A Circle on the Surface Read online

  To his amazement she moved closer, and pressed herself against him.

  He wanted to speak but could not. Her breath was in his ear, warm and soft and a little sour. Astonishingly, their breathing seemed to fill the room and it wasn’t so bad, not so bad at all, not nearly as impossible as he had imagined it to be.

  Out there in the boundless dark, from the island a foghorn sounded, and as he and Una shifted, the bedsprings yielded to their cautious weight. Una stifled a nervous giggle.

  “What if Hannah hears? I wouldn’t want her to be frightened.”

  “Frightened?” He felt his face burn, glad of the moon’s dimness. “Of people making up?” His hand lounged on the strange territory of her shoulder, which felt oddly new and unexplored. “I imagine she’s heard worse. A lot worse.”

  “Granted.”

  Sink or swim, fish or cut bait. The only way to overcome an aversion is to jump back in. So the old man’s voice returned from years back, and with it the chill of water below the wharf, its iciness up his nose and in his eyes—and how his thrashing had kept him from sinking like a stone, arms flailing towards making the strokes that had later saved his life but not George’s.

  It was too late to undo the snarls in their marriage. But in choosing to stick it out, with time and patience and gentle tugging, the knot at its centre would tighten. Following something through, you and it could be saved.

  Perhaps.

  “Enman? En? Are you with me?” Una was breathing in his ear, reaching for him. And quite possibly Hannah did hear. The bedsprings complained till they were close to giving out, and still he couldn’t quite grasp or believe the relief that flooded him, that joined—or seemed to join—the both of them.

  For him, at least, it was the sheer cooling relief of letting go of thinking how and in whatever small or large way Una had used her wiles to hook him, hoodwinking herself into believing marriage was what she wanted, not simply a smoother ride through a troubled patch in life. Letting go enough to forgive her if not her wiliness.

  When they were done, they listened to Hannah’s snore become a soft whistle that could have been a spring peeper singing.

  ‘“Here we are,”’ he heard himself whisper tunelessly into Una’s ear, ‘“out of cigarettes.’” He interlaced the fingers of one of her hands with his, and held tight. Clapping her other hand over his mouth, she moved his knuckles to her lips.

  She lay half on her side, half on her belly, as relaxed as could be.

  “Une. My numéro une. Shouldn’t you be—? Here. I’ll shove over, let you get on your back. There, now. Keep still.”

  She laughed then, regretful, he hoped, for her deceit. “It takes a bigger person than me to forgive the one who knowingly causes hurt. Maybe it’s easier to forget their cruelty itself.”

  He guessed this was Una’s oblique way of apologizing, appealing to his kindness? After her waffling over Hannah’s staying, he thought the apology might be better directed at the girl. “Hannah’s the bigger of us, you mean?” He felt a prick of guilt. “You’re afraid she’ll remember your about-face, your odd welcome, and hold it against you? Hannah hold a grudge? I doubt it. She’s already forgiven you. What’s the cruelty you’d like to forget?” He squeezed her hand, teasing. “Sometimes you baffle me. Forgive me for saying it, but I wonder at times if you know your own mind.” He pulled her close again, felt her hair’s softness at his ear. “I guess we all have our little blackouts, don’t we.” The wrong word. “Our whims.” Yet Una’s whims seemed more capricious than other people’s, and the thought of this burrowed like a tick.

  “So it was more than marrying on the rebound? I would like to know. And what if you meet someone better?” He felt the silkiness of her arm touching his. “Tell me, then I’ll blow it off into the ether.”

  “Oh, Enman. Can we just let it go?” Then, after a moment or two, she thanked him for being patient.

  He dreamed vividly that night, for the first time in months. The dream was all about water. At first he was walking on it. Next he was wading past the dropoff where the undertow clawed the sand away—well beyond the point of safety. Someone onshore, a woman, was hollering: “Don’t, please don’t—come back, Mister!” But then he realized it wasn’t him but Barton Twomey, an off-camera Barton Twomey, she was yelling to: “You’ve done some crazy things, but don’t go all to pot on us and do another.”

  The woman was Win. Win Goodrow. It was her standing there shouting, and she was holding a bundle: a wee swaddled baby—his.

