Burden of Memory (11 page)
Charles sputtered. Kyle put his hand onto Dave’s arm. “Let’s finish our breakfast, eh?” He whispered something that Elaine couldn’t hear and pushed Dave backwards. It was gentle shove but it threw the other man off balance.
“Time to be going,” Rachel trilled in a cheerful voice as false as a politician at an all-candidates debate. “Thank you so much for the wonderful breakfast, Moira. I’m pleased to see you looking so well.”
The group moved as one toward the French doors leading onto the deck. Willow was confused at the sudden change of atmosphere, but she bobbed along behind.
“Please come visit again, Willow,” Moira said. “How about dinner tomorrow night? We’ll have lots of leftovers because all my family will be gone.” She grinned at Charles, the edges of her sharp brown eyes turned up like those of a particularly malicious cat.
“Okay, that’ll be great. I love turkey.” Karen grabbed Willow’s arm and yanked the child out the door.
Dave followed, his eyes locked with Amber’s until he was forced to turn away to concentrate on keeping his footing.
“Really, Moira,” Charles said at last, when the footsteps had descended the wooden stairs and faded from earshot. “Why on earth are you encouraging those people?”
“I like those people,” Moira said. “Elaine, please go to the kitchen and thank Lizzie for making such an excellent effort with absolutely no notice.”
Elaine rose to her feet. Moira sat in her wheelchair, head high and chin defiant; Charles glowered at her from his impressive height.
“They’re not to be trusted,” he said. “Look at their hair and the way they’re dressed. Why, that white boy was quite insolent.”
“Hardly. He merely made a statement of fact.”
Megan and Ruth flattened themselves against the wall as Elaine passed. The sound of two strong voices arguing followed her down the hall.
***
Elaine stood in front of her bedroom mirror, watching herself as she slipped on her one pair of precious gold earrings. This was the night to dress to the nines in her clinging black cocktail dress, stockings, and dangerously high stilettos. The party clothes were clingy and highly uncomfortable after months spent in the freedom of nothing but jeans, running shoes, T-shirts, and loose sweaters. She tugged at her pantyhose in disgust. She also hated wearing the high heels, but she did feel wonderfully sexy in them.
Nothing was going right. The post of the left earring fell out of her clumsy fingers and hit the floor, forcing her to her knees (mindful of the fragile pantyhose) to scramble for the lost object amongst the grain of aged wood. Finding it, she struggled back to her feet and faced herself, once again, in the mirror.
She tried not to think about last Thanksgiving. But trying not to think is a Herculean task, far beyond the capabilities of mere mortals. She remembered being told as a child that one could not think of nothing, and, determined to prove them wrong, she lay flat on her back in her neat bed beside her massive collection of stuffed animals, trying hard to think of nothing.
This was exactly the same. An exercise doomed before it began.
They had gone to Ian’s parents, as usual. Her husband’s parents lived in a beautiful old home in Rosedale, the best part of Toronto. The turkey was overcooked, as usual, the stuffing as dry as dust, the gravy the consistency of colored water. As usual, Mr. Benson was three sheets to the wind before his guests even rapped the copper knocker that graced the old oak door. All that was missing was the face of Jacob Marley on the knocker itself.
She suffered through the horrible meal, the boring conversation of traditionalist males, and the empty, vicious gossip of their wives. Elaine smiled and tried to be friendly, daring to offer the weakest, slightest, most hesitant political disagreement in a charming manner.
Mr. Benson (she could never bring herself to call him “dad” as he always insisted, in his drunken, leering, drooling-all-over the-both-of-them manner) finally drove everyone out the door, as usual, while Mrs. Benson pressed aluminum foil-wrapped leftovers on her daughters-in-law.
“God, how perfectly awful,” Elaine said, kicking off her shoes the minute they stepped through the door of their condo. The dog ran to greet them, restless after an evening spent alone. Elaine ruffled the black and white fur in a heartfelt greeting and walked straight into the kitchen to toss the aluminum packets into the trash.
Ian stood in the doorway, watching her. “I don’t think it’s proper to waste good food that way.”
Elaine laughed, blissfully unaware of the abyss into which she was about to step. Ian hated his mother’s cooking even more than she did. “Good food, yea. But this ain’t it.”
She looked up, smiling. His face was tight and closed. They had been married for almost fifteen years and Elaine still loved him with something close to the passion she’d felt in those first heady years. If she saw him walking down the street, unaware that he was being observed, the look on his face and tightness of his body could still make her pulse speed up and her heart skip a beat.
