The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  Her smile beams as the other girls scuff their way through the sand, trying to look casual as they pick up their bags and disperse.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Mr McKinnon. It’s the reading they hate, and I know big words too. Like floccinaucinihilipilification—I just learned that one; or honorificabilitudinitatibus—that’s in Shakespeare, you know. They think I’m saying I’m smarter than them.’

  ‘You probably are—smarter, I mean, not saying so.’ He squares the books into a single pile and slides them into her bag. ‘What were you doing down here?’

  Isabel takes the satchel from him, fastening its clips and placing it carefully onto the grass. ‘I come down after school sometimes—I’ve been practising tunnelling, and cartwheels. Mum’s at the library, you know, and Mrs May doesn’t have tea on till later. So I like to come down here and play. They usually leave me alone when we’re not at school.’

  ‘I suppose the daughter of a librarian couldn’t help but be a big reader,’ says Roy, squatting down in the sand beside her and looking out across the water. ‘Your mum must be very proud.’

  ‘I think she still misses Dad,’ says Isabel, and Roy blinks. He’s forgotten the leaps a child’s mind might make, and of course, for Ani, and perhaps her daughter too, everything must still come back to Mac.

  ‘She used to read all sorts of things,’ Isabel goes on, ‘and now it’s all romance and happy endings.’ She screws up her pretty face. ‘I suppose that’s okay, but it’s not what I’d want to write—’ And she blushes across the size of saying this, and to this man, of all people, who must know about these things.

  ‘Not another one.’ He feigns horror. ‘I don’t know if this village has room for the both of us—so you’re lucky I don’t do much writing these days. The stage is clear for you, Isabel Lachlan. You should give it a try.’

  Her blush deepens. ‘It feels dangerous to make jokes about it,’ she says quietly. ‘Did you make jokes about it? When you were little?’

  ‘Constantly,’ says Roy. ‘I still do.’ He’s forgotten the fake bonhomie of distracting a child—he loves it; he’s missed it; he could sit here for days. ‘Now these tunnels,’ he says, switching her attention again. ‘What’s their purpose? What are we making? Is it transportation you’re thinking, or defence?’ And before he knows it, he’s bent down and following her instructions for an intricate series of ramparts around her latest sand city, shovelling sand through his legs with the stance of a busy cartoon puppy.

  ‘I told Mum I was thinking about writing,’ says Isabel after a while, ‘but I didn’t know quite how to start. She said I might ask you about it. Would that be okay, if I did?’

  Roy straightens up, pulling his shoulders back and pushing his stomach forward. ‘I’m probably the worst person to ask,’ he says, serious. ‘I was almost five years between poems, can you believe it, and you know what got me started again in the end?’ She shakes her head and he pushes himself forward on the serendipity of the meeting, the bravery of seeing off her foes. ‘Your mother, Isabel, it was your mother. The first poem I wrote after the war, I wrote about her.’ His voice is quiet now, as if he’s forgotten he’s talking to anyone but himself.

  ‘Did you publish it?’

  ‘The pragmatic questions of youth.’ Roy smiles. ‘No, but I’m going to, I hope. I did leave a copy for her—but she mustn’t have found it. She never mentioned it, did she? A small present? A tribute from a poetic admirer?’ You can say anything to children—he’s forgotten that too—and they’ll sift out the gold from the dross.

  Isabel shakes her head. ‘She found a poem my dad wrote— he must’ve written it before he died. It’s so beautiful—maybe she’d let you read it. I guess all her attention for poetry has been taken up with that at the moment. That’s how it is,’ she says, stretching her shoulders, her stomach, in imitation of him, ‘with things to do with Dad.’

  The exquisite torture of infatuation: standing tall next to this young girl, Roy registers how foolish he must look with his shoulders back and his gut out, how foolish, when he’s no reason to be proud or sure. There’s a burning taste at the back of his throat and his stomach knots around unknowns—if Ani has mistaken his poem for one by Mac, and the gall of thinking a railwayman might make such a thing. It wants elegance, and talent, and craft to make a thing like that, he wants to shout, like a man discovering he’s been double-crossed.

