At the Edge of Summer

At first the post office told me that there were no letters. We’d been gone from Laghouat for almost two years. Surely something came in that time. Surely Luc had written. Oily black clouds were rolling in across the city and I begged Grandfather to ask again. To plead.

Finally the postal clerk, an elderly Algerian who probably wanted nothing more than to go home early and take a nap, sighed and shuffled back to wherever they stored years’ worth of uncollected mail. Grandfather patted me on the shoulder. “They’ll be there.” I watched the minutes tick by on my watch, a splendid man’s pocket watch bought from the junk market in Constantine that I wore on a chain around my neck. He patted me on the shoulder again. Outside, the sky rumbled. Grandfather began tapping his acacia walking stick. He didn’t like to be wet. I shook my watch to be sure it was working.

Finally he shouldered his walking stick. “Excusez moi!” he called towards the back. “My good fellow! Allô?”

Date palms shuddered in the lift of wind.

The man finally came back, slowly, a small packet of letters in his hand. Not even enough for a canvas sack. “This is all we have. I spent much time looking.” My watch would agree, but the crumbs of sugar littering his drooping mustache gave him away.

He handed them to Grandfather, but I pounced and thumbed through the meager stack. A few from the University of Glasgow, where he used to lecture, two from Mrs. Pimms, our ancient housekeeper in Perthshire, a half-dozen from friends of his (“Ah, young Toshie wrote?” he cried, seizing on one), and, at the bottom of the stack, one for me from Luc. One. Nearly two years, and only one letter.

The rain started as we left the post office. I held my one letter against my chest and ducked my head against the weather. Was it a dismissal? A disappointment? A hopeful finger-crossing? As we slipped in through our door and shook off our hats, I looked at the postmark. It had been sent four months ago, the day the war began. Spattered with rain, the envelope had transferred its ink onto my blouse.

I waved a hand at my ink-stained chest. “I should go see about…”

“Go.” Too impatient to find a towel, Grandfather was drying his hair with a tablecloth. “I know you want to read your letter without an old man staring at you.”

I fetched him a cotton towel from my little improvised washstand and then shut myself in my room.

The letter inside wasn’t long, scrawled on one side of a thin yellowed page numbered xii in the corner. Luc, the rule-follower, had defaced a book for me. I slid off my stained blouse and sat on the bed in my camisole to read it.

The script was smeared from the rain. It couldn’t be from tears, not with solid, dependable Luc Crépet behind the pen, but his words trembled. He must have written it the very moment war was declared. I don’t have their courage, he wrote. I don’t know how my tale will end. I wanted to reach through the paper, through the four missing months, and take hold of him. I wanted to tell him that I would be fine, that he would be fine, that someday we’d both return to Mille Mots and sit beneath the chestnut tree. Even if it was a lie. I can think of no better standard to carry into war than the memory of your face.

As if I could forget his. A day didn’t go by in those two years that I didn’t think of Luc, of the way he watched me with those owl-brown eyes, the way he always stood near me, close enough to touch, not close enough that I’d have to worry he would. He’d held my hand on four occasions; I could still remember the way my fingers felt in his.

I wrote to him. Of course I wrote to him. Piles of letters with our precious store of Alizarine ink and paper. I wrote about the seemingly endless camel rides, until my backside ached and my arms itched. The oxen with their curved horns that carried our boxes strapped to their humped backs. The pith helmet Grandfather bought me, like an inverted soup bowl. In it, I felt like a true adventurer. The round, grass-roofed huts where we stayed in each village. The dugout canoe we took down the Senegal River. The donkeys and goats and the one tame lion weaving in and out of the scattered buildings. The naked children standing in the mud at the river’s edge. The carved wooden skull mask, traded from an old man along the river for a little sketch of France. The insects. Oh, God, the insects. The sudden fever, where, sweating on a bullock hide on the floor of a hut, I lost track of days. The letters that I planned to mail in one great stack when we reached Saint-Louis at the end of the river. The letters, all lost when one of our canoes overturned. I could only cling to Grandfather, soaked and still weak, watching them float away, one by one, in a trail of white squares.

When we reached Saint-Louis, we finally saw a newspaper. We heard what we hadn’t in our meandering year and a half on the river, swatting away mosquitoes, sleeping in huts, and transcribing Berber. We heard that while we were gone, the world had gone to war. In a café, as French as any in Paris, we spread out newspapers and read while our bitter coffee grew cold. The newspapers were in French and out-of-date, so we read through weeks of news at once. Things growing tense in Paris, war declared, young boys marching from train stations in their uniforms of blue and red. Those first battles, in a rushed and bloody autumn—Tannenberg, the Marne, Arras, Ypres, the Aisne. So many other names, scattered across France and Belgium, that I cut a map from a newspaper and marked each and every one with a blot of ink.

