Random Winds (36 page)

When he got to his room, he propped it against the wall in a corner without unwrapping it. Why the devil had he bought the thing? There it stood, making a disturbance in the room. There were enough
disturbances in
the world without any more.

It was three days before he took the picture out of its wrapping and held it to the light. In the lower left-hand corner, she had placed her initials: MFL. The bottom of the F turned up in a flourish; the L had a curlicue. Slowly he traced the letters with his fingernail. So she was still living at Lamb House with Alex! But of course, he had expected nothing else. And he wondered whether by now any other man had come into her life, and if so, who and how.

He went outside. The night was still. In the west lay a low streak of hazy, lingering pink. No bombers had gone out yet On most nights at about this time a flight roared overhead from the airbase only ten miles to the north. In early dawn, you heard them again; they never seemed as loud on the homeward flight and you wondered how many had failed to return.

He stood leaning against the cottage wall. The cruelty, the haphazard idiocy of men’s lives! The planet was a ship on an uncharted sea cleaving a way through infinite cold space. At least they said it was infinite. Who really knew what the concept could mean? Perhaps, like a ship heading toward a hidden reef, it was even now careening toward its doom in some unimaginable celestial wreck. All we know is that we are whirled through our short days and our transient delights, so quickly over and lost.

Some three weeks later on a Saturday afternoon, Martin stepped out of a train and walked down a standard village High Street The church, he recalled, was on the left. There one turned into a country lane, and after a short walk, arrived at Lamb House.

No sooner had he arrived there, he wanted to go back. He felt that his presence must announce itself to everyone who saw him, that someone surely must turn to challenge him. He passed a few women carrying market baskets, a Tommy home on furlough and some girls on bicycles. But no one even glanced his way.

The tiny door-gardens had been planted in vegetables. Only one scrap of earth, too small for vegetables, bore any reminder of what life had been before the war. It was a
patch of mignonette, like late snow, next to a clump of larkspur.

He ought to go back. But he hadn’t come here to entangle anyone; he had only come to see how she was! What could be wrong with that?

The front lawn had been planted with cabbage. He had taken no more than a few steps up the lane when he saw Mary. Her back was toward him but he knew her, nevertheless. She was hoeing the cabbage. And again he felt a powerful urge to go away. Afterward, he was to ask himself whether he might not truly have done so if she had not happened that moment to see him.

She stood quite still as he approached. She wore a white shirt and a brown skirt. She was sunburned and had a smudge of earth on her cheek.

“I bought your red birds. In a gallery in London,” he said.

She looked at him, not understanding. “I saw the sketch of Ned, I think it was Ned. Was it? So I came here.” He stopped. “I’m not making any sense.” She let the hoe drop. “What are you doing here?”

“Here? Or in England, do you mean?”

“You’ve just come to England?”

“No. Since last fall.”

They stood looking at each other for a minute.

“You’ve not grown any older,” she said.

“Eleven years older.”

The years had told on Mary. There were some lines on her forehead which had not used to be there; also a thinning of the cheeks so that the enormous eyes were deeper.

“Is Alex here?” he asked.

He hadn’t planned the question; indeed had had no thought of what he would say when he got here. But the question sounded normal enough.

“With Montgomery in North Africa. He volunteered.”

There seemed then nothing to say.

“You’re well?” she asked. “Your family’s well?”

How queer and formal she sounds! he thought. The questions confused him.

“My family?”

“Your wife. Your boy. Aunt Milly writes to me sometimes. That’s how I know.”

The word “wife” flustered him. “Oh yes, yes, everyone is well,” he answered awkwardly.

“You’ve been seeing Claire again.”

“Yes, yes, I have.”

“I was glad to hear it.”

Again he thought: How correct she is!

The sun, glittering in his eyes, gave him an excuse for looking away. He felt that he hardly knew this woman. He felt quite numb inside.

“Will you come in, Martin? We have five children now and I have to help with the supper for them.”

He was astonished. “Five?”

