The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘What you been doing?’ It was a companionable enquiry, not a nosy one, and Spencer took it as such.

  ‘Upstairs reading.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Yes.’ Spencer weighed up how much to elaborate. ‘By that writer I met years ago up at Buck’s, remember?’

  ‘I do,’ Mack nodded, adding disapprovingly: ‘Did away with himself a year or two ago.’

  ‘He was okay. He can really write.’ There was a pause. Mack took a mug from the shelf and the coffee pot from the range.

  ‘Want one?’

  ‘No, thanks. I think I might go walk for a while.’

  ‘You do that. Moon’s a sight to see.’

  Mack went through to join Caroline, and Spencer left him to tell his mother where he’d gone. He let himself out of the back door and walked quickly across the yard and up the out-of-town road until the surface grew rough and he was out of range of the lights.

  Now he slowed down, and breathed deep. His footsteps were like a steady whispered heartbeat. The moon seemed even bigger and brighter as he left the town behind, a giant benign face gazing down on him. The spaces opened out on either side, a pale nighttime sea of grey grass. Here and there in the middle distance he could make out the dark shapes of longhorn cattle like ships becalmed on its surface. Further on a startled horse stood near a fence, its ears acutely pricked, watching him. Half a mile beyond that two deer crossed the road in front of him side by side, quite leisurely, seeming to float, their slender legs wavering beneath them in the moonlight like waterweed. Once or twice a brisk trundle of movement at the side of the road advertised a racoon or a skunk, its snuffly business interrupted.

  He was reminded again of the littleness of Moose Draw, set down at the foot of the mountains as if the doughty pioneers had looked up, marvelled, and gasped: ‘That’ll do’. He remembered how in England, even in the blackout, you could cycle from one village to the next and be able to see the one you’d left and the one you were going to, even if it was only the church spire. Here, one mile from town, you could smell the forest, and the rock, and the icy tumbling rivers of the mountain fastness to the west, and sense the awesome empty roll of the open country to the east. Miles and miles of miles, distances that were both terrifying and protective. It may have been called America, but it was just land, brute nature, massive and enduring. No wonder they saluted the flag and declared their Oath of Allegiance over and over – what lay between sea and shining sea was way beyond what any puny human colonists could call theirs. It was impossible to imagine it threatened and beleaguered like England. Surely it would just twitch its huge hide and shake off intruders like a fly . . .

  These thoughts drifted around in his head at first randomly and then starting to form a pattern. It pleased him, he began to make more deliberate comparisons and to search his brain for clearer ways of expressing them. He walked steadily for more than an hour, and only turned back when he felt the bite of cold on his face and hands.

  By the time his footsteps were once more silenced by tarmac, and the little lights of Moose Draw turned the shadows a sullen and secretive black, he was almost lightheaded, buoyed up by a balloon of happiness and hope.

  It was more difficult than he thought, but not for the reasons he’d imagined. Spencer knew what he wanted to say and pretty much how he wanted to say it, but when he sat down to write he felt slightly foolish. What gave him the right to attempt this? Did the desire to put something down on paper in itself make one a writer? And if not, when exactly did one become one? He kept catching a mental glimpse of himself and it made him wince with selfconsciousness – who did he think he was?

  For this reason he kept his new ambition a secret. He continued to work for Mack and, it must be said, with a rather better grace for having his own small project in the background. The seasons were on his side, for with the turn of the year there were even fewer mechanics’ jobs. His lack of sociability outside of work and mealtimes seemed not to arouse any curiosity in Mack, but he was aware of his mother watching him, she knew him too well. The last thing he wanted was for her to ask him about it. Perversely, the fact that she would understand, approve and be interested, was what put him off. If this thing wasn’t exclusively his then it was nothing. Once he talked about it to someone else, especially someone like his mother who might with the very best of intentions give advice or encouragement or have suggestions to make, he’d be lost. He was wary of her English sensibility, her imagination and her strangely secretive heart. He didn’t want a repeat of that emotional encounter in his room, didn’t want her feelings, whatever they were, to spill over and cloud his own.

