Beyond the Blue Page 2

  Imogen tries to make herself small in the bustle of Victoria Road, angling herself away from the women—always it is women now, in their felt hats and hands clasped over their pocketbooks—pressing past her. Imogen has spent her whole life surrounded by women—first her mother, then her aunt and cousins—and is tired of their unhappiness. Imogen wants to be thoughtless, cavalier. She wishes she had been able to fight in the War, to cross the Channel to France and Germany, maybe even Africa. She wants everything outside this flat, the ocean on her face, sun on her back, lovers, strange rooted vegetables. She imagines that Wallis must want it too, that she must go there when she gets that odd, distant look.

  Wallis can make her face so blank and doughy and vacant, as if she forgets about herself for a while and travels to some other place. Imogen is sure that other place would be nothing like their flat: a tight bedroom, a parlour crowded with photos and chairs and knick-knacks and a tiny galley kitchen with a bed in the curtained alcove. Imogen knows they are fortunate to have a toilet in the flat; most flats share a toilet on the landing, or on the external stairwell. Imogen has never known any different; the flat she shared with her parents, Oliver and Brigid, was airy, roomy, full of small, good things.

  Full of ghosts.

  Some days, Imogen believes that she is a sort of ghost; she is that pale, that delicate and temporary. She thinks that, perhaps, she might be able to turn herself invisible; in this way, she imagines, she could let herself into the locked rooms of other people’s lives. She wills herself to be invisible when she follows Wallis down the streets of Dundee; she must follow her because, otherwise, Wallis would never let her into the secret parts of her life. Already, Imogen has followed Wallis to her Union meetings, to the shoemaker on Hilltown, to the harbour where she looked out across the even, blue water. Wallis is both complacent and shrouded in mystery.

  Today, Imogen has followed Wallis down to Victoria Road, where she slipped into the bank with the thick door quickly shutting behind her. Imogen imagined the swoosh of the door, the small push of wind that would have lifted the hem of Wallis’s skirt. Imogen stood farther down Victoria Road, where she could watch for Wallis in peace. She waited as others went in and out of the bank, all looking terribly efficient and pleased with themselves, wondering what had prompted Wallis’s new, frequent excursions to the bank. Imogen imagined Wallis saving for something extravagant and secret: a strand of real pearls to wear to church, a pair of calfskin boots. When Wallis finally came out, she walked farther down the street toward the red brick of the Courier building, and Imogen immediately thought of Oliver. His fingers stained and dark from the ink. She had happily followed Wallis through the haze of the day, meandering through Dundee, waiting for something dramatic, something interesting and mysterious to occur. There had been nothing. Only the grey of the day and the city, even the grey of Wallis’s skirt.

  Later, Imogen thinks she’ll keep following Wallis wherever she goes, disappear for a moment with her somewhere into the fading, aching orange.

  Caro wears a smart black hat as she leaves the post office and walks alone up Dens Road in the early-evening wind. As she turns onto Isla Street, she can hear them though they are still blocks away: loud, cackling laughter and the tight pitch of excited voices. When she passes Clepington Church and turns onto Main Street, the voices get louder. She hates how common it all seems, how desperate the women are for anything to fill the few free hours of their days, leaning out the windows of their flats, gossiping across the close to other women, their voices carrying down neighbouring streets. It weighs on her, the possibility that her life will be nothing more than this, that everything has been laid out before her like a smooth cement path. Caro walks through the close quickly, avoiding their eyes and their bodies pressed up against the windowsills.

  “Hullo, Caro!”

  “Ah, Caro’s on her way.”

  She raises a hand to them. Other times she ignores them completely, keeping her hands tucked tight in her pockets. Caro absently touches her black hat. Long, loping wash lines hang between the windows of these old, untended tenements. They have lived in the flat all her life; she has seen women come and go from the flats around them, their dark shoes loud on the hallway’s bare floors. And she has heard the low rattling in their throats at night, consumption and mill fever and diphtheria, echoing through the small tenements. Everything seemed to pass so quickly between the cracked windows: joy, grief, laughter and sickness.

