The Island Walkers (39 page)

The next morning, alone in the house, she searched his clothes. In the pockets of his dirty factory greens she found a screw, a broken latch needle, a note that read
Eaton’s, fifty-two pairs #367
, written in an unfamiliar hand, a half-used book of matches, bits of tobacco. Was he smoking again? She’d smelled smoke on his shirts and now the golden shreds of tobacco hinted at a life of illicit pleasures. She went into the cellar, to his workbench. It had an almost shrinelike neatness: the tools hung in ranks, the little jars of screws and nails graded according to size. She usually felt a tenderness on seeing his workbench. He had bought these tools for his carpentry business, back in 1949. They were all that was left of his plans, plans he’d once wooed her with, in England. But this morning she rummaged irreverently through his drawers. She peered into cans and boxes. In a deep drawer, under a bundle of electrical wire, she found an envelope containing half a dozen old-fashioned tinted postcards. Two were of French scenes: the Eiffel tower, the Place Pigalle. But the other four were of naked women. They posed in boots and berets: young, big-bottomed women with short, curly hair and heavily madeup eyes.

Their rising swaths of pubic hair shocked her. The young women looked stagily surprised, holding up their hands, palms out. On the final card, a blonde in a sailor cap was tweaking her own nipples. Her eyes with their huge false lashes conveyed a look of amazed innocence, as if she’d never thought of doing
this
before — tuning herself like a radio. Margaret remembered how Alf had hurt her nipple in the night. Was
this
his inspiration then? Was this her rival? Impossible, surely. Now she was indignant, scarcely able to believe he had kept the pictures. How could there be any pleasure in such little-boy stuff? She flung the envelope back in the drawer, not caring that the photos spilled out across the bottom.

The towel hung from a peg at the bottom of the board, nearly hidden between the bench and a sheaf of quarter-round. A blue-and-white-checked dishtowel: she’d
wondered
where that had got to. In a moment, she found the stain. It was lipstick, there could be no mistake: a pink halfway to cherry.

Margaret turned in the dim cellar and thought, Carrie Crean.

After lunch she changed into the rust-red corduroy dress she kept for parties, pulled on her Sunday coat and boots, and marched across town to Kellys’ Irish Linens. Carrie Crean worked there as a clerk. At the New Year’s party in the Parish Hall, at midnight, Carrie Crean had wrapped herself around Alf and planted a kiss on his lips that Margaret herself would have been embarrassed to give him, at least in public. She had seen the same colour lipstick then, on both their mouths.

Margaret pushed through the door into the fresh-linen and wool fragrance of the old store. Tablecloths, handkerchiefs, bed linens, and blankets hung from the pressed-tin ceiling: the place was a veritable forest of suspended textiles, and Carrie Crean was in it somewhere. Margaret went up the aisle, alert. She felt that all she needed to do was look into Carrie’s face, and she would know.

Then Evelyn Brockhurst was there, turning from a display of fancy handkerchiefs. Her face was as wrinkled as a peach pit, her head shook continually with some kind of nervous disorder. She sang alongside Margaret in the Anglican choir, where her presence was a source of embarrassment. She whooped on the high notes, but no one had the courage to tell her she should quit.

“I hear you’re singing for the Clarke wedding.”

“Yes. Saturday.”

Evelyn stared at her, while her head wagged back and forth. It was as if she was continually saying, Well who can believe
that
?

Margaret smiled thinly. She was aware of movement — of life — in other parts of the store, somewhere in that thicket of hanging cloths, that deep scent of fresh wools and linens. Perhaps Carrie Crean was eavesdropping.

“What are you singing, dear?”

“I’m sorry —?”

“For the wedding.”

“Oh, just a little thing. It’s called ‘Seven Wishes for You.’ ”

“I’ve never heard of that! Is it nice?”

“Yes, lovely.”

No, no, it’s not, Evelyn’s head said. Deep in the store, someone dropped a pair of scissors.

“And how’s that boy of yours?”

“Joe?”

“Such a nice-looking lad. I’ll bet he has to shoo off the girls. I think he takes after his father.”

“Sorry?”

“So good-looking!” Evelyn cried.