  He decided that the only way to do this was to be absolutely firm and clear. However curious Caroline was he knew she would never breach his privacy if it was obvious that was what he wanted. So there would be no doors left ajar, no half-truths, no invitations for interruption. When dinner was cleared away he said goodnight to them both and went upstairs, closing the door firmly and audibly behind him.

  Then came the infinitely harder challenge of getting the thing written. Whenever he made a start and read it over it seemed to him pompous and sententious. How did a writer get to sound so authoritative, so aware of an audience, and yet remain himself? How could he write as he wanted to and still be Spencer McColl? His thoughts and ideas seemed to be diminished rather than burnished by the process of writing, to lose their buoyancy and become clunking and pedestrian. He knew it wasn’t their fault, they were good ideas: it was his, because he couldn’t write.

  Inspiration, when it came, was from an unlikely source. After a week of evenings that began in a ferment of hope and ended in a dry rustle of disappointment he took off on the Saturday for a drink in town.

  He went to O’Connell’s Bar, off the main street on the corner of Oaksey and Davenport. The identity of the eponymous Irishman was lost to memory, it he’d ever existed, but the bar was big and cheery and, since the war was no longer a solidly male preserve. As well as Dec the barman there were now Sandy and Lucille, coiffed and corseted to kill, who served drinks with ferocious speed and dexterity and who (it was rumoured, and Spencer wouldn’t have cared to test the proposition) could deal equally effectively with any trouble.

  He bought a beer and a chaser and sat at the end of the bar furthest from the door. The juke box was playing something twangy and sentimental and one or two couples were dancing. The way they danced reminded him again how far he was from England. In Church Norton the band on the base had played Glen Miller and the local girls had quickstepped and jived and jitterbugged like New Yorkers. Here in O’Connell’s the couples swung and swivelled to a different beat, cowboy dancing, something that no matter what the rhythm seemed to combine the lilt of a waltz with the stamp of a square dance. It was as distinctive as a native language, something out of the ground and in the blood, a western vocabulary that the dancers had learned without trying. Spencer liked it a lot. He had never been a great dancer, had always been glad of the crowded dance floors in London that meant everything was reduced to a rhythmic shuffle. These men clasped their partners tight with a brawny confidence, and the women scarcely needed to be led anyway, even the biggest of them stepped and twirled like soubrettes. He envied the dancers their easy self-assurance.

  ‘Spencer? Spencer McColl?’

  A big, heavy, dark guy stood there, grinning expectantly. Spencer didn’t for a moment recognise him, but the red-haired woman with him was familiar. He slipped off his stool and extended his hand, praying for a clue.

  ‘Hey . . . How you doin’?’

  ‘Remember Minna?’

  ‘Sine I do, who could forget?’

  ‘Spencer. Good to see you again.’

  ‘We’re married now.’

  ‘Well, congratulations.’

  She was less changed, still pretty and sassy. He shook her hand and that reminded him that of course this was Bobby Forrest. Bobby the jock, the stud, the most envied boy in Moose Draw, now grown solid and unremarkab
le.

  Keen to show he remembered. Spencer said heartily. ‘Bobby, Minna – buy you a drink?’

  ‘Uh-uh!’ Bobby held up his hands. ‘I saw you first, what’s yours?’

  The bar was filling up. Minna hoisted herself on to the spare stool next to Spencer, flashing trim little legs in peep-toe shoes, and Bobby rested his bulk on the bar in between. Spencer had to lean round him to offer her a cigarette, and then again to light it, but she didn’t seem put out at being sidelined. While Bobby filled in Spencer about the refrigerator business, she simply smiled and struck up a conversation with the guy on the other side, who must have reckoned his luck was in. Minna was a prom-queen kind of girl, confident, in command, not motherly like Trudel. Even before she was Mrs Forrest you just kind of knew that she didn’t spread it about: her bouncy little body was hers to do as she liked with and she might or might not bestow its favours on other people. She saw sex, he sensed, as a currency not, as Trudel did, as a shared benison. He was sure that in spite of Bobby’s amiable small-town boorishness it was his wife who ran the show. She was – he stole another look at her sleek ankles and carmine-tipped toes – a nose-art kind of girl.

