The Island Walkers (24 page)

“Aspects of Romanticism,” Anna Macrimmon read in a voice that to Joe was touched with doubt. “Among people who read poetry,
the Romantics seem to have fallen out of favour. Where once young men and women read Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats to each other, now we prefer ‘tougher’ or more ‘modern’ writers such as T.S. Eliot, or W.H. Auden, or Dylan Thomas. In one way, this is good and natural, for those more recent writers catch the flavour of our troubled times, when two world wars have shattered some of the cozy certainties society once rested on. But we are in error if we think that Wordsworth and Shelley and their company have little or nothing to say to us. In fact, they understand the modern world as well or better than many of the writers who followed, for they were there at its birth, when the first factories and industrial towns were creeping across the English countryside, and science was beginning its long undermining of the Christian Church. They received the shock of the new in their souls, and while they still looked to the future with confidence, there is a shadow aspect to their work that presages, profoundly, our modern skepticism about the phenomenon of so-called progress. I believe that their analysis of the situation is the deepest we have, still, and that, in a way, we have yet to catch up to them.

“Take Wordsworth, for example. In his sonnet that begins, ‘The world is too much with us …’ ” She read on. They listened, they who for the most part did not read poetry, for whom Wordsworth was only the author of “Daffodils,” which they had had to tediously memorize — they listened with a quietness that was rare for them. Perhaps it was her voice that held them, more than her ideas: a light voice, almost a woman’s, yet breaking at times like an adolescent boy’s in little patches of roughness. A few of the students seemed to listen to every word. Others slipped into daydream, into the bare trees branching into the cold blue sky outside the classroom windows.

When she sat down, the silence continued. A radiator clanked in solitary appreciation. Then applause rippled briefly through the class.

After school, Joe turned past the trophy case and saw her in her brown cloak and tam, pushing open the glass doors to the street. In seconds he was beside her.

“Your essay was wonderful —”

Immediately, he felt the poverty of the word “wonderful.” She used language so well that when he tried to speak, he felt like a complete amateur. Yet the irony was that around her, or even just thinking of her, he seemed about to say everything he had always wanted to say but lacked the words for; he seemed about to relieve the pressure of all the confused ideas and feelings he had carried with him all his life. Once, when he was very young, he had known things, but no one wanted to hear about them — not his parents, who never had patience or time, or Smiley, who had made fun of him for trying. So he had fallen into the habit of silence, and into the deeper habit of not paying attention to what was stirring in the shadows: his intuitions about the beauty and ugliness and truth and strangeness of things. Yet whatever was there, was still alive for him. Instinctively, he knew she was his chance to speak.

She was walking quickly, as if fleeing something, her face cast down a little, sheltering behind the erect collar of her cloak. She thanked him for his compliment but in the same breath added, “I couldn’t help thinking how simple-minded it was.”

“Oh no —”

“By the time I was through, I even doubted I agreed with it, with most of it.”

She seemed genuinely dismayed. He did not know what to say. If
he
had written such an essay, he would have strutted for weeks afterwards. But to her, it seemed a defeat.

“I mean, how can I say that life has got more regimented than it was then? I wasn’t alive then — and I don’t have that much experience now. It was all wrong —”

A car went by, full of students, honking as if coming from a wedding. Davy Mackelroy thrust his freckled face towards them and screamed. Joe watched Anna jump back and glance quickly at the car, and in that moment he saw, again, her vulnerability. He had once thought of her as immune to such things, as she had appeared that first afternoon on the river: remote and superior and somehow
unblemished. But since then he had seen a great deal more: her headaches, the red places on her ink-stained fingers where she’d torn her cuticles — and now this reaction to the kids in the passing car. He saw she was immersed in the thousand particular details of life — all that misery he knew himself.

And this gave him hope that he had a place by her, as her helpmate at least.

