A Circle on the Surface Page 20

  “We all see things while in our cups,” a Meade snorted, prompting Twomey to take a swing. His beefy fist grazed a stack of matchboxes. Amazingly, it didn’t topple. Greeley stepped up, ready to restrain him.

  “Order! Someone must have specifics? Times, dates,” shouted the navy brass.

  “I just gave ’em to you,” Iris Finck spoke again. “What more d’you want?”

  Drawing Una close, he whispered, “I’ve never seen old Iris so lively,” When his lips grazed her ear, it felt warm, too warm. Was she coming down with a cold?

  Una’s eyes shone unnaturally. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  Well, it was warm with so many packed in, and Twomey’s little display had made people move back, further crowding him and Una. Greeley stayed put. The heat of Mrs. Finck’s enthusiasm was certainly contagious.

  The brass fixed on Win. “Mrs. Goodrow, is it? Can you describe what you saw?”

  At this point Enman felt the need to interrupt, was forced to shout over several heads, “How long was buddy in the water, if you don’t mind us asking?”

  The official ignored him, eyeing Win. “Madam, were you able to identify the body you saw?”

  Win glanced back at Una and rolled her eyes, then faced him. “As if! Wasn’t a pretty sight, Una can also tell you. Though he could’ve been worse, I guess.” Win shook her head. “Of course not. How would I know who he was?”

  The officer glowered, clearly irked by Win’s tone. Meanwhile, the officer had pulled something from a briefcase and laid it out between the sweets and some cakes of Sunlight soap. It made Enman think of a gutted halibut, that same grey. A jacket.

  “Our friend, the deceased,”—the fellow arched his eyebrows—“wasn’t wearing this. But you discovered it, correct, Mrs. Goodrow? Earlier in the week. We can confirm it’s—”

  Part of a uniform, you didn’t have to be a mucky-muck to recognize it. It was the attire the enemy wore in newsreels. Without matching trousers, it made him think of a body missing legs.

  Enman cleared his throat. “Good, good—but, as I was asking, sir,” he spoke up, ignoring Twomey’s scowl, “by your estimation, how long do you figure the body was—”

  Una cut Enman off to aim her own question at the officer. “Isn’t that why we have experts? Pathologists.” It was almost as if she was lumping Enman in with the ARP. Her voice was loud but tremulous. Isla smiled into her hand, patted Una’s arm. Una did not brook fools being in charge, which Enman suspected stemmed from her having to bow to the odd incompetent principal who hadn’t deserved the authority he wielded.

  “Might I remind you, Mrs—? It’s wartime.”

  Before he could stop himself, Enman raised his hand. “I would ask that you don’t speak to my wife that way. If you don’t mind. Sir.” Clint snickered at Enman’s audacity, and so did Isaac, perched on a wingchair dragged from Iris’s front room, the chair in which Lester had “dozed off.”

  “You’re leaving us at the Jerries’ mercy, is what you’re saying,” Isaac croaked, then hawked. Silence fell before the old fellow swallowed; heads turned as he set his jaw. You could barely breathe for his cigar smoke and the smells of hair tonic and the odour rising from the baby in Isla’s arms.

  Suddenly Una was no longer gripping his arm or holding his hand, or even standing there. She was slipping through a gap opening in this mob of folks he’d known since forever. He caught a quick glimpse of some rust-coloured stains on the jacket’s lining before he could angle himself towards the door. It was the perfect moment to exit. She was ill, that was it. Ill, as in pregnant? Forget what she had said. It was no cold: it was a sign, unbeknownst to her, that their bodies and their maneuverings had cooperated? Twomey thundered behind him about “motherfuckers havin’ at each other” and how, if he’d “got hold of them bastards then you’d see blood.”

  “Not around the ladies, Bart,” Enman managed to shout back, then felt sanctimonious.

  Sylvester Meade, ever the contrarian, corralled him with his rheumy eyes. “Enman Greene, defender of women.”

  “Suffering God!” someone muttered. “Bunch of numbnuts, all of youse.” Then Timmy Flood was waving something—a ticket stub—yelling, “I’ve got proof Jerry’s been among us. You could’ve sat in the same seats.”

