The Silver Bend

Irena Vey:

“We were racing the creamery cart down Bellweather Hill. That is how it began. Tomas says there was no cart, but he never could run, so I expect he has removed it from the story.

“The road mirror had gone up that morning at the quarry turn. It was a round thing on a striped post, bright as a soup spoon. We had never seen one before. Old Pera told us it was there so lorries could look around the bend.

“We stood in front of it and pulled faces. The glass made the hill small and steep behind us. It showed the ash trees, the white gate, the dust on our socks.

“It did not show us.

“There were three grown people in our place. A narrow woman in a green coat. A heavy man with both hands in his pockets. Another man farther back, wearing a straw hat in winter.

“We thought they were on the other side of the mirror. Tomas knocked on the glass. The heavy man lifted his head.”

Tomas Vey:

“There was no cart. We were sent for yeast, and Irena dropped the coin in the ditch.

“She is right about the people, except the woman’s coat was blue. I remember because it had one pale button at the throat, like the coat I am wearing now. You can write that down if you like, but it proves nothing. People buy blue coats.

“The man in the hat frightened Sava. Not me. Sava began crying and asked why the man had his mouth. That is what he said: ‘He has my mouth.’

“We went around the bend to find them. There was nobody there. The quarry road was empty except for a lorry standing with its engine off. Hot stone smelled of struck matches.

“When we came back, the mirror showed children. Not us. Children dressed in clothes from before we were born, with stiff collars and black stockings. Irena says this never happened. She remembers only the adults.

“She also says Sava was with us.

“Sava was not born until the following spring.”

Sava Vey:

“I remember the mirror clearly. Memory is not a ledger. It is a room, and sometimes you enter by the wrong door.

“I was there.

“The others were laughing, though Tomas denies that. I saw the man in the straw hat and knew him at once, the way a dog knows someone coming in darkness. He was old. He had a white seam beside his mouth.

“I have that seam now. A jar broke when I was thirty-eight.

“The mirror stayed at Bellweather Hill until the quarry closed. By then I drove the bread van. One November morning, fog lay in the hollows and the hedges were hung with drops. I slowed at the bend.

“Three children stood in the mirror.

“I could not see them through the windscreen. Only in the silver. Irena had her red scarf tied badly. Tomas was holding the yeast coin between his teeth. Beside them was a smaller boy in a school coat, though I had not owned such a coat yet.

“He raised his hand.

“I raised mine.

“That is the part my brother and sister remember wrong. They believed the people in the mirror were watching us. They were not. We were watching them, from both ends of our lives.”

Irena Vey:

“Sava has always made it beautiful. He needs things to be beautiful.

“When they took the mirror down, the council left the striped post. It is still there, rusted through at the foot. Someone has hung a little oval of polished tin from it with string.

“I passed last Sunday. The tin was turning in the wind, flashing the hill, the quarry weeds, the empty road.

“Once, just as it turned edgewise, I saw the back of a child’s head.

“I cannot tell you which of us it was.”