It was a harmless, ordinary conversation, except that Margaret felt that Carrie Crean might be listening and this made every word both trivial — almost meaningless — and portentous, like a trolling drum. Finally she escaped. She moved on down the aisle and back up again, glancing into the bays, priming herself to meet Carrie Crean. But apparently she was not in the store.

In a few days, Carrie Crean’s presence filled the town, to the point where the rivers and the very shape of the hills suggested her: suggested her blonde curls, her small, shallow, twinkling eyes, her strange, wide, thin-lipped mouth: like a frog’s, Margaret thought, with fascination and loathing. She couldn’t visit the stores now without thinking she might run into Carrie Crean, without a sense of dread that quickened her pulse and left her as alert as a soldier.

She watched Alf, dissecting his every comment and gesture, while pretending that nothing was wrong. He seemed in a much better mood than he had been around the time of Pete’s funeral, and in fact he was quite affectionate with her. But she no longer trusted this affection, even when he suddenly hugged her or kissed her with real exuberance, for she suspected she was not the cause of his outburst,
she was only catching the overflow. When he announced on a Saturday night that he was going to the Legion, she invented an excuse to phone him there. And he was there, a familiar voice like an island in the babble of background voices. She experienced a huge relief that died within seconds of hanging up: he might be there, but what was to prevent Carrie Crean from being there too? She supposed the whole town knew about Alf and Carrie Crean. Yes, they were probably laughing at her, or pitying her, and from then on she saw secret laughter or pity playing in the eyes of nearly everyone.

She told herself it was all nonsense, she hadn’t a shred of proof. And for a few minutes, or an hour or two, she would keep busy enough to forget. But then she would remember, with a sickening plunge that seemed to prove by its very violence the truth of what she suspected. How could such strong feelings be caused by nothing?

She felt on Sunday she would know. She would see Carrie Crean on Sunday, since Carrie also sang in the church choir. Margaret did not usually wear makeup, but on Sunday morning she applied lipstick and rouge and a touch of eyeliner, then cleaned it all off in a fury of dissatisfaction. Carrie Crean was what, fifteen years younger than she? There was nothing in Margaret’s bottles to compete with
that
. In the end, she used lipstick and rouge only, and felt as if she were wearing a mask, ungainly and comical.

Even before Margaret saw Carrie, the church seemed alive with her anticipation. The old doors to the Parish Hall with their chevron pattern, the brazierlike lamps hanging from the high ceiling, the crowd of choir members in their dark-red gowns, the familiar neat figure of Jack Ramsay, so brightly welcoming in his robes — all these things were as vivid to Margaret as if she had never seen them before. She pressed into the passageway where the choir gowns were hung. Beyond a half-open door, the piping, wintery notes of Helen’s organ were filling the main body of the church. People were sliding into their pews. And there she was, Carrie Crean, standing right in front of her, between the gowns and the wall, talking to Brian Stokes, a gangly tenor who leaned grinning over the young woman.

Margaret’s gown hung just behind Brian. She advanced towards it, smiling through her makeup mask.

Carrie Crean’s mouth moved. Those thin, strange, froglike lips with their coating of pink lipstick shaped the words “Hi, Margaret!” and the tiny eyes brightened. Brian Stokes turned to Margaret. Greetings fluttered in the close air.

“I’ve decided to get that organ,” Brian told Margaret. His long face loomed over her with a grin at once boyish and sepulchral.

“Oh yes?” Margaret drawled. But she understood nothing.

“I was just saying to Carrie, we might as well have it now, while Mom’s around to enjoy it.”

“Enjoy it while you can,” Carrie Crean sang, with a coy, knowing glance at Margaret. And Margaret, blushing, managed to remember that for weeks Brian had been ruminating publicly about buying a Hammond organ. He’d been in quite a turmoil about it, but then, other than his sickly mother with whom he lived in a bleakly tidy house on John Street, he didn’t have much to be in a turmoil about.

His breath smelled as if he’d been drinking turpentine.

