by R. M. Green
Then one blustery, grisly afternoon, Wendy bumped into Fraser. Literally. It was in the Tesco’s car park in Aldershot. Wendy was distracted, thinking about her latest painting which was refusing to cooperate and Fraser was in a hurry, dashing to pick up a few luxuries like chocolate, vitamins and decent shower gel which he would need in the coming months in Afghanistan. They sedately reversed into each other and as soon as each emerged from their respective car to apologise rather than remonstrate, they fell totally in love. Fraser was a sergeant in the parachute regiment getting ready to go off to fight in Helmand. He was due to leave in ten days and this was one of his final opportunities to do a bit of last-minute essential shopping. They chatted for an hour and a half in the car park and Fraser took Wendy to dinner the following evening. From that moment, they spent every spare, precious second they could together. The weekend before Fraser was due to leave, he managed to call in a few favours and get a pass out for 48 hours. They went to the New Forest and spent two days not seeing much beyond the bedroom of the little guesthouse. On the Sunday evening as they sat together in his car in front of the house where Wendy lived on the ground floor, the top story belonging to an often absent AA man, Fraser asked Wendy to marry him. She cried, laughed, kissed him and told him to come back safely from his tour of duty. Fraser looked crestfallen.
“What’s the matter?” laughed Wendy through her tears.
“You didn’t actually answer the question,” said Fraser mournfully.
Flinging her arms around his neck and covering his eyes, cheeks and lips with a thousand kisses, Wendy cried, “Each kiss is a thousand times yes, yes, yes!”
She stood on the pavement long after he had driven off gazing in the direction his car had gone and only went in when the chill of the evening finally found its way through the warmth of her glow. It was the last time she ever saw him. The shock of Fraser’s death in a friendly-fire incident two months later brought on the miscarriage.
She gave in her notice, went out to spend a few months with her father, who had just taken early retirement and had bought his dream villa in Portugal, paid the briefest of visits to her mother who told her to get over it and find herself another man, preferably one not engaged in a hazardous profession, and finally got a job as assistant head of the art department in a decent secondary school in Essex. She stayed there gathering dust, extra pounds on her waistline and a semi-regular series of weekend hangovers for a dozen years. She occasionally endeavoured to pull herself together; the spontaneous gym membership had been the result of one such attempt, but she gradually found herself sliding into middle age unloved and unloving. She never painted now and concentrated on encouraging the potential of her better students and nursing the less able ones to acquit themselves well enough for exams. Birthdays, Christmases and long summer holidays came and went and Wendy barely noticed their passing.
When her father died and left her the villa, she had thought of moving out there with her savings which amounted to quite a tidy sum as she hadn’t taken a foreign holiday in years and spent little money on herself save her packet of Silk Cut every other day, a decent bottle of wine or three at weekends, and as much ice-cream as she wanted. However, she decided against the move for no clear reason other than the seemingly oldest law of physics that inertia is the strongest of all forces.
Yet, a couple of years later, Wendy received a call from her former student whose father had the restaurant in Hampshire and suddenly felt very old as this young girl, as she remembered her, was now herself an art teacher in Devizes in Wiltshire. It was her first year out of college and she had spent a year teaching and saving up before intending to head off backpacking around the world in search of artistic inspiration and cheap hallucinogens. She was calling to tell Wendy that the head of the art department at her school was retiring and, if Wendy was interested, she would put in a good word with the headteacher as he was a golf buddy of her father’s. Three months later, Wendy took up temporary residence with the antisocial geography teacher and put in an offer on an old farm cottage in a village some four miles outside Devizes.
She had planned to do up the cottage and spend her time reading and painting again and to slide gracefully towards the age where it didn’t really matter anymore whether she shaved her legs every other day and where no one noticed if she wore the same outfit three days a week. The final proof would be when the other female teachers, and the wives of the male ones, were always nice to her since they no longer perceived her as a sexual predator or threat, a phenomenon which most art teachers appear, at some time or another, to have been suspected of.
