by John Bemrose
“What?”
“It’s from a poem.”
“One of yours?”
She shook her head, apparently amused.
“What’s so funny? You’re laughing at me because I don’t know the quote.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are. You think I’m a bit of a clodhopper.”
She looked at him with great seriousness, alarmed.
“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t at all.”
He was only half-appeased, and embarrassed at exposing his own insecurity. He turned back to the rail. The sun was a thin, low hillock now, quivering as it sank.
“Anyway, I’ll bet this is just as beautiful as anything in France.”
She was still looking at him. When he turned back to her, the light in her eyes — wounded and fond — sparked a desperate desire in him. He kissed her gently, holding the back of her head with his hand. When he opened his eyes, to peek, she was looking at him. He wondered if his kiss had touched her at all.
“You didn’t close your eyes,” he said, piqued.
“I wanted to see you.”
They looked back to the valley. A jet was tracking overhead, outracing its own vacant, drifting thunder. Its vapor trail shone and slowly separated. Down the sky, a few solitary clouds had turned sumac red. He drew his fingers across the small of her back, touched her hair, as he looked out at the flaming sky. He seemed to be touching the pulse of life itself. It would be impossible to get closer. Though he wanted to reach out and seize it all, he knew that only a delicate touch would do. There was a sadness in him, a faint, sad desperation, that he was so close, and yet could get no closer. Life could not be taken by force: life was elusive, this light brighter than noon was elusive, a thing to be briefly touched, not held.
They descended into the shadowy lower town. On Station Hill, near the house where the Catholic sisters lived, two birches glowed in the bluing dusk. She stopped to watch a cat hurry across a lawn. It was long and black with a look of slinking determination, a cat on its way to kill.
“Take me to your house,” she said impulsively. “I want to meet your family.”
“Now?” He had taken pains never to mention his family. He wanted to be born out of thin air to her, with no past.
“You’ve seen my family. I want to meet yours.”
He told her she could meet them another time — perhaps she could come to dinner some Sunday — but she insisted with such tenacity he finally gave in.
Flush with her victory, she went along swinging his hand, excited by the idea of a neighbourhood called the Island. He knew she was bound to be disappointed — as he told her, in self-defence, it wasn’t exactly Hawaii. At the low bridge over the race, she stopped and peered at the dark water littered with old boards and rubbish while he watched in a misery of apprehension. “You see what I mean,” he said. “It’s not much of an island.” “Shut up,” she told him. “It’s an island to me.” She looked down the little street crowded with houses. “Actually, I think I was here once, on one of my walks. I just didn’t notice it was an island.” Nearby loomed the metal sheds of the town yard, with its dimming piles of sand streaked with salt, a scarred yellow road-grader — signs, to him, of the decline in neighbourhood since they’d come off the Hill. But she spied an old snowplough, its curved, rusted blades rising like wings. “An iron angel,” she declared, running her palm over the scabbing paint.
When they reached his house, she stopped and looked at it, while he fidgeted beside her. “We’re planning to move,” he told her, clutching at the family myth, which normally he despised. Before them, the whitewashed facade with its dark-green shutters (one had begun to sag badly!) looked out with a starkness that appalled him. “It’s like another century,” she declared. This was apparently a compliment, though with her he could never be sure, irony shadowed so many of her enthusiasms. A sprinkler was throwing twists of silver around the tiny front lawn.
His mother was in the back, working in her garden. She had seemed weary and remote of late, her eyes shadowed with a darkness he found painful to contemplate. But it was the yellow-purplish bruise staining much of her right cheek that he was acutely aware of now. She had told him the whole sordid tale — his father’s refusal to take the job of assistant manager, his striking of her — with a tone of cheerless exhaustion he had never heard in her before, all the while watching him steadily, as if demanding to know what he was going to do about it. Not long afterwards, he had confronted his father in the backyard. Alf had born his (embarrassingly) tearful recriminations — Hadn’t he taught Joe never to strike a woman? — in a silence that unsettled Joe because it made him wonder, later, if he had the whole story. In any case, his mother’s revelation had gone on working inside him, like a chemical reaction producing anger and revulsion. He was set against his father, but really he was sick of both of them, of their standoff that had filled the house with a deepening tension.
