A Sudden Sun (5 page)

Grace thought about Charley’s grave. “I never really wanted to go on a Grand Tour,” she said. “I mean, I want to see the world, but…I can’t imagine myself as a lady of leisure, just touring around for the pleasure of it.”

“I know, it seems a bit…idle-rich, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, exactly. I’m not rich, and even if I were I wouldn’t want to be idle.”

He laughed. “Very little danger of you ever being idle, I’d say.”

“I suppose I’ll take that as—a compliment?”

“That’s how I meant it.”

The train whistle blew. Jack took her hand as he helped her back onto the train. Grace took down the picnic basket Aunt Daisy had packed for them. Bread Daisy had baked herself—the maid was not allowed to turn her hand to bread—cold sliced ham and apples and a little jar of rhubarb jam. How simple and orderly it was, Daisy’s way of caring for others. A woman’s way, anyone would say.

At Shoal Harbour in mid-afternoon they waited on the platform for the branch line to Bonavista. On this last leg of the journey a stout older man settled into the seat across the aisle and nodded at them as he settled his bags and packages around him.

“Going to Bonavista, Captain? Miss?” the man said, taking off his hat.

“Catalina,” Jack said.

“Of course, of course.” The man took his seat, leaned forward a little and squinted at Jack. “Oh, you’re Zeke Perry’s young fellow?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for your service, young man. The Empire owes everything to young men like yourself. And,” he turned to Grace, lifted his bowler hat again, “to your brother. If I’m not mistaken you must be Reverend Collins’s daughter.”

“Thank you, sir.” Grace searched her memory, trying to place the man. “Judge Hickey?”

“Very pleased to meet you young folks,” the judge said. He turned back to Jack then and began quizzing him about whether Newfoundland could maintain the Regiment as a standing army in peacetime. Grace went back to staring out the window as miles of rock and barren rolled past.

When she glanced at Jack again he was deep in conversation with the judge. Jack Perry had always been handsome—all the Perry boys were good-looking—but with the added maturity and muscles earned overseas she thought he was fine-looking indeed. His
ice-blue eyes, fixed on the older man, crinkled around the edges when he laughed: the few lines in his young face only made him more attractive. Just then he glanced over at her, and she looked away, feeling her cheeks flush.

As the train swayed and rolled along the track and the conversation plunged deeper into military matters, Grace dozed. A loud snore woke her, and she startled to see Jack laughing at her. “I must be a wonderful conversationalist,” he said. “I’ve put the both of you to sleep, you and Judge Hickey.”

“I was wide awake when it was just you and me.”

“And now it’s the two of us again.” They were speaking in whispers, not wanting to disturb the older man who snored so loudly it seemed people in the second-class car must hear him.

She felt a nudge against her ankle, looked down to see the polished toe of Jack’s boot. His smile suggested it hadn’t been an accidental nudge, and he kept his toe there, gently brushing against her ankle. She lifted the hem of her skirt just a little, baring the top of her boot. Her skirts still covered her leg but still it felt as if she were being daring, even immodest, here under the closed eye of the distinguished magistrate.

Jack shifted in his seat, leaned a little forward as if to talk quietly, but he said nothing. Now his lower leg was pressing against hers, heat travelling through layers of fabric rather than contained by boot leather. It felt as if a trail of that heat shot up Grace’s leg, coiling in her belly and spilling into her most intimate parts, then rose through her chest up to flush her cheeks.

When the silence seemed unbearable Grace said, “You said you can’t see me as a lady of leisure, but what about you?”

“Well, I can’t see myself as a lady of leisure either.” He spoke lightly, but his leg still pressed against hers.

“You know what I mean! Isn’t that what everyone asks when a soldier comes home? What are you going to do now?”

Jack looked out the window. “Did I ever tell you my mother had dedicated me to be a missionary? I was the son she was giving to God, either as a minister or a doctor, to serve the heathen overseas.”

