by H. S. Cross
—Up you get. Do you the world of good. Enough living on tea and tinned herring.
He was seizing him by the collar:
—Back in a few days. Plenty of time then for your book.
At the stairs, John extracted himself from Jamie’s grip. The air was thick. There was a glare. He tried to think of another way to refuse.
—What’s the word from your goddaughter? Jamie asked.
John had to admit there had been none. A look of pain came across Jamie’s face, and he touched John’s hand, which John realized was still holding the cigarette.
—Nothing’s going to happen to her in a few short days, Jamie said. Perhaps when we get back there will even be news.
Jamie took a drag on John’s cigarette and coughed.
—You don’t mess about. These’ll kill you.
John replied by lighting another.
—Father asked after you again, Jamie continued.
—He what?
—Gave me a dressing down for having left you here alone. Oh, do come walking. Just the two of us.
They were alone in the cloisters, the school vacant, Jamie’s wife absent. With each breath John felt the wall of words between them, unspoken yet known.
The next morning, they took the train to Scarborough and set off by foot up the coast, turning inland at Robin Hood’s Bay to follow the northern edge of the moors. They found accommodation in cottages, usually sharing a bed. Jamie slept in what Mrs. Firth would have called his all-together, which made John feel prudish in his pajamas. Added to that, Jamie slept in a contorted position and thrashed in his sleep, once waking John by poking him in the chest like some sleepwalking grim reaper. When John told him about it the next day, Jamie refused to believe it had happened.
The few days’ jaunt turned to several. There was leisure in conversation they hadn’t felt in years, the freedom to talk or be silent, time to discuss the school, politics, the careers of former pupils, including their protégé Morgan Wilberforce. John’s account of his research and his book prompted Jamie to rehash his own doctorate, and great stretches of Eskdale were taken up with casuistry. Jamie did not dwell on his stay at the Rectory, a delicacy John appreciated. It seemed Marion was stopping with her people, and on his way back to the Academy, Jamie had paid a visit to Arents, the geezer he’d met at Ali’s funeral and charmed into buying the Academy a new organ. Arents had shown Jamie sketches for the instrument, but after raising Jamie’s spirits, he had subsequently dashed them by revealing just how long the installation would take and how much disruption the chapel would have to endure. John hoped the scheme would die a quiet death and save the old organ the indignity of being stripped out, its case left empty for months as if a troop of Roundheads had sacked it.
Each day, John made a point of finding a post office and placing a call to the Academy. His matron, now returned, reported no letters from abroad, and her tone made it clear she disapproved of profligate telephone calls. On the sixth evening, though, she announced a postcard, photograph of a cathedral, edge chewed, May the fourteenth: Thinking of you, love Cordelia.
—That’s it? he asked.
She cursed foreigners and their foreign post.
As John emerged into the road, he found Jamie leaning against the wall and penciling a postcard himself.
—News? Jamie asked.
—Yes. That is, no …
John described the damaged postcard, sent months before. They traversed a stile and at the top of the field stopped to catch their breath.
—It’s no good, Jamie said, looking for people who don’t want to be found.
Heat rushed through him.
—I’d have thought that was more your friend Merewether’s line, Jamie continued. Wouldn’t you?
With this, Jamie set off across the ridge. John followed, crushing a fistful of rebuttals. It was easy for Jamie to say, who had a wife that clung to him like a limpet and behaved like a bull terrier to anyone who came near; whose mother died before he was old enough to remember; whose place in the world had been carved in oak since birth; who waltzed from post to post, including Headmaster before he’d managed so much as a dorm round; who’d never been compelled to pursue an infernally elusive cure.
—You probably don’t want to hear this, Jamie said.
The air blew warm across the tops as they picked their way through the spongy ground.
—She’s right as rain, Jamie said. Otherwise, you’d have heard from her.
The peat looked firm, but John’s boot sank.
—You’re the first person she turns to when things go wrong, Jamie continued. And when the sun is shining, she forgets you exist.
Cold peat was running into his socks.
—It’s much more complicated than that.
—It isn’t, Jamie said. Honestly, it isn’t.
He took off down the track, and John let him go. The ground was treacherous, his temper in his throat. He needed to pay attention before he broke a leg or Jamie’s nose. Later, at the bottom, he found Jamie puzzling over the route and dribbling tea down his shirt. John snatched the map before he spilled the whole flask across it. It was the wrong way round, per usual. John refolded it and headed for the woods.
—I’m only saying it as a friend, Jamie called.
John pretended not to hear, but Jamie caught up as he was crossing the stream.
—How much of your life are you going to waste loving someone you can’t…?
The river roared. On the far bank, John tripped and Jamie caught him.
—How dare you? John snarled.
Jamie smiled.
—He’s left her, John said, for good this time.
Jamie searched his face with more pity than he could stand.
—Is it so wrong to love a friend? he blurted.
Jamie’s chin froze for an instant, but then he clapped John on the back:
—Don’t listen to me. I’m an upstart who thinks the world is his to play with on a string, at least that’s what Burton’s always telling me. Come on. Last one to the pub pays.