  “I just needed air,” Una explained once he’d squeezed outside and caught up. He tightened his fingers around her clammy ones, but she wrenched her hand away. A fine drizzle was falling. Without warning it thickened, mist enveloping them in its chill.

  They hadn’t made it ten yards from the store when a torrent ripped through the fog, rain lashing down in sheets. A car crept up alongside them, then sped past. The navy fellow and the ARP man barely turned their heads, rubber tires hissing in the downpour. The taillights were two red squiggles.

  In the slashing wet it was impossible to read her expression. She was imagining the bath she would draw? The mascara she had put on for their outing streaked down her cheeks, a blackish ruin. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

  His spirits leapt, in spite of his apprehension. It was selfish to bring a child into a world of war. But after being around Isaac, seeing how the man loved his sons, Enman had warmed to and welcomed the thought of childen. He hardly felt his clothes pasted to his body or the sting of hair tonic in his eyes. This was going to be it, what he hoped for almost more than life, news to set everything right.

  “Enman. I can’t lie. I’ve—"

  It didn’t matter that he hadn’t considered a baby the be-all and the end-all, hadn’t warmed to the prospect as fast as she had. His moment of hope was supplanted, and the feeling of letdown that replaced it allowed the strangest thought to take hold. In the city these days there were a hundred men to every gal, so people said. What was keeping her here with him in Barrein, with what he feared might be a snowball’s chance in hell of getting pregnant?

  “I’ve applied for a position. I’m still waiting to hear.” Her voice wobbled, begging his patience?

  “That’s grand, dear. Grand.” He meant it too, sort of. So the school board had relaxed its rules about hiring hitched women? But she had planned all along to move back without broaching it. Thank Christ for his banker’s voice and the never-failing ability to summon it. A drink would have fixed him right up, no question. Just a shot.

  “I’m glad to hear it, Una,” he said after a minute or two. “Sometimes, if you don’t mind me saying, your gifts seem wasted, staying home.”

  Then, Lord knows why, he thought of Cecelia Twomey, how before she’d taken off—even before the fling with his father—people had said she was like the village bike left outside Finck’s store. Just about everybody had ridden it from time to time.

  “There, now. Don’t worry. We’ll make out fine. We have so far,” he said, because she’d gone silent again.

  Once in the house they shook off what they could of the rain. Una ran upstairs to change into something dry. Remembering some extra work—some ledgers in the cubby under the eaves, he told her—wet to the skin, he fled to his old room. It felt odd shutting out her humming as she puttered in the bathroom, odder still when he peeled off and stretched out alone on the narrow, lumpy mattress.

  But he needed to gather his thoughts. The first thing his mind reached for was a drink: the imagined taste of rum swirling down his throat, warming his eardrums, warming him from the top of his head to his baby toes. From there his brain lurched back to the first time he had got drunk, a vague recollection of swaying up the stairs, shutting the door on Ma’s voice.

  He’d been fifteen years old. Ma must have known; how could she not? If Archibald’s example hadn’t set him straight, who knows but he would have ended up a drunken Peter Pan living under her roof.

  At his head the pillow smelled musty, and the spool bedstead of old polish. Otherwise, the room bespoke what he could only think of as a female fussiness. It was g
raven into Ma’s embroidered runner and the picture Una had hung of a boy and his collie in its fancy frame—a long-ago present from the old man atoning for one absence or another. Cleary had occasionally ventured to the States, supposedly on business, selling the Meades’ catches of lobster when people in Barrein would as soon fertilize gardens with the stuff than eat it. “‘Avoid Pa’s example’—of making a living to the south, or drinking and womanizing?” he had asked, the distinction between them somewhat hazy.

  After a while he got up, dragged the wooden salt-fish crate of ledgers from its spot, and rifled through them noisily, opening one on the bedspread in case Una peeked in. Much as he wished she would, she didn’t. But he stayed put, lying there in his shorts, listening to the foghorn out on the island making up for lost time. It was a sound that, along with the scent of finnan haddie and pie wafting upstairs, had soothed his boyish heart. It had instilled the feeling that being ashore, no matter what happened, he and Ma would be all right, safe and comfortable enough.

