by Rafe Posey
Wendy frowns. “But don’t you think she needs those opportunities? Those connections?”
June looks down at her own empty glass. “I had thought so, yes. But she was so ill, Wendy.” She shakes her head, unsure how to explain the fear in which she and Alec had dwelled for those weeks this past summer with Penny in the relentless grip of a hepatic fever. “I didn’t go until I was fourteen, Alec either, and while I had hoped to start Penny earlier . . . It’s hard to consider letting her that far out of my sight, if I’m honest. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to be here, and it was only after Alec swore they would be all right, and Floss promised he would get a plane to fly me back at a moment’s notice if I had to go . . .”
Wendy’s mouth twists sadly. “I’m so sorry,” she says, reaching over and laying her hand over June’s, just for a moment. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“She’s only ten years old,” June says, her voice breaking. “And I was so afraid.” She turns away, watching the other diners. Café Leo has filled with people since she arrived; every table is full now, and a cluster of men stands at the bar, heavy steins of beer and plates of sausages and mustard in front of them. It’s been a long time since she found herself somewhere that feels so full of camaraderie. All these men and women talking and laughing with one another . . . It’s comfortable here in ways June had not anticipated, and it steadies her even as it makes her miss her family more. She glances at Wendy and away again, wondering if Wendy, with no family at all, is lonely here.
Wendy catches her eye, nodding as if she can read June’s mind. “It’s good here, isn’t it? The Hubers, Greta’s family . . . I know it’s complicated, what with the war and all that, but everyone here has been very welcoming.”
“I’m awfully glad,” June says. She takes a deep breath, lets it out. She feels steady enough, as long as she doesn’t try to look over the confusing wall that keeps her from asking, or Wendy offering, more information about the work here in Vienna.
* * *
• • •
Later that evening she stands at the window of her hotel, watching the streetlights come on. A horse-drawn carriage clops along the street below her window, and the evening light falls across the pale dun flanks of the horse like muslin. What must it be like closer to Christmas, when the city lights up for the holiday and the back streets fill with markets and vendors? Already the corners near the Ringstrasse are occupied by old men turning chestnuts or potato wedges in heavy black kettles, and as they’d walked from Café Leo back to June’s hotel, Wendy had stopped to buy a tiny sack of chestnuts to carry in her pockets and warm her hands. It had been a good stroll in the growing dark, much like the walks they’d taken together in Scarborough and Colombo, except for the lean, dignified dog at their side.
It has been a grand trip. She has enjoyed the conference immensely, particularly a panel on algebraic vs. analytical semigroups, led by an elderly Polish professor and one of his protégés. She’s learned so much and spoken with other researchers and professors who share her interests, and it’s only reasonable that there will be other conferences, other boons of this academic life that somehow seem to make up for the rut she’s in at the university.
And, when the bustle of the conference has proven too much, she’s had ample opportunity to explore. The day before she had had lunch with Floss at a Heurige attached to one of Vienna’s small vineyards on the northwest fringe of the city. Below them, coated in the gossamer haze of the October afternoon, Vienna had spread down across the valley like a bicycle’s broken wheel. Squinting, June had been able to see the Danube, and there had been a hard moment when she’d wondered if she were imagining it, overlaying reality with the maps she carries in her mind.
But then he had paused in front of the tavern, and she had been able to smell the hazy bite of the fir twigs hung over the doorway to tell passersby that the Heurige would be serving wine from its vineyard. It had been a bit rustic, a reminder of an older Europe that she didn’t quite understand, and knew she never would. The twigs’ scent had dug into her chest with the sharpness of a memory, but for a life she’d never had.
It transpires that she loves Vienna, not least because she has enjoyed her conference so thoroughly, and because Floss, the day before, had taken such pains to show her the old city at its best. In the time she’s been here, Floss has worked his magic as if he were Prospero and she Miranda; the Vienna he’s giving her for this short visit is glossier, more enveloping, than the Vienna she would have had if she had chosen it. But that door is closed, and has been for some time. This Vienna is mostly a gift, but increasingly it feels like an admonishment as well, a pointed reminder of a life she would have loved.