John won the footrace, such as it was in rucksacks, and when he tried to order his usual lemonade, Jamie shot him the kind of look you’d give a child trying out rude language in public. The drink at the pub was porter, it seemed, and no one was having anything else. John let Jamie bring him a pint and took a sip for form’s sake—thick, smooth, bitter, you could chew it. Jamie’s face broke into gratitude:
—I can’t drink alone, not tonight.
They were brought sandwiches on country bread and more porter, but a hot meal never appeared. The stairs, when they climbed them, were uneven. John returned from the bathroom to find Jamie’s clothes strewn across the floor and Jamie snoring on the bed. He managed to shift Jamie and pull the coverlet over him, but when he lay down himself, the mattress sagged and they rolled to the middle, peas in a napkin. Heat came off Jamie, sweat, beer, moors. The bed spun like a fairground ride, and when he moved the pillow, Jamie’s arm fell against his cheek. Smooth, cool, tasting like the smell but even more, like something you could never have enough of even if you started having it years before, his teeth like a snare, and if he bit…?
Snore, snort—his tongue froze where it was, and Jamie moved again, breathing on his shoulder and then resting there. But Jamie’s hand cast about beneath the covers, grazing, reaching, fishing into his pajamas, fingers cold, drawing him out as if they knew where to find him. Softer than handling himself, acutely different from his sorry old hand—he gripped the sheet and his toes gripped the air, and it rushed in his ears and rinsed his skin, taking him, making him, killing him, saving him.
* * *
Morning cold and damp, head the size of Lichtenstein. Jamie relished the eggs and kipper, but John had to excuse himself and vomit. When he returned, the landlady had removed his breakfast and left a brackish potion in its place.
—Cure for what ails you, Jamie explained. She says drink it all.
He choked it down for penance sak
e.
—Strange night, Jamie said.
His stomach seized.
—Strange dreams. Can’t remember a thing, as usual.
The rain streaked the windows. They delayed their departure, reading the newspaper and asking for an extra pot of tea, but the storm did not abate. John was just beginning to feel less vile when Jamie rapped the table:
—Come on, Grievous, enough procrastination.
They secured their rucksacks, mackintoshes, caps.
—It can’t be helped, it must be done, so down with—
—Yes, thank you, John interrupted and led the way into the downpour.
They pressed on without stopping until they reached their lodgings for the night, a sprawling farmhouse whose room had twin beds. Their hostess made a fuss of them and insisted on hanging their wet things across the sitting room while they huddled before the fire. John sneezed and wondered, a bit hopefully, if he wasn’t coming down with something. Mrs. M, as the two called her, not having quite caught her name, pressed John with hot drinks and a scalding footbath. His body, entire, began to throb.
—I’ve got it, Jamie exclaimed.
He’d received a letter at the post office and slapped it against his knee:
—It’s the twenty-sixth of August. Your father’s birthday, isn’t it?
John blew his nose. He hadn’t remembered, but now he did.
—And tomorrow the day he died. I knew something was on your mind.
He coughed violently, and his eyes watered.
—I’ve always thought, Jamie continued, there’s something quite your father’s son about this book of yours.
—There’s no similarity, John said. He was a showman who spent his life doing parlor tricks with measuring tape and forceps. He cared more about that than anything else, and I mean anything.
Jamie looked knowingly at Mrs. M.
—I’m nothing like him! John snapped.
—Nothing at all.
—I mean it!
—Oh, so do I, Jamie replied. It’s only that you’ve always taken everything so seriously.
John blew his nose again. On examination, he did not feel well. He retreated to bed, where Mrs. M brought him a hot-water bottle and turned out the lights against the long, gray evening.
He awoke later, disoriented and feeling the residue of childhood, as if he weren’t old enough to be alone in a strange room, in the farmhouse where he realized eventually he was. He closed his eyes again and felt the boat rocking beneath him, the punt he shared with Meg and Delia. White feathers drifted down like the moltings of angels, and back at college the porter gave him a letter, addressed in his father’s handwriting. He popped the sealing wax knowing that the letter had finally come that would take back the disowning. He’d admit John was right: not cowardice but courage to refuse murder in the name of war. This time forgiveness would not come too late, his father wouldn’t die with everything between them, and if that could happen …
When he woke again, it was dark and the bed beside him creaked.
—Awake?
Jamie’s whisper. John coughed. Outside sheep bleated, and Jamie spoke again:
—That letter.
He could still see the dream letter from his father, but that wasn’t what Jamie meant.
—Marion’s motoring up tomorrow, Jamie said. This morning.
—What? Why?
—You didn’t look well. I thought you’d want to go home, and she—
—Doesn’t want you spending time alone with me.
Because it was dark, he could say these things.
—No! Jamie said. No. You always do that!
He felt oddly calm, a storm almost upon them.
—You always take the wrong end of the stick and run away with it, Jamie said.
—Do I?
—Just like you did that time.
—What time?
—You know perfectly well what time.
The statement flashed in the dark. John thought of counting seconds in the silence that followed.
