“Triffie! Are you up?”
Of course I’m up, I’m standing on my front bridge, you ignorant cow, Trif thinks, but does not say, as she turns to see fat Nellie French from the house next door, out in the laneway. She is clad, like Triffie herself, in a winter coat over her nightdress, boots on her feet.
“Well! You will not believe, not in all your days, what I found in my house this morning,” Nellie French says, obviously pleased with herself. And though Triffie wants to burst out the answer, joy and relief make her magnanimous enough to listen through the woman’s whole story.
“…and I went in, before I lit the fire, like I always do, to check on the young ones, and there in Isaac’s bed there was two little heads instead of one, and the other one was fair-haired. You knows none of my crowd is fair, so I peeled back the covers and there was young Will, sound asleep. Now I knows he wanders so I wonder could it be, he just wandered right out of your house and into ours, up into Isaac’s bed? Could he do that, I wonder?”
Trif is ahead of Nellie French, racing into Nellie’s house, up the stairs. He could do such a thing, apparently, and did. Today Uncle Albert will have to put on that new lock, up high on top of the door where even standing on a chair – for he’s capable of that – Will won’t be able to reach it. He’s capable of anything, if his night-wanderings can take him into a neighbour’s house, a friend’s bed, without ever waking.
He wakes when she picks him up. “Triffie,” his sleepy voice says.
“Will! Do you know where you are?”
“In bed.”
“Yes, but not in your own bed.” She carries him downstairs and sits down in Nellie’s kitchen, by the newly lit woodstove, while Nellie chatters away about the strangeness of it all and Trif, in the rocking chair, rocks her small cousin. His golden head fits just under her chin.
“I’m in Isaac’s house?” he says, confused.
“Yes, you got right out of your bed in your sleep, went out of the house and over to Isaac’s house. Do you see now why your mother got to tie you on? You could come to harm, wandering like that.”
“But I didn’t come to no harm. You came and found me.”
“Yes. Yes,” she says, soothing him. “What did you dream, Will? Do you remember your dreams?” She has never asked him this before.
“Same dream as always,” he says sleepily.
“What dream is that?”
“I’m far from home, and I got to find my way back. Out on the barrens, and I got to walk back before the fairies takes me.”
Though the boy is safe in her arms, another shiver runs down Trif’s spine at the mention of the fairies. She knows the tales as well as anyone on the Point, stories of children who vanished on the barrens and never returned, or worse, returned forever changed, fairy-touched. Old wives’ tales, Trif would have said if anyone asked her, though she carries a crust of bread in her pocket when she goes berrypicking all the same. Now she holds Will closer in her arms, till he falls back to sleep and she can carry him across the lane and put him down in his own bed.
Kit
St. John’s
September, 1905
My dearest Posy,
Oh to think of you now, in our old Schoolroom, standing by the side of our Dear Pedagogue and the little ones before you in their breeches and pinafores. How strange that you should be teaching the children while I am yet Learning, still a Schoolgirl though in a Schoolroom far bigger and grander than we ever imagined back home!
I spend my days in study and books, but I yearn for the day when I shall have my own classroom to manage, my own Pupils to Inspire. All the hard work I put in last year towards my Preliminary examinations has paid off, and I am finding this year much easier. Though I would like to carry on, and learn all there is to learn, Father says that will be enough schooling for the present, that I should take a school of my own next year.
I send you kisses and dear thoughts, all the way from gray and cold St. John’s to the beautiful shores of Missing Point. I imagine the sun sparkling on the waters off the Point, though I know that if the Sun is shrouded here, it is likely foggy there too. In my memory the sun is always shining.
It is indeed a gray, windy day in St. John’s. Kit finishes off the letter to Triffie by drawing a few quick pencil sketches in the margin – caricatures of Miss Shaw, Miss Babbage, rude little Nancy Ellis and a few other girls from school. She puts in a handful of pressed flower petals picked from Cousin Ethel’s rosebush two weeks ago. It is late September, and the summer months at home are already receding, slipping away from her memory. Home is real when she is there, but once she steps on the train it becomes a place in a book, covers closed. She likes to imagine it as a place where nothing will ever change, where her parents will never age and the children will not grow up. Only Triffie is allowed to change, growing year by year older to keep pace with Kit herself.
