Elaine crawled out of bed and slipped on jogging shoes and an old tracksuit as the first rays of sun touched her pillow. The first night in a strange room never led to a restful sleep. The nighttime temperature was set to accommodate a thin, elderly woman: a degree Elaine found nothing short of sweltering. The storm had returned, and lightning flashed and thunder echoed throughout most of the long night. Enormous ancient trees grew close to the cottage and the winds had them scratching rhythmically against her window.
Now the house was silent. Augustus Madison watched her, his dark beady eyes brimming with hostility, as she tiptoed down the stairs. Childishly, she stuck her tongue out at him.
Her foot touched the bottom step and the dogs, shut in the kitchen for the night, howled. Elaine dashed down the hall, struggled to unlock the sliding glass doors leading to the deck and plunged outside, jerking the door shut behind her. For the first time, her heart was racing before she had even begun to run.
Because she didn’t know where she was going, Elaine decided that the best idea would be to simply run for thirty minutes in one direction, then turn around and jog back. Simple. She rounded the house and headed up the driveway. The trees sloughed off the remainder of the night’s storm and the air was fresh and clear with a hearty autumn bite.
A snake lay in the center of the driveway, flattened right across the midsection, clearly by the wheels of a car. Which might even have been hers. The snake wasn’t big, and no doubt perfectly harmless in life. But in death it filled the lane and her imagination. Elaine cringed and clung to the sides of the road, almost walking through the trees in order to pass the elongated corpse. The image was fixed firmly in her mind throughout her run, enough that she scarcely noticed her surroundings. On her return trip she was alert for the dead creature miles before she reached it.
Eyes to one side, breathing deeply, and not only from the exercise, Elaine trotted up to the parking area. Her car remained where she had parked it, covered in a sparse blanket of colored leaves. She plucked the dead vegetation off the windows and roof and gave the car a good pat.
Alan walked around the side of the building, Hamlet and Ophelia at his heels. The dogs bristled at the sight of her, and she was sure that they were measuring her for size and weight. Alan growled deep in his throat and they sat, their sleek haunches twitching.
“Sorry,” he said with a not-at-all-sorry grin. “They’ll take some time to get to know you.”
She didn’t acknowledge him, merely lifted her head and followed the flagstone steps around the cottage.
The sun rose behind the building and this early in the morning long shadows stretched out over the water. Instead of heading inside to get ready for her first day on the job Elaine strolled down to the dock.
The air was heavy with the scent of decaying foliage and woodsmoke but was, at the same time, light and fresh, free of the odor of car exhaust, overworked factories and too many people confined into far, far too small a space.
The flowerbeds were neatly raked and tidied, the lawn mowed one last time. The flagstone path wound its way down from the deck to the boathouses and the dock. And there it ended. Abruptly, unexpectedly.
A line of white pine rose up, blocking the way, the dense forest closing in behind. Elaine loved nature, in all of its costumes, but she didn’t like the feeling of these trees. They crowded her, closed in on her, although she was standing several feet away. Her breath struggled in her throat, the airways fought to stay open. The well-maintained lawns and gardens of the family estate lay behind her.
Safe.
Secure.
But she wanted to step off the path. To see what lay behind the tall white pines.
She pulled air into her lungs and stepped forward. One hesitant step and then another, and another.
No one had been here for a long time. The path simply ended where it touched the woods. Nothing but moss and weeds and saplings sprouted between the trees. If the trail had once continued on through here, no trace of it remained.
There was nothing unusual here, except for the smell. Not pine nor wood nor wet, decaying leaf mulch as she would have expected, but a hint of…perfume? Far too sweet and coy in this setting. Not at all pleasant, like cheap toilet water. A bit of effluent flowing through these beautiful woods? These days anything was possible.
It was cold; the temperature dropped dramatically once she left the path. So cold that she could see her breath forming in gentle puffs in the air in front of her face. A gust of wind picked dead leaves off the forest floor and swirled them around her feet. Through the barrier of untrimmed trees and undergrowth run wild, she imagined that she could see a building. A cabin, standing alone in the dark woods, its outline the same as she had seen in yesterday’s wide-awake dream.
