The house on Shakespeare Close is frenzied with tulips, rocketing out of the soil at Alec every time he comes up the front walk. The riot of late-spring color, all those reds and yellows, and the way the stones of the oldest lanes hold together in the Old Town and the castle remind him of Srinagar, a bit. Morningside, in particular, feels sometimes more like a small town than part of a bustling city, and he likes it that way. Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat loom in the northeast, but he and June are largely free of the flurry of activity that the city proper carries through summer.
On a day like this, the May sun streams through the tulips and lights up in filigree the veiny leaves of the pear tree craning upward where the front garden meets the street. The whole of early evening is a balmy weight on the back of Alec’s neck, and Edinburgh seems like the best idea anyone has ever had. He pauses to dig for his latchkey on the front stoop of the old villa, its yellowing Georgian bricks reassuringly solid and dappled with the crisp shadow of the rhododendron.
This part always takes a moment—despite the work he’s done on his hands over the last two years and all the improvement that has come with that work, there are still these pauses like the skipping of a note in a song. Fetching out his keys bedevils Alec endlessly, though he’s experimented with a variety of systems: larger key fobs that are easier to grasp, a strap built into his attaché case to make the keys quicker to find, a loop from his belt into his pocket . . . but nothing has ever quite solved it. Per ardua ad astra, he thinks. Through adversity to the stars. The RAF’s motto, and now his own. He grips the key at last and smiles. The struggles have been worth it. The struggles have brought him to Edinburgh, to a job he likes with Sanjay at Livingstone & Gray in Leith, to a new closeness with June. To this lovely old house on the oversize lot, his and June’s, bought by the pair of them with their combined inheritances and the proceeds from selling Constance’s cottage. A long series of confusing days and weeks, getting them out of Fenbourne, but look where they had ended up. It’s the perfect place for starting over, or for a young married couple looking to start a family. Ad astra indeed.
Inside, Ursa greets him with a quivering tail and the mincing smile she sometimes wears when she has spent her day on the sofa, where she knows very well she is not meant to be. Alec lays his hands against the sides of her jaws and shakes her head gently; the waft of her tail increases. She follows him to the kitchen, where June has left him a note: She is at the university, working on her research into algebraic varieties, and will be back before supper. Alec smiles; he has always known how brilliant June is, but watching her bask in the work, the way she looks when she talks about zeta functions and a thousand other things he doesn’t understand, gets into his chest and lights him up with pride. He taps his fingers on the note, then heads upstairs to change into something better suited for a ramble up to Blackford Pond. Ursa follows him.
The sun won’t be down for hours yet, and the angle of the light through the bedroom window, broken into piecework by the thick leaves of the magnolia outside, catches at the pale scars on his thighs. He hardly remembers how they got there—which disaster marked him. His hands, his legs, a knotty tangle at the base of his spine, some of the hearing in his left ear. The trains on which he had been shifted across the Continent had sometimes come under fire. British, American, Russian . . . perhaps the Germans themselves, if they had known what manner of train it was.
When he’s dressed, he lets Ursa lead him back down the stairs, where she goes straight to the front door and sits, her eyes fixed on her collar and lead.
“Silly baby,” Alec says. Ursa’s tail speeds up, but her gaze doesn’t falter. He slips the collar over her head, running his thumb up the smooth slope of her forehead, and clips the lead on. He checks his trouser pocket for the house key, and then they’re off.
Ursa stops to smell the rhododendrons, sniffing for mice or moles, then moves on, uttering a low, excited whine to lead him down the walk to the gate. Rachel Murray, a young mother who lives round the way, is out on a walk as well, with her son, Ian, in his pushchair.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Oswin,” says Rachel. She smiles at Ursa.
“Afternoon,” Alec says. “Fine day, isn’t it?”
“’Tis” Rachel says. “Everything all bright and growing.”
Ian, not quite two, wriggles, reaching for Ursa. She sits, quivering, and stares at him.
Alec says, “Ursa, would you like to say hello to Ian?”
Ursa takes a step closer, sits again, and delicately raises her right front paw so Ian can reach it. He grabs her paw and squeezes ecstatically. “Doggie.”
