I know it sounds cliché, but life goes on. In the time I was away, the factory and my friends didn't shrivel up, stop, die away, for want of me. And now that I was back, it was still true. Life, and the war, rolled on. There was no big party to celebrate my return, no elaborate effusions of joy – from anyone other than Gladys that is – and very quickly we had all settled back down to normal routine. Every day was much the same – breakfast, an awkwardly silent ride with Betty to work, the repetition of the shift broken only for lunch, another silent tram ride, dinner and bed. Sometimes, in the evening, we would go out dancing, or to the bar, or Gladys would come and dance with me in the corridor, but those occasions were less frequent now than before and were never as free and easy as of old.
The entrance of the gravely uniformed men into the factory that morning broke routine, and sent a silent chill around the girls on the factory floor. The unannounced appearance of officers usually heralded bad news for someone, and I saw a ripple of head turns, swallows and girls crossing themselves spread out through the shift. The men, caps clutched under their arms, ascended the steps to the office. Everywhere, I knew women were praying desperately that their man or sons were safe, that the news would once again pass them by. Gladys beside me, her breath shaky with worry, focused ever more carefully on the bomb beneath her hands. By contrast, Betty did not even look at the soldiers, but carried on unflappably at her station. Why should she worry, I thought. Her brothers, I know, are exempt from military service – farming is a reserved occupation. She's like me, no-one to worry about.
She's like me, and not like me at all. So bold and brave and completely herself. Sometimes, alone in my room, I would practice being Betty, standing like her, imagining her responses to scenes from my life. I would rehearse conversations, out loud, into my mirror, with my hair pinned back behind my ear like hers. Slowly, I would always feel more confident, more complete until I believed that I could do anything, be anyone, be with anyone. Afterwards, however, as I took down my hair and gentled my voice again, I always felt foolish and ashamed, like a little girl playing at being grown up. I never put my practices into reality, and I wondered how different my life would be if I had.
The men reappeared from the office, slowly made their way down to the steps and out onto the floor, and towards our assembly line. They appeared on a direct heading for us, and even as they got closer did not change direction. Gladys had stopped working, her hands sitting loosely on the top of the casing, her eyes fully averted from the oncoming men. Not James, I thought, anyone but James. They stop in front of us, one behind the other, and their eyes move between us, gauging who to speak to, and it seemed that today the news had not passed Gladys by. She will not take this well, I thought, there will be hysterics and depression and weeks and months of tears. Just let him be injured, not dead. Let him be injured, and able to recover. Let this not be the end of her world.
"Mrs Elizabeth McRae?" the older man asked. My head snapped round uncomfortably quickly, and from the side of my eye I could see Gladys had done the same, her mouth hanging open. Betty, who only then looked up from her job, sighed, swallowed and closed her eyes almost together, right-left.
"Yeah," she said, when her eyes opened again. "That's me". She stopped her hands, rested one on the bench, the other stuffed into the pocket of her coverall. She waited, unmoving, as the officer in front of her spoke again.
"Mrs McRae, I regret to inform you that the HCMS Ottawa was lost in the early hours of yesterday, and that your husband, William McRae, is not among the survivors." His voice was calm, practiced at delivering bad news, and I wonder how many others he had visited that morning alone. Betty stood still, let out her breath in one long sigh.
"Do his parents know?" she asked, and her voice too was calm, unwavering. When the officer shook his head, she nodded. "Thank you for the information" she said, and she could have been thanking him for telling her the time, or when the next streetcar was due. As the officers marched away, Mrs Corbett placed her hand on Betty's arm, and led her a short distance away, speaking in low tones. I turned to Gladys, who looked just as shocked as I, and vastly more relieved. She gestured in Betty's direction.
"Did you know?" she asked, taking my own question out of my mouth. I shook my head, wordlessly. I didn't know, I hadn't had any idea. I assumed, because of what happened between us, that she was unmarried, unattached, but I had been wrong. I thought I knew Betty, thought I had the measure the woman who said she loved me. I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts, I had not noticed Mrs Corbett's approach. "Miss Andrews," she said, voice low and soft, kinder than she normally reserves for me, "would you take Betty home?" I nodded, mutely, and left the line, another girl coming from the bench to fill my place.
