The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  Back in town, he put out the word for any work and was told to meet up with one of the town’s builders early the next morning for a job of roofing that was needed in a hurry.

  He slept at the pub, his dreams spiked by tall thin figures who darted, silhouettes, along the horizon. And when he woke in the morning it was still dark, a frost on the ground, and the sound of snoring all along the hall. He washed his face, shaved, wetted down the worst of his hair, ate porridge in the pub’s kitchen, drank a huge mug of tea, and was out in the clear, cold air as the first birds began to call.

  He liked the town, the way it pressed together instead of spreading wide in all the room it had, and he liked the sound his boots made on its roads. He followed the instructions the publican had given him, humming here and there, singing now and then—a couple of bars of Speed, bonnie boat, a premature snatch of Morning has broken—and still filled with the possibility of all the space around him. He was an ocean boy himself—the cuan, he loved it—mucking along beaches for whelks and crabs, swimming as far as the cold would let him, and out on the trawlers if he was able. But the span of the sky out here was a close match for the sea—as wide and as blue.

  ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean,’ he sang softly as he rounded the last corner. He’d reached the edge of the town without realising it and before him lay the shape of a house, low and spreading, and its roof, triangular and partial, open to the morning. The road dipped down a little towards it, the first brightness of sunrise beyond in reds, pinks, golds: he was walking directly east. ‘My bonnie lies over the sea.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Lachlan,’ a voice called from up in the air, and as he arched his neck to see where it had come from, he made out two figures perched on the roof ’s narrow frame. ‘The kind gentleman in the public house said you’d be along early in the morning.’ It was an odd accent, soft, with the first syllable of each word leaned on a little, like a strangely rhythmic march. It was unlike any he’d heard before, and as his eyes adjusted to the changing light, he made out the man, tall, fair, with a tanned face and thick blond beard and moustache.

  ‘Mr Kalm,’ he called, ‘I hope I’ve not kept you,’ and as he raised his hand to wave, it shaded his eyes for a moment so that he saw her just as the ball of the sun came over the crest. Anikka Kalm, standing next to her father, watching the earth roll forward into a new day. Tall, like her father, and fair, like her father, her feet were set apart to balance on the beam— he thought, She’d stand well on any ship; he thought, That’s what lissome is, then—and the bright rose-gold of the moment seemed to burnish her hair, her face, her skin, her shape with light.

  ‘The first time I saw you,’ he would whisper to her afterwards when he told her the story, ‘it was just getting light. I took you for part of the sunrise.’

  But at that moment, in that morning, he simply stood and gazed up at her while she stood above him and gazed out towards the sun.

  Oskar Kalm swung down onto the ground, talked about frames and nails and slate and hours, and Mac agreed to anything, paying no attention to the conversation. He heard himself say, ‘I’m more an ocean man,’ heard Oskar say that one would have to be an ocean man to find oneself so far from home and in this part of the world. But then the memory of those words, too, disappeared under the sound of Anikka’s voice.

  ‘I’ve never seen the ocean,’ she said, her voice halfway between the roundness of her father’s Nordic accent and the stretch of every Australian voice Mac had yet encountered. ‘It must be so wide, so blue, so . . .’ she fumbled for a word, her fingers worrying at the air as if she might find it there—‘so wet.’ And she blushed.

  ‘My daughter,’ said Oscar Kalm, ‘was rudely landlocked by my ending up here.’ He swung a belt, a hammer, towards his new assistant, calling up to the girl that they needed to be getting on with the job they were there for. And Mac watched as she swung herself down—bending easily to grip the framework near her ankle, dropping down until her toes found the shape of a window below that, and then springing back to arrive standing, next to him, as tall as him, on the grass.

  ‘Mackenzie Lachlan,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Anikka Kalm,’ she said, shaking it firmly.

  ‘I could take you to see the ocean one day,’ he said, and blushed.

  ‘I could come with you to see that,’ she said, laughing— although he wasn’t sure if the laugh was for the suggestion of the ocean or the red flush on his cheeks. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr Lachlan. I’ll bring some lunches out later in the day.’ And as she strode away, it seemed the sun kept pace with her movement across the ground.

