The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘Come up, Mackenzie Lachlan: you come up and listen to me. I don’t mind your underwater thing—you can read about it and dream about it all you like. You can dive down from the highest board at the pool and you can duck your head under the biggest breakers that the surf pushes up. But under the sea, properly under the sea, so far down and so dark, so dark—I just don’t know why you’d want to do something like that.’

  ‘You’re still a landlubber after all these years, aren’t you, pet?’ he said, ducking fast under the bath’s surface again as she threw a washcloth, a nail brush at him. And he stayed under this time, blowing a few bubbles, and then holding his breath until she leaned forward, her frown anxious, and scolded him again.

  ‘I was going to offer to read to you while you’re in there,’ she said then, ‘even from your silly new underwater book. But now . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Your shenanigans.’ But she was smiling.

  Mac pulled a towel from the side of the bath, rubbed the water from his hair, his ears. ‘You’d like the book, Ani. The creatures they see, and how beautiful it is down there. Even when I was little, I’d swim out into that cold grey Scottish water, peering down to try to see what was underneath—my gran had all these stories of the ashrays and the selkies and the blue men of the Minch, and I was after a glimpse of them as much as any sort of fish or shells or proper sea life.’ He shivered, although the bath water, straight from the copper whose little fire Ani tended, was steaming hot. ‘I cannae tell you how cold it was, how cold, out there in that water. And I’d swim and swim with my fingers numb, then my hands, then my arms all the way up to the elbows—I probably wasn’t in more than a few minutes each time.’ He closed his eyes and saw himself as a small boy, shivering across the shale on the other side of the world. ‘My gran always had the fire high and the soup on the stove when I gave up and came in. And she’d warm me up and fill me up—and tell me the next round of stories about the water lovers to get me ready to go again.’ He laughed, reaching for the soap. ‘But read me a bit, lass; there’s a lovely bit about the colour and the light—you’d like that part, I promise.’

  ‘This part?’ she said, flicking through the pages. ‘At 600 feet, the colour appeared to be a dark luminous blue?’

  ‘That’s it, Ani. That’s it.’ He slid his shoulders beneath the warm water again and closed his eyes.

  At 600 feet the colour appeared to be a dark, luminous blue, and this contradiction of terms shows the difficulty of description. As in former dives, it seemed bright, but was so lacking in actual power that it was useless for reading and writing.

  There are certain nodes of emotion in a descent such as this, the first of which is the initial flash. This came at 670 feet, and it seemed to close a door upon the upper world. Green, the world-wide colour of plants, had long since disappeared from our new cosmos, just as the last plants of the sea themselves had been left behind far overhead.

  At 700 feet the light beam from our bulb was still rather dim; the sun had not given up and was doing his best to assert his power . . .

  She paused. ‘Do you want the next bit, about worms and things?’

  ‘Just the colour, Ani, just the colour.’ His voice was low, his eyes closed, and his mouth smiling.

  ‘At a thousand feet, then, here,’ she continued.

  At a thousand feet, I tried to name the water; blackish-blue, dark grey-blue. It is strange that as the blue goes, it is not replaced by violet—the end of the visible spectrum. That has apparently already been absorbed. The last hint of blue tapers into a nameless grey, and this finally into black, but from the present level down, the eye falters, and the mind refuses any articulate colour distinction. The sun is defeated and colour has gone forever, until a human at last penetrates and flashes a yellow electric ray into what has been jet black for two billion years.

  In the quiet room, the space behind his eyelids replicated the shape of the bathroom light, the pale rectangle made by the bath itself.

  ‘I think,’ said Ani, as Mac opened his eyes to look at her, ‘I think that I was afraid of the dark, when I was little. I remember, after my mother died, my father used to sit with me until I went to sleep, and sometimes I had a lantern in the room at night—I must have called out.’ She smiled, closing the book. ‘But I suppose your blue sounds lovely—your luminous blue. And I suppose I could trust you to a bathysphere for one ride down to see it, if you really had to go.’ This was Ani, he knew, doing her best to be generous.

  ‘My birthday treat one year,’ said Mac. ‘I wonder if they’ll ever have them available for rides? I could go down off the coast here, see all the coal ships lost off that old jetty, and the deep dark drop where the continent falls away. That’d be something, to see what’s down over that edge.’ But she was frowning again. ‘Too much? Too far?’

  ‘No, no, if you like . . .’ But he could tell she was humouring him. ‘I was just thinking of all the other ships trapped under the water now,’ she went on, ‘all the lives stopped down there. And would there be mines? Would there still be mines? How long would those mines go on floating in the ocean— and how would you know where they might end up?’

  Mac eased himself out of the bath, dried off, found his pyjamas, and kissed her, very slowly and gently. ‘Things needn’t always come back to that war, Ani love. It’s over now; it’s over. You mustn’t always be remembering it.’ And he kissed the top of her head, taking the book from her lap. ‘I’ll make you some tea,’ he said quietly, and she nodded, brushing at her eyes.

