The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  There was something beautiful in his smile, he thinks as he jogs across the grass to his sister’s—it’s the first time he’s had a nice thought about a kid, he realises, since the war expelled him from his classrooms. But it’s replaced in an instant by the more beautiful idea of being held under the water, his limbs still. He kicks at a stone and wants to shout and cheer as it lands directly between two of Iris’s potted plants.

  ‘Is that you, Roy?’ she calls as he scuffles at the door.

  Who else? he thinks, calling, ‘Yes—I’ll just hang out my towel.’ She’s in the bathroom, the air thick with the competitive smells of eucalyptus oil, vinegar and methylated spirits.

  ‘You don’t want a wash, do you? I’m halfway through doing the bath—didn’t expect you until the end of the day.’ Kneeling on the lino, she’s hunched forward over the tub and scrubbing so hard he can see her muscles working through the fabric of her dress.

  ‘It’s a hot day for cleaning, Iris,’ he says. ‘Can I get you something cool to drink?’

  ‘Well there’s nothing else that wants doing today, so I thought I’d get on and do this. Didn’t expect you home until nightfall,’ she says again, and he nods in acknowledgement this time, giving her half a smile.

  ‘All the smoke out, it’s no weather for walking. And the pool’s full of kids on their holidays. Almost sconed by one of them, little bugger.’ He watches her arm drag the scrubbing brush back and forward, over and over. What would she say if he told her about the tranquility of drowning? What would she say if he told her the boy’s smile was beautiful? Then, ‘Any of that Christmas shortbread left? I could get you a piece, with a drink, if you like.’

  ‘There’s lemonade there.’ Iris leans back on her haunches. ‘A jug of it. But I’ll finish this first, you go on.’ They watch each other a moment, a strange staring contest while Roy tries to pick what his sister will say next. Something about lunch, or a job; safe bets both.

  But, ‘Frank Draper dropped a book in for you.’ Her hand wipes across her eyes, and fusses with the edges of her hair. ‘Kangaroo—I told him you’d had it already from the library and hadn’t made much headway. But he said you needed it until he could get you some Yeats.’

  Roy grimaces. ‘Bloody Frank.’ Every second time they saw each other, Frank was loaded up with mementoes of their dreams, their plans, as if an accretion of these might cajole Roy back into his vocation. Every other time, Frank’s mood hovered somewhere dark and bleak, his conversation snapped and icy, his observations weighed down with despair.

  Roy saw his friend on the same seesaw with Iris: there were days when Frank walked out with her and smiled at the smiles of the town, and days when he snapped at the very mention of her, and Roy knew he’d snap at her in person too. Just kiss her, he wanted to say. Just walk down here now and get this over. The man of action, the man of motion: that’s how it used to be with Frank. If anyone was hesitant, or reticent, Roy knows it’s himself.

  ‘Look, how hard can it be to start?’ Frank had blustered at the pub one afternoon. ‘One sentence, right now, top of your head, worst thing you saw: get it out—don’t think about it.’

  And I said, the way a man looked nothing like a man when he’d met a machine gun; the way no woman would meet your eyes when you were carrying one.

  ‘Okay, good—that’s a start; that’s a start.’ Frank had drained his beer in a gulp, signalling immediately for another. ‘Now the best thing—best or most beautiful. Top of your head. Come on.’

  The way the ocean glowed green some nights; the way the little boats used the light of the Milky Way, used its pathway, to navigate.

  ‘There you are—write that down. I reckon you’re on to something here, Roy. I reckon you’re cooking.’

  Even now, Roy knows, the scrap of paper on which he obediently wrote these ideas is folded neatly in the top drawer of his bedside table. He unfolds it every morning, and rereads it, waiting to see what will happen next.

  Now, in Iris’s kitchen, he opens the box of shortbread and breaks the last piece into two, reaching for a glass with his other hand. ‘I’m taking this around the side,’ he calls. ‘Want to keep an eye on the fire.’ He drops the shortbread into one pocket, Frank’s copy of Kangaroo into the other, settling himself against the wall beneath his bedroom window, where he can see the mountain to the west and the wide reach of the beach to the east.