  Her blonde hair so bright it looked lit from within.

  20

  Roy McKinnon returns Jane Eyre on the day it’s due. Ani looks up from a box of books and he’s standing in the doorway, scraping his shoes on the mat, taking a little too long to do as simple a thing as come into a room.

  ‘I’ve brought this,’ he says simply. ‘I’ve been staring at it so long but I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘Mr McKinnon,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry if it wasn’t what you wanted.’ As if she should have been able to guide him, to advise him on a happier book; as if she’s failed in her job somehow.

  But he shakes his head, seems to shake his hat right from it, and, bareheaded, finally steps inside.

  ‘No, no, it was good; it was good, Mrs Lachlan, and I’ve finished with it now. I wanted to hang on to it, that was all. I wanted to keep it close, but—’ He smiles, holding it out towards her. ‘I wondered if I could ask you to get me some particular poets, if that’s possible—the British, from the Great War. I thought I might try them.’

  ‘Wilfred Owen? Rupert Brooke?’ She’s pulling names from the contents pages of the one anthology her own shelves hold at home, wanting to sound knowledgeable.

  ‘No, no,’ he cuts across her quickly, ‘not the ones who died; the ones who survived. Sassoon. Graves. The ones who kept living, kept writing.’

  There’s an edge in his voice that she knows from somewhere, but it takes her a moment to place it. It’s panic, the voice of mothers when their children can’t be found for a moment; the voice of women against the news that their sons, their husbands, are not coming home; the voice of Anikka herself one day when Isabel inched too close to the edge of the station’s platform—of Anikka herself, she suspects, in the hours, the days beyond the accident.

  ‘I made some tea, Mr McKinnon, just a moment ago— could I get you a cup?’ She’s on his side of the desk now, pulling out a chair, clearing a space. ‘Was there something you were looking for in particular? Some poem? Some description?’ The way he lowers himself onto the chair is as if he distrusts it, and she wonders whether poets think differently about simple things like chairs and hats. Filling a cup, she wonders if it would be rude to ask.

  As she turns towards him again, the tea carefully balanced, the afternoon’s light hits that point before sunset where it softens and swells sometimes into a few minutes of rounder, warmer illumination. Through the window, the greens of the trees thicken slightly, the shadows lengthen, and the sky takes on a fuller shade of blue. The mountain, diminished at midday, surges again to its full height; the clouds flare a brighter white.

  Inside, the last of the sun picks up the wood of the library’s shelves, its floor, its desk, grazing the side of the poet’s head and turning his dull grey-brown hair into something flecked by ginger and gold. For the shortest moment, Ani wants to reach out and touch it—to see if it’s warm, to see if it’s soft— and it’s only the cup and saucer that stops her from making this movement.

  ‘There,’ she says, blushing a little, ‘it’s a magic time of the day when the sun goes over the mountain, don’t you think? The way it makes everything glow.’

  He drinks his tea too fast—she knows how hot it is—gulping with each mouthful, until he reaches the layer of sugar at the bottom. ‘Is it always like this?’ he asks then, china rattling against china as he replaces the cup
too forcefully in the scoop of its saucer.

  ‘The light?’ she says. ‘No—I think it needs particular clouds, or a wind. There’s something more to it than just the end of the day, but I’ve never managed to work out what it is.’

  But he’s shaking his head again; she’s misunderstood the question. ‘No, no; I mean, how you say things—the light, the time—is it always like this? It makes you sound like a poet yourself.’

  The blush goes all the way up to her hair this time. ‘I don’t know the first bit of poetry really,’ she says, a little desperate. ‘Although my husband used to read poems aloud to me sometimes—the Scottish ones; they rollicked along. I like to read, Mr McKinnon. That’s all.’ And she wishes for an instant that she hadn’t given him the tea—even though it’s already drunk and finished—or the chance of a conversation. It feels heady, or reckless, and she steps back until she feels the solid horizontal of the desk hard behind her.

