The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  Fenbourne is a set of shapes in the distance, the spires of St. Anne’s shimmering in the August sunlight like a mirage. June has such mixed feelings about her return. Homecoming is meant to be a joy, isn’t it? But she feels something else—there is no home in Fenbourne to welcome her. Perhaps it’s the idea of coming back to a village where every memory is tinged with grief—even the wondrous moments have that curtain of loss behind them now—or the way it feels almost like going backward to return to this haunted place.

  She wants to make things right with Alec, and perhaps being back in Fenbourne will help them through it. It’s their home, after all, not just hers. Or it was, for all those years, even in the confusing shadows of India and Alec’s life and losses there. All those summers with their birthdays one after the other, Cook making a Victoria sandwich for Alec, the games of hide-and-seek in the hedgerows or the dark upstairs of the vicarage.

  “Mummy?”

  June turns in her seat and looks back at Penny. “Yes, love?”

  “How much longer until we get there?”

  “Only a bit longer,” she says.

  Penny scratches her nose. “But how do you know?”

  “Well,” June says, “I grew up in Fenbourne, so I know more or less how long it takes to get there, but also, I’ve looked at the map, so I know the best route between the two places.”

  “I want to look at the map and see, too,” Penny says, putting out her hand imperiously.

  In the driver’s seat, Alec chuckles. “Apple doesn’t fall far, does it?”

  June looks over. This is the first thing he’s said in a while, and it feels good. She smiles and opens the glove box to pull out the Bartholomew guides in their worn case. She flips through until she finds the sheet for this part of the country. They’re part of the half-inch series, and she’s always liked the way the linen backing helps them keep their shape.

  “Here,” she says. She opens the map and points to the tiny dot of the village. “That’s Fenbourne.” She moves her finger east a bit, closer to the curve of the Wash. “And this is where we are right now.”

  Penny takes the map, frowning attentively. The sight of her daughter peering at a map gives June a lurch of pride, though she knows full well Penny is far too young to actually understand it, let alone read the names of villages, market towns, and tributaries. Still, she likes the idea of the two of them looking at maps together, perhaps tracing railway timetables across the paper country.

  “Daddy,” Penny says sternly, “don’t get lost.”

  He doesn’t get lost, of course. June watches him drive, his hands confident on the wheel despite the scars and whorls of the old injuries. Sometimes she wonders if this is what he was like in the air, his palms deceptively languid on the yoke, his whole attention on the horizon, the wiry muscles of his forearms tight when he makes a turn. June wonders if he is feeling the same tensions she is about their return. She pauses, then reaches out and squeezes his shoulder.

  “Almost there,” he says. His voice is terse, but he doesn’t pull away, so June leaves her hand where it is.

  “Oh, yes, I see,” Penny says. She shakes the map authoritatively, for all the world like a cartoon banker with his newspaper.

  “Thank you for your help with navigating,” Alec says, grinning at her in the rearview mirror.

  Without warning, the haze of village in the distance resolves into Fenbourne itself, just as June remembers. Well. Nearly. There are more cars, more people, more everything. The yew behind the postmistress’s house is gone—and who knows if it’s even still her house. The chemist’s next door is now a car wash. The Morris rumbles down the high street, and Alec’s shoulder tenses beneath June’s hand. As they drive past the train station with the village’s name in dark gold paint on the swinging wooden sign, June has a flash of sitting in her father’s lap, a too-straight fringe across her forehead, reading the timetable for the express train to London. She smiles, but it falters in the swirl of conflicting feelings. Her parents would have loved Penny.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Black Dragon sits on the banks of the River Lark, an old travelers’ stop in Fenbourne, sparrows nesting beneath its old Tudor eaves. They have never stayed here, but the Rose and Crown is yet another place laden with too many memories, especially those of her return to Fenbourne after the war with her parents dead and the vicarage destroyed. She has sat in the pub here and had a drink with Alec a handful of times, watching the boats on the Lark, but those are not the kinds of memories she wants to avoid.

  Alec pulls the Morris into the car park behind the inn, and the three of them tumble out eagerly, as if they’d been driving for days. He shakes out his hands, grinning at Penny. “Here we are, then. Our old stomping grounds.”

  June stands still, taking in the burr of sound from the front of the building—cars and people, mostly, a bicycle bell, the sharp bark of what sounds like a small dog. “It’s been so long,” she says.

  Alec looks over and smiles, just a bit, and her whole body relaxes.

  “Ages.” He stretches, craning his neck to stare at the familiar sky.

  “Can I look at the river?” Penny asks.

  “Of course,” Alec says. “Your mother and I used to spend rather a lot of time by the river. I’ll be awfully glad to show it to you.” He puts out a hand, and then the two of them round the building and cross to the riverbank, June following close behind.

  The village has built a low wall along the riverbank here, and Alec lifts Penny and settles her on his shoulders.

  June gazes at the river. Their river, out of all the rivers in the world. Their Lark, and their bridge not half a mile upstream. The dark green water flows smoothly, interrupted when it eddies around the bright blues and reds of small boats tied up here and there at the river’s edge. How many times had they stood here together, dropping stones into the water to watch the ripples? Looking for fish or flood debris?

