“I noticed a cabin, back through the woods, above the boathouse, out walking this afternoon.” Elaine accepted the bowl of peas.
She looked up to see the family staring at her. Even Phoebe sat open mouthed and gaping.
“You went to that ghastly old cabin,” Amber said. “Whatever for?”
“Well, it was there.”
“We don’t go there,” Moira said. Her voice placed a firm period at the end of the next sentence. “Nor should you. More wine, Desmond?”
“Thank you, my dear.” Alan slipped silently behind to pour. Elaine wanted to talk about the cabin, ask why it was boarded up and deserted. Why it hadn’t been torn down in favor of a more modern out-building for guests and their friends to bunk in. Why the foliage gave silent testimony to scarcely a human visit in years. And why the wind moaned and the leaves gathered and the scent of cheap perfume permeated the air and she knew that she had to run for her very life.
Tonight they had been joined by the Josephesons. A family from a neighboring cottage, friends of the family for many years. Mr. Josepheson walked with the help of a cane and was dressed in a gray business suit, white shirt, and silk tie with alternating thin red and gray stripes. Mrs. Josepheson had cut her gray hair exceedingly short, almost to the scalp, and wore a plain black dress with a single string of pearls, which gave her an air of quiet dignity. The effect, however, was somewhat ruined by the orange reflective necklace, a favor handed out by a large fast food chain one past Halloween, that encircled her neck. Mrs. Josepheson might be physically in their presence, but mentally she appeared to be absent most of the time.
They were accompanied by their son, Greg. Handsome in that sort of heart-stopping, breath-clutching way that drew the gaze of every woman in the room regardless of her age. If there had been a baby girl at dinner, she would doubtless have been equally smitten. His short hair and neatly trimmed moustache were dark; tiny laugh lines crinkled the edges of his sea-blue eyes and generous mouth. He smiled at Elaine over the dancing flames of the silver candelabra and she forgot all about the strange cabin and the wind that had a mind of its own.
“You absolutely must ask Desmond about the war years,” Maeve had said to Elaine, the moment the guests arrived. “He and Charles were great friends.”
“True,” Moira interrupted, steering Elaine off to a far corner of the drawing room to converse with the younger generation of Madisons. She huffed. “If that reactionary bunch had their way, my memoirs would be about how great my brother and all his friends were. And oh, yes, he did have a rather unattractive little sister, whatever was her name?”
Elaine touched the thin arm and bent to look the old woman balancing precariously on her two walking sticks straight in the eye. “But that is why you hired me, if you remember. Because I know that the saving of lives was as important as the taking of them. And that we built a nation on sharing and caring. Am I right?”
Moira threw back her gray head and laughed so much her tiny frame shook like an earthquake rollicking under the San Andreas Fault. “Indeed. Otherwise, why should we bother to continue?”
“Why indeed?” And they had gone into dinner.
As much as she liked Charles, Elaine detested his friend Desmond Josepheson from the minute she met him. The man loved to talk about nothing other than himself, his fabulously successful business ventures, his great wartime glory, and his successful family. On and on he prattled. “I’d be delighted, my dear,” Mr. Josepheson said, his deep voice rising above the general hum of conversation, “to let you interview me about the war years. Charles and Ralph and I served together in England. That’s where I met the boys. I was devastated when I heard the news about the death of Ralph. A tragic, tragic loss indeed.”
“That was when Charles won the George Cross,” Megan piped up.
“If you knew Moira over in England, then I would like to talk to you,” Elaine said. “The war years will be the focus, but not the entirety, of the book.”
“I didn’t actually meet Moira until after the war, when my father bought a piece of property up here on the lake. He was searching for a holiday home and I remembered Ralph talking about his family place. Turned out to be a great investment, eh? The old man would be fighting to get out of his grave if he knew what property goes for on Lake Muskoka today.”
“That paints a charming picture,” Phoebe mumbled around her spoon.