  Caro does not intend to become like her mother, married to a useless man and later left alone with two children in a claustrophobic city that is full of smoke and steel and sweat. Caro walks up the three flights to the flat, determined that she will get out, somehow; she doesn’t know how yet, but she is sure it will have something to do with a man. Everything always comes back to men.

  “Back from the post office, are you?” Morag is holding a cup of tea, sitting on the small chesterfield, when Caro comes in. Caro unbuttons her coat in the heat of the room.

  She was pleased to get the position at Maryfield Post Office, because she hated the thought of working at Bowbridge with Morag and Wallis. She didn’t want callused hands and coughing fits and the dour expressions they came home with. Instead, Caro comes home having handled letters and cables and announcements. Births, deaths, marriages, doomed romances. Women in the tenements are wary of her, worried that she has special knowledge of their children and their sisters and their husbands. Mostly, their husbands, who stare at Caro with the eyes of predatory animals. There is always the hot flush of recognition from a man; she knows how they see her: smooth, dark hair; a creamy cheek; waist small enough for a handspan. Men who might want to be near her, to touch her maybe, to keep her like a possession. And Caro might let some man do this, but not just any man. She’s seen other girls become desperate about men; she pities and berates them at the same time, amazed by their foolishness. Like Lucy Bell, who got all teary-eyed and listless when her boyfriend left her for another girl, a more beautiful girl, and her letters were returned to the post office. These things, Caro thinks, are bound to happen. It’s the temperament of men.

  Caro moves across the flat to sit by the window. “Desperate women, heavy letters,” Caro says. She holds her hand up to rub at a smudge, to make the view clear. Bowbridge Works. The spire of Clepington Church. The pub, where Morag might stop to have a whisky. If Caro could see farther, she would see the Tay or, better, Broughty Ferry.

  “Mmm,” Morag mumbles. “It’s all desperation now.”

  If Caro imagines her life, it is full of the walled houses among the Ferry’s tall, graceful trees, the private washrooms, each room heated in the winter, a car to drive all the way to Edinburgh if she liked. She imagines this life free of her family; as if extricating herself from them might make Caro’s life easier. She would not want to see Wallis’s face, stunned and silent when mounds of clotted cream or Dundee cake were passed around. Wallis, who would move through the house leaving sticky fingerprints on everything she saw: fine paintings, heavy woollen blankets, Waterford crystal sparkling at a windowsill. The thought of it turns Caro tense, stiff. Sometimes, she thinks she is a tight ball of nerves and control, pulsing like mad. She wonders if she might explode from all the pressure, an ugly red mess on Morag’s floor. No doubt Wallis would mop it up, quickly, so that they might forget about it and soldier on.

  Caro looks down to Caldrum below, hoping for anything other than the stones, the smoke, the stream of women from the Works. Dark skirts moving across the street. Small, quick feet on the cobblestone. The town has been stripped of men, left barren and rocky as an abandoned mine. The only men left here now have weepy eyes, flattened limbs, or lovely, lush houses in the Ferry.

  Before the War, the men went mad for Caro, everywhere the girls went. Dances, pubs on Saturday nights, even Murraygate on a busy afternoon, men stopped to watch Caro pass or smiled shamelessly at her. Their intentions simmered just below the surface. She kept crimson lipstick in her pocket and applied it in a small gold mirror, patting her lips together and saying, “There.” At the dances, Caro was spun around the floor until she was slightly dizzy, either from dancing or the sips from hidden flasks. Her throat burned sinfully and brought a smile to her lips. She could still taste the thick, amber alcohol mingled with the waxiness on her lips. Wallis sat at one of the tables, looking bored and ashy under the smoky air and dim lights. Most nights, Caro forgot about Wallis until it was time to leave and some man was trying to steer her out into the crisp night air. Then, she was glad for Wallis in her cardigans and simple dresses. They would leave with their arms linked together, Wallis greedy for details.

  “How close did he hold you? Did he try to kiss you? Did you let him? Tell me.”

  Caro was vague, shrugging her slim shoulders and cocking up one thin eyebrow. Some nights they giggled like children, until their stomachs ached and they had to lean against a door frame for support. Those moments were rare, bright patches between them. They transported Caro back to childhood, when there was still the possibility of normalcy for them all. She was just Caro then, her face tight and shining in the moonlight as her sister held her elbow.