Grandfather hung his head over the newspapers at that little café table in Saint-Louis. “Thanks to God that your father wasn’t sent to this. Maud, she never could have borne keeping house by herself.”

The first he’d spoken of my parents in years. “Mother has borne being alone for enough years, hasn’t she?”

He curled his tattooed hands around the coffee cup. “Not the being alone, but the managing. Though Maud would never admit it, your father, he was a steadying influence. Without him, the household would have crumbled.”

“But, without her, it did.” I leaned back in my chair and spread my fingers wide on the café table. “When she left, Father did, too. He retreated into himself.”

“Sometimes we need people without ever realizing it,” he said, with a bowed head.

I ran my finger over my map and sent up a quiet prayer.

So many blots were near to the unassuming peacefulness of Mille Mots that I wrote to Madame immediately, asking for news. I didn’t ask after Luc, but I hoped she’d read it through my words. I didn’t know where to write to him.

Though I wished it was more, to find even that one letter from Luc waiting in Laghouat was more than I expected. Only one to let me know that, at the start of the war, he was still safe. Only one to let me know that he hadn’t forgotten me.

I tucked it in my camisole, close to my heart, and buttoned on a fresh blouse. Out in the lounge, Grandfather, draped in a loose cotton robe, sat on one of the low sofas, his own letters spread out.

“This is a blessed mess. All of it.” He ran a hand through his damp hair. He needed a trim. “Glandale says the classes are nearly empty. The school has sent all the boarders home. The German master—do you remember Grausch?—he was sacked. His replacement is teaching Flemish. Flemish!” He tossed aside a sheet of paper. “And Johns, his sons are joined up, all six of them. One lost already at Arras.”

I pushed aside pillows and dropped onto the squashy sofa. A mug of tea steamed quietly by the brass pot. “Luc wrote.”

He nodded. “And?”

I swallowed. “He’s gone to war.” I shrugged. “What did I expect?”

“A chance to realize what was happening. A chance to know there was a war on before he said goodbye.”

I let my fingers trail over the scattered envelopes, strewn on the cushion between us. “You receive nothing but bad news, I receive a goodbye. All reminders of how the world changed while we were gone.”

“Ah, it’s not all bad news.” He picked up an envelope. “I heard from Charles Rennie Mackintosh. You remember Toshie? Was a draftsman with your father at Honeyman and Keppie when they were apprentices.”

Mr. Mackintosh was an architect of note and a familiar visitor at our house, all of those times he wanted to escape Glasgow to bemoan the lack of appreciation for bold architecture. “You knew him, too?”

“Not well.” He traced the edge of the stamp. “I met him at your parents’ wedding.”

I poured myself out a mug of tea. Mint. “Kind of him to write.”

“He’s in Suffolk right now, but is putting together a little exhibit. With so many men gone, he thought to highlight the work of some of the women at the Glasgow School of Art.”

I brought the mug up to my face and inhaled the sharp steam. “Mother loved it there, didn’t she?”

“Maud was a whirlwind when she was feeling creative. Yes, she loved it.”

“Then why did she leave school?”

“You know the answer to that. She met your father. She had you.”

“She was only there for a handful of years. Less than that. How much could she have learned?”

“How much could you learn from one summer and a few missives?” He slid Mr. Mackintosh’s letter back into the envelope. “She produced plenty. And that’s why young Mackintosh wrote. He asked for permission to exhibit a few of Maud’s pieces.”

All of those times I’d watch Mother through the window, sitting in front of an empty easel. “Do any still exist?”

“They do.” He crushed the envelope in his fist. “Ah, but they’re at Fairbridge.”

I pulled a pillow closer and tucked it up on my lap. “Grandfather, we’ve been away for a long time. At some point we need to stop wandering and return home.”

“Home?” He tossed the letter next to the teapot. “The world—”

“Is our home. I know.” I pressed my lips to the hot mug, took a scalding sip. “I don’t want to return to Fairbridge any more than you do.”

He exhaled. “I know.” He stared out the window, at the rain falling straight down. “Staying away, it doesn’t help. We can’t avoid sorrow.”

“Have the past three and a half years been sorrowful?”

He reached out and touched my hand. His fingers were cold against mine. “Of course not. But things will change, whether we’re there to see them or not. Look at what we missed while we were wandering in the wilderness.”

“Not everything has changed. Some things are constant. Today is Christmas Eve.”

“Ah, so it is.”

“Merry Christmas, Grandfather,” I said, and in my mind I sent out another. Merry Christmas, Luc, wherever you are.