The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  And I’ll know you this time, Isabel. I’ll spend the rest of my life knowing you.

  ‘All right, my men. Who’s for it? Who’s for it?’ Mac was halfway across the field, keeping pace with the referee, as the rest of his team pulled up their socks and gulped at their water jars. ‘C’mon, hurry up, hurry up—it’s a braw day for a win.’

  The whistle blew, the man with the ball paused for the smallest sliver of a second, suspending the world and its time again.

  And then the game went on.

  16

  Opening the library door on her first morning, Ani watches the room reveal itself. There’s no sign of Miss Fadden, her presence recalled by only the slightest imprint of her glasses and her fan in the desk’s dust. Ani opens the windows, first one, then the other, craning her head to see the first train so as not to be surprised by its noise. If she learns when to expect their great loud rush, she reasons, they won’t catch her off-guard, won’t surprise her into thinking about Mac, about shunting, about the solidity of a train against the soft give of a body.

  She stands a long time, holding off this last thought, mesmerised by its awfulness. This is how it is, she thinks. Two shifts, morning and evening, and Mrs May heating up Bella’s supper. Another breath. All right, all right, this will be all right. The clock on the wall ticks loudly, and for as long as Ani stares at it, neither of its hands appears to move. Which would be worse, she wonders, a day in which no one came—or a day in which people came and talked with her, at her, about finding her there, about how she is, about the circumstances of her employment?

  She had never appreciated before the lovely anonymity of an unremarkable life.

  The minute hand scrapes slowly around from five past to ten past. She would take any conversation.

  Pushing herself out of her reverie, she begins a circuit of the shelves. Of course, if no one comes, I really can spend my time reading—what could be better? And she reaches for Kangaroo, left, as Miss Fadden had promised, in its rightful place. But the words blur and merge, her eyes unable to decipher the text. Replacing the book, she tries another and another. It’s so quiet, so sepulchral, that she fears for a moment the world has stopped—or perhaps just the world of this one room.

  Frozen, here, with time stood still. And if I can’t read, if I can’t read—the wave of panic that has been building in her since Mac’s death finally crests and breaks, and she sits gasping and crying until a northbound train clamours into the platform outside, its noise jolting her back into herself.

  A scant quarter-hour has passed. She wipes her nose, her cheeks, her eyes, stretching her face into as many contortions as she can manage as if to confuse its memory of her weakness.

  She thumbs at the ledgers then, the card files, the neat stacks of paper ranged in the neat wooden trays—a strange topography for her to learn; where things are recorded, how things are traced. She glances at the names of the library’s borrowers, names from church, from Isabel’s school, from conversations in the street. The lady who owns the dress shop has been borrowing Penguin classics. Mrs Padman, Mrs Bower, Mrs Floyd—their husbands all crossed out of the register; probably Mac has been crossed out like that now too. The two owners of the rival shoe shops had both requested a manual of railway signs—how peculiar is that? Her fingers flick towards L for Lachlan: Ani, Isabel—and Mac. And there it is, the list of every book he’s ever borrowed, the line now through his name, the terrible sense of a thing reckoned complete and unalterable.

  The northbound train pushes out of the station as Ani turns and opens the window further, catching the last of its sound, its steam. She does love that smell, slightly heavy, slightly mechanical. She loves the way it tastes. And as she tastes it now, she runs her hand along the piano, tucked to the side of the window, and slowly opens its lid. She’s slightly scared of pianos, as if someone might expect her to know how to play if she’s standing near one. And she did take a couple of lessons from one of the shoe-shop owners when she first came to the coast—he played piano for the Saturday-night dances—but gave up in embarrassment. The only thing she knows how to play is the treble part of ‘Für Elise’—her father had taught her by rote, numbering the keys so she could remember their sequence, when she and Mac visited before Isabel was born. Ani can still feel the way Isabel kicked and squirmed as she destroyed Beethoven’s lovely tune over and over again.

  ‘We could call it Elise, if it’s a girl,’ she remembers Mac saying, standing behind her. ‘Maybe the baby’s trying to tell us that it already recognises its name.’