This latest change – Trif assisting Mr. Bishop in the school – is, of course, wonderful news for everyone. Wonderful for Mr. Bishop, who needs the help. Wonderful for the children, who could not ask for a better tutor. Wonderful most of all for Triffie, who has so longed to get out of the drudgery of Aunt Rachel’s house. Kit has behaved exactly as she should, congratulated her friend on this wonderful opportunity. She won’t admit even to herself that she envies Trif, who since last spring has been standing where she, Kit, ought to be – not just in front of the classroom, but at Joe Bishop’s side.
Kit has seen little of Mr. Bishop since he came to call on her here in St. John’s nearly a year ago. When they meet in passing during her school holidays, he asks about her studies but betrays no personal interest, nor has he written to her. His last hard, urgent kiss is seared into her memory, but it seems to have been an end rather than a beginning.
Very well then, she will make her own beginning. Kit Saunders is not a girl to wait on anyone else for a fresh start. She makes her way in the world, creates her own opportunities. So she tells herself, every day.
Miss Shaw, the English mistress, is her new role model, her new Dear Pedagogue. Sturdy, brisk, her red hair turning gray – she must be about forty – Miss Shaw strides into the lecture room, a model of sober spinster scholarship. But when she opens a textbook a new woman emerges, a Sarah Bernhardt hidden beneath the sensible gray tweed of her skirts and jackets. As she reads Shakespeare aloud, she becomes each character in turn, creating an entire Globe Theatre with her voice and hands.
Some of the girls laugh at Miss Shaw, imitate her accents and gestures behind their hands in the common room. They invite Kit to join them with smiles and glances, but she holds herself aloof.
What the magic of her own voice and Shakespeare’s words do in the classroom, Miss Shaw attempts also to do with the Spencer College stage and a handful of awkward adolescent girls. Kit joins the Dramatic Society and wins the role of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. She felt she had the temperament and spirit to play Kate, but tall girls who can act well tend to get the male roles. Which would be good news if they were doing Macbeth or Hamlet, but Miss Shaw says tragedies are too ambitious for schoolgirls; one needs to have suffered to play Hamlet. The older students are doing Much Ado About Nothing. Miss Shaw likes plays with strong female roles, even though her girls end up playing men as well, in a reversal of Shakespeare’s original staging.
Having fallen in love with the part of Kate, Kit now tries to throw herself into the opposite role, to learn the lines of the proud man who wants to crush that independent spirit, bring Kate to heel like a trained lapdog. “It’s impossible!” she complains to Miss Shaw in the gymnasium, flinging the book across the room.
“A very Kate-like display of spleen.” Miss Shaw draws down the sides of her mouth as if she’s trying not to laugh. “But this is acting, Katherine. It’s not finding an excuse to play out your own little dramas under someone else’s name. It’s about crawling into another person’s skin, seeing the world through his eyes, becoming Petruchio.”
“But can I do it
? I’m not sure I can.”
“I certainly hope you can; if not, I shall have to recast the part,” says Miss Shaw, and strides away to where the girls playing Kate and Bianca are practising their quarrel.
Something rises like a tide in Kit’s chest. She thought she wanted Miss Shaw to do what Mr. Bishop would have done when she was a child, to say, “Of course you can do it, Kit. You’re clever, you’re brilliant, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to!” But this is better – this brisk dismissal with no honeyed words of praise. Do the job, or I’ll find someone else who can. This, Kit decides, is a challenge to which she can rise.
“Very well then, let’s take Act One, Scene Three, from Kate’s entrance,” Miss Shaw bellows a few moments later, and Kit walks onto the stage, trying to imagine how a sixteenth-century Italian man might swagger into the courtyard, confident in his right to possess and rule. She thinks what she is doing is actually a poor imitation of Miss Shaw striding into the classroom, but perhaps it will do for now. “Good morrow, Kate, for that’s your name, I hear!” she announces.
