‘What do they say about walk hours?’ she asked.
‘Separate walk hours for the separate sexes. Never coincide.’
‘But why? That’s silly.’
‘They figure the affairs up here are quick enough without that.’
‘Oh, really?’ she laughed.
‘But I can’t see that sort of thing. No point to it.’
‘Oh?’ Her tone needled him.
‘No,’ he said seriously. ‘There’s no future in that sort of thing up here. Gets too complicated. Just take what happened to Lenny for instance.’
‘You mean Lenny the punchy fighter you wrote me about?’
‘That’s the one. Fell for a Greek girl up here. Well, he married her over the holidays. Back here now with her, she being twenty-seven, he twenty.’
‘Good lord, why did he marry her?’
‘Nobody knows. Says he loves her, that’s all. His parents are as upset as hell.’
‘Affairs are one thing,’ she said. ‘But signing your life away because you’re lonely, because you’re afraid of being lonely, that’s something else again.’
He gave her a quick look. ‘That sounds funny coming from you.’
‘Maybe,’ she said defensively. ‘But that’s the way I figure it. That’s the way I figure it now anyway.’
He was looking at her so curiously that she broke the tension with a little laugh, and, lifting her gloved hand, she patted his cheek. Aloof staccato pats, but he did not know the difference, and she saw that her spontaneous gesture had made him happy. His arm tightened about her shoulder in response.
From somewhere in front of the bus there was a cold draft of air coming. It blew back, freezing and cutting. Three seats ahead a man had opened a window.
‘God, it’s cold,’ Isobel exclaimed aloud, pulling her green and black plaid scarf closer about her throat. The old man at the other end of the back seat heard her and smiled, saying, ‘Yes, it’s the open window. I wish they would shut it. I wish someone would ask them to shut it.’
‘Shut it for him,’ she whispered to Austin. ‘Shut it for the old man.’
Austin looked down at her keenly: ‘Do you want it shut?’ he asked.
‘I don’t care really. I like fresh air. But the old man, he wants it shut.’
‘I will shut it for you, but I won’t shut it for him. Do you want it shut?’
‘Shh, not so loud,’ she said, fearing that the old man would hear. It was not like Austin to be so angry. He was angry; his jaw was tight, and his mouth shut firm. He got angry like cold steel.
‘All right, I want it shut then,’ she said sighing.
He got up and went front three seats and asked the man to please shut the window. Coming back to her he smiled: ‘I did that for you. No one else.’
‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘Why are you so mean about the old man? What are you trying to prove?’
‘Did you see him? Did you see the way he looked at me? He was perfectly able to get up and shut it himself. And he wanted me to do it.’
‘I wanted you to do it too.’
‘That’s different. That’s altogether different.’
She kept quiet then, feeling sorry for the old man and hoping he hadn’t heard. The rhythmic jolting of the bus and the warmth was making her drowsy. Her eyelids drooped, lifted, and drooped again. The sleep waves started to come up under her, and she wanted to flatten out and go away on them.
Leaning her head back on Austin’s shoulder, she let herself be lulled by the rocking of the bus in the circle of his arms. Intervals of warm blind languor, and then ‘We’re coming to the stop,’ he was saying gently in her ear. ‘Mrs Lynn will be ready for you, and I have an evening pass until nine.’
Slowly Isobel opened her eyes and let the lights and the people and the old man come back. She straightened up, yawning hugely. The back of her neck was stiff from leaning her head against the arm Austin still kept around her shoulders.
‘But I don’t see anything,’ she said, rubbing a dark clear spot on the steamed window glass and peering out. ‘I don’t see anything at all.’
Outside the window the darkness was broken only by the flash of headlights on tall banks of snow that went careening backwards into the blackness of the trees, into the overhanging blackness of the mountains.
‘In just a minute,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see. We’re almost there. I’ll go and tell the bus driver when it’s time to stop.’
He stood up then, and began edging his way down the narrow aisle. The passengers turned their heads to look as he went by. Everywhere he went people always turned to look.
