A Sudden Sun Read online

  “She was right, you know, your mother,” David Reid told her. “She wouldn’t have been happy with the life I’ve led. And if I’d done what she wanted—stayed home in St. John’s, changed myself all around to be a good husband and father—well, I’d have felt stifled. Trapped. All that business about true love conquering all—I don’t believe that.”

  “So—have you been happy?”

  He smiled a half-smile and stared down into his glass. “Happy’s not the word I’d use. I’ve lived the kind of life I wanted to live. I’ve done at least some of the things I meant to do. I doubt when I die anyone’s going to say, There goes old Reid, God rest his soul, he lived a happy life.”

  Grace played his words over and over like a gramophone record in her mind as she watched the steamer push through the waves. She imagined docking in St. John’s and getting on the train at once for Catalina, walking to the manse and sitting down with Lily at the table. Telling her everything. Asking for the truth, at last.

  Instead, she returned to St. John’s, to church work, and to the Women’s Franchise League. The general election had returned the Squires government to office, but one of Squires’s defeated ministers had made sweeping allegations about corruption in the government and there were talks of the prime minister resigning. “When that sleveen is gone for good,” Mrs. Salter Earle said at the one meeting she attended, “then we’ll finally see some real progress.”

  “Progress on the women’s vote, certainly,” said Mrs. Gosling. “And high time, too. Squires has been stalling and delaying for two years on the issue. They say he’ll be out by the end of June, and it’ll likely be Warren who replaces him.”

  “Changing one bad leader for another,” said Mrs. McNeil. “The party’s still the same. I don’t say we’ll see any real progress until there’s another election.”

  “We’re not prepared to wait another four years!” Grace burst out. “You should have been there—in Rome—you can’t imagine how it felt to be like the poor sisters at the table. Almost every other woman in the English-speaking world, every white woman in the British Empire, can vote. Do we have to wait another four years before we get our chance?”

  “It won’t be four years—without Squires that crowd won’t hold together more than a few months,” said Mrs. Earle. “We’ll be back at the polls within a year, you mark my words. Well, the men will be. Now, whatever coalition they come up with is going to have Reform or Progressive in its name, they all do that. What we need to know is who’s going to be really progressive—who’s going to give us the vote.”

  In the aftermath of the Congress and the election, the League met more often, and her job at Gower Street kept Grace busy as well, dealing with problems that had arisen during her extended break. Rome and New York—the conference, and her meeting with David Reid—were two huge things that she had to somehow examine and make sense of, but all around her life went on like a rushing stream, with no intention of giving her time to pause and think about it all.

  The mail piled up for the weeks she had been away included a thick letter from Jack. He had been away nearly a year now and had committed to another year with Dr. Grenfell’s mission. He hoped to come home for a visit this fall, to see his parents and Grace, before returning for another long, dark northern winter.

  Grace laid down his letter and tried to remember David Reid’s words about love and happiness. Could she be happy, married to Jack and living in Labrador? Could she be happy in St. John’s without him? And was it even her choice? In all the letters he’d written from Labrador, he had never mentioned marriage. Perhaps they really were nothing more than friends now.

  She wrote to Jack about meeting David Reid: even if he was only a friend, he was the only person she could tell about the encounter and even having someone to confide in on paper was better than telling no one at all. She did not include any of Mr. Reid’s comments on love and marriage or any speculations as to how those might apply to her own situation and Jack’s.

  One hot day in late August, Grace was making her usual round of hospital visits when the head nurse pulled her aside. “Miss Collins? We have a patient here who is asking to see you.”

  “Oh, of course—which ward?” Grace said.

  “He’s in a private room upstairs. And I should warn you, Miss Collins, he’s not one of your parishioners. He says he knows you from years ago—from the veterans’ hospital. A Mr. Barry?” The nurse looked for recognition in Grace’s face and Grace knew at once what she was worried about: that Grace would recoil from visiting a man so badly disfigured.