  “Bart! Enman! He’ll be lost without a dad.”

  Then the dream shifted to winter, the water to ice. He was scrambling across the frozen harbour, leaping from one ice pan to another, across gaping black crevasses, a shortcut. Because Iris Finck had died and the store was closing for good, and if he made it in time he would have his pick, his heart’s desire, of all remaining stock. But there was a greater urgency. He was in a mad, crazed rush to buy Crown corn syrup and Carnation milk, fixings for baby formula. For he’d been caught short, and even as he leapt he could hear its wailing. Win’s bundle was abandoned now on his stoop, come to call Hannah its sister.

  He woke in a sweat, yet washed in a damp, sombre calm. A quiet jubilation filled him. Una was curled there next to him.

  “I do love you, Enman,” she whispered, “You know it, right?”

  Of course he was already late, and wouldn’t blame Isaac if he docked him more than a day’s pay for truancy. Una had his breakfast waiting when he practically tumbled down the stairs. He was guzzling down his tea when the radio spilled the news. Overnight a corvette had hit a U-boat and captured the crew, the handful of Jerries, it was assumed, that hadn’t gone to the bottom with it.

  The strike had happened inside the harbour approaches, it seemed, southwest of the Neverfail light buoy—this following reports of recent alien sightings, a possible enemy landing in the general vicinity of Barrein and Shag’s Cove, or perhaps even closer to the East Coast Port, near Bear or Herring Cove. The prisoners, suffering hypothermia and treated according to convention, had been taken to the East Coast Port “for processing.”

  As if they were meat, he thought.

  “More work for Inkpen’s?” Una wondered, turning her back as Hannah came thumping downstairs. Una shook her head. “And double the fodder for Win.”

  20

  Early September, 1943

  “Got something for you,” Mrs. Finck’s croak came over the phone. “Might wanna haul yourself over, Missus, and collect it.” The old woman made no bones about watching Una open it, though every so often she pretended to swat a fly. Hannah had the sense, at least, to busy herself picking through the grubby yard goods that constituted Finck’s’ “fabric section.”

  Well, that superintendent had taken his time drafting his reply—though when she hadn’t heard before Labour Day she pretty much knew. Still, reading it was crushing. They had wanted high school experience, he wrote. An upstanding person with sound moral judgement and a background in chemistry. Married women need not apply.

  Una wasn’t surprised. She had resigned herself to the reality that the principal would forward her file, and the hope that the reason she was available might be fudged, had faded. The hateful rule about married women stood unchanged, which added insult to the super’s veiled threat that teachers not meeting the code of conduct were liable to have licenses revoked.

  If the letdown was stamped all over Una’s face, Iris Finck hardly noticed.

  “Hey! Girl! Hands off! Nobody wants material tha’ looks like it’s been drug through mud—unless Missus plans on paying? Lester’s right, saying ‘get out of yard goods.’ The young ones these days, too flippin’ lazy to sew.” Iris’s raspy voice wavered theatrically. “Too much maaaysuring and cutting for them, I guess.”

  But then the old woman’s eyes came to rest on Una, a glimmer lighting them.

  “And what�
��s up with you, Missus? You’re looking a little…oh my, Enman’s righteous shine has rubbed off on you? Next you’ll be sporting haloes, you two.”

  A particularly snide remark, given how piqued Una felt. Making matters worse, Hannah dove right in. “Looks like that all the time, Missus does. Felt so sick she had to lay down while I did my morning’s reaaadin’.”

  Grin and bear it, Kit would have preached, the main reason Una put off calling her.

  “Well, well. Last time I saw that look on someone, antidotally speaking, it was Isla’s girl.”

  What was more obvious than Una had hoped flew right over Hannah’s head. “Missus is gonna learn me how to sew,” the girl crowed, beaming. The nausea was not just in the morning but lingered all day.

  Una gathered her wits enough to correct her. “Teach. Someday. First things first, then maybe we’ll see.”

  But to save face and take her mind off the sudden queasiness that overtook her, she did the nice thing, the decent thing, and took five yards of greyish flannelette off Mrs. Finck’s penny-pinching hands. It was on Enman’s nickel and what price, an excuse for a few minutes’ peace while Hannah sewed?