  There are more flames now, licking at the scarp’s edge; you could never say aloud that it was exhilarating, thinks Roy, but it is, it is. He reaches in his pocket for a pen—there might be something in this; the anticipation, the terror, the threat of conflagration—and finds the paperback instead, watching as it falls open at a dog-eared page:

  Cripes, there’s nothing bucks you up sometimes like killing a man—nothing. You feel a perfect angel after it. When it comes over you, you know, there’s nothing else like it, I never knew, till the war. And I wouldn’t believe it then, not for many a while. But it’s there. Cripes, it’s there right enough. Having a woman’s something, isn’t it? But it’s a fleabite, nothing, compared to killing your man when your blood comes up.

  What is this? Roy rakes at his hair, at the air, at the mushy mess of the shortbread he spat onto the grass when he began to read these words—to feel them, to taste them. You feel a perfect angel: what the devil thing is that to say? Where’s Frank’s fancy-sounding psycho-neurosis taking them now?

  Roy stares at the page until the words blur into grey lines against the yellowing paper. You do bloody not feel like an angel, mate, and the last thing you think you can ever do again is trust yourself with anything as gentle as a woman. Something moves across the road, and Roy sees the boy from the pool padding along, a bucket swinging from his hand like the arc of a pendulum. All the nights Roy’s tried to swing himself to sleep with his watch; all the nights he’s watched the back and forth of its face. And they awoke the next day refreshed and able to carry on. That’s what the paper said.

  Bunkum.

  Turning his head from side to side, Roy’s gaze pans from the fire to the water and back across the landscape in between. How long before I find my deep and refreshing sleep? he wonders, his head jerking still as he sees her step out of the brightness to come along the beachfront: Ani Lachlan, her pale dress wet around the bottom and a lumpy newspaper parcel held awkwardly across her body.

  That’s why he hadn’t read Kangaroo when he borrowed it from her—all those lurking traps of violence and brutality when all he wanted was the scenery of it, this place. As for killing a man . . . Roy snorts. Frank Draper could hold those five hundred souls on the knife-edge of his conscience for as long as he liked, but it was nothing compared to seeing a man, and lining him up, and pulling a trigger, and watching him fall.

  From the top of the mountain, a single line of flame picks its way down through the trees, slower than Roy had expected, as if it is considering its every move. Yet even down here, the smoke is thicker for its incursion, stiffening the air and sharpening it somehow.

  You do not use a word like angel in a sentence like that. He tears at the offending page of the novel, ripping it out of its binding and screwing it into a ball to throw away.

  The word ‘angel’—he looks out through the infernal day, beyond the limitless sea—the word ‘angel’, the very idea of such a being: that belongs to someone like her. And Roy raises his arm to hail Ani—‘Hullo’—the word swallowed by the width of the road, the sound of the sea, the purposefulness of her stride. The look of her on Christmas afternoon, soft and gentle in her light, white dress, and smiling as if she’d just realised there was life in some place she’d thought otherwise desolate.

  And there it is, the beginning of his poem:

  Let this be her.

  A folding of the light

  And she stepped through, candescent messenger

  ‘Candescent messenger.’ He uncaps his pen and scrawls the phrase across the endpapers of Draper’s wretched offering.

  ‘Mrs
Lachlan,’ he calls again, but her head is down and she doesn’t turn.

  She looks, he thinks, like an angel in a lost world. Is that who she is—his muse? But he closes his eyes and sees her as she was on Christmas Day, and he knows there’s something more to it than inspiration.

  ‘Desirable,’ he whispers, ‘lost, and lonely, and desirable.’ It would be something, he thinks, to make her smile, and he lets himself imagine her, her hands out to receive a gift from him—a sheet of paper thick with words that she’s inspired. There’d be such light and joy in her face.

  If he’s going to be a poet, he’ll give her this one thing a poet can give; he will write a poem for her. No, better: he will make her a book full of beautiful verses and set these words— his words for her—as their climax, their culmination.