The pert little thing playing Kate – Nancy Ellis from Bonavista – looks up at Kit through fluttering eyelashes. “Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing. They call me Katherine that do talk of me.”
“What the – what do you think you’re playing at, Nan!” Miss Shaw’s voice cuts across the lines. “Kate’s not flirting with Petruchio, she can’t abide the man! She’s a wild horse who won’t be broken! Show some spirit, Nancy!!”
Kit remains Petruchio, does not break character, does not even listen to the voice that says I could have done it so much better! She is Petruchio; she will not disappoint Miss Shaw.
When the rehearsal ends, Kit goes into the cloakroom to put on her coat and hat when she hears the chatter of a group of girls just outside. “Ahh, I don’t mind Shaw, she’s not so bad,” one girl says. “I mean, she’s a bitch, but she’s a schoolmistress – it’s ’er job to be a bitch. What I can’t take is girls who act like they’re better than anyone else, and you knows ’oo I mean, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, prancin’ around up there like she’s God’s gift to the theatre,” the other girl chimes in. It takes no effort at all to recognize the voice as belonging to Liza Butler, who plays Baptista. Only in that context does Kit realize the first girl who spoke was Nancy Ellis. She’s rarely spoken to Nancy except during rehearsals, and the carefully cultivated stage voice Nancy uses for Kate bears little resemblance to her real Bonavista accent, which, like most of the girls’ accents, sounds stronger when she’s excited or upset.
“I wouldn’t care so much if Shaw didn’t make a teacher’s pet out of her,” says another – that would be Grumio, a skinny redhead whose name Kit can’t recall. “Not just in the play – she’s just as bad in class, calling on her all the time, reading out her themes like she’s – oh, I don’t know what.”
“Like she’s better than the rest of us,” Nancy says. Kit, long since dressed for the outside but now trapped in here, hears the other girls murmur agreement. “She wants to be taken down a peg or two, is what she wants – ’oo do she think she is? Miss Kitty Saunders from God-Knows-Where, a cut above the rest!”
The other girls laugh and Kit hears them getting ready to leave, going to collect their coats from the other cloakroom. She considers, just for a moment, sweeping out of the room before they go, head held high, fixing them all with a cutting glare, and then walking past them all as if she really is so much better than they are that their petty insults don’t even touch her.
Inside, there’s a Kit who can do that, who is just brazen enough to come out now. But she’s lost access to that Kit, here in this place where her only ally is a teacher who is said to make a pet of her. After a year at Spencer she’s not made one close friend. She was always the centre of a lively circle of girls back on the Point, though Trif was the only one she truly felt close to. Here she is a loner, and has made no effort to change that status.
If Trif was here, I could do it. I could brazen it out, I could face them all. She hears the girls leave, waits till their voices fade, then steps out into the corridor.
But worse awaits. One girl is still there, kneeling down, packing her books in a satchel. It’s blonde and pretty Alice Templeman, who plays Bianca – another girl Kit has barely spoken to in her time here. In Alice’s case it’s not dislike but sheer intimidation: she comes from a well-off St. John’s family. What acquaintances Kit does have are girls from around the bay like herself, aspiring teachers who were the brightest and best in their little one-room, outport schools. While Kit’s family connections make her one of the most well-off girls on the Point, she’s well aware that the St. John’s merchant families are a different class of people. She has no experience of girls like Alice, who make up the majority of students in her classes at Spencer. Knowing that Alice was out there, hearing the other girls discuss Kit, makes the whole experience infinitely worse. She can only hope Alice leaves quickly, without saying anything, without meeting her eyes.
“Miss Ellis used a rather coarse word beginning with a B.” Alice’s clear voice has no trace of an accent that needs to be expunged. “I’d say it applies to her more than to anyone else, wouldn’t you?”
Kit forces herself to meet the other girl’s eyes as Alice straightens up and shoulders her satchel. Alice’s small grin looks positively wicked in her pretty face. “Don’t mind them,” she says. “You know there’s always that kind of girl that has to put other girls down to make herself feel like someone. Nancy’s that kind – I’ve seen it in her ever since she came in here. There’s a few in every school.”