  But she was delighted to hear the name. Ivan Barry! Grace had lost track of him in the years after she left the Empire Hospital, and often wondered what had happened to him. As she climbed the stairs to his private room she thought of all the time she had included his name in her morning prayers. Grace tried to keep up a practice of praying by name for people she had worked with over the years, as specifically as memory would allow, and Ivan Barry’s name was on the list in the back of her Bible. Grace might pray, on a given morning, that her old Social Work classmate Miss DeWitt, to whom she still wrote regularly, would be given grace and strength and perhaps a bit of extra cash to help run that orphanage in the Appalachians where she worked. She might pray that Effie Butler, married at sixteen, would be better able to provide for her own children than she had for the four little siblings in the orphanage—for whom Grace also prayed, by name. But when Ivan Barry’s name arose on her prayer list Grace was at a loss, and prayed only that the Holy Spirit would comfort him. “And when the time comes, may he have an easy death and be taken to Your arms,” she would pray, wondering if this had already happened. She had not forgotten the hours spent with him in the old hospital and her firm belief that Charley had met a better fate by dying in France. It would be a mercy, Grace often thought, if God had taken Mr. Barry home by now.

  But here he was in the General Hospital. Perhaps he was dying now? And she just happened to be here, and could perhaps share a few words of comfort at the last.

  She found Ivan Barry sitting up in a chair by the window, not looking at all as if he were dying. He wore a cloth mask that covered the missing parts of his face; he could not smile at her, but lifted a hand in greeting. Grace sat on the edge of the bed opposite him and asked how he was.

  “Well enough...touch of—trouble in the lungs. Bothers me from—time to time.” Of course his words did not come out crisp and clean like that: there was the usual garbled wheeze, though Grace imagined his speech was a little clearer than it had been years ago. No doubt, being the kind of man he was, he practiced to get it right. She had to strain to understand, but as always, the longer she listened the more she could hear his words and not just his tortured voice.

  “But otherwise you’re well? How—where do you live?”

  She thought she saw a gleam like laughter in his one good eye. “I found—ways. Boarding house, here in town. Tried to go home but—hard. For the family.”

  Hard for you too, no doubt, Grace thought. She gestured at the mask. “You wear this now?”

  “Yes—easier. For people.” When Grace nodded, she saw his eye-smile again and he said, “Like—Phantom of the Opera? You read that?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Grace laughed. “I can’t imagine you kidnapping young girls and holding them captive, though.”

  “No. I do have—a captive. My cousin. Nice girl. Only one in the family can—be with me, much. She wanted to live in town and—like you. Doesn’t mind—seeing me. Helping. I have—my pension. Not much but—enough for room and board, a little pay for her.”

  So he had found someone to help him, found a way to make a life, Grace thought. And he had been here in town all along, living in a boarding house. She ought to have looked him up. Of course he was Church of England; the poor relief people in his own church probably knew about him and helped where they could, just as she did with a few badly wounded veterans in her own congregation who were unable to work. His meagr
e veteran’s pension couldn’t have paid for a private hospital room, Grace thought—and then realized the hospital had probably chosen to put him here, to spare others the sight of him.

  Mr. Barry picked something up off the window ledge and passed it to her—the veteran’s newspaper, opened to a page with an article circled. “This is—what I do now. When I can,” he said, and Grace began to read, seeing the by-line I. Barry, Royal Newfoundland Regiment, at the bottom of the column.

  It was a simple little piece, a letter to the editor, but it was lyrical and even beautiful. She remembered he had wanted to be a minister. “So now you write the sermons you won’t get to preach?” Grace said, after she had read it.

  “I—try. Essays, here and there. A few published, some others—maybe one day.” Speech was still a great effort for him but his pen flowed freely. “Letters, little sketches—you know about the poets? Owen, Sassoon—the poets of the war?”

  Grace nodded.

  “I’m—no poet. But—can write, a little. Someday—maybe more.”

  “Maybe a book?” Grace suggested, and he too nodded. “You should write it,” she said. “A story like yours—there must be hundreds of other men who’ve suffered what you have, and don’t have your skill at putting it into words. Keep writing.”

  “Oh—I will. No fear—about that.”

