The Island Walkers (38 page)

“I can’t watch,” Brenda said.

They were all spellbound: Mrs. Lamport with her big front teeth, and Ginny, her pretty face drained of colour, and Brenda, her
red-rimmed eyes looking from the hovering needle to Penny’s eyes and back again.

Sometimes, at home, she hesitated for a long time before pushing the needle in. She was afraid of the pain — the thin, slicing pain that sang through her arm or leg. She tried not to believe in this pain. She told herself, she told her mother, she told her brother Jamie, “I
like
needles.” But as often as she said this, she knew she did not like needles, she hated them.

Now, seeing their fearful, fascinated faces, she experienced a rush of triumph.

“I like needles,” she said calmly, and pushed it in.

33

THE RAPID PIPING
of the organ climbed above the church, into the February sky. Bach, Margaret thought, pausing on the sidewalk, and it was as if an old, dear friend she had not seen for years had surprised her. The lower notes were muffled by the thick cobblestone walls, but the clear treble ran on and on, a joy that never exhausted or repeated itself.

She entered the church as quietly as she could, so as not to disturb Helen. Near a brass railing she paused again to listen. Now the bass was clearly audible, running on its own merry way, tossing themes back and forth with the treble. It seemed a wintry music, sunlight glancing off icicles, that also contained by some mysterious alchemy the depths of summer.

Helen botched a run, started over, botched it again.

“Damn!”

Margaret laughed and moved forward to the steps.

“Oh you’re here!”

“I’ve been listening. It was absolutely —”

“A mess!”

“No, no. It was lovely,” Margaret said with feeling. She slipped off her coat and laid it on a choir bench. “Are you playing it for the wedding?” Her friend turned to her in the pool of light at the console.

“No, lucky for all concerned. Anyway, I don’t suppose the Clarkes or the Williamses have ever heard of J.S. Bach.” Helen screwed up her thin mouth abruptly, as though suppressing some more sarcastic comment, and held out some sheet music for Margaret. She was Margaret’s age exactly, forty-two: a prematurely grey-haired woman with skimpy bangs and a slight stoop. Her husband was the editor of the
Attawan Star
. Often she and Margaret went off to Kitchener or Hamilton or Toronto in Helen’s Buick, to operas and concerts. They had adopted a jolly, bantering, slightly superior tone, two women who shared a love of music and had little tolerance for humbug.

Margaret looked at the music Helen had given her: “Seven Wishes for You” by Anne-Marie Fletcher-Valois.

“Never heard of her. Are we going to do all seven?”

“If we want to get paid.”

Helen picked out the melody with her right hand while Margaret read it over her shoulder. Finally she took her copy and stepped away from the organ. The empty pews seemed ready to listen. In a stained-glass window, a book carried by a bearded apostle shone like a ruby. She lifted her face a little as she sang and her body swayed slightly. Her family often teased her about “wriggling around” and she tried not to. But it was the effect of singing itself, the pleasure she felt as she became an instrument for the music, even the unexceptional music of Anne-Marie Fletcher-Valois.

“Seven Wishes for You” listed, as promised, seven wishes the newly married couple made for each other. It was a sluggish, sentimental piece, but there was a run of notes in the refrain she liked immensely, which gave a haunting lilt to the word “you.” Each time she sang the word, shivers ran over her face and chest.

On the sixth wish, she ran into a problem. The verse ran: “I’ll listen to you, I’ll hear your troubles/ Even when you’re far away.” It was innocuous enough, but on the first syllable of “Even,” her voice broke and she stopped.

The organ died out behind her.

“Sorry,” Margaret said. Unaccountably, her face was burning. She made a point of not turning to Helen. “Just give me a little introduction.”

It was worse the second time. As she broached the word “Even,” a shudder went through her and she only stopped it from turning into a wail by clamping her mouth shut. She sat down.

“Are you all right?”

“It’s the oddest — I’m sorry.” She could hardly talk yet, but leaned over in the stall. Helen came and sat beside her.

“I just felt faint,” Margaret managed. “The oddest —”

“Would you like some water?”

As Helen hurried to the parish kitchen, Margaret bent over, pressing her forehead on the hard, cool back of the next bench, struggling to fight down the impulse to weep. Tears wouldn’t do, and especially they wouldn’t do in front of Helen, any more than a true confession would do. She considered Helen her closest friend, but still, theirs was not that kind of friendship, she felt.

They decided to stop for the morning. Walking home, Margaret turned aside to the rail of the Shade Street bridge. Below, the Atta steamed from a narrow fissure in the ice, as it made its peaty way towards its meeting with the Shade. For some reason, the water drew her thoughts to England — gave her a sharp intuition of the English spring, with its distinctive smell of earth and damp woods and petrol fumes — and for a few minutes she was swept along by a deep nostalgia for her girlhood — for her mother and father, both dead now, for the green of a certain field, for the high, chalk-veined downs behind her house with their glimpses of the distant channel, that grey, strangely heartening infinity. As she wept, she dug frantically
through her purse for a handkerchief, thinking, This won’t do, This won’t do. All she could find was a paper napkin.

By eleven-thirty she was busy in her kitchen, getting the children’s lunch. Penny’s took a special effort — everything had to be weighed on the spring scale, whose round, numbered face dominated the counter — and dessert was always a problem, since Jamie still clamoured for sweets. The dietician at the hospital had told her that the rest of the family should go on eating as usual, but when Margaret had set a lemon meringue pie on the table, Penny’s face had fallen. Margaret had sworn never to torture her again.

Noon came with the plunging howl of Bannerman’s whistle. A few minutes later Alf called to say he had to work through the lunch hour. She leapt at his voice, but though he was cheerful and warm enough, she felt he was impatient to hang up.