Just inside the changing room, Betty stopped, and raised her hand to her forehead, covering her eyes. I stepped round in front of her, put my hand to her face, lifted her chin with my fingers. Her face creased, the corners of her mouth turning down, her eyes screwing closed, and an ugly sob tore its way out of her throat. She threw her arms around my neck, pressed herself into a hug, her face against my neck, her tears seeping into my collar. I moved my arms, too, around her, held her close around her waist, placed my chin on her shoulder and pressed butterfly kisses to her neck, her ear, her cheek, any exposed skin I could find. "Oh Betts," I said, keeping my voice as soft as I could, "oh Betts." She shifted against me, pulling me closer, more firmly against her. I inhaled the scent of her, the feel of her, and pressed another kiss to the soft spot between her shoulder and neck. You pervert, I thought, enjoying your friend's misery, taking advantage of someone else's grief for your own sinful ends. Mrs Corbett pushed her head around the door of the room, checking, and I ushered her away with a wave of my hand, knowing she would keep anyone else from intruding. I could feel Betty working to control her sobs, swallowing the sounds, wiping away her tears. "I didn't want him to die," she whispered, and I pulled back slightly, looked at her face, all red and blotched. I wiped away the tears with my thumb, pushed an errant lock of hair back behind her ear.
"Of course you didn't," I said, and smiled at her. "Come on, let's go home." We showered and changed in silence, Betty's tears having run dry for the moment. She changed, pulling on her clothes carelessly, uncaring, her fingers fumbling as she tried to button the blouse. I stepped forward, took the material from her hands, did up her blouse, and pushed her blazer over her shoulders. Without the early morning press of people, the ride from the factory back to the boarding house was more silent even than usual, Betty sat by the window, her face pressed flush against the glass, and I by the aisle, watching her.
In her room, she reached under the bed, retrieved a half-drunk bottle of whiskey and poured two large glasses. She finished hers in one practiced motion, refilled the glass, and handed the other to me. Sitting heavily on the bed, she sighed and looked at me. "I guess you're shocked," she said, "Me, with a husband. Bet you didn't see that one coming." She laughed, then, sarcastic and bitter. I could not tell what was coming next, whether the reproach I could hear in her voice was for me, herself, or someone else entirely. She didn't speak again, just stared at the whiskey swilling round in her glass. I waited, until it became apparent that I was expected to prompt her, to pull the story from her. "Tell me about him," I said, and sat down next to her, our legs touching. She looked at me sideways, and then back down at the drink.
"I was very young," she said, "nineteen. He lived the next farmstead over, and I'd known his family since the year dot, went to school with his sister, Vi. We'd stepped out a couple of times. You know, the harvest dance, the flicks, that kind of thing. Not much to do out in the boonhicks, you know. One night, my brother was doing the final rounds, and he found me, half dressed, hiding behind the barn door. He told my father he'd seen Bill running over the fields. That McRae boy in that god-awful yellow shirt, he said. It wasn't god-awful – I liked that shirt. Especially when Vi wore it." She smiled wryly, and took a large mouthful of the whiskey, pulling a face as it burned its way down her throat. "Well, anyway," she continued, "my Pa was black as thunder, and all for going over there and beating the living crap out of him. Well, I couldn't let him do that, you know. That'd have been even worse. So, I married him. Went over the next day, and told him flat out to ask me." She got up and searched through a drawer, looking through a stack of photos. On the top I could see the ones of me in the bathing suit, that I'd left behind when I returned to my father. They looked dog-eared, and had I not known their date I'd think them old, much held, long kept and looked at. The fact she kept them twisted my heart painfully in my chest, and I forced myself to concentrate on the now. She found the one she was looking for, and held it out to me.
It was a group photo, all their relations and guests, I supposed. In the middle was Betty, in a white dress overflowing with lace and a large-brimmed hat, and a young man, hair slicked back off his forehead, a flower in his buttonhole. They were both grinning, happy, at the camera, as were all the other faces. I looked at the photo, trying to guess the relations between each of them. Some, I supposed, were Betty's brothers – the gaggle of young men laughing and smoking at the back, perhaps – and the two older women in the front row, the happy couple's mothers. Just one face was unsmiling, a young woman in the second row, half obscured by Betty's flowers. That was Violet McRae, I guessed, and a stab of jealousy hit at my stomach. I handed the photo back to her, quickly, harshly, no longer able to bear looking at it. "Your hair," I said, "its darker." I knew that it was almost irrelevant at this point, but it was the first thing that came to mind to say. She took the photo, gazed at it, her finger tracing some pattern across its surface.
