When the powers that be at Livingstone & Gray stamp the racing sloop with their imprimatur, Alec’s job shifts from design to the earliest parts of marketing, and the pressure changes. He has phone calls to make and copy to draft, appointments to book with furnishers and builders, a host of quotidian details to arrange. He misses having his hands on the ships, but it’s not time for that now—and the sharpened focus of announcing the new ship is a different type of excitement.
Despite his pleasure in the work, sometimes he feels a measure of discomfort, brought on by something he can’t quite name. Of course part of it is his belief that he should be at home. Not here, settled perhaps too cozily into the comforts the Carters provide. He’s built Spitfires and worked on homework with Cullen, the two of them finding their patterns and routines winding together more every week. Somewhere in the back of Alec’s mind is a layer of guilt over how attached he has let Cullen become; it won’t be easy for the boy when it’s time for Alec to leave Halifax. Too, he has fallen into the habit of sitting up at night with Maeve, each sharing about their childhoods and their families, India and Fenbourne and a village just outside Dublin. More than once she mentions Cullen’s cousins—but Desmond’s siblings in Thunder Bay and Edmonton are so far away, and Ireland even farther. And Alec can’t help but wonder about Penny, the only child of two only children. Penny loves Roger and loves the ghost stories he tells her that keep her up at night during his very rare visits, but it’s hardly the same as family her own age.
But with only a handful of time left, he’s still trying to balance the tug of home with the very different anchor he has found here in Halifax.
One night he dreams of frozen crows falling like blocks of obsidian from the sky above Stalag Luft I, and the screaming of kriegies being brought to heel with the crash of rifle butts and bullets. He wakes to find his hands aching and a throb of pressure over his eyes that reminds him of that dark time just after the war when he hardly slept.
The next morning a letter comes from June, and it is not the balm Alec had hoped it might be. She sounds sanguine enough about losing out on the Reader position that she’d hoped for, but still Alec is rankled on her behalf. How can the chair not see how brilliant June is, how hardworking? Even so there is also the small, terse voice in the back of his head arguing that the man has a point; June’s family needs her.
The whole thing makes him a bit uneasy, and his disorientation grows as he reads the rest of the letter, puzzled and a little cold. But the point is clear—she’s been offered an opportunity at Oxford and feels she would be foolish to pass it up, Penny is getting older and has done well enough with Alec abroad, just the Michaelmas term, back by Christmas. Imagine me, she writes, in the black robes of a don at Somerville. He reads that sentence again, touched by her obvious excitement, but at the same time the idea sticks in his craw. He can certainly see how a post like that would go a long way to make up for the sting of her situation with the maths people at home. But imagining her away at Oxford . . . Her place is with him and Penny, just as his place is with them. And then the capper: Floss reminds me not to underestimate the boost this could give my career.
June has never made a secret of how important her work is to her, no more than he has of his wish for family. Perhaps what he has always wanted has never really been in the cards. And perhaps Corbett’s influence is more pernicious even than he thought. He’s never felt Corbett wants to replace him as June’s husband, but God knows there are other ways the man has held a bit more sway than Alec would like. It’s hard to tell from this remove, through all the confusing, half-nostalgic layers of life with the Carters, whether or not there is something else he should do to make the pieces of his life fit more securely.
Can’t wait to tell you more, she writes, but that gives him pause as well. She has not presented it as a discussion and it’s not quite an edict, but the sentence about Floss Corbett makes it feel as though it may as well be. Damn the man—Corbett has moved with an unsettling efficiency, using every moment of Alec’s absence to reorder the world. He stares at the letter as if it contains a map he hasn’t deciphered yet, one of those secret messages June used to leave for him when they were children—a cairn, an arrow chalked on a wall, a false alphabet. But nothing rises to the surface beyond his bewilderment.
He doesn’t begrudge June her career or her dreams, does he? But her place is with him and Penny. And harder than the confusion about the message itself is not knowing what she’s said to Penny about it, if anything, not knowing what’s unfurling for his future, his family’s future, while he’s an ocean away.