  She could see he was tiring and she said goodbye then, promising to visit again. How strange, she thought, when she had been picturing, even praying for his peaceful death these past few years, to see Ivan Barry still so stubbornly alive. She had always pitied the man but pity, she saw now, was an insult to such a passionate desire for life.

  When Grace arrived home that day a telegram was waiting. ARRIVING CATALINA ON HOME SEPTEMBER 1 TO VISIT FAMILY FOR A FEW WEEKS THEN BACK TO LABRADOR FOR WINTER SEASON STOP CAN YOU MEET ME IN CATALINA.

  Jack knew she had not been home for nearly a year. She had told him, finally, the story of her mother burning the petitions. “It’s not that I’m refusing to go home out of spite,” she had written him, “but somehow it’s easier to stay away. I will go home again—perhaps when you come for a visit?” Now he was coming home. Grace could only spare a day or two from work, having taken so much time away in the spring for the Rome congress. Jack had not mentioned coming to St. John’s; if she wanted to see him she was going to have to go home. Seeing her mother again and seeing Jack would both be difficult, for such different reasons. It might be easier to stay in town and set her face firmly towards the future, putting the past behind her.

  But she took the train out home on a Friday morning. Jack was waiting for her on the station platform. It seemed they were always meeting at train stations and she was always sizing him up, evaluating the changes in him since she had seen him last. Did Jack do the same with her? And what did he see?

  He stepped toward her, then hesitated. They stopped a few feet from each other, then Jack reached to take her train case. When his hand closed over hers on the handle, she moved closer, and Jack pulled her into his arms, right there on the platform for all of Catalina and Port Union to see.

  “I told your parents I’d drive you to the manse,” he said.

  She sat next to him on the seat of his father’s gig, and the knot of tension that had been in her stomach the whole train ride, the fear of what she’d find when she saw him again, dissolved as soon as Jack smiled at her. He seemed like his old self—not the Jack she had known before he went to Labrador, but the Jack who had come home from overseas and won her heart.

  But if the barrier between Grace and Jack seemed to have crumbled, the barrier that separated her from Lily seemed as impenetrable as ever. When she walked into the manse and said hello to her parents, Grace saw, as she’d been seeing in her mind’s eye since New York, a different Lily—a young Lily, brave and frightened and alone, carrying a child whose father was far away, marrying a man she hoped would shield her secret. But that younger, vulnerable Lily disappeared almost at once behind the thin, stern, greying woman who had burned the suffrage petitions, who had not given her blessing for Grace to go to Rome.

  They embraced, coolly, pressed their cheeks against each other and stepped back. Grace had imagined all kinds of conversations, tearful confrontations with her mother in which she confessed the visit to New York, confronted Lily with what she knew, forgave her for burning the papers. Instead there was only this wary politeness. Nothing was said about Rome, or about suffrage, or about why it had been so long since Grace had been home. Getting out of the house to be with Jack was a double pleasure, first for Jack’s sake and second as an escape from all the things unsaid between herself and Lily.

  On Saturday evening Grace and Jack walked over to Port Union to watch Nanook of the North at Congress Hall, the latest of the town’s impressive new edifices. Moving pictures were a rare treat outside St. John’s: another of the blessings Mr. Coaker had bestowed on the Union faithful. “Do you think the film will be anything like life in Labrador?” Grace asked Jack as they walked.

  “I don’t know how a film could capture it,” Jack said, “but I’ll be interested to see someone try. Even if it only shows a little of what life’s like up there, it’s a world most people never imagine, much less see.”

  “You really like it there, don’t you?”

  “Even I find it hard to believe sometimes, but yes, I do. People keep asking—Dr. Grenfell himself asked me, when he visited this summer—if I’ll go back to medical school,” he added as they walked across the bridge. “The way they look at it, I’m doing good and useful work, and I could do so much more if I qualified with my M.D. But I have to tell them I can’t. I don’t really understand it myself, but I know there’s a balance I have to hang onto, and going back to school would destroy that balance, somehow. I don’t suppose you can understand that anymore than the rest of them can.”

