The Island Walkers (65 page)

He knew she was working again at Bannerman’s, in her old job as a seam-stitcher. Alf himself had put her on the list the negotiators had asked for. Her smile shocked him. He wondered if she’d found out he’d helped her.

“Do you know where Billy’s got to?”

He supposed she had noticed him with the boy. But he felt it was him, really, she had come to see.

“He went off to the woods.”

“That kid — he’s a regular escape artist!”

Her black eyes, suddenly empty of expression, searched his. He had left her without an explanation, simply walked away. He felt
he deserved hostility from her, but there was something else here instead, girlish, wondering. Shame heated his face, but he was glad, very glad, to see her.

It was threatening rain. The air was soft, close; the park felt wrapped in sadness. His hands had grown heavy. He was aware of her bosom, rising below her smooth, exposed chest, and of a faint twist in the left side of her mouth.

“So I guess you’re a hero now,” she said.

Was she speaking ironically? He could not meet her eyes.

“I wouldn’t say so,” he said.

“Why did you leave me?” she said, looking straight at him.

“I’m sorry, Lucille. I —”

“Well, you’re a busy man.” She turned away and stared at the crowd for a moment while he watched her. He wanted her, and was appalled at himself that
this
should crop up again. “I really hated you for going,” she said. “I sort of thought — well, stupid me, eh?”

“There’s nothing stupid about you,” he said.

“I just thought we might have, you know, talked about it.”

“I was a bastard,” he said.

The space between them filled with an awkward silence.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I better find Billy.”

“I’ll help you,” he said.

As they walked off together, he realized people must be watching. Before, he had taken great pains to hide his connection to her. Now he told himself they were only going into the woods to hunt for her boy: they were innocent entirely. Careful not to touch each other even accidentally, they walked across the dry grass, her sandals slapping at her heels. They did not speak, and again he felt that strange blankness, almost a deadness, that descended on his mind whenever he was with her. He wondered if she were only tolerating him now. Men stuck to her, clung to her like burrs: it was something she was used to. He didn’t care. That was the main thing, he didn’t care. At the woods they had to separate, to enter the mouth of the trail. He
followed her down the dim path that smelled of mud in hidden springs, watching the white tag of her dress where it had stood up against her neck, white on brown.

58

JAMIE WATCHED THEM GO
into the woods. His balloon tickled its string lightly through his hand and slipped away, unnoticed. By the time he reached the trees, it had sailed, a red dot, high over the river and the Island.

He climbed through the dim mass of trees. After a while he stopped, below a tall clump of cedars. Water slimed and rutted the trail. The fragile, tentative tap of a woodpecker came from space grown ominous.

Billy had said,
He’s going to be my father now
. Now it had happened, he felt. He’d watched Billy go into the woods. Now his father and Billy’s mother had gone after him. The three of them were together.

He heard a laugh. It came from just up ahead — his father’s laugh! And for a second he felt everything was going to be all right — that’s what his father’s laugh meant to him — and he remembered a time when they had gone swimming at Devil’s Cave. His father had stayed a long time underwater, then burst up, the water pouring off his head, laughing. He floated up the trail. A flicker in the leaves told him his father was close by. Stopping, he turned a little and saw his father and Billy’s mother. They were standing right in front of him, facing each other, and his father’s hand was on her face, touching her cheek.

“Dad,” someone said.

For a minute he thought it was Billy who had spoken: that hard little voice. But it was himself, Jamie, his voice like a stone.

His father’s hand dropped from her cheek. They looked at him.

“Jamie, hey! We’re just looking for Billy.”

Looking for Billy in Billy’s mother’s face. He stared at his father, who came forward with a grin. “Hey guy,
you
seen Billy?”

His father mussed his hair.

They went back down to the park together, the three of them. Billy could find his own way home, his mother said.

In the park, she went off. His father took him across the bridge and off the Island to the stores. He wondered, Were they still looking for Billy? His father took him into the Oasis and bought him a double-scoop chocolate — for doing so well in that race, he said. They walked back towards the Island. On the bridge, his father stopped and leaned on the rail. He lit a cigarette and tossed the flaming match towards the water. Jamie stood licking his cone and watching his father’s face. Ice cream melted cold on his fingers, and somewhere down the shadowy race a mourning dove cooed three times.

“What you saw there,” his father said, “that was just Billy’s mother being sad about something. It’s okay, really. We don’t have to mention it to your mother. Okay?”

Jamie licked at his cone. “Are you still my dad?” he said, in his strange, new voice. It seemed, almost, to come from outside him. The mourning dove had stopped.

He was falling, falling through the mild air. His father laughed. A large hand caressed the back of his head. “What a crazy idea!”

59

THESE DAYS
— the long summer holidays of sun and burnt lawns and the whining lathes of the cicadas in their high, secret workshops — Joe would have spent every hour he had with Anna, who was leaving
in a month. But he had to work. He had to prowl the dim aisles of Bannerman’s shipping department, invoices in sweaty hand, taking down sweaters and T-shirts from their shelves, fitting them into cardboard boxes stamped with the logo of the Boy Scout with the banner. The place was miserably hot under its flat roof and, despite the pine scent of Dustbane sprinkled liberally everywhere, stank of human waste. The toilet faced directly into the workplace, its saloon-style doors revealing the dropped trousers and shins of whoever was inside. The shins always looked vulnerable, pathetic, the source of endless jokes —
Show us your knees, Maggie
— which Joe quickly grew tired of.