—Do you imagine it wasn’t on purpose? Jamie said. That I’d let myself be caught—like that, in the changing room where anyone could see—and not have it be intentional?
The whirlwind had arrived, winding them both back there and showing John the scene from Jamie’s side of the room, the fixed past now blown apart.
—I only did it to get a reaction, and you … you did what you always do.
A searing light.
—Do you think I didn’t know what I’d get? Do you think I didn’t plan that, too?
Riving roots, flesh from bone.
—I had the marks more than a month. You should be proud of that.
How to speak without air?
—I know, Jamie said. I’m the one who should apologize.
—You should have told me, he said at last.
—I know.
The windows were graying, their time passing away. He bowled a last ball in the vanishing dark.
—Why on earth would you do that knowing…?
A creak in the bed as Jamie turned away:
—You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never seen yourself when you’re …
—What?
—Like that. It’s …
The unsaid poised, sword deserved, aiming its fall.
— … it’s irresistible.
30
He had begun to hear the girl’s voice as he rode across the Isle of Thanet. The August sun burned, and he imagined her in a boater hat writing new American letters. New York is beyond your strongest dreams, Tommy Gray. We watched a parade for Charles Lindbergh and then went up in a dirigible. By now perhaps her mother would be thriving, restored by grand remèdes and Dr. Felix Rush. We’ve booked passage to the Kingdom of Peru, where we will visit Mr. Bingham’s excavations at Matchu Peetchu. As he rode against the wind, her phantom letters teased—The tombs of Deir-al-Bahri simply beggar belief, Tommy Gray—but also punished his greedy heart—If only you could see the colors of the Congo!—the one that made wishes that no one could hear. He wished no ill upon her, but did he not long, just a little, for the girl who wrote him in need? And did he not, if he touched the selfish truth, want her entirely back? Even so far as the storm? Even then.
* * *
The roof was leaking again, and when Elsa said in vexation that it might be time to sell the cottage, the boy had cursed her—not in words, but good as—and ridden off in temper, leaving her alone with bucket and mop. She lifted the telephone, that black contraption that used to wake them in the night, and as she negotiated the exchange, her nerves untangled. Peter wasn’t at the first place she tried, but she found him at the third. They could marry at Christmas, she told him. Something private, in Shetland with his parents.
* * *
The cathedral bells tolled, and the sands and airplane engines of Gray’s book dropped him onto a lawn too low and too ordinary. The bookseller he’d been patronizing all summer had given him the French book that afternoon, a gift from one book lover to another, and as soon as he sat down with it, time had slipped its bounds, lifting him into the skies with the pilot Saint-Exupéry as he delivered the mail across the Sahara. Now the afternoon had vanished, and given the distance from Canterbury to Swan Cottage, he would certainly be late for tea. His mother would hit the ceiling, but since it was falling in—ha. It would serve her right if he ran away and joined the aeroposte. He mounted the bike, but as he passed the gardens, a painted sign made him squeeze the brakes: Mid-Summer Night’s Dr. One Nt only! 1/—
On a bench near the front he plunged back to the Sahara, but when he looked up again, the seats had filled and children were ringing hand bells. Players were emerging from the bushes, from trees, from beneath the very benches, a small, dark people, their voices like bells in his ears … And then it was dark, and Puck stood on the stone ledge, the others melting into the night with its fireflies, as many as the stars. Lantern in hand, Puck spoke as if waking a child: If we shadows have offended. A
fluttering inside, wings beating in his veins. Give me your hands, if we be friends. His throat strained and there were tears on his face, but the shame that should have been there had vanished with the sun.
He walked the bicycle through the crowd, out of the garden, and past a row of tents, their canvas glowing and flapping against the ropes. A plane’s propellers could make enough wind to flay your skin, but even planes obeyed the air. The voice caught him like crosswind, Come, dear, jingle of bracelets, drawing him in from the night, voice male, voice female—
—Bring that machine, dear, before it wanders off.
Skirts everywhere, costume from another drama, a tiny figure with the hands of a man:
—I don’t bite, dear. If you could see your face …
She sat on a stool that looked made for a child. Fingers like leather took his and smoothed them, palms up, across the tablecloth.
—Ah. Ah, yes …
Pencil, scrap, she told him to write his name. Don’t show it. Fold in three, tear in six, set beneath a three-fish bowl. She asked for a tanner and he gave it. Her face creased like a contour map, goldfish drifting sluggish before them.
—You’ve lost a friend, dear, in the … you know, dear … stable. You think it’s your fault, but it isn’t, you know.
When he pedaled home, the moon lit the lanes.
—When he closes a door, he opens a French window.
He tried to memorize what she said, but already it was crumbling, like a dream after dressing.
—And her, dear … you know the one I mean, be kind, dear, no matter what.
Around him, hedgerow hoots and cries.
—You mustn’t give up on him, dear. Not your friend—the other.
She hadn’t always made sense.
—Be careful with those tires, dear.
She’d muddled things, places, people.
—Messages, dear, heading to you, but not straight.
Some words stuck.
—You think you’ve lost something, but it isn’t lost, dear.