The Island Walkers (30 page)

“Course,” his father said, and his voice went inside Jamie and filled him so that he seemed, almost, to be listening to himself. “When I was a kid we’d cut our own tree.”

Their headlights reached up the steep, winding road of the Mile Hill, through a forest where trees leaned out into the light, from banks of ghostly snow. They were on their way to Gowans’ farm for a tree, and the heater was making a sound like a toboggan scraping over rough snow.

A car appeared up ahead, its headlights flicking down.

“How come we don’t now?”

His father said nothing, and Jamie knew he hadn’t heard.
He’s sad about Pete
, Jamie’s mother had said.
They were friends when they were boys
.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“How come we don’t now?”

“Don’t what?”

“Cut our own tree.” He thought of Billy’s hatchet, bouncing off the tree without hardly cutting it and felt again the sadness of the forest of Christmas trees outside the old man’s house, in the blue, lonely snow. It was still with him. He felt he shouldn’t have left Billy. He wondered if he was still in the house, on the brown couch, and he saw again the look in Billy’s eyes when the old man touched him, his eyes going faraway, not scared, but faraway as if he were in a day-dream where no one could ever find him.

“Well,” his father said, and again there was a pause. The tires crunched over a patch of ice and up the road, a long shape bounded through the edge of the light. “A deer!” Jamie looked but whatever it was had already vanished into the jail of shadowy trees that fell towards the river. His father slowed the car, and they looked off the road where a cable hung between posts. He couldn’t see the ground there, it dropped away so sharply. The deer seemed to have flown away among the trunks of the trees.

“A buck! Did you see that? Did you see the antlers on him!”

His father’s jacket smelled of smoke, a good smell. Jamie peered past him out the open window where the cold air flooded in. The trunks of the trees were lit dimly up one side.

“Did you see him?”

“Yup,” Jamie said. But he wasn’t sure
what
he’d seen.

“A big boy, eh?”

“Yup.”

He didn’t know if he was the big boy, or the deer was, but he was happy that his father was happy at the sight of the deer. The happiness
of the deer had filled the car. He looked over at his father, hoping it would last. His father put the car in gear and they went on, through the high-piled snow.

My love is in the blue snow
, the voice said. He sat alert, very still. He hadn’t heard the voice for a long time, though he hadn’t noticed until now.
My love is in the blue snow
: it was deeper in him than anything, than even his father’s voice, or his own voice, and at the same time it seemed to have come from the night around the car, lit by the car’s passing lights. He waited for it to speak again, but the only sound was the roar of the heater.

24

MARGARET WATCHED
as the Reverend Ramsay, Jack to her, picked up his tea tray by the wooden handles and placed it carefully on his desk, the bone china rattling almost musically. There was also a plate of the biscuits his sister had sent from England: Fortnum & Mason’s. Just watching him put out tea, the way tea should be put out, calmed her. She felt it was something people in this country didn’t understand: the measure of peace that came with doing things right. Taking the right amount of time. Ceremonious. People here slurped their tea from any old sort of mug or cup, even paper ones, as if all they cared about was slaking their thirst. But tea was hardly about thirst at all, she felt. It was about conversation, and restraint, and good cheer: a bulwark against the failing day.

“What have you got this year — two angels?” Jack Ramsay said, taking a chair near her. He crossed his legs, in their priestly black serge: a tidily good-looking man, with a pleased, suggestive shine in his eyes, as though his occupation as the minister of St. Paul’s Anglican were not only a pleasure to him but a bit of a lark. He had
the English talent, so welcome to her, of making an instant party, a little conspiracy of merriment.

“Both shepherds. Penny had her heart set on being an angel but —”

“Well, she
is
an angel,” he intoned.

“I’ll tell her that,” Margaret said, “if you don’t mind. She’s convinced she’s quite ugly in her bathrobe. Of course what she’d really like is the Virgin Mary, all the girls want the Virgin. I was the same, back home.”

“I never wanted to be anything
but
a shepherd. The angels seemed sissy to me, and as for Joseph — unimaginably embarrassing.”

“Why was that?” she cried eagerly. Any talk that led them back to England was a joy to her.

In the main hall outside his door, children were making a racket. In another ten minutes they would begin the next-to-last rehearsal for the Christmas pageant. Besides singing in the choir, Margaret was assistant director this year, which involved riding herd, mostly, making sure the requisite number of bodies was trooping down the aisles at the right times, searching for lost halos.

He said, “Well, if you were Joseph, it meant you were married to Mary. The other boys wouldn’t let you alone about it. Reduced more than one Joseph to tears. Married to the mother of God at thirteen, not easy!”

He shot her a twinkling look, lingering a split second longer than was necessary. She enjoyed his flirtatiousness. He was married to a Canadian woman much younger than she. But Helen was childless, and though she was pretty and good-hearted, Margaret found her a bit thick. She felt she offered the minister a taste of something a little more cultured, more in the spirit of his spirit. And it all felt safe.

“We’ve a lovely Mary this year,” she said, looking down, suddenly uncomfortable. In the hall Stella Bridgeman, the pageant director, was shouting for order.

Jack Ramsay’s voice came down a tone: “You wanted to speak to me.”

“I suppose it can wait …” She glanced at the open door.

He got up to attend to the tea.

They had never talked intimately, not really: intimacy had only been implied. Far from ever mentioning her problems, she considered it a point of pride to give the impression she had none. Others might come crawling to him, for help. But she and he were equals, in their English merriment. She no longer wanted to confide in him.