  ‘. . . came through without a scratch then crunched my pelvis fooling around off duty.’ Bobby was telling him about his war, with the infantry in North Africa. ‘There’s a moral in there somewhere, Christ knows what it is.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Spencer. He entertained a fleeting image of Fast ’n’ Loose hitting the ground, cartwheeling crazily, slamming to a moment’s halt before pouring its life upward in a torrent of smoke and flame . . . ‘There isn’t one. You okay now?’

  Bobby slapped his hip, a rueful expression. ‘Bye-bye football.’ Slapped his midriff. ‘Hallo, rocking chair.’

  ‘Old rocking chair’ll get me . . . Spencer was shocked.‘Nonsense. You’ve got a beautiful wife, a good job, your whole life in front of you.’ It sounded pretty lame. He added: ‘A whole lot more than me, I’m telling you.’

  ‘So what are your plans, Spence? You’re a flier, there’s all kinds of doors open to you.’

  ‘I guess so. But I’ve done with flying.’

  ‘Boy!’ Bobby clicked his teeth admiringly. ‘You must have some stories. We used to envy you guys whizzing around up there, but one little sneeze and you could be dead, right? I read that piece about you in the Monitor.’

  Spencer pulled a face. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the paper, Bobby. It took all sorts to win the war.’

  ‘Sure, but what an experience. Only thing was they made you sound kinda serious. I mean, I know you’re a serious guy, but I kept thinking if you’d been telling all about it face to face there’d have been those stories, that stuff the paper thinks isn’t worth bothering with?’

  ‘Like what?’ Spencer smiled at Bobby to show he wasn’t being argumentative but was genuinely interested. To his surprise it was Minna who answered.

  ‘He means the girls.’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘ ’Course you do, honey.’ The endearment put Bobby in his place worse than a slap on the cheek. She adjusted her position slightly, her right arm resting on the bar, cigarette in hand, telling the other guy that she was part of this group now. She took a dainty drag, narrowing her eyes at Spencer as she did so. ‘That’s what guys want to know.’

  Spencer opted for gallantry as being also expedient. ‘The best girls were the ones you left behind.’

  ‘Sure, sure . . .’ She blew smoke, tapped the cigarette on an ashtray. ‘But how did you know?’

  Bobby jerked his head at his wife, gave Spencer a grin that was both of pride and apology. ‘You don’t have to answer that.’

  ‘Well, naturally we had fun.’

  They were both looking at him now, Bobby with salacious expectancy, his wife with a small droll smile, one eyebrow raised. Spencer’s mouth was suddenly all stopped up with memories, the power of which he could not possibly convey.

  ‘But things are different in war, I don’t have to tell you,’ he muttered.

  ‘You were the conquering heroes in that little English town,’ declared Bobby. ‘Bet the local ladies couldn’t wait to show their gratitude.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’ He sounded prim and humourless, even to himself, but they were trampling all unknowing on ground that even he could scarcely bring himself to tread.

  ‘It’s always like that!’

  Suddenly Minna, as if calling a halt, pushed her glass in front of Bobby. ‘Mine’s another, honey.’ Spencer thanked God for her tough tact.

  A little later when she’d gone to the powder room, Bobby said: ‘I hate to sound like a guy with only one thing on his mind, but you seen anything of Apples?’

  It was so long since he’d heard the nickname that Spencer didn’t react right away, and Bobby added: ‘Apples Flaherty?’

  He shook his head. ‘We wrote one another when I first went overseas, but somehow or other we stopped . . .’ He’d stopped, was the truth. The sweet, seductive spell of Craft Cottages had overtaken him body and soul and Trudel’s last three letters had gone unanswered.

  Bobby jerked his head and clicked his teeth, pleased to be the bearer of local news. ‘Incredible.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Spencer waited.