* * *
• • •
That blurry, upsetting sense of dreams unfulfilled sticks with June the next morning. With the conference at an end, her last day in Vienna holds lunch with Floss and then, in the early evening, her flight back to Edinburgh. With the rest of the day empty, she elects for a walk; her whole visit the spire of Stephansdom has called to her, and now she is finally able to take the time to explore. Standing in Stephansplatz and gazing up at the old cathedral makes her stomach hurt, and she’s not sure why—the great Gothic towers are more ornate, and more tragic, it seems to her, than those of other churches she’s known. But it’s also true that she can hardly see a cathedral without thinking of the vicarage and her parents. This church was nearly unscathed by the war, even when the Allies bombed Vienna so doggedly that nearly a quarter of the city was destroyed. But its bells share a tone with the bells of her childhood, and perhaps that is enough.
June is on her way back to her hotel when she’s brought up short by a stunning gold-and-white memorial in the middle of the Graben, where pedestrians mill about through shops in the great cathedral’s shadow. She steps closer, mesmerized by the baroque immensity. On further examination it turns out to be a memorial column set in place hundreds of years earlier, both to commemorate the victims of the last great wave of plague to scour Vienna and, if she’s reading it right, to celebrate the final expulsion of the Turks at around the same time. It’s a remarkable work, dozens of feet of marble coursing upward and telling a story through its statues. She peers closer, noting the emblems of emperors and nation-states. It’s glorious but grisly as well, especially the tragic fallen figure of a plague victim, suffering writ across his stone face and empty rib cage.
June shudders. The stone man reminds her of the men she met at Anderson when the war ended and the Japanese camps were liberated—gaunt, damaged, hollow. God. Alec would have hated it here; it would have hurt him every day. She looks around, trying to get her bearings though she feels vaguely ill. A cluster of schoolchildren in thin gray blazers brushes past her, a woman June assumes is their teacher pointing out the different historical figures on the column. The children are Penny’s age—if June had brought the family to Vienna, perhaps the teachers at the English School would have brought their students down to the Graben to parse the city’s memory as well. Perhaps Penny would be one of these children. June looks away, hard-pressed to contain the quickening of loss.
Vienna’s memory is so long, and yet she herself will be only the tiniest blip on it, less than the fallen feather of a swan in the Danube. The realization hurts. It’s all too much, suddenly—the plague column, the children, even the sharp midday shadow of the cathedral . . . There are too many reminders, too many emotions, and she makes her escape into a toy store not far from the column. Josef Kober, Spielwaren, the sign reads. June steps inside, takes the clattering lift upstairs. It’s quieter there, and looking at the toys and stuffed animals gives June something to focus on beyond the ravages of her own confusion.
She drifts back through the store, trailing her fingers across the shapes and textures of the toys she encounters. The shop seems to have everything, but even through her delight at the idea of finding something for Penny, June is a
lso wary of bringing back anything that will trigger another round of questions and worries from Alec. Better to keep it simple. She eyes books and a series of models, looking for exactly the right thing. Penny is almost eleven, in that odd in-between place where she is no longer a little girl, but not remotely an adolescent, either. Too, her illness last summer had resulted in more than enough stuffed animals from classmates and friends. June pauses to thumb through a set of adventure books of the kind Penny loves best, but they’re in German, and June suspects they might provide a somewhat different angle on the recent war as well. That would never do.
At last her eye is caught by a stand of soft animal puppets with the tiny brass Steiff tag in their ears. She hovers there for a moment—they’re stuffed animals, certainly, but Penny loves to tell stories, and perhaps these hand puppets would help her in that endeavor. June looks through all of them, eventually settling on a silvery wolf and a tiger with pale yellow and black stripes. She can almost hear Penny coming up with a narrative that will suit these characters, or some elaborate task for Lucky to perform with them and, satisfied, she purchases the puppets and turns her steps back to the hotel.