And so, there she sat, nursing a cooling cup of coffee and a dull throb in her temples in her charming kitchen surrounded by packing crates and cardboard boxes feeling fat; closing in on fifty at an alarming rate and yet, surprisingly serene now that she had made up her mind to accept her fate. She had her eyes closed, partly against the pain in her inflamed brain and partly because she was trying to work out in her mind’s eye the detail for a painting she was working on, when there was a loud metallic clang as the hinge on the letter-box snapped shut. Simultaneously, Wendy started and winced as she felt the clang resonate around her skull amplified by a factor of ten and rising as steadily as she could from her chair, she wandered into the hall and up to the pile of post on the doormat. It wasn’t much of a pile, just a leaflet from the local supermarket boasting that its doors would be open until 10pm on Christmas Eve (Wendy felt sorry for the check-out girls, forced to stay at work like so many Bob Cratchits), an envelope containing a ‘Happy Holidays and Best Wishes’ card from the school’s board of governors (no signature) and a small, very worn and dirty ivory coloured postcard decorated with what seemed like a sprig of holly and some faded blue and red silk-like material on it.
Puzzled, Wendy turned the card over and saw it was addressed to the cottage but to a Miss Amy Hobbs. The day and month of the date were smudged but there was no doubt over the year, 1916. Taking the card carefully between her hands as she would have handled a hot casserole dish, Wendy carried it over to the kitchen window and read it. Then she read it again and again until the words blurred before her eyes and she had to be careful not to add her tears to the single drop shed by the Scottish nurse onto the ink ninety years before. She suddenly thought of Fraser, killed in a faraway land two days after his last email. Of course, she didn’t know what had become of this Walter or his dearest Amy but she suddenly felt moved to find out. She felt that receiving this card, just at that moment in her life, was almost a sign of something. Wendy didn’t believe in fate or destiny or God or anything more spiritual than a few vague notions that inspiration came in the unlikeliest of forms and from the most bizarre sources sometimes. But she knew she was in Amy’s cottage and that Amy had had a sweetheart who was away in a war and who had loved her and thought of her. For Wendy, that was inspiration enough to discover more. It would have to wait until after Christmas, she reasoned. Then she would go to see the vicar and introduce herself (although she admitted that she would be a very inactive parishioner. She couldn’t actually remember the last occasion she had been inside a church) and see if he could help her look at the parish records. In the meantime, she felt sure she could find the regiment from the blue and red ribbon on the postcard with a little help from Mr Google. Her hangover now disappeared, Wendy set the postcard down on her easel which was about the only furniture she had unpacked apart from the bottle opener, a single wine glass, two coffee mugs, one of which was currently serving as her makeshift ashtray and a few odd plates and saucers, and went and took a long hot shower. Padding back into the kitchen, now wrapped in a ridiculously fluffy white dressing gown (nicked from the Grand Suite cabin on the QEII by her dear old dad), Wendy cleared the table and wiped it down and taking the postcard, a sketch pad and a charcoal crayon from their temporary resting place on the easel, made a few brief sketches of the card both front and back and found herself actually looking forwar
d to Christmas for the first time in years.
***
Over three thousand miles away, in Toronto, Amy’s great grandson, Keith, was having difficulty sleeping. He often did the night before taking a flight. Keith loved airports and planes and as a child had dreamed of becoming a commercial jet pilot. Asthma had put pay to that idea and instead he helped others to fly in big planes and became a travel agent. At the age of 49, he now had his own agency catering to independent travellers and he loved his job. His mother, Amy’s granddaughter, Denise, had come to Canada on a plane on one of the very first commercial passenger flights between London and Montreal when she was 4 years old after the Second World War with her mum, Elsie, (the daughter of Amy and Walter) and her Canadian flying-officer father, Joe, who took them away from rationing and worn out little England to a new life in Calgary and a farm bigger than a small English county, as Elsie always said. That was the only occasion his mother had ever been in a plane and she never forgot it and Keith supposed his love of planes and travel came from there. When Keith’s grandparents retired in the sixties, they sold the farm and moved out to Vancouver while Denise and her husband, Keith Sr. and little son moved east to Toronto to start up in the dry-cleaning business. They had a small chain of six shops and did well, and when, in turn, they sold up and retired to Florida, Keith Jr. had already had his own travel agency for nearly ten years. He had married too young and divorced but remained on good terms with his ex-wife, Carol, and saw his twin girls, Alice and Amy, very often. The girls were now both at Toronto’s York University; Alice studying law, and Amy, English Literature.
