A Sudden Sun (7 page)

“It’s only to bring in conscription, my dear,” Reverend Collins had said. “The Union government knows they can count on the women who have men overseas to vote for it.”

“Well, they’ll reap the whirlwind,” Lily said.

There were invitations here too, and calling cards, and a handful of postcards. Grace looked through these as well, feeling slightly guilty at reading her mother’s private correspondence. But surely Lily would have destroyed or taken with her anything important, and most of the postcards were quite dull. She recognized the names on a few, her mother’s cousins in Wesleyville or Harbour Grace. Only two were interesting: one in looping, girlish handwriting that read,
“
It’s a pickle and no mistake, but it needn’t be a tragedy. Come to me, darling, and we’ll puzzle out what to do. Won’t you?
” It was signed only “
A
.”

A for Abigail, Grace wondered? If Grace were to visit with Mrs. Parker, become friendly and confiding, could Mrs. Parker tell her what sort of pickle Lily had been in, and whether they had ever puzzled it out together?

Grace realized, looking through the scattered papers, how very little she knew of her mother’s life—who her girlhood friends had been, what she had cared about, even what books she had read. Lily talked a great deal, but seldom about her own past. The other mysterious postcard showed a young man playing a guitar for a willowy young lady, her hair in a Gibson Girl sweep and a bustle accentuating her wasp waist. On the back was a scrawled and male-looking hand, quite different from the careful feminine writing that covered the other cards. Grace had to peer at it for a few minutes to piece it out.

The letters resolved themselves into words. But the words made no sense at all.

A
BIGAIL HAYWARD PARKER. Well, well.

Lily held the telegram between thumb and finger, reading it over. It was the third one she’d received in the past fortnight. The first had announced Abigail’s arrival in the capital city; the second asked if Lily might come to town so they could see one another again.

This one read:

Stop, stop, stop, Lily thought. Stop dragging back people, names, images from the past. She did not like to think of Abigail Hayward, not the silly girl she once was nor the preachy Lady Bountiful she had become. Abigail frequently wrote about her various committees
and hospitals and orphanages, thinking good works formed a bond between herself and Lily. She had no children of her own. It was almost inevitable that she should meet Grace and want to take her under a well-feathered wing.

Lily thought she ought to go to town and put a stop to this wing-sheltering business.

She avoided visits to town. She had no desire to walk the empty halls of the house she had once lived in, the beautiful house Papa had rebuilt after the fire. She had sweeter and more bitter memories of the two short years she’d lived in that rebuilt house than of any other part of her life, though very little had happened to her in the house itself. The house had been the place she returned: her tiny room on the top floor with its gable window looking out over Queen’s Road was the place she waltzed back to as if there were air under her heels. There was the pillow she had hugged as if it were a living person in her dreams, the floor she had paced hour after midnight hour. There was the bed on which she had thrown herself crying ’til her throat ached, ’til she felt drained and empty of tears.

She had no desire to go back and see her father, who had steered her inexorably towards the only possible solution and never known what he was doing. She had no desire to go back and see Daisy reigning in her mother’s stead. The happiness Papa had found with Daisy in his second marriage was an affront: not so much to her mother’s memory—there was so little of Eleanor in the first place that her memory was almost completely insubstantial, like the shadow of a shadow—as an affront to Lily’s own unhappiness.

The only person she wanted to see, of all that merry party in St. John’s, was Grace. Lily wanted Grace home for one of the conversations they had only in her imagination, when they sat on the front porch in the sun. It was always warm and sunny in the land of Lily’s imagination, and she and Grace sat in the sun doing some kind of fancy-work. Grace talked about the things that troubled or
interested her, and Lily listened and gave sage advice, which Grace always accepted and thanked her for.

Lord, how her head ached. Keeping her hair up all day was such a burden. She was alone in the house now, except for the girl in the kitchen, and what did it matter? Lily pulled out one hairpin, just the one that was making her temple throb, and felt a split second of blessed relief as a rope of long, heavy hair snaked down over her shoulder.