Her body yearned for him. Perhaps not quite as much as in those intoxicating days when they were first together, but he could still switch her to a slow burn with just a look.
Lately his touch had been cool and regulated, as if he did the duty only because it was expected. For Elaine the last few months had passed in a daze of terror. Knowing that something was wrong, fearing the worst, afraid that if she confronted it, she would, like a character in a fairytale, somehow cause her nightmares to come true.
He looked into the fridge. “Wine?” He pulled out a half-emptied bottle of Bordeaux.
“No, thanks,” she said, the words dry in her throat, desperate to escape to the safety of her bed.
But he said the dreaded words.
“We have to talk, Elaine.”
And so it ended.
The bottle of Bordeaux was followed by an excellent Cabernet Sauvignon, one that they had been saving for a special occasion. There would be no special occasion. Ian told her that he was leaving for Los Angeles; an offer had come through on his screenplay.
“This isn’t a good time for you to leave your work.” He buried his face into a dime-store glass brimming with expensive wine. “Didn’t McMaster say he would be in touch with you soon?”
“Actually,” she said, standing at the window and watching the traffic move on the street below, “he said ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ Or words to that effect.”
A taxi pulled up to the building opposite and an elderly man climbed out, bent almost double over his walker. It was raining heavily, and the streets had a dangerous, slick look under the yellow glow of the streetlights. The taxi driver hustled out of his seat and offered a strong arm to assist the old man into his building.
“Things are pretty uncertain, down in L.A. I’ll go on ahead and check it out. Find a place to live, that sort of thing.” He babbled, a man not knowing how to come right out and tell his wife he didn’t want her any more. Their border collie, a beautiful, hugely intelligent dog named, not terribly originally, Lassie, crawled under the kitchen table. Not at all pleased at the tone of voices filling the room.
“You do that.” Elaine turned away from the window and tossed a full glass of wine down the sink. “I’ll sit right here, waiting by the phone for your call.”
“Elaine.”
“Yes, Ian. Are you about to change your mind and tell me that we’ll all go together? You and me and Lassie. Because that’s the only thing I want to hear.”
“No. I can’t say that.”
“Then don’t say anything. Please. But tell me one thing. Who are you going with? There has to be someone.”
His face still held a touch of memory of the hot summer sun. It was late, and a day’s worth of stubble added to his dusky good looks. He had the grace to appear embarrassed, which contributed to the charming, boyish look. Elaine almost cried at her thoughts. She should be screaming and yelling and hating him, not thinking how wonderfully attractive he was.
“I’m sorry, Elaine. It isn’t anyone you know. I met her over the summer. She’s a scriptwriter. She’s done some good stuff and she has contacts in L.A. She’ll be a great help to me.”
“Oh, I’m sure she will. Be gone in the morning, okay?”
A year later and Ian was long gone, the condo sold, fifteen years of possessions divided up, and the dog dead. Ian’s movie deal had fallen apart; his young girlfriend returned to Toronto in disappointment.
Elaine had surprised herself by the viciousness of her delight when a friend eagerly told her the news.
Moira continued to explore the countryside on her half-owned bicycle. The autumn of 1942 found her sailing between the hedgerows like a ship in full sail. Another winter of rationing and hard work, cold beds and colder baths approached; she was determined to enjoy the gentle sunshine and the soft cries of birds venturing off to warmer climes for as long as she could.
He came around the corner, from behind a thick hedge, going in the opposite direction, but his speed and absent-mindedness matched hers exactly.
They met at the bend in the road with a screech of inefficient brakes and cries of indignation. A flock of sheep watched the confrontation with idle interest.
She hit the ground, spiraling forward with enough force to knock the breath out of her. Her right knee caught the worst of it, and her body collapsed at the unexpected lack of support. Face first, Moira ploughed into the roadway.
“Good heavens. I’m so dreadfully sorry. Didn’t see you coming.” He dropped beside her prone body on one knee. “Can you move? I don’t quite know what I should be doing here.”
Moira laughed, surprising even herself. She rolled over and did a quick mental inventory of body parts. “Just a scrape, I hope. No need to call for assistance.” Unfortunately the knee was torn right out of her favorite pair of slacks. Couldn’t be helped. She tried to sit. The world swam before her eyes.