  And beneath the bile and the spasms, there’s something else, the memory of Mac charging down a football field, powerful, broad and alive. Roy can see him as clearly as if he was bearing along the sand right now—she’s mine, McKinnon, mine to dream of, mine to know. He steps aside as if to dodge the apparition, surprised by the real, wet feel of the ocean’s water against his feet.

  He would run me down in a heartbeat, Roy thinks as the outer edges of Isabel’s metropolis is saturated by the sea, and weakens, and falls. Why not throw down a poem from the other side of death?

  But I’m alive, he wants to shout at Anikka Lachlan, or perhaps even at her daughter. I’m alive, I’m here, look at me.

  And then I could stamp, the way a ten-year-old girl might stamp. He laughs at himself, shaking his head. They taught me well, those kids I used to teach.

  The next wave surges across the sand, washing out one section of Roy’s ramparts, and he leaps to repair it as if it was the most pressing problem in his world. Well, either Mac did write a poem and Ani’s not found his, or she’s found it and taken it as a gift from someone else. Either way, she’ll know who made it soon enough. He’d only baulked twice before handing it over at the post office and seeing it off on the next mail train, bounding home with a palpable sense of relief as its vans disappeared from view. It’s beyond me now, and his editor would read it soon enough, Roy was sure, and print it after that; he was sure of that too. He knew its worth.

  The magazine would come; Ani would read its words. And then—well, and then.

  He scoops the sand and packs it hard, drizzling wetness like mortar along the top to hold it firm. ‘This is how you can reinforce buildings,’ he says. ‘But I’m sure you know this already, a practised sand architect like yourself.’

  Because her citadel has reached the base of the pumphouse, where she pokes the triumphant banner of a Norfolk Pine’s needle, and executes three cartwheels back to Roy.

  ‘Did you teach your mum to cartwheel, or did she teach you?’ he asks, applauding.

  ‘Cartwheel? My mum can’t cartwheel.’

  Roy smiles, tries a cartwheel himself, and lands in a heap on the sand. ‘I saw her—I saw you both one morning. I have to say, you made it look quite easy.’ He tries again, and fails, laughing.

  ‘I think that’s the only time she tried—it was a rare sighting, Mr McKinnon, of a rare species: the cartwheeling Anikka Lachlan.’ Her hands curled like the twin tubes of binoculars, she’s scouting the landscape for this beast when another wave comes, washing at her feet and demolishing another section of her city wall. She lets out the wail of a much younger child.

  ‘Come on,’ says Roy, ‘we can triumph over this. We just have to make it bigger and stronger,’ ignoring the logistics of an incoming tide.

  He watches her from the corner of his eye, the way she scoops the sand up so quickly, marking out ramparts and skyscrapers while he beavers away at small things—reinforcements, buttresses—and makes much less progress. She’s set on the task, he can see that, while his own attention wanders now and then, registering the yellow flowers that have bloomed among the grasses that fold down towards the sand, and the satisfying crunch this undergrowth makes under the pressure of his feet as he climbs in among the greenery, picks some of the pretty blossoms, and carries them back to fashion a garden along the inside of one of the citadel’s smooth, sandy walls.

  Down at the waterline, he retrieves tiny shells and tendrils of seaweed, planting them here and there across Isabel’s expanding complex. He picks at the edge of the cliff face itself, astonished at how easil
y the fine pink sandstone becomes its original grains. Up above him, towards the top of the headland, he can see narrow bands of siltstone, and coal above that, striping the cliff like a licorice allsort. He’s never noticed the delicacy of all these colours and their transitions before, and he wonders how he might thank Isabel for making him pause here this afternoon and look more closely at this place.

  ‘Look how much you’ve built up,’ he calls then, astonished at how far her work stretches north along the beach. ‘What happens at the end of the day? Do you leave it for the tide, or jump it down yourself?’ He’d do that, he thinks, with the satisfaction of destroying something you’d laboured so hard to make.

  She’s working in the fold where the beach meets the rest of the continent as he speaks, and Roy watches as she turns towards his voice, glancing west towards the setting sun and out, hasty, towards the encroaching tide. Her hair, he thinks, lights up just like her mother’s.