To his relief, his mother roused to her old bright, English self. And in the dusk, the bruise on her face hardly showed. He was hoping they could have a few words in the garden and leave. But she insisted they have tea. Joe followed miserably into the kitchen, where Anna walked around the kitchen table, complimenting his mother on her decorating — that blue with that yellow — so cozy and bright! “It reminds me of farmhouses in France,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking of,” Joe’s mother said. “I used to holiday there when I was a girl.” They talked cheerfully of Normandy while Margaret boiled water and put out a plate of Peak Freans at the kitchen table. “We don’t keep much in the way of biscuits any more,” she apologized. “Not since Joe’s sister got diabetes.” Joe sat beside Anna, smiling thinly, conscious of the bruise on his mother’s face. It seemed to him that the good cheer that had filled the kitchen was a sham created by Anna’s politeness. He was aware — surely Anna was aware too — of the nicks on the kitchen chairs, the cracks and worn spots in the linoleum, the sad, weak light from the overhead fixture.
A noise in the hall startled Joe, who feared his father was about to appear. But it was only his sister and brother. Introducing them, Joe watched Penny sneaking glances at Anna’s birthmark. Jamie, dressed for bed in his yellow-and-brown polo pyjamas, was more straightforward: “What’s that on your face?”
“Jamie,” Joe’s mother scolded.
“Did you hit it on a cupboard?”
Joe’s mother turned away.
“No,” Anna said, laughing. She explained to Jamie about birthmarks, while he stared like someone at a zoo. “You can touch it if you like,” Anna said. As the boy tentatively put out his fingers, she slipped a smile to Joe.
A few minutes later, they were all sitting at the table when Joe’s father came in, his face weary, his hair collapsing over his ears. Joe was instantly on guard: he felt he no longer had anything in common with the man. Yet he didn’t want Anna to think ill of him, so he managed a warmer note than usual with his father as the two of them shook hands.
“You’re even more handsome than your son,” Anna told Alf.
“Well, I’ve tried to teach him as best I can,” his father said. His pale-blue eyes, suddenly decades younger than his face, blazed happily at Joe. Joe looked away.
“She’s got a birthmark!” Jamie cried.
“Yes, I can see that,” Joe’s father said, looking at it frankly. “I’d call it more of a beauty mark.”
Anna laughed, charmed. To Joe’s dismay, his father made himself comfortable at the table. Across the kitchen, his mother had retired into silence. Whatever was between his parents was in the room, he felt: a dark pool spreading beneath the merriment. “We’ve been talking about France,” Anna told him. “Ah yes, France,” Joe’s father said, running his hand over his head in a contemplative way. “I once spent a good many months in France.”
“On holiday?” Anna said.
“No, no,” Joe’s father said, blushing a little, with a glance at his wife. “The war —”
“I forgot!” she said. “
You were in the war!” A new tone had come into her voice, at once excited and reverential, almost breathless. Joe waited in suspense: this mention of the war seemed bound to drive his father into an awkward silence. Around the table, Joe’s brother and sister lowered their gazes to their half-finished glasses of milk. Like Joe, they’d been brought up not to ask about the war.
To Joe’s astonishment, his father seemed not the least bothered by Anna’s questions. Sitting back in his chair, he told a story Joe had never heard, about borrowing two bicycles with a soldier pal of his and heading off into the hills. They had stayed with a French family. He recalled their warmth, and the fine bread the woman had made in an outdoor oven. “It was the only time I actually felt like I was in France,” he told them. “The rest of the time — you were just too — wrought up. You’d see some spot — some village or a grove of trees — and you’d know it was beautiful, you’d know you wanted to spend time there, but even if you did, you weren’t really there, you know? You couldn’t really get comfortable. France was, I don’t know, sort of a dream. I kept thinking, Later, when the war’s over, I’ll come back, I’ll really have a look at the place.”
