The Island Walkers (61 page)

“And did you?” Anna said. Joe looked at his father, who was shaking his head. He could hardly believe his father was telling her, a stranger, details he had never told Joe; he almost resented it.

“Nope — never made it back,” Alf said, colouring. He seemed embarrassed by his failure to return.

“Oh, you
have
to go,” Anna cried. “It would be a pity if you didn’t go. Mrs. Walker — you both love France — you have to go back!”

Joe shifted uneasily. Anna seemed unaware of the tension in the room, she seemed unaware that not everyone could just go off to France. His father looked over at his mother, his eyes bright. “Maybe we will one day,” he said softly. Joe saw that his mother was staring at the floor, and missed his father’s glance.

“Did you drive a tank?” Jamie said. Everyone looked at him. His voice had chimed into the silence like a small bell.

“I should have been so lucky,” Alf laughed, tousling his head. “No, I’m afraid I walked the whole way.”

Outside, in the dark, Anna took Joe’s hand.

“I love your family,” she said as they went along. “I think that’s how a family should be — noisy and happy. Not gloomy like mine. We don’t live in our house, we
haunt
it.”

Joe said nothing. He wasn’t about to tell her what she had missed: if she
had
really missed it. There was no point dwelling on unhappiness. It was like admitting failure — yes, unhappiness
was
failure — whenever he looked into her face, her beautiful face, he knew this.

54

ONE EVENING LATER
that month they climbed the steep stairway between two short, fluted pillars, pushed open a heavy door, and climbed farther, into the high-ceilinged main hall of the library, with its deep rose walls and white trim, its polished, creaking hardwood that made every step significant. Anna stood before the unused fireplace, looking up at the twin portraits of Abraham Shade and his wife, Rebecca. Both were seated, both wore sombre clothes, their strong bloodless hands gripping the arms of their chairs, their pale faces, stark as axe-blazes against the paintings’ shiny black backgrounds, looking out sternly. “A pretty gloomy couple,” Joe said, moving in beside her. His arm tingled where it brushed against hers. “But look at his eyes,” she said. “There’s real life in them.”

He did as commanded, and saw the dots of brightness in the founder’s pupils. No matter what he showed her, she pointed out
some detail he had not seen. He almost resented it, this constant revision of a world he thought he knew.

“He wrote poetry, you know.”

He told her about Shade’s diaries, the sonnets and other verses Archibald Mann had found in one of the volumes. Most of them were nature poems, Mann had told him, Shade’s stolid attempts to evoke the beauties of the valley. Anna watched him closely as he spoke. Her green eyes roved over his hair, his mouth, as if she was not only listening but taking in all of him. It thrilled him like a stroking touch. Still, he couldn’t help worrying that she already knew what he was telling her, or if he was making some mistake (he was talking about poetry after all).

“Have you read them?” Anna asked.

“No. But maybe Mann’d show them to us.”

“Why don’t we visit him? How about Saturday?”

She was squeezing his arm as she urged him. There was a force in her that was always saying Yes, yes, pulling him on to the next novelty. Her glad, hectic approach electrified him, it broke some barrier of caution in him, but at the same time he was suspicious of her recklessness, which seemed to leave some vital knowledge out of account. She did not seem to remember that the rose had thorns; or perhaps it was simply that she did not fear them. He did not know which.

At the counter, the librarian cleared her throat in a discreet warning.

“I have to work Saturday,” he whispered, a bit put out that she never remembered this.

“Sunday then.”

They studied at a table behind tall shelves crammed with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels — three copies of
Lorna Doone
, complete sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, James. The worn covers smelled pleasantly of decay. They turned pages and made notes, her feet planted between his on the floor, held between his insteps with a snug rightness that kept distracting him. When he
looked up, she was nearly always deep in concentration, pushing unconsciously at the birthmark with the rubber end of her pencil or picking at her cuticles as she stared at a page. He looked back to his book. He was studying a chapter in his Latin composition text entitled “Constructions with Verbs of Fearing, Preventing and Doubting.” Looking up, he saw she had pushed her text aside and was busy devouring
Daniel Deronda
, fished down from a nearby shelf.

He scowled at his book, and tried to concentrate. He looked up again, watching her for a while before he spoke. She was slouched back in her chair now, one bare arm slung over its back, her mouth a little open as she read.

“You should be studying.”

“I don’t think I would have
liked
George Eliot,” she announced without looking up.

He sighed and tried again.

“Study your Latin, girl! These are important exams!” Their finals, in fact: for all purposes their entrance exams to university. He tapped with exaggerated sternness on her Latin book, sheathing his command in a smile. She looked at the book, then up at him, with a sharp, penetrating candour, almost hostile. Her anger always seemed close at hand.

“Okay,
don’t
study your Latin,” he said with a shrug. She went back to her reading. He was acting indifferent, but her look had chilled him. Anna’s independence was something, for all his desire to honour her freedom, that could gall him. She might have at least entered into the spirit of his reprimand, which rose out of concern for her, he felt. But she had looked at him so coolly she had made him feel like a stranger, a person of no account.

