The Island Walkers (22 page)

They lingered talking in the kitchen. Liz stood with her back to the counter, with one arm planted on her hip, the other stretched along the counter. It was a bold pose, and it suited her, suited her look of blazing candour. Below her knee-length skirt, maroon stockings complemented the deep cherry red of her blouse. She wore more eye makeup than usual, a touch of Cleopatra. He found her attractive, in a provocative, almost vulgar way.

“I
liked
what you said yesterday in Mann’s class, about war not being good for anybody.
Very
beautifully put.”

He muttered his thanks. He’d been rather embarrassed by his own comments at the time, his argument with Brad Long in front of the whole class, in front of Anna, about the benefits of war. Brad had
bragged that his father, an officer on a destroyer, had gone away a boy and come back — this had raised a laugh — “a real cool guy.”

“War must be so horrible,” Liz said, looking at him with deep concern. “Don’t you think?”

He said, “Did
your
dad go overseas?”

“Oh heavens no!” Her hand with its three rings splayed over her chest. “They would never have had him, not with his
eyes
. My God, he couldn’t have told which end of a gun was which. Oh no, he missed it all, thank God. Or I think, thank God,” she added ominously. He glanced at the dark door to his right. He was expecting Anna to appear at any minute. Someone turned up the music. In the cupboards, glassware was beginning to dance. Liz said, “Why don’t we go somewhere where we can actually hear each other?”

Reluctantly — yet half-glad of the distraction — he let himself be led through the dining room, where a vast table gleamed in the dimness. Then into a large living room, past a long couch with carved, shapely legs, upholstered in some striped fabric. Two identical, moss-green wingback chairs faced a fireplace with a marble mantel. There were Indian rugs scattered over the broadloom, while oil paintings glinted under little tubular brass shades: bright, ornately framed landscapes showing winding autumnal rivers, a red northern sky stamped by a V of geese. He had never been in such richly decorated rooms before. From this moment on, he would never think his own house anything but shabby and second-rate.

But the living room was apparently not to Liz’s taste. She led him on, through the hall where he’d first entered, through a heavy door into a den. This room looked more lived-in. Photographs in gilt frames hung over a carved desk where a stack of papers was pinned with a rock of raw glass. There was a small television and a wide couch covered in a beige material, with throw cushions in green and blue. Liz curled up at one end of it, drawing up her legs in their maroon stockings. He sat at the other end, but had difficulty finding the right posture. To match hers would have committed him to a directness and
intimacy he did not feel. He sat at an angle to her, his attention diverted by a large book resting on the coffee table. On its cover, a racing yacht tilted under full sail.

“So,” Liz said, as if they were two old friends who at long last had found time to talk.

“Your dad likes sailing?”

“Oh yes,” she said, a bit impatiently. “He’s already got one boat, up at the cottage. But he’s threatening to get one he can go around the world in —”

“Really?”

“I hear you broke up with Sandy,” she said, ignoring his question. “Or do I have that wrong —”

“No, you’ve got it right,” he said, a bit surprised. He looked into her face, all sympathy and concern, though in her eyes the brightness danced: wasn’t life hard and wasn’t it fun?

“A
very
pretty girl,” Liz said. “I hope it wasn’t too painful.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging. It had been painful, but not in the way she perhaps meant.

“When Bob and I broke up — this was over a month ago — well, it’s not something you want to go through every day.”

“No,” he said. It occurred to him she might be vetting him, for Anna. Anna would have to know whether he was free. “No,” he repeated, more strongly. “Not every day.”

Behind him, though the closed door, he heard someone come into the house. He looked around.

“Just ignore them,” Liz said sharply. “They can find their own way.”

“Is Anna here?” he said.

“She
was
,” Liz said, without missing a beat. “She and Brad got here first. They went off about twenty minutes ago —”

“Oh they’re here together?” he said, feigning a mild interest.

“Together!” she cried. “The original Bobbsey Twins! We were running out of beer and Brad said he could get some from a friend, although of course knowing Brad they probably went by way of the
gravel pit.” She was watching him with a straight-on innocence now. The abandoned gravel pit to the east of town was a favourite parking spot. There were nights when the spring-fed lake at its centre was completely ringed with cars.

Later, she drew him onto the dance floor for a slow one. Her hand was cool in his, and as she snuggled in, her pelvis brushed against his thigh. His own excitement — the stirring in his trousers — seemed a distant thing, a nuisance, really, and he pushed her back a little. It was clear now that Liz had never been fronting for Anna, she was only fronting for herself, and though he found this flattering, he could not stop thinking about Anna, Anna out there in the night somewhere, Anna with Brad Long. He refused Liz’s view of them as inseparable, because it didn’t square with what he knew. It was true, Anna and Brad had gone out together, at least once, but to Joe’s mind she was more at ease, more content, with him. He didn’t trust Liz. All he needed was to have Anna find him all wrapped up with Liz and he could kiss his chances with her goodbye — which, maybe, was Liz’s plan.

After three dances he left her on the excuse he needed a washroom. The one off the kitchen was in use, so Liz directed him to the second floor. Returning downstairs, the sound of a cabinet door squeaking in the den tempted him to look in. Anna Macrimmon was there, leaning forward to peer into a tall bookcase. She wore a rather short, pleated skirt of green plaid, which he’d never seen on her before, green stockings, and a tight-fitting white blouse with long sleeves.

“Anna,” he said, going right up to her. Beer had given him confidence. “I thought you weren’t coming. I was heartbroken.”

“Go on!” she cried, catching his bantering tone. But she put her arm through his and drew him to the books. He was suddenly giddy and, at the same time, stone-cold sober. She had never been so physical with him. His right arm weightless.

“Look at this,” she said. “They’ve got Shelley’s poems —”

“Jeez, do you think we better tell him?”