“She likes you very much,” Alec says to the baby. He’s glad, watching Ursa lick Ian’s fingers, that Rachel is not the kind of mother easily overwhelmed by a fear of dogs or their theoretical germs.
“She’s nae the only one,” Rachel says.
Alec nods. The bond between the two has been clear since the first time Ursa and Ian saw each other, not long after the Murrays moved in last summer. It can be difficult, sometimes, to navigate the confusion of watching Ursa with a small child—sometimes it’s hard to push away the fact that he had hoped for a baby of his own by now. June has her reasons, certainly, and they make sense—she is in the midst of her program at school, her focus almost entirely on the intricate dance of equations that make up her particular cosmos, and dealing as well with the stressors of being one of very few women in the university’s graduate courses.
And of course there are his hands. They do well enough now for the quotidian details of maintaining a house and garden, and at the shipyards he has adapted tasks as much as he can. But being a father . . . That strikes him as a wholly separate list of challenges. Could he even hold a baby with these rough, knobby hands? Surely he will find his way through it, when the time comes.
After a few more pleasantries, Alec and Ursa continue down the Close to Mortonhall Road. He weaves Ursa’s lead from hand to hand, practicing his grip as the doctor has instructed him. June had set herself to finding him help almost from the very first moment of their life in Edinburgh, and Captain Carnaby at the Royal Infirmary, for all his unorthodox ideas, has in fact helped him considerably. Alec had been afraid that Carnaby would fixate on his mental state or soothe him with snake oil, but he has turned out to be a sensible chap. It’s no small credit to him that Alec’s left hand has grown stronger and more functional, or that the right has regained a small measure of its old mobility and grip. The exercises Carnaby demands are grueling, but even on his worst days, Alec must agree that June’s searching has paid a considerable dividend.
Ursa pauses to nose around the head of the path to the Jordan Burn. Most seasons, it’s hardly a trickle even before it vanishes under the willows beyond Glenisla Gardens, but the sound of it is always a delight. Part of what drew them to this part of Edinburgh, already desirable with its detached houses and the proximity to the King’s Buildings at the university, was the greenery.
He tugs the lead gently, impatient to get to the pond and the trails that curl away from it. “Come along, Ursa.”
There are swans at the pond, a cob and pen drifting with a clutch of cygnets trailing after them. Ursa eyes them, and Alec taps her softly on the forehead with his knuckle. She looks up at him, tongue lolling free, then back at the swans. He knows she won’t chase them; an encounter with a farm goose before they left Fenbourne has left her permanently wary of large birds.
Watching the swans sets currents moving in his chest, reminders that although he is happier in Edinburgh with June than he’s been perhaps ever, there are still those gaps. Perhaps it’s the cygnets, the family the swans have made. Too, there is an energy in June that he doesn’t understand. He’s seen her sit as still as the ice that rimed the fens sometimes in the dark of winter when she’s working her equations or solving a puzzle, and he’s admired the grand long stride she has when they go for their walks. But this new hum feels like both at once, and he doesn’t know how to name it or what it means. Sometimes he finds her looking out the window at something too abstract to see, rather as if there is something hailing her, a clarion call that only she can hear. He feels in his bones that June’s longing for something more is not less than it was when they were children. In those moments, he can almost see a shadow surrounding her, the pent-up vibrations of a girl who has not yet found what she’s looking for.
And that shadow worries him—it makes him wonder about her work, about the delays, no matter how reasonable, in growing their family. Love is meant to be all eggs in one basket, isn’t it? He knows he wants her forever, and she wants him, too. He believes this despite the lingering guilt, the idea that he has somehow trapped her, despite the ways the war changed them both. That feeling he had the first time he met her, of being with someone who could see who he really was, or was meant to be, has left him feeling as if his life is both more real and more perilous. He has so much more to lose now.
An hour or so later finds him back at home, a set of schematics spread out across the dining table before him. It’s a new tugboat, which he hopes to sell to one of his connections at the port in Aberdeen. He’s eyed the bones of it in its berth at Livingstone & Gray, and now, studying the clear blue and black lines before him, he can see how it will look. All those years running his eyes over horses, cars, planes . . . Selling ships was not what he had ever expected to do, but he loves the deep joy that comes from being able to imagine the sweep of the hull, or the exact circumference of a smokestack, and find confirmation when he looks at the plans. One day he hopes to be part of the design team in their crowded, fuggy offices overlooking the mad glory of the yard, and if that dream is to come true, he must teach his hands to draw again. He lays a sheet of onionskin paper over the blueprint, licks the tip of the pencil clenched in his left hand, and begins to trace the tugboat’s lines.