For the first time she smiled. Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes.

“No, no, mine are away. Ned’s in the RAF and the girls are at boarding school. These are evacuees from the bombing.”

“Then you must be busy. I’m keeping you.”

“You’re not keeping me.”

He followed her into the house.

“Sit down while I set the table,” she said.

He sat down stiffly with his cap on his knees and watched her laying the places at the carved oak table, an earthenware plate and mug at each plate. He remembered her sitting at that table, wearing velvet. He shouldn’t have come. How could he tell what feelings she might have toward him now? Embarrassment, no doubt. Perhaps even anger. It was possible. Anything was possible.

“Have you come by car?” she asked abruptly.

“No, I took the train.”

“Then you’ll have to stay the night There’re only three trains a day now, and the last one’s already left.”

“I’m sorry! I never thought! Perhaps there’s a room somewhere in the village.”

“No need. We’ve plenty of room here, even with the children.”

He tried desperately to think of something to say.

“All these strange children. They’re quite an undertaking.”

“Not really. I’ve reared three of my own, after all. These keep me company.”

“Ah, yes.”

“I’m afraid you’ll find it bedlam here until they’re all fed and sent up to sleep,” she said politely.

“I shan’t mind,” he answered as politely.

It seemed to him they were behaving like relatives, who, meeting after long silence, had found that they didn’t like each other very much anymore.

It was impossible that a bloody war was being fought! Or that there could be places like the operating room where Martin bloodied his sleeves every day. A fire was snapping on the hearth. The tough old sycamores creaked in the wind at the corner of the house. Country noises out of a Victorian novel! Nothing in the room had relevance to what was happening in the world outside it, neither the framed ancestor in the plumed hat, nor Alex’s copper-and-silver riding trophies on the mantel, nor the needlepoint bellpull to summon servants who were no longer there.

A door closed above. There were steps on the stairs, and Mary came into the room.

“I’m sorry I took so long. Hermine—she’s the youngest—still cries sometimes for her mother. It takes a while to comfort her.”

“I didn’t mind. It’s peaceful in here.”

“Peaceful and chilly.”

Kneeling, she stretched her hands out to the fire. An enormous sheep dog came in from the hall to flop down near the heat. The tall clock ticked, making a lonely sound in the stillness. At the supper table, the children had created distraction. Now again there was nothing to say.

Mary stared somberly into the fire. Presently, she looked up.

“Are you happy, Martin?”

The question, following the stiffness of their first hours, startled him. And he evaded it.

“Can anyone be happy in 1943?”

Her eyes said:
That’s not what I meant
.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I know you meant something else … I suppose I am.”

“Tell me about your children. First, Claire.”

“Oh,” he answered, relieved at a question he could answer with ease, “Claire’s going to be
somebody!
Whatever she does will be on a large scale. She’ll have a great deal of joy or a great deal of pain. Probably both.”

“That’s rather like you, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see myself. But she’s like her mother, too,” he said thoughtfully.

“Tell me, what do you know about Jessie?”

“Only secondhand reports from Claire, and not very many of those. But I can tell that the household is cheerful; that says something.”

“I think of Jessie all the time; I suppose it’s just conscience nagging.”

“Eleven years,” Martin said softly, “and it still nags?”

“Why? Don’t you ever feel it?”

Now. Now they were approaching the heart of the matter.

“Yes,” he said, “I do. But talk about something else. There’s nothing to be done about what’s past.”

“All right Tell me about your little boy. What is his name?”

“Enoch, after my father.”

“I remember your father. He was a plain man and very kind.”

“Well. My boy was three when I last saw him, a quiet baby with a kind of sweetness. Very different from Claire.”

Mary rose from her knees to sit near the fire, resting her hands on the arms of the chair. “You’re not wearing the topaz,” Martin said.

“Topaz?”

“That odd, carved ring you always wore on your little finger.”

“Oh, you remembered that! I gave it to Isabel. It was my mother’s, and Isabel is like her, even though she looks like Alex.”