  ‘It’s a lovely light,’ he says at last, but so quietly that she almost misses the words. ‘As if it’s coming through stained glass—even when you’re outside. You know, I’ve never thought of it like that before.’ Unfolding an envelope from his pocket, he feels across the surface of her table, his eyes fixed on the middle distance between them. ‘May I—do you have a pen?’ And she slides one towards him, spinning it around so it’s ready for him to pick up and write.

  ‘Is this . . . are you . . .’ She wants to know if she’s watching some act of creation, if something is coming into being in this library that didn’t exist the moment before.

  ‘Those terrible stories of the books burned in Germany before the war,’ he says then. ‘Do you remember? A city square on fire with great pyres of words—they burned Helen Keller, you know. They burned Jack London. Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn people—I read that somewhere years ago. And it will be years before we know how many people were truly lost through this war—before it started, when it was happening, and now, even now, when it’s supposed to be over.’ His words come in a rush, tripping over themselves. ‘How many bodies burned in one city, or another country, or the whole rest of the world. And now your books, Mrs Lachlan, are caught by the edge of fire, their spines red and orange, just there, just above you. And it’s beautiful.’ He pushes the pen away, puts the blank envelope back into his pocket, carefully refolded.

  ‘Are you writing now, Mr McKinnon?’ Her forthrightness flares the redness of her face again. ‘I mean, since you’re home—these past years . . . I don’t know if it’s a question I should ask you or not, but it’s always intrigued me how—’

  ‘What intrigues me, Mrs Lachlan—’ there’s a coldness in his voice and he’s suddenly on his feet, adjusting his hat, and turning for the door, ‘is what sort of a man can find a poem in the middle of all that, and then come home to a place as pretty as this, and find nothing, nothing . . .’ He breathes in too long a breath, then tips the edge of his hat. ‘But I’ve become monotonous. If you could let me know when those books come in,’ he says, and is gone.

  ‘I hope you’re feeling . . .’ she begins to say, into the emptiness. She wonders if he registers the tightness in his own voice.

  Taking a deep breath herself, Ani pulls the ledger towards her again, begins to run through the books that will go back to Sydney the following day. The Grapes of Wrath has been popular, and Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land, while people wait for its sequel, and Zane Grey, as ever. He’s dead, but still publishing: what literary medium makes that happen, that writing from beyond the grave? Mac loved him, following his stories across every incarnation of the Wild West’s frontier. And if Zane Grey is still writing books after his own death, maybe Mac Lachlan is still reading them. It feels a dangerously flippant thing to think.

  She shakes her head to dislodge the idea, changing the angle from which she looks at her list. If she concentrated on which books were most popular in each batch, would she find the secrets of what this village thought and felt among the stories it borrowed to tell itself? It’s a safer thing to think.

  She pushes at her temples, unsettled, and sees Roy pulling the envelope from his pocket so that it shakes out to its full size, reaching forward—doesn’t matter that it’s her pen, her desk—for anything that might make a mark. With her eyes closed, she can make him Mac, the table their kitchen table. She sees her own hand push a pen towards him, sees him pick it up, begin to write.

  She can almost see the words as her husband tries to make a poem.

  And why not? Why not?

  She blows a long breath into the empty room: there he is, there he is, Mackenzie Lachlan, her man. He leans forward, finishes his first line with a flourish, looks up into nothingness—she’s invisible—and then down again, the pen busy with another line and another. She watches for a minute, knowing she should leave him to do this on his own. No, if she’d had this moment, she’d have sat there, seeing it happen, soaking it in.

  His hand slows, stops, and he’s blowing onto the words, softly, as if to hurry them dry. What would he say next? Would he read it? Would he fold it up, slip it back into his pocket, promise to read it to her when it had sat for a while? Would he pretend that nothing had happened, that he’d been making a list of the things he needed to remember to do the coming weekend?

  He’s fading; the kitchen is fading. She’s back in the library, staring somewhere between the titles of books she’s spent the morning packaging up. Without looking, she pulls a sheet of paper from the stack on her desk, a pencil from the jar. So close, he was so clear. She can do this: she can pull a poem for him out of the air.

