That Forgetful Shore (30 page)

She looks back at him, startled. It's a question nobody has asked her for years.

“You don't know, do you? But somebody knows. Ask Aunt Rachel – ask her what she remembers about my father, old Captain Josiah.” And he turns around and begins to cross back up the beach towards the South Side Road, leaving Triffie alone on the beach.

She looks back out at the waves, at that forgetful shore. She knows what Jabez is implying, though she's heard only the vaguest of rumours about Captain Josiah Badcock, dead many years now. What would Aunt Rachel say if she asked her? It's not something Triffie can think about now, but she tucks it in the back of her mind for another day. Another piece of the past, another secret forgotten and buried.

She stands not on the shores of the River Lethe, but on the more prosaic shores of Conception Bay, and she knows now that she would not drink the waters of forgetfulness if she could. For every bitter memory there's a sweet one: the thought of Will lying dead on a muddy field calls up the memory of his head bent over the Royal Reader, a smile quirking his mouth as he says, “Read it for me, Trif, it's better when you reads it.” The picture of Kit standing at the bottom of the stairs, her mouth twisted and angry, can't be separated from the memory of Kit and herself curled up in bed reading Shakespeare out loud. If she could erase the dark memories, she'd lose the bright ones as well.

She remembers Tennyson again – '
Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all
– and hopes the years will prove him right.

Triffie climbs up the beach and crosses the road, back to her children and her home.

Kit

Crossing the Atlantic
August, 1921

My dear Maggie,

I sit writing to you from a cabin on board the
Digby
, sailing across the broad Atlantic, bound for England. I find a thrill even writing these words, knowing that at last I am Outward Bound, setting forth upon such an adventure.

I think that our visit last summer was truly an
inspiration
to me, for I have taken some measure of Encouragement from seeing you, so Bold and Determined upon charting your own path in life, and realized that I must do the same. Things have happened to me that are out of my control – surely I would never have wished myself a Widow and an Orphan both, at the age of thirty! – but now I must take the good from the bad, and chart my own course. And so I have done, resigning my position at Spencer and applying to study for a B.Litt. at Oxford, just as we talked. So many things in my life have fallen out unfortunate, that I must always remind myself there have been a few Benefits as well, and take advantage of those.

The few benefits are not inconsiderable. Kit, though by no means a wealthy woman, knows herself fortunate to be as free from concerns about money as she is. Her St. John's house has been rented out, providing her with a steady income, and the house in Missing Point, left to her on her father's death two years earlier, has been sold to Ki Barbour. Thanks to Ben, she has a modest army pension, and thanks to Bishop Spencer School and her own frugal habits, she has savings from seven years of teaching. Not a fortune, by any means, but enough to make her an independent woman.

Nearly three years have passed since Ben's death. Two years since her father suddenly died of a heart attack. Kit hadn't expected this second blow. Her mother was the fragile one, the one expected to go first. Kit's plans had never included coping with a widowed mother.

She made her last trip to Missing Point the summer after the war, to bury her father, pack up her mother's things, and sell the house. Her mother, even more faded and fragile than before, made no protest about leaving the place where she was born, moving into St. John's with Kit. For the last year and a half of her life she lived with Kit, a querulous and often annoying presence in the house. Kit hoped that caring for her ailing mother would mold her own character, make her a better, more devoted daughter, but this has not happened. Still, she got used to the company, found herself more irritated by her mother in some ways and fonder in others. Kit cried when her mother passed away after a bout of pneumonia during the winter, but she'd be lying if she denied the renewed sense of freedom. No ties at all, now, and the future hers to do with as she likes.

The possibility of going to England woke something inside her that has been dormant since before the war. For the first time in years she feels excited, looking forward to a new adventure, as she was when she taught in Elliston or sailed into Halifax to go to college, or moved to St. John's to marry Ben.

It was Miss Shaw who gave her the idea of further study – and in Oxford, of all places. Miss Shaw attended Somerville College at Oxford in the 1890s, when the great university allowed women to study and write examinations, but not to receive degrees. In fact, the first women received degrees from Oxford just a year ago, an event Miss Shaw celebrated by returning, thirty years after the fact, to receive her own B.A. and M.A.