  Back home, Hannah helped set up Mrs. Greene’s ancient Singer in the little bedroom and Una started in with a lesson, as best she could, a basic one on hemming.

  “There—in and out, see? You push the treadle, make the needle go—”

  “Like a pecker. A bird, I mean, pecking.”

  Una took a deep breath, gazed at the window. Despite the rockiness in her gut, the deepening shock that her body had a will of its own, she had to bite down hard not to laugh. With Kit present she would have laughed, Kit would have said a sense of humour saved you. The lesson, like so many others, was futile. The girl ended up sewing two flannelette squares back to front, then accidentally snipping them in two.

  “God, Hannah! What were you thinking?”

  “You’re not gonna send me home, are you, Missus? I mean, Uncle would, he’d—”

  “Oh, dear. We haven’t yet, have we?” The poor kid. But it would wear on anyone’s nerves, Una thought, having Hannah underfoot. The house wasn’t big enough for two these days. “Why not take a little hike, go for a swim?” she hinted repeatedly, taking every opportunity to shut the door and stretch out on the bed. Though beach days were history, long past. At any rate, Hannah seemed not to hear.

  The sewing fiasco forgotten, Hannah dashed off to unearth the grade-four reader. She wasn’t gone but a second before she hollered up, all in a flap, “Better get your arse down here, Missus.”

  What did a person have to do for a moment’s rest? Then Una’s stomach buckled. Oh please don’t let it be Twomey, please, not just now. She let her mind roam back to Enman’s book—that blunt instrument of a book on marriage hygiene that dictated who should and shouldn’t have babies—and tried to recall what it said about the havoc all of this played with your body. She’d have looked it up. Except the book had disappeared, oddly, along with the liquor and any obvious signs of his drinking.

  Maybe a drink, a tiny one, would have fixed her up. A thimblefull of dry sherry, maybe.

  Downstairs, God in heaven, it wasn’t Twomey but her neighbour who filled the mudroom door. It was the first time in weeks and weeks, the first since that nerve-wracking night in the store, Una found herself face to face with Win. Standing there, Win’s face puckered into a wincing smile. Oh, but Win didn’t speak. She was too busy darting her eyes around. Yellow, so much yellow.

  “So?”

  At the table Hannah toyed with a scrap of cloth. She whispered to herself that it would make a “dipe” for a baby that didn’t grow—like Isla Inkpen’s granddaughter who, for whatever reason, failed to thrive.

  Win didn’t say a word. She had a paper bag in her hand and she held it out. Nodding slowly, “Nice,” she finally said to Hannah. Hannah glanced up then, clearly baffled when Win handed her the bag.

  “Did you hear? Finck’s is closing—for good. Iris, well, she told me just now, wanted me to be the first to know. Can’t imagine us with no store, can you? ‘Let someone else run it, someone with time on their hands,’ Iris says. ‘Got places to go, Win, folks to see.’

  “Thought maybe, what with his figuring and your…you and Enman might try giving it a go. You’ve got a head on your shoulders, Una. Now the opportunity’s here.” Win laughed lightly, eyeing her. “‘Hell’s bells, Lester, gimme time to pack,’ Iris was going, ‘Hurry up, man, and wait!’” Win spoke to the floor. Ill as she felt, Una couldn’t hold back a snicker.

  Hannah, meanwhile, had opened the bag. A blush spread over the girl’s face.

  “Figured it was something you’d like. Said to Clinton, I said, ‘The Twomey girl might like that, seeing how she enjoys humming.’ ‘And Enman,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t he be tickled pink having his sister play an instrument.’”

  Win’s face took on a funny look, wistful with a tiny hint, perhaps, of apology.

  Hannah pulled out the gift inside the bag and waved it. Her face was as full of the devil as it was with glee.

  Una definitely needed something then, besides the soda crackers she had scarfed down earlier. “Be a help, Hannah—put on the kettle, would you? Tea, Win?”

  Tea is calming, cooling too, in moments of duress, even the principal had said.

