The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  When Alf had finished, Doyle stared at the ground for a long while, the smoke twisting above the forgotten stub of his cigarette. To Alf, his silence seemed to open a gulf between them, which deepened with each second: he was sure his friendship with the organizer had just ended.

  “I wish you’d told me about this before,” Doyle said finally. He squinted up at Alf, whose back was to the sun. “So what do you want to do?”

  Alf looked towards his house. In Joe’s bedroom window, he could see the small, pale moon of Margaret’s face, the bruise barely visible at this distance, watching him. She still had not spoken to him, and yet there was some quality of expectation in her look.

  “I’ll quit if you want,” he said. His voice a dry, foreign thing. He looked at his own shadow on the sand before him. “But what I want — is to go on with the union. If the union will still have me.”

  Doyle got up heavily, paced. Snapped away his butt. Swung his thick, scabbed arm at a scrub willow. He turned back to Alf.

  “All right, mate,” he said. “I think we’ll be all right. Everybody knows you were fired unfairly. They won’t believe Ford’s stories — or very few of them will. We’ll just keep on, steady as she goes —”

  Alf nodded. The sun beat on the sand, on the stunted bushes, on Malachi Doyle’s red face, on the back of his neck. He stood by the hushing river, his eyes half-closed, aware of nothing but its heat.

  52

  PENNY RODE HER BICYCLE up West. Near the bridge, several girls were skipping double dutch: the two long ropes turning against each other like the beaters in her mother’s Mixmaster, slapping the road under Ginny Lamport, who in Penny’s opinion was the best skipper on the Island, her ponytail bouncing, her white socks jogging up and down, faster and faster, as the ropes snicked under her. The other girls, the turners and the watchers, sang out in saucy voices:

  One Two Three A-Laura

  Four Five Six A-Laura

  Seven Eight Nine A-Laura

  Ten A-Laura Secord!

  Ginny ran out through the speeding ropes and another girl ran in. Seeing Penny go by, Ginny, her face flushed, called out for her to join them.

  “Can’t,” Penny said and kept riding. Pedalling off the Island and up West — it was pretty much on the level all the way to Bannerman’s hosiery mill — she could hear the girls’ voices crying out behind her: “First comes love, Then comes marriage, Then comes Linda with a baby carriage!” At the hill, she stood up in the heavy old bike with the balloon tires and wicker basket — it had once belonged to her babysitter, Joyce French — and managed to ride halfway up until she finally had to get off and push. Far below, to her left, the river glittered through the trees that crowded up the steep bank to the road. She was not quite sure where the path was — it had been at least a year since her father had showed it to her — and when she turned off the road, hiding her bike below the guardrail, and started down the narrow slot in the weeds, she still wasn’t sure she had the right place. But she soon came to the clearing. It was shielded from the road above by trees, and looked out through a gap in the trees below to the water. Yes, there was the weedy hump, the sticking-out bits of old boards and a crooked window-frame with slivers of glass hanging in it — the remains of Johnny North’s shack. She was here because of a dream. She had been lying somewhere, unable to get up, for the heaviness of her body, lying in misery, as if she had been abandoned by everyone, and cold, for she had no clothes on. But a man had rescued her — Johnny North. He was wearing a black coat and he was young. His hair was really black, not stained with shoe polish. He had smiled down at her with his broken teeth — she had not been frightened — then scooped her up, putting her right on his shoulders. Suddenly, Johnny North had got big, so big he had turned into a giant. And she was so high she had been able to see the whole world as he walked over it — the countries, the mountains, the islands dotting the silver oceans like stepping stones.