“So—Alex volunteered, you said?”

“Yes. He had strong convictions about the Nazis long before most people did, and he wanted desperately to go.”

“He’s a man of spirit.”

“If he weren’t, I don’t think I could have stood it all these years.”

Back again now to the heart of the matter. This time he was less afraid.

“Has it been so terribly hard, even so?”

She clasped her hands. He had forgotten that passionate young gesture of hers.

“I don’t know. What I mean is, you come to love life more when it’s been hard, isn’t that true? There are balances. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as close to my children if things had been different Maybe I’ve learned to care more about other people.”

There was a change in the room. Suddenly he became aware that his heart had begun to race … The fire snapped. In its twisting flames flowers burst open, surf tumbled, castles towered and fell. And Martin sat quite still, letting himself be hypnotized.

At last he said, “You’ve been very strong, Mary.”

“You do what you have to do,” she said quietly.

“Do you look into the future at all?”

“Not beyond this war. When it’s over—whenever that may be—then I’ll think about the future.”

She got up and put another log on the fire, making a small thud and a rush of sparks.

“ ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ ” Martin said. And, as Mary looked puzzled, he added, “I don’t usually go around quoting Job. It just came out of my head, stuck there after all those Bible readings in the front parlor when I was growing up. Anyway, it’s glorious poetry, even if you can’t take it all as literal truth.”

“You think man is born to trouble? Doesn’t he make his own?”

“You could argue that till doomsday. Whatever the cause, though, I wish you hadn’t had so much of it.”

“My sufferings rank pretty low next to what’s happening in the world right now.”

She smiled, and with that unfolding, courageous, lovely
smile, time contracted. Eleven years was yesterday. Today was eleven years ago.

“Blue eyes don’t belong in such a dark Spanish face. Or is it Greek?” he said.

“There’s no Spanish in me, or Greek either, Martin.”

He stood up. She was so close that he could see the pulse in her throat, could see the dark line where the lashes grew out of the fine, white shells of her lids, could even see a glistening of tears.

“I shouldn’t have come!” he cried out.

She didn’t answer.

“I didn’t come here to begin it all again. I swear I didn’t.”

“Oh my dear, I know that.”

Enormous happiness flooded. It surged in him. He could have shouted to the skies. He could have sung.

How could he ever have convinced himself that it was over? He had wanted to believe that those few days on the southern coast of France so long ago had been simply an interlude, one of those delights, mingled with a piquant grief, that life occasionally bestows. Now he knew that those days had been not an end, but a beginning, or more exactly, the end of that beginning which had occurred when he had first walked into a room and found her there, long ago.

They met in London or at Lamb House or at an inn near the hospital. When they were unable to meet they wrote letters.

“Dear My Love,” he wrote, “All music and all grace are yours. If I could write a poem, it would start like that I sit at the window of your flat and wait for you. It is night. I can’t see you coming down the street, but I know by the sound that it is you. The front door opens softly, not with the crash that other people make who enter here, and you come up the stairs.

“I am never irritable when you are with me, I, a man always in a hurry, who runs instead of walks, who am impatient for people to complete a sentence.

“The little sounds you make are pure pleasure to me. I close my eyes and, half asleep, I listen to you turn a page. Your heels make a delightful click on the floor between the rugs. When you draw the curtains, I hear leaves rustle.

“I open my eyes and watch you pour tea. I am entranced by your hands, by everything you do.

“All this past year that we have been together, all these odd hours, are the reality of my life. The hospital and the war are its dark background.

“What have we not done together? Heard music often, sat in a bomb shelter through eerie hours, lain in an old
bed in an old room at Lamb House and tried to believe that there was no time earlier or later than our long, deep, lovely night.

“Oh, Mary, it’s been a long time coming, this acknowledgment. Did you have the same long sense of loss? Like dreaming of some perfect place, some cool blue place that could be forever home, and then waking to find you’re not there and never will be?