“The place is full of undergraduettes, as some people insist on calling them,” she reported to Kit upon her return. “Of course the higher degrees for women are still rare, but if you have the interest and the opportunity, there's no-one who would be better suited to the chance than you, Mrs. Porter.” She always calls Kit Mrs. Porter, as does everyone at Spencer and, Kit supposes now, people she meets in England will do as well. It seems strange that her brief married life has left such an indelible imprint on her as to change her name, erase the memory of Kit Saunders altogether.

After landing in Liverpool and taking the train to Oxford, she arrives on a late-summer morning hotter than she's accustomed to. She stands on the platform of the station in Oxford, two trunks beside her, smelling the air. It tastes and smells different from at home; she is really in another world now.

Somerville College is like a dream of Oxford, with its brick halls and ivy. Kit, a mature woman with an education and years of teaching behind her, finds it hard not to stare and gawk like a small-town girl on her first outing to the big city. Anything might happen here; she is in a place where dreams can come true. Not just the dream of a higher education, but the dream of a broader, and perhaps even a deeper, life.

By the time Kit undresses for bed in the tiny room assigned to her, the day seems to have lasted forever. She has met with the Dean, taken dinner in the Hall and been introduced to faculty and fellow students. The majority of them are, of course, girls taking their B.A., but she sat at dinner with four other women who are reading their B.Litt., two a little younger than she and one at least ten years older. Two of them are, like Kit, schoolteachers; the youngest, Miss Pennyweather, has just taken her B.A. and is staying on for further study. She intended to be married after the war, but her fiancé was killed on the Somme.

“We lost a great many men from my home on the Somme,” Kit says, “at Beaumont-Hamel. At home they call it the July Drive.”

“Oh, and where is your home?” Miss Pennyweather asks. “Your accent is hard to place – you're surely not Irish, are you?”

Kit, who believes she has erased all traces of her accent, explains where she comes from. Miss Pennyweather, despite her recent Bachelor of Arts, seems slightly confused about where Newfoundland is, but the other two women know all about it, and the older woman, Miss Stone, says kindly, “We heard a great deal about the bravery of the Newfoundlanders, during the war years.”

“They were brave, indeed,” Kit says, and, to get it over with, adds, “My husband was an officer with the Regiment; he fought at Gallipoli, on the Somme, and at Monchy and Gueudecourt.”

“I'm so sorry, my dear. Was he killed in France?” says Miss Stone.

“No, he was discharged after an injury in 1918, and died of the 'flu only a few weeks after his discharge.”

Now they are all feeling sorry for her, shaking their heads – one dark, one blonde, one grey. It can't be helped; her biography is short and simple, not intended to elicit pity, yet inevitably it will have that effect.

That night, before sleep, she sits on her bed looking out the window. She wants to write to someone about the day's adventures, but she has already written to Maggie and to Miss Shaw while on the boat, and mailed those letters upon arriving in Liverpool. The one person Kit really wants to tell the story of her sojourn in England to, the one person who would have burned with envy yet been truly glad for her, has not received a letter from her in nearly two years.

In that dark lonely time after Ben died, after she drove Triffie away, Kit composed one letter after another to her Posy, and tore them all up. She tried to put Triffie out of her mind, until she saw her again on that last visit to the Point. So strange to get off the train in Bay Roberts and not be met by Triffie, not step at once into that welcoming embrace. Trif attended Kit's father's funeral; she dutifully sent food over to the house as did most of the women of the community. She shook Kit's hand politely at the wake and said, “I'm sorry for your loss,” but Kit could find no words to bridge the gap, and it seemed Triffie had no interest in seeking such words.

Soon after that visit Triffie's cousin Betty left Kit's house to be married, and Kit, though she liked Betty, was relieved to have this last tie severed. Trif is cut off from her; her parents are dead; the house on the Point is sold. Whatever Kit's future contains, there will be little of the past in it, nothing to remind her of the place she grew up, the people who were once her whole world.

