Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. I was hardly young compared to the beribboned girls in my classes. “Too young? Or too female?”
“Oh, not at all! Rather, I sometimes think lasses may have surer fingers for art.” His accent was thickly northern, words curling in the air. “They’re not afraid to let their imaginations spill from their fingertips.” Rather wistfully he said, “My sister was an artist. I always thought she had the clearest eyes of anyone.”
I’d been hearing “was” more often these days. “I’m so sorry,” I said quickly.
He blinked at my automatic response, then shook his head. “She’s not…she’s still alive. We just…haven’t spoken in some time.”
I regarded this man, standing there in front of Robert Miller’s. He wore a fir-green sweater, like a fisherman, beneath a homespun jacket. Though he stood straight and still, he leaned on a carved dark walking stick. Nothing spotted with paint or streaked with clay. No reason for him to be standing here in front of an art supply store.
“Sir, are you an artist?”
He smiled then, either at the “sir” or the question. He didn’t look much older than me, except for in the eyes. “Sometimes I come to look through the windows of the shop and wish I was. But, no.” He tapped the walking stick. “Though I do carve.”
I bent to it. What I’d thought were merely gnarls and whorls were the scales of a serpent, twining around the shaft of the stick until his chin rested on the top. The beast gazed out at Trongate with wooden eyes almost benevolent. “Oh, but it’s beautiful!” I exclaimed. “I have a friend who would like that very much.”
Had, I should remember to say. Had a friend. If you’d had no word of someone for years, could you use the present tense?
“Thank you,” he said, bashful, startled.
“You are an artist.” I nodded down to the walking stick. “You just have to convince the rest of the world.” It was what Luc always said to me. “Trust yourself.”
The next day when I stepped out of the school building on Renfrew Street, clay still under my fingernails from a day smoothing the neck of a bust over and over until my fingers ached, my new friend with the walking stick waited.
“Why hello!” I said and rubbed my eyes. “Fancy meeting you again so soon.”
“I was waiting,” he said, and held out a small tube of brilliant cadmium yellow. “Thank you.”
I took the tube, turned it over in my hands. Cadmium yellow was not inexpensive. “For what? We only exchanged a handful of words.”
“You said to trust myself. You were right. I’ve enrolled in the School of Art.”
“So suddenly?”
“Evening classes. I can start next week.”
“Are you always so impulsive?”
“Not usually,” he said softly. “But war can do that.” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Life moves on when a man walks away from it. I suppose I’m only trying to stay a step ahead.”
His eyes grew red and damp. Though I was tired, I touched his arm. “Oh, not here,” I said. “Please, come inside.”
I took him into the sculpture studio, cluttered with tables and boxes and canvas-draped figures. He walked slowly, stiffly. The walking stick wasn’t an affectation. Inside, I pulled two scarred chairs together, facing one another.
His name was MacDonald, like half of the people at the School of Art. Finlay MacDonald. Tucked away off the street, he quietly cried in that way men do, with red eyes, lots of swallowing, but no tears. He talked, in that northern accent that sounded like bens and lochs, like rolling mists, like the sea. He’d left home; they didn’t want him there. They didn’t want him in the army either, at least not anymore. And so he was here, in Glasgow, without any clear idea of what to do, but knowing that he loved walking the streets, seeing the solid buildings, the windows full of art. He felt at home here. We sat face-to-face, knees nearly touching, me hiding accidental yawns. He had such a gentle face, looking so desperate and heartsore that I finally stopped his tale of woe the only way I could think of. I kissed him.
It was nothing like that tentative summertime kiss under the poplar tree on the road to Mille Mots. In the sculpture studio, warm and smelling like dry clay, Finlay put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me like a rainstorm.
Suddenly everything—the way I’d left my only family behind when I set off for Glasgow, the way I’d been so achingly lonely since coming, the way I knew I shouldn’t worry about Luc but I did, Christ help me I did. Everything washed over me like a wave and I knew I wasn’t the only one drowning.
In that frantic, sudden kiss I felt a year older. I felt a year beyond Mother, Father, Grandfather, Luc, all of the little things that held me tethered to the past. Finlay tasted sweet, like berries unexpected in wintertime. He leaned towards me. I reached forward and put my hands on his knees.
But he stopped and pulled back. Looking down, he tugged at the fabric stretched across his knees. “You shouldn’t,” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. Then, “I forgot.”
I brought a knuckle up to my lips. “You forgot what?” My eyes slid to his left hand, but he didn’t wear a ring.
“I shouldn’t have done that. I’m too broken down for you.”
I thought of a lonely girl clutching a sketchbook on the beach of Lagos and hiding tears in the rain of Seville. I’d spent so many years missing people—my parents, Luc, now my grandfather. I thought of that girl, who dreamt of letters left on breakfast tables. I thought of a woman who dreamt of letters left on fields of battle. “I understand.”
He drew in a breath and took my hand. “See.” He moved it to his leg, below the knee. Through the fabric I felt wood and metal joints.
I nodded. “See,” I said, and moved his hand to the hollow of my chest. “I understand broken.”
Something had to change, I knew it. I couldn’t be alone the way I’d tried to be, pretending such self-sufficiency, pretending that there was a prosthetic for my heart. Finlay’s hand uncurled against my chest.
I went with him that night, to the rough room he rented, bare and impersonal apart from a pencil drawing of a Highland cottage tacked above the bed.
“It’s okay,” he whispered once, mostly to himself, and then pulled me close and didn’t speak again. We didn’t have to open our eyes, we didn’t have to give excuses or explanations, we just had to be there. We fumbled nervously, until he lay back on the bed with me on top, until my hands at his waistband found instead the leather strap holding on his prosthesis. He stopped and pushed me away.
“It’s fine. You can leave.” He rolled away. “I shouldn’t have expected…”
I rested a hand on his back. My lips still tingled. “You didn’t.” And he didn’t. He didn’t ask me up to his room. Neither did he stop me when I followed him up.
But he said, “I can’t help but think of tomorrow.” Beneath my fingers, his back tensed. “You called me ‘impulsive,’ but nothing done on impulse is without consequences.”
Consequences.
My hand fell away.