That evening, Alec sprawls in one of the stolid rattan chairs on the back terrace, happy and exhausted. Maeve and Cullen had invited him to go to the beach, and after a bit of dithering he had agreed. The pleasure and ease of their company had been exactly what he needed. It was a long afternoon picnicking and watching cormorants and gulls cruise along the breakwater, and he feels more a part of Maeve and Cullen’s unit than ever. Settling onto the sandy blanket with them had felt entirely natural, as had carrying Cullen to the low surf and letting him feel the sweep of the water against his legs, and listening to the boy tell him the history of pirates in Nova Scotia.
Sometimes Alec doesn’t know what to make of the Carters or how he feels about them; there are moments when it seems as though he’s stumbled into another world in which this is his life. Those moments leave him disquieted at best, but he can’t help the draw he feels. He could not possibly adore Penny more than he does, but watching Cullen reminds him how much he would have loved to have had a son of his own, and the larger family his sights had been set on for so long. And as the weeks have crept along, he has noticed Maeve more often watching him quietly.
It’s not long before Maeve joins him on the terrace with a tumbler of Irish whiskey in each hand and settles into the chair opposite Alec. She’s not much of a drinker, but now and again she’ll have a dram with Alec after Cullen’s gone to bed. Dragonflies and swifts lash through the low lavender sky above them. Inside, the sitting room lights blink on, and Alec can just make out Mrs. Carter taking her seat beside the hearth with her newspaper. She’s not chaperoning, exactly. But he’s not quite sure she approves of these palavers.
Maeve takes a sip, shudders. “Desmond loved a bit of whiskey, but for the life of me I’m still always ready to be done almost before I’ve started.”
Alec smiles. “Acquired taste, I suppose.”
She nods, gesturing out toward the stand of elms just outside the brick wall that borders the garden. “Look, a raven. No—a pair. They mate for life, don’t they?”
“I don’t know,” Alec says. He eyes the ravens, the pair of them sitting thickly on the branch, their feathers dark and soft in the beginnings of twilight.
Maeve nods sagely. “Des used to teach me about birds and the outdoors. All these years and still I want to go and find him when a jay leaves behind a feather, or there’s a robin’s egg in the grass.” She shakes her head. “You’re lucky to have your June, Alec.”
“I am,” he says quietly. But the idea of “his” June makes him just a bit uneasy. The letters from home bring him the details of life on Shakespeare Close, but the undercurrent of June’s need to be working has not escaped him. Nor has what that means for the household. Twice now Penny has written happily about how much she likes the fish and chips from the shop down the road, and he has the sense that with Mrs. Nesbit more or less out of commission the family dinners he’s always cherished have fallen somewhat out of favor. And this latest letter seems as if the life he’d hoped for will be one step further away.
“She and your Penny are lucky to have you, too.”
He lifts his glass to her. “And Cullen, you,” he says.
“I’m blessed to have him, and it’s my good fortune I’m able to be home for him and not busy with work outside. A mother belongs with her child, sure.”
Alec looks down at his drink, then back at Maeve. She would never understand what June is asking—even a handful of days away from Cullen would be too many for Maeve. The thought gives him a thick, unpleasant feeling, as if he’s been caught in a disloyal sulk. Instead of responding to Maeve he says, “Very handsome birds, aren’t they?”
Maeve tilts her head, watching the ravens mutter and launch themselves. “Des used to tell Cullen and me the old stories,” she says. “Brian Boru and the rest. Lugh and his ravens.”
It gives Alec a pang to consider what it must have been like for Cullen to lose something like that, as he himself had as a boy, especially given how important the bear stories are to Penny. “He sounds like a fine man,” he says, shifting himself on the love seat and shying away from the rest of it. “A good father to Cullen, too.”
“Oh, that he was.” She lets out a small sigh. “When I lost Desmond . . . I lost my way, a bit.”
Alec doesn’t say anything—she’s moving toward something, as clear as stepping out on a wire.