  ‘She’s back right now, staying with her mother.’ Bobby shook his head again. ‘You ought to go call, bet she’d like that.’

  ‘So what’s so different?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ He grinned as Minna returned. ‘Hi, hon. Incredible.’

  So that was two ideas Spencer brought away from O’Connell’s that night. When he got home he picked up his sheets of paper off the chest and scribbled ‘Bobby’ at the top, and then wrote a few sentences. He’d put Bobby’s name as a reminder of their conversation, but having it there made him feel he was still talking to him, and that in turn tweaked an end of the knot in his mind. The sentences looked fresh and bright, they started to say what he wanted them to say. By some process he scarcely understood, a psychological alchemy, he’d found his voice.

  A couple of days later he’d almost finished and there was nothing much doing for Mack so when he’d written his quota Spencer drove into town and parked a little way down from the Flahertys’ place. He sat in the car for a moment, not wanting to get out. He hadn’t been this end of town since his return, only driven through. He’d kind of avoided stopping, partly through guilt, partly through the avoidance of old memories. Though he told himself it was crazy, he felt that he had betrayed Trudel in some way. It was true that she had finished with him rather than the other way round, but she had still been truer, more faithful. She it was who had written three unanswered letters. The last of these, he recalled, had ended with the words: ‘So, Spencer, I’ll leave this with you. If I hear from you that’ll be great, if I don’t I’ll try not to think the worst, and hope to see you after the fat lady sings. Love always, Trudel.’

  Love always.

  He got out of the car and walked towards the house with his head down, sort of hoping that no one would look out of a window and recognise him as he approached. It was awkward enough without Trudel or her mother having the advantage over him.

  But when he rang the bell there was a long interval before the door was answered, and then it was a woman he’d never seen before, young and brisk in a uniform.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wonder if Trudel Flaherty’s at home? Or her mother? I’m an old friend, Spencer McColl.’ He returned the young woman’s combative gaze.

  ‘Mrs Flaherty’s taking a nap. Mrs Samuelson’s out right now.’

  He thought he’d misheard. ‘It was actually Trudel I wanted to see, Mrs Flaherty’s daughter?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She was loving it. ‘Mrs Samuelson.’

  He was felled. ‘I see . . . Well, it seems a lot’s happened since I went away.’

  She didn’t flicker. ‘Shall I say you called?’

  ‘Um – yes, why not? Sure.’ He backed off, feeling an idiot. ‘Than
ks. ’Bye.’

  Back in the car he thought. Bastard! The least Bobby could have done was tell him this the most obvious piece of information, the kind of thing any old friend wanted – needed, for Chrissakes – to know. It was nothing more nor less than a dirty trick designed to embarrass and humiliate him.

  Smarting, he drove out to the creek and parked, pushing the door open and lighting a cigarette. Gradually, very gradually, he calmed down, the hot flustered feelings fell away one by one and he was left with a bleak sadness: Trudel was married. Apart from the manner of its discovery it could be no surprise. She was young, smart, sexy, and had by all accounts had a tough time. She needed and deserved a good man to look after her. But he realised now that the possibility of something with Trudel had always been there. Even now, after events in England, he had supposed they would pick up where they’d left off because he’d be able to tell her about the English sisters, and she would understand and not judge. They had something going. Or did have – now she was a married woman that easy intimacy would be over.

  Another thought occurred to him. Perhaps Samuelson himself was there too? A duty visit to the ailing mother-in-law, what could be more appropriate? Spencer experienced a twist of jealousy. He wished he hadn’t left his name.

  But it was too late. That evening when he was in his room the telephone jangled imperiously – it was Mack’s big indulgence, invested in on business grounds – and Mack called up to him.

  ‘Spence – for you!’

  Coming down the stairs he asked, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Woman . . . Search me.’

  He picked up the receiver warily. ‘Spencer McColl.’

  ‘Spence, it’s – Trudel.’ There was a minute hesitation before the name.

  ‘Oh, hi there.’

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t in when you called.’