The Island Walkers (50 page)

In Mann’s upstairs study, under a slanted ceiling, several windows gave a view of the distant Shade. A scarred wooden table ran beneath the sills. There was a casual, slightly dishevelled look about the place, created by the stacks of books on the floor, the old
New Yorkers
scattered around the jute rug. Joe loved the room — its light,
its books, its feeling of important work being done. Mann, he knew, was writing a history of Attawan. Parts of it had appeared in the
Attawan Star
.

He felt privileged to be here: privileged, and almost forgiven for his poor performance in his essay. He wanted to be an historian himself, and to come here was like being admitted to some secret, initiatory stage of the long process that would lead him forward. He was alert to everything, keen to make a good impression. He sat between the high arms of a low chair — the pink duster covering it seemed a bit incongruous, even shocking — sipping his tea and looking at the books the teacher took from the shelves and rubbed with a cloth, before handing them to Joe.

“You won’t want all of these,” Mann said with a grin. Inexplicably, the teacher was blushing. “At least I’m getting my books dusted.”

Mann handed him a large format book with a dark board cover, and knelt with cracking knees beside the chair as Joe opened it. The book was full of black-and-white photographs from the First World War: wagon wheels fattened with mud, ragged files of grinning soldiers, the lifeless common of no-man’s land. Reaching over into Joe’s lap, the teacher leafed through the pages until he found a picture of several soldiers in a trench. They all had dirty faces, and had paused in various activities — eating out of mess tins, cleaning their rifles — to smile at the camera.

“That fellow there,” Mann said, tapping on the page to indicate a figure sitting on a crate, his soup-plate helmet pushed straight back from his blackened forehead. “My brother, Gordon.”

Joe looked at the figure and caught a hint of Mann’s own square face and dark eyes, circled with dirt or fatigue. “Vimy Ridge,” Joe read.

“Not long after they’d captured it.”

“He was at Vimy?” Joe said with excitement. The name of the great German strong point successfully stormed by the Canadians — after British and French forces had failed for years to take it — was a mythic name to him, and as with all such names, it came as a surprise
to discover that someone he knew, or at least a relative of someone he knew — an actual human being — had been there. It was like finding a ladder into a world that was bigger, brighter — infused, somehow, with immortality.

Again Mann tapped the page. “Look at those grins. They’re always grinning in these pictures. It shows their youth — what
good boys
they were. They were living in hell, but they still couldn’t help going on their best behaviour when a camera appeared. It tells you a lot, I think, about how well disciplined they were — I don’t just mean as soldiers, but as social creatures. They were so eager to please. I always find it sad.”

Joe studied the picture, and was moved by a curious sense that he knew what it was like to sit there, in the cold mud in France, eighteen years old, with his friends.

“Maybe they’re just happy to be alive,” he said quietly.

Mann studied him for a moment. In his brown eyes was something moist, searching — entirely too intense. Joe had to look away.

Mann went on kneeling beside Joe as they examined the photographs. The teacher’s left hand hung on his shoulder. Joe shifted away, a little uncomfortable. He could sit in a crowded church pew beside his own father and hardly notice that their legs were touching. But with Mann he became increasingly self-conscious. He became aware of the chapped back of the teacher’s free hand, which was trembling a little, and the white flecks in his nails, and always the man’s unpleasant breath, like the smell of a machine. Mann, he remembered, was retiring at the end of the year; he was old.

When he left, Joe felt immediate relief at being outside, in the mild bright evening. From a lawn a robin sent out its shivering cry. He hurried to Shade Street, and along to the corner of Banting, where he sat on a low wall of cut limestone and took out his copy of
The Poet’s Quill
, hunting through its newsprint pages until he found her poem.

WHIRLPOOL

Eyes

in the green whirlpool

looking up at me,

blinking and darkening and letting go.

Eyes of water

emerging, submerging —

the eyes of some vast green beast

who knows it must only lazily

circle

until I fall —

devoured by my hunger for looking.

Then you

standing by the grey rock,

a land-man, not of the river

with your startled love-look

beyond mere looking.

I was more afraid of you than the river,

more afraid of you than death.

Your eyes offered something more complicated than water,

wilder than the turquoise river.

Let me go

back to the pleasures of looking.

Let me drown on the bottom with my words.

— Anna Macrimmon

He read it several times. Was he the “land-man”? Yes, surely he was the “land-man”! And he remembered the day he had driven with Anna, Liz, and Brad to the whirlpool: saw again the wild water, surging past the rock where Anna had stood.

What was she telling him? “Let me go/back to the pleasures of looking.” Was she telling him to leave her alone? He looked up, scarcely aware of the cars streaming past, or of the Bannerman mansion across the road, its grey stone warming in the late sun. She was telling him to let her go. But she wouldn’t tell him that, would she, unless he had a power over her — more, maybe, than he had guessed?