  “I don’t, fully,” Grace admitted. “But I know how unhappy you were in Montreal. I wouldn’t wish that on you again.”

  “It’s not just unhappiness,” Jack said. “It’s a kind of…desperation, I suppose. I believe now I can fight it as long as I’m doing work I believe in. It’s not as if everything’s wonderful all the time, it’s just that I can keep my head above water. There’s been reports on this kind of thing, you know—men who came back from the Front and broke down months, even years later, but I think the simplest thing, the thing the old folks would say, is that if I went back to school my nerves wouldn’t stand the strain.” He took her hand. “We said when I went away that there were no strings binding us. All this time, I’ve been reminding myself of that, afraid every letter I got from you would say you were engaged to marry someone else.”

  “I used to imagine I’d get a letter from you telling me you’d fallen in love with an English nurse and got married, or that you were going native and moving into a tilt with an Esquimo woman.” Grace stopped to lean over the bridge rail, watching the water tumble over the rocks below, the river widening at its mouth to open into the broad harbour beyond.

  Jack laughed. “No, there’s no one else for me. Sometimes I can’t imagine sharing my life with anyone else. What do I have to offer, really? I’ll never be a doctor. I might live out the rest of my life on the Labrador coast, and that’s not much of a place to raise a family. And I can’t even promise a woman that I’ll be sane or stable from one day to the next. I feel fine now, but I remind myself of Sol Sweetapple’s old fish store—something that’s been patched and propped up so many times, so many different ways, you have to worry that the next strong wind might blow it down.”

  They were walking again, into Port Union now. Grace could see, on the flat roof of the Union Store, the white triangles of codfish laid out to dry: fishermen were using the store roof as a flake. Nothing was wasted in Port Union. As always, the optimism of the place infected her, and she took a deep breath, trying to find words to match her thoughts.

  But Jack spoke first, still gripping her hand in his. “I say I can’t imagine sh
aring this life with anyone, but the truth is, I can’t imagine a life without you in it, either. I love you as much as I ever did, Grace—maybe more, after the way you’ve written to me and kept believing in me. I don’t know if it’s fair to you, loving you when I’ve got so little to offer. But I can’t change how I feel.”

  Then Grace had the words she needed. “I don’t know what’s fair and what isn’t, or if that even matters when it comes to love. I know this much—I’ll marry you, Jack Perry, if you ever get around to asking me. If you don’t ask, then I’ll do all right by myself. I’m a New Woman, or so my mother tells people, in a tone that makes it clear she doesn’t approve. I can get by on my own—but I’d rather get by with you.”

  “Somewhere in that speech I think you proposed to me, Miss Collins.”

  They were at the steps of Congress Hall. The good people of Port Union were crowding into the yard, drawn by the unusual promise of moving pictures. It was hardly the place to kiss or embrace, but Jack took both Grace’s hands in his and held tightly. She thought of David Reid saying that he and Lily had been better off without each other. She thought of Ivan Barry alone in his boarding house, writing essays. We live the lives we make for ourselves, Grace thought, as best as we can.

  “I don’t want to be sitting alone at a restaurant table in thirty years, wondering about the life we might have had together,” she said. “Even Battle Harbour would be better than that.”

  Lily

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  LILY HATED WINTERS around the bay. Her girlhood memories of winters in town were pleasant—sleigh bells in the streets, walking through crisp snow, church bells ringing out through chilly night air. Had it always been so bright and cold and clean? Or had memory transformed twenty winters into a series of Christmas cards?

  Before her marriage she had spent one winter outside town: that winter after the fire, when she and her mother lived in her grandparents’ house in Harbour Grace. The day of the fire she remembered feeling aflame herself, as if she were incandescent. Then came that dull indoor winter in Harbour Grace, reading books by the fire and waiting for spring. It was tedious, but did not match the crushing despair of that first Greenspond winter—the worst winter of her life, Lily thought. Then she wondered about the winter after Charley died. No, the first winter of her marriage was the worst, the winter when she lived in that cold godforsaken parsonage on a barren island with a man she could never love. The winter she lost David’s child, and lay in her lonely bed plotting escape.