Since Abigail’s telegram had been delivered she had been restless. It would be a good day to polish the silver, a task no kitchen maid in Lily’s experience had ever been able to do properly. She got as far as opening the box in the dining room that contained the silver, then sat down and stared at the beautiful pieces, starting to show signs of tarnish around the edges. Time was she would have been horrified to let the silver get into that condition. Lily had prided herself on her housekeeping, on managing the house and the maid and the menu and the silver as well as the Women’s Missionary Society and the Sunday School. She had done everything expected of a minister’s wife and more.

She had dropped all those responsibilities in the hard weeks after Charley’s death, and then, knowing it was expected, she had taken them up again, one by one. She still did everything expected of her: this afternoon Elizabeth Perry and Rachel Snelgrove were coming over to plan the sale of work to benefit the wounded veterans, and Lily had promised to find a steady older woman to take the boys’ Sunday School class since no reliable young man could be found to replace Bert Courage, who had gone off to Sydney to work in the mines. But as so often in this last year, Lily felt as if she were only going through the motions. Silver spoons with tarnished edges looked up at her like wide, unblinking eyes, accusing her.

There would be a rag in the kitchen, but if she went to the kitchen she would have to think of something nice to say to the girl.
Nellie. Lily kept calling her Elsie, but that was the last maid, gone and married now. Nellie was fourteen years old and competent on her best days, but she liked to chatter.

Preparing to polish the silver became a litany of the house. The kitchen: to be avoided because of the girl. Parlour: her usual place to sit, sometimes for hours on end, sewing or doing embroidery. The window looked out on a long green meadow that ran down from the front of the parsonage to the path along by the harbour. Grace once kept up a bit of a flower garden there; Charley used to cut the grass in the field. They had moved to Catalina from Elliston the year war broke out, when Grace was fourteen and Charley seventeen. The children were away at school over the winter. They had both gone to town to live with Papa and Daisy at age twelve to attend the Methodist College. Charley moved on from there to study at Dalhousie up in Canada.

But in Catalina, just as they had done in Elliston, they came home for summer and Christmas, and Lily liked to remember that first year or so as a happy time. When she sat in the parlour now she remembered looking out on long summer evenings at clusters of young folk sitting on the porch, Grace and Charley and their friends talking and laughing and singing. Then Charley joined the Regiment and all that ended. Though Grace came home to teach school during the war and had had girlfriends over to the house in the evenings, still the house seemed in Lily’s memory to have become silent after Charley left.

Ghosts paraded on the lawn; ghosts hung on the walls of the parlour. Not only the ghost of Charley, framed in uniform, but of the whole family when the children were very small and they had had a photograph done at Mr. Parsons’s studio in St. John’s. The ghost of an even younger Lily with the Reverend taken at the same studio a few days after their wedding, a stiff formal pose in which they both looked terrified.
With good reason
, Lily thought.

Neither silver polish nor a rag would be in the parlour. Lily shook herself out of reverie.

The cupboard under the stairs was a jumble. Nellie wasn’t keeping it properly tidy, or perhaps didn’t think it was part of her duties to take care of such things. After a little searching around on the narrow shelves, Lily found the silver polish poked behind a bottle of bleach. She pulled the string to turn off the light bulb. Oh, those light bulbs: the shining evidence of Mr. Coaker’s dream-town! Electric lighting all over Port Union and Catalina, not just here in the manse and in Coaker’s Bungalow, but even in the simple homes of the fishermen. Electric lights, books and lectures, a clinic with a nurse brought over from England. How the Reverend and Mr. Coaker could go on about it, by the hour, when the great man visited their house. Still the lights were nothing more than a convenience when all was said and done: a good thing, but not exactly evidence of divine approval.

She was up the stairs, back up to her bedroom. The master bedroom, where the master had not slept these many years. Lily remembered their wedding night, a big bed in the Cochrane House hotel, in a room paid for by her parents. She remembered how cold the room was, and how she had clutched her nightgown about herself. She remembered lying awake beside him all that night, staring out the window.

She had no need to go into his study, that austere temple of the learned man. He could work late there on sermons and then go to bed in the adjoining room without disturbing her. That was the official reason for separate quarters. If anyone had asked, which of course no one ever did.