“I suppose so,” Kit says. “Thanks.”
Alice shrugs. She hasn’t, after all, done anything much – she certainly didn’t tell the other girls to shut up, defend Kit to their faces. But a little friendship offered on the sly is better than nothing at a time like this. “I don’t have much time for people like that,” she explains.
“I knew there’d be all kinds in college,” Kit says, “but to tell the truth I was more worried about – well, girls like you. Townie girls. At home they always say the townies will look down on you.”
Alice smiles. “So we will. Some of my friends are awful, the way they talk about the bay girls – making fun of their clothes, their accents, the things they didn’t learn in school. But the bay girls are worse to each other, especially if they think anyone’s getting above herself. Like lobsters – you know?”
“Lobsters?”
“They say if you’re cooking a lot of lobsters in a pot, you know, boiling them alive –” Alice wrinkles her pretty nose at the idea. “– if one tries to escape, the others will pull them back down into the pot. I don’t know if it’s true, but you see it all the time with people. Can’t let anyone rise too high, you know.”
Kit goes home that night and writes to Trif about the lobster pot, and the girls’ cloakroom, the nastiness of Nancy Ellis and the unexpected kindness of Alice Templeman. It would all be more bearable if she and Trif could face this together, but in the absence of her Posy she forges a sort of friendship with Alice and some of her townie friends. It makes Nancy more poisonous than ever, to see Kit walking to and from class with the St. John’s girls who have been at Spencer since they were learning their alphabet. But even if few of the girls have the qualities Kit would like to see in a true friend, sitting or walking with them is like having a bodyguard – no-one dares touch her when she’s in their midst.
Still, it’s only when lost in a book or onstage, playing Petruchio, that she loses all self-consciousness and really loves college life. It can’t be denied that the rivalry between herself and Nancy adds fire to Kate’s and Petruchio’s scenes: they are able to snap at each other with genuine dislike, though their eventual reconciliation and romance is less convincing. But on the night of the performance they come out together to take their bow and clasp hands as if they really were lovers, united for that one moment in the glory of perfo
rmance.
It’s a pity, Kit writes to Triffie the next day, that going on stage is considered neither a Respectable, nor a Practical Occupation for a young woman. For if I had my wishes, I think that is exactly the career I should Pursue! What would my mother make of that, do you think?
Triffie
THREE OF THEM go off to school in the mornings now. Ruth leads the way, her plaits so tight they almost stick straight out from her head, her pinafore always clean and starched. Will slouches along behind until he catches up to Isaac French or another of his friends; he seems more reconciled to school this year and rarely sleepwalks, though it’s clear he’ll never make a scholar. A little behind them walks Trif. Miss Bradbury, they call her once they are all inside the schoolroom, even her cousins. Back in the spring when she first started helping at the school she was in Parsons’ Mercantile one day when she heard Annie Barbour say to her sister Clara, “Do I got to call Triffie Miss Bradbury now she’s a teacher?”
“That one! She put on enough airs before she was a teacher; she won’t be fit to live with now,” Clara replied. “Too good to walk on the same ground with the rest of us.” Trif was standing only a few feet away, the other side of a stack of barrels, and the Mercantile isn’t a big shop. Clara knew she was there, meant for her to hear. Clara never liked Trif and Kit in their schooldays, but her insult has no sting for Trif. All she hears out of that is “now she’s a teacher.” She walks to the school each morning like a prisoner on the day of her release, leaving behind laundry and scrubbing, garden and house, Aunt Rachel and Betty.
In the schoolroom a different kind of chaos waits to be made into order. Boys and girls tumble through the doors, stumble over each other. Small quarrels flare and die down as children hang up their jackets and press onto the benches. Trif moves among them with authority, silencing them, straightening away books and boots to make the aisles and desktops clear. Then she sits on a chair by the stove, which is already throwing out a nice bit of warmth since Joe Bishop got here early to build it up. He takes his place behind the desk at the front of the room and the children, magically transformed from a pack of wild puppies to erect, dignified schoolchildren, rise to sing “God Save the King.”
That Forgetful Shore Page 4