  ‘Elise or Ludwig.’ Ani laughed. Mac was always so sure the baby was going to be a girl—and she was, thinks Ani now. There she was.

  She pauses halfway through a bar, goes back to the beginning. Why didn’t they call Isabel Elise? It was a lovely name—although Isabel is too, of course, and for Mac’s mother, which seems to matter more. She’s glad she insisted on that. She hums the melody, a note or two out from the version she’s picking out with the index finger of her right hand. ‘Für Elise’—imagine being able to hum a tune you knew someone had written for you, and such a beautiful one, so beautiful. She tries the opening again, and again: perhaps she could teach herself the piano here—or at least learn this one melody so that it sounds as graceful, as easy, as it should.

  Elise Lachlan: that would have been a lovely name. But then perhaps it would have made Isabel a different person, and what would I change of her? What tiny piece would I want to be different? Her thumb and little finger pick out an octave, pulsing from higher to lower and back again, louder and louder, until she hears a sound at the door and turns to see Mrs Lacey, her arms full of paperbacks.

  ‘Mrs Lacey.’

  ‘Mrs Lachlan, I thought you must have started—I saw Miss Fadden in her garden as I came down the hill.’

  ‘You’re my first borrower.’ Ani says, making a great show of taking the books and finding the card.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ the other woman assures her as Ani falters then, casting around for what to do next. ‘Miss Fadden always had a deck of cards in the drawer—she used to play Patience when there was no one around.’

  Ani slides out the drawer, and there’s a deck of cards, the colours garish, with caricatures of Uncle Sam as the kings, and the Statue of Liberty as the queens, Hitler and Mussolini faced off as the jokers. She laughs. ‘I would never have expected this—I should return them to her; they look like some sort of souvenir.’

  ‘We did mark that victory however we could.’ Mrs Lacey moves around the shelves, pausing here and there. ‘I read this when I was a child—always wanted to read it again. Always wanted a daughter that I could call Anne.’ She pats Anne of Green Gables’ cover, placing it carefully on Ani’s desk. ‘You won’t tell anyone if I borrow it?’

  Ani smiles, shakes her head. ‘I loved these books when I was little. Bella’s reading them now—she reads me sentences and I can almost remember what dress I was wearing when I first read it myself, or whereabouts I was sitting in our garden. Such strange particulars, and yet other memories are gone in a minute.’ She smiles again. ‘Which is a blessing, I suppose.’

  But Mrs Lacey has moved away, scanning across titles. This is better, thinks Ani. Quite nice—quite a nice way to pass the time. She brushes non-existent dust from the cover of Mrs Lacey’s book, smoothes her ledger for its entry, readies the library’s card.

  ‘And these two,’ says her borrower. ‘Iris McKinnon told me this Timeless Land was very good, so I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘I enjoyed it,’ Ani nods, ‘and there was supposed to be a sequel coming—I’ll let you know if it comes in—if it’s any good.’ She breathes, feeling her way back towards inconsequential conversations. ‘Did I see Iris’s brother on the beach a while ago?’ Proud of being able to shape such pleasantries.

  ‘Yes, he’s home—with poor Iris wondering how long for and what he intends to do. Iris says he’s no idea about teaching anymore, just talks about wanting to write, and do
esn’t. I imagine you’ll see him in here before long; she never was much of a reader and if you were a poet, well, you must need to read all the time, mustn’t you?’

  Ani transcribes the titles carefully, not looking up. ‘I don’t know anything of poets, Mrs Lacey. I’ll see if I can get any hints if he comes in here for books.’ And they smile at each other—easy; pleasant. ‘I was thinking about Iris when you mentioned Dr Draper coming. I’m afraid I don’t remember your dancing like Ginger Rogers, but I remember Frank and Iris—she wore such beautiful dresses then.’