He handed her a cup and saucer, and went to close the door.

The cup steadied her: the creamed tea, its soothing fragrance. She sipped and went into herself, to find the reason, the
feeling
, that had brought her here on an impulse. She was no longer sure of the purity of her motive. Perhaps she had only wanted the distraction of his company.

But he was listening, waiting, only two feet away. The panelled room with its smell of old books and mildewed Sunday-school papers had filled with the pressure of expectation.

“It’s Alf,” she said, looking at the front of his desk — and immediately felt as if she had betrayed her husband to a process she was not sure she believed in. Already, in her mind, she was backpedalling, portraying matters as less serious than she felt they were. “I just feel, losing his friend and all — he’s in a bad way. It’s been nearly three weeks since — since the funeral — and he’s — he’s always been a very private person.”

She sipped at her tea, avoiding his eyes. She had no way to convey, did not want to convey, what lay behind her husband’s gaze.

“What do you mean — a bad way?”

“It’s nothing specific. He’s just — well. It reminds me how he was, after the war. Not really himself at all. The children feel it. I suppose it’ll be all right.”

She shifted in the hard chair. Her time of month was coming on and for a moment her digestive tract seemed crammed with nails. She felt all this must show in a general unattractiveness. Yes, it was a mistake to have come.

“If he’d like to drop by for a talk,” he said. His tone had hollowed, professionally sympathetic now. But
he
had actually withdrawn, she felt. It made her feel even more the pariah. “Would you like me to speak to him?”

“No, no. He’d know I — he wouldn’t thank me. He’s very proud,” she said, and a flash of love went through her, for her husband. It was something she did not often think of, but now rediscovered as true. In her husband’s isolation, which she deplored, was something else, which she did not deplore at all. He was better than all the rest, better than Jack Ramsay with his endless, friendly chatter.

“No,” she said, suddenly protective. “It’s all right. Just let it be, for now.” And thinking she must give Jack
something
for his time, she managed a smile and added, “It’s been helpful, though, just talking to you.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Grief,” he said, and the word sounded theatrical on his tongue, “it can take a long time to work itself out. You just have to be patient with him. Pray for him,” he told her. “I’ll pray for him.”

“Thank you,” she said. She
had
been praying for
Alf
, but this mention of prayer unsettled her. Prayer was such a private thing, the words leaping and stumbling from the heart. She felt that in talking openly about it, he had turned it into something vaguely shameful.

Yet prayer, really, was a joy to her. To feel the leap of her silent words, the leap of them in the dark bedroom, as she lay beside her husband: an electric current of joy, as fine, and finer in its way, than singing. Prayer
was
a kind of singing. What she wanted, almost more than anything, was for Alf to know the same joy. But he had never taken kindly to her suggestions that prayer might help. She suspected he did not pray. Watching him in church, from her place in the choir, it seemed to her that he was set against the place and everyone in it: his mouth not moving during the prayers or hymns, his eyes looking straight ahead without any discernible emotion. And in bed, in the dark, she had no sense of him praying, in the dark beside her. It was disheartening, to think he did not know this joy. But then again,
perhaps he did. He was so private, and prayer was the most private thing of all.

She left Jack Ramsay’s office feeling uneasy, and followed the mob of children into the church. She separated the angels from the shepherds, the shepherds from the wise men and the animals. A few lights had been turned on against the leaden day outside. She noticed Penny, slumped by herself at the end of a pew. Her daughter looked forlorn. Since getting diabetes, Penny seemed more prey to these moods: Margaret was perpetually wondering if her blood sugar was all right. She picked up a shepherd’s crook and approached her daughter. “Is this yours, love?” Looking up out of her abstraction, Penny appeared not to recognize her. Those eyes simply looked at Margaret, out of their alien blue.

Later, at home, she found Alf on the bed, lying on his back with his shoes sticking out from the bottom of the spread. The top was pulled up to his chin. He had been lying there, as the light grew dim, for God only knew how long, in the cold bedroom.

Changing her dress, she snapped on the light on her dresser: an act of aggression, to make him stir. After a while, he threw back the spread and sat on the edge of the bed. He was wearing his trousers and an undershirt and his hair was splayed every which way. She was hopeful, but he stuck there, staring at the floor and scratching at his thigh. It infuriated her, the way he had given in to his sadness — if that’s what it was. Even more than she wanted him to talk, she wanted him to bury his sadness, like she did. She wanted him to drive sadness out of the house, by force of will.

“Supper will be a bit late. I just put the meatloaf in.” She went past him quickly and out. Turning at the top of the stairs, she glanced back along the hall and saw that he had not moved. He was looking at her now: his shadowed eyes agleam. It was his postwar look, definitely, when he would watch her, backed by such a fund of dark knowledge she had felt she must scream or suffocate. There had been
days when she wanted to leave him, to go back to England. One day she actually packed her bags and carried them as far as the front door. But leaving was no longer a possibility. There were the children now, and there was something else: she was married to him, in a way she had never been married at twenty-three. Over the years, like two trees twining together, their trunks had fused. Perhaps they did not belong together, perhaps their natures were all wrong for each other (she had considered all such possibilities), but there it was: their marriage was a fact, a fact that had somehow made its way to the core of her being and lodged there.

She met his gaze frankly. She would not be cowed by his look, as she had been, years ago. Even though she understood nothing about it, about what he was feeling or thinking or remembering, she refused to be cowed.

“Come down soon,” she said briskly. “I’ll make you tea.”

25