"Before I dyed it," she said. "Seven years, we were married, and lived with his parents. When the war came, he signed up. It was our ticket, he said, our ticket out of there. Well, I wasn't going to stay there, on my own, cooped up in that house with his mother, always complaining I hadn't given her grandchildren. So I signed up too, came out here to the factory, made something of myself on my own terms. When the war ended, I figured, I wouldn't go back. I'd say we'd both changed, too much to stay together. I'd accept fault, and he could find someone who really loved him, you know, who'd give him kids and live her whole life for him." She finished her whiskey, and poured another, still looking at the photo. "I didn't reckon on him dying. Stupid prairie boy, what was he doing out on all that water?" She began crying again, the drink slopping over the edge of her glass and onto her hands, her blouse, the carpet. I crossed to her, took her drink, and folded her in another hug. She clung to me, then, and cried great heaving, ugly sobs. We stood like that until the house began to fill again with noise of returning workers, with their laughter and the smell of their cooking dinners.
"I'm sorry, Kate," she said, wiping ineffectively at the damp on my shoulder. She moved away, and dragged her hands across her eyes and down her cheeks. "I have to call his parents, let them know." I let her go, watching as she moved down the hall to the telephone. The other girls, I saw, gave her a wide berth, uncertain what to say in the face of grief, knowing it could be them the next time. On the phone, I could see that Betty had become again unemotional, calm and collected, holding the pieces together for the sake of her husband's mother.
In the dark that night, as I lay in my bed across the corridor from her, I thought of nothing but her. I had prayed for Gladys to be spared, and she had, but at what cost? I would not have prayed like that had I known it would shift the hurt to Betty. I had never imagined this, had always believed Betty mine alone, barring the inactive ties of affections to a distant family. Nine years of marriage, as someone's wife; nine years is a long time. Nine years of married duties, on the farm, in the kitchen and in his bed. The image brought a sour taste to my mouth, and I felt like washing it away with a second bottle of whiskey.
Within the week a memorial service – a funeral requires a body, Betty reminded us – had been arranged, and Betty prepared to return to Saskatchewan and face her past. Gladys had volunteered to drive Betty to the station, and so we stood and watched as Betty put on her heavy black overcoat over her skirt and cardigan. She looked so little like herself, beaten, that it broke my heart. I wanted to go to her, hold her, dress her again in her brown trousers, add a flower to her breast, take her dancing at the Tangiers. Gladys reached down behind her, and brought up a black hat with a small veil, and placed it on Betty's head. Betty scowled, and reached to take it off. "Come on, Princess, knock it off. I don't want that." Gladys brushed away her hand, and fixed the hat more tightly against Betty's hair.
"You look fine in it," she said. "And besides, it'll hide if you cry." Betty nodded, resigned to our friend's fashion meddling, and accepting her wisdom in this case. Looking at herself in the mirror, Betty's mouth twitched into a half-smile. "Look at me," she said, and I had never heard her sound so bitter, "a respectable widow woman." On her way out of the door, she paused by me, and I thought she might kiss me, or I might kiss her, passing strength for her ordeal to come. She didn't, just squeezed my hand, and made her way down the corridor, Gladys trailing, car keys in hand, just two steps behind.
Three days later, I waited on the platform for her, coat pull tight against a lazy wind. The train pulled into the station, the smoke from its engine filling the platform, obscuring all but the closest passengers from view. I waited, peering anxiously down the platform for her, squinting against the fog. As the smoke cleared, I still hadn't found her. She hasn't come, I thought. She's stayed, with her family, with his, with Violet. I wouldn't blame her, after all, I understood the pull of family when things are tough. I am about to turn, and leave, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, and there she was, back in her own clothes, looking once again like herself.
"Looking for someone?" she asked, and held out her arm for me to take. Me hanging on one hand, suitcase hefted easily in the other, we left the station and headed for the streetcar. Once safely sat in our seats, she turned to me. "Well, that life's done," she said, and ran her hand through her hair. "Not quite how I imagined being on my own again." I picked her hand up and, uncaring of the other passengers in the car, kissed her knuckles.
"You're not on your own, Betty," I said, "not while I'm here." I smiled at her until she smiled back, and when she did it lit up the carriage for me. Still holding her hand, I sat back happily, loved and loving, watching the swaying backs of our fellow passengers. A squeeze of my hand returned my attention to her. "I do love you, still," she said.
"I know, and I love you." The confession slipped easily from my lips, and I wondered how it took me so long to say the words. "By the way," I added, "that really is a god-awful yellow shirt." And we laughed. And our lives went on.