A Sudden Sun Page 6

  Grace said she would, indeed, come.

  “I work with some very interesting people in New York, you know,” Mrs. Parker said. “Oh, I’m not the one to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty like you. I chair committees, sit on boards, raise funds, that sort of thing. Ladies devoted to good works—men dismiss us, but the fact is there’s very little good works that would get done without ladies. So much suffering in the war, but so much here at home, too! Newfoundland seems a simpler, finer place, but I know—I remember—there’s hardship here too. So, what do you think of Lloyd George?”

  Grace felt like she was being given an oral examination in school by a very distracted and scatterbrained mistress who had forgotten to tell her what the subject of the test would be. Fortunately, Grace did have opinions on the subject of the British prime minister, and was able to gather them. The conversation broadened, then, like a stream widening out into a pond, taking in the whole group, and Grace had no more private conversation with Mrs. Parker until the guests were leaving. Her mother’s old friend turned to her again at the door and said, “Expect an invitation from me within the week, unless poor Papa takes a sudden turn for the worse. Just you alone, so we can really have a proper talk.”

  Late that night, when the guests had gone and her grandfather and Daisy were in bed, Grace slipped out of her bedroom and climbed the staircase to the third floor. Grandfather and Daisy only used the first two floors of the three-storey house; they had given Grace what used to be the spare bedroom across from theirs. Annie, the maid, went upstairs once a week to dust but otherwise the top floor was unused, furniture shrouded with sheets so the rooms were like ghosts of rooms. Grace had not been up there since she was a child and had played hide-and-go-seek with Charley in the old house. Now she went slowly up the stairs, thinking of Abigail Parker telling her she was just like Lily in spirit, and of Daisy saying Lily had “fine ideas” once. What kind of ideas?

  She didn’t know which of the old rooms was which. Even when her mother was young, would they have needed so many rooms? Lily had been the only surviving child, two others having died young of diphtheria. Had they had a cook or maids who slept in these upper rooms? One might have been a guest room, since the spare room on the second floor used to be Grandfather’s study. And this room—this must have been Lily’s bedroom, Grace thought, as she pushed the door open.

  A broad bay window looked down on Queen’s Road and the huddled shades of two wingback chairs flanked it. A mirror over the dressing table was unshrouded and thick with dust. Annie was not being particularly diligent, then, about dusting. And why should she? Grace stood in front of the mirror, seeing a greenish, distorted picture of herself—the old mirror, the dust, moonlight filtering in through the blind windows. Was she really the living image of Lily? People said so, but Grace had never been able to see it.

  This could not, after all, have been her mother’s room growing up, not this exact room, for Grace remembered her grandfather saying he had had to rebuild the whole house after the Great Fire, and Lily must then have been—Grace counted backwards—about nineteen, as old as Grace herself was now. So this room, if it was Lily’s, must have been hers after the fire, in the new house.

  She pressed the light switch and a dim bulb flickered to life. Grace folded back the sheet that covered a small dressing table. A silver comb and brush set sat on top of a lace doily. One drawer was empty except for sachets of potpourri. The one below that held ribbons and gloves. At the bottom of the drawer, a tiny key. But the dressing table had no locked drawers.

  On the other side of the room, similarly shrouded, was a rolltop desk with one locked drawer. Not much of a system for hiding secrets, Grace thought—a locked drawer with the key just across in the dressing table. But perhaps there were no secrets in there, after all. Only things Lily had forgotten, things like the comb and brush that she had not deemed worth taking with her when she left home as a bride.

  The key fitted the lock, the drawer slid open, and sure enough, it contained little except newspapers and clippings. Several copies of a paper called the Water Lily, with articles circled and words underlined. Clippings from the Telegram, the Herald, the Gazette—accounts of the Great Fire, accounts of attempts by the WCTU to pass a temperance law. Grace spread them all out on the bed, wondering if these were indeed her mother’s youthful papers. Handbills from meetings promoting Votes For Women? Grace read through one: In Newfoundland today a woman who manages her own business can have no vote, no voice in elections—yet the most incapable man in her employ may do so. And every word still sadly true in the year of our Lord 1919, she thought.

  Had Lily once been a suffragist? She certainly had no sympathy for that cause now. Grace remembered her mother glancing at a newspaper article last year when women in Canada got the franchise. “They say it’s only for the wives and mothers of soldiers while the men are away at war, but of course they won’t give up power once they’ve had the taste of it,” Lily had said.

  “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.

  L Dearest —. Sorry for everything. It is never too late

  to change your mind. Or rather, soon it will be too

  late—for you, that is. I put no address on the envelope

  but you can find me at Mrs. Tulk’s boarding house,

  642 President Street. Please come.

  – D.

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

  Lily

  CHAPTER SIX

  ABIGAIL 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:

  DINED WITH YOUR FATHER AND WIFE STOP IMAGINE DAISY GILL MISTRESS OF YOUR FATHERS HOUSE BUT SHE RISES TO THE OCCASION STOP MET YOUR DAUGHTER STOP SPLENDID GIRL AND A FINE YOUNG SUITOR STOP WILL TAKE HER UNDER WING STOP ARE YOU COMING TO TOWN STOP.

  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 inevitab
le 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 en
tered 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.