For the rest of the time in the library, he brooded. He was so on edge around her. He felt as if security lay with her, and if he could only draw close enough to her, he could have it too. But the way was fraught with traps, and a terrible provisionality. He could not forget for more than an hour that she was going away in August, everything
they did lay in the shadow of that fact, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. This was bad enough, but what really unnerved him was that she was apparently not the least bit upset that she was leaving.

When the library closed, he walked her up the hill.
Daniel Deronda
rode with the other books, pressed to her chest by her folded arms.

They reached the edge of King’s Park, stepping through its border of old trees. Up ahead, the little bandstand appeared like the point of a rocket emerging from the earth. The grass had been cut, leaving drifts of dead clippings here and there, a smell of hay.

“
Fieri non potest quin te amem
,” he said.

He had memorized the sentence from his Latin text, and now waited with pounding heart for her response. His textbook had translated the sentence as
It is impossible for me not to love you
. He’d got the message that she didn’t like to hear him say “I love you,” at least not as often as he’d been saying it. But he couldn’t help himself. He was fishing desperately for an answering “I love you.”

“Is that you talking,” she said after a moment, “or page 167?”

“I find I agree with it exactly,” he said.

Again she was silent, stepping along over the grass. A slight rain had fallen earlier, dampening things, intensifying smells. A scent of blossoms drifted from somewhere, sickly sweet.

“How about you?” he said nervously. “Would you say the same holds true for you?”

“I’m suspicious of the word ‘love,’ ” she said, a bit impatiently. “I mean, I always feel a bit queasy about putting it in a poem. I think that tells me something —”

“What does it tell you?” he said, reluctantly taking up her line of thought. He felt she was avoiding his challenge.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s as if it means too much, so it ends up meaning nothing.”

“Too vague?”

“Something like that. And maybe sentimental. And maybe a bit — easy, somehow. If you feel that way about someone, better to show it in your actions.”

“So better that I jump off the railway bridge —”

“No,” she said, looking up at him. “Definitely not that.”

He walked along in silence, then said, “But it
is
a definite feeling — everybody knows what it is. Even you know what it is, I’m sure. But if we can’t
say
it, then, I don’t know, the whole world’s going to be pretty frustrated.”

“I’m just talking about me, not the whole world!”

“But if you think it’s wrong for you — and for me — don’t you think it’s wrong for everybody?”

“I guess I do,” she allowed.

“You’d like to do away with the word ‘love’ altogether then?”

“A ten-year moratorium,” she said, “and then we’d see —”

“So even parents shouldn’t say to their children, I love you —”

“Even that.”

“That’s
monstrous
,” he said, stopping. She turned to face him, perfectly calm, it seemed. “Without love,” he said, gesturing with his free arm, “there’d be, I don’t know, no
glue
holding things together. It would be awful —”

“I’m just talking about the word,” she said. He felt her smile was false, a placating of him, a bit patronizing. “I know there’s something there the word refers to — I just think we should think about it a bit, before we throw it around.”

“So what I just did was throwing it around, even in Latin —”

She looked at him. He was breathing hard, really upset. He felt his heart had been laid bare and, in some way he could not quite put his finger on, mocked. He kicked at a little pile of dry grass. “Now I feel you’re trying to put
me
in a straitjacket, telling me what I can and can’t say.”

She came up behind him and leaned her head into his back. They stood like this for some time. He was sulking, really hurt. He could not understand why it wounded him so much, this refusal of hers to
have him use the word “love.” To her, it was just an intellectual matter; to him, it was as if she had rejected his deepest self.

He turned to her. In the weak light of the street light her face seemed misshapen, as if bent by the atmosphere. But there was concern for him there, real concern, though he saw, too, that spark of amusement in her eyes. Nothing, it seemed, could quench it.

“You say what you like,” she said quietly.

“I will,” he said. “You can just take your chances.”

They looked at each other. She leaned up suddenly and kissed him on the mouth. He seized her by the shoulders, intending to plant a firmer kiss. His tongue sought hers. But she pushed him firmly back, with her free arm. They went along together, through the park. The sense of disjunction between them seemed stronger than ever to him, a sadness. It seemed to come out of the ground, out of the damp hay and blossom scents, out of the branches of new leaves: a sadness and, yes, a sense of deepening vulnerability. Like a trapeze artist, he had abandoned his swing to throw himself into the air towards her. He had to be sure her hands were there to catch him. Perhaps, he wondered with a kind of terror, she was warning him off love in an attempt to get him back to his perch. But it was already too late. He was tumbling through the air, his arms outstretched, his hands open.

55

ARCHIE MANN PULLED
the plastic wrap from one of Shade’s diaries, exposing the leather-bound volume to the air of his study. He opened the book carefully, turning its parched, crackling pages. At his elbow, Joe and Anna saw the brown loops of the founder’s hand.

“I like this one best,” Mann said, handing the book to Anna. “Be careful. The pages are halfway to dust.”

Anna held the book at chest level, bowing her head to decipher the block of writing. As Mann stepped out of the way, Joe moved in beside her.