by Mary Swan
He was healing beautifully, they told him, and he’d found a new balance when he walked. When he shuffled, rather; he still moved carefully, as if he were carrying the most precious, delicate thing. Sometimes he made his way outside to the bench that was surrounded by roses, and the misty light made the green lawns glow where they rolled toward the sea. There was a high fence there, at the cliff’s edge, that was said to be against invasion, but he was certain it was really in case anyone had the urge to leap over.
When Janet asked he told her his son was called Robert Angus, named for his father and Edie’s, and she thought it had a nice, solid ring to it. He didn’t tell her about the photographs he had, good ones, that his mother had taken. On the back of one she had written, He’s the spit of you at his age, as if she knew about the crazy thoughts in his head. She’d sent other photographs, of Edie standing sideways, with her hands on the growing shelf of her stomach, but a different picture had slithered in. Edie lying with someone else, the two of them laughing at how easy he’d been to fool. He knew it wasn’t true, but the thought was hard to shake. That time Beadle tore his letter in two and went mad in the mess, throwing plates and anything that would smash, Robbie knew what that rage would feel like.
Every so often people came to look at the burned boy. Sailors and soldiers of different ranks, and wives and parents, once an elderly couple all the way from Dundee. No one recognized him, though as Janet said, they’d be lying if they said they could. The story was that he’d been plucked from the smouldering sea after a battle, though no one could explain how he’d ended up here, nor why he was lying in Lumberjack Ward, surrounded by screens near one of the tall windows that lined whatever grand room it had once been. There was no chance at all that he’d live, and the doctors were baffled he’d survived this long. His hair had burned away, his nose and fingers, his toes. His uniform, of course, but even if he was a Hun, if his moaning was German moaning, you couldn’t feel anything but pity.
There wasn’t really anywhere you could touch him, the nurses said, and they all hated the sound of the morphine-filled needle going in. Some of them thought it would be a kindness to give him too much, and some thought he should be moved to some far-off, private corner, to spare the rest of them, but the men all said to leave him be. Robbie wondered how many shared with him the small, mean thought, beneath the genuine, comradely sentiment, that as long as the burned boy was there, there would always be something worse.
The nurses had a lot to do, and women from the nearby town, all ages, came to read and visit and help out with the craftwork that was supposed to be good for them, grown men weaving baskets from thin, pliant strips, and clumsily poking thread through canvas. They’d been told, he was sure, to be cheerful and matter-of-fact, and he wondered if that was how it would be for the rest of his life, people speaking to him in that bright tone that forced him to answer the same way.
One of those volunteers asked what his work was, back home, and she said that once she’d broken her arm and had to do everything with her other hand, and it was strange, wasn’t it, as if you had to change your whole brain around. She got flustered, in case he thought she was saying it was anything the same, and he felt sorry for her, with her prim dress and shoes and her pale hair so carefully brushed. He told her that he’d been a schoolteacher for a little while, that maybe he could do that again, and she beamed as if he’d said the cleverest thing, and threaded his needle for him.
Another day a different woman told him about an article she’d read, the amazing work they were doing on artificial limbs, and he just nodded. Everyone said the legs were not bad but the arms were shite, and if he’d still had doubts, watching Kirkwood’s struggles would have convinced him. He’d tried so hard, Kirkwood had, but developed a ring of sores from the straps, a bad infection on the stump from all the chafing, and the arm was put in store with the rest of his things. Elizabeth carried it away, trying to work out how to hold it. In the end she braced it on her shoulder, the way you might carry a rifle, or a baby that wanted to look around, and the hand bobbed along the length of the ward, waving goodbye.
Kirkwood had been a bus driver before, and he grinned with the others when they ribbed him. When they said, “What did you think? Did you think you could stick a glove on it and no one would notice?” Irony was the word, all right; it was everywhere. The best was Gillis, when he wheeled himself into the lounge, where the man from the Ministry was asking his questions. “Step dancer,” Gillis said, and everyone laughed till it hurt.
Janet asked, quite hesitantly for her, if he wanted to give away the banjo, but he said no. Remembering how he’d imagined himself, on their little front porch back home, the dark, soft air and the sound of summer insects. He’d be holding that battered banjo, having magically learned to play it. Edie somewhere in the house behind him, maybe rocking his son to sleep and he was helping, plucking out a slow, restful tune. His son could hear it and it soothed him, the sound threading through his dreams, and in some way he would remember it, and would always feel safe, and cared for. Robbie tried to make that a reason, a pure and important reason for why he’d wanted the banjo and the way he had set about getting it, the sneaky shuffle, the tricks.
Duggan had been someone who’d got to him from the start. Got to many of them, for some reason, the butt of all jokes, a foot stuck out or a stool moved at the last second, grown men laughing like bullies in a schoolyard. He seemed like someone who’d grown up in a sack, so little did he know about the world around him, even the names of the countries that were fighting this war. Straw hair and bucked-out teeth and a snorting laugh. But something wondrous happened when he took out the banjo he toted wherever he could. The way his fingers flew over those strings, over the frets with the mother-of-pearl glinting between them, and no one could keep from clapping along, from stamping their feet and whooping. Sometimes he looked up with his quick goof’s grin, but mostly he was lost, transported, hunching over and rocking back, and he didn’t sing but sometimes he gave a little yip, and sometimes an eerie, low crooning, as if just for a moment the voice of whatever was possessing him had burst out. Until he stopped playing, and then he was Duggan again, with his hideous teeth and his big, clown’s feet; just Duggan, stupid as mud.
