by Rafe Posey
His hand has just started to tremble from the effort of following the lines so precisely when the jackdaws who nest behind the chimney call out their chuffing alarm. Ursa looks up, her tail wagging and her ears shifting forward as a car purrs to a halt outside. Alec glances at the door, puzzled. June walks to the university most days, not quite a mile from Shakespeare Close to the mathematics department. But as the engine idles, he recognizes the pantherine throb of it—Floss Corbett’s sleek Bentley. Alec goes to the window and regards the blue-and-gold MK VI crossly, trying not to admire its lines.
“Beautiful machine, even if Corbett is insufferable,” he says to Ursa. It’s hard to say why exactly Corbett bothers him so much—their interactions have been few and far between, and he’s never been less than correct with June. Alec just has a vague sense that Corbett views him increasingly as a nuisance. And that sense pushes up against the doubts he carries on his own and makes them that much worse.
Ursa nudges at him as if she can tell he is starting to fret at himself. Alec drops his palm to the sleek crown of the dog’s head, tells himself not to be an ass, and goes to the door to greet June as the car slides back into motion.
She embraces him as she comes in, and hands him her school bag, since he’s standing closer to the rack. “Don’t get too close,” she says belatedly, “I’m head to toe chalk dust. Honestly, I’m quite sure I’m breathing it by now.”
Alec chuckles. “Only you would be more worried about that than your exams. They’re what, a fortnight from now?”
“Yes.” June smiles and lays her hand against his cheek. “Has Mrs. Nesbit left supper for us? I’m ravenous.”
“Cold meat and a jam roly-poly,” he says. He’d worried, when they started looking for someone to do for them, that they’d never be able to replace Mrs. Hubbox, who had gone to care for her elderly father in Ely, taking George with her, rather than following them to Edinburgh. But while Mrs. Nesbit has not quite replaced Mrs. Hubbox in their hearts, she has been a boon. Alec likes the days Mrs. Nesbit comes, because she is a much better cook than June, whom he suspects of exaggerating her lack of skill so they have a reason to keep Mrs. Nesbit on. Too, June’s program at the university requires so much of her attention that finding time for more domestic pursuits seems unlikely. Perhaps that will change when she finishes her degree. Or when a baby comes.
“I’ve got to change,” June says. She pauses in the foyer, glancing in at the papers he’s strewn across the dining table. “Will you be a darling and set things out for us?”
“Gladly,” Alec says, and goes to the kitchen.
* * *
• • •
After, they settle in the drawing room with the wireless, June stretched out the long way on the sofa to read with her feet in Alec’s lap.
“I’m glad you’re home,” he says.
“I am, too.” She smiles at him. “We were talking today about the Weil conjectures. Rather a lot to think about. Brilliant man.” She lowers her book to her chest. “Are you and Sanjay still thinking of going down to Nottingham for the First Test next month? You’ll be gone a week?”
“I think so,” Alec says. Australia have come to England for the Ashes series, and it’s been years since either he or Sanjay has seen any proper cricket. It’s confusing, of course, because it reminds him of dreams long past, and of Smasher, dead in Germany. But it’s cricket, and perhaps adding new memories will help soothe some of the old ones. It would be fine to watch Norman Yardley bat a century instead of having to read about it in the paper a day later. “We probably should have found a way to that two-day match in Yorkshire, instead.”
June reaches for his hand where it rests atop the back of the sofa. “This will be good, though. You and Sanjay will have fun.”
“Yes.” He kisses her palm. “Although it’s not certain he’ll manage the whole run. Parvati is expecting again, and although it’s still quite early on, Sanjay’s a bundle of nerves.”
June, as if she can hear the longing he tries to contain, sits up, tucking her feet underneath her. She nods, looking down at her hands as if she wants to say something. Whatever it is, Alec is not sure in that moment that he wants to hear it. He knows why they have not begun a family of their own yet, and she knows that he is looking forward to the day they do. It’s a tired argument at best. Only the day before they had been at it again; after years together they are still not quite on page with what their family should look like.
“In any event, they’ve got all their aunties and Parvati’s mother and lots of people,” he says, “so I expect we’ll still go.”
“I hope you can,” she says, piercing him with those eyes of hers. “It will be good for you.”
* * *
• • •
That night Alec can’t sleep. There’s just enough light from the streetlamp at the corner to lend a glow to the tobacco-dark of June’s hair on the pillow. He knows she would prefer to have even less light while she sleeps, but full dark is too much like the dank, filthy, lightless sheds the Germans would put the kriegies in for the slightest infraction. Full dark is too much. He leans closer, trying to distract himself from the grim memories by recalling newer, better things—the moonlight and the sea and the two of them on their honeymoon. It will have been two years in July, but his heart still quickens when he thinks of it. Her skin in the summer moonlight, the soft pale expanse of her dotted with blue and gold and red from a bit of stained glass in a hotel window in Wales. The swell of emotions in the brief ceremony at a registry office in London, Sanjay and Ainsley Finch-Martin standing up for the two of them, Roger sending his blessing from Kandahar.