  Alec glances at her with a faint smile as if he too feels the pull of the river. “Do you remember that winter we were, what, eleven? Twelve? And you poured that cup of tea into the river to see what the hot water would sound like when it hit the cold?”

  June laughs. “Of course,” she says.

  A swan cruises past, followed by a cygnet. Alec tugs Penny’s ankle and points with his elbow at the swan. “Look, princess.”

  “Oh!” Penny says, “Is that a baby swan?”

  “It is indeed,” Alec says. The sound of a motor putters up to them from around the bend, cushioning the cries of gulls.

  “I wonder where the nest is,” June says.

  “Can we go see?”

  June looks up at Penny and smiles. “No, darling. We mustn’t bother the wild things.”

  Alec says, “Your mother is quite right.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, princess?”

  “Once upon a time there was a river,” Penny says.

  “Oh, there was, was there?” Alec’s eyes widen with delight. “And then what?”

  “A bear!” Penny chortles and pats his temples and points at the water. “Does this river have a bear?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Alec says. He tilts his head just a little, staring upstream. “Well. Perhaps it has, sometime.”

  Penny shifts on his shoulders. “Down, please.”

  “We should get checked in,” June says. “And eat something.”

  Alec lowers Penny to the ground. “Yes,” he says. He looks around as if he’s trying to take in everything about Fenbourne, both old and new, and shakes his head. “Did you see the car wash?”

  “I did,” June says. “Imagine.”

  He shakes his head again with a wry smile. “I can’t.”

  * * *

  • • •

  June doesn’t sleep well that night, and at breakfast the next
morning she is grainy and overtired. She tries to focus on watching Alec and Penny with their toast and jam. It’s been a while since rationing ended, but real bread still seems miraculous, and she knows Alec feels it, too. She catches his eye and smiles at him, and this time he smiles back. She looks away to try to hide the rush of feelings she has from his smile, from watching him eat without wariness. It took such a long time for his insides to heal, and even then it was years before he stopped tensing up if anyone left even a morsel of food behind on a plate. June knows she will never really understand what happened to him in the POW camps, particularly in Germany; the few stories he’s told her are impossible, with nothing she can recognize to anchor herself against the horror. Catastrophic.

  After breakfast they strike out on foot. June is in no hurry, and it seems easier to focus on the details of the walk—the dab-and-wattle facade of the Rose and Crown, the jumble of homes and shops that surround the Black Dragon, the new post office, all the children and dogs she’s never seen and doesn’t know. Alec is loose and relaxed as well, ambling along the cobblestones and narrating the sights in a silly voice that makes Penny giggle, lifting her to his shoulders again when she asks him to.

  At the turnoff to Melody Keswick’s old home, Fenhall, June stops and points to the mansion almost out of sight around the curve of the drive. “That’s where Ursa used to live, before she came to live with Mummy and Daddy.”

  Penny peers up the drive with interest. “When she was a baby?”

  Alec says, “She was so small she was nearly like an apple.”

  Penny laughs. “No, Daddy. She’s a dog.”

  “Quite right,” he says, “not an apple. Rather more like a coconut with legs.”

  June smiles, and he crosses his eyes at her the way he did when they were children, trying to make her laugh. It works, makes her feel lighter. She steps closer and bumps up against his arm with her shoulder. And then they continue on their way until they reach St. Anne’s. June lays her palm against the humble stones. At least the church is more or less the same, the windows replaced or rebuilt since the bombing all those years ago. It doesn’t make up for the loss of the vicarage, or the modern brick monstrosity going up in its place across the churchyard. They had had a letter last Christmas from George Cowan, who had mentioned that he’d heard they were rebuilding the vicarage, but June hadn’t really understood what that would feel like until now. Her old home is gone, erased by the war and time and progress.

  She looks at Alec helplessly, and he catches her eye. He lowers Penny to the ground and puts his arm around June’s shoulders. The weight of his arm feels like safety, and she leans into him, away from the ugly new building.

  Alec rests his cheek against her head, just for a moment. She squeezes his hand gently, relieved that they seem to be doing better. Then they walk together to the churchyard, Penny at their side. June sighs. The graves will be hard, but better than the bricks.

  The churchyard is full of drifted leaves, blasted out of the sycamores and poplars by the gales that have filled this August, and burnished in the late-morning sun. Everything is green and gray—leaves, headstones, the church. A wind comes up off the fens; it smells of black, fecund mud. Like flooding. She can almost hear the bells tolling the warning.

  Nearby, the slab of Barnack stone that marks Constance’s grave no longer sits flush. It’s been pushed up by the roots of a white willow pollard, tilted like a drunken signpost. Alec stares down at the stone, then leans closer and thumbs away a layer of winter-left rime from the words carved there. Constance Tennant Fane, it reads. Beloved Wife, Devoted Sister and Aunt, 1888–1945, In God’s Care. Her husband, Anthony, is buried next to her; when June and Alec were very young, his aunt would take them to the churchyard every Remembrance Day to lay a poppy on Anthony’s grave, and on his birthday a bouquet of harebells.