Robbie knew that Janet had the wrong idea about what kind of reminder the banjo was, and before he’d realized that her confidences were spread all over the ward he might have tried to explain. His new, lopsided self understood that his war had released something ravenous in him, something he didn’t recognize, but didn’t resist. There were things he wanted, all kinds of things, and no reason why he shouldn’t have them. I want that, he’d thought in the pub in Liverpool, when he saw Caroline sit down on a drunken man’s lap. And on the ship, when Duggan played and the men stomped and whistled, he thought, I deserve it more.
Eventually the proper papers were signed in the proper places, and he said his goodbyes. Janet came to share a last cigarette and told him she’d decided to marry that butcher’s son. The one with thick glasses that she’d joked about, who’d been asking for years. “Is that irony too?” she said, and he supposed it was something close.
He’d thought he’d have trouble on the train and he did, a little. His heart beating faster, his palms and forehead damp, but he closed his eyes and imagined himself in a boat in the middle of a lake, no land in sight. Not the Erebus, nothing like that, but a small boat, rocking gently. The sun picking out bands of colour in the water, and just enough breeze. He might have slept; when he opened his eyes they were still rocketing through the countryside, but he was calm, removed. That feeling stayed with him all the way to the docks, to his berth on the ship that would carry him back across the ocean; that feeling stayed.
On board he kept to himself, as most of them did. There was none of the bravado and hijinks that had marked the voyage over. He thought of the distance unfurling behind him like something that was slipping through his fingers, becoming as hazy as what was ahead, though it had seemed
so real at the time. He remembered how it was at first, teaching his left hand to take over. How aware he was of his brain saying squeeze, saying lift, saying move this way or that. And he thought that maybe that scrambled feeling had nothing to do with the knock on his head. Maybe it was just a snarled phase before things untangled, reordered, and he really was coming home with a different mind too.
The ship docked and there were trains and more trains, but that calm feeling stayed. There was so much bustle in the stations that he couldn’t hear his own footsteps, and he always seemed to be moving against a flow of young faces, fresh uniforms; he thought how much easier it was to get into the war, swept along on a wave of cheers and brass bands, and fluttering handkerchiefs. The journey felt as though it could go on forever, but finally he was on the last, shorter train, and the people getting on and off at its frequent stops were familiar, although he didn’t actually know any of them. He must have looked very fierce or sad because no one sat with him or tried to start a conversation, though a few times someone asked if he was getting off, if he needed help with his bags. “No, thank you,” he said. “I sent them on ahead.”
Those bags would have already arrived, would be sitting somewhere in his house, like the effects of a dead man, and he wondered how large they would seem, in his son’s small world. He tried to imagine himself walking through his own front door, but another picture formed in his head and he saw himself slumping down, heavy in his seat as they drew into his station. He saw himself staying on the train and riding farther, riding north to the end of the line. There was a ferry there, he knew that, and he could sail with it across the neck of the lake. He saw himself walking down the short ramp on the other side, walking on and on until he reached the start of the dense bush that would seal itself behind him, after he’d passed through.
That would be right, that would be better, and it would be a better thing, a braver thing, to leave his son with the story he would make for himself, from the things unpacked from the battered bags. From the banjo with its snapped strings and the jacket with polished buttons, from everything else he’d be told. They would tell him the only things he should know, Edie and Robbie’s mother. The funny stories and the scrapes he got into when he was a boy, the facts of the rest of his life. And that way his son would grow up knowing the best of him.
It had nothing to do with his missing arm, although that’s what everyone thought. Would think. Back at the hospital Elizabeth sometimes sat with him on that bench by the roses, her cool hands folded in her lap. She told him once about her fiancé, Patrick, who was somewhere in muddy France, and she asked him to believe her when she said that nothing would matter, nothing, as long as Patrick came home alive.
He had let her believe that she’d helped him, because she was kind, and it was kindly meant; he knew that Edie would say the same, but he also knew that he didn’t deserve it. He’d seen something in himself, he’d been something, that left him shamed and grim. The smooth skin of decency had shredded so easily, leaving something raw and puckered and angry. He had no memory of the racing speed of that other train, no memory of the crash, or the broken bodies flung wide. But he remembered the old woman with her smoky grey ball of wool, and he knew that he was a man who would have kicked her aside to save himself.
The train carried on through the scruffy countryside and he began to recognize each tree, each weathered barn, and each place where the lake glinted briefly before vanishing again. Time seemed to have speeded up, and suddenly he wasn’t sure of anything. What was courage, and what the worst kind of cowardice. He remembered the burned boy, holding on for all of them long after he should have let go, and wondered if it was really that, wondered if he even knew that he was alive.