Elaine almost choked on a mouthful of soup and had to pretend a coughing fit, held discreetly behind a crisp linen napkin.
The conversation took off: all to do with land values, and property taxes, and the prices people were paying for good water frontage.
“What would a property like this fetch these days?” Brad asked.
Mr. Josepheson named a sum well beyond Elaine’s wildest imaginings.
“And to someone who would truly appreciate the quality of the main house and the out-buildings, probably a whole lot more,” Elliot added.
“Did you hear that they tore down the McDonald place?” Megan said. “That wonderful old cottage. It was built in the true Muskoka tradition, every plank, every beam an original. The new buyers, some sort of dot com millionaires, whatever that might be I have no idea, thought the cottage too old and dark and tore it down right down to the foundations. Tragic.”
“Have to go with the times, my dear,” Mr. Josepheson said, leaning back to allow the maid-for-hire to clear his plate. “Modern people don’t want these old places. Have to go with the times.”
“Well, I agree with Mrs. Stoughton,” Greg said, smiling at the old woman. Beneath the excessive layers of peach blush, Megan colored like a schoolgirl. “There’s still land up here for people with money. Let’s leave the historic cottages for those who truly appreciate them.”
“Like this place,” said Elaine. “It’s absolutely irreplaceable. The quality of the wood, of the stone, not to mention the patina of age and respect that covers everything. I would hate to see it torn down to be replaced by some modern monstrosity of steel and glass.”
“If you like the older cottages, then you must come and see ours,” said Greg, taking a slow sip of wine. His lovely blue eyes smiled at her over the rim of the glass, reminding her of a week’s holiday in the Caribbean. “It’s of much the same age as this one. My mother has gone to considerable trouble decorating it.”
Mrs. Josepheson beamed broadly but her husband snorted. Always the academic, Elaine noticed that Greg’s words weren’t exactly a compliment, merely a statement of fact.
“You’d talk out of the other side of your mouth, boy,” Mr. Josepheson said, “if you had the chance to sell it. If it wasn’t tied up between you and your sister, you’d have your signature on the page before I was cold in my grave.”
As his father talked, Greg’s eyes narrowed to dark slits and his mouth set in an angry line. Before he could reply, Moira interrupted. “Plenty of time to discuss your legacy in the years to come, Desmond.”
Lizzie and the maid carried in the main course and conversation ended. But as she picked up her fork, Elaine saw Greg and his father exchange looks that would freeze the lake solid.
Liquors were served in the drawing room. The dogs were, at last, silent, and the fire blazed cheerfully. The blinds had been pulled back and outside the moon cast enough light on the deck to bleach the pale wood a strange shade of ghostly white.
Alan winked at Elaine as he passed her a cut-glass snifter shimmering with brandy.
Was Alan flirting with her? Elaine studied the glass as her heart pounded furiously in her chest. She scolded herself for the thought. He was just trying to be friendly, after they had gotten off on such a bad footing—what with the dogs and all. But maybe not—she prepared what she considered a charming smile and looked up. But he had turned away to talk to Alison.
Furious with herself, Elaine turned her attention back to the general conversation.
Mrs. Josepheson chattered to herself in the corner and they all politely pretended not to notice.
“Well, I for one am greatly looking forward to reading Aunt Moira’s memoirs,” Alison said once everyone had been served drinks. “She won’t let any of us help with them. It’s all quite secret and terribly hush hush.”
Elaine laughed. “That isn’t the intention, Alison. It’s easier to work without an audience.”
“Perhaps I do have my secrets,” Moira said. She sat in pride of place beside the fireplace. Despite the heat, she’d asked Ruth to place a wool throw over her thin shoulders. “Don’t assume you all know me so well.”
“Oh, Auntie,” Phoebe laughed, helping herself to a miniature chocolate from a sliver tray. “I don’t think any of us take you for granted.”
“Skeletons in the closet,” Brad said, trying without success to make his voice deep and mysterious. “Maybe a family scandal.”