“I don’t play that well,” Brian said, “but Carrie was just suggesting that Helen might give me lessons —”

“I daresay she would,” Margaret said, casting a quick glance at Carrie Crean. The young woman gave her another complicit smile, though exactly what it knew or what it was trying to tell her, Margaret could not have said. For a moment she felt faint, and as she turned away to grope for her gown she nearly dropped it on the floor. She was in utter confusion. She’d been certain that when she saw Carrie Crean she’d know in a twinkling whether Carrie had betrayed her. But she found that she couldn’t tell, one way or the other. Either the woman standing an arm’s-length away was the destroyer of her life, or she was just blonde, innocent, indifferently pretty Carrie, chattering in a rather mindless way to someone about organ lessons.

They went together into the Parish Hall. Walking behind Carrie Crean, Margaret was struck by how small and slight she was:
petite
was the word. At her back, the border of her gown was turned under against her blouse.

“Here,” Margaret said, suddenly commanding. “You’re rumpled at the back. Let me fix you.”

So Carrie Crean stood while Margaret smoothed her gown and passed her trembling hands over Carrie’s shoulders for good measure. She was treating her kindly, and controlling her too, treating her like a schoolgirl. If she
was
guilty, then her kindness could only make Carrie feel guiltier, perhaps guilty enough to stop whatever it was she was doing with Alf, if they were doing anything.

Carrie’s torso was extraordinarily slim — she was built like a boy — and Margaret felt an odd thrill of excitement as she touched her, for she was imagining how Carrie would feel to Alf.

“There,” she said, her voice tightening. “All done.”

Turning to her with a smile, Carrie did an extraordinary thing, so extraordinary that Margaret would think about it for days afterwards. The young woman pushed out that wide, pinkish mouth until there was just a little black hole shaped like a diamond in the centre of it and blew Margaret a kiss.

Margaret was left in a state of outrage. It seemed that Carrie had flung her an insult, a taunt. That kiss was too much! Ten minutes later, she could still see those lips sticking out at her.

All through the service, Margaret kept her eye on Carrie, who was seated just ahead of her and a little to the left, her cap of curls nodding now over her purse as she extracted a candy, unwrapped it with a rustle of cellophane, and popped it into her mouth. Margaret caught every twitch of her cheek. By moving her head a little, she could make out Alf, where he sat with the children, but it was difficult, at that distance, to see whether those pale-blue eyes were contacting Carrie. She was certain, though, that there was something between them. The more she thought about that kiss, the more it seemed proof — terrible, mocking proof — of everything she suspected.

On the drive home, she was short with Alf and the children, and while making their Sunday dinner (she had put a roast in the oven
before church), she managed to break a bowl and burn the scalloped potatoes. The curious thing was she was no longer thinking of Alf and Carrie Crean. They had sunk into the blackness of a more general fury, for it seemed as she laid out her good plates — they were chipped and old-fashioned-looking and not nearly good enough — that her whole life was a mistake and an injustice.

That night, creaming her face as usual at her dresser, she nearly confronted him. She nearly asked (he was standing in his underwear as he hung up his trousers), Are you having an affair with Carrie Crean? But in the end she said nothing, and came to bed feeling armed by her silence. There was something about knowing his secret that gave her an advantage over him. And too, she was afraid of the truth, of the edge it might drop her over.

Then, lying on her back in the dark, all her cold, furious strength was gone in an instant. Tears slid down her cheeks and tickled her neck. Beside her, Alf seemed to be asleep. Moving very slowly, she touched the back of her wrist to his buttocks. She wanted to reassure herself of his reality. She felt the curve of his warm buttock on the back of her wrist and she remembered their first night together, in a small hotel in London. Twenty-four years ago. He had been so excited by her nakedness: he had wanted her to just stand there, in the light of the lamp, while he marvelled over her — worshipped her, really. She had felt awkward and ashamed and entirely oblivious to
his
nakedness, though she made a half-hearted attempt to touch his erection. He had hurt her, and ever since she had felt sex was something she did more for his sake than for hers. She had pleasure with him, of course — you couldn’t help but have pleasure if someone was touching you the way you liked, in certain places. But she’d never felt excited by him, not the way he seemed excited by her, with a fever of anticipation. In certain moods (she hadn’t seen him in one for some time, mind you), he could fairly prance with excitement, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. It was all a bit of a mystery. She wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with her when it came to sex. It just didn’t seem to matter so much to her. It all struck her as faintly silly,
even childish. She glanced down the room, where the mirror of her dresser shone like ice, and heard a cat howl in the street.