His hand has just started to tremble from the effort of following the lines so precisely when the jackdaws who nest behind the chimney call out their chuffing alarm. Ursa looks up, her tail wagging and her ears shifting forward as a car purrs to a halt outside. Alec glances at the door, puzzled. June walks to the university most days, not quite a mile from Shakespeare Close to the mathematics department. But as the engine idles, he recognizes the pantherine throb of it—Floss Corbett’s sleek Bentley. Alec goes to the window and regards the blue-and-gold MK VI crossly, trying not to admire its lines.
“Beautiful machine, even if Corbett is insufferable,” he says to Ursa. It’s hard to say why exactly Corbett bothers him so much—their interactions have been few and far between, and he’s never been less than correct with June. Alec just has a vague sense that Corbett views him increasingly as a nuisance. And that sense pushes up against the doubts he carries on his own and makes them that much worse.
Ursa nudges at him as if she can tell he is starting to fret at himself. Alec drops his palm to the sleek crown of the dog’s head, tells himself not to be an ass, and goes to the door to greet June as the car slides back into motion.
She embraces him as she comes in, and hands him her school bag, since he’s standing closer to the rack. “Don’t get too close,” she says belatedly, “I’m head to toe chalk dust. Honestly, I’m quite sure I’m breathing it by now.”
Alec chuckles. “Only you would be more worried about that than your exams. They’re what, a fortnight from now?”
“Yes.” June smiles and lays her hand against his cheek. “Has Mrs. Nesbit left supper for us? I’m ravenous.”
“Cold meat and a jam roly-poly,” he says. He’d worried, when they started looking for someone to do for them, that they’d never be able to replace Mrs. Hubbox, who had gone to care for her elderly father in Ely, taking George with her, rather than following them to Edinburgh. But while Mrs. Nesbit has not quite replaced Mrs. Hubbox in their hearts, she has been a boon. Alec likes the days Mrs. Nesbit comes, because she is a much better cook than June, whom he suspects of exaggerating her lack of skill so they have a reason to keep Mrs. Nesbit on. Too, June’s program at the university requires so much of her attention that finding time for more domestic pursuits seems unlikely. Perhaps that will change when she finishes her degree. Or when a baby comes.
“I’ve got to change,” June says. She pauses in the foyer, glancing in at the papers he’s strewn across the dining table. “Will you be a darling and set things out for us?”
“Gladly,” Alec says, and goes to the kitchen.
After, they settle in the drawing room with the wireless, June stretched out the long way on the sofa to read with her feet in Alec’s lap.
“I’m glad you’re home,” he says.
“I am, too.” She smiles at him. “We were talking today about the Weil conjectures. Rather a lot to think about. Brilliant man.” She lowers her book to her chest. “Are you and Sanjay still thinking of going down to Nottingham for the First Test next month? You’ll be gone a week?”
“I think so,” Alec says. Australia have come to England for the Ashes series, and it’s been years since either he or Sanjay has seen any proper cricket. It’s confusing, of course, because it reminds him of dreams long past, and of Smasher, dead in Germany. But it’s cricket, and perhaps adding new memories will help soothe some of the old ones. It would be fine to watch Norman Yardley bat a century instead of having to read about it in the paper a day later. “We probably should have found a way to that two-day match in Yorkshire, instead.”
June reaches for his hand where it rests atop the back of the sofa. “This will be good, though. You and Sanjay will have fun.”
“Yes.” He kisses her palm. “Although it’s not certain he’ll manage the whole run. Parvati is expecting again, and although it’s still quite early on, Sanjay’s a bundle of nerves.”
June, as if she can hear the longing he tries to contain, sits up, tucking her feet underneath her. She nods, looking down at her hands as if she wants to say something. Whatever it is, Alec is not sure in that moment that he wants to hear it. He knows why they have not begun a family of their own yet, and she knows that he is looking forward to the day they do. It’s a tired argument at best. Only the day before they had been at it again; after years together they are still not quite on page with what their family should look like.