  The light is heavy before sunset

  The world encased in thick stained glass

  —but that’s stealing. That was the poet’s line, and she’s back in the room with a thud, Mac gone, the poem gone, the light gone and the evening coming on fast.

  The thunder of a train coming down from the north collides with the thunder of one coming up from the south and for an instant, out of nowhere, Anikka is certain they will collide, here, in her station, outside her window, in a great crash of metal and fire and weight.

  She hates these thoughts, tries to shrug catastrophe away from her shoulders.

  The light is heavy before sunset, she recites. ‘The light is heavy before sunset.’ She pulls another sheet towards her, writes out the poet’s request for anything by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves. She’s read poems by them—she’s sure of it, staring at the names until a line comes into her mind: Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted, and beauty came like the setting sun.

  When Mac was hit, how long had it taken him to die? Did it happen immediately? Did it happen later in the afternoon? Did he go during daylight, in the darkness, or just as the sun set? Was there anyone she could ask? The inquest was coming, she knew, and she’d said again and again that she would not be attending, did not want to sit through the details of injuries and blame. The time, and the light; she’d like to know about those. She could ask the railways man, or the minister. She could ask Luddy; he might know. But there is something preserving in the idea that people could know parts of the story that she didn’t, as if she didn’t need to bear them all at once—she tells herself this, and believes it is true.

  She folds the request letter, licking so fiercely at the envelope that it slices her tongue.

  ‘Damn it.’ She’s never cursed anything before. ‘Damn it all.’ Closing the book before her tears fall onto its pages and make spots on all the lists she’s taken such care to transcribe. ‘Damn and damn and damn.’

  ‘Mrs Lachlan?’ Iris McKinnon, the poet’s sister, is standing in the doorway. ‘I’m sorry—my brother forgot to give you this one,’ sliding Kangaroo across the desk. ‘I hoped it might help him be here, but . . .’ She fiddles with the clasp on her bag. ‘I don’t think he got past the first chapters. And he asked me to apologise to you.’

  ‘For not reading the book?’ Anikka hears a harshness in her own voice and doesn’t care if
Iris McKinnon hears it too.

  ‘I don’t know—he just said to apologise. It’s hard, I think, for him . . .’ Her voice sounds tired of making her brother’s excuses.

  Anikka slides the book towards herself so it rests against her belly. ‘If he’s staying with you for some time, Miss McKinnon, he should probably get his own card—so that you can keep borrowing as well.’ Changing the subject; filling the silence.

  The other lady smiles. ‘Oh, I don’t mind—I never need to read as much as he does, and it’s nice to think I can do something for him, give him something that might help him . . .’ She pauses, awkward. ‘Of course it’s a great blessing to us that he came home and came home uninjured, and really that’s all you can ask for.’

  Ani taps the spine of the book on the desk, as if its pages needed to be squared, and moves to reshelve it. ‘There are different kinds of loss, you know,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Well, yes,’ says Miss McKinnon, her fingers fidgeting with a handkerchief as if she’s thinking about dabbing her eyes, or blowing her nose. ‘As you know yourself, Mrs Lachlan, after all these years.’

  Anikka blinks at the thin woman’s ferocity—it crosses her mind that she might damn her, and to her face, and this doesn’t seem a bad idea, although Iris McKinnon is talking again.

  ‘But as I always say, time heals all wounds—I remember telling you that a long time ago, Mrs Lachlan, and I try to tell my poor brother every day now as well.’ Her back is rigidly straight, her face is set, and the weakness implicit in the handkerchief ’s brief flutter has been stuffed back into her handbag along with the white fabric.

  The room darkens as the night properly begins. In the last moments of shadow before she reaches for the lights, Ani hears herself say: ‘No, Miss McKinnon, no. I do remember you saying that to me, and I’ve been meaning to say ever since that you were wrong. Time passes, and wounds close over, but the healing is a different thing altogether—and often, I think, you cannot expect that it will ever fully occur.’