Annabel - Kathleen Winter [52]
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