A children’s playhouse, or guest cottage? Surely it would be visited, enjoyed, loved? Not abandoned to fall into ruin and decay at the end of an overgrown, untrammeled path.
Elaine placed one running shoe-clad foot in front of the other with great care. Because of the heavy rain during the night, the non-existent path was damp, the carpet of leaves and pine needles soaked with moisture.
Behind her, one of the dogs barked. Only once, short and sharp, a sound brimming with alarm. The air between two of the larger trees seemed almost to move. It shimmered in space, as if it were struggling to take form. She stepped forward; she couldn’t quite see. She wanted to see more.
Squelch. Elaine looked down at her feet. One of her top-of-the-line shoes was sinking into a puddle of glutinous, ugly, black mud. She pulled it out with a curse and walked out of the woods.
***
Elaine found the kitchen by the simple act of following her own nose. The fragrance of freshly ground and brewed coffee flowed down the hallway, carrying with it the aroma of breakfast.
The kitchen was all wood, stone, and rock. A massive fireplace, rows of logs stacked in neat formation beside it, filled one wall. An antique rocking chair, looking as if it were waiting for a wizened grandmother with a pile of pink and blue knitting, took pride of place in front of the hearth. Elaine settled herself to the big table, and a smiling Lizzie served up a virtual feast: coffee first, then spicy Italian sausages, toast with jam, eggs any way she wanted, crisp home fries. Elaine happily dug in to a meal the like of which she hadn’t dared touch in years.
“Have you worked here for long?” she asked, through a mouthful of runny fried egg on whole-wheat toast thickly coated with slabs of creamy butter.
“Coming up to two years. It’s easy and comfortable and pays well and so…here I am.” Lizzie poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and pulled a chair up to the timeworn wooden table.
“What made you want to be a cook?”
Lizzie watched the liquid swirling in her cup. “My father was a chef, a good one. My parents owned a restaurant for years. Enormously successful it was too. My mother managed the business end of it, my dad cooked. I’m an only child and they raised me rolling pastry and dodging pots of boiling water and temperamental sous-chefs. My parents always intended that I come into the business with them. Dad had great plans for opening another restaurant and putting me in charge.”
“But you didn’t want to?”
“They were killed in a car accident. On one of their rare vacations. They closed the restaurant for a few days and drove down to Florida to visit my grandparents. They never made it home.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I couldn’t imagine trying to run the restaurant without them. I didn’t want to be a chef anyway. I love to cook, but a restaurant is such hard work, absolutely killer hours, stress beyond belief. I was afraid of how to tell them I didn’t want it. Then I didn’t have to.”
A pot hissed and Lizzie moved to attend to it. “Everything happened so suddenly. I had no idea of what to do. A friend of my dad has a place near here. He knew that the Madison cook had quit and told me about the position.”
“You were lucky.”
“If luck had anything to do with it, my parents wouldn’t have died. But I know what you mean. I needed time to decide what I want to do with my life, to sort my mind out. That’s the absolute worst thing about sudden death; the survivors are left so totally lost.”
Elaine considered herself to be a survivor of a different sort. Survivor of a broken heart perhaps, a ruined life. There were times when, in the dark recesses of her mind, she wished that Ian had been struck dead, perhaps in a car crash like that which took the lives of Lizzie’s parents. But no such luck. They never die when you want them to.
“Will you stay here?” she asked, rather than contemplate that which hadn’t worked out. In more ways than one.
“As long as it suits me. And it suits me now.”
“Moira seems nice.” Elaine dipped a segment of sausage into a red puddle of tomato ketchup.
“She has her moments.” Crisis taken care of, Lizzie sat back down and added a generous splash of cream to her coffee.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning nothing. She’s a rich old lady. She’s great, but she’s used to having her way. She pays better than anyone else in the area, although I’d be happy to work here for much less. But don’t tell her I said that.”
“Pardon me, Lizzie, if I seem a bit unsure. I’ve never been part of a household before. It’s all a bit strange.”