“I’m so dreadfully sorry,” he said again, slipping one arm under her back to offer a bit of support.
“You all right there?” Two Land Army girls leaned over a farmer’s fence. One of them carried a sharp pitchfork. Their overalls were caked in farm dirt, dust lined their eyes and their hair was trapped behind severe, plain scarves. Several sheep also gathered to offer moral support.
“We’re fine.” The young man waved one arm. “Just a bit of a bicycle collision, I fear.”
The girls nodded and returned to their work. The sheep kept watching. Moira smiled up at the young man.
He helped her to her feet, apologizing some more.
“It was my fault, perhaps more than yours,” she said. “I was so enjoying the beauty of the countryside that I wasn’t really watching where I was going.”
“Canadian,” he said, pointing an index finger.
Moira was about to reply that it wasn’t really such a great guess, their being in the vicinity of the Canadian Army Hospital, when he continued. “Ontario, I would say, probably Toronto. A comfortable childhood and some higher education. But an Irish mother for sure.”
She stared at him. “My mother has never been to Ireland.”
His face fell so much that she felt sorry for him, so she hastened to add, “But my grandmother was Irish, very genteel, and she raised me almost as much as my own mother did. So that was quite a good guess.”
He held out one hand. “Grant Summersland. I don’t mean to appear pompous, but it was no guess. Before the war I studied the language and dialect of the English peoples and I do rather feel the need to practice now and again.”
She shook his hand. “Moira Madison. I studied nursing before the war, and I have absolutely no need to keep practicing any more. In fact, I sometimes wish I could stop practicing.”
He wasn’t good looking. What with an overly long nose, and huge ears, he looked rather like a basset hound left outside for too long in bad weather. But he was close to six feet tall and extremely brawny. A huge basset hound. His cropped hair was so blond as to be almost white and his eyes were the color of blue cotton left too long out on the wash line, forgotten and faded. His well-patched tweed jacket and brown pants were much too snug on his bulky frame. Intelligence and sensitivity shone behind his eyes and Moira melted.
She also felt a trickle of warm moisture running down her cheek. She lifted one hand and touched tender skin. Blood dotted her fingers.
He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Please, take mine.”
It was clean, although badly wrinkled, and Moira scrubbed delicately at her aching face.
“Much better,” he said. “Keep the handkerchief, please. You may need it later.”
“I’ll wash it for you.”
“Let me help you get your bicycle back upright. It seems to be none the worse for the experience.”
“True. But I fear the same can’t be said for yours, Mr. Summersland.” Moira stuffed the bloody handkerchief into her pocket. “Your machine is a bit of a mess.”
He kicked the fallen contraption. The front tire had burst free of its moorings and lay at a strange angle.
Moira laughed. “We aren’t far from Bramshott. I’m sure that between us we can manage to carry your craft to some sort of repair shop.”
“I hope so.” His face was the very picture of despair, the basset hound imagery all the more striking. “I’m not terribly good at fixing things.”
“Well, I know someone in town who is. Come along, Mr. Summersland.”
Moira walked her bicycle down the country road while Grant Summersland dragged his. Her knee stung badly, but they walked slowly. The Land Girls and the sheep watched them leave. The girl with the pitchfork lifted one hand in greeting and turned to her companions with a word. They broke out in gales of laughter. Neither the sheep nor Moira understood the joke.
As they walked, they talked. Grant Summersland was a pilot in the RAF. He said it as if it were something to be ashamed of, instead of making him one of “the few” in the wonderful words of Mr. Churchill.
“I’m really more interested in linguistics. I was doing some incredibly interesting work with Professor Langley at Oxford. Do you know him?”
“Uh, I don’t believe so.”
“You see, my father was quite the fanatic about aircraft, long before anyone else saw the possibilities it offered. He built one of the first airplane factories in the world. I learned to fly not long after I finished drinking my mother’s milk.” He stopped abruptly and colored red. “I’m so sorry, Miss Madison. Please excuse me, that was quite indelicate.”
“I’m a nurse. I know what mother’s milk is for.” Moira smiled on the outside but inside she cringed. Not Grant Summersland’s fault, but why, she wondered, not for the first time, were women expected to give bloody birth, tend the dying aged and the hideously wounded young but at the same time know nothing about the facts of life?
“Therefore because I could fly already the Royal Air Force was dreadfully eager to take me on. It’s quite exciting, actually. But I think I’d be of more use cracking codes and the like. Don’t you agree, Miss Madison?”