  He smoothes the paperback’s rough page, folding his first new sentences over and over in his mind until they are certain and secure, embedded in his imagination.

  ‘Let this be her, a folding of the light,’ he says again, and loudly, his gaze moving between the surreal red trickle of the bushfire and the last glimpse of a woman going home.

  29

  He wakes early, before dawn, but with no intention of going to the service. Anzac Day; the dreadful glory of that war that was going to end all wars. Not even for his sister will he pin on his medals and walk about in the smell of rosemary. No, Roy McKinnon is not for that sort of remembrance. He turns in his covers, feeling them twist tight around his legs, his body, until he almost panics.

  What’s wrong with you, man; what’s wrong with you? Shaking himself free, he stands to stretch by the window.

  In the next room, Iris is awake and dressing—she will go to the service. She will say, Someone should; it’s our duty.

  Let her go then, thinks Roy. She can do her own remembering. He watches through the window until the front door clicks, and she is hurrying away along the street. And let Frank be there, thinks Roy, waiting for my sister.

  He pulls on a jumper and trousers, and goes into the kitchen to make himself some toast. So rarely hungry, he must have dreamed good dreams to wake up and want to eat.

  And perhaps she was in them, he lets himself think, turning the bread as it browns on one side. Perhaps she was there. He glances up the hill, towards the street that runs along its crest. From Iris’s back door, he can glimpse the front of Ani Lachlan’s house. She will go to the service, he thinks. Ani Lachlan would care about those things. Not letting himself touch the idea that she might go for the chance of seeing him.

  The way he’s carried her, these three, four months since he found the first lines for that poem; the way he’s crafted her and shaped her, forming a suite of stanzas so right, so perfect, it almost takes his breath away. The poem’s final draft on a sheet in front of him, he lets his fingers rest gently against the lines of which he’s most proud:

  . . . her white dress,

  So light she might float clear,

  Were she not tethered by the limitless

  Surprise of being here.

  The limitless surprise: he sighs. It’s as if he’s been in the deepest and most intimate conversation with her—and it astonishes him, every time he sees her, to remember that she has no knowledge of it. Yet.

  On the table in his room, the thing he’s been making is finally finished—transcriptions of great and stirring poems by great and stirring writers, and his own new poem, right at the end. He’s typed them out on thick, creamy paper, reveling in the fake sound of industry coming from his Remington Rand. Not my words, he thinks he should say when his sister remarks on the busy clatter, but there’s something reassuring in being thought productive at last.

  The poems complete, he found some fine red silk thread in one of Iris’s sewing boxes—the remnant of long-abandoned embroidery—and stitched his pages together, binding them hard with two pieces of card covered in red. At school, he remembered, he always loved the presentation of his projects as much as composing the words that filled them, and as he sat cross-legged on the end of this narrow bed in his sister’s house, with his meticulous needlework, he was a kid again, all happiness and potential. So maybe this morning, he thinks, steeling himself. I could sneak it in while she’s away. The thought of her face, the thought of her smile—these daydreams have collapsed into the possible embarrassment of shame, or her displeasure, or of having offered something unwanted. He’s not reassured enough to face that, he thinks, flat.

  ‘And then what?’ he asks himself aloud. ‘What happens then?’ The unknowable thing. But he makes himself leave the house before he can change his mind again, is up the hill, through Ani’s gate, and around to the back door before the sun has cleared the horizon.

  Ani’s house is empty; he knows that immediately. She and Isabel are certainly not here. Very slowly, Roy eases the door open and steps inside. His heart is pounding, his hands damp against the rough, red linen of his gift.

  Into the lounge room, over to the mantelpiece; he is ready to shove it in anywhere and leave, when he stops, pauses, and takes in the volumes the shelf already holds. She spoke of this, the books she and Mac shared—she told him the story of unpacking them like a dowry, and putting them here. You’re a rude bugger to want to muscle in on that sort of memory, nodding at the authors, the titles. All the places she’s been through these pages, all the people she’s met. Where else would she have ended up, but in a library?

