The Postmistress (18 page)

“Good-bye,” Emma said hurriedly.

“So long, Emma.”

Emma stopped and turned, her hand on the door. Miss James was leaning forward on her elbows watching her, and Mr. Vale, his hip against the counter, turned also to see her go. Emma nodded, and pushed through the door, tears sliding down her cheeks as she walked down the post office stairs and through the gate, starting blindly up the road.

The roof and chimney of the Bowtches appeared, and above that the roof and chimney of the Snows. After that, at the highest point rose her own roof. A sharp spring sun slapped hard on the water, and she had to turn her face away from the harbor glare and stare instead at the faces of the shingled house she passed on her way up the hill. She was tired. There were people back there in town, all over the world, lots of them, sweating and shouting and grabbing handfuls of life, handfuls to toss around, toss at each other, toss away. Her chest tightened. When she had come here, she had thought she could join them. She thought she
was
joining them when she put her right foot down on the carpet in the aisle of the little church—and hesitated a minute, looking up and seeing Will standing there at the end—and then running toward him. She had thought she was erasing the line in her heart that said she was alone in the world. She put her hand wearily on the gate. Other people believed they were tethered to the world and didn’t imagine it could break. But she knew. The memory of her mother’s voice was as light and vague as a veil sliding off the back of a chair. All that remained of her brother was the memory of their shared bed, his breath on her cheek finding her in the dark sometimes, just before sleep. Death was the lightest kiss, the coolest touch, a pinch on the thread and then you were gone.

Up ahead, Jim Tom Winthrop was coming toward her, the baby tied to his back in a makeshift rucksack. Emma stumbled and looked down, hoping not to draw his attention.

“Hello!” he called, and pulled his cap down over his ears. There was nothing to do but wave as he walked to where she waited on the pavement.

“Where are you off to?”

“Back home.” Her eyes strayed up to the bundle on his shoulder.

“You want to see?” He swung around so she could peel away the blanket he had stuffed over the top of the knapsack and peek in. The baby was fast asleep with her mouth open.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

Emma nodded and replaced the blanket.

“How’s things?” Jim Tom was looking at her closely.

She tucked the blanket under the straps of the knapsack, not trusting herself to look at him. “Just fine,” she answered, stepping up onto the sidewalk. She looked back down the street in the direction of town, hoping for some distraction, or someone to come along. But the street was as empty as daybreak. “How are you?”

“Oh, we’re pulling through—”

“Good,” Emma encouraged politely, taking a step away, trying to indicate that she was on her way home. “That’s good to hear.”

“I’ll walk with you a little ways,” he offered. “She sleeps as long as I’m moving.”

“All right,” Emma answered, and set off, a little desperately.

“Hang on,” he teased.

She slowed down.

“The boys have been grand,” he continued, and fell into step alongside her, “and little Maggie’s giving us something to do so we don’t think too much about”—his voice failed him suddenly. Emma didn’t look at him. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

“Aah,” he said thickly into the handkerchief. He shook his head, wiped his eyes, and turned to her. “Sorry,” he said, “it just comes over me.”

Emma stiffened.

“Tough, isn’t it?” Jim Tom slipped his handkerchief into his pocket. “For us left behind.”

Us?
A wild, unreasoning fury rose up in Emma’s chest. “I beg your pardon”—she turned on him—“but Will hasn’t
died
.”

He quit walking and she simply kept going, her fury like jets pushing her forward and away. It had been horrible,
awful,
but she didn’t care. There were wood fires burning in the houses along the way and the smell of someone’s cooking, and the comfort they spoke of home fed her fury. It was wrong that Will had gone. There must have been something wrong with Maggie before she went into labor. It wasn’t Will’s fault. Will hadn’t owed the world a good goddamn, but Maggie’s death had made him think so. Home? There was no home.

She arrived without seeing at her gate, and stopped. On that first afternoon, she and Will had turned in here and she looked up the walk to this house. She tried to recall seeing the weathered shingles and gray sills, but all she remembered was Will’s hand on her elbow, guiding her forward.

“You ought to paint.”

She jumped.

The man in the overcoat she saw around town was standing next to her. The German man who worked for Mr. Vale. Standing quite close.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

His eyes took her in and held her for a moment as if he might have something to give her, Emma thought irrationally. He was very close. He smelled like salt and something deep and dark like bread. Very near.