  ‘What was it about, your dad’s poem?’ he says, not wanting to let go of the girl or this sweetly cross-purposed conversation. ‘Did you read it, did you say?’

  ‘It said Mum was like an angel,’ says Isabel softly, ‘and it was lovely, really lovely.’ She sits back, digging her hands in her pockets. ‘What about yours? What did yours say?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny, you know,’ says Roy as the sun dips down behind the edge of the scarp, ‘but I think mine was about that too.’ Watching her closely, as if he might see Ani’s own reaction through her child’s.

  ‘Wowee,’ says Isabel, softer still. ‘I wonder if someone’ll write me a poem like that one day.’

  ‘If you’re a writer, you can write your own,’ says Roy, matter-of-fact. ‘Takes all the bother out of having to rely on another person.’

  She considers this, considers him, considers the rim of light where the sun has disappeared behind the mountain— and suddenly looks at her watch.

  ‘I have to go, Mr McKinnon,’ she says, twisting the face of her watch towards him—although whether she means for him to admire it or read its time, he’s not sure. ‘My teatime in ten minutes. Oh, do you like this watch? It was my dad’s, you know. But I can wear it now, to be in charge of wherever I have to be.’

  He catches her wrist and does good work admiring the timepiece. ‘Your dad would be proud you’re in charge,’ he says, brushing the sand from the watch’s webbed band. ‘It was nice to see you, Isabel Lachlan, and don’t worry about those girls. They’ll grow out of their jealousy and you’ll leave them far behind.’ He hopes she can wait that long.

  ‘Thanks for the help with my sandwork,’ she says, shouldering her bag and turning to go.

  ‘And listen,’ Roy calls after her, casual, and diminishing. ‘Can you ask your mother if she did find my poem? It’s no trouble if she didn’t—it’s bound to be published pretty soon. She can see what she thinks of it then.’ Buoyed by the unexpected afternoon.

  Isabel nods, settles her satchel, and heads up the hill. But halfway home, she sees a small brown rabbit ambling along the verge, stopping and nibbling, its ears and paws as winning as a picture-book drawing. She crouches for a while—the time, the message, the dinner all forgotten—picking nasturtium leaves and bright-green grass stems, and holding them out to it as snacks.

  When she finally reaches Mrs May’s table, the rabbit is all she talks about, wondering where it came from and whether it needs a home. And by the time she sees her mother, later that night and home late from the library, Isabel is almost asleep and even the rabbit is almost lost.

  ‘Mum? Do you think we could get a bunny?’ Her words slur towards each other, their consonants blurring. ‘There was one near the beach, and Mr McKinnon . . .’

  ‘Sshh now, Bella, we can talk about it in the morning.’

  ‘But Mr McKinnon said, he said . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know Mr McKinnon was anything to do with rabbits,’ says Ani gently, smoothing her daughter’s hair, soothing her into sleep, and wiping the thought of the poet from anything that might be remembered in the next, new tomorrow.

  While Roy, heading home, finds Iris sitting on her own front doorstep, her cheeks flushed and her smile wide.

  ‘Hullo, dear. Did you leave your key? I was just over at the beach—you could have found me . . .’

  ‘I’ve just proposed to Dr Frank Draper,’ she says, leaning back on her hands and looking triumphant. ‘I was so sick of it, I just asked him. The silly bugger, of course he said yes.’

  37

  Rounding the street, Mac looked up and saw the tail of a shooting star—extraordinary—and stopped. If Ani were with him, she’d make him make a wish. He slung his bag over his shoulder and breathed in the crisp night air. He loved these nocturnal starts, loved walking through the village as everyone else lay inside, warm and sleeping—it was like being able to walk through their dreams. Occasionally he’d hear a dog bark, or a baby cry; occasionally a light would come on as he passed by a house, and he’d wonder if it was his footfall its inhabitant had heard.

  Tread softly, he thinks now as he passes along a street of darkened windows, because you tread on my dreams. That’s Yeats, that is: Ani had read it to him in the evening—and you couldn’t get better than that. His steps lengthened, crunching the gravel as he ran through Yeats’s words:

  Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

  Enwrought with the golden and silver light,

  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

  Of night and light and half-light,

  I would spread the cloths under your feet

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams . . .

  Then came another crunch, and another, out of time, and Mac peered into the darkness to see the young doctor— Draper—and Iris McKinnon’s brother, Roy.

  ‘Good evening, to you, gentlemen—or is it good morning? I’m never quite sure at this time.’ He enjoyed their start; Roy McKinnon almost jumped. ‘And where might you be bound at such an hour?’ As if he had the perfect right to interrogate anyone he encountered on his way.

  ‘Good morning to you.’ It was the doctor who spoke. ‘A fine morning for a walk. A fine morning to feel the air around you.’ His voice was tight, his face flushed—Mac wondered if the two of them had been up somewhere drinking.

  Roy McKinnon patted his friend’s arm, and then held out his hand to shake Mac’s. ‘Don’t mind Frank,’ he said. ‘We’ve just been listening to the latest news from Spain—some terrible bombing raid—they’re saying there might be thousands dead, and thousands of children orphaned too.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s no news to greet a man with on a fine night like this; I’m sorry.’

  ‘A marketplace, man, they bombed a marketplace. Are they safe in their beds’—the doctor grabbed at Mac’s arm, clutching it tight—‘the people you love? Do you have a wife? Or children?’

  Mac stepped away from the man’s fingers, let his own hand rest on the doctor’s shoulder. The flush, the tight breathing: he was just like Ani when she tried to take in too much of the world’s news. ‘I’ve been following the stories, Doctor. It doesn’t bode well for the world, not at all.’ And he watched how the doctor’s hands shook as he took a cigarette from the packet in his pocket, how the flame of the match quivered in the darkness.

  Silence then, and then a long breath made of smoke. The doctor held the packet out to Mac, to Roy McKinnon, shaking his own head as each of them refused. ‘And what can you do, then, what can you do?’

  Mac tipped his head back, looking up at the stars and the wisps of cloud that obscured slices of the constellations here and there. There was the Southern Cross; there was the Milky Way running up from the south towards the high dark line the mountain made to the west. ‘My wife is at home, asleep, yes, and we’re not yet lucky enough to have a child.’ He shrugged. ‘That world is a long way away, and I hope if it comes close, I can keep my wife safe from it
—and any children too.’

  ‘As every father in Europe has thought before you.’

  The tip of the doctor’s cigarette flared bright as he inhaled; Mac stared as its colour flickered. There was something hypnotic about these wee licks of fire people carried around with them, but then, he was like that with any flame, always drifting a little closer than he should. It scared the life out of Ani when he had to work a spell near the engines’ fireboxes, he knew, as if she feared he’d be sucked in and immolated in one random rush.

  ‘Every father everywhere, I suppose.’ Frank Draper threw the cigarette down on the ground, stamping at it impatiently. ‘I want a train that goes far enough and fast enough to take me away from stories like this—and I know that there’ll only be more and more of them to come. A pessimist, my friend here calls me a pessimist. But I’m a doctor, a man of rationality and investigation. And I say this is what we men do best—we fight, we kill, and we use our best imagination to find newer ways of doing it.’

  ‘Come away, Frank,’ said Roy McKinnon. ‘We’re keeping this man from his business—come away.’

  But they stood there, the three of them, like the fixed points of some perpetual triangle. An owl called, and another answered, and in the next lull Mac heard the turn of the waves, sneaking along streets in which they usually kept their silence. ‘The oceans and the skies,’ he said, ‘and the sun coming up each new day. That’s all there is, I think. That’s what it matters to think on, not the news and the wars and the dying and the loss. It’s not a bad sort of insurance.’

  The doctor laughed, and clapped Mac’s shoulder hard. ‘And I thought Roy here was the poet—didn’t know this place had managed to infect two of you.’ He pulled his coat around him, fastening another of its buttons. ‘All right then, let’s get on. I could use a drink to settle me down—a dram of whisky.’ He tried to mimic Mac’s accent, and laughed again. ‘You’d go, wouldn’t you, if there was some mad call to fight?’