She glanced again through the window. Out of the confused dark sprouted sudden rectangles of light. Windows of a house low-eaved in a pine grove.
Austin was beckoning her to come to the door. He had taken her suitcase from the rack already. She rose and went to him, rocking unsteadily down the aisle with the motion of the bus and laughing.
Abruptly the bus swung to a stop, and the door folded back into itself with an accordian wheeze.
Austin leaped down the high step into the snow and reached up his arms to help her. After the warm damp air inside the bus the coldness struck at her dry and sharp as the blade of a knife.
‘Oh, all the snow! I’ve never anywhere seen so much snow!’ she exclaimed, stepping down beside him.
The bus driver heard her and laughed, closing the door from inside and starting to drive away. She watched the lighted window squares move by, misted with steam, and the face of the old man looked out at them from the back. Impulsively, she lifted her arm and waved to him. His return wave was like a salute.
‘Why did you do that?’ Austin asked, curious.
‘I don’t know,’ she laughed up at him. ‘I just felt like it. I just felt like it, that’s all.’ Numb from sitting still so long, she stretched, and stamped her feet in the soft powder of snow. He stared carefully at her a moment before he spoke.
‘It’s just over there,’ he said, pointing to the blazing windows of the low-eaved house. ‘Mrs Lynn’s is just over there, up the driveway. And the san is only a little farther along the road, around the bend.’
Picking up her suitcase, he took her arm, and they started walking between the tall banks of snow, up the drive to the house, the stars blinking cold and distant overhead. As they tramped up the front walk, the door of the house opened and a shaft of light sliced out across the snow.
‘Hello there.’ With languid blue eyes and blond hair crisping about her smooth-skinned face, Emmy Lynn met them at the doorway. She wore black tapered slacks and a pale blue plaid lumbershirt.
‘I’ve been waiting for you all,’ she drawled, and her voice had the slow clear quality of honey. ‘Here, let me take your things.’
‘God, she’s lovely,’ Isobel whispered to Austin, while Emmy Lynn was hanging their coats in the hall closet.
‘That’s a doctor’s wife for you,’ Austin said. And it was only when she saw him looking down at her intently that she realized he was not joking.
Emmy Lynn came back to them, smiling drowsily. ‘You two go in the living room and take it easy awhile. I’m going upstairs and read in bed a little. If there’s anything you want, just call.’
‘My room …’ Isobel began.
‘At the head of the stairs. I’ll take your suitcase up. Just lock the front door after Austin goes, will you?’ Emmy Lynn turned and padded cat-like over the rug in her mocassins to the foot of the stairs.
‘Oh, I almost forgot …’ she turned back with a grin. ‘Coffee’s hot on the stove in the kitchen.’ And she was gone.
Blue-patterned wallpaper in the hall widened into a long living room with a log fire dying in the grate. Crossing to the couch, Isobel sank into the soft depths of the cushions and Austin came to sit beside her.
‘Will you have coffee?’ Austin asked her. ‘She said there is some in the kitchen.’
‘Yes,’ Isobel said. ‘Yes, I think I need something hot to drink.’
He came back bringing two steaming cups and set them on the coffee table.
‘You too?’ she said surprised. ‘You never used to like coffee.’
‘I have learned to drink it,’ he told her smiling. ‘Black, the way you do, without cream or sugar.’
She bent her head quickly so that he could not see into her eyes. It shocked her to see him acquiesce this way. He who had been so proud. Lifting her coffee cup she drank slowly the scalding black liquid, saying nothing.
I am reading a book, he had written in one of his latest letters, where the man is a soldier and the girl he has made pregnant dies, and oh, I began thinking that you were the girl, and I was the man, and I could not stop thinking about how terrible it was for days.
She had wondered a long time about that, about him alone in his room reading day after day worrying about the imaginary man and the dying girl. It was not like him. Before, always, he used to say how silly she was to feel sorry for people in books because they were not real. It was not like him to worry about the girl dying in the book.
Together they finished the coffee, tilting the cups and draining the last warm drops of liquid. In the fireplace one thin blue flame flared, small and clear, and went out. Under the white ash of the gutted log, coals still showed red, fading.