“You ought to paint it,” he said again.

His voice curled around the English words slowly, as if he negotiated a dangerous turn.

She frowned. “What?”

He pointed to the windows where, it was true, the paint peeled from the shutters and off the sills, leaving bare wood. “It rots,” he said more slowly.

She nodded. The two of them stared up at the house.

“I like the fresh white.” He went on. “One could see it miles way.”

“Miles away,” she corrected reflexively.

“I could do it for you.”

“Oh.” She almost laughed, and turned to face him, understanding now. He needed work, that was all. He needed a job.

“But I can’t do something like that. My husband’s gone, and—I don’t have any money,” she fudged. There was plenty of money for house repairs. Will had even left instructions for how to get at it, in case of a leak.

The man in front of her had dark blue eyes, and a deep crease ran down from one of them as he smiled. “Some day.”

She blushed. “I can’t paint the house.”

“So?” He bent toward her. “All right, then.” And he kept going in the direction of the dunes past town. Before she pushed the gate open, she turned to watch him walking away. She wanted to call him back, almost, but let the impulse go.

“Hello?” she called into the empty house as she did every day on returning.

She walked straight back through to the kitchen. “Hello?” One of the dishes shifted in the drainer. The late trap boats were sliding back into the pier below, and she stared at them, leaning her belly on the lip of the sink.

The house ought to be painted. Emma reached for the kettle and walked it to the sink, letting the water run cold before filling it. She set it on the stove, pulled out cigarettes and her matches and turned around, understanding at last what the foreigner had meant by miles away. Like Hansel’s breadcrumbs lighting a white path along the dark forest floor to find his way home, the German man meant the house ought to be seen from off shore. She inhaled against the match and drew the flame.

Will?
She exhaled.

She wandered away from the window and down the hall where the magic eye on the radio cabinet against the living room wall glowed with the dull green of a strong signal.

More than anything right then, she wanted to turn the knob to tune in Will speaking—hear his voice calling,
Emma Emma.
She sniffed. She turned the shortwave knob until the crackle gave way to a voice, brought her a voice to fill the empty house. She wanted someone to speak to her, right then, any human body.
Do be sensible, my mother writes me. Do take care
, the woman said quite slowly
. But what is sensible anymore? In the mornings waking first to the quiet, a city thrown over with quiet, like the blanket on a parakeet’s cage. Fear has long since been domesticated
. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON,
the signs have gone up all over the city, roller-pasted on the still-standing brick sides of buildings.

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

Emma reached and switched on the light without breathing, and then stood directly in front of the radio, her arms crossed over her chest, her heart pounding.

In the great big novels of the last century, there was time,
Frankie Bard continued
, time to survey the vast expanse, here a figure approaching across the heath, there a girl sitting at her window teaching a boy to read in the factory’s shadow. There was time and there was quiet for page after page. What can be written now to tell of the smashing bombs, the noise and rage at the skies? How we are yanked out of bed, no time to think—perhaps you cannot hear a story like the old ones anymore. The quickest thing to cure a person of omniscience—a belief in some orderly overseeing eye—is war
.
Chaotic and unaligned, people die or are saved without an orchestrating arm. The orchestra plays chords but the notes take off, willy-nilly.

“Shut up,” Emma whispered to the eye. “Shut up, why can’t you?”

13 .

O
N MAY THE TENTH, one hundred bombs a minute rained down on London for five straight hours in what was the most devastating single night of the Blitz. Fires exploded everywhere and at once, and where there had been, even on the other nights, pockets of calm, dips of peace, that night the din in the skies could drive you mad. Hit were Parliament, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey, and countless houses smashed to pieces.

Now, a week later, more than anything, Will needed sleep. He had worked steadily since the tenth, and had been wandering in the direction of bed when the air-raid siren wailed up into the night somewhere to the west. Will rubbed his eyes and looked down at the letter he was writing to Emma. He needed sleep. He needed one night in his own bed. Antiaircraft guns battered at the sky. Perhaps the bombs tonight would stay in one place and he could stay home, he thought, glancing at his bed just as the nearer siren three blocks over began its banshee wailing. He groaned and stretched. He’d have to get himself down into a shelter if he wanted any sleep at all tonight.