Kit opens her trunk and finds her going-away gift from Miss Shaw: a leatherbound blank book. Kit has not kept a diary since she was twelve years old: she realizes now that she poured so much reflection into years of letters to Triffie, that she needed no other outlet.

Now she turns to the first clean page and pauses with her pen above the paper. How to begin? She cannot write “Dear Diary” or “Dear Journal” like a schoolgirl. She sits with pen in hand until the urge to write, “Dear Posy,” passes. Then she begins, without preamble or heading:

Today I arrived in Oxford, “that sweet city with her dreaming spires.” If the spires are truly dreaming, I cannot tell, but I have been dreaming for years, all my life perhaps. What could be more surely a fulfillment of dreams than to be here, a student at Oxford University? Nothing. Which leaves only one question – how does one live within a dream fulfilled?

Triffie

“I SEE THE Church of England minister was here today,” Jacob John says, coming in with an armload of wood for the stove. Trif is putting supper on the table, dishing up beans onto plates Katie has already laid out.

“Wasn't the first time, won't be the last,” Trif says. “Katie, get the bread out of the warming oven and get your brother in out of the porch, make him wash his hands.”

“I'll go get him,” Jacob John says. He asks nothing more about the minister's visit; he must have met Reverend Spence on the road.

Since replacing good old Reverend White, the new minister comes every so often to reason with Triffie, to try to make her see sense and give up on the Holy Spirit, just as his predecessor used to try to make her give up the Sabbath, though Reverend Spence shows far greater fervour than Reverend White ever did in trying to correct her supposed heresies.

Sunday nights, now, whenever Jacob John can spare her and the pony, Triffie drives over to Clarke's Beach for the meetings there. Pastor Garrigus, a woman preacher from St. John's, came to Clarke's Beach to hold a revival. A congregation has sprung up there of people who, like Triffie, have received the baptism of the Spirit. Now that she's had a taste of real worship, worship with hands and voices raised as high as they can go, speaking in tongues and dancing in the aisles, she can't do without it. Hard to confine herself to the staid rhythms of the Prayer Book or the earnest Bible studies at the Adventist Church. Since winter closed in it's been harder to get to Clarke's Beach, though two weeks ago she caught a ride in Eliza and Bertha Dawe's sleigh and stayed over Sunday night with Aunt Orpah Dawe.

Her association with the Holy Rollers, as Jacob John calls the Pentecostal believers, has caused a bit of talk around the Point, and it certainly seems to trouble Reverend Spence. Reverend White had known Triffie for years and after arguing with her a few times about the Sabbath and the state of the dead, he gave up and accepted her as she was. But this new minister feels an obligation to do something about a woman who helped raise up the Seventh-day Adventist Church and now worships with the Pentecostals, yet still holds her influential position on the Church of England Women's Association.

Today he came to explain to her that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, as described in the book of Acts, were only intended for the spreading of the gospel in apostolic times, and were not for the Church today. Triffie gave him back as good as he got – few Anglican ministers can quote Scripture to beat Trif Russell – and eventually he gave up on the Bible study and launched into a diatribe about Miss Garrigus and the other Pentecostals, and the woman minister Miss Guy who was left behind to shepherd the flock in Clarke's Beach. His diatribe degenerated into a complaint about how fewer people were coming out to church since the war, which trailed off into a whine about the difficulty of raising money for poor relief. With Christmas approaching people expect the Church to do something for the poor, but the money simply isn't there.

“Now, 'tis not that hard, Reverend,” Trif says. “We need something like a sale of work. The children are having their pageant at the school before Christmas – why don't I talk to Mr. Bishop about putting off a sale the night of the concert? I'm sure he won't mind, and then I'll talk to some of the women and see what they can contribute. I'd say a nice few people would buy little things for Christmas gifts, and then we'll use the money, and maybe some of the goods that don't get sold, to make up a few boxes for the families that need it.” By the time he left, the minister was calling down blessings on her name, forgetting that he'd come to warn her away from dangerous heresies.