy McKinnon have thinking I look like an angel in a white dress and the sunshine?’

  ‘Well, none, now, does he, but he thought the world of you—you must have known that.’ She can hear the impatience in his voice as he stands and raises his empty cup. ‘My turn to make the tea then?’ And he disappears inside, leaving Ani and this newly dense idea alone in the morning.

  She shifts the magazine, leafing through it at random. And when she finds the poem again, and reads it, it’s Roy McKinnon’s voice she hears, not some far-off trace of Mac’s. Of course my name wasn’t in Mac’s writing, she thinks at last. How could it be, when he didn’t write it? She pushes her nails into the palm of her hand like a run of sharp pins. ‘And the brooch,’ she says under her breath. ‘My Christmas brooch.’ The simple words stick in her throat.

  Inside, through the open door, she can see the luminous wood of her little bibliotheque—no question he made that. She glances down at the page again and sees in tiny letters beneath its title, For A.L. A new and big thing that she was too afraid to see.

  No question, no question at all.

  She looks up as Frank comes out with the tea—‘No milk or sugar in yours; I think I remembered it right?’—and wraps her hands around the cup’s warmth as if it were the coldest winter’s day.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says—for the tea, for the poem, for whatever. The warmth burrows deep into her. The magpie begins to chortle, and she lets it finish before she speaks: ‘And Roy? What happened? Did he see this before he—before—’

  There are dark smudges on the skin below the doctor’s eyes, and his eyes are red and rheumy. He leans into Ani’s pause, taking a mouthful of his own tea and holding it in his cheeks a while before he swallows and answers. ‘The magazine came yesterday, Iris thinks, and Roy went out last night. Hard to know what happened, except he drowned, fully clothed, with a few pebbles in his pockets—a fisherman saw him trying to run along what’s left of the old jetty.’

  A great blast comes up from one of the railway’s engines, and Ani starts, as surprised by its noise as if the train was in her very yard. ‘The first time I saw him, when he came home,’ she says as its sound fades away, ‘the first time I saw him, he was perched on one of those poles. I always wondered how he’d got down.’ Only later will she remember that Mac was there too; only later will she realise she’s excluded him from the story.

  The doctor sighs, and wipes his eyes. ‘I was hoping for a happy ending,’ he says. ‘If I could manage it, surely anyone could.’ He frowns at her frowning, at her blank incomprehension. ‘You must have known, Ani. Every second gossip in this village has been talking about it for months. How long you’d wait. And what you’d wear.’ He laughs, but the laugh makes a cold and empty sound. ‘You know how they are, how they all like to dream.’

 
Ani picks up her teacup and is tempted for a moment to throw what’s left of its liquid in his face. Then she moves her hand to throw it past him and away over the verandah’s rail and onto the garden down below. ‘The year I’ve had, Dr Draper, here, with my daughter, making sense of this strange new world. I’ve lost my husband. I have this job. I wake up in my own room, in my own house. And yet everything, everything is different. Meeting Mr McKinnon, even meeting you; you were new people in my new world. And I appreciated that very much. I didn’t think about much more than that. I paid no mind to what the village was plotting might happen next. I’ve just been trying to get us through the days, just me and Isabel, that’s all.’ There are truths and untruths in this, she knows, but it feels too late to worry about any of them. And as she says her daughter’s name, Isabel appears, lovely and smiling and half full of dreams.

  ‘Bella.’ Ani reaches up to her girl. ‘You’ve had the loveliest long sleep. Dr Draper’s been here drinking tea with me. And now he’s just on his way.’

  And she holds on fast to her daughter’s warm hands.

  ‘Ani,’ says the doctor, standing now and fumbling with his hat. ‘It’s all right—I only meant . . .’ And he sighs, pointing to the magazine. ‘I’ll leave you this, then, and I’ll leave you to your morning, Mrs Lachlan.’

  From across the village comes the hard pull of an engine’s brakes, and they both react, the doctor and the railwayman’s wife. Frank Draper turns and walks away, still shaking his head as his car purrs and he pulls out onto the empty road.

  Up on the porch, Ani keeps her eyes on the nothing of middle distance until the car has gone. She feels Isabel crouch beside her, sees her reach for the journal, and hears her gasp as she starts to read.

  ‘The poem, Mr McKinnon’s poem, oh, and I—oh, Mum.’

  While Ani, leaning in, reads along, wondering what she might feel about any of this—not now, when everything seems pushed away and at arm’s length, like trying to bring a line of type into focus, but some other time, on some other day. Then a sentence leaps at her from the facing page, its words wrapping around her, and she disappears into their world, enveloped and contained, lost to anything in this here or now, its chances, its hazards, its missed opportunities.