HOWZAT

hungry. There are certain kinds of stories that do this. They usually are stories which travel, stories with cold, stories where you’re waiting for a fire and a hut and bowl of stew. As the spring wind began to pick up it was easy to imagine, on this tidy heath, how lonely it might be out in some northerly place with only five gold coins to keep you warm.

They walked down the hill – he was rolling his bike – passing the neat brass line that marked the two halves of the world. The gate that guarded the line was shut now, so they couldn’t play the game of skipping from one half to the other, or holding hands across East and West. And yet, as they walked (now, just now, in silence) she understood that the two of them could be standing on opposite sides of the world and yet still be near, each hear the voice of the other, even if they never spoke of the peculiar thing that had led to their meeting.

The third time they had met. Luke, Sylvia; Sylvia, Luke. No romance. Something better. This was not that. And so they walked, in step, side by side, down the hill to where the street lights dropped their yellow eyes to the pavement, where the river slid on to the sea.

–Are you cold, Miss Cruikshank? he asked.

— They were standing by the rail. She was wearing only a light coat, and although she had a scarf, she had neither hat nor gloves. He had not expected that, to see her auburn hair, just like that, lifted away from her broad brow by the ocean’s wind.

— I’m all right, Mr Norman, she said. She smiled at him, and the tip of her nose was red. Her knuckles were white.

— We should go inside, he said. He did not say, Please, Alice, call me Robert; that would not have been correct. He wished to be correct.

— Not yet.

The first time he had seen her he had noticed how she walked. The sea had been calm, flat calm, you would have said, like glass, and yet there was always motion, the great ship’s engines roaring her along, the pull and push of the waves which rippled so lightly along the liner’s prow but still somehow showed the water’s cold green strength. So that when you walked even in a calm sea (not that he had ever been on any kind of sea before) you had to hold the movement within yourself, allow for it, somehow, and the ones who had to clutch at the rails or deckchairs, the ones who stumbled or didn’t like the stairs or hesitated, were the ones who had not absorbed the motion into themselves. He had discovered that he liked the feel of the sea in his legs, in his hips, and when he saw her he thought that she must, too. She had walked to a settee carrying a book under one arm and a cup of something hot – he could see a curl of steam, a miniature of the steam that rose from the ship’s funnels – in the other. She had sat; opened her book; begun to read, begun to sip. He had not said anything to her, that first day.

Of course there had been girls, back home. But this was different; not that he could have said how. Perhaps it was because his new life was beginning: what had been was no more, he could be whatever he would now. Back home he had done what had been expected of him, whether that was to keep his distance, or allow himself to be teased, or accept an invitation for tea where his back ached within five minutes from sitting up so very straight and the cup rattled on the saucer when he put it down and the girl was, all of a sudden and in the presence of her mother, no one he could recognise. Never mind the presence of his own mother, perched there always in the back of his skull. It was not on this ship, but on the train down from Glasgow, perhaps, that he’d begun to feel an expansion inside him, the seed of his own life waiting there and ready to sprout. A suitcase, a trunk, the skill in his hands, Canada. What was not possible now? It was the 20th century, after all.

So it was possible, the second time he saw her, to notice the tiny diamond set into a ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand and not feel disappointed, or afraid. It was the late afternoon, before dinner, and for something to do he had seated himself at the piano – how fine, that there was a piano – in the dining room, and played a little, some Bach, as well as he could. Strange, the way one makes one’s own life; how he had hated his piano lessons! He had sworn that when he was grown he would never play. But here he was, on the ocean, at the piano, playing, and she had walked by, again with her book, and she had smiled at him, a small smile, and he had seen the light from the chandelier catch the stone on her hand. A glitter and she was gone, just like that. But he kept on playing, and wondered if the sound would carry out to her as she passed into the corridors of the ship.

The stone still flickered on her hand as she held the rail.

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