The kitchen door closed behind me. Clementina’s footsteps. She put her arm around my waist, and in silence we watched Magnus Tulloch wobbling down the road on the bicycle.

~

Of the thousand things I had missed in those years apart, the one that pulled most at my heart was that space in every day when Magnus Tulloch would unpin my hair, unravel its twists and curls, and we would talk. The rhythm of our lives seemed to live in those long, steady brushstrokes, reassuring and calm, commonplace, everyday. A promise made and kept. An always promise.

I thought of this when I heard the bicycle fall against the front wall that first night. It was late. Clementina had gone to bed already, the children long before her. I put the kettle on the stove. But when he let himself in, Magnus Tulloch’s eyes were hazy, his step unsure. He slurred sorry, my Meggie and goodnight and clasped me in a hug that was over before I could lean into it.

Superficial. We did not agree, the army and I, on what it meant.

I heard the music of Emily Dickinson in my head.

There is a word

Which bears a sword

Can pierce an armed man.

It hurls its barbed syllables—

At once is mute again.

Now I knew. I knew the word.

~

Castlemaine took Magnus Tulloch back, and I was always grateful to them for that. But it did not work out as they had hoped. Less than a month, it was, before the coopering shop was too much for him—the noise, the light, the impact of hammer on hoops, jarring nerves that were never still any more. Mrs Laskon, Mr Prentice, the girls at the factory—people were sympathetic, they seemed to want to pat my arm and talk in hushed voices, but I didn’t care about people, only that Magnus Tulloch was alive and had come back to me.

All that skill an’ training, it canna be for nothing? Clementina whispered when Castlemaine put him in the store-room, a packer of bottles, a lifter of the kegs he’d once crafted with special tools brought out from home.

Nothing is for nothing! Fierce. Wishful.

He never slept much at night. I would hear him moving round the house late; sometimes the scrape of bicycle tyres on the limestone outside our window. He told me once that the army doctor’s orders were plain: he must push everything he’d seen, everything he’d done, from his mind.

Just don’t ask me, Meggie. They said it’s best if ye just never ask and things don’t ever get said.

It made sense to him. He had no wish to bring unsayable things from the dark to live with us in the weatherboard cottage in Martha Street. But they did, anyway. Of course they did. I had learned for myself that things like that had to live somewhere.