In Grace’s room, she thought, there would be old clothing she could tear up for polishing rags. Grace had never cleared out the room because she had not really moved out. Not like a girl did when she got married. This gadding off to St. John’s, volunteering at the
hospital, trying to be a career girl—none of that ever lasted, did it? Fishermen’s daughters went off into service and ministers’ daughters taught school or did good works. No girl truly left home until she got married.

Lily had moved out of her old room in her parents’ house when she married the Reverend, but even she had left things behind, old clothes, scraps of paper, and bits of writing and letters. Things she could not imagine taking with her into married life. Nothing that could reveal any secrets to a curious eye, should anyone ever search there—she had burned all the dangerous papers.

Grace’s room had the untidy look of a place the owner intended to return to, which both irritated and comforted Lily. She never went into Charley’s room. After word had come of his loss she had locked the door and never entered it. She wasn’t keeping the room like a shrine, as some foolish women did. It was as if the room had ceased to exist at all, like a piece torn off the house.

In Grace’s top drawer Lily found something she could tear up to make rags: an old blouse, far too small—something Grace had worn when she was eight or ten years old. Beneath it was a hand-made rag doll; a gift from Daisy when Grace was about six. They had been living—where, then? Before Elliston…oh, those were the years over on Cape Freels, the most godforsaken spot on earth. So Grace had dragged some of this stuff in her little trunk from Cape Freels to Elliston and then from Elliston to Catalina. They would have been packed up and gone to another place by now—the Methodist circuit liked to shuffle their ministers around—except that they were having a hard time finding a minister for Catalina so they were leaving Reverend Collins there for now. Another postwar shortage, Lily supposed.

She stood holding the cloth doll in her hands. It was a faded little thing, stuffed, she thought, with cotton batting, buttons sewn on for eyes. Grace used to streel it about with her everywhere and
sleep with it at night. One arm hung half-off. Lily had a vivid memory of coming into Grace’s room one day to find Grace cradling the doll and crooning to it, “My babby…My babby…My babby.” It had startled Lily because that was what she had called both Charley and Grace when they were little, “My babby.” But only for such a short time, when they were babies and it felt safe to be sentimental. She had stopped it, she was sure, by the time they were both weaned, if not before. She had always been careful to call them by their names and address them in proper English, no foolish baby-talk.

The year Grace was ten and Charley thirteen, Lily had accompanied the Reverend to some church meetings in Toronto—the one and only trip she and her husband had taken off the island together. In a store on Yonge Street, Lily had seen a doll: eighteen inches tall, dressed in a gown of real green velvet trimmed with lace, face and hands of exquisite china, real hair with a lovely auburn sheen, and emerald eyes that opened and closed. She bought it for Grace, had it packed in its own special box with layers of protective fabric and straw to preserve it for its long journey home on the train and steamer. She had bought a gift for Charley too of course—a toy fire-engine, she thought—but it was the doll for Grace that absorbed all her thoughts.

Grace’s reaction had been gratifying. Her eyes had been wide and her mouth an O of delight. She had said it was the most beautiful doll in the world. She put it on its own shelf in her room and there it stayed; that doll, too, had moved from one parsonage to another, though by the time they got to Catalina, Grace had been too old for dolls. In the months after she first gave it to her, Grace’s lack of attachment to the doll bothered Lily, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on what she wished Grace would do differently. It wasn’t that she ought to have played with the doll—it wasn’t a doll made for hauling around from place to place, and
indeed the few times Grace had attempted to take it down from its shelf Lily had told her to put it back and reminded her to be careful. After that she seemed content to let it sit there and glance at it from time to time. She took the doll for granted, while Daisy’s tatty little ragdoll was her babby; even at ten she still dragged it about with her everywhere and seemed to love it more the more ragged and disreputable it became. It irritated Lily even now, when she walked into Grace’s room and saw the Toronto doll inviolate on its shelf. It was behind her now, on a shelf by the bed. In the mirror its green glass eyes stared at her.

Lily laid the rag doll back in the drawer, covered it with the blouse. It was just possible that the blouse had been saved as the rag doll had, for some sentimental reason that only existed in Grace’s mind. In another drawer she found a threadbare pair of bloomers and ripped them apart. Silver polish in one hand, rags in the other, she went back down to the dining room. Before the ladies came for their meeting, she would polish the silver.