Lizzie smiled. “Not much different from living at home, with Grandma and Mom and older brother. Actually it’s a lot nicer than living in some people’s homes. But wait until the family arrives. Then there’ll be more than enough to do. Those tight-assed old ladies don’t approve of me and they won’t ever let me forget my place.”
The relaxed, chatty mood shattered. While Elaine finished her breakfast in silence, Lizzie gathered up the cooking equipment and piled it into the sink.
“I can understand that no one wants to talk about it, but I really want to know what happened to the first woman hired to write Moira’s memoirs.”
“She drowned.”
“So I heard. But how?”
Lizzie sighed and squirted dishwashing liquid into the frying pan. “We don’t really know. I guess that’s why we’re so afraid to discuss it. She’d only been here a few days, when Alan found her floating in the lake at the end of the dock one morning. It was very early, everyone else still in bed. Alan often gets up before the rest of us—he likes the morning light, he says. And there she was, fully dressed, floating in the lake.”
Elaine shuddered. “How awful.”
“The police looked into it, of course. The coroner said it was an accident, no signs of foul play or anything like that; apparently the body had been there all night. When her family came to collect her, her father told Moira that she couldn’t swim, not one stroke. So it was assumed that she’d walked out to the edge of the dock and somehow fell in. Although the coroner said that she hadn’t had a heart attack or anything like that. It’s very deep at the end and a good distance to the rocks and the ladder out of the water. Next summer, Moira’s going to have a ladder put in at the end of the dock. The coroner recommended it. Bad things happen, that’s all. Why did some redneck drunk kill my parents?”
Lizzie scrubbed furiously at a bit of grime stuck to the bottom of the pan. “Anyway, Donna’s death had nothing to do with you, so why worry about it?”
September 1940. The peaceful serenity ended, and the Battle of Britain began. The soldiers and Nursing Sisters of Hospital Number 15 sat alongside the people of Southeast England in grandstand seats to the spectacle, cheering on R.A.F. Spitfires in their aerial dogfights against Luftwaffe fighters escorting the waves of bombers to their targets and standing with hearts in their mouths as a tiny aircraft would plunge downward, spiraling back to the arms of mother earth, trailing long plumes of fire and smoke.
At night the eastern sky glowed red, telling the tale of another heavy raid on the city. The nurses lay awake in their hard, narrow cots, listening to the sound of planes overhead. German bombers flying to or from their targets, English fighters in urgent pursuit.
One perfect, crisp day in early autumn Moira took her bicycle out to get some exercise. It had been a hard duty shift. A young soldier, famous around the camp for his easy laugh and sense of fun, fell off the roof of the barracks during a childish prank and rather than foolishly breaking a leg or two, had fallen onto an iron spike lying abandoned in the long grass. The spike pierced his chest and he died on the operating table. It was a horrible, foolish, tragic waste, and Moira had been brought to tears.
She cycled through a small path cut around the farmers’ fields. The sun shone bright overhead; the crops were lush and full. She stopped pedaling to wave enthusiastically to the Land Girls bringing in the harvest. She was still waving when the whine of an airplane engine in distress sounded directly overhead. It was a German bomber, no doubt about it; they had all been trained to recognize the distinctive appearance of enemy aircraft. Smoke billowed from under the wings and, as she watched, minuscule figures leapt from the undercarriage and drifted on billowing clouds to the outstretched arms of a welcoming green earth. There was nothing for her to do: excited Land Girls and angry farmers armed with pitchforks descended on the fluffy parachutes. Moira watched as the aircraft spun out of control and crashed into a far distant field, exploding in a ball of flame. It was too far for her to reach, across the farmers’ ploughed fields, on her ancient bicycle, in time to offer aid. If indeed aid should be required. Heavy of heart, she turned and headed back to the barracks. There was nothing she could do, she was too far away, and help (if needed) was on its way, but for many years after, she berated herself for her selfishness, because she did not want to see the face of the enemy.
At eight o’clock sharp, Elaine tapped on the study door and edged it open. Moira’s chair was pulled up to the ornate antique desk, and Ruth, dressed in a different dress than yesterday but still proper servant’s black, stood stiffly beside her.
