Two Tickets

The passage cost seventy-five pounds and they had forty-one.

They sat on the step with the tin between them and counted it twice, because the first count had been done in hope and the second one was done properly. Clement said what they both already knew, which was that one of them could go now or both of them could go in four years, and four years was a long time to stand still in a place where the work had dried up.

“Then you go,” Merle said.

“I am not going first.”

“Why? Because you are the man?”

“Because you have never been cold in your life,” he said, “and I have at least been up Blue Mountain.”

She put the lid back on the tin. “They are advertising for nurses,” she said. “They are not advertising for you.”

That was the argument. It took three weeks and he lost it.

· · ·

April.

Dear Clement. The sea was not what I expected, it was gray for nine days and then it was gray for four more. A woman from Clarendon in my cabin taught me a way to keep sugar from hardening which I will show you. I am well. I am at the hospital from seven. The other girls are from Barbados and one from Antigua and one English girl who is kind. It is cold but I have the coat. Do not worry about the coat. Tell Mama I will send when I am paid. M.

May.

Merle. The rain came bad and took the back of the shed but not the good part. Mr. Dixon give me two days on the truck. I have eleven pounds saved which is eleven more than last month. Everybody ask for you. Your mother ask for you twice on Sunday and pretend she was asking about the weather. What is the hospital like. You did not say. C.

June.

Dear Clement. The hospital is a hospital. They put me on nights which nobody wants so I take it because it pays more. Sister says my hands are good. There are eleven of us on the corridor and by two in the morning it is only me and the woman who mops. I am sending three pounds. Give one to Mama and keep two, do not give her all of it, she will only send it back in a barrel with things I can buy here cheaper. M.

· · ·

What she did not write:

That the first four landladies said the room was taken while the card was still in the window. That the fifth one let her in and then stood in the doorway and said she hoped there would be no cooking of foreign food, and that Merle said no, of course not, and then ate bread for five days until she found the market.

That on nights, when an old man on the ward called her by the name of a woman he had known in the war, she answered to it, because he was dying and it cost her nothing.

That she cried the first time she saw snow and could not have told anyone whether it was from joy.

What he did not write:

That he had taken the ring to Mr. Chin in the arcade and asked what it would fetch, and Mr. Chin, who had known his father, told him to take it home and never come back with it.

That people had begun to ask him, in the way people ask, whether he had heard from her lately. The way you ask about a woman who has gone to England and may be in the process of becoming somebody else’s news.

· · ·

The second year she sent nine pounds in March and nothing in April, because she had been off sick for eleven days and would not say so.

The third year he wrote: I have thirty-eight pounds. I am not telling you the number of years anymore, I am telling you the number of pounds, because the years make me feel like a old man and the pounds make me feel like a man with thirty-eight pounds.

The third year she wrote: I have been made up to staff nurse. Sister put it in writing. I read it four times standing in the corridor and then I went and did the sluice like normal.

That was also the year the letters changed. Not in what they said. In what they stopped bothering to say. The endearments went first, because they had begun to feel like something recited. Then the questions. A letter can carry news across four thousand miles perfectly well and carry nothing else at all, and by the fourth year that is mostly what they were sending each other: news, correctly spelled, arriving on time.

In the fourth year Merle wrote a letter that said: Clement, I want to ask you something and I want you to answer it and not be polite. Are you still coming.

He wrote back: I have sixty-two pounds.

She read it in the corridor at three in the morning with her back against the wall, and she understood that he had answered her, and that he had been answering her every month for four years in the only language he trusted himself with.

· · ·

He came in the fifth year, in November, because that was when the money was finished and not before.

She had written: bring nothing. There is nothing you can bring that is worth the weight of it. Bring yourself and your papers.

He brought himself and his papers and, in his coat pocket, her mother’s small sewing scissors, the ones with the bird handles, which her mother had put into his hand at the gate and closed his fingers over.

The train from the coast took hours. He had been told about the cold and had not been told about the light, which came down the color of dishwater at two in the afternoon and was gone by four. He stood on the platform in the shoes he had polished on the ship and looked at the people coming toward him, and for a moment, a long moment, he did not see her.

Because she was not a girl on a step with a tin between them. She was a woman in a good navy coat with her hair pinned up under a hat, moving fast through a crowd of English people as though the crowd were something she had long ago learned the trick of, and she had lines at her eyes from five years of night shifts, and she was almost past him before he said her name.

She stopped.

They stood there. Neither of them reached out. Five years is not a thing you can cross in a step, and they both knew better than to pretend, and around them the platform went on emptying.

“You look old,” she said.

“You look like a matron.”

“I am not a matron. Do not say that in front of anybody.”

Then she was laughing, with her hand over her mouth in a way he had never seen her do, some habit she had picked up in this country, and he put his suitcase down on the wet platform and put his arms around his wife.

“I have the room,” she said into his shoulder. “It is small. The gas fire eats money like it have a mouth.”

“I have sixty-two pounds.”

“You keep telling me that.”

“Is all I have to say for five years, Merle.”

She pulled back and looked at him, and there were people going around them on both sides.

“No, it is not,” she said. “You have from now.”

He picked up the suitcase. She took his arm, and they went out into the cold together, which was the thing they had been paying for all along, in installments, in two currencies, since the day they counted forty-one pounds on the step and found it was not enough.

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