The last time he saw her—the morning he left India, tucking himself onto one of the jute ships destined for Dundee—she stood on the veranda in the shade. Early morning and already the sun was unrelenting, spiralling heat up from the dirt roads. The smell of cardamom clung to the house, mixing with the scents of the previous night’s cooking.

  She stood in the shade, her skin dark against the white sheet wrapped around her body. Gold bangles on her arm elicit music on the close morning air. She pushes her hand through her hair, letting the dark strands fall through her fingers. Midnight rainfall. She says, “Oliver.”

  Oliver is standing away from the house, away from her in the white bedsheet he had lain on the night before, in the early sun. He can feel the heat on the top of his head, burrowing through his hair. He wishes he had a hat, or could move into the shade.

  She says, “Oliver. Please.” In her accent, this plea becomes a song. He wants to forget the sound of her voice.

  “You’ll be all right,” Oliver says. “He’ll be back soon enough and you can forget all of this.”

  “I won’t forget you.”

  “You’ll have to.” He knows she will lock the memory of him away, just as she had put away the image of her husband while he was gone. Oliver was not even sure where he had been; all she would say was business, business, and wave her hand. The music of her bangles. Two months of business, and only one letter. A letter she tucked into the folds of her green sari. Oliver watched her hands for days, but never saw her unfold the letter. He imagined she must have woken in the middle of the night, crept from the bed they’d shared, and read the letter by moonlight. To Oliver, her husband is a faceless man. He could pass him in the street without notice.

  She does not deny it, just leans against the porch column. The bedsheet slips and exposes the side of her breast. She catches Oliver staring at her and moves forward, still in the shadows, until her toes touch sunlight. Slowly, she unwinds the bedsheet and lets it fall away from her body. The dark shadows of her breasts, the brown-black nipples, the curve of her abdomen, the dark patch of her pubic hair nestled between her soft thighs. That spot where thighs meet torso, where Oliver’s lips had travelled and rested. Breathed in her unwashed skin, the soft down there.

  She holds his gaze. Dares him to step forward, back into the shadow of her husband’s house, the comforts of her body.

  Oliver moves to her, collects the sheet from her feet and wraps it around her. He says, “It’s not enough.” He touches the side of her face, lets his hand graze the heavy curtain of her hair. Then he turns and leaves, already trying to push the image of her naked body from his mind.

  He had walked into town, to the port where the jute ships waited, and then left the country behind.

  Oliver had turned to Caro and said, “India feels like years ago, not months. A different life, a life belonging to someone else.”

  Caro turns from John O’Groats and begins her walk home. Tonight she will stand at the corner of Thistle and Mains Road and wait for Oliver to appear in the dusk. His feet on the stone, coming more quickly when he sees her.

  In the flat, there is a door that is always closed. Her small hands push against it, but it does not give. Her small hand around the knob. The striking chill there.

  To her left is the window where she watched Oliver leave. Beyond that, the sea. Always the sea.

  The blue ribbon in her hair has come undone. The edge of it trails along her face. She pushes it away as she stands at the door. A tendril of hair now in her mouth. Her hand at the door. The blue ribbon. The cold metal knob, the roll of it in her palm. Push. Push.

  This is where Imogen’s memory stops. Stunned as a bird that has flown into a window. That dull, detached sound of feathers to glass.

  She sits across from Oliver in his room and says, “Did you come back when Mum died?”

  “Imogen.”

  She has promised herself not to ask him again but cannot help herself.

  “Did you come back?”

  Oliver sighs. “I was already on a boat to India. I didn’t find out until months later.”

  “Did you know how it happened?”

  He looks at her. She avoids his eyes, but is aware of him in her periphery. He says, “Yes. Morag told me.”

  She is afraid to ask him any more. She wants him to fill in this blank, colour it with all the vibrancy of Brigid, but knows he is reluctant.

  He says, “You still don’t remember, do you?”

  Imogen looks at him, feeling sudden shame in this admission. She says, “I dream about her. About the bedroom door.”