“Factory life,” he said, and suddenly he was swept with tenderness for her. His fear and self-consciousness had vanished. “I liked what you said about that —”

“I’ve never worked in a factory,” she said. There was laughter in her voice, dismissive, and hinting at despair. “What do I know about factory work? It’s ridiculous that I stand up there and tell people about it. Half of them probably know more about it than I do —”

“But you got it right,” he said.

She looked at him.

“I’ve worked in a factory, in Bannerman’s.” He could feel his face heat at his admission. Before, he had done everything to hide his background from her. But now, he was willing to risk exposing it. “It’s no fun,” he said, “watching machines go around all day. Putting socks in boxes. It sort of drives you crazy. You go numb. Nobody likes it. I mean, people write things on the walls, in the washrooms, about how much they hate it. The management keeps painting them over and putting up signs not to do it, but it doesn’t help. The writing always comes back.”

“What work did you do?”

“Lots of things. For a while I was a knitter.”

“A knitter!”

“Sure, I sat in a rocking chair and knitted,” he said, joking. “There was a whole roomful of us —” When she laughed, it was the girl in her who laughed, sunlight on a wave. He walked her home. She lived on Banting Street, in a large house of weathered brick, with a small white porch supported by four pillars. For a while they stood
at the curb, in the drifting smell of bonfires, talking. She seemed in a better mood now, holding her books over her chest, smiling at the stories he told her about life in the mill. But he wasn’t simply telling her stories. He was watching her, calculating when to make his next move. He couldn’t help himself.

Stepping up on the curb — a sudden hot rush of courage — he said, “So when are we going on our walk?”

She looked at him. “Did I promise to go for a walk?”

“At Liz’s party. I wanted to take you out to Devil’s Cave. It’s a cave in the limestone, you’d love it, what the river does there. It sort of slides in, you know, with these little whirlpools in it — they pop up and go spinning away —”

“It sounds fascinating,” she said, still looking at him; he felt he had moved her. But then she added, “Maybe Liz and Brad would like to go —”

“I was thinking, just the two of us.”

“Oh, Joe,” she said quietly, a note of alarm.

“I don’t think they’d mind. Heck, we don’t need to tell them.” He half-hated himself for pressuring her — surely he was being boorish and insensitive — but he couldn’t seem to stop. She was looking askance now, into the road.

“If I tell you something,” she said, “do you promise to keep it to yourself?”

“Yes, of course!” Unexpectedly, she was presenting him with two of his most fervent desires: she was opening herself to him, and she was asking something of him.

“And not ask me any more than I want to tell you?”

“Not a word,” he said. He was watching her eagerly now, loving every movement of her eyes, her face.

“I — this sounds so melodramatic. I made a promise to myself. A couple of years ago, I — well, something happened. I had a pretty bad time. And after, I promised myself I’d — I’d take things easier. I’d live a more ordinary life.”

“Ordinary —” He did not see how anything about her could be ordinary.

“I just wanted to be, I don’t know, like most people my age. I wanted to, you know, do my schoolwork, have fun, have a boyfriend, and not get too serious about it — just ordinary things.” She was deeply flushed now, watching him, and her eyes seemed to be begging an understanding for what she could not express.

“So I guess what I’m saying is, let’s just be friends. You’re very special Joe, very — special, but I can’t — I guess what I’m saying is, I need some room.”

“I’ll give you room,” he said and couldn’t help adding, “I’ll give you anything you want.”

She let out a little explosion of breath. Abruptly, she turned from him and hurried up the walk.

That evening after supper, he crossed the dim yard and climbed the garden steps to the top of the dyke. The Atta gleamed like oil, under ghostly limestone. He turned and looked towards the North End, hidden by trees and houses. She had pushed him gently away, and at the same time she had given him a secret, or at least a piece of one. How could having a bad time make her want to be ordinary? Had she told her secret to Brad? Did Brad know he was part of the ordinary life she wanted, or in this ordinary life was there no room for the telling of her secret? Did Brad know, how had she put it, that she wanted to have a boyfriend
and not get too serious about it
? And where did that leave him, Joe? She had said he was special: did being special disqualify him for the ordinary life she wanted? He walked along the path on the top of the dyke. Someone was riding a bicycle across the footbridge to the park. He could see the spokes flash, behind the wire mesh fence, and hear the planks rumble, each one speaking out in turn as the wheels fled over it.