“Oh you’re as bad as Brad,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze.

“Don’t say that,” he said, keeping up the levity. But her reference to Brad had stung. “I’m far worse.”

“Then I’m
really
in trouble!”

She squeezed his arm again before releasing it. He watched her take down the ancient-looking volume in its faded leather cover. He was drunk on her now: her smell that was scarcely a smell but a freshness, a space: her shoulder brushing his as they leaned over the musty-smelling pages. He read:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power,

Floats though unseen among us …

Her attention to the brittle page was all-consuming, it drew the whole room towards Shelley’s words: the furniture, the photographs, the other books, all found their centre in the packed lines of verse. But
he
couldn’t concentrate on the poetry. He kept looking up at her, at the way her lips moved slightly as she read, at the way her hair fell across her birthmark, white burned below brown.

She uncovered a picture of the poet, under a tissue overlay. Shelley’s huge eyes were trained upwards in anxiety and exaltation. “I’ve been in his house,” she said, “on the Gulf of Spezia — the Casa Magni. You can feel him there. He was only thirty when he drowned.”

“How did he drown?” he said, for something to say. His eyes went on roaming her face, her hair.

“He was sailing and — he put out in a storm he shouldn’t have put out in. Maybe he thought it was time.”

She looked at Joe now, with a meaning he could not decipher: a probing seriousness and, far away, a hint of gaiety, of cold, bright gaiety, sun on a cold sea.

“I wonder what year this is,” she said suddenly, turning back to the book.

She found the date on the last page, and they struggled with the Roman numerals.

“I’m no good with these things.”

“Eighteen fifty-six,” he said at last, “the year the Crimean War ended.”

“You love it too, don’t you?” she said. And when he looked puzzled, “The past.”

“Sometimes I feel like it’s still going on,” he said. He had once tried to tell this to Smiley, and Smiley had mocked him mercilessly. He had not told anyone since.

“Yes!” she cried. “You think that when you turn a corner, you’ll run into women with long dresses. You’ll run into Shelley!”

“You’ve been in his house,” he said, wondering.

“Yes, I went there with — a friend. It was hard to find. But the people around there all call it Shelley’s house. There’s not a plaque up or anything. They just remember. You get a feeling they’re proud to.”

“Where is it again?”

“In Italy, near Leghorn. It’s on the sea. You know, the last anyone saw of Shelley he was laughing as he went out to meet the storm.”

For a moment, beyond speech, their gazes remained locked. She was the first to look away. He saw colour flood her neck, saw it change the mark on her cheek: the white becoming pink.

“Let’s go out,” he said.

“Where? Out in the cold?”

She had her head down, evading him.

“I mean, let’s go out on a date. Let’s go for a walk.”

“I can’t, Joe.”

“Why can’t you? You go out with
him
.”

“I
like
Brad,” she said, lifting her face in defiance.

“You don’t like me?”

“You know that’s not what I mean. I like you very much.”

She was riffling quickly through the Shelley now. She put the book back on the shelf.

He touched her hair, tried to tuck it behind her ear, as he had seen her do, so many times. She pulled away.

“Just go for a walk with me sometime,” he pleaded.

“Of course I will — a walk.”

She had turned her back on him, and her voice sounded muffled, miserable.

“Anna,” he said.

Liz came in.

“There you are,” she said. “We’ve been looking all over for you!”

Brad, grinning, towered behind her.

17

IN THE OLDS’ SPEEDOMETER
, the green ribbon grew longer, extending to seventy-five, eighty, as Brad floated them past a string of slower cars. He steered with one hand, his arm straight to the wheel, and kept glancing over his shoulder at Joe, chatting with his happy, boasting mixture of enthusiasm and disbelief, as if the world were full of marvels he could scarcely credit.

“Too fast,” Anna said from the seat beside him. Her dark glasses gave her a convalescent air. She had a headache, and for the last half-hour had kept mostly silent. They were on their way to Niagara Falls. The trip had been Liz’s idea: Anna, unlike the rest of them, had never seen the Falls, and wouldn’t it be nice for the four of them to go down? So here they were, on the day after the party, in Brad’s father’s black 98, watching the oncoming lane where a tractor and wagon had just pulled into their path.

“Brad,” Joe warned from the back seat.

“I got it,” Brad said, and at the last second, while fascination hovered at the edge of horror, he tucked the Olds behind a station wagon.

“You see,” Brad said cheerfully, “if we’d been going any slower we’d be dead.” In the filthy window of the station wagon a child was waving frantically.

“If you’d been going any slower, we wouldn’t have been out there,” Anna said dryly, and Joe, sitting directly behind her, thought, How can you go out with him?

Through gaps in the trees, Lake Ontario gleamed dully like sheet metal. Their near-miss had filled the car with silence. The bitter, devouring land fled past in its post-harvest brownness. A dog ran down a hedged drive, its bark small and faraway. On a porch, a carved pumpkin scowled. After their exchange over the Shelley, Joe had not been able to talk alone with Anna again. He felt there was unfinished business between them. He’d asked her to go out with him, and in that moment felt he had brought her, her head bowed away from him, to the edge of a response that would reveal something new, that would break them out into new territory. Perhaps his doom lay there, but he was more inclined to think her answer would favour him, for he clung to a conviction that they were bound at a level she must eventually acknowledge. The centre of his awareness was the soft helmet of her hair, not two feet away, and her face, looking straight ahead, alive with expressions he could not see. He felt he was alone with her — the others in the car were no more important than strangers — and that she felt this way too.

They came down through the city of Niagara Falls, past the empty motels and cavernous eating joints, past the low hall with its shadowy bumper cars, huddled together for the winter, past a ten-foot-high picture of a bearded fat lady: Rasputin with breasts.