Splinters of thought were piercing the calm that had wrapped him; he tried to imagine himself in that boat on the empty water but he couldn’t do it and then, too soon, they were into the last, long curve before the station. There was a point in that bend where he could see the track ahead, and he looked for the boy who had balanced on the rail like a rope walker, both arms held out at his sides. He looked for the boy who was trying so hard to be brave, staring straight at everything that was rushing toward him.
THE MAID ON THE SHORE
She used to stand on the shore with the boy, looking out at the vast ruffled lake and imagining that it was the ocean, that at any moment a ship could appear, bringing her lost ones back to her. Just for a little while; the boy was always hungry for his breakfast and when he tugged at her hand she let him draw her on to the wooden steps, counting with him as they climbed. One two three four. The wind and the sound of the waves falling away, replaced by the sound of their own harder breathing, until—seventy-three, seventy-four—they were back on the bluff near the bandshell, back in the town.
Every night before he slept, when Robbie was small, he liked me to talk about all we’d done that day. “Tell it like a story,” he used to say, and I did: It was a cold, windy morning and the woman walked with the boy. She made him wear his new warm sweater even though it itched him, and the lake was all ruffly, and he found a black stone with a hole right through. “And the woman is you,” Robbie said. “And the boy is me, I found it.” And I said, “Indeed you did.”
Sometimes I told him about the ship the woman watched for, that was bringing her family back. The snapping sails and brother Frank at the big wheel, with a peaked cap on his head, brass buttons on his jacket. Millie and Jim high in the rigging, holding on with one hand as they lean out, waving, and our mother standing in the prow with the baby in her arms, both of them dressed in the cleanest white. She points to the shore, showing the baby, and they are smiling so wide, maybe laughing, as if they would never be anything but happy. “And that’s why you’re Francis James Robert,” I always told him, and it was mostly true. Though Robert was my own father’s name, or so my mother once said.
How can it be, that all that time has vanished? All the days and years we walked through together, my same hand turning down the lantern, night after night. A silly question to be asking myself, no point in wondering, no answer. Like the rules of light and shadow, some things just are as they are, and the only way is to start from there and carry on. Robbie was a boy and now he’s a man, he’s been to war and come back changed, has children of his own. Like a seedling growing, like a bud that opens to flower, you can be there every day and still not see exactly how and when it happens. Though when I think of that, I know it was the boy who was wide open, a bright flower. His growing up somehow a process of folding away.
Those old steps from the beach are not much used now, except by children, or by people who don’t want to be seen. But I climbed them this morning, pleased that I still could, though I needed to stop and rest along the way. And each time I lowered myself onto a step, looking west out over the lake, I marvelled at the changes that had happened while my back was turned. Curls of pure white breaking everywhere farther out, and the band of pinkish-mauve along the horizon slowly expanding, pushing up the lowering clouds. The scrub on the hillside turning from grey to green, and then different shades of it. By the time I reached the top and turned to look out again the sun had cleared the trees, cleared the town behind me and poured out over the lake. The gulls that had wheeled by the score from wherever they slept, high flashes of silver and bronze, had settled on the rocking water. I thought about where I had started and where I was now, about the way everything is transformed by time, by light.
I’ve never been much of a churchgoer, except in the Home we were taken to when I was young, that was supposed to give us a better life; between scrubbing and praying we spent most of our time there on our knees. It would be comforting, I’m sure, to be able to believe that everything happens for a reason. To believe there’s a plan, God’s plan, and you only need to surrender. There are rules in the world, I know, things that clever people understand. The path of the sun, the stars and the tides and currents, and gravity that lets some things rise up and keeps others firmly on th
e ground. But it’s always seemed to me that the rest is all chance: the people you meet, the places you end up, which way you turn at a corner. That all you can do is make the best of where you are, no point in dwelling on what might have happened if you’d gone another way.
It was just chance, I know, that brought me to Inverhaven, when Robbie was still curled safe inside me. I had an advertisement for a housekeeper folded in my bag, and if the connecting train hadn’t been so late I would have carried on to that other town and had a different life. Chance too that the sun was shining that April day, and the station master—not Angus, but the one before—gave me directions to a hotel with a dining room that was reasonably priced. The town was like all the others I’d ever been in, a short main street, still frozen and rutted, a grocer, hardware store, pharmacy. But the sun was actually warm, and a man who was stretching in a doorway wished me Good day. I passed a school just as the children tumbled out; a young boy running with his jacket unbuttoned called back Sorry missus after he bumped me, and I was struck by his grin, by his healthy pink cheeks.
I must have missed the street I was meant to take, and found myself following a cleared path that led past a bandshell to where a snow-covered bench looked out on the sudden expanse of lake, a strange landscape of frozen mounds and furrows, and the enormous sky. It should have reminded me of the boat from Liverpool all those years before, the terror of so much open water, but perhaps because of the ice, I didn’t think of that. Instead a great calm settled on me, even my hunger gone. I brushed off the bench and sat looking out until the sun had lost its warmth, until I heard a distant train whistle and knew that it would go on without me.