  “What do you dream?”

  “My hand is on the knob. I have a blue ribbon in my hair.”

  Imogen waits for Oliver to respond. She cannot read his face. She wonders if Oliver misses Brigid as acutely as she does. She says, “Do you miss her?”

  “I did, once.”

  They sit together, quietly, in the stillness of the room. Oliver’s bed tucked into the corner, clothes stacked on a chair, small candles set at the window. Oliver’s life reduced to this small room in Magdalen Yard Green; a small life in a small room. She touches the newspaper clippings that clutter a small side table. Oliver’s name in stark black ink. She says, “Did you ever write about her?”

  “No. That’s not what I write about.”

  “Did you write about India?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Imogen turns to Oliver and searches his hands, the grey-ness of his temples. India. There is nothing in his face to let her into his life. He might be sitting next to her, but she realizes he is as unknown to her as when he was away.

  With the girls full of sleep and moonlight on the parlour floor, Morag knows when she closes her eyes that she will not open them again in the morning. She settles into this new knowledge not with fear or anxiety but with a strange new calm. Her aching lungs. The weariness pressing down on her like a giant thumb. The strain of opening her eyes to another bloodstained handkerchief.

  Caught somewhere between sleep and consciousness, Morag sees the gentle face of her mother. The slight smile. The memory of her hand on Morag’s as they walked down Broughty Ferry’s pier.

  Mother.

  Morag opens her eyes to the flat, silent in the night. The wedding photo on the mantel. Had she ever really been that young? She does not even recognize her own face any more. The delicate teapot, the chipped cups to match. The porcelain figures lining the windowsill. She has stood at that window for two decades and watched the neighbourhood below. Children laughing in the close. Women across the tenements waving to her.

  Morag wants to get up and watch her daughters sleep. Something she has not done in years, watch the rise and fall of their chests. The flicker of their eyelids, holding back dreams. She wants to see their faces, the slack and innocence of sleep. She remembers their childhood smiles. The smell of their hair. All this softness, this sheltered love around her. Morag wants to look at her daughters, but cannot find the energy even to brush back the alcove curtain.

  She lets herself sink and settle into the bed. Feels her body relax as she thinks about her daughters, her sister, her father, her niece. Sees her mother’s face again. The past forty years come to her in a gentle haze: profiles of faces; long rows of trees and farmers’ fields; boats coming into harbours; children’s hands held in hers; sunlight and rain and spring blooms.

  Come.

  That soft whisper. It could be the wind, but Morag knows it is not.

  Come.

  For the first time in months, Morag breathes without pain. Can imagine sleeping deeply enough to dream of summer skies above Arbroath, perhaps of a parasol on Broughty Ferry’s pier. She has missed dreaming.

  Come.

  Morag closes her eyes and is covered in darkness.

  Wallis comes into the sitting room and feels the chill of the new day. She is comforted by the scent of the kitchen—gas, heavy margarine, steeped tea—and then looks to Morag in the alcove.

  Stillness. Not even the labour of a single breath.

  Wallis knows what she will find before she puts her hand on the heavy blanket that covers Morag. Knows she will never forget this moment, when the room is still and quiet and hers completely; before she will have to wake Caro and Imogen and begin the laborious process of grieving. Dresses of black and sombre faces. Wallis imagines a photo of the three of them, their pale faces shocked and still with sorrow. A gap where Morag once would have stood.

  The songs of autumn birds will always remind Caro of awakening this startling bright morning in September 1918. Wallis sitting still in the paisley chair with her hands together. Closed. Peaceful. Wallis staring ahead as if there were something to see besides Caro. The moment before Caro knew of Morag’s death, when the day was still full of possibility and normalcy. The gift of morning sunlight.

  Wallis is afraid to tell Imogen about Morag’s death. She tells Caro that she is afraid Imogen will be reminded of Brigid’s death, that it will be something like a dam let open. “It will be too much for her,” Wallis says.