19

MID-NOVEMBER
. Lookout Hill a grey cloud looming over the Business Section and the Island. Alf was walking home from work when Pete’s Sarasota drew up beside him.

“Hey-yoh,” Alf said, stooping to peer inside. Pete held his cigarette like a pencil in his crimped fingers, turning from the wheel to look unhappily at Alf. His hand, Alf saw, was stained red with dye.

“You get it too?”

“What?”

“I just got laid off.”

A sudden nausea swept him, at the smell of stale smoke and sour, ancient seat covers. And Pete, Pete just went on looking at him, accusingly it seemed to Alf, with the butt smoking in his fingers, his eyes hard. It had been a couple of months since Alf had given Woody Marr’s name to Prince, months of worrying what the result would be. But nothing had happened to Woody, or to anyone else. He had begun to think he was home free.

“They didn’t lay you off?” Pete said. And still his eyes held Alf’s, with their look of pain and accusation and, under it, something of his old plaintiveness, his old hopefulness, hanging in gamely.

“No, no. Pete, this is terrible.”

“The scumbags said there wasn’t enough work. Complete bullshit. Somebody squealed on us —”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody’s who’s been let go was at my place that night.”

“There’s more?”

“Eight I know of. I’m gonna phone Doyle,” Pete said, finally releasing Alf from his gaze. He ground out his cigarette with a sharp twist.

“Who else?” Alf managed.

“Get in,” Pete said. Alf got in and shut the door. Ahead, a few snowflakes drifted across Water Street. He felt he had passed a subtle border into another world. Everything looked the same, and yet he knew it wasn’t. The sign hanging outside the Royal Hotel, the orange cloud of willows above the millrace bordering the Island: they seemed hollowed out from the inside, less themselves. Pete put the car in gear and they drifted down Water.

“You’re sure it’s just union people?” Alf said, rousing himself.

“Every one of them was at my place.”

“Who?”

“Terry, Lucille, Ed —” Pete ran through eight or nine names. He glanced over at Alf. Alf found it awful, the darting of those wounded eyes. He felt Pete suspected him. What else could he think, given that he, Alf, still had his job?

“How about Woody?” Alf said, as casually as he could. He had worked it all out before, tossing in bed, imagining the worst. Woody was the key. He had given Prince Woody’s name: if Woody had been fired, it meant Woody had not talked. But if Woody still had his job, it might well mean he had given Prince some names to save it. And if Woody was the
only
person to keep his job, other than himself, it meant he had talked for sure. And in that case, though Alf hadn’t given up the names directly, he might as well have. He had knocked over the first domino, which toppled the rest.

Pete looked away into the falling snow.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Was Woody laid off?”

“I dunno,” Pete said dully. His voice held a note of despair, as if something had just collapsed inside him. “There’s a few I ain’t heard about.”

When they got to Alf’s place, Alf insisted that Pete come in and have a beer. Mercifully, Margaret and the children were out, but all the same Alf immediately regretted having Pete there, regretted his
thin figure hunched at the table peering bleakly through the smoke of his cigarette, gesturing with his red hands, bad-mouthing his foreman and everyone else on management he could think of. He wanted to get on the phone to Woody — no, not to Woody, that would give the whole business away — but to
somebody
and find out if the knitter had been laid off. He was smoking now too. Blue uplands of smoke hung in the kitchen, drifting in the snowy light from the window. Ever since he’d taken Woody’s cigarette on the fire escape, he’d been smoking on the sly and hiding the fact from Margaret. Now he no longer cared.