One low, filthy window looked out on the straw-pale playing fields behind the arena. By putting his face close to the left side of the glass he could peer over the arena roof and just make out the cloud of trees obscuring the North End. They seemed alive with Anna’s presence, like the blank sky above, and the steep roofs of the Bannerman mansion nestled in foliage. He was impatient to get up the hill again, to renew the spell at its source. He kept glancing above the shipping-room door, where the hands of a large clock jerked arthritically through the day, and was startled by a paradox: he was wishing the hours away, but every one of them, when it was past, was another sixty minutes deducted from her time in the town. She and her mother, who was going back to visit family, had already bought their tickets.

When the five o’clock whistle went, he was always first down the stairs, first across the playing fields. At home: a shower, fresh clothes, then a quick bite and out again. His mother kept asking if he didn’t want to invite Anna home for supper. “Such a lovely girl” she said warmly, more than once, “clever too.” But Joe resisted. “Love you,” he’d tell her as he brushed past with a quick kiss. He
did
love her, it was easy these days, love seemed to spill from him without effort: he even loved the cozy, familiar kitchen with its banged-up furniture, he loved his brother’s bicycle, abandoned on its side on the dry grass …

Something had shifted between him and Anna. It was their love-making in the mills that had done it, he felt — pitching them into a new level of intimacy. He had never forgotten Liz’s words:
Anna can’t love. It was a man, not a boy like you
. Well, he had proven her wrong, hadn’t he? And now, surely something could be worked out about France. He told Anna he could visit her in Paris; maybe he could become a student there himself in a year or two, if he could find the money. Yet his enthusiasm never generated anything definite from her side. They made love a few times more, in her bedroom when her parents were out, and once, at his insistence, in the lowlands beside the Shade where they’d first got together on the night of the graduation party. But even so, he began to fear that, for her, nothing essential had changed. She actually seemed to be looking forward to going away. He wondered if she felt any pangs at all. Couldn’t she see, couldn’t she guess, what he was going through? His desperation grew cagey, his desperation, and, yes, his jealousy. He wondered if her old boyfriend was still in the cards — the
man
-friend Liz had mentioned. He wondered if it was the man in the picture on her desk.

One Sunday afternoon they were reading in her bedroom. Sitting at her desk, he could hear Anna flipping pages on the bed behind him. Unable to concentrate, he kept studying the photograph in its gold frame — the picture he’d first seen that winter afternoon he’d brought her the heather. He worried over the handsome face of her friend, the heavy eyebrows, the unreadable expression of the rather deep-set eyes, the sense of casual ownership implied by the loose draping of his hand over Anna’s shoulder. In her head-scarf she had the air of a convalescent, bundled against the chill.

The man was movie-star handsome, Joe thought, but there was something vacant in his face, as though it had been hollowed out from within. It was a mask of handsomeness, from which unhappy eyes stared. He had constructed a theory. This man was the man Liz had referred to. Anna had fallen in love with this man, and he had abandoned her. She had had a terrible time. Here, in the photograph, her unhappiness was already coming upon her, because the man —
this man with his cold, careless face — was in the process of leaving her. She had been a long time recovering, and now she was wary of love, of love’s abandon, because she could not allow herself to go through it again. Even if she loved Joe (and he was almost convinced she did), she could not let herself feel it. He needed to go slowly, to be patient. She needed patient, tender care and of course he was willing to give it to her, only there wasn’t much time left to be patient in.

Twice he nearly spoke, to the rustling on the bed behind him. Each time he hesitated. Any attempt to enter her intimate space always seemed to embroil him in new sorrows. She was a nest of tripwires. You never knew what anger or rebuke you might set off. But he had to know.

Offhandedly, he sang out, “Say, who’s this handsome friend of yours?”

When she didn’t answer, he turned in his chair. She was lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows over her book. She was wearing Bermudas and a sleeveless blouse. Those green eyes looked at him across the carved mahogany of her bed.

“In the photo,” he said.

“Enrico,” she said matter-of-factly. “He was my best friend in Europe.”

She went on looking at him, while he conducted a rapid analysis of her words. She had spoken so casually of this Enrico that he wondered if he
had
been only a friend.

“Very good-looking,” he said, struggling to maintain a disinterested note. “Were you in love with him?”

“In a way,” she mused, still watching him.

He could no longer stop himself.

“Will you be seeing him — when you go back?”

“Yes,” she said in a muffled tone, looking down at her book. Staring over the back of his chair, with the false smile dying on his face, he felt suddenly emptied. In two seconds, the happiness and confidence of the entire summer had evaporated.

“So this is my rival,” he said. His voice came out as a croak.

She turned a page. Her bare feet were twining with each other, and this seemed to him the twining of naked bodies, of which his was not one.

“Anna,” he said.