A Sudden Sun (31 page)

S
HE STAYED IN bed for a week. When the midwife came again she told her to get up. “You’re not the first woman to miscarry and you won’t be the last. It’s a hard thing but there’s harder things than this, you mark my words. You take to your bed and you might never get out of it again.” Her words were harsh as sandpaper but Lily felt no urge to throw a cup at her head. She got up, dressed, began to move cautiously about the house.

She went back to church two Sundays afterwards. The ladies of the congregation showed a gentle mix of curiosity and sympathy. One older lady pulled her aside and said, “I used to have a terrible, terrible time at my time of the month when I was your age. The old granny, Mrs. Cuff’s poor mother-in-law that was, she used to make me a lovely tea to help me get through it. It will all be better once you haves a baby—it was for me.”

A baby. Because of course she would stay here, stay in Greenspond as the minister’s wife, bear him children. She had made a vow before God.

After dinner the Reverend went back to the church to teach
Sunday School. He wanted Lily to help with that when she felt better, to take a children’s class. These were things the minister’s wife was meant to do. He wasn’t merely taking a bride, he was hiring the other member of his team. They were to be like a pair of oxen yoked together, for what church—other than a papist one—could function without the minister’s wife?

When he was gone Lily went to his study and took down his strongbox. She searched through his desk ’til she found the key. He was not very good at hiding things, perhaps because it had never occurred to him that his wife might steal his money.

She counted out banknotes. Her passport was here in the strongbox along with his. She had never carried it herself; her father had given it to the Reverend with her other important papers, in case they travelled together someday. But how much did a steamer ticket to St. John’s cost? How much more, then, a ticket to New York? She had no idea. She counted out the money and sat with it in her hand, awash in the vast ocean of her own ignorance. She could not even run away because she did not know how much a steamer ticket cost, had never been on a journey on her own before.

And how could she sneak aboard the steamer, when everyone came out to see the passengers board, to put their mail and packages on board, to wish the travellers well? Who could ignore the minister’s wife setting foot on the boat? It was a long and tiresome journey: off the island of Greenspond itself, then on down the coast, stopping at every little port; everyone in Bonavista Bay would know that the Greenspond minister’s wife was leaving home. And on top of everything—oh, she had forgotten—it was January. No steamer service, no hope of escape, ’til spring.

She would not live until spring.

And yet she did. Her body, that resilient animal thing, recovered. She kept the door of her bedroom closed to him, telling him she wasn’t ready yet. She had read once, in a book, that until a man and
woman came together in the marriage bed it was not really a marriage, and could be annulled. Could that be true? And if it were, who would vouch for her, when her own father believed she and the Reverend had been like man and wife long before the wedding ever took place?

There was no one here to help her. No one in St. John’s either, yet when spring came—April, when the baby should have been born—she begged the Reverend to allow her to go home. “To visit,” she said. “I need to see my parents.” She did not even know if they would welcome her in the house, if she really were going home for a visit. She had written on the first mail-boat to tell them the baby had come early, and did not live. She had never seen it—did it even look like a baby? She pictured it with skin made of glass, so that everything inside could be seen.

“How long will you stay?”

“A week or two. Is that all right?”

“I don’t want you to be away too long. I feel you haven’t really settled here, Lily, and I need your help and support—around the house, and in the church. I feel you’re not happy here.”

She thought of throwing something at him again but she had been so good, so docile, all winter that he had surely written off that one incident as a moment of madness brought on by the strange mystery of a woman’s body.

He agreed to a fortnight in St. John’s. She waited ’til the morning the steamer left, when he was down at the church meeting with the Vestry, to steal the money from the strongbox and take her passport. She had asked around, in casual conversation, to try to get an idea from people of how much it cost to travel; she took more than she thought she would need.

When she got to St. John’s, she inquired about tickets to New York before she ever left the docks. She counted out her money there in the Furness-Withy office. She had only enough to go to Halifax,
with a little left over to hire a room for the night. The steamer left the next morning.

What was the good of going to Halifax, with hardly a cent to keep her when she got there? Not enough to stay for more than a night, nor to go further on the steamer, nor to buy a train ticket. Enough, perhaps, for a meal and room—and enough to send a cable.

The next day she stood on the deck of the ship, watching St. John’s slip away. She had spent the night in a room at the Crosbie hotel where the desk man had looked at her strangely, a young woman travelling alone. She kept her wedding band firmly on display, though she meant to drop it overboard into the sea on her way to Halifax.

The crossing was rough and Lily was sick as she hadn’t been sick since the earliest days of her pregnancy. It was hard to believe, now, that she had really been pregnant, had carried David’s child inside her for nearly six months before letting it slip away. Maybe her husband was right. It would be like it had never happened. She could have the new start he had talked about. Not with him, of course, and not in Greenspond.

“Lily! Is that you, Lily dear!”

The one thing she had gambled on was that she would not know anyone on the steamer. She had gotten from the harbour to the hotel and back again this morning without seeing anyone she recognized, and that was miracle enough, St. John’s being the town it was. But here was Jessie Ohman, of all people, under a magnificent feathered hat with her hands shoved into a fur muff, strolling about the deck. She was on her way to Montreal, where her husband had already settled and opened a business.

“And truth to tell, I’m not sorry to be leaving,” she confided to Lily as they stood in the bracing sea wind watching the grey waves roll past. “Newfoundland will always be home, but after the
barriers we’ve faced these last few years I’ll be glad to be moving to a more enlightened place. The women’s cause is much more advanced in Canada.”