“Moira, please. But if you and your fellows hadn’t stopped the Nazis last year and the year before that, would anything else you could have done matter?”
“Perhaps not.” He kicked at a rock in the roadway, his long thin face lined with seriousness. “Sometimes I wish I had been born in a time when one was allowed a life of indulgent study.”
Moira laughed so hard she had to stop walking. She liked this man whom she had met a less than an hour ago, very much indeed. “Do you think that Archimedes or Plato or Galileo lived a life of indulgent study?”
He chuckled. “No, they certainly didn’t. But I would like to live in a world in which one is allowed such a life.”
Moira smiled. “So would I.”
“But as we live on the planet Earth in the Year of Our Lord 1942, we have to take that which we are given. True?”
“Sad. But true.”
“And Hitler waits to be defeated, regardless of the movement of the planets or the progress of linguistics. So perhaps my father, who lived only to build aircraft, was right after all.”
“I think I would like your father. What is he doing these days?”
Grant’s face clouded over and Moira knew the answer before it was voiced.
“1938. A routine flight. Good weather, a first class aircraft, nothing too experimental. Pure bad luck. You have nothing, if you don’t have luck.”
“How true.”
“Particularly for a pilot.”
The edges of town and the Canadian Army General Hospital came into view. They stopped walking.
“I like talking to you, Lieutenant Nursing Sister Moira Madison,” he said, the very picture of embarrassment.
“And I to you,” she replied, also caught in the grip of mortification. What should she do, what to say? Would he ask to see her again? Oh, she hoped so. Would he invite her to a church supper to meet his sainted wife and aged mother? Let the earth open up under her feet.
But he only stood in the roadway and smiled awkwardly.
“Moira, there you are.” A group of her fellow nursing sisters descended on her out of the long shadows of the approaching evening. They were gaily dressed in their best civilian dresses and hats, hair combed and curled, perhaps a bit of lipstick carefully applied. Jean stepped forward; she had appointed herself the head of their group.
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere. We’re off to town. There’s to be a dance and Matron said that we can all go. She’ll be there, of course, in full battle armor. We can only hope she’ll be taken desperately ill and rushed off for immediate surgery. But who is this young man you have here?”
A man on the loose. Jean smiled with all the warmth of a shark. The rest of the women either giggled and held their hands in front of twittering mouths or tossed their hair at Grant.
He visibly cringed under the force of their attention.
“I’ve had a bit of a mishap,” Moira said. “And I really would like to go for a nice wash and maybe a nap. You won’t miss me for a moment, will you?”
The women exchanged glances. “I guess not,” said Jean. “Perhaps you could come on later.”
“Perhaps I will.”
Moira and Grant continued pushing their bicycles down the road. They came to the edge of the camp and Moira mounted her bicycle.
“Thank you for walking me back. There’s a shop as you come onto the main street where I’m sure they can fix your bike. It’s a bit late so they may be closed, but no doubt you can leave it in the yard and they’ll know what is needed.”
“Will do. Thanks again. Moira. That’s a beautiful name.”
“My mother loved all things Irish,” she said as an explanation.
It was getting late, the sun reluctantly falling into a carrot sky.
Moira sighed, deeply. Grant watched her, shy and afraid. She knew she had to make the next move.
“This is where I live. I had better go on in. I’m late and it sounds as if they have been missing me. But please do come and visit one day, soon.”
He grinned from one flapping ear to the other. “I would love to. Thank you.”
“Good day.”
“Good evening.”
He wrote to her the next day. A simple note, explaining that he had enjoyed meeting her and that the mechanic in town, retired from Grant’s father’s aircraft factory, was sure he could have the bicycle back into shape in no time. His leave had been cancelled and he had to return to his unit. He would write again.
And he did. He wrote regularly, long letters in his cramped, nearly impossible to understand handwriting. Nothing about the war or news of his fellow pilots but full of his hopes and dreams, and before long she could read his handwriting as easily as that of her own mother. Several times a week, she wrote back. The Battle of Britain was over, but even so he had a dangerous job, and she tried not to worry.
Moira threw herself into her work. She thought of Grant Summersland often, and every time the memory of his awkward, smiling face popped up she made the effort to push him out of her realm of consciousness. And every time she failed. She kept his letters hidden at the bottom of her dresser, folded neatly under her rough underwear.