  She looked around a bit nervously, then began to remove her clothes, putting them on a flat rock: her sleeveless T-shirt, her red leather sandals, her shorts with her package of Arrowroots in the pocket, her underpants with their blue Bannerman’s label. When a car passed on the road above, she looked around wildly for a hiding place. But she knew she had to do this, the idea had been with her ever since she’d woken up. She had to do it, though she couldn’t have said why. She stood straight and closed her eyes and felt the air on her bare body. When a fly landed on her arm, she brushed it off. “I’m here,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure whom she was talking to, the trees or Johnny North or the river rushing over its dam or the sloping fields of Wiley’s farm or someone who was all of those things, and more. “It’s me, Penny.” She breathed in the presences. She could feel them drawing close, touching her with their fingers of air, drawing faint perfumes by her nose, opening the valley —

  But there, that darned fly was back. She opened one eye and glared at it.

  53

  THEY LAY ON HER BED, kissing and talking. Slipping his hand under her blouse, Joe cupped her small breast, under the soft fabric of her bra. Hooking his thumb under the bra’s edge, he began to peel it up.

  He was acting with a playful casualness. But he was tense.

  “I don’t have much feeling in my breasts,” Anna told him.

  She was watching him a little distantly: those green eyes with their irrepressible spark of humour. On her cheek was the birthmark. Up close, it revealed its subtlety, like a burn of many colours: the white, the tinges of pink, blending into tan. He had caressed it and examined it and kissed it, this badge of her uniqueness.

  As his hand closed on her breast, he was aware that her nipple was not standing up. He squeezed, stroked. Finally he lifted her blouse. Her nipples were extraordinarily pink, like a kitten’s tongue. He licked, sucked. The little buttons of pink flesh remained flush with their aureoles.

  She pushed at his head.

  “I really don’t enjoy that.”

  “I’m sorry, I just thought —”

  “That you, my Prince Charming, would succeed where all others have failed.” She touched his hair affectionately, but he was chagrined. He didn’t like to be reminded there had been others. What had she done with these others, that was the question. He’d assumed they would sleep together, as he and Liz had slept together: had assumed that Anna Macrimmon was at least that experienced, but for two weeks now they had necked and petted only. He wondered if Brad had got any farther — Brad, who these days was acting as if he, Joe, didn’t exist (except, that is, for a floor-hockey game when Brad had thrown a vicious elbow Joe had barely managed to slip). He wondered about the handsome man with the swept-back blond hair, so clearly older than she, whose arm cradled her possessively in the boat, in the gold-framed photo facing them even now on the back of her desk. “A friend,” she had said, with a casualness that told him nothing.

  She was fussing, almost maternally, at his hair. She had not said she loved him. Twice now he’d told her he loved her — and he did, with a feverish certainty unlike anything he’d experienced — but it seemed wrong to press her for the same avowal. There was something in her he was a little afraid of. More than anyone he’d known, she seemed provisional in her presence. I will stay here if, her presence seemed to say, but there was no telling what came after that “if.”

  “Are you a virgin?” he said. The light went out in her eyes and he feared he had just committed the act that would make her disappear. The atmosphere around her was charged with invisible sanctions.

  “No,” she said, looking at him frankly.

  “Then why can’t we —”

  He burned red, not at the sexual innuendo, but that he was exposing his own eagerness, which seemed clumsy to him, a failure to appreciate some subtlety.

  “What — do it?”

  “Ya, why don’t we do it?” he said, catching her tone of mock coarseness. “Don’t you want to do it? I mean, what did those other guys have that I —”

  She rolled s
wiftly from the bed, went to her dresser, picked up a brush, and stood dragging it fiercely through her hair at the window. The late-afternoon sun made the flying wisps shine.

  “Anna?”

  It was the first time she had reacted so sharply towards him. She turned to him.

  “Don’t ever refer to other guys,” she told him. “I’m not a highway!”

  “I didn’t mean that!”

  “Then don’t imply it!”

  “Anna, I love you —”

  “That’s no excuse,” she said, really angry now. He sat up in a kind of shock. “You can’t just say ‘I love you’ every time you get yourself into trouble, like it was some kind of abracadabra to fly you out of there. I won’t have it!”