  Mrs Lacey settles the books in the crook of her arm and taps the side of her nose. ‘That’s a story still in progress, Mrs Lachlan. But I know she’s lonely, even with her brother home.’ And she turns towards the door, pausing on its step. ‘It was lovely to be your first borrower, dear. I hope you like it here—it seemed such a fine idea when Luddy told me. I could imagine you being happy somehow.’ The words are unexpectedly expansive—Ani bows her head underneath them, and when she looks up again, Mrs Lacey is making her way across the gravel.

  But Mrs Lacey is right; she does love a library. She remembers once, during the war, getting out of the rain in Sydney—she can’t place why she was there or what she was doing, but a great spring storm had come on and she’d run up the stairs of the nearest building to find herself at the new public reading rooms, pushing the heavy doors open with her shoulder.

  It was dim inside, dim and quiet, like a church, and then she saw it: a great map made in mosaic, a whole ocean laid out across the floor, with grand ships and blue waves and angels blowing the wind from the south-west, the north-east.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she’d said softly as the door eased shut behind her. ‘Beautiful.’ In the middle was an old outline of Australia from centuries before when the west coast was mostly rumour and the east coast a single, unvarying straight line—the cartographers’ graceful guess at filling a blank. There was no hint of her beach, her coast, her part of the world. It was funny to think that where she lived had been invisible, or missing.

  She patted a whale, traced out the accurate shape of Tasmania, and then stood up, moving slowly forward through the next set of doors and into a huge room with the soft light of a pale blue glass roof, and bright stained-glass panels illuminating its walls.

  The hush was magnificent, sullied only by the occasional scrape of a chair, the shuffle of paper, and once or twice the sound of a catalogue drawer tugged open against its will. Standing very still and quiet, Ani felt like a child in an adult’s room from which she knew she should be barred.

  She scanned the banks of shelves, the pretty stairs that ran up to higher shelves again, the wide desks nested on the floor. What was this paradise, this sanctuary? And the light through the delicate roof—it was shimmering, and it was gorgeous. Around the walls, the stained-glass windows glowed with images of newspaper presses, of old, old books, of scenes from Chaucer—the pilgrims leaving Southwark, the pilgrims arriving in Canterbury. She tilted her head: was that a koala on the bottom? Were there koalas in Chaucer? Then again, what did she know about Chaucer? Epigrams, really, that was all. Love is blind. The life so short, the crafts so long to learn. And, People can die of mere imagination, a line that had terrified her when she was at school.

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’ There was a tall man at her elbow, a librarian, she supposed. ‘Was there something in particular you were wanting?’

  Ani shook her head. ‘No, thank you, it was raining, I came in. But it’s lovely, lovely to see this.’

  And the man smiled: ‘There’s something about a room for thoughts and words.’ It was a statement, simple and direct, but it rang for Ani with the sharpness of revealed truth. ‘I’ve always wondered if paradise might not be a little like a library,’ the man said then. ‘But that’s probably a sacrilegious thing to suggest.’

  Ani blushed, as if it was, and at the grandness and the intimacy of the words. Her eyes flicked along the rows of men, some women, who sat with their books, their pencils and their notes.

  ‘It was raining, I came in,’ she said again. But what would it be like to come somewhere like this for a day’s work, instead of the trains or the mines or any of the other noisy, messy places where most of the people she knew went to work? She glanced at the librarian and saw his hands smooth where Mac’s were rough and grained with dirt. His shoulders, too, were stooped, and thinner than the straight broadness she was used to. But to come here to work; to sit in that silence, and that light.

  She’d told Mac about it that night, as if she’d discovered a new world or uncovered a treasure, and she’d blushed when he laughed at her, at the power she’d invested in the idea of just sitting, sitting and reading. ‘Well I do, I do think it sounds like heaven. And I do think about the things other people do, the other people I might be.’ Which had silenced him, and made him say something sharp about regretting he could make her no more than a railwayman’s wife, and made her wish she had never said any of it, never talked about this new and beautiful place. They were rare, these dissonances and petty tiffs. Ani would have walked a thousand miles rather than have had one.

  ‘And how would I have found you, hidden away in a great library?’ he’d wanted to know. ‘There’s nowt of adventures and explorers on shelves like those.’ The stories he loved; the stories, she suspected, he dreamed about living when he dreamed himself of being someone, or somewhere, else.