“They called it the Crippler,” she says. “The whole of Canada was scared half to death. And at mass every Sunday they would read the names—so many. An adult here and there, but so many children, Alec.” She meets his gaze, her eyes full of pain. “Then masses half empty, everyone after keeping their children safe to home.”
“It must have been terrifying,” he says quietly. “Like the cholera.” He grimaces, remembering the smell of fire, and Maeve nods.
“When Desmond got sick, I thought he was tired, sure,” she says, her voice almost too low to hear. “And then Cullen . . . I thought the world was coming to an end. Father Mayhew kept coming along and telling me the Lord had a plan. And then Desmond . . . he was hardly alive, Alec, an iron lung breathing for him, and then he was gone.” She trails off and takes another sip of whiskey.
“I’m sorry,” Alec says. “So very sorry.”
“I couldn’t even grieve him properly.” She gestures with her glass. “Everything I had left went into taking care of Cullen. I was so afraid of losing him, too. And Father Mayhew . . . Well.” She makes a little tsk sound and shifts in her chair. Alec leans forward so he can hear her, as if the gathering darkness of the evening has made her soft voice even softer. Her smile, when it comes, is a sad one.
“Well,” she says again. “He came to the hospital, and there I am with my tiny little boy, and Father Mayhew is on about the Lord and His sparrows, and . . . I don’t know what it was that came over me, Alec. I told that man I couldn’t accept the word of his god, not with an island full of dead children and my good man gone, and what did he, with no wife, no children, even know of what we’d lost?”
Quietly, wanting to comfort her somehow through the swelter of feelings rising in him, Alec says, “I can’t think how exhausted you must have been. How bloody afraid.”
“Like a banshee, I was,” she says simply. “Railing at a man of God like that until I ran pure out of words.” She takes a last sip of whiskey and sets down the empty glass. “I didn’t go back to mass that week, or the next. I was so ashamed.”
Alec gazes at her, unable to organize his feelings into words. At last he says, “But you were suffering so very much, Maeve. You can’t blame yourself for that. We all do things we regret when the burdens become too heavy.”
“I was so angry,” she says, shaking her head. “And I wished him ill, Alec. God help me, I wished he would know, somehow, the feel of a loss like that.”
“You mustn’t be so hard on yourself,” he says. “Sometimes we are faced with the unreasonable.” He stops, startled when a broad-shouldered gray-and-white cat leaps up to the top of the wall just beyond the terrace and stands there watching them. Alec blinks—the cat looks so much like his old barracks cat Jack, even down to the ragged tips of its ears. Alec falters, trying to quell the sudden shaking in his hands.
Alec is vaguely aware that Maeve is responding, but the cat is on the move, its tail lashing as it prowls. It pauses on the edge of the terrace and lets out a hoarse yowl. Alec turns away, sweat beading down his spine and the back of his neck. He has too many ghosts, but mostly their haunting has slowed. This is something else, though. His stomach drops as the cat comes closer and winds itself around the legs of the table, looking up at him with its green eyes lanterned in the light from the house. Jack used to do that, curl the crooked end of his tail around the legs of Alec’s bunk, purring like a racecar. The big cat had been lying there purring on that last day, the last cat left in their barracks, before . . . Alec shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the memory of men crying with hunger and Jack’s tatty gray coat gone still, the engine quieted, before one of the other men had taken Jack away to turn him into something else. Not a cat.
“Alec? Are you all right?” Maeve’s voice is soft and confused, but he doesn’t look at her. Instead he watches the cat, hoping it will just go away, but instead it jumps up on his lap, purring like Jack always had. The weight of it, the soft puff of its fur . . .
“Get it away,” he chokes out through the nausea. Maeve stands and shoos the cat away, and as it vanishes into the darkness at the back of the garden Alec forces his trembling hands into stillness. “Thank you,” he says at last, when he thinks his voice will be steady enough.
She takes a seat beside him. “I take it you’re not keen on cats, then?”
Alec hesitates, trying to find his way through what he wants to say. What he wants her to hear. How much he needs to explain himself to her and offer her something in return for her story. But the words come slowly. “When I was shot down . . . I was a prisoner of war for a long time, in Italy first.”