  The thing looked rusty and even at that distance smelled fishy. Hannah held it to her ear, the way you would a seashell. Grains of sand fell from it when the girl put it to her lips. A smile tightened Win’s mouth. A gloating, superior smile. Then Hannah blew into the instrument and a gritty wheeze of notes whistled out.

  Was it a sailor’s jig on a summer’s day that the notes brought back?

  Who knows but Win wasn’t thinking the same, or of something darker.

  “A mouth organ, go figure. Never know what the tide’ll drag in, do we ladies?” Win cackled.

  The kettle shrieked—thank God for small mercies—and Win went silent. She gazed around again, casing the place, sure, fixing on some other paper bags lying by the cellar door. Each bag was labelled with a colour written in pencil. Enman’s precious order from East Coast Seed ensured that Hannah would have her very own bed of flowering bulbs to moon over come spring.

  Una had taken him to task over it. “Really. You don’t think that’s a bit much? So she’ll be with us this spring, then summer, and then fall.” She’s here for the duration, Una had thought, working to hide her dismay. She need not have bothered.

  Enman was oblivious anyway. “Why not, sweetpea?”

  Win’s eyes swept from the bags to the cellar-door calendar and lit on Enman’s jottings about waxings and wanings and prospects for an early frost.

  There were no more red Xs.

  “Enman’s ma would approve.” Win gave a stiff, choppy nod, watching Una snatch up the kettle. Then she breathed in loudly, obviously revving up for more.

  “One more thing. I’ve come to apologize—for before, I mean. If I was ever short with you. Maybe I was, a bit. What I might’ve said that time, about you parading around buck naked.”

  Hannah sniggered into the harmonica, spewing a blather of notes.

  “What exactly did you see, Win?” She held Win’s gaze.

  “Nutting I haven’t seen a thousand times myself,” Win laughed, “gawking in the bedroom mirror. Except, except—you looked kind of sad, pitiful I mean, lying there on the beach, you know, in your altogether, more’s the pity, all by your lonesome like that.”

  The place inside that Una assumed would be her uterus tightened.

  “That’s what you saw?”

  Win shrugged, slack-jawed. “Guess I felt kind of sorry for you.” Win eyed her suspiciously, those eyes the eyes of a shrew. “What do you take me for? You expected me to take a pit-chure? Live and let live, I always say. To be honest, I was kind of scared that day you were day-ud, the way you were ly
ing there. Before we found that Jerry.”

  Hannah butchered “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Una felt her face burn. In spite of herself, covering her mouth, she couldn’t suppress a giggle as she felt, then recognized, a flutter. The instant she lit upon it, the sensation stopped. When she tried to summon back whatever had sparked it, she couldn’t. There was only its blur inside her, a soft, faint twitch as indefinite as a leaf unfurling. The perfectly ordinary feeling of her stomach against her lungs.

  Win peered at her then. Hannah spat sand into her palm, wiped it on her shirt. The grin spread across Win’s face like a house materializing through fog.

  “Oh. My. Jesus. Does Enman know?”

  Win bustled over and hugged her so fiercely that Una almost didn’t hear the scuff of soles on the mat, or the satchel’s thud as it landed on a chair.

  The satchel containing the checks and balances of Enman’s other world, the sum total of Inkpens’ enterprise.

  “Does Enman know what?” Doffing his cap, he was smiling—looking puzzled but smiling with his silly, strange expectation that surprises could be—were, more often than not—good. He nodded to their visitor. “How are you, Win?”

  “Better than Iris Finck.” Win beamed slyly. “And how are you? Isn’t it the truth, hon, we all pay for our fun.”

  “Exactly right,” Hannah piped up. “You should hear them two goin’ at it, Missus Goodroad. When I’m—and you wanna know something else? Babies poop. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Missus Goodroad.” Then all at once the girl’s smile sagged, an anguished look storming in to replace it. “Does it mean, Mister, that with a baby there woon’t be room no more for me?”

  Any, any more. But Enman wasn’t hearing. He was looking completely idiotic, baffled, gobsmacked, shaken.

  “Jumpin jumpin jumpins,” he started crowing, the most foolish grin imaginable overtaking his features. Then his arms were around her in a hug, a smothering one. “You’re joking, aren’t you? Just yanking an old fella’s chain.”