“Good morning, dear. Did you sleep well?” Moira asked. Today’s T-shirt proclaimed support for kidney research. Ruth nodded once in greeting.
“Very well, thank you,” Elaine lied. “And I’ve already been out jogging and had a lovely breakfast. So I’m more than ready to get to work.”
“Sit down then and let’s do just that.”
Elaine sat in the straight-backed chair pulled up beside the desk. Nothing in the room would put one in mind of the early 1900s except for Moira’s desk. Carved out of solid oak, it was coated with a patina of decades of love and care and attention. The rest of the furnishings and the room itself could have substituted for a spread in this month’s issue of
Modern Home
. Sofa and chairs, piled high with white cushions, were upholstered in a fresh shade of blue. The walls were painted white, decorated with large, colorful pieces of modern art, and one heartbreakingly beautiful painting of the lake outside the study window, but as it must appear in deep winter—a lone moose crossing the endless white expanse of ice and snow in search of enough food to see his massive body through to the plentiful days of spring. The carpet was a thick soft cream with a touch of blue edging. Navy blue horizontal blinds had been pulled back to let the morning light stream through two bay windows. Pillows were piled invitingly on the window seats in the bays. Luscious philodendrons sat in white wicker pots on either side of the windows, drinking in the morning sun.
“This is a beautiful room, Moira,” Elaine said. “Different from the rest of the cottage.”
Moira looked around her, admiring the surroundings with an air of long established comfort. “This is my study so I’ve done it up to suit to my taste. The cottage itself belongs to the Madison family, of course, thus I have chosen to keep the rest of it in the style as chosen by my grandmother and mother.” Her brown eyes twinkled. “Saves family arguments that way.”
Pleasantries over, the old woman clapped her hands. “Now to work. Where do we start?”
Elaine pulled a tiny tape recorder out of her sweater pocket. “With your permission, I’d like to tape all of our conversations. Simply because I have a hideously bad memory and it’s easier than writing everything down.”
Moira nodded.
“Before I begin going through your correspondence, if you could give me a general idea of how you want the memoirs to be constructed, who your audience is to be, what you hope to achieve? That sort of thing.” Elaine pressed the record button and whispered the date. She placed the machine on the desk between them and pulled a small notebook for jotting down comments to herself out of the other pocket. Ruth slipped across the room and took a seat in the bay window.
“This is to be a book about me, not about my family. We are a prominent family indeed, but my father and grandfather and my brothers-in-law can be accessed in any moderately competent history of Canadian business. Am I speaking loudly enough?”
“Yes.”
“I want this to be the story of the life of one Canadian woman. I won’t pretend false modesty and call myself ordinary; these surroundings would make a mockery of that word. But I do hope that my life has something to say to women today. It is so hard to get women’s stories told and once told, heard. Stories of who they really are, not as appendages to their husbands’ careers. Do you know what Maryon Pearson said when asked about her husband’s success?”
Of course Elaine did. Maryon Pearson was the wife of the late Lester B. (called Mike), a much-loved former Prime Minister of Canada. But she knew better than to interrupt the flow of narrative.
“She said that ‘behind every successful man stands a surprised woman.’ I always liked that line.” Moira chuckled with a warmth that made her appear decades younger.
“I decided that as I have the money and leisure to tell my story the way I want it to be told, I would do so. Is that all right with you, young woman?”
“Perfectly all right. A great idea.”
“Of course, I can’t forget about my family entirely. I’ll tell you about the early years, how wonderful it was growing up in this place, having everything a young girl could possibly want, and then some. But most of all I want to tell you about the war years. Those wonderful, terrible years in London and Italy, and all the people I knew back then. And my years in Central Europe with the Red Cross and after that my work for Médecins Sans Frontières.”
Elaine looked up. “You were with Doctors Without Borders? How absolutely fantastic. But you didn’t mention that in your letter.”
“No, I didn’t. I thought it would be a nice surprise. I went to Zaire with them, in 1978.” She coughed lightly, then with more strength, until a fit of choking had Ruth rushing over from her seat by the window with a glass of water. She placed one hand on the back of Moira’s head and helped the old woman to take a sip.