The man at the front desk flags her when she walks in. “Frau Doktor,” he says, “I have here a message for you.” June thanks him and takes the thin envelope he’s offering, pale cream stock with the golden sigil of the embassy, and her name on the front in Floss’s unmistakable scrawl. Her heart sinks as she slips it into her pocket to read once she gets upstairs to her room.
June, the note reads, I’m afraid I must cancel our lunch. Postpone, rather, as we can make it up when next I’m in Edinburgh. But there are great doings just now, and I’m needed here. I know you understand. More to follow. F.
She looks up and out the window at the stately opera house across the street, a bitter taste in the back of her mouth. Certainly she can lunch by herself, but . . . There’s a difference between knowing Floss has carried on without her and actually hearing it firsthand—she could not feel more aware of her own obsolescence now than if Floss had done this deliberately.
June washes her face and hands, eyeing herself sadly in the mirror before going back downstairs. If she regards the rest of the day as a list, maybe it will mitigate this gnawing feeling in her chest. Very well, she thinks. Soup, a glass of wine, perhaps a slice of Sacher torte. Then she will collect her belongings and take a taxi to the airport and the plane that will take her back to Scotland, her family, and her research, as if those glorious days at that ghastly old mansion and its outposts had never even happened.
All those years of urgency, and the endless ripples of consequence. Lives saved, to be sure, but her marriage imperiled, her health chipped away at like a flock of sheep beset by wolves. And yet. Wouldn’t she do it again, if she could, even knowing the cost? The codebreaking, that work . . . It had been home. Of course the house on Shakespeare Close is home as well, as is Alec, their family. But it’s not the same. Perhaps she is ungrateful. But sometimes she thinks back on the life her mother had planned for her, the life June had tried so hard to avoid, only to realize that she’s ended up more or less where Imogene Attwell had wanted her. And that is a bitter pill indeed.
1964, Kenya
Swifts wheel across the limpid green surface of the river. Alec lies back on the thick tartan camp blanket, watching the little black birds in the dusking African sky. They remind him a bit of the war, darting through space like tiny miracles the same way that he and the other pilots had had to conquer the air to fight the Germans. He can almost imagine the sound of engines overhead, until the illusion is scattered into prisms by the splash of a kingfisher’s dive.
“We should be heading back,” Roger says, coming up behind him with a cough that reminds Alec that his uncle, no matter how hale he makes himself out to be, is dying. “Ezekiel and his boys say there’s been a leopard on the prowl lately, and we don’t want to get caught in the dark.”
Penny, not far from the water’s edge, looks up, her eyes bright, and comes to join them. “Daddy, I should love to see a leopard!”
“Just like your grandmother,” Roger says. “Can’t tell you how many times Connie had to talk Pen out of larking off after a tiger or some such.”
Alec laughs, then turns and grins at his daughter. He’s glad they’ve come to Kenya, although he wishes they had come sooner, when Roger was healthier. “If I let a leopard get you, your mother will skin me alive, darling.” June is back at Brightmere, having decided some days ago that riding horses out into the bush was not for her. She was reading on the verandah when they left, one of the farm’s mostly tame zebras grazing the lawn nearby.
“You’re just the right size for stashing in a tree,” Roger says in a lurid tone, and Penny giggles. He has spent Penny’s whole life indulging her taste for ghost stories and adventure, and since they’ve been in Kenya the old man has added animal tales and accounts of his childhood in India to his repertoire.
“Not if it gets you first,” Penny says to Roger.
“Eh,” Roger says with a shrug, “don’t think any self-respecting leopard would go for a tired-out piece of leather like me.”