“And did you?” Anna said. Joe looked at his father, who was shaking his head. He could hardly believe his father was telling her, a stranger, details he had never told Joe; he almost resented it.
“Nope — never made it back,” Alf said, colouring. He seemed embarrassed by his failure to return.
“Oh, you have to go,” Anna cried. “It would be a pity if you didn’t go. Mrs. Walker — you both love France — you have to go back!”
Joe shifted uneasily. Anna seemed unaware of the tension in the room, she seemed unaware that not everyone could just go off to France. His father looked over at his mother, his eyes bright. “Maybe we will one day,” he said softly. Joe saw that his mother was staring at the floor, and missed his father’s glance.
“Did you drive a tank?” Jamie said. Everyone looked at him. His voice had chimed into the silence like a small bell.
“I should have been so lucky,” Alf laughed, tousling his head. “No, I’m afraid I walked the whole way.”
Outside, in the dark, Anna took Joe’s hand.
“I love your family,” she said as they went along. “I think that’s how a family should be — noisy and happy. Not gloomy like mine. We don’t live in our house, we haunt it.”
Joe said nothing. He wasn’t about to tell her what she had missed: if she had really missed it. There was no point dwelling on unhappiness. It was like admitting failure — yes, unhappiness was failure — whenever he looked into her face, her beautiful face, he knew this.
54
ONE EVENING LATER that month they climbed the steep stairway between two short, fluted pillars, pushed open a heavy door, and climbed farther, into the high-ceilinged main hall of the library, with its deep rose walls and white trim, its polished, creaking hardwood that made every step significant. Anna stood before the unused fireplace, looking up at the twin portraits of Abraham Shade and his wife, Rebecca. Both were seated, both wore sombre clothes, their strong bloodless hands gripping the arms of their chairs, their pale faces, stark as axe-blazes against the paintings’ shiny black backgrounds, looking out sternly. “A pretty gloomy couple,” Joe said, moving in beside her. His arm tingled where it brushed against hers. “But look at his eyes,” she said. “There’s real life in them.”
He did as commanded, and saw the dots of brightness in the founder’s pupils. No matter what he showed her, she pointed out some detail he had not seen. He almost resented it, this constant revision of a world he thought he knew.
“He wrote poetry, you know.”
He told her about Shade’s diaries, the sonnets and other verses Archibald Mann had found in one of the volumes. Most of them were nature poems, Mann had told him, Shade’s stolid attempts to evoke the beauties of the valley. Anna watched him closely as he spoke. Her green eyes roved over his hair, his mouth, as if she was not only listening but taking in all of him. It thrilled him like a stroking touch. Still, he couldn’t help worrying that she already knew what he was telling her, or if he was making some mistake (he was talking about poetry after all).
“Have you read them?” Anna asked.
“No. But maybe Mann’d show them to us.”
“Why don’t we visit him? How about Saturday?”
She was squeezing his arm as she urged him. There was a force in her that was always saying Yes, yes, pulling him on to the next novelty. Her glad, hectic approach electrified him, it broke some barrier of caution in him, but at the same time he was suspicious of her recklessness, which seemed to leave some vital knowledge out of account. She did not seem to remember that the rose had thorns; or perhaps it was simply that she did not fear them. He did not know which.
At the counter, the librarian cleared her throat in a discreet warning.
“I have to work Saturday,” he whispered, a bit put out that she never remembered this.
“Sunday then.”