This Christmas, Keith was to have the holiday he had dreamed of for many years. He was going to trace the English side of his family. His father’s side had originally come from Italy and Keith had immensely enjoyed his visit to a small village near Naples with the girls three or four years previously, where they met several people with a similar surname who all immediately claimed to be long-lost relations and spoiled their three Canadian cousins rotten. What he did know was that his mother, Denise, had been born in Norfolk in the east of England because that’s where her father had been stationed and Elsie, her mum, was a WAAF at the same base. Elsie knew that she had been born in 1917 in Wiltshire on a farm but couldn’t say more than that because the flu epidemic of 1919 had carried off her mother, Amy and Amy’s parents. All she remembered was being taken on a train by a woman who smelled of cough mixture and what she later discovered to be gin, to an orphanage. The woman, Miss Brown, who Elsie later assumed to have been some sort of proto-social worker since she never revealed her first name or how she was connected to Elsie, had visited her several times over the next few years and told her that her mother’s name was Amy Hobbs and that she was born in a village in Wiltshire. Miss Brown told her neither the name of the village nor the name of her father, and Elsie was too young to think much more about it. The orphanage was no luxury hotel but it wasn’t a Dickensian workhouse either and Elsie learned to read and write, and was polite and sweet-natured, and at the age of fourteen was taken on as a second lady’s maid by a well-meaning Bloomsbury type and went to live in Hampstead. When the war broke out, Elsie, thanks to the progressiveness of her employer, was encouraged to join up and, due to an instinctive gift for arithmetic and the calmest of temperaments under pressure, was assigned to the be a flight plotter on an bomber airbase in Norfolk, which is where she met Joe.
It wasn’t much to go on, but Keith Jr. had done some research on the internet and had discovered two or three villages in Wiltshire where there had been several families named Hobbs. His plan was to visit these villages to see whether he could discover the record of Elsie’s birth in the parish registers and to spend some time in the land of his fathers, or more accurately, mothers. He already had a list of the vicars of the three villages he thought were most likely and felt that making contact with them to arrange a visit immediately after Christmas would be the best place to start.
As for what happened next? Well, everybody likes a happy ending.
THE AUTHOR
My name is Nancy Drew. Really! And yes, if I had a nickel, or even a penny for every comment, wisecrack and raised eyebrow that my name has invoked over the last thirty-odd years, I would be very, very rich. Well, actually I am pretty comfortably off, but not because of my name and the little injection of wealth is recent and a surprise. I certainly wasn’t expecting it.
I only started one day because the TV was on the fritz and I couldn’t watch my soaps.
And I wasn’t born Nancy Drew. I was born Nancy Wisniewski, right here in Ottawa. The Drew came attached to my husband, Jeffrey, when we got married in the Fall of 1981. That’s him now, banging about in the basement. It’s Sunday afternoon and Jeff is building a cocktail bar for the basement den. I ask you, a cocktail bar! He doesn’t even drink cocktails! But he and the guys have this competition as to who has the best basement. Larry, originally from Aberdeen and Jeff’s co-worker from the Rogers office, has an Olhausen Excalibur pool table in his; Habib, our neighbourhood veterinarian, who was born in Beirut, has a 65-inch flat-screen Samsung LED TV in his; and our next-door neighbour, Ian, originally from Buffalo, has installed several vintage arcade games including a 1976 Captain Fantastic Elton John pinball machine (when Ian had it delivered, his partner, also a musician in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, William, rolled his eyes and said, “Honey, I think everyone already knows we’re gay. Do we have to gild the lily quite so much?”). So, you see, Jeff just had to build the cocktail bar.