Maeve tilts her head, her eyes searching his face. “First?”
“When Italy surrendered, the Germans took me. Nearly two years in one of their camps, and it was almost the end of me.” He takes a breath. “There was no food for months, only a knob of cabbage now and again, our rations not coming . . . We were so hungry.” He stops. “I haven’t told anyone before.” Not even June. It feels wrong to say any of this out loud, especially to Maeve, and his next words stick in his throat. “There were cats, though.” He tries to meet Maeve’s eyes, but his gaze skitters away. “That’s all there was.”
Maeve’s hand goes to her mouth, and Alec’s heart sinks. What if he’s said too much? But then she leans toward him, her brow furrowing. “You were surviving. Isn’t that what God wants for us? To do the best we can and survive?”
Alec looks down at his hands, then away. The last thing he wants to think about is Jack in the barracks licking Klim from his palm before everything went from bad to much, much worse. When he finally looks up again, Maeve is watching him with tears in her eyes. The relief in finding someone so kind, so understanding, to hear his darkest moment, feels like a gift. There is an element of peace in it, perhaps even of absolution. But it nags at him that he’s brought Maeve something he has never shared with June.
“You poor man.” Slowly, she lays her palm against his cheek, her thumb brushing tenderly against his cheekbone. When she puts her arms around him, he lets her hold him for a moment, too aware of the rawness of it, unsure if he should return the embrace. But there is a comfort here that he didn’t expect, though he’s seen her with Cullen often enough to know how warm she is. It’s disorienting to be so close to this soft bask of affection. He’s tried to think of her as Desmond’s widow or Cullen’s mother, but now she is just Maeve. Not new information, but a new way of realizing something he had refused to notice before.
Her fingers brush the back of his neck, and he shivers. He wants to relax into her care, but with her softness so near him and her scent rising around him like butterflies he knows that is a path best not taken. He can feel her pulse. Or his. He’s not sure, and not sure it matters. In his confusion, time stretches out like a willow on the bank of a stream.
Alec pulls back, guilty and confused by the threshold on which he’s hovering, but Maeve stays close and still. The whiskey and her embrace have warmed him, and the terrace feels like a pocket out of time or place. It’s a dangerous feeling, as if he and Maeve have opened a perplexing, new liminal space. Agitated, he finishes his tumbler of whiskey. “I should probably turn in.”
Maeve’s face falls. “Oh, already? Would you not like another wee drop first? It’s so early yet.”
Alec shakes his head, and Maeve’s eyes fill with disappointment. Regretfully he says, “I’d best not.”
“I understand,” she says quietly. She gets to her feet and takes his glass.
Alec frowns, sorry that he seems to have let her down and unsure how to navigate this confusing new space. He stands, too. “Well. Good night, then.”
“Good night, Alec.” She moves to the door, where she turns back to face him. “You’ll forgive me saying so but . . .” She gives him a small, rueful smile and speaks so softly he strains to hear. “What I wouldn’t give to be in June’s shoes.” And with that she disappears inside.
Alec lets out a whoosh of breath, overcome with feeling. An owl passes overhead, silent on its way to the pines across the way. He watches it go, trying to understand what’s just happened.
The last week of his time in Halifax races past, and Alec makes half a dozen fitful starts of a letter to June. He resents having to write it, having to ask her to hold off on a decision until he’s home, and he’s frustrated that he will likely be on the ship back to Britain by the time she gets the letter he finally composes. He needs to get back to Edinburgh and try to understand what’s happening. Or try to fix it, if there is something that can be fixed. He also struggles with the alarming, tangled threads of his ties to Maeve and Cullen. He can’t forget what it felt like to be held, or the words she said before she went inside the house, and the effort to quash his confusion and try to act as if nothing happened is exhausting. And even beyond that, he doesn’t know quite how to leave them, especially when he thinks about how much time he’s spent with Cullen, how much their routines have intertwined. And he needs to settle himself back into his real life, not this strange existence where he waits for Maeve to smile at him and then feels a rush of shame when she does.