She nodded. Mrs. Perry had never been shy of talking about her ambitions for her children. Fred and Earl would take over the family business. Bill was to be a schooner captain. Jack, once it became clear how clever he was in school, would be either a minister or a missionary doctor. “When I was overseas,” he went on, “working in the field hospital—well. I won’t talk about it. Some days I thought if I got out alive I’d never want to see another wounded body again. Other days I thought if God spared me I’d do exactly as Mother wanted and go to the mission field. Now—well, I’ll go back to McGill in the fall and finish my training. Then—who knows? None of it seems very real right now. Nothing but—” he dropped his eyes, smiled, and reached forward and took her gloved hand as an explosive snore ripped through the carriage. “Nothing in the world but you, me…and of course the magistrate.”

L
ILY KNEW THE story as soon as the two of them stepped off the train. Any fool would know. Elizabeth Perry’s son in uniform, giving his hand to Grace to help her down onto the platform. That was the picture everyone wanted to see this spring. The boys coming home from war; the girls who had waited. There would be half a dozen weddings all around the harbour this summer.

Lily hated him, of course, for being alive when Charley was dead. When Charley was brave and signed up to go overseas Jack had stayed behind, listened to his mother who was too much of a coward to give a son to her country. Had Lily wanted to beg Charley not to go, beg him to stay home? Of course she had. But she knew his duty, and her own. It was what you raised a boy for: to go out into the world, even to war if he was needed, to spend his life or lay it down. If the world were arranged with any justice, the mothers who allowed their sons to go to war would have them back safely, while the cowards, women like Elizabeth Perry, would beg their sons to stay home and eventually lose them in the mud of Flanders. But Lily knew it was vain to hope for justice.

“Do you think young Perry wants to marry our Grace?” the Reverend asked Lily that night. They generally took a cup of tea together in the evening, before Lily went up to bed. The Reverend would stay up and read for another hour or so, then retire to his own bed in the room adjoining his study. Sometimes they drank their tea in silence; more often her husband made an attempt to initiate a conversation he thought she might be interested in. He usually misjudged.

“Didn’t you see him—see the both of them?” Grace had come home from the station with her parents, dropped off her bag and announced that she was invited to tea at the Perry house and would be home later in the evening—by nine at the latest, she’d said. “They look like they’re head-over-ears in love with each other,” Lily added.

He glanced at her over the teacup, answering her tone rather than her words. “And you think that is a misfortune.”

Lily shrugged. “What do you think? Have you ever known any good to come of anyone falling in love? Grace had enough sense not to throw herself away on young Abe Russell last year when he came sniffing around, but if she imagines she’s in love it’ll be a different story.”

It was a story with many endings, Lily thought: the broken heart, the tarnished virtue, or perhaps the so-called happy ending, the wedding. Only the wedding was not the ending. The wedding led to the long years of housekeeping and one baby after another, and no matter which way it ends Grace would be ground down, damaged, broken. Everything Lily tried to spare her.

“You think it would be better, then, for her to make a sober choice? Should she marry some suitable young man from a good family, without any—er, any emotional attachment?”

The Reverend’s tone and glance could not be construed as anything but a challenge. Lily clattered her cup in the saucer, some
unfinished tea sloshing over the edge. “To be quite honest, I’ve not known that sort of marriage to have much success either,” she said. “Good night.”

Upstairs, she took down her hair, put on a nightdress, and got into bed, but she did not sleep. Sometimes, these last two years since Charley died, she slept far too much. Other times sleep eluded her. She would lie awake through the night, turning the pages of a magazine without retaining anything, watching the moon cross her window.

Those times, the sleepless times, could linger for days, up to a week, until finally, exhausted, she would sleep through a whole night and long into the next day. She thought of taking a few drops of laudanum but pushed the thought away. She had gone to see a doctor on her last trip to St. John’s, when she could hardly sleep at all in those terrible months after the news had come about Charley. She didn’t like or trust the Bonavista doctor, and didn’t want anyone in Trinity Bay knowing she’d seen a physician. The doctor in town had said laudanum would settle her nerves and help her sleep. But Lily prided herself on a clear mind, on being beholden to nothing and no one. She would never be a ghost in her own house. She would never be Eleanor Hunt.