He leaves a kiss on June’s shoulder and goes to the tiny square bedroom he uses as a workshop and study. Ursa follows, yawning, and stretches out on her cushion in the corner. There’s a sturdy table set up alongside the window, which looks out over the road and catches the soft golden light at the end of day. In jars on the table sit the tools Captain Carnaby has assigned. In Germany there were men in the infirmary, or more often in barracks, with damage that the doctors there had treated with exercises, and he had expected Carnaby to recommend something along those lines. But while work of that kind is part of his therapy, he has also found himself confronted with paintbrushes and clay, fragments of thin wood that he’s meant to be making into something else, pots of gruel-like paste that remind him of the flyers slapped up through London in the Blitz. Handling these items, turning them over in his hands, trying to make his fingers work, is hard, often painful, and in the beginning, it was nearly beyond him.
After that first afternoon consult with Captain Carnaby, he had come back to the house with his hands feeling as battered and sore as they had in years. But June had helped him then, has always helped him. A day later she had brought him a jar of paint, a sheaf of paper, and a tin of hair-tipped brushes. He had struggled to hold a brush, or to control its path through the thin layer of the vermillion paint she’d poured into a saucer. It had been well-nigh impossible, but she had wrapped her hand around his and guided him across the flimsy paper. You need to be able to write, she’d said. I’m here, and I’ll help as you like, but you need to build your hands up again. Painting will help with that.
He seats himself on the high stool at the table and reaches for a scrap of sandpaper. He makes his fingers grasp it, forcing his right hand to perform, and then he concentrates on smoothing the edges of the structure he’s been working on. Such minuscule work, so painstaking, but one notion has stuck with Alec—the idea that if he is using these paints and pastes to craft something that matters to him, he will progress faster. And so he is building a house. But it’s not just any house—not a house one might find in the Fenlands or Edinburgh.
He looks at his work. It is nowhere near done, but it has begun to take shape, the thick walls he’s formed of clay to look like the heat-defying walls of his home in Bombay, timber laced with rushes and held to
gether with dung and soil, whitewashed until on the hottest days it looked like a mirage. If he were to build rooms, or the compound, he would have to build the room in which his mother died, the stable yard in which he learned to sit a horse, and the servants’ quarters. So he is building a shell, a memory.
His hands ache against the smoothing of another layer of clay, but it’s a good ache. It reminds him a little of the way his shoulders would pull when his Blenheim wanted to carve the sky with a particular arc and he had to fight the yoke.
When he reaches a stopping point, he wipes the bulk of the clay from his hands with the rough towel he keeps ready on his desk. The house is so quiet. In winter the boiler groans like ghosts. But in May, especially a lush, rainy May such as this one has been, the radiators are silent, and the trees are whole and green. The froggy trill of a nightjar comes in through the open window.
He should try to sleep. June will want him to have slept. But here he is, awake on another of his endless night missions. The moonlight glows indistinct and prickly through the trees, and Alec looks up at the sky and counts the stars.
1950, Edinburgh
Almost Christmas, the world glowing gray and white outside the kitchen, and snow dusted over the frozen ground. The sun will be down far too soon, and the coming close of day throws lavender shadows as the trees lengthen into the afternoon. It’s the coldest winter in Scotland for more than sixty years, and June is more than happy to sit by the fire while she works her crossword. She’s layered herself in jumpers, her back to the hearth while the flames hiss and gallop. Ursa lies nearby, her paws quivering in her sleep. June regards the puzzle, confronting a clue about maths, which seems like a happy omen on a cold afternoon, especially one on which she has spent the morning honing the details of the latest draft of her dissertation. She smiles and pens the letters into the boxes.
Alec comes back from the kitchen with a heavy mug of tea cradled between his palms.
“Bloody cold,” he says, settling into the warm spot beside her on the floor. “You know what it reminds me of?”
June sets the puzzle on the hearth and turns her attention to Alec—sometimes the cold reminds him of the brittle world of the German camp and all the stories he hasn’t told her. What he has told her is ghastly.
“Once upon a time, there was a river,” Alec says, “and on that river lived a bear.” June lets out her breath, relieved and pleased, and follows him gladly into the world of the bear and his princess, the story swirling with enchanted stones and the gleam of Himalayan snow. When he trails off, she lays her fingers against Alec’s shoulder, and he leans into her touch. He has always been rawboned and lean, but now, almost five years after his return from Odessa, some of those hard planes of bone have finally layered with flesh, and the feel of him under her palm blooms a warm sense of well-being in her. She wants the rest of the story—will Alec ever not stop before he gets to the end? Long ago she had given up asking him to finish; if he wanted to, he would. But it has seemed sometimes as if he leaves them incomplete on purpose, like the girl in the thousand and one nights, or Penelope with her weaving.