  Stoking the stove, he shook his head. She could just say something about wanting a dress made of luminous blue— which would be beautiful; a dress for dancing, if ever there was one. Why must the war still feel so heavy for her, and so close? Three years now, he wanted to say—he almost wanted to shout it. And we came through, we came through, love. Here we are. Together. He hated the way she carried it with her, the way it surfaced so easily in her mind. It made him anxious; it made him fearful.

  Tossing a handful of kindling into the firebox, he registered the spit of flame and the hiss of steam as a drop of water from the kettle’s spout hit the plate.

  ‘But could you not have a nice landlocked daydream as well?’ she said, nestling in behind him with her arms hugging his flannelette waist. ‘A nice landlocked daydream that wouldn’t make me worry about the dark and the depth?’

  He was quiet a while, measuring tea out of its caddy, setting the cups carefully on their saucers, thinking of different things he might say—how they might sound, what they might mean. The tea was drawing, the milk poured, before he spoke.

  ‘If I do have a dream,’ he said, ‘it’s that I might make a poem—just one, just one. I was thinking about it when we saw Roy McKinnon. Imagine that; making a set of words so perfect that had never been put together that way before. I’ve never told anyone that, not even my gran. But it’s something I’d like to do; I’d like to make a poem.’ It was magical, the way such a thing could make her smile—the way she’d smiled when he said he loved reading Jane Eyre, all those years ago. Such a little thing, he thought, it made no odds. And he knew it would mean the world to his wife.

  The kitchen was still, ruffled only by the occasional crackle from the combustion stove, the occasional drip of water from the tap. Watching her across the smooth red table, Mac raised his cup and paused—the smallest toast— to drink. That was marriage, he thought, remaking yourself in someone else’s image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end?

  ‘Thank you, Mackenzie Lachlan,’ Ani said. ‘Thank you for telling me that.’

  He watched the darkness of her eyes sparkle and change as she slipped into a daydream. Well, he would write her a poem, if he could—or mebbe she is my poem, he thought, her and Bella. Still beautiful. Still his. He didn’t always believe that could be so in the bloody mess of the rest of the world. Which wasn’t a thing to say aloud.

  ‘You’re lovely, Ani Lachlan,’ he said, reaching out to stroke her hair. ‘You’re
lovely, my angel, my golden-sun lass.’

  She reached across the table, took his hand, and kissed it.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Right there. I’d say that was the makings of a poem.’

  26

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Do you wonder sometimes, do you wonder where Dad is?’

  The two of them, stretched like starfish in the backyard, their first Christmas morning without Mac, under the early blaze of a summer sun.

  Anikka props herself on one elbow, looks at her daughter, looks at the length of her as she lies there—longer every day, if that’s possible—at her stillness, at her calmness.

  ‘I mean, I hear you some nights,’ Isabel goes on, ‘I hear you crying when you go to bed. And I wish . . . I wish you didn’t. I wish you felt like he was somewhere good and quiet and peaceful.’

  Sitting up now, her back straight, Ani says: ‘Is that what you think? Is that where you think your father is?’ Picking at bits of grass with her fingers, folding their stalks, and flicking them towards the run where the hens peck and mutter.

  Isabel sits up in turn, stretching higher and longer again. ‘I don’t mean a Sunday school kind of place,’ she says, ‘just somewhere quiet. You know, somewhere that he’d want to be.’ She pauses, looking past her mother into some infinity. ‘You know that book he had, about diving and getting right down to the bottom of the sea? I think he’s there. It’d be so quiet there, and all the fish and shells and things he could see, like he always said he wanted to.’

  Like he always said he wanted to.

  Anikka remembers the book, remembers the day it came, wrapped carefully in brown paper, all the way from America. ‘My undersea explorer,’ Mac had said, smoothing its cover, flicking through its pages. ‘Remember the magazine story? The man in the bubble going half a mile down? This is him; this is his book.’ And Ani had smiled and nodded, scared, for the first time, that she might find her husband with weights tied to his feet, practising holding his breath at the bottom of the big, tiled municipal pool. Scared, in an instant, for Mac and the sea.

  And this is where Isabel imagines him. Ani leans over, brushing dried grass from the back of her daughter’s frock. ‘What does he do down there?’ she asks at last, wondering at the steadiness of her voice. ‘How does he spend his time?’

  ‘He draws the fish and the squid and the other strange creatures that go past. He writes down the things he sees to send in to the National Geographic. And he works out ways of keeping his light going—because you know, the men who dived, they were talking about how dark it was, and how long their light might last. I think Dad would have worked out a way by now to have the light on so that he could make days, and then turn it off when he wanted to sleep at night.’

  ‘I don’t like to think of him being in quite so much darkness,’ says Ani. ‘And maybe not somewhere so far away, so on his own.’

  But Isabel shakes her head. ‘Oh no, I think there’d be lots of people down there—they’d have ways of talking to each other, one bubble to the other, maybe like those strings that connected the bubble to the surface. Maybe they talk through those, or maybe they talk to the stingrays and the squid and the stargazers.’

  ‘Stargazers?’

  ‘There’s a fish called a stargazer—its eyes are on the top of its head. Better for counting at night, I guess.’