  Stepping back, he looks around the rest of the room. There’s an engraving of Edinburgh Castle over the fireplace, and another of a three-master on a high sea over the chiffonier. A pair of slippers, some pencils and a drawing sit abandoned on the floor—he reaches for the paper, admiring the likeness of the house he’s standing in to the one in the picture that Isabel has made. She’s a bright one, that one, he thinks, setting it back on the ground, and for the first time in almost a decade, he misses the bright girls he used to teach in tiny schools. He misses teaching them how to dream.

  He moves towards the hallway, noticing the way the light comes in through the stained-glass panels in the door—when Ani is here, it’s always propped open for the breeze. On the sideboard, a small white bowl holds four blown-glass Christmas ornaments—two red and two blue—so delicate, the lightest touch might shatter them. Beyond these, two photographs. The first is Mac, in a smart suit and tie—Roy is almost tempted to turn it face down. At what point is it appropriate to court a widow? he thinks, clinical. And who’s the appropriate person to do that courting? Not some sneak who breaks into her house, not some twit terrified of his own shadow, not some fellow who wants to swim out to the horizon and keep going, mate.

  He stares at the picture, remembering Mac’s size, his momentum, the way he strode along a street or ran along the football field. You, one of those men of motion; bet you never thought it would come to this. Bet you never thought I’d be the one alive, and standing here—as if Mac would have thought of him at all. Which seems a pity, somehow. He’d have liked Mac Lachlan as a friend.

  Because he did like the man, he thinks suddenly, and remembers all at once standing shivering in a cold predawn, talking with Mac about the mess of the world. Before the war—was it ’37, ’38? And what had Mac said? That he wouldn’t go, if it came to fighting; that it was nowt to do with him, and he’d stay here with Ani. And wouldn’t you, wouldn’t you, thinks Roy, as he turns to the second photograph, Ani and Isabel, taken by a street photographer in Sydney.

  That’s Martin Place, he thinks, smiling at the silly sunglasses, the silly smiles both are wearing. Must have been during the war: Isabel four years old or so.

  ‘Nice way to spend an afternoon while we were out saving the world,’ he says aloud, as shocked by the slam of his mood and the iciness that freezes around his voice as he is by the words’ presence in the still, quiet house. Makes me sound like Draper.

  Turning again, he sees the doorway to Ani’s bedroom, and stops. What the blazes are you doing here? What if she comes home? Take the book and get out
of here—give it to her yourself when you see her, you great fool—all this, as he mistakes a sound for footfall on the porch stairs and hurls himself back through the house, towards the back door.

  And stops, hearing only silence.

  All right, Roy, all right. Back at the mantelpiece, he slides the thin red book in between two paperbacks, and then turns and runs, tripping on the mat, leaving it dishevelled, half looking for her reflection in the corrugated surface of the kitchen cabinets as he skirts past—their plates and glasses rattling a little as he goes—and on, through the back door and through the gate before he has time to draw breath.

  The inverse of burglary, he thinks. And now, now what?

  He can’t hear for the sound of his heartbeat in his skull. He can’t stand still for shivering against the autumn’s chill. But he’s pleased with it, this thing he has made—the best of the world’s best poems, as he seems them, and the finest new thing of his own. Then, clear and complete, he remembers that autumn night, twelve years before, when he and Frank Draper huddled over a radio for news of a bombing in Spain. More than a thousand dead, they said—and how few that number sounds now. It was shocking, the way his head had pounded then with his own useless vitality. Women and children, going to market. And they’d stood and talked of it with Mac. He stops, breathes deeply, tries not to retch.

  From across the village, he hears the sound of a train, and then, high above, the purr of a plane’s engine—it’s all he can do not to dive under a hedge for cover.

  It doesn’t get any better, he thinks, making himself keep walking. It doesn’t get any easier, the being here, or the being.

  Twelve years since that bombing and the mood Frank had been in when they’d heard the news and walked home through the night. So dark, so bleak, so pessimistic.