Austin reached for her hand. She let him interlace his fingers with hers, and she knew that her hand was cool and unresponsive.
‘I have been thinking,’ Austin said to her then, slowly, ‘all this long time I have been away I have been thinking about us. We have been through a lot together, you know.’
‘Yes,’ she said guardedly. ‘Yes, I know.’
‘Remember,’ he began, ‘that Friday night we stayed in town so late we missed the last bus out, and the crazy boys we thumbed a ride back home with?’
‘Yes,’ she said, remembering how it was all so lovely and hurting then. How everything he said had hurt her.
‘That crazy guy,’ he persisted, ‘in the back seat. Remember him? The one who kept tearing up the dollar bill in little pieces and letting them fly out the open window?’
‘I’ll never forget that,’ she said.
‘That was the night we saw the baby born,’ he said. ‘Your first time at the hospital, and you had your hair all wound up under a white cap, and a white coat on, and your eyes were all dark and excited over the mask.’
‘I was afraid someone would find out I wasn’t a medical student.’
‘You dug your nails into my hand while they tried to get the kid to breathe,’ he went on. ‘You didn’t say anything, but your nails left little red crescents in the palm of my hand.’
‘That was half a year ago. I’d know better now.’
‘I don’t mean that. I liked it, the red marks. It was a good hurt, and I liked it.’
‘You didn’t say so then.’
‘I didn’t say a lot of things then. But I have been thinking up here of all the things I never told you. All the time up here when I am lying in bed, I remember the way it was with us.’
‘It is because you have been away so long that you remember all the time,’ she said. ‘When you get back to med school and the old fast life again you won’t think like this. It is not good for you to think so hard.’
‘That is where you are wrong. I did not want to admit it for a long time, but I think I needed this. Getting away and thinking. I am beginning to learn who I am.’
She looked down into her empty coffee cup, stirring aimless dry circles with her spoon.
‘Tell me then,’ she said softly, ‘who are you?’
‘You already know,’ he said. ‘You already know better than anyone.’
‘You sound sure of that. I am not so sure.’
‘Oh, but you do know. You have seen the rotten streak in me and you have come back, no matter how bad it was. You have always come back.’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘Can’t you see?’ he said simply. ‘I mean you have taken me always the way I am, no matter what. Like that time I told you about Doris, and you cried and turned away. I thought for sure that was the end then, with you sitting crying on the other side of the car, looking out at the river and not talking.’
‘I remember that,’ she said. ‘It was going to be the end.’
‘But then you let me kiss you. After all that you let me kiss you, still crying, and your mouth tasted wet and salt from the tears. You let me kiss you and it was all right again.’
‘That was a long time ago. It is different now.’
‘I know it is different now because I never want to make you cry again. Do you believe that? Do you know what I’m trying to say?’
‘I think so but I am not sure. You have never before talked to me like this, you know. You always let me guess at what you meant.’
‘That is all over now,’ he said. ‘And my getting out of here won’t make it any different. I will get out of here, and we will begin again. A year is not a very long time. I do not think it will take me more than a year, and then I will come back.’
‘I have to know something,’ she said, ‘I have to ask it of you in words to make sure.’
‘Do you need words now?’ he said.
‘I have to know. Tell me, why did you want me to come?’
He looked at her and his eyes reflected her fear. ‘I needed you very badly,’ he confessed, quite low. He hesitated, then said quietly, ‘It is unfortunate that I can’t kiss you.’
He put his face into the hollow between her neck and shoulder, blinding himself with her hair, and she could feel the sudden wet scalding of his tears.
Stricken, she did not move. The patterned blue wall of the rectangular room fell away, and the warm geometric light fell away, and outside the snow-covered mountains bulked hugely through the irrevocable dark. There was no wind at all and it was hushed and still.
All the Dead Dears
‘I don’t care what Herbert says,’ declared Mrs Nellie Meehan, dumping two spoonfuls of sugar in her tea, ‘I saw an angel once. It was my sister Minnie, the night Lucas died.’