Alec gets to his feet, gathering up the blanket, and goes to the acacia where they’ve tied up the horses. He loves the way Roger and Penny have bonded; they’ve always been as close as distance would allow, but this trip has created a new layer of connection. It will be hard for her to lose her beloved great-uncle, and when Alec thinks too closely about that future, how sad Penny will be, his insides knot with grief. They have told her Roger is ill—she’s a bright girl, and eleven is old enough for the truth—but she has never seemed to dwell on it. Indeed, with Roger’s influence, Penny has expanded, somehow, becoming more than ever the kind of child who would have thrived in the India of Alec’s childhood. Watching her stride the foothills of Mount Kenya in boots and an Australian bush hat has been a wonder.
When Penny joins him, he gives her a boost and she settles into the saddle and pats Mfupi’s neck. The stocky bay Abyssinian pony whickers softly at her, his ears alert, and Alec’s heart warms. It had been an effort to convince Penny to leave Lucky with Mrs. Nesbit in Edinburgh; even June’s point that Lucky would be miserable in the confines of an ocean liner for a fortnight had barely had any traction with Penny. Alec had understood her reluctance—being without Ursa while he had been in Halifax had been dreadful sometimes. Too, in the autumn after Penny’s illness, she and Lucky had been more inseparable than ever, the young dog waiting with his crooked ears at the gate for her to come home from school every day. But two weeks at sea had helped Penny adjust to this temporary life without her dog, and as they’d steamed ever closer to the equator his daughter had come more and more out of the quiet shell of healing that she’d been in for so long.
Alec pulls himself awkwardly into his own saddle and ties up the blanket behind him. Until this trip, it had been decades since he’d been on horseback, and his hands have been slow to adjust. The rest of him, however, has not. While their first canter out around Roger’s farm had left Alec sore and somewhat chafed, it had been immensely gratifying to find the old muscle memory still alive and well. The pressure on his inner thighs from the animal’s breathing, the comfortable bend of his knees when he’d slipped his boots into the stirrups, the sway of movement . . . That first day Penny had shared his horse; by the next morning she’d been clamoring at Roger to let her ride one of his sleek, fast polo ponies. He’d laughed and steered her away from the spirited South African geldings. Next year, he’d said, with a sideways glance at Alec. They both knew next year was a pipe dream at best, given the circumstances that had brought them to Kenya, what Roger had called his last hurrah. But, as difficult as it has been coming to terms with seeing Roger for the last time, it has been grand to watch Penny turn out to be as comfortable on horseback as Alec had once been on the cricket pitch.
Roger secures his shotgun in its holster beside his saddle, and t
he three of them set off down the hill toward the gleam of the house’s thatched roof.
“We should race,” Penny says, urging Mfupi to a trot so she can catch up with Roger.
Roger glances down at her with a warm smile. “Your uncle’s a bit tired for that,” he says cheerfully. He pats his horse’s dappled gray roan neck. “And this terrain isn’t ideal for Ajax the way it is for Mfupi, in any event.”
“All right,” Penny says, and she drops back into second place again, just ahead of Alec.
* * *
• • •
Brightmere sits nearly seven thousand feet above sea level, a sprawling home built of cedar and stone. The verandah looks out toward the distant western horizon, and to the east Mount Kenya looms against the amethyst morning skies. It had taken hours to get to Roger’s farm from Nairobi, where they had spent their first night after coming ashore in Mombasa, and Alec had been startled and pleased by the thrum of recognition he’d felt in the highlands. It wasn’t India, but the house, surrounded by white Mardan roses, brilliant sweeps of bougainvillea, and a bristle of blue and pink delphiniums, had reminded him of the kind of place his parents had loved in the hill stations of his childhood. It is unmistakably not England, though even with the country grasping its independence this year, Kenya still feels like part of the Empire.
But wasn’t that why Roger had retired here after independence and Partition had erased their idea of India forever? As he’d put it, it had been time for him to retire in any case, and if the Indians didn’t want him taking up space in Ooty or Kerala, he’d be just as happy to take up space in Kenya. After all, he’d said, you didn’t see the Africans throwing a fellow out, independence be damned.