“You’re too tired for any more of this,” Ruth said, sounding more nanny than assistant. “Let Elaine get into the storage room and read what she wants in the boxes. You need your rest.”
Moira lifted her right hand and hit the glass with enough strength to knock it flying out of Ruth’s hand. It struck the sharp edge of the desk and shards of glass and droplets of water flew through the air.
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” Moira shrieked. “I’m not a baby, do you hear me? Do you? I don’t need to rest five minutes after I’ve started. Go and clean up that mess and then leave us alone. I’m sure you can find something useful to do, if you put your mind to it.”
Ruth burst into tears and fled from the room. Elaine scrambled to her knees to pick up the sharp pieces of glass, more to hide her embarrassment than from any desire to be useful.
“Leave that,” Moira snapped. “Ruth will do it. I don’t know why I put up with her. Incompetent fool.”
Ruth chose that moment to slip back into the room, bearing pail and cleaning cloth. She gathered the bits of debris and mopped up the spilled water silently and efficiently. Her hands trembled.
“Where were we? Oh, yes.” Moira settled back into her chair. “I had scarcely begun talking to Donna, what with the arrival of my sisters and their families for the Labor Day weekend. So I am starting this from scratch. Tell me if I get too boring. I don’t have many letters saved from when I was a girl. Simply because there weren’t many. I lived with my mother and father. They sent my brother Ralph away to boarding school, but we girls stayed at home. There were four children. Ralph was the oldest, and my mother’s favorite. She absolutely adored that boy. Even all these years later I can remember how jealous I was at the fuss and attention Ralph got when he came home for school holidays. To my father and grandfather, he represented the future of the company and the family. Ralph would be trained to follow in their footsteps every step of the way.”
“Did you resent him?”
“No, I didn’t. Does that surprise you? I should have, but instead I idolized him. Everyone loved Ralph. He died in the war. So sad, such a tragic waste. My grandfather died the day after they got the news, and my mother was never quite the same again.” She breathed deeply and stared into another space and time. Elaine did not interrupt, but made a quick note to find out more about the doomed Ralph. Paragons were rarely quite what they seemed. Ruth finished tidying up and left the room. Moira missed her resentful glare, but Elaine didn’t. It would seem that she had made an enemy, through no actions of her own.
“And then there were the three girls. I came first. Moira, the willful one, my mother called me. Maeve arrived right after me, the attractive one. She was quite pretty, but never the stunning creature my family pretended. Of course, with our money, if they said a donkey was a great beauty everyone would have bayed in agreement.
“And Megan, the baby. The talented one. She played the piano. Quite well, actually. If she wasn’t so spoiled she might have achieved something in the world of music. Do you notice anything about our names?”
“They all begin with M. A coincidence?”
“Not at all. My mother thought of herself as a poet. She wrote quite a bit, although she never showed anyone her work. She burned everything not long before she died. I often think about the significance of that. That huge body of work, never seen by another soul. Tragic, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“She loved alliterations. I suspect she only married my father for his last name. She certainly didn’t love him. And she didn’t need to marry him for his money. Her family had quite enough of their own, thank you very much. Her name was Mary Margaret. But her last name was boring old Brown. After their marriage, she wrote or embroidered ‘MMM’ on absolutely everything—towels, stationery, linens. She would have loved to have lived to see the year 2000.”
“Why?”
“MM, of course. Roman numerals for 2000. Her family was of Irish ancestry. She liked the old Irish names. I can well imagine that my father had to put his foot down to avoid a son named Liam or Sean. But he didn’t have much interest in the girls, so she named us as she liked.
“I never remember a time when I got on well with my mother. My father, as suited our class and times, was a distant, almost mythical figure. What could I be but difficult? Sandwiched between Ralph, the sacred male child, and the beauty and the artiste.”
A frisson of excitement crawled up Elaine’s spine. She had taken this job for the chance to start a new life, get away from the city and the memories and the familiar haunts. Her career that once blazed with such promise had flat-lined, leaving behind it not the faintest signs of a pulse. She’d hoped that helping a rich old woman write her boring memoirs would give her a chance to breathe new air and come to some decisions. But maybe there would be a story here, after all.