Then Penny came through the door, pigtails bouncing. The eleven-year-old launched into a story about a schoolyard quarrel and a moment later Joe and Jamie came in pink-faced, having raced each other from the edge of the Island. Margaret watched herself go into gear — the cheerful mother setting out bowls of tomato soup and plates of baloney-and-cheese sandwiches, listening and commenting on the stories they had brought. Then her children were gone, in a gust, and she was alone. Life itself seemed emptied away. A dozen jobs called to her, but she sat at the kitchen table in a trance, the sadness that had threatened her almost violently all morning a calm pool now, a pool that seemed to hold everything, the white daylight at the window, the crumbs strewn around the oilcloth like bits of sand or dirt that had blown in.

She had an urge to call Alf. “Don’t be daft,” she scolded herself, in her brisk English way. “Don’t behave like some daft girl!” She never phoned the mill, except in emergencies. Two minutes later, she picked up the phone.

Matt Honnegger, the knitting-room foreman, told her Alf had left an hour before. “Funny,” Matt said, “I thought he’d gone home.”

She didn’t see him until he showed up at five-thirty. He was in a good mood, almost too good, and he’d brought her a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate in its dark-blue and silver wrapper, just like the old days. Margaret couldn’t resist the tide of his good spirits. At the supper table, while Jamie was telling them about every turn and twist of some TV show, Alf looked at her and winked in happy complicity. Suddenly she felt insulted, patronized. It was the sort of wink you might give a child.

The next morning after the children had left for school, she walked over to the Flats. Passing the arena — its whitewash walls blinding in the sun — she turned down the lane that led to the mills. No one was in sight, though she could hear the thrashing of machines from open windows. Furtive now, almost dizzy with tension, she pushed through a heavy door into the vestibule of the sweater mill. The wooden rack of time cards hung beside the clock. She searched the array of yellow cards until she found her husband’s:
Walker A. #117
. Pulling it out, she swiftly put it back again — someone was on the stairs above — but the footsteps faded and again she retrieved the card and found the day she was looking for: yesterday. The unevenly inked numbers printed by the clock showed that Alf had left the mill at one-forty, and not returned until five after three. She put the card back in its slot and pushed outside, blinking in the sun reflected from the snowbanks.

She had a hundred questions for him, seething inside her, but dared not ask them until they were safely alone together. And even then — it was ten o’clock that night and she was creaming her face at the dresser while Alf read a paperback in bed behind her — she hesitated, sensing a danger, as if a wrong word might plunge her into a situation she would regret.

She watched him in the mirror. He lay on his back with one knee
up under the quilt, idly massaging the top of his head with one hand. His eyelids had sunk as he read, giving him a vaguely drunken look that irritated her.

She heard her voice say, cheerfully disinterested, to the deep glass, “So, did you ever get lunch yesterday?”

He grunted, scarcely hearing, apparently.

“Alf —,” more sharply.

For a moment, the blue of his eyes shocked her in the mirror. Such eyes that husband of yours has, Helen had said to her once. Faraway-looking eyes, of a pale, electric blue. She knew other women found him attractive, more attractive perhaps than she did herself. And now those eyes were suddenly fresh to her, a shock and a rebuke.

“Yesterday, when you had to work through the noon hour, did you ever get lunch?”

He lowered the book. She knew her question must sound queer, caring about so trivial a thing a day later.

He was watching her over the fallen book. In his hesitation she sensed calculation. She turned on the bench to face him, in her flannelette gown. In the street a dog barked.

“I went out to the Rendezvous,” he said at last. “Had a yen for a burger.” He cleared his throat. “Why?”

She hesitated at his challenge. Of course she couldn’t say, You were away for an hour and a half. Does it really take you that long to eat a burger? She would have to admit she’d read his timecard, and she didn’t know enough to risk that. Maybe he’d gone for a drive. She could see him sitting in the car above the river somewhere, eating as he stared at the ice. But she couldn’t ask.

“Nothing — I just wondered how you got on. I worry you’re not getting nourished.”

Immediately, “nourished” seemed false on her tongue, a too-elaborate word, hiding her own duplicity. He gazed at her for a long moment, then raised the book. Instantly, she was piqued.

She said, “Are we all right?”

“Hmm,” he said.

“Alf!”

The book came down.

“Are we all right? Are things all right between us?”

She supposed she was making a scene, maybe unnecessarily. But there was something desperate in her, kneading with tiny fists in her chest and throat.

“Sometimes I think — we seem to be drifting away from each other.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, warmly enough, and her spirit leapt at that, eager to believe.

“You still like me, then?” She lifted her face to him, defiantly, flirtatiously, feeling the remains of the cold cream like a mild burn.

“Hey-hey,” he said, cajoling. He got off the bed and came towards her while she watched him with black, sober concentration, not sure whether he was approaching out of duty or desire. When he kissed her on the mouth, she strained to read him, his mind, through the pressure of his lips.

For the first time in weeks they made love. He was attentive and slow, just as she liked. She held him at the small of the back and focused with shut eyes on travelling to that place that was so elusive: that little patch of light that might, just might, expand suddenly into a meadow of pleasure. It seemed critical that she get there tonight, as if to seal a new pact with him. And suddenly — she had never done this before — she thought of him being with another woman. And for a moment
she
was that other woman, unknown to herself, holding on to Alf Walker’s back, the back of a man who belonged to another woman. And pleasure rolled through her in a smoothly swelling wave.

But just as she seemed about to slip into a deeper pleasure, he pinched her nipple so hard she cried out in pain. Everything came apart for her then: the road to heaven filled with stones and briars. Alf was flustered and apologetic. Sorry, sorry, he told her, I just
forgot. In the end she was left feeling raw and used. She lay in the dark as he slept, wondering what it was he had forgotten.