  The fog itself had always felt like a blanket, insulating them from the Meades and the Twomeys and any others whose dissolute ways seemed threatening.

  The cosy little room had been his shelter, inviolable. But now it felt draughty and unsound, as if the wind might drive the rain in between the shims. He heard the toilet flush and Una’s cry of relief at having water. After a while she padded in. Her bare soles made a sticky sound on the varnished fir. She brushed her hand over the pages lying opened there with all his dogged entries. “The job was in the paper. I should’ve let you know before jumping at it. It’s a bit complicated, it seems. I’m awfully sorry.”

  “For what exactly?” Must they always speak at cross purposes? He took her hand, ran his thumb over her narrow palm. For goodness sake, she was making a lot more of this job than was necessary, building a drumlin out of an anthill, he thought, mildly pleased with himself at the analogy. She mightn’t even get the job. But if she did, he would have to demand a raise to cover the cost of a decent car or her room and board in town. He tried to imagine them living apart.

  “A tiny bit of warning would’ve allowed me a head start on adjusting, cobbling together some funds,” he teased, though he was thinking again of statistics: that ratio of men to women. And who wanted a weekends-only marriage? The loneliness would heighten his need. She shut the book on his hand, pulled him to his feet and to the other room and their bed.

  The weather battering the window reminded him of being at sea: just what the Jerries would have ordered. They operated most efficiently on nights like this, under cover of storms. He pictured a depth charge spooling down the side of an Allied destroyer, hitting nothing. He longed even more for a stiff wallop of rum—the sad truth.

  She snuggled closer in the sag, but when he pulled her to him she rolled away. “There’s something else. I was let go. Last year. Fired, for a mistake on my part. I should have said.”

  He laughed a little uncertainly. “You’re not the first to lose a job.”

  “It wasn’t quite…as I let on. It involved another teacher.” She watched him for his reaction.

  “So your eye wandered from the kids.” Enman smiled, a bit confused. “I guess that mightn’t be the first time that’s happened to someone.” Her look was almost sullen, until he realized she had tears in her eyes. “Can’t be as bad as all that, now. Are there other things you haven’t told me?”

  “Of course, there aren’t. But, I was out of a job and—”

  “That’s when you saw me.” He waited, patted her hand, pressed it to the sheet, away from him.

  “Don’t worry. I’d have told you about the job I’ve applied for before dragging you back to town.”

  “So what was it, then, that singled me out, that you seemed to like?”

  “You needn’t ask that. But if I’d known we’d end up here, I wouldn’t have given up my flat. I wouldn’t have been so quick to—”

  “Our flat. Come now, and you and I would never have bunked in together?”

  “Lovely way of putting it.”

  He flapped the sheet. “Oh my dear—you know as well as I do what a hellhole it’s become. People crammed into places not fit for rodents. Dodging vomit every time you hit the sidewalk.”

  “It’s war. We won’t be at war forever.” Perching on her edge of the bed, Una wiped her eyes.

  “The Allies and the Jerries, maybe.”

  What was going on behind those eyes? Despite the tears, they seemed dulled. Weary—of him?

  “Oh, things change, Una. They won’t always be like this. You’ll have a child. You’ve got Hannah to work on. Things are looking up.”

  “Looking up?” She laughed bitterly. “I’ve made a mistake. Thinking I could do this, playing house, helping with your mother and—”

  “Marrying me? If you think so. Sorry you feel that way.”

  She flinched at this, curling on her side, curling into herself.

  “Come on now. Tell me it’s only been since Ma passed, your unhappiness—”

  “You tricked me into coming here, staying.”

  “Tricked you? What state were you in to be so, so…bamboozled? I suppose next you’ll say the cocoa was spiked.”

  “What?”

  “At the Egg Pond. When you said you’d never met a nicer guy and wouldn’t mind spending time—”

  “Please. Maybe I’m not solely responsible for feeling this.” She waved at the walls as if she were imprisoned, then she smiled weakly. “But I married you to save my hide.”