He looked back down at the letter. “
Emma, darling
,” it said. He had wanted to tell her about the strange image he had had tonight when he was walking home.
Darling
, he wrote. But he had lost the thread of what would come next.
Good night, my sweet
.
I’ll write more tomorrow, I promise.
He finished hurriedly and folded it into the envelope, licking the flap.
Emma Fitch
, he wrote out on the front,
Box 329, Franklin, Massachusetts, USA,
and shoved it into his jacket pocket. A third siren went off, this one to the north. He slid his lighter and cigarettes into his jacket, stood, and reached for his hat.

“Dr. Fitch.” His landlady knocked at the door. “The siren’s gone off.”

“I’m awake, Mrs. Phillips, thank you for checking.” He opened the door and called after his landlady, who was already hurrying down the stairs. He turned and pulled the blanket off his bed, considered the pillow, but left them both behind.

Out on the street, people hurried toward the brick shelter at the end of the block. The fires set to the north roared up into the sky. There was a whistle and a swish and the bomb hit so close that Will felt as though his lungs were sucked from his chest. He staggered back against the boardinghouse. The air released him and he started to run, heading at a jog for the Kensington High Street tube station, judging there’d still be space there. Just as there had been on the tenth, the consistent drone of the planes above was a blanket in the head. He reached the stairs down into the tunnel and slowed as he descended.

There were interlocking rooms within the station, their tiled caverns inconsistently lit. Will picked his way through the first two, already full, and found a spot in the corner of the third where he could sink down and rest. Relatively comfortable, he thought, stretching his long legs out along the floor. Room enough for sleep.

But he had not been prepared for the stink down here, and how easily the restive, impatient fear passed around in a room. A second run of bombs went off one after the other; it sounded like it was right on top of their heads, the noise so deafening that Will ducked instinctively, even though he was fifty feet underground. The bombs lasted fifteen seconds and then stopped. He half-stood to go help up above, but he was so tired, he realized his legs had fallen asleep, even if the rest of him hadn’t. A steady stream of people creeping in to find place in the shelter began, and families shushed the crying children, and the men and women wrapped themselves in blankets and leaned one against the other. A latecomer, a tall blonde, picked her way shakily across the outstretched legs of the others and sank down into an open spot across the way. For a long while she leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Then, rousing, she pulled her sweater off and shoved it under her bottom.

She was the type of girl men say they would die for. The kind who could stop a room with her smile, though Will was fairly sure this one might not try. He appraised the one long leg crossed over the other, gracefully at the slim ankle. Blond, brainy, too old for games. She looked more like the kind who’s got something and knows it, but didn’t need to advertise. Like Emma.

Her name sent a flush of warmth across his chest. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the wall.
Emma
, he invoked her again,
Emma, Emma
—like a bellows—but all that came were the teasing, incongruous pieces: her head against his shoulder, the flip of her hair carefully curled under and resting against her thin little neck, or the narrow leather belt she wore at her waist. Lately, he could not quite call her face fully to mind. He had a photograph of the two of them taken on their wedding day, but the longer he was away, the more that girl standing next to him didn’t seem to be Emma. She was a pretty girl tucked under the arm of a good-enough-looking guy. He had the absurd but persistent fear that the girl in the photograph—with her brown hair, brown eyes, soft little chin tipped up as if someone had just told her to be brave—had erased Emma. So that now, when someone asked about her, he found himself only able to say “brown hair, brown eyes”—he lit the match to the end of his cigarette and shook it out with an exasperated snap of his wrist—for Christ’s sake. She sounded like a fairy-tale girl. And she was no girl. They had made love. There. He remembered her blushing up at him, asking whether Tolstoy meant it. Making love. In those two words she was there. She was true blue—but in the dark she was also so soft, moving under his hand, he could almost feel her now
.
And the image that continually came to mind now was not her face, but her figure from behind. The dress, the belt, the sweet line of her calves down to the leather flats. The way he had first come upon her from behind at the party, and then a year later when he’d asked her to marry him and, without turning around, without saying a thing, she had simply leaned back against him, trusting him to remain where he stood.