“Why do we have to watch this, Miss?” Brent Shiwack said. “It’s queer.”
Wayne saw the dance as an elaborate knot but would not say so out loud. It was like the knots his father made in traps and bowlines. Wayne saw it as an interesting mathematical pattern, and wished he could trace its lines with his body.
“How come you don’t live in a normal house, Miss?” Brent Shiwack asked. “How come you live in the Guest House?”
“I used to live here in a normal house. I used to live in the house the Michelins live in now.” Everyone looked at Wally Michelin. Wally shrunk in her desk. “It’s a nice house. It’s a beautiful house for the Michelins. But if I was there I’d look out the windows and see my husband, Graham, coming past the fence with a bucket of water for his horse. I’d see my daughter, Annabel. I’d smell the rain on her clothes. She used to sneak up from behind and hug me. Her breath was like cold petals.”
When Thomasina spoke the name Annabel, Wayne realized this had been the name she called him years ago.
He had thought the name was Amble, which was a nonsense name, he realized now, but when he was small it had been like any other nickname. But it wasn’t Amble. It was Annabel. Why had Thomasina called him that?
Everyone talked about the new teacher at recess. Teachers didn’t tell you about the cold breath of their dead daughters. They didn’t give you stone eyes. Wayne was glad Thomasina had not told the class she had known him when he was younger, or that she had sent him postcards with bridges on them from all the places she had travelled.
Thomasina waited for Wayne to speak to her. He spoke as he fed the newts in the class aquarium while she corrected math reviews. The recess bell had rung and everyone was yelling past the windows. There were crows in the yard, and frost in the asters.
“I made a bridge.” Wayne’s voice came out faint, as if he were trying to talk to Thomasina through layers of old paper. “I got all your postcards and I made my own bridge.” He did not tell her Treadway had helped him build it, or that his father had later taken it down.
“You did?”
“It was like the one in Florence. The one the Germans didn’t destroy in the Second World War.”
“Ponte Vecchio.”
“It was great. Me and Wally Michelin had it going all summer. It’s gone now but we had lights on it and everything. I have all my postcards in a tin.”
Thomasina had been watching Donna Palliser and her clique. She had noticed undercurrents normal for a grade seven class; she had learned at Harlow to watch for them, and she had her own insight. Thomasina had always had insight. Graham Montague had called it second sight, but she knew it was not that. It was simply stepping back from a scene and letting its layers reveal themselves. She did not have to step back far or wait long to see below the surface of the life of Wayne Blake.
“It was Annabel you called me, wasn’t it? When I was little.”
Thomasina saw that the child she had secretly named Annabel, in memory of her own lost daughter, had become graceful and mysterious. She saw how he sat at the back of the class, quietly unrolling the big map or reading library books stuck inside his textbooks. She saw how he walked at the edges of the corridors, the gym, the schoolyard. He had no idea of the circumstances that had surrounded his birth, yet a thoughtfulness lay in his eyes that the other children, save for Wally Michelin, did not have. It was the spirit a poet might have, or a scientist, or anyone who sees the world not as he or she has been told to see it, with things named and labelled. Wayne Annabel, as she called him in her mind now, saw everything as if it had newly appeared. He looked at each thing as if he had never seen it before: chalk, a map of Argentina, or grasses collected in science class, or the steps of the Greek dance she had tried to introduce. When Wayne Blake walked, he floated. He was Wayne, she saw now, and he was Annabel. He was both at the same time, but he did not know this.
“I’m sorry about that, Wayne,” she told him now. “I should have called you the name your father gave you. I didn’t think clearly enough. I should have kept my sorrows about Annabel to myself.”
“Your daughter who drowned. You were calling me after her?”
“I should have kept it to myself.”
“You must have been really sad. You only called me that when we were by ourselves, remember? You can still do that if you want. I don’t mind.”
“You’re kind, Wayne. Very kind.”
In the evenings Thomasina prepared her classes in her kitchen, which was normally shared with whoever rented the other rooms in the Guest House, but no one else was here now. She did not close the blinds, though every woman in Croydon Harbour closed the curtains at dusk. Thomasina had nothing to hide. The Guest House kitchen was white and modern, with a Formica table and a General Electric stove, and it contained the bare necessities. It had counters that she kept spotless, as it did not take long to wipe up a few toast crumbs after herself or clean the drop left by the back of her teaspoon. There was a small washing machine in an alcove but no dryer, and she laid her clean wet clothes on the radiators under the kitchen windows, so they would dry as she worked.
On her table was a stack of pictures with heavy outlines: archers, lyres, winged sandals, golden apples of the Hesperides. Normally she would not give grade sevens colouring sheets, but these were to make booklets about the Greek deities, and she had found the pictures in an Athenian museum. They were informative in a way that would tell a good part of each god’s story without words. Some of her students could read marks on a trail winding through eighty miles of wilderness but they were not good readers of English textbooks. Each student would be responsible for researching one persona: Artemis, Hera, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Hermes, Demeter, Ceres. There was a deity to represent every human character, and Thomasina had found them all in her class, though the students did not know it, from the control and manipulation of Artemis reflected in Donna Palliser to the musical Euterpe in Wally Michelin and the presence of a descendant of the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus, in Wayne Blake.
Thomasina did not venerate Greek religion over the Protestant Christianity of the settlers in Croydon Harbour, or over the aboriginal stories her dead husband, Graham Montague, had known. She saw all tradition as metaphorical. It was, in her mind, all about story, character, psyche. She would not drum any religion into her students. They would see, she knew, through dogma of any kind. What interested Thomasina in Greek studies was that there was no pretense that the gods had lived. Everyone knew they represented the character in all of us. She would not tell her class this but intended only to let them enjoy playing roles they normally hid. Donna Palliser, for example, concealed from adults the way she led and ranked the girls. Wally Michelin had gone so far underground with her music that only the most intuitive person could spy it. Wayne Blake had no idea there was a girl, fully formed, curled inside his body.
To colour the illustrations Thomasina had artist-quality pencils. The Greek dance recording featured drum music she had bought from street musicians in Athens. A small man had played a bellows-like instrument she was eager for her students to hear, since it sounded like the button accordions their fathers and grandfathers played when they came home from the trapline.
She took her trousers and cardigans off the radiators and put them away, and made toast with homemade strawberry jam. She had stewed the berries whole. There was no place in Croydon Harbour to get strawberries. They were a soft berry, a summer berry, and Croydon Harbour did not have a summer long enough to include them. Thomasina had brought these frozen, insulated in newspapers, in her suitcase on the plane along with her tape recorder, her music, her few clothes, Pears soap, a ten-pound bag of coffee beans, and a small grinder. Could you not make a life for yourself any way you wanted, and in any place?