  When she turned to him again, saying nothing, he rose in silence and found the stack of bills and receipts from the spike he had brought from the office and stashed in the other room, and started downstairs. “If you don’t mind, I’ve got figuring to do.”

  This was a stretch, since the past week business at Inkpens had waned slightly, and the week before, despite what Enman had told the bank. Neither he nor the Inkpens had raised it, and the bank hadn’t asked for a closer look at his figures, but the previous month things had lagged as well. Fewer ships had been hit. But it was jumping the gun to think that Jerry wasn’t the worry he had been.

  Now he needed a drink. But in lieu of liquor, he had debits and credits to balance and to steady him. To hell with rum. To hell with blackouts. With both the parlour light and his banker’s lamp blazing, the rain streaking the windowpanes turned shadows into ripples of light. They fell across the flimsy papers, the carbons with his signature. His fingers, too clumsy to go near the record player, let alone his violin, fumbled with the pen, totting up sums and subtractions, entering the final figures on crisp lined pages. An invoice to the navy for repairs to a dinghy, its duplicate receipt stamped Paid. Another from a boatyard in Pictou that was doing joint repair work to a corvette, the Pictou yard reaping more than the lion’s share. Allotments over rivets and screws.

  He doodled. Doodling wasn’t serious—its absence of purpose, its lack of intention allowed his marks to remain just that, marks. But aimlessness gave way to rumination. What had she done to merit getting sacked? Una had seemed so charmed, so in love, yet she had tricked him? He struggled to believe it, her affections had been calculated. He was a milk ticket, a supplier of rent. He pictured the flat, a coal fire behind the grate, the noisy neighbours. Children crying, a couple’s arguing coming through the ceiling at all hours. “That will never be us,” Una had said. Who knew she wouldn’t pick up where she had left off with her first mistake, her misdemeanour? Yet, he had the strange idea that if he continued to move the pen it might strike out her cold calculations, her opportunism, at least draw the pair of them back to where he’d thought they had been.

  Into the small hours, the rain drummed its message about equality in love: what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine. But his doodling led to ruling two distinct columns on a fresh sheet of foolscap. One was headed with Una’s name, the other with his. He knew
he probably wasn’t obliged to split things down the middle, but felt the need to. Stagnant savings, Beulah, the house. He jotted words, dollar values. But how on earth did you divide disappointment, dismay?

  Through a break in the rain a long, low boom sounded—an explosion out at sea? Even as he dwelt on it, a voice inside coaxed, Now don’t go jumping the gun. It’s nothing really, it’s not so bad. Unusually playful, Tippy leapt to the desktop and batted at the page, knocking over his pencils. Freshly sharpened, the leads pointing upwards was how he liked them arranged in their mug: such order was the antidote to disorder and sobriety’s reward.

  Moving to the cabinet, he reached blindly inside. He would drink to himself and Una—no, solely to Una, for having given him what she had of herself, however falsely but freely, he thought bitterly. And then, why not, he’d toast his lifetime’s worth of sums and subtractions, problems easily solved.

  The empty bottle slid free—Una had tucked it behind that bloody book, the book that seemed almost to blame, at least partly, for this turn in their marriage. Tumbling from his grasp, the bottle connected with the floor and lost its neck. A speck of rum darkened the mat. Hygiene, he mused, as if the conjugal state were armpits to be bathed, a scalp to be de-loused.

  Too late he heard the stairs creak. He pressed his arm across the foolscap sheet.

  In the lamplight Una’s face was ghostly. He slipped the paper into a ledger, turned the page. Was it possible her paleness had a certain glow? She hesitated and when she finally spoke, her voice had a rasp. “That was a wasted evening. Do you suppose they’ll come around asking more questions? People do love a fuss.” She spoke as if the matter, any imminent threat it might speak of, was well past.

  “They do.” He didn’t bother mentioning Flood’s theatre ticket or the bloodied jacket. But then, just for now, the enemy threat rated a certified molehill measured against the mountain facing him. Facing them. He murmured about her getting the job. A done deal? he guessed.

  “Not really. But if I do get it, it’ll mean dropping Hannah. Like with everything else, I got ahead of myself, taking her on. There’d be no time left to tutor her.”