  Ani laughs. ‘Maybe I should read that book after all— I never . . . I never got round to it.’ If that’s where her daughter thinks Mac has gone, maybe it’s not for Ani to tell her she thinks it sounds dark and lonely. ‘When I think about where your father is, I think about a room at the very top of a house, with a wide view through a big window, and the most comfortable bed in the world. And he’s curled up in the bed. He’s comfy, and sleeping. Just sleeping.

  ‘He might wake up sometimes; you know, when you wake up somewhere that’s not your home, and it takes you a minute to recognise where you are. But he’s never awake long enough to wonder about any of that, although he can look out of the window and see the stars, the moon, think about the tides. Then he snuggles down and goes back to sleep. Waiting for the morning.’ She’s making it up, and she’s sure Bella knows. Mostly, if she’s honest, she doesn’t yet quite trust that Mac is dead; mostly she avoids thinking of any of this at all.

  Isabel leans back on the grass, recovers her starfish pose. ‘It’s lonelier, yours than mine; mine’s got electric light and conversation.’

  ‘Mine’s got dreams,’ says Ani defensively. ‘And there will be a morning—one day.’ When I get to wherever he is, she thinks. Even if I’m an old woman, breaking down the door. She stretches up herself, her fingers mimicking the starfish shape she and Isabel have cast on the grass. ‘We should start thinking about this Christmas lunch for Mrs May and everyone—setting the table, checking the pork.’ And she stands, holding a hand out to Isabel, who springs up like a jack-in-the-box.

  ‘What about all the men in the war, Mum?’

  ‘All which men in the war?’ Knowing perfectly well.

  ‘All the men—all the people—who died? Do you think there’s enough space for them all to have somewhere to go, or maybe even more than one place, like Dad, who’s got a bubble under the sea, now, and a bedroom with a view?’

  The woman whose son died when his plane tumbled into the sea, who imagined him floating on its wing, floating on the surface of the water, surfing a wave here or there, as if he was a young chap on holidays again. The woman whose husband died when the building he was in was bombed out of existence, who was sure he’d been blown all the way home by the blast, and was somewhere out in the garden, checking on the last plants he’d put in before he left, and leaving her messages about watering here, pruning there.

  ‘More than enough space, lovely,’ she says, keeping hold of Isabel’s hand as they walk from the bright yard to the cool, shaded house. ‘It’s probably like your kaleidoscope: you look at one piece of space, and every tiny twist or turn multiplies that into somewhere new—somewhere different. More than enough room for everyone’s version of everyone to fit in somewhere, to be doing the different things we all think they ought to be doing.’

  She pulls her daughter into another hug, noticing her tallness again: the evening shifts she works in the library, the nights Mrs May gives Isabel her tea, the nights Isabel’s asleep when Ani gets home. Sometimes Ani feels she’s lost her daughter as well as her husband. But then she pays her bills, or buys the growing girl a new dress, or sends a little money to her father.

  She has to trust that this is the right thing.

  Now, she hugs harder. ‘I miss you, Bell; I miss how things were.’ And then, quickly, against anything else that might be said, ‘But will you make the custard later, the way Mrs May’s been teaching you?’

  And as she irons out the tablecloth, rubs up the silver, chops the potatoes, rinses the tomatoes, she sees Isabel back in the yard, her kaleidoscope to her eye and the lens up at the sky, turning it by the smallest of increments, remaking the big blue space.

  Ani flicks the white linen across the table and the world disappears for a moment behind its movement. When she focuses again, she sees Mac’s book, the diving book, perched on the edge of the sideboard, as if it might have been there since she read it to him in the bath on the night of Isabel’s birthday. Perhaps Isabel’s been reading it; perhaps that’s what made her think about where Mac was. Ani pats its cover, but cautiously, as if some fanged fish might shoot out from between its pages, nipping and biting. Then she picks it up and it falls open, and she begins to read:

  I sat crouched with my mouth and nose wrapped in a handkerchief, and my forehead pressed close to the cold glass—that transparent bit of old earth which so sturdily held back nine tons of water from my face. There came to me at that instant a tremendous wave of emotion, a real appreciation of what was momentarily almost superhuman, cosmic, of the whole situation; our barge slowly rolling high overhead in the blazing sunlight,
like the merest chip in the midst of the ocean, the long cobweb of cable leading down through the spectrum to our lonely sphere where, sealed tight, two conscious human beings sat and peered into the abyssal darkness as we dangled in mid-water, isolated as a lost planet in outermost space.

  Ani slams the book shut. Cold and deep and dark and lonely, with that string, that fragile cobweb of string, the only connection.

  It is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs—it’s Jane Eyre, and it’s Mac’s voice, Mac’s voice saying the words for her memory—tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped.

  That cord of communion, that fragile cobweb, whatever it is that still connects her to Mackenzie Lachlan. I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped. She bows her head, patting at the side of her body, feeling the exaggerated landscape of her ribcage. She has to remember to eat.

  So long since she made a meal for anyone other than herself and Isabel—she’s forgotten how nervous it can make her, and the dead space before the first guest arrives when she’s sure the food will taste dreadful and no one will have anything to say, when she wishes, more than anything, that no one was coming, and is terrified, the next moment, that no one will. And then what would I do with all this food?