Amber stood by the bar, in four-inch platform shoes and a tight, short skirt that barely covered her pert bottom. “Maybe Great-great-grandpa was a pirate and all our money is the product of his ill-gotten gains. The Scourge of the Muskokas they called him.” She tossed her long blond hair, peered out from beneath her eyelashes and smiled seductively at Alan as she held her glass out for another sweet liqueur. He managed to scowl without being rude. A difficult feat.
“Really,” Maeve said, her voice tinged with disapproval. “Our family has never been anything but perfectly respectable. Anyway, I don’t think there were any pirates on Lake Muskoka, were there?”
Alan stirred the embers and placed another log onto the fire. He winked at Elaine, and she struggled to keep her face straight.
The young people, however, didn’t have her self-control. They erupted into gales of laughter.
“Bluebeard,” Amber shouted. “They called him that because his beard matched the color of the lake.”
“He traveled the lakes in a canoe, a giant skull-and-cross-bones painted on the bow.” Brad scooped a handful of the tiny chocolates up and popped them into his mouth, all at once.
“No, no,” said Phoebe. “He couldn’t fit any henchmen into a canoe. It would have to have been a rowboat. Or maybe after he earned some money, he graduated to terrorizing the lakes in a wooden power boat.”
“I don’t think that’s at all respectful of your great-grandfather,” Maeve said. Her voice was small and timid but puffed with indignation. No one heard her except Elaine and Moira.
“That is quite enough of that,” Moira said, realizing that things had gone too far and her sister was highly offended. Her voice cut through the laughter.
Elaine held her glass up to indicate to Alan that she would love another brandy. The golden liquid had slid down her throat like nectar.
“I’m sure that your aunt has no family secrets to impart,” Greg said, in a feeble attempt at calming troubled waters. He tossed a lopsided what-can-you-do? smile towards Elaine.
Without asking permission Desmond Josepheson lit up an enormous cigar. Judging by the look on Moira’s face, permission would have been refused. Alan discreetly pulled a silver ashtray out of the recesses of a cabinet.
“Isn’t that right, Moira, my dear?” Desmond puffed happily. “What secrets could a respectable lady such as yourself possibly possess?”
The brown eyes looked at him without blinking. “Respectable was never a goal for which I aimed, Desmond. I have always believed that the supposed value of a woman’s reputation has never been anything other than a weapon used by society to keep her under control. And as a woman of means, respectability never mattered to me one whit. Money always beat out reputation. Still does, I am sure. Why I could have been the Whore of Babylon….”
Maeve gasped, Charles harrumphed, Amber twittered, and Brad actually blushed.
“…but it wouldn’t have mattered in the least to all the prospective young men lined up at my father’s door. As for secrets…I have many more than these young people would believe, Desmond. As you and Charles well know.”
“Moira, I must insist that you not continue with this foolishness,” Megan said, the color rising in her face. “I may not have mentioned my objections before, but….”
“You have mentioned them, dear,” Moira said, “more than once. But this project is important to me, and I can assure you that….”
“Pirates,” Mrs. Josepheson announced from her chair off in the darkest corner of the room, her voice clear and strong. “I was a pirate at a Halloween party once. I had a black patch over my eye and a stuffed parrot standing on my shoulder. It was so much fun. But the parrot fell into the punch bowl. Desmond said it was embarrassing.”
A log crashed into the fire amidst a shower of flames. Brad helped himself to the last of the chocolates.
Her leave ended, as all good things must. Ralph and Charlie returned to their unit and Moira caught the Monday morning train south.
Heading out of the city, the train was a good deal less crowded. Moira spent the journey in uncomfortable silence seated opposite a fat old woman who said not a word but cried constantly into a sodden cotton handkerchief. At Ralph’s request, the hotel had prepared her a good boxed lunch, but she was too self-conscious in the face of the woman’s misery to open the packet and examine it. She decided to save it to share with her roommates back at the barracks.