Lily nodded, wondering what story she should spin for Mrs. Ohman about her presence on the ship. But Mrs. Ohman was doing her work for her: “Going to New York? Oh, you must be going down for Miss Hayward’s wedding, are you? How nice that you’re able to go. Did you get the card I sent for your marriage?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, I didn’t send out thank-you cards,” Lily said, aware of the enormous breach of etiquette she had committed.

“Ah well, I thought you must be very busy out there. It’s not an easy life, you know, my dear, but a minister’s wife can do so much good. It’s every bit as much a calling for her as for the minister himself. And I’m so glad, Lily, that you made a wise choice. I know it’s easy for young girls to get distracted by romantic notions, but in the end, nothing matters more than choosing a godly man.”

It was like the moment when she had thrown the cup at the Reverend—Lily’s hand moved as if it were its own creature, darting through the icy air to slap Mrs. Ohman’s smug round cheek.

Mrs. Ohman gasped, put her own hand to her cheek. “Lily! Whatever do you—are you all right, my dear?” Lily turned to go but Mrs. Ohman reached out and grabbed her upper arm. “Has something happened? Talk to me, Lily. Clearly you’re upset, your mind is unbalanced.”

“If it is, it’s all your fault!” Lily said, finding her voice, feeling as if she had been silent for months, for nearly a year, perhaps for her whole life. “What lies, what lies you told me! You told me a woman was the equal of any man, that we had the same rights as men, that all we had to do was stand up and demand those rights and that when we did so the Lord would bless us for doing His will! You told me those lies and made me believe them and you don’t even believe them yourself! Why did you let me believe they were true?”

She was howling now, crying all the tears she had locked inside since the night her child was born and died, or perhaps since the day she sold herself to Reverend Collins in return for respectability. Tears dried on her face in the wind before they had a chance to fall.

“My dear—you’re overwrought—you need to get down to your cabin, have a nice cup of tea, can we do that? Come, let’s go below.” Mrs. Ohman took Lily’s arm, steered her inside. “You mustn’t confuse these things—I do believe in the rights of women, but I also believe in the sanctity of Christian marriage. You mustn’t think, as some misguided women do, that if we assert our rights under the law, we throw off that Higher Law.”

Lily wrenched her arm from Mrs. Ohman’s and turned to face her. They were in a corridor now, a narrow passage leading to the cabins, and without the howling of the wind on deck it was likely people could hear her shouting, but Lily did not care. “They are right—they are, and you are wrong! Everything you taught me, everything you said about freedom and equality—of course it leads to all the rest. Free love and fallen women. If you don’t see that then you’re blind and short-sighted! Oh, what a fool I was. I believed it all, and now I’m paying the price, and God help me, I’ll be paying it every day of my life ’til I die!” She turned to run and this time Mrs. Ohman did not grab her arm or run after her. Lily found her cabin and locked herself inside and cried ’til her eyes and throat and chest burned, and she felt scooped-out and hollow. She heard a tap-tap at her door, but ignored it, and did not see Mrs. Ohman when the ship docked at Halifax.

When the porter had taken off her case and she had finished with the customs shed, Lily stood on the pier, watching the crowds of passengers depart. Everyone had some place to go, it seemed. Everyone had a place in the world except Lily Hunt. Lily Collins.
I am all alone
, Lily thought.

“Ma’am? Do you want me to call a cab for you?”

She had no money for a cab. She walked with her little case to a hotel near the station that didn’t look too expensive. Halifax—a different world, a foreign city. One that had not had to burn down and reinvent itself but had grown here solidly, uninterrupted by fire and disaster. She wondered what New York was like, or for that matter the rest of the world. Wondered if she would ever know.

She took a piece of paper from the hotel desk and wrote out the two messages she would bring to the cable station. She wrote and rewrote each of them, crossing out words, not just to save money but to find the right thing to say. Finally she finished them and read over both messages.

She sat with the two messages on the desk. She had no idea which one to send. Perhaps in the morning it would be clear.

T
HE PROW OF the steamer pushed a clean line through the dark grey water, foam falling away on either side. They were far enough out to sea that no land was visible anywhere; the illusion was of being on a ship headed on an endless journey. Grace stood on deck wrapped in a sweater and a blanket. Rome had been blistering hot and New York barely cooler. She had no winter coat with her.

“She wrote to tell me she was having a baby.” Grace could still hear David Reid’s words, see his hands laid flat on the table in front of her. A baby. Whatever she had imagined about her mother loving and leaving another man, she had never imagined this. Never imagined that Lily Hunt, thirty years ago living in her father’s house in St. John’s, had conceived a child out of wedlock.

She had been silent for a minute, then, more breath than speech, had said “Charley?” Her brother had been born in 1897, nearly three years after her parents’ marriage. He had been just short of his twentieth birthday when he died at Monchy. Which part of that was a lie—Charley’s birthdate or her parents’ marriage date?

But David Reid shook his head. “The baby died. A miscarriage,
I guess you’d say, or a stillbirth.”

“You—my mother—she was going to have a baby, and she miscarried?”

“That’s what Abby Hayward told me. The last I ever heard from your mother, after she told me she was pregnant, was that she was going to marry your father. I never got another letter, not a postcard nor a cable. It drove me crazy, wondering what had happened, so finally I looked up Abby and she told me.”

They had stayed another hour in the little restaurant. The waiter, who was also perhaps the owner, had brought them some sweet rolls, more discreet whisky for Mr. Reid and a cup of proper English tea for Grace, to banish the taste of the Turkish coffee. Stayed talking, even though immediately after Mr. Reid’s revelation Grace had thought she would get up and leave, that she couldn’t talk with him further. But it turned out that she could.

“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 meagre 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.