Not that she is smiling as much as she had before that night on the terrace. She’s never mentioned it, but sometimes Alec looks up to find her regarding him pensively. He feels as though something has changed in how she talks to him even while he cannot pinpoint exactly what that difference is. Sometimes he feels as if she is avoiding being alone with him too, and he’s glad to have so much to do at Livingstone & Gray to tie up the loose ends and ready the project for its next stages; he can’t be at the house and see Maeve without his thoughts blurring into disarray.
His last morning in Halifax, the Carters join him in the dining room for a send-off. Cullen has got him a book on the pirates of the Atlantic coast, full of garish, lurid illustrations. And Maeve, who seems to remember everything he likes best, has made him a Victoria sandwich, laden with cream and raspberry jam. Even after all these weeks of Maeve’s baking, she can still surprise him, and it lights a discomfiting spark in his chest that he doesn’t quite want to extinguish.
“It’s not your birthday, of course,” she says, “but perhaps it isn’t always needing to be?”
“It’s perfect,” he says, tugged at by memories of Cook’s sponges at the vicarage and a thousand other bafflements and memories. “Utterly perfect.”
She pinkens gladly, but then her smile fades a bit. Her shoulders square as she takes a breath and pulls one of the flowery index cards she keeps in a tin on the kitchen windowsill from her apron pocket. “Thought I’d send the recipe along. For June.”
Alec falters just briefly before he takes the card from her. He understands all in a moment what this is, understands that Maeve is acknowledging—accepting—the way things are, the way they must be. He’s touched by her stoicism, and by her kindness. “Thank you,” he tells her, even as he knows very well June will never make this cake. “Thank you awfully much,” he says again. “For everything.”
Maeve ducks her head. “We’re going to miss you.”
“It’s been a pleasure to host you, Mr. Oswin,” Mrs. Carter says.
Cullen looks up, his eyes sad. “You were the best one we ever had.”
“It has been my honor to know you,” Alec says, his voice stiff. There is too much to say to this boy, and he’s not sure how to acknowledge the hole saying goodbye to Cullen is going to leave in Alec’s world. Or, worse, the hole he’s going to leave in Cullen’s. “You’re a grand lad, and I would not have enjoyed Halifax half as much without you.”
“Do you think you might come back?” Cullen’s eyes brighten with hope.
“Acushla,” Maeve says gently.
Cullen glances at her and looks away again, picking at his cake. “Will you write, at least?”
“Of course,” Alec says. “You as well, I hope. And perhaps one day when you’re having your adventures I’ll see you again, yes?”
The boy nods tightly. Maeve watches her son, her brow furrowing with concern, and reaches along the table to take his hand in hers.
Alec leans back in the chair that’s been his for so long now, watching these people for whom he has come to care so deeply. It’s time to go home—well past, if June’s letter is any indication—but the idea of leaving Maeve and Cullen behind colors the relief of homecoming. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out a parcel wrapped awkwardly in brown paper, then slides it across to Cullen. “I had hoped this would come sooner, so we could build it together, but . . .”
Cullen reaches for the parcel and pulls out a small plastic-wrapped Beaufighter kit. His eyes widen. “Where did you find it?”
The gladness in Cullen’s face warms him, but it does nothing to soothe the ache of leaving. “Took a bit to track it down, certainly. Let me know how it turns out, will you?”
“I will,” Cullen says. He turns the model over in his hands, and Alec grins, recognizing the excited glint the boy gets in his eyes when he’s planning a build.
Maeve smiles at Alec, her eyes glistening.
Alec puts his palm to the boy’s thin shoulder. For a moment he’s lost in the memory of Roger squeezing his shoulder this way, a lifetime ago in that stormy night coming from India, the rain lashing into his face. Out front of the house a taxi is sounding its horn. Alec gets reluctantly to his feet. It never would have occurred to him, all those weeks ago, that at the end of his time in Halifax he would feel this way. The pain of goodbye is persistent and unavoidable, and being the one who is leaving feels no better, it transpires, than being the one who’s left behind.