  “No,” he said bleakly. He was still not sure what he’d done wrong.

  “Love is the biggest alibi in the world,” she said.

  He stared at her and she sighed, letting the hand with the brush fall to her side. Her blouse hung out over her skirt.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said.

  “You weren’t meant to.”

  She came to the bed and sat facing him.

  “I just want to go slowly. Is that all right?”

  “Sure it is. I’m sorry.” He was thinking of what Liz had told him. Anna can’t love. It was a man.

  A man, not a boy like you.

  “You told me once you’d had a bad time,” he said. Her look darkened. “Does that have anything to do with wanting to go slowly?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Maybe one day you’ll be able to tell me,” he said.

  He was touching the back of her hand, with its two silver rings. Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed him, more openly, softly, than she had before. He resisted the desire to pull her down with him. He was willing to be a patient suitor. Unlike Sandy or Liz, Anna Macrimmon inspired him with a hunger to be better than he was.

  He ate supper with her family in the backyard, at a small table her mother had covered with a white cloth. They were under a large maple tree, where the bare earth was littered with the chains of greeny-yellow seeds that fell from the tree, almost caterpillarlike, sometimes into their plates of stew, even into the glasses of red wine Andrew Macrimmon kept refilling with a slightly wicked insistence as if determined to get them all drunk. Anna’s father was a slim, fair-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses through which small, intelligent eyes the same colour as hers — though not the same feline shape — peered a little sadly. He was near-sighted and a bit stooped (his posture seemed to Joe to go with his position as senior accountant at Bannerman’s; he imagined him slaving over a tall, old-fashioned desk like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol), but he also had a robust laugh that subsided to a silent, up-and-down shaking of his body. Joe felt that Andrew Macrimmon had to know about his father’s firing, his work with the union, and almost certainly disapproved. But if he did, thankfully he kept his opinions to himself.

  Anna’s mother, Estelle, sat very erect in her chair, her plump face held a little up in pride, as if conscious of some higher standard of behaviour, some Old World noblesse that was under constant siege. Joe was reminded of his mother, who carried her Englishness like a badge of honour. But there was something frantic about Estelle: he saw it in the way her hair strayed from her untidy bun, and in the restlessness of her square hands, which kept touching things on the table as if to reassure herself of their proper placement, or perhaps of their very reality. She spoke English with the same enthusiastic articulation as French, so that her conversation was rich and dramatic if sometimes incomprehensible.

  Joe liked her and felt a gallant urge to support her; he imagined she must feel out of place in Canada. He tried out his poor French on her, which set her smiling with pleasure even as she winced at his pronunciation. He wanted desperately to be a success with her and her husband, not just for Anna’s sake, but to make himself a place within the family, which seemed so much more desirable than his own. His father’s attack on his mother had set a cold wind prowling through the house on the Island. He wanted to escape it, wanted to escape the tawdriness that always seeps in after violence: now, every imperfection of his home life — the worn kitchen linoleum, his father’s guilty, dishevelled presence — seemed part of a morass that threatened to swallow him. Here, at the table under the tree, was another world.

  But his escape was problematic. As he was trying to tell a story, in French, he watched Estelle’s face grow hard. Thinking he’d made some terrible gaffe, he rushed his telling, then fell silent. A train was passing — the main line connecting Toronto and Windsor ran in the hillside, just below the back fences of the houses along the south side of Banting — and for a few minutes it became nearly impossible to hear anybody speak as the cars throbbed and clattered by, out of sight below the fenced edge of the yard. A stink of oil and heat crept under the maple tree. Estelle picked solemnly at her food. A deep unease had spread around the table. Joe felt he was glimpsing the outskirts of some ongoing family crisis. There was a tension, as if Anna and her father were half-expecting some outburst from Estelle. Her ears, below her untidy nest of hair, had grown bright pink.