Doctors! She thought of that Perry boy, strutting around like a peacock, going to university to become a doctor, coming back from France without a scratch on him. How could Grace hang on such a boy, cling to his arm as if he were worthy of her? Grace, Lily’s only remaining treasure, would go away with that boy if he so much as whistled for her. She would be hurt and used and shattered, and what could Lily do about it?

Lily didn’t remember getting out of bed but she was pacing, pacing on the rag rug that protected her feet from the bare pine boards. She had made that rug in the first year of her marriage. She had torn the strips of fabric and hooked them through the brin when
her eyes were a blur of tears. The rug was a promise, more of a vow than the words she’d said during the wedding ceremony. With every stitch she swore to God she would be a good minister’s wife, that the mistakes of the past would be shredded and torn beyond recognition, worked into a pattern that would be, if not beautiful, at least useful. Lily had hooked a good dozen rugs since then but when she walked on this worn old rug she could still feel the bitterness seeping up through the soles of her feet.

Somewhere in the house, a door closed. The girl, Elsie, had finished her work and gone home two hours ago; she lived with her parents down in the harbour rather than up in the manse. The Reverend had gone up to his study. He might have gone downstairs for something—but the steps she heard were too light to be his. It must be Grace home from the Perrys’ house. Lily glanced at the clock: quarter to ten.

Grace was home, going to the kitchen. It was an old habit of hers from when she lived at home. Whether she was at home or out in the evening, Grace would always make herself a cup of tea or cocoa in the kitchen before going up to bed. She was a night-owl and liked to sit up late, usually reading. Years ago, when Grace was young, Lily would go down to join her in the kitchen for a cup of tea. Those ought to have been easy times, warm and companionable. She heard other women talk of sharing confidences and secrets with their daughters and wished Grace would confide in her, but most of her memories of those late-night cups of tea and cocoa ended with harsh words, sometimes tears, Grace striding out of the room and up to bed offended. Lily’s good advice, the guidance she tried to offer, never failed to upset Grace.

These last two years, since Charley died, Lily hadn’t bothered anymore. When Grace was home she still went down to the kitchen for a mug-up at night but Lily left her to her own devices.

Now she was back home with a young man—maybe in love
with him. Surely it was for the first time. Lily could read her daughter, knew the language of her face and eyes and body. If Grace had ever been in love before, Lily would have known it. She had been alert for danger since the girl was fourteen.

Lily went downstairs to find Grace at the table, her hands cradled around the teacup. A little cup, with painted yellow roses, one of her favourites from childhood. The last of a service of eight, from Lily’s wedding china. Despite the circumstances of the wedding the Reverend’s mother, formidable old Mrs. Collins of Wesleyville, had ordered a full set of wedding china for her son and his bride. Over the years, various housemaids and Grace herself, as a young girl, had broken one cup after another, ’til only this lone survivor remained.

“Mother. Can I get you a cup? There’s still some in the pot.”

Now they sat at either end of the table, facing each other over teacups. Lily turned her cup—from a different set, bought later in their marriage—round and round in her hands, practicing sentences in her head.

“Has he asked you to marry him?”

“I—what?”

It seemed pointless to repeat the question. “Everyone thinks it’s very romantic, war brides, boys in uniform. But there’ll be many a girl sorry because she said yes hastily.”

“He—Mother, Jack hasn’t asked me anything. He’s only been back from overseas a few days.”

“Still and all there are plenty who’ll jump into it without thinking. I don’t want you to make that mistake. These boys who’ve been overseas—nobody knows what they’ve seen, what they’ve done.”