They studied at a table behind tall shelves crammed with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels — three copies of Lorna Doone, complete sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, James. The worn covers smelled pleasantly of decay. They turned pages and made notes, her feet planted between his on the floor, held between his insteps with a snug rightness that kept distracting him. When he looked up, she was nearly always deep in concentration, pushing unconsciously at the birthmark with the rubber end of her pencil or picking at her cuticles as she stared at a page. He looked back to his book. He was studying a chapter in his Latin composition text entitled “Constructions with Verbs of Fearing, Preventing and Doubting.” Looking up, he saw she had pushed her text aside and was busy devouring Daniel Deronda, fished down from a nearby shelf.
He scowled at his book, and tried to concentrate. He looked up again, watching her for a while before he spoke. She was slouched back in her chair now, one bare arm slung over its back, her mouth a little open as she read.
“You should be studying.”
“I don’t think I would have liked George Eliot,” she announced without looking up.
He sighed and tried again.
“Study your Latin, girl! These are important exams!” Their finals, in fact: for all purposes their entrance exams to university. He tapped with exaggerated sternness on her Latin book, sheathing his command in a smile. She looked at the book, then up at him, with a sharp, penetrating candour, almost hostile. Her anger always seemed close at hand.
“Okay, don’t study your Latin,” he said with a shrug. She went back to her reading. He was acting indifferent, but her look had chilled him. Anna’s independence was something, for all his desire to honour her freedom, that could gall him. She might have at least entered into the spirit of his reprimand, which rose out of concern for her, he felt. But she had looked at him so coolly she had made him feel like a stranger, a person of no account.
For the rest of the time in the library, he brooded. He was so on edge around her. He felt as if security lay with her, and if he could only draw close enough to her, he could have it too. But the way was fraught with traps, and a terrible provisionality. He could not forget for more than an hour that she was going away in August, everything they did lay in the shadow of that fact, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. This was bad enough, but what really unnerved him was that she was apparently not the least bit upset that she was leaving.
When the library closed, he walked her up the hill. Daniel Deronda rode with the other books, pressed to her chest by her folded arms.
They reached the edge of King’s Park, stepping through its border of old trees. Up ahead, the little bandstand appeared like the point of a rocket emerging from the earth. The grass had been cut, leaving drifts of dead clippings here and there, a smell of hay.
“Fieri non potest quin te amem,” he said.
He had memorized the sentence from his Latin text, and now waited with pounding hear
t for her response. His textbook had translated the sentence as It is impossible for me not to love you. He’d got the message that she didn’t like to hear him say “I love you,” at least not as often as he’d been saying it. But he couldn’t help himself. He was fishing desperately for an answering “I love you.”
“Is that you talking,” she said after a moment, “or page 167?”
“I find I agree with it exactly,” he said.
Again she was silent, stepping along over the grass. A slight rain had fallen earlier, dampening things, intensifying smells. A scent of blossoms drifted from somewhere, sickly sweet.
“How about you?” he said nervously. “Would you say the same holds true for you?”
“I’m suspicious of the word ‘love,’ ” she said, a bit impatiently. “I mean, I always feel a bit queasy about putting it in a poem. I think that tells me something —”
“What does it tell you?” he said, reluctantly taking up her line of thought. He felt she was avoiding his challenge.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s as if it means too much, so it ends up meaning nothing.”
“Too vague?”
“Something like that. And maybe sentimental. And maybe a bit — easy, somehow. If you feel that way about someone, better to show it in your actions.”
“So better that I jump off the railway bridge —”
“No,” she said, looking up at him. “Definitely not that.”
He walked along in silence, then said, “But it is a definite feeling — everybody knows what it is. Even you know what it is, I’m sure. But if we can’t say it, then, I don’t know, the whole world’s going to be pretty frustrated.”
“I’m just talking about me, not the whole world!”
“But if you think it’s wrong for you — and for me — don’t you think it’s wrong for everybody?”
“I guess I do,” she allowed.
“You’d like to do away with the word ‘love’ altogether then?”
“A ten-year moratorium,” she said, “and then we’d see —”