  There’s another footfall on the gravel and Ani looks up, startled out of the loop of that thought—startled, somehow, to find herself in the realisation of this library that’s suddenly, unexpectedly, her domain. A shadow changes the light in the doorway, and then a man comes in, dark-suited, dark-haired, and rubbing his hands together as if he’s come in from the coldest winter.

  ‘You’re the widow, then,’ he says, taking off his hat and drumming his fingers across its crown. ‘I heard they’d given you this job out of pity.’

  Ani watches his fingers play over the fabric, beating a tattoo that matches the rise and fall of her stomach. There she is, mired back in the one story by which she might now be defined; she hates him, whoever this is.

  ‘I’m Draper,’ he says. ‘The doctor. Come to minister to your sick and your dying, and bring all your new people into the world.’ He coughs, and Ani tries to fit his shape to some memory of dancing—but all she can imagine is Mrs Lacey in a fine frock she saw Ginger Rogers wear once in a film, all swan’s down and chiffon, and that image is too ridiculous to belong to anything real. She waits for whatever he will say next, rubbing her own hands together as if to ward off his chill.

  ‘And they’ve given you all this.’ He gestures so flamboyantly that there’s no doubting how little he thinks of the place. ‘Which is generous, when not so many women have been able to stay in work since the war.’ He sets his hat down on the desk—her desk, she thinks, proprietorial for the first time. ‘Still, there’s an argument, I suppose, that it will be better to keep your mind busy than to let it stretch and twist at leisure.’

  ‘Dr Draper,’ she says at last, ‘you’re not at all how I remembered. But I heard you were coming. And of course I have a daughter to support, and a house to keep.’ She’s blushing, wishing to sound cool and sure. This isn’t anyone she can remember; this isn’t anyone who would dance or laugh.

  ‘As so many do, losing their men to war—so many women, all over the world, and now the world is supposed to be back to normal, and the men are back to take their jobs, and what happens to those widows who haven’t rushed back to the altar with some new man? What happens to their daughters, to their houses?’

  Ani feels her teeth clench. ‘There’s Legacy,’ she says slowly: it feels like an interrogation, an exam. ‘There are provisions for helping war widows. And as for me, everyone has been very kind. I’m neither ungrateful for this compensation nor’—her voice narrows to a tight spit like his—‘unaware of its privilege.’ She pauses at the squeal of a train’s wheels on the tracks outside.
‘But it’s an odd gift, perhaps, to work by the sound of the thing that killed your husband. Not even your war widows have had to endure that.’ They’re unsayable words; she is almost sneering as she watches the doctor’s face crease with distaste, but she feels strangely powerful. What now? she thinks, defiant. What will you say to me now? She’s never felt so sharp before.

  But the distaste, it seems, is for himself. ‘My apologies, Mrs Lachlan.’ The brash gaze is gone, his eyes focused on his own fingers as they worry at a knot tied in the corner of his handkerchief. ‘I lost many things in those years abroad, and among them were my social graces. Psycho-neurosis, our American friends call it, if you want to be learned about it. People always like to have a label—for a newcomer, an outsider, or a widow. Still,’ he straightens up, drawing a random shape on the brim of his hat with one finger, ‘the nuances of widowhood must be different, of course, when they aren’t marked out by the weight of a war—I wonder whether people will regard you as more, or less, available.’

  Ani stares, wondering how it would feel to slap his face. She’s never wished to do anything like that to anyone before. ‘My husband is barely dead.’ There’s ice in her voice, and as she looks down to make the calculation by the calendar, she sees the date of her wedding anniversary, a few weeks ahead, and tastes something sharp and metallic in her mouth, unsure if its bile is for the nearness of a date that now feels purposeless, or the fact that she didn’t know, immediate and certain, precisely how many weeks, days and hours had passed since Mac stopped being in the world.

  The train pulls out, and as the room falls silent again, the doctor turns, his gaze panning the rows of shelves. ‘I expect there’s nothing here that I require, but I will come and look another day.’