  Caro is restless in the flat. She stretches, leans against the window and then says, “I need some air. I’ll be back.”

  She walks down Hilltown, through Murraygate and on until the Firth of Tay gleams cold and silver in front of her. The new Tay Bridge—people still call it new despite its being built thirty years ago—stands sleek and straight above the water. She pulls her coat tight against the cold, adjusts her hat; it might start to rain and she has forgotten an umbrella. She walks parallel to the Tay, mindful of the grey sky.

  From here, Caro thinks she could slip onto a boat and go anywhere. She could disappear and become someone
else: forget Wallis’s huge, plaintive eyes, Morag’s disapproval, Imogen’s frailty.

  A tramcar comes behind her, wheels loud and metallic on the tracks. She watches the smooth arc of it as it passes by on the curved road. A half-moon and then it’s gone, leaving a lone automobile behind it.

  Caro always notices the people who drive cars: they are the people she wants to become. No more walking in the rain, no more crowded stench of tramcars. The pure, spoiled luxury of pedals beneath your feet, wheels whirring.

  It’s Desmond Lindsay, the man who owns the Bowbridge Works. She can tell by the shining black automobile and his peppered hair behind the windshield. She doesn’t need to see his face to know him. For a moment she thinks he is slowing down, he will perhaps stop to offer her a ride. Caro pauses, smiles.

  No. He is simply cautious in the new rain, afraid of veering out of control. Perhaps afraid, mostly, of crashing into the girl who just stands at the side of the road, staring.

  At seven, Imogen spent most of her time with her fingers in her ears. Plain refusal. Maddening to anyone around her, especially Morag, who longed to reach across the table and tug her slim hands from the air. There. Listen now. Morag would not have allowed this sort of behaviour from Caro or Wallis, but there was something so torn about Imogen that Morag relented. Imogen a reminder of Morag when she lost her own mother. Morag as a small, staring four-year-old, waiting for the train car to resurface. Morag recognized the pained eyes and the tendency to bend and whimper at the slightest disruption.

  Morag watched Imogen and thought she could see the fracture in her: this break here, this is Brigid’s death. Morag knows the fissure has been tentatively sutured only because Imogen does not remember. If she remembered, she would be split and raw and left to the elements.

  Morag believes it is the kind thing to do, to allow Imogen a gentle reprieve from it all. This is the only way, really, to keep her from breaking apart again, quick and thrilling, to the bone. To let her forget.

  If only we could all forget. If only I could forget.

  The day after Brigid’s death, Imogen woke early and came out of the bedroom. Her face was creased from the pillow. She stood still and stared at Morag’s silent body in the alcove bed beside James. Morag looked back at her. Imogen’s eyes were dull. Blank.

  “Where’s my mum?”

  Morag stared. “Your mum?”

  “Where is she?”

  Morag sat up, careful not to wake James. “She’s gone, dear.”

  “With my dad?”

  “No. Gone.”

  Imogen rubbed her eyes. Squinted. “She’s left me?”

  Morag said gently, “Don’t you remember, Imo?”

  Imogen shook her head. Waited for Morag. She was so small.

  “There was an accident, Imo.” Then, “Your mother has gone to be with God. You don’t remember?”

  Imogen said, “No.”

  Morag thought it the generosity of the mind, the way Imogen’s memory was turned into corridors, then into rooms, then into doors with locks. Her mother’s death was shut away and locked and forgotten.

  Every day Morag worries that one of these doors will be unlocked, swing open with the horrible sound of an unoiled hinge, and everything will spill out. It is only a matter of time before Imogen lets herself remember.

  Silent Deaths

  AFTER ELSIE’S DEATH AT THE WORKS, Morag dreams about the bridge, the lightning, the shrieking wind, the collapse. The way the centre of the bridge snapped, then crumbled into the Tay below. She dreams about hands pressed up to the glass, desperate to escape the compartment of the train. She sees the o shapes of their mouths, the way their eyes began to go mad. Yet, she never dreams of her mother’s face like that; in her dreams, her mother is not on the train but at home in the flat, her hands tired from sewing all day, small circles on her fingers from the thimbles. Morag dreams her mother alive.