The four of them were sitting late around the red coal fire that November evening in the Meehans’ new-bought house: Nellie Meehan and her husband Clifford, Nellie’s Cousin Herbert, lodger with the Meehans since his red-headed wife left him at haymaking time some twenty-seven years before, and Dora Sutcliffe who had dropped over for a pot of tea on the way back home up Caxton Slack after visiting her friend Ellen, just out of hospital, recovering from a cataract operation.
The dying fire still glowed warm, the battered aluminum tea kettle steamed on the hearth, and Nellie Meehan had gotten out her hand-embroidered linen tablecloth, all wreathed with violets and crimson poppies, in honour of Dora’s coming. A snowdrift of currant cakes and buttered scones banked the blue-willow platter and a little cut-glass bowl held generous dollops of Nellie Meehan’s homemade gooseberry jam. Outside, in the clear, windy night, the moon shone high and full; a blue, luminous mist was rising from the bottom of the valley where the mountain stream flowed black and deep over those foaming falls in which Dora’s brother-in-law had chosen to drown himself a week ago come Monday. The Meehan’s house (bought early that autumn from spinster Katherine Edwards after her mother Maisie died at the doughty age of eighty-six) clung halfway up the steep hill of red-berried ash and bracken which flattened out at the top, stretching away into wild and barren moorland, twigged with heather and prowled by the black-faced moor sheep, with their curling horns and mad, staring yellow eyes.
Already, during the long evening, they had discussed the days of the Great War, and the various ends of those who thrived and those who died, Clifford Meehan creaking to his feet at the appropriate point in the course of conversation, as was his habit, and taking out of the bottom drawer in the polished mahogany china cabinet the cardboard box of souvenirs—medals, ribbons, and the shattered paybook providentially in his breast pocket when the bullet struck (bits of shrapnel still lodged in its faded pages)—to s
how Dora Sutcliffe the blurred ochre daguerreotype snapped in hospital the Christmas before Armistice, with the faces of five young men smiling out, lit by the wan winter sun that rose and set some forty years back. ‘That’s me,’ Clifford had said, and, as if naming the fates of characters in some well-known play, jutted his thumb at the other faces, one by one: ‘He’s got his leg off. He was killed. He’s dead, and he’s dead.’
And so they gossiped gently on, calling up the names of the quick and the dead, reliving each past event as if it had no beginning and no end, but existed, vivid and irrevocable, from the beginning of time, and would continue to exist long after their own voices were stilled.
‘What,’ Dora Sutcliffe asked Nellie Meehan now in hushed, church-going tones, ‘was Minnie wearing?’
Nellie Meehan’s eyes grew dreamy. ‘A white Empire smock,’ she said. ‘All gathered about the waist, it was, with hundreds and hundreds of little pleats. I remember just as clear. And wings, great feathery white wings coming down over the bare tips of her toes. Clifford and I didn’t get word about Lucas till the next morning, but that was the night I had the pain and heard the knocking. The night Minnie came. Wasn’t it, Clifford?’
Clifford Meehan puffed meditatively on his pipe, his hair silvery in the firelight, his trousers and sweater bayberry gray; except for his vivid, purple-veined nose, he seemed on the verge of becoming translucent, as if the chimney mantel, hung with its gleaming horse brasses, might at any moment begin to show faintly through his thin, grayed frame. ‘Aye,’ he said finally. ‘That was the night.’ His wife’s undeniable flashes of second sight had always awed and somewhat chastened him.
Cousin Herbert sat dour and skeptical, his huge, awkward hands, cracked with wrinkles, hanging loose at his sides. Herbert’s mind had long ago riveted itself on that distant sunny day, the first fair weather after a week’s downpour, when his wife Rhoda’s folks, up visiting to help with the haymaking, jaunted off to Manchester with Rhoda, leaving Herbert alone with the hay. On returning at dusk, they’d found their luggage packed, hurled into the far corner of the cow field; Rhoda had left him then, indignant, with her parents. Stubborn and proud, Herbert had never asked her back; and, stubborn and proud as he, she had never come.