Moira switched tracks so quickly Elaine almost fell off. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to be growing up between the wars. In the fabulous twenties. The strong, healthy child of a rich family. Only years later did I come to understand that not everyone lived like us. Or even like our servants, whom I did think of as part of the family, in my patronizing little way.”
Elaine thought of the difference between how Moira talked to Ruth and to Lizzie and herself, and that perhaps some things hadn’t really changed at all.
“Those years were simply absolutely, fabulously magical. Despite all the usual childhood fights and tantrums and bickering. We came up here every summer, immediately after Ralph arrived home from school, and we stayed until Labor Day. I was born in 1914, so I was a girl and then a young woman, what today they call a teenager, through the twenties. The best of all times, I often think. The twenties I mean, not my youth.
“Then came the crash of ’29. It scarcely made a ripple in our lives. We were all right. The family industries were diversified enough that we escaped the worst of the Depression. But all over the lake places were sold or closed up and neighbors and good friends never seen again. I had a dear friend, Lorraine Hamilton. The summer of 1929 we were all of fifteen. Surely the most perfect and innocent of ages. At least it was in our time, although I suspect it is no longer. We swore our undying friendship to each other, like Anne and Diana. We had simply devoured the Anne of Green Gables books that wonderful summer. When I wrote to her at Christmas she never answered and come the next season, their cottage was boarded up so tightly a cockroach couldn’t have found a way in. I never saw or heard of Lorraine again.”
She paused for a breath and looked around her in some confusion. “I seem to have misplaced my water glass, dear. And I am getting quite parched, all this talking. Could you call Lizzie and ask for a cup of tea. Push that button here and someone should answer.”
Elaine did as instructed and in the time it took a kettle to boil, Lizzie was kicking the door open, laden tray in her arms.
The cook poured. This time tea was served in thick mugs, one of which was a souvenir of Niagara Falls, and the other a testament to the World’s Greatest Aunt.
Lizzie noticed Elaine reading her mug with a disappointed frown. “Good cups and silver are for afternoon tea. This is morning tea. No ceremony.”
Moira gripped her mug as she thanked Lizzie. The tips of her fingers turned white and her arthritic hands shook, but she raised the quarter-filled cup to her lips and took a tiny sip.
“I can’t tell you, dear, how horrible it is to grow old. Helpless as a blind kitten is bad enough, but it is knowing that things will only get worse that is hardest.”
Elaine swallowed. “My mother always said that getting old is hard, but the alternative is worse.”
Moira threw back her head and laughed. Elaine was so startled she leapt to her feet and failed to catch her hostess’ mug before it hit the floor. The thick carpet absorbed the impact and the cup bounced away, unharmed. A bare dribble of tea seeped into the fibers.
“Oh, that is so true. I will remember that. When things are the hardest. Please pour me more tea, dear, I seem to have lost what bit I had.” She wiped her eyes with a scrap of tissue tucked into the sleeve of her T-shirt, but the smile died too soon. “There are times I wonder if the alternative might actually be better. That is why I want to work on these memoirs. So it is not forgotten when I’m gone. Just a touch, thank you.”
Elaine checked the tape. “You were telling me about when you were young.”
“Indeed I was. The parties, the dances, the picnics, the boat races, games on the lawn. The summers passed in an endless haze of fun and irresponsibility. My grandmother loved her garden with a passion and the property blazed with flowers all season long. We had a full-time grounds staff of three, here at the cottage, and that’s apart from the staff at the house. Can you imagine?”
Elaine couldn’t imagine. Her idea of a garden was two tomato plants stuck into plastic pots, struggling to survive out on the balcony.
“Ralph was always inviting school pals up for a weekend, or boys from other places on the lake. We had the grandest parties, and the boys absolutely swamped us, Ralph’s sisters, with attention. At the time, of course, I assumed the force of my sparkling personality attracted them. Now I know that being the oldest daughter of Frederick Madison was more than enough.