  Caro says nothing. She imagines Imogen made elastic, stretched and tugged and pulled back again, finally snapped. The two strange ends of something that was so recently whole. She is still too stunned to know that Morag is truly gone to speak.

  “I’ll have to be gentle,” Wallis says. She has expected to be the one to console Imogen, to take on the role of protector and provider.

  Caro says, “I think I should tell her.”

  “Oh—of course.”

  Oliver, Brigid, Morag. Caro will be the one to shatter Imogen’s life again. Wallis will make funeral arrangements while Caro will be the one, again, to break their cousin into splinters.

  Later, Wallis sits on the hill overlooking the long stretch of farmland just outside Dundee, the patchwork of green and gold and brown. This is where she has come to be alone, silent and solitary as a tree in the wind.

  Ahead and to the right there is the rapeseed field in all its golden, furious glory. It is hard against her eyes. Cows moving lazily in the calm green of the pasture to the left, coming across the field to her. Wallis thinks, Comfort, and closes her eyes. The scents of green and the sea mingle together to form something predictable, reassuring, solid.

  She watches as the farmers cross the fields, pausing only to lay their hands on the cows’ gentle hides. Wallis imagines their warmth, the thick, soft hides. There is a simplicity here, where the sky dips down into this breath of a valley, where farmers still know their herds by the shape of their ribs.

  Wallis rubs the rosary in her hand. Here, her own private cathedral. This long, open plain of countryside. Where green stretches up to meet blue, where yellow leaks into the surrounding earth and makes a golden glow. The closest she will come, now, to the greenness and cathedrals of Ireland.

  Once, Caro asked Wallis if she still prayed as they had as children. Wallis had been too ashamed to admit it, that she found relief and comfort in a small conversation at night. Her lips moving, her eyes sealed tight. Her hands worrying the rosary in her hands. Wallis prayed for everything and nothing at once.

  Now, Wallis holds the rosary and thinks of her mother. Morag. There is an ache and she feels her fresh tears before she realizes she is crying.

  A line of ambling cows move across the field. They pause every so often to put their mouths to the ground and bite off slender blades of grass. They move slowly, certainly, contained by the low, rickety fences. It seems absurd that such squat wooden borders could hold these animals in.

  Whispered Hymns

  IN THE DAYS after Morag’s death, they move about the flat, unsure of how to behave with one another. They move cups, place them two inches to the left, move them back. They do not speak of her death, do not acknowledge the new plains of grief. Instead, the three of them stand together at the sink and wash the same knife three times over. Miss when lighting a match. Miss again until finally the room smells of smoke.

  They lie together in the same small room, Morag’s alcove hidden behind its curtain. Imogen holds her hand to the window. Caro twirls her hair. Wallis stares blindly at the ceiling. They do not speak but breathe in synchronization. This continues for days before Caro says, “How long will this go on?” She has become terrified of the silence of the flat; she craves anything obvious: raucous laughter. Terrible grief. Joy. She wants to break glass after glass on the floor, just for the sound. “I can’t stand this much longer.”

  They discuss the plans to make, a headstone, a service.

  Caro says, “What should it say? Mother? Wife?”

  Wallis says, “Not wife. She hasn’t been a wife in years.”

  Caro says, “Mother, then.”

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Wallis asks. “She wasn’t anything else. She wasn’t much at all, in the end.”

  Caro balks; the words are like a cold stone wall, too thick for Caro to step over. The sheer breadth of it against her palm, the shock.

  Imogen says, “Maybe there should be an angel.”

  Caro looks at her, her head tilted to one side, her hand at her mouth, her mind somewhere beyond the confines of the flat.

  Wallis says, “No.” Unflinching.

  Caro listens to the rise and fall of their voices. There has been a definitive shift, a sloughing away of their old lives.

  Imogen with her hand in the air, feeling the wind. A sharp, chilling breeze comes off the water, the kind that only those who live by ocean shores ever know. The mix of salt and wind whipping into her, burrowing to settle. Imogen has only ever known this wind. At night, she feels it churning within her, never letting her be.