  When the clattering and rumbling finally grew distant, under the retreating wail of the diesel, Anna began to chat volubly about some restaurant in France. But Estelle kept under her cloud. She scowled and picked at her food and generally gave the impression, for all her dignity, of a sulking child.

  Suddenly interrupting her daughter, she turned to Joe.

  “This is your last year at the school?”

  “Oui —”

  “Et l’année prochaine? L’université?”

  “Oui — l’université de Toronto. Je vais étudier l’histoire.”

  “Ah bon!” Estelle spoke rapidly in French, and a bit irritably, to Anna. Joe hardly caught a word. He did, however, recognize the word “Sorbonne.” It was where Anna planned to go, in the fall. He had glimpsed a letter on her desk, bearing the rich purple of a French stamp, with the Sorbonne, Paris, as its return address. He’d tried to persuade her to go to Toronto with him, but without actually contradicting him, she had seemed amused, at best, by the very idea. She was planning to leave in August. Already — and it was only May — he was dreading the end of the summer.

  Anna bowed her head, under her mother’s scolding. She shook her head, and smiled with closed lips in a way that suggested she was making a familiar refusal, in a state of bland tolerance. But she was upset, he could see: her arms were moving, where they disappeared out of sight below the edge of the table. He supposed she was tearing at her hangnails.

  Andrew was murmuring to his wife in French, placatingly.

  Estelle looked haughtily around at their empty plates and asked Joe, with great formality, ignoring the others, if he would like dessert.

  After supper they escaped for a walk. Down Banting, the rich, low light of the spring evening infiltrated the deep crevasses in the bark of ancient maples, making them glow like golden cork. She had shown him a special way of holding hands, two fingers interlocked in an unusual way, and they fell into this manner now. To him it was a secret language, the pledging of a pledge. It established a claim on the future.

  Her hand was fine-boned and light in his. She seemed a creature of lightness. She walked with her mother’s erectness, her head held up and a little back.

  “Mama’s not very happy. I guess you saw that.”

  “I thought she was ticked off at something I said.”

  “No, every time a train passes, she’s reminded of where she is. She has no friends here. She doesn’t understand the way of life. She thinks people here are crude, the life here is crude. It’s all about hurry, and money, she says, and — a lack of pleasure in things. She’d go back to France tomorrow, if she could.”

  “Is that what she was saying to you?” He felt included in her mother’s criticism.

  Another train was rumbling behind the houses, sounding its blatant horn. Her hand slipped his.

/>   “She likes you,” she said. “She was telling me I should go to Toronto with you.”

  “A wise woman!”

  “An angry woman,” she said. “She talks against herself. It’s like there’s a splinter in her, she has to push it in deeper. I’m just glad it wasn’t worse.”

  “You mean she doesn’t really want you to go to Toronto?”

  “I don’t think she knows. But she likes you, she really does. It’s wonderful the way you spoke French to her.

  “Let’s go down here,” she said suddenly, pulling him to the right.

  The sidewalk on Peter gave way to packed earth thick with spruce needles. They passed an old mansion, gloomy behind its wall of dark green, and came to the black iron rail bridge. It rose a little in the middle, and from this summit they looked to the west. The tracks gleamed in their great arc, rounding towards the Junction, where an old water tower, like a block on legs, stood silhouetted against the sunset. To the left, from the depth of the valley, thrust the mansard roof of Bannerman’s hosiery mill, with its dormer windows. “Like a château,” she said. That it reminded her of France both pleased and saddened him. Sometimes she seemed to be travelling away from him and coming closer, both at once.

  Beyond lay the sloping fields of Wiley’s farm, fringed with darkening woods that hid the bend of the Attawan as it made its way into town. A huge, molten sun had settled on the horizon.

  “Sometimes I wish I was a painter,” she said, leaning forward at the rail. “I’d paint this. Though I’d never get it. No artist ever gets anything, really. It kind of makes you ill — the failure to get anything.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “ ‘The edge of terror we’re just able to bear.’ ”