  The bridge had only been open a year; though she was only four then, Morag insists she remembers the celebration, the first lumbering train to cross it. The bridge seemed impossible to her; all that concrete and steel held up in the air like a gift to God. She loved the clacking sound of the train running over the tracks, the possibility of hovering over water. She had watched from her mother’s arms as that first train eased its way onto the rail bridge; they had clapped as the train became smaller, moving steadily toward Edinburgh. Morag remembers the lavender scent of her mother’s hair, the heavy wool of her dress, the heat of her body so close.

  Morag holds on to these memories as if they were lifeboats; as if she were the one drowning.

  In the photo, his hair is neat, combed to one side with a part that shows the white of his scalp. Wallis has looked at the photo so many times that she even knows the spot where he was careless and the part jags to the left, into his thick brown hair. There is a small worn corner of the photo where Wallis’s thumb has held it, obliterating Paddy’s elbow.

  The photo does not belong to Wallis. It belonged to Mrs. Hennessey, who kept it in a black photo album in her parlour. One afternoon when Wallis was seven, she silently opened the album, freed the photo from its corners and tucked it into her dress pocket. Later, she put the photo under the mattress with the stolen rosary. Slept for the next twelve years with Paddy’s face and Rosemary’s rosary beneath her.

  Now, Wallis holds the photo to her face and breathes in, expecting the lingering odour of gas.

  No one wants to work the carding machine Elsie McRae’s body was pulled from. Wallis says that people stand idly by and stare at it; Morag knows that soon there will be rumours of hauntings, sightings, but Morag dismisses superstition. Instead, she wonders what they did with the jute from her machine. It would have been stained red with her blood.

  Desmond Lindsay visits on the pretense of sorrow over Elsie McRae’s death, but really, he is there to make certain everything is running smoothly. Even he can’t afford to close the Works for a full day just for a carding girl. Morag imagines he will say how sorry he is, what a tragedy it was, all the while not even knowing who the girl was. She wasn’t pretty enough to be one of the girls Mr. Lindsay remembered.

  Everyone knows about Desmond Lindsay, though some of the girls pretend not to. Those girls smile up at him with coy, lowered eyes and admire his wide smile. Desmond Lindsay loses interest in these girls quickly. He leaves them crying, plaintive, ashamed. Morag has heard that he has children by such girls, girls who suddenly disappear to Glasgow, Edinburgh, places where they are less likely to be noticed. Places where they can wear a gold band and people might believe their husbands are heroes at war.

  Mr. Lindsay comes into the weaving warehouse flanked by two managers. The men are talking to him, pointing out repairs and improvements. But Desmond Lindsay is busy looking at the backs of young girls at the looms, seeking out that tender spot where their hair touches their necks, that hollow begging for a thumb or lips.

  He is stiff and straight, crisp in pressed trousers, a fitted jacket and tie. His shoes click on the floor. His strides are long, smooth, despite the fact that he is relatively short. Desmond Lindsay is one of the richest men in Dundee. “Good morning,” he says, flashing some of the prettier girls a smile. They blush and mutter, “Morn.”

  There is sudden, muted excitement. The girls feign concentration on their looms, stand with hips cocked to the side. These girls, Morag thinks, are ridiculous.

  Morag is thankful when Desmond Lindsay passes her wordlessly, moving quickly past her looms. Once, before she had been weathered down to transparency and essentials from daily toils in his mill, Desmond Lindsay might have paused to notice her thick, brown hair and smooth skin. She touches her cheek, now, and feels only the pull of age and weariness.

  Morag turns her attention back to her looms, to the continual sound of them, as Desmond Lindsay exits the weaving warehouse. She pities the girls around her. These women would all carry Desmond Lindsay with them as if marked by his fingertips, the pungent smell of his wealth.

  To wake from a dream, so full and weighted by it that you might think it has reshaped your morning, this day, your life. This is how Imogen wakes after dreaming of Brigid. She opens her eyes to the small room and believes, for a moment, that she is in the flat on Park Avenue, that the last seven years have dissolved like candy in her mouth. She does not want to turn her head, afraid that even the slightest movement—the slightest acknowledgment of a day spread out before her—will break the crystalline texture of her dream.