  Now, Imogen stands in the wind as she stares over the harbour and out to the bridge. A heavy monument. Her grandmother present as if she were a part of the structure: a leg, a cross rail. She is not part of Imogen’s memory, but just as real. Another borrowed memory that has become her own. Like Brigid’s face. If she closes her eyes, a flash of Brigid from a photo: her face still and stiff, posed. Brigid’s stark white gloves against her dark coat.

  The water slides up to the harbour and eases its way into slices in the sturdy wood of the dock, fitting into the absences there.

  She squeezes her eyes shut and wills herself to remember Brigid, but finds that all she can recall is Morag’s face. Her grey eyes, the way her hair came loose at the temples after a long day at the mill.

  But Brigid.

  Imogen moves her hand in the air and feels the salt deposit on her skin, the stain that is left there. She tastes the skin on the back of her hand. Something she had done as a child, a day walking down Main Street to Isla, early Sunday, with the spire of Clepington in view. Imogen’s hand cleaved to Oliver’s as Brigid trails behind. The sounds of her shoes on the stones. Her whimpering at Oliver’s back.

  Imogen can remember the walk, the rub of her stocking inside her shoe. The sound of shoes on stone. But not the actual argument, her mother’s anger earlier. Just her presence behind Imogen, the quiet of her plaintive voice. She remembers the feel of Oliver’s hand in hers, the darkness of his good suit. Later, she searched her hands for any ink that might have migrated from his fingers to hers.

  There is no funeral hymn, no lengthy service, no gasping and weeping. That kind of grief would be too gaudy, too extravagant. It is not what Morag would have wanted, so they are still and silent.

  Caro, Wallis, Imogen, Oliver, Bessie Lyon and a few other women from the tenements and Reverend McWilliam stand about Morag’s gravesite dripping in the rain. No one from Bowbridge, where she had spent so much of her life. The minister has thought to bring an umbrella and holds it up now over his head. There is the sound of the rain hitting the umbrella, the wet thwack of it. Rainfall and the quiet trills of birds high up in the trees. They watch the funeral from their branches, interested perhaps in the glint of the silver brooch on Caro’s lapel. They watch the brief funeral, interested not in the muffled sounds coming through the rain but in the woman leaning in closer to the tall man. Wallis touching her eyes with a handkerchief. Oliver holding Caro’s arm gently. Imogen tugging at the edge of Oliver’s coat. The strict triangle of their bodies with Oliver at the centre, even in the Eastern Cemetery on a rainy afternoon. Rain coming down their bodies, turning the ground below them to mud.

  When Wallis looks up to the sky now, something has shifted: she will work in the mill without believing that, one day, she might know something other than the carding machines, the din of the tight rooms, the inevitable injuries. Just this morning, she had stepped onto the mill grounds and paused under the glint of the hanging camel and thought of Morag. The camel ever looking down upon their hesitant steps and surrendering spines. No more imagining Paddy as a grown man, sitting across from her at a warm hearth. Now, when Wallis looks up she sees only ordinary clouds in a blue sky.

  She does not have to lie to others about meeting John after a Union meeting but finds herself still uttering an excuse when she leaves the flat. She says, “It’ll be a long meeting tonight. I’ll be late.”

  Wallis and John walk down Ancrum Road, toward the park. She worries that he might notice something unhinged in her, but, if he does, surely he assumes it is grief. He does not suspect that she had been so close to choosing another life, to leaving him suddenly and silently. She looks up at him and smiles, a smile born out of guilt and a softening for his kindness. John smiles back at her and glances at his pocket watch. “A walk through the park then?”

  They move silently up toward the park and Wallis thinks that, surely, John must hear the buzz in her head, must feel the heat coming from her. She glances at him, his gentle smile and the vulnerability of his limp on the grass, and feels a sudden burst of pleasure at walking with him. She smiles at him and believes, in this moment, that this could be her future.

  They round the edge of the footpath and come across the pavilion. Wallis says, “Let’s sit and look at the stars. It’s nice out tonight.”

 

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