Honestly, I don’t know why they bother. All they end up doing if the Senators aren’t on TV is play Texas hold’em and talk about snow tires, from what I can tell! But boys will be boys, even if the youngest of these particular boys won’t see fifty again!
But I don’t mind. When it’s our turn to host, I make up some sandwiches and make sure Jeff has remembered to buy in plenty of Rickard’s Red and OJ for Ian who has been on the wagon for fifteen years ever since he nearly lost a hand when he took out a tree in his Nissan and, “Losing a hand for a professional violinist is never a good idea,” as Ian said when he got out of hospital. Then I go and pick up Sonya, Habib’s wife who was also born in Lebanon but to a Druze father and a Quebecker journalist mother and we go to the movies or try out a new restaurant (last week it was Gezellig in Westboro, delicious! Try the Beef Daube, it’s to die for!). Sometimes we meet up with Rachel, Larry’s ex-wife who is a nurse at the Ottawa Hospital. Larry knows we are still friends with Rachel but we don’t rub it in. So the boys have their evenings and get to win or lose a few Loonies and argue about sports or the government or which actress is the hottest (William may be gay, but according to Jeff, he has a real soft spot for Liv Tyler) and we get our girls’ night and talk about… what do we talk about? The news? Never! Politics? Not likely! Same goes for sports, although Sonya is a secret Habs fan but she keeps that quiet in Ontario! And we certainly don’t talk about our men! We talk, like most middle-aged mothers who (apart from Rachel) have always been homemakers, about three things: our children and grandchildren; when and where we are going to retire; and, tragic to say, what we are currently watching on TV or have just read in a glossy magazine.
Pretty standard stuff, really. And along with these everyday lives comes the usual catalogue of joys and woes. For us, they are things like our daughter Caroline’s graduation from Toronto despite her dyslexia, and her wedding to Daniel three years ago but subsequently learning she can’t have kids and the angst of deciding whether to face the process of adopting. Or our son Paul being made Lieutenant Commander in the navy and taking command of a Kingston-class coastal defence vessel out of Halifax, and finally marrying Sarah two years ago, after ten years living together and having two beautiful boys, Aaron and Bradley, and losing one, Ben, to sudden infant death syndrome, or Jeff’s prostate cancer scare (thankfully caught early and cured). Just the usual. For Rachel and Larry, the pain of an acrimonious divorce after twenty-three ye
ars of marriage, or their son, Damien, getting married at eighteen to Julie when they were both still in high school and six months later, Julie presenting them with grandchildren; triplets, all girls! Ten years on and Damien has his own cab firm now and Julie works the dispatch from home. And at least the grandchildren have ensured that Larry and Rachel are civil with each other these days. For Sonya and Habib their woes were so many and so harrowing during the strife in Lebanon that they seldom mention them, but since coming to Canada in the late eighties, they too have settled into the gentle and sometimes not so gentle ups and downs of suburban life. Their son, Ali, has just graduated med school but wants to go and work in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Medecin Sans Frontieres! His parents are proud and mortified all at the same time. As for Ian and William, we never talk about it now, – they were so afraid of telling us, so sure we would shun them, but we all got past that – but if they can live with William’s HIV (ironically, contracted before the screening of blood in 1985 became mandatory, during a transfusion after a simple slip on the ice took him through a glass door outside the Mall), so can we. William says he is blessed which may seem an odd way to look at his affliction. Yet since only 4% of people diagnosed with HIV thirty years ago are still alive today, I can understand his sentiment. William has nearly died a dozen times but with the steadfast love and support from Ian, an amazing will to live and latterly, with the help of ARVs, he is still making us laugh with his waspish wit, and cry with the beauty of his skill on the cello.