44

A WEEK LATER
Joe and Brad drew up Anna’s sloping drive. It was the evening of the Spring Frolic — a clear, fragrant evening, unseasonably warm. With a slight stiffness, ever the wounded athlete fresh from hockey or basketball wars, Brad, resplendent in his tux, left the Olds and took a jogging step or two as he crossed the lawn to her house. Joe got out and climbed into the back seat with the tiny carton that contained Liz’s corsage. He couldn’t stop thinking about the oversized black shoes he had borrowed from his father — clown shoes, surely, their toes stuffed with newspaper — shoes that seemed to broadcast his father’s current difficulties, as if their shine betrayed the loss of his job, his unhappiness deepening through the house like an unpleasant odour. Joe had not wanted to wear them, but he owned only brown shoes himself. Staring at Anna’s front door, he was aware his hands were shaking. Then the door opened and he saw Anna in a coat he hadn’t seen before, a beltless white coat that came to her knees but did not entirely cover the long, pale skirt flexing below it as she picked her way across the lawn. “Joe,” she said, smiling at him as she got in. He had to remind himself that she didn’t know he’d read her poem — the new issue of
The Poet’s Quill
wouldn’t be distributed until next week — and this helped him subdue his nervousness.

A few minutes later, the Olds swung into the McVeys’ drive, stopping with a lurch behind the sky-blue Lincoln. As he plodded to the door, Joe could hear Brad’s laughter in the car behind him. He felt barely composed, a just object of mockery, the evening already fraying beyond control.

And yet, and yet:
she
was here. On the short drive to the school, the world seemed to survive only by grace of the sleek head in front of him. Inside, gusts of music swept through the dimly lit corridors. Couples in fancy dresses and suits, in tuxedos and evening gowns, with hair creamed and combed, bouffanted and permed, paraded towards the gym with a sound of whisking cloth and tapping shoes. Joe glimpsed Sandy, looking entirely different from the person he still went out of his way to avoid. She was wearing what looked like false eyelashes and a puffy, Popsicle-green dress, and she was clinging to the arm of Sid Miller, a North End boy with a reputation. There was an excitement in the warm air, almost an anarchy, as though some long repressed power was nearing its point of release. Two teacher-chaperones, watching from the shadows, seemed out of place.

They climbed the stairs to the classroom serving as a cloakroom. Fluorescent light fell harshly over the desks heaped with coats. Helping Liz off with her wrap, Joe stared past her at Anna. She, too, had just shed her coat, and he was mesmerized by her appearance in her simple, white, form-fitting dress with its square neckline that mirrored the cut of her bangs and left her arms completely bare. He was made breathless: by her naked arms, by her rebirth, once again, to newness, by the beauty of her face, smiling across the desks as she discovered him. She wore no jewellery.

They went down to the gym and sat at the little table reserved for them. A candle fluttered in its bottle, signalling to the dozens of other flames winking around the perimeter of the vast room. The floor was crowded with dancers, their heads and shoulders touched with the racing moths of light reflected from the multifaceted globe turning overhead, above a ten-foot high model of the Eiffel Tower, its girders wrapped in aluminum foil. On stage, the Morganaires had stood up
in their pale-blue, silver-trimmed blazers, leaning forward to release the deep voices of their horns. The outside doors were open and the mild night air stole in and mixed with the warmer, perfumed air inside, making the candles flicker.

Liz drew Joe onto the floor. She hooked her bare arm over his shoulders and drew in close, possessively. Her body seemed uncannily thin to him, and hungry, pressing at him as if to staunch a wound in her midriff. They turned among the other couples in a slow, shuffling drift. Her hair smelled of a new perfume, a flowery scent he found too sweet. He pushed her away a little, and tried to dance more energetically, aware that Anna might be watching: wanting her to know he was ready to break with Liz.

“Anna looks nice,” Liz said, closing with him again. He grunted something noncommittal and twirled Liz. She came back to him, her face with its gash of red lipstick expressionless in the blizzard of light.

Half an hour later all four of them were at the table, arguing in a slightly forced way about the Beatles. Only Brad seemed to be enjoying himself. With one elbow propped on the back of his chair, his open jacket revealing a frilled shirt and cherry cummerbund, he grinned in his amiable way and announced that the Beatles were for thirteen-year-olds. Joe glanced at Anna. She was twisting her paper napkin — they had been eating cake — and sticking out her jaw in an odd scowl.

“Would you like to dance?”

He was surprised by how collected he felt. He could sense Liz and Brad’s sudden stillness, on either side of him. But Anna had not heard: her reverie had taken her entirely away.

“Hey,” Brad said to Anna. He seemed hugely amused. “You’ve got an admirer.”

The Morganaires had started into “Twilight Time.”

He felt he had never touched Anna Macrimmon, not really, though sometimes their hands had brushed as a book or paper passed between them. Now, out on the floor, she turned to him with a half-smile, her face both revealed and hidden by the flakes of light that streamed over her head and shoulders. Her hand in his was cold and
dry: was she merely tolerating him? He placed his right hand on her back — his fingers touching ever so gently into the firm groove there, under the soft, rucked material of the dress. As they moved off, she miscued a little and trod on his shoes.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right. My shoes, they’re my dad’s, actually. They stick out too much.”

He could not believe he had admitted this. But he scarcely felt in control of himself.

They danced a little awkwardly, unable to find each other’s rhythm. His hands were sweating, and he lightened his touch on her back, not wanting to stain her dress.

Her face was close to his, a little below. He drank in the perfume she wore, which had almost a non-smell: a cleanness, like vanilla. A wisp of her hair brushed his cheek. Between them was the orchid Brad had pinned to her bodice, a senseless mouth gaping upwards.

They grew a little more competent, and she settled in closer. The singer wailed his anticipation of the coming night.

Her breast touched his bottom rib. The entire front of his body felt as if it had opened, like a door. He closed his eyes.