Being in London again had brought the reality of the war so much closer. She had seen the destruction first hand and was nothing but amazed at how well the Londoners were faring. She often thought of the crying young woman with the four unruly children, and a husband presumably off at war, if not already dead. She could only imagine how people with family and children (despite the evacuations, there were still children running happily through the London streets and playing in the mounds of rubble) to worry about managed to go on. Yet they did, and more often than not with a smile firmly in place and a quick joke whenever the conversation got too serious.
But for the women at Canadian Army General Hospital Number 15 the war remained a distant threat. They had plenty of work: sickness, accidents, training incidents, men recovering sheepishly from their own foolishness.
August of 1942 and everything changed.
Moira had thought the work hard when she was in training. And then as a junior sister at Toronto General Hospital. The daughter of a privileged family, until then she had never known what it was like to really work. She tried hard at her schoolwork, and played a wonderful game of tennis, although her mother told her not to play quite so well. The young men didn’t like it, she said, if a lady beat them. Moira thought that if the young men wanted so much to win then perhaps they should learn how to play properly. She told her mother so, and was banned from the annual family Labor Day picnic for her honesty.
Not much of a sacrifice. Instead of spending the day eating soggy sandwiches and pretending to be charmed by elderly uncles and obnoxious sons of the prominent lake families, all of whom seemed to be in search of a respectable (read wealthy) wife (she preferred the uncles), she spent the day catching up on the stack of medical journals hidden under her bed. She didn’t understand a good deal in them, but in those days it was enough to read the words and dream.
Nothing in Moira’s life had prepared her for the days after Dieppe.
Canadian General Hospital Number 15, Bramshott received the worst of the Canadian wounded from that vain, ill planned, heroic, and foolish raid. Moira had wished for some excitement in the daily hospital routine, and now she bitterly regretted that wish. The nurses and doctors worked around the clock, snatching what bits of sleep they could when they could no longer keep exhausted eyes focused at the task at hand.
There was one young man in particular, from
Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal
, whom Moira remembered for a long time. His accent was French Canadian but his last name and soft red hair spoke of an Irish ancestor who had landed long ago upon the shores of Old Quebec. He had lost both legs and his right arm. Claude was his name, and Moira sat by his bedside longer than necessary after changing his bandages, whispering sweet words of encouragement into his ear. He looked to be all of eighteen years old.
“Maman,”
he cried out one night. He had taken a turn for the worse and raged with fever.
“Écrivez à ma maman
, s’il vous plaît.”
Moira’s high school French was barely up to the task, but she was desperately afraid that Claude wouldn’t live until morning. Fortunately she found a sister who had a French grandmother, and the two women sat long into the night copying a letter to Claude’s mother.
He was still alive in the morning, and as the days passed Claude got stronger and stronger. Before she would have believed it possible he was being wheeled about the wards in his makeshift wheelchair, and doing what he could to cheer up the other patients, many much less seriously wounded than he.
As soon as the doctors considered him to be ready for travel, Claude, and the other seriously wounded and maimed, were packed off to a ship heading home to Canada. As he was being pushed out of the ward by a man with half his face wrapped in bandages, Claude gestured for a stop before Moira, standing by the door with the rest of the duty nurses to wish the men a good trip.
“Merci,”
he said.
Many years later Moira enjoyed a rare holiday in Montreal, touring the narrow streets of the old city on a brilliant summer’s day. She caught a glimpse of a man in a wheelchair, enjoying a pastis at a sun filled sidewalk terrace, close to the Nelson monument. His knees were wrapped in blankets, one sleeve pinned across his rough woolen sweater. She hesitated, wanting to go forward, but afraid to intrude. As she stood in the square in the warm sunshine a young woman, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, the very age Claude himself had been when Moira knew him, walked out of the building and resumed her seat. A glass of white wine waited for her. A granddaughter?
Moira bought a posy of purple violets from a street vendor and sniffed deeply as she continued her walk down to the water’s edge.