Grace looked down at her teacup as if by dropping her eyes she could hide her answer, but it wasn’t only in her eyes. It might as well have been inked on her skin. You’d have to have been in love like
that yourself, once, to see how clear it was written.

“We’re friends,” Grace said. “I told you, he’s only been back—well, since the day before yesterday.” She looked surprised herself, glancing at the calendar, as if she thought it had been much longer.

Two days
, Lily thought. And hours of that spent sitting on a train together. More than enough time. An hour was time enough; a moment, even.

“You always think you know best,” Lily said. “But you know the saying: Marry in haste…”

“I’m doing nothing in haste.” Grace set her teacup down in the saucer with a sharp clang.

“You never want to listen….”

“I never listen? Oh, that’s brilliant, coming from you. When have
you
ever listened to me?”

“When have you ever tried to tell me anything?”

Grace had never been one to confide, even as a little girl. She talked to her father if she talked to anyone, but they talked about opinions and ideas and things in the newspaper, not the kind of secrets a girl was supposed to share with her mother.

“Well perhaps I would, if I ever thought you’d listen instead of telling me what to do, or barring yourself up in your bedroom to cry over Charley!”

Silence. A sip and another clang of the teacup. Grace swiped at tears with the back of her hand.

“I beg your pardon,” Lily said. “I suppose there’s something wrong with me because I couldn’t just go on after Charley died, just forget about him like you and your father did.”

“You know I never forgot, or Father either. But I’m still here. My life is going on, just like his would have, and I don’t want to miss it all!”

“Big dreams, fine words, grand ambitions. I know what you want—but you can’t have it. The world isn’t like that, not for a girl
anyway. Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

“How would you know? If you’d ever
had
any dreams or ambitions perhaps you’d understand mine—but all you ever wanted was to have your only son back, your favourite child…”

Now Grace was crying full-on, her voice trembling, reduced to the language of childhood quarrels.
You love him more than you love me
. Until Grace bore a child herself she’d never understand, Lily thought—it wasn’t about
more
; it was different. Loving a son was so much simpler than loving a daughter. It was a straightforward thing, like shooting an arrow and watching it fly. Loving a daughter was a tangle like embroidery, weaving one thing in and out of another, the whole thing wrong-side-up and looking like a mess until it was done and you saw the pattern.

Of course, Lily had never shot an arrow. She’d done plenty of embroidery, though.

She finished the last of her tea, watched her daughter cry. When had she last held Grace on her lap, put an arm around her? Five? Six? Not at seven, no. Grace already had her reserve then, her haughty spirit. Even younger than that, at three years old, she would squirm and pull away if Lily tried to hold her on her lap.

Lily stood up. “I’m going up to bed.” She reached over the table and picked up the little yellow-rose teacup. “Look, you put a spall in the rim. That’s no good now—and it’s the last one of that set.”

She went upstairs, closed her door, and listened for the sound of Grace’s footsteps. When she heard them coming upstairs, she let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. Grace was wilful and headstrong but she had always been, in the strictest sense, a good girl, and Lily could not really imagine her going out into the night, running away from the manse, seeking out Jack Perry in the dark spring night. Except that any girl might do the unexpected, if she imagined she were in love.

Lily Hunt Collins had been afraid as long as she could remember, of too many things to count. A particular kind of fear came with having children: she remembered the years of thinking of everything that could go wrong in the birthing bed and afterwards. Cot death, and diphtheria, and whooping cough; the myriad terrors of childhood. She had thought the fear might retreat when they grew up but if anything it became sharper. She imagined Grace in a boy’s arms, embracing, yielding, then lost and abandoned and alone. Images of Grace in trouble turned easily to images of Charley dead on a French battlefield, lying in a cold grave far from home, and Lily sat on the edge of her bed and put her hands over her face. She was not such a fool as to think that because you had suffered one terrible loss, God would spare you a second. She learned long ago that was a lie.

Turning back the covers, she thought of the laudanum bottle. Perhaps just tonight, a little dreamless sleep.