“In any event, they’ve got all their aunties and Parvati’s mother and lots of people,” he says, “so I expect we’ll still go.”
“I hope you can,” she says, piercing him with those eyes of hers. “It will be good for you.”
That night Alec can’t sleep. There’s just enough light from the streetlamp at the corner to lend a glow to the tobacco-dark of June’s hair on the pillow. He knows she would prefer to have even less light while she sleeps, but full dark is too much like the dank, filthy, lightless sheds the Germans would put the kriegies in for the slightest infraction. Full dark is too much. He leans closer, trying to distract himself from the grim memories by recalling newer, better things—the moonlight and the sea and the two of them on their honeymoon. It will have been two years in July, but his heart still quickens when he thinks of it. Her skin in the summer moonlight, the soft pale expanse of her dotted with blue and gold and red from a bit of stained glass in a hotel window in Wales. The swell of emotions in the brief ceremony at a registry office in London, Sanjay and Ainsley Finch-Martin standing up for the two of them, Roger sending his blessing from Kandahar.
He leaves a kiss on June’s shoulder and goes to the tiny square bedroom he uses as a workshop and study. Ursa follows, yawning, and stretches out on her cushion in the corner. There’s a sturdy table set up alongside the window, which looks out over the road and catches the soft golden light at the end of day. In jars on the table sit the tools Captain Carnaby has assigned. In Germany there were men in the infirmary, or more often in barracks, with damage that the doctors there had treated with exercises, and he had expected Carnaby to recommend something along those lines. But while work of that kind is part of his therapy, he has also found himself confronted with paintbrushes and clay, fragments of thin wood that he’s meant to be making into something else, pots of gruel-like paste that remind him of the flyers slapped up through London in the Blitz. Handling these items, turning them over in his hands, trying to make his fingers work, is hard, often painful, and in the beginning, it was nearly beyond him.
After that first afternoon consult with Captain Carnaby, he had come back to the house with his hands feeling as battered and sore as they had in years. But June had helped him then, has always helped him. A day later she had brought him a jar of paint, a sheaf of paper, and a tin of hair-tipped brushes. He had struggled to hold a brush, or to control its path through the thin layer of the vermillion paint she’d poured into a saucer. It had been well-nigh impossible, but she had wrapped her hand around his and guided him across the flimsy paper. You need to be able to write, she’d said. I’m here, and I’ll help as you like, but you need to build your hands up again. Painting will help with that.
He seats himself on the high stool at the table and reaches for a scrap of sandpaper. He makes his fingers grasp it, forcing his right hand to perform, and then he concentrates on smoothing the edges of the structure he’s been working on. Such minuscule work, so painstaking, but one notion has stuck with Alec—the idea that if he is using these paints and pastes to craft something that matters to him, he will progress faster. And so he is building a house. But it’s not just any house—not a house one might find in the Fenlands or Edinburgh.
He looks at his work. It is nowhere near done, but it has begun to take shape, the thick walls he’s formed of clay to look like the heat-defying walls of his home in Bombay, timber laced with rushes and held together with dung and soil, whitewashed until on the hottest days it looked like a mirage. If he were to build rooms, or the compound, he would have to build the room in which his mother died, the stable yard in which he learned to sit a horse, and the servants’ quarters. So he is building a shell, a memory.
His hands ache against the smoothing of another layer of clay, but it’s a good ache. It reminds him a little of the way his shoulders would pull when his Blenheim wanted to carve the sky with a particular arc and he had to fight the yoke.
When he reaches a stopping point, he wipes the bulk of the clay from his hands with the rough towel he keeps ready on his desk. The house is so quiet. In winter the boiler groans like ghosts. But in May, especially a lush, rainy May such as this one has been, the radiators are silent, and the trees are whole and green. The froggy trill of a nightjar comes in through the open window.
He should try to sleep. June will want him to have slept. But here he is, awake on another of his endless night missions. The moonlight glows indistinct and prickly through the trees, and Alec looks up at the sky and counts the stars.