Maclean by Allan Donaldson Page B

or purpose, that would not let him consent to be the husband of this simple, good woman? Had the wounds he had suffered finally rendered him unfit for active service in the world?
    He gave his battered face a final look in Alice’s mirror, then turned away and went out into the hall. A doorway led to the living room in the old part of the house, a room with everything needed for a comfortable evening at home. Off in one corner, a collection of photographs was arranged on a big oak table.
    He slid through the doorway and crept like a thief across the room. Some of the photographs were recent, some from long ago. A photograph of Alice and Mitch in front of the house all dressed up for some occasion. A photograph of Alice’s daughters and their husbands and children. The wedding photograph of Mother and Father. Mother, small and elegant, looking wistful, as if foreseeing the future, the way people in photographs sometimes do. Father drawn up stern, scowling into the camera so that God would not think that he really cared for such vanity as this. A studio photograph of Alice aged eighteen or so, looking very pretty in a white dress with a white ribbon in her hair. A photograph of the children and their teachers in front of the old school across the river. Himself, Alice, Harry. Elsie Skadget, big and awkward, smiling her big smile over the heads of shyer, smaller kids.
    Apart from the school picture, there were no photographs of him. His father would have destroyed them all. Just as years before he had destroyed all the photographs of his mother’s people, the Somervilles. Once when he had asked his mother why his father had said that her father was some kind of a bad man, she had said that her father wasn’t a bad man but that Father didn’t like him, that was all. And the reason Father didn’t like him, it turned out a long time later when Maclean was old enough to understand such things, was that her father had been a man who could play the piano and had taken part in plays and operettas and, more sinful even than that, had been far better off than Angus Maclean. He hated all the Somervilles, and once when his mother had sneaked off to see one of her sisters who was ill, he had locked her in the pantry and wouldn’t let her out. Later, when the sister died, he wouldn’t let her go to the funeral, and she sat outside on the bench beside the kitchen door, listening to the bell of the Anglican Church tolling on the far side of the river.
    He looked back at the studio photograph of Alice. How pretty she was! If somehow he had never seen her after that photograph was taken—if, for example, she had moved away while he was at the war and then, now, moved back, looking the way she now looked, and he had met her on the street, he wouldn’t have known her. It was as if there was another person altogether still living somewhere there in the past who had nothing to do with the fat, sweating old woman with her straggly hair who was in the kitchen making cookies. Or as if maybe, somewhere along some other branch of the road of time, there was an Alice this age, but not this Alice—an Alice who had been let go to high school and had married Harry Noles, who had not gone to the war, not been blown to pieces at Festubert. And another John Maclean too who had not gone to the war either because he had finished high school and had better things to do with his life than join the army and fight for the god-damned English.
    He became aware that Alice was standing in the doorway behind him, wondering no doubt what had been taking him so long, not knowing what journeys, backward and sideways, he had been making through the tangle of life.
    â€œI’ve been looking at the old pictures here,” he said.
    She came and stood beside him, silently, then picked up the wedding photograph.
    â€œTomorrow’s the day father died,” she said. “Mother’s birthday. It was so hot that