June has loved the bear stories for most of her life, ever since she gave Alec a map she had drawn of Fenbourne, the path from the vicarage to the cottage on the sluice road marked out one precise black x after another. He had looked at the map, tracing the roads, his fingers lingering where she had marked the bridge over the Lark, the overgrown yew bush behind the postmistress’s cottage. The next day he had appeared at the vicarage with one of his father’s old uniform buttons, taken from the small metal box of treasures he’d brought from India.
“Second Lancers,” he had said, offering the button to her as they sat on a bench in the conservatory. “I had two, and I thought it might be best if you had one and I the other.”
June had thanked him, and she’s sure she must have said more, if nothing else to ask him about the Lancers, or about his father, but all she remembers now is the way the button had sat in the palm of her hand, a small brass nub that meant more than she could say. The button is upstairs now, huddled with other treasures in a small ivory box her father had brought back from the Boer War before June was even born—one of the few relics she has of the vicarage. But she and Alec are the same, in some ways, the small things writ large, handed back and forth like a canteen in the desert.
* * *
• • •
Later that evening, she and Alec are due at Sanjay’s home at half past six for dinner. She likes Sanjay and Parvati, although it can be hard work, pretending to be more ignorant of India and the topics they raise than she truly is, until the result is that she feels more distanced than she would have if she’d never seen India at all. Too, there are the babies. There are three of them now, a four-year-old girl and twin boys who have only just turned two. June wants to look at them and feel the rush of heat to her heart, that longing to nurture, that she knows Alec feels.
“I’m looking forward to seeing Sanjay,” Alec says, smiling.
“I should think so,” June says fondly. Alec’s job has changed somewhat as they’ve given him more responsibility—he functions now more as a liaison between design and sales than he had before, with a secretary dedicated to interpreting his cramped, dreadful handwriting. Both men have become increasingly integral to Livingstone & Gray, but the trade-off has been that they’re in different offices now and see each other much less frequently. And it’s good for Alec to see Sanjay, to have that extra bit of connection to India and his time in the RAF. To be reminded, among other things, that a man can leave the RAF and find a new career without it being a loss.
* * *
• • •
Alec always takes the same route, up through Bruntsfield, and June watches the city pass outside her window. Edinburgh is laced in ice, a winter filigree adding a festive sense to the night where it glitters on windows. Ahead of them, the castle crouches above the city like a giant stone animal, watching and protecting. June has always loved the way it glows at night, lit by countless lanterns and the moon.
The Kichlu household occupies a tidy Georgian town house a stone’s throw from the narrow, jagged lanes and alleys of the Old Town. Parvati’s family has lived there for nearly a hundred years, their ancient Punjabi heritage blended into the Scots traditions they’ve lived among for so long. Sometimes June envies them the long history they have in this place; she doesn’t feel nearly so connected to anywhere.
Parvati welcomes them into her home with a kiss on each cheek, her accent more Edinburgh than Lahore, completely at odds with the rich red and gold fabrics of her outfit. The four of them exchange pleasantries, Sanjay and Alec chatting away about sports and slapping each other’s shoulders companionably. Parvati watches them with an affectionate smile. “Look at them,” she says, “blethering like old aunties.” June laughs, but she’s right—most of what the two men ever talk about is their coworkers at the shipyards or their heroes on the cricket and football pitches.
Sanjay’s mother is waiting with the children in the drawing room, where Parvati has set out pistachios and a bowl of roasted chickpeas that remind June of Anderson. Sanjay pours drinks, and June takes her gin and tonic gratefully. Shivani, the four-year-old, clings to the tail of her grandmother’s dupatta. The twin boys, Ronit and Rakshan, are less reticent, and when they swarm Alec, June hangs back. She has no idea how to talk to a two-year-old, much less a pair of them. Alec, though, has no such issues, and it’s only a moment before he’s sitting on the floor with the boys climbing him. When he pulls sweets from his jacket’s inside pocket, the boys crow with delight. Shivani drifts closer, considering.
There’s a pair of lavishly upholstered ebony footstools not far from Alec, and June sits gently on one. She watches Alec coax Shivani closer, losing track of what the boys are doing until their wrestling bounces them off the inlaid center table between the footstools. It’s an old, sturdy table, the base of it an intri
cate carving of a banyan tree surrounded by jackals and birds, and Rakshan lets out a wail, clutching his elbow.
Parvati bundles him close to her, examining his arm with exaggerated care until she’s tickling him. He chortles happily, elbow forgotten, and his brother joins him on Parvati’s lap.
“Let’s get you all upstairs,” Parvati says, hugging them. She stands and puts her hand out for Shivani. The children say their good nights as Sanjay swoops them into hugs. Alec shakes each child’s hand, and even Shivani giggles at him. Then Parvati and her mother-in-law usher the children out and up the stairs.
“They’re so big,” Alec says to Sanjay.
“My little warriors. Their sister is the smart one, I think.” He laughs. “You need some of your own, Cosmo.”
Alec glances up at June. “We’ll get there.”
June smiles, but her face feels tight. “Something smells awfully good,” she says instead of responding directly.
“I have been kept out of the kitchen all day while she’s worked on our dinner,” Sanjay says, his face lighting up as Parvati comes back into the room.