  The churchyard feels different, tangled with the new and unknown. Even the summertime shadows are different, with the old vicarage gone. She’s afraid to know what else has changed—what’s happened to the cottage on the sluice road, or if there’s anything left at all of the stars beneath the bridge over the River Lark.

  June lays her hand on her parents’ angel marker, not praying exactly, but wishing them well. Even while she knows they would counsel her to turn her heart to her family and shake off the opportunities Floss dangles for her now and again—posts in Berlin, Hong Kong, even Washington—she also knows they, especially her father, would be proud, if they knew what she were capable of. What she’d done in the war. What she could now, given half a chance.

  When she looks up again, Alec is sitting on the old stone wall with Penny, nodding solemnly.

  “They’re all gone?” Penny asks. She looks more curious than worried.

  June joins them on the wall. “Yes, love. My mother and father and Daddy’s mother and father are gone now.”

  “Oh,” Penny says. She clambers down from the wall and goes to look up at the angel.

  Alec and June exchange a look, waiting for the questions they’re still not sure how to answer. Penny stares at the angel for a few minutes, then seems to come to some conclusion and walks back to them.

  She puts her hands on Alec’s knees, looking up at both parents. “Are you sad they’re gone?”

  It takes June a moment to collect herself, but the answer is simple. “Yes. Very much.”

  Alec nods, laying his hands atop Penny’s. “I would have loved for all of them to have met you. And they would have thought you were the very best, princess.” He stands and scoops her up, holding her over his head, her arms out to the side while she laughs. “The very cat’s pajamas.”

  “Cats don’t wear pajamas,” Penny says, as he sets her back on the ground.

  “Well, not regular cats,” Alec says. He widens his eyes dramatically and whispers, “Not the ones we can see, anyway.” Penny giggles.

  June gets to her feet, grateful that he’s distracted Penny from harder questions. It’s so effortless for him, the clowning and affection. As a boy, he spent much of his life without a father, but somehow the ideas he’s cobbled together from dreams or memories or vague imaginings of his life before England have made him into someone for whom fatherhood is as natural as the curve of the earth. Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish the blurry line between envy and admiration.

  Everything used to be so simple—she was June Attwell, and he was Alec Oswin. They belonged to each other from the beginning, until the war came and changed them both. Changed the world around them too, and left less room for a love like that. It is intolerable, all of it. Floss and the university will move along without her, given the slightest opportunity, and Alec and Penny will love her as hard as they can, but they won’t give her the sense of purpose that her work has provided.

  Try as she may, June has no way to reconcile her obligations to her family with her obligations to her work. She loves Alec and Penny with all her heart. But increasingly it seems Floss was right. That he’d always been right. She is not one of those women who was glad to have the war behind her, who feels the tug of children and nurturing. She’s tried so hard to do both, to manage the widening gap between motherhood and vocation. But it’s endless, feeling always as though she’s giving short shrift to one or the other.

  Penny says, “Once upon a time there was a cat,” and points at a ginger cat sunning itself in the lane.

  Alec says, “That’s right, princess. And what was it doing?”

  “It was in the road,” Penny says. She frowns, concentrating, then beams happily. “Wearing pajamas.”

  Alec stops in his tracks, his face alight with love and joy as he looks down at her. “Oh, that’s lovely,” he says. “What color pajamas?”

  They walk away ahead of June, Penny still talking about the cat, and for just an instant June almost cannot breathe. She loves them so much, and yet. They are a pair, Alec and Penny, a unit. And more
and more she feels that she is not part of it. The tether connecting her husband and her daughter does not quite extend to her, and she feels its absence as if it were the sword of Damocles suspended overhead.

  “Wait for me,” she calls, and when they stop, the two of them hand in hand, both of them golden-haired in the sun, telling stories as if it’s a language only they can speak, June thinks her heart might break.

  1959, Halifax

  The aurora paints the night more often than not, greens and magentas curtaining down from the heavens. Alec spends most of his time on the forecastle, watching the sun sink into the great basin of the sea before the ship, the pink foam of cloud hovering overhead. He’s midway through the crossing from Leith by way of Liverpool, and the world is all ocean. Pods of porpoise cleave the ship’s wake, throwing sunlight like pennies against the hull. The RMS Highlander is Livingstone & Gray’s first ocean liner, and Alec loves every inch of her—the clean white lines and perfect crimson of the stacks, the fin of the bow slicing through the water, they all work on him like a spell. For years now he has watched her come together in the shipyard, always thinking that if he were to board her, take her out into the world, it would be like sailing again on the RMS Jaipur.

  It’s not, though. Not at all. Even when the whole sky is broken open with stars, the constellations anchored in the darkness, this crossing is not that crossing. And now, halfway through, he no longer wants it to be. It’s a relief to have it be neither the bewildering voyage from Bombay to London nor the very different return from Odessa. Both sailings had been fraught with not knowing what would come next, ships and crossings as clear as hinges linking one part of his life to the next. His life had changed so much between the first crossing and the second, and since his return from the war there have been other enormous shifts—chief among them his reunion with June and the eventual arrival of Penny.