A Sudden Sun

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  Mr. Barry liked to hear selections from the Book of Common Prayer when the nightmares of shell shock kept him from sleep. He had a loving mother and sisters out in Humbermouth who could presumably be reading the Morning Service to him, but they had come on the train to visit him and could not bear to be in his presence for more than a few moments. He lost his nose, one eye, an ear, and a piece of his jaw on the Somme; his face was a cratered map of the Western Front and its horrors. He needed help to eat, though he could walk about fine on his own. Except for the ruin of his face and the rattle in his lungs he was otherwise hale. Even some of the nurses had trouble looking at him, but Grace found, to her surprise, that the sight of maimed faces did not revolt or horrify her. A face was still a face, after all. Mr. Barry’s eyes were the colour of deep-woods ponds, brackish and still. She looked mostly into his eyes, but she did not shrink from the rest of his face, and she knew that he appreciated that more than her readings from the prayer book.

  He told her once that he liked to hear the prayer book because he had planned to be a minister. At least, that was what she pieced together out of the tortured sounds he was able to get out. Speech was difficult for him, but Grace imagined that in another life Mr. Barry might have been a good minister. A better preacher, perhaps, than her father. Reverend Obadiah Collins was a great Bible student but he lacked the gift to convey what he had dug out of his Greek lexicon in a form that would excite the fishermen and their families in the pews. When she was young, Grace used to think her father was awkward in the pastoral role, as well, trying to comfort the afflicted, but that had changed since Charley’s death. Parishioners seemed drawn to him now.

  People were naturally suspicious, Grace thought—they didn’t really believe that a preacher could understand their pain unless he had suffered pain himself. It was a shame Mr. Barry couldn’t be a minister. Surely a man who had survived the trenches and come back with half a face, but with his faith somehow intact, would be able to talk to people about God’s love. He could place a hand on top of theirs, and they would know he had suffered, like Jesus, in all points like as they had. Even Jesus, though crucified, got to keep His nose and His jaw intact.

  By mid-afternoon when Grace left the hospital, a cold sleety rain had begun, making the walk home far less pleasant than the walk down in the morning. Aunt Daisy met her in the doorway. “I have a surrrpriiise for you!” she trilled. Grace used to think “trilling” was just something writers said in books and not something a person could actually do with her voice, but Daisy disproved this theory. The trill, the glow on her round face, the word “surprise,” all effectively removed any possibility of Grace actually being surprised. She knew before she stepped into the parlour that she would see Jack Perry there, in uniform. Whatever made her gasp for breath at the sight of him, it could not possibly have been surprise.

  She wanted to go to him, for him to fold her in his arms the way he did that day she told him about Charley. But two years had passed. She had shaken Jack’s hand in farewell the day he left Catalina to go to St. John’s to enlist. Jack was her brother’s friend, nothing more. They had written often while he was away, the kind of friendly letters a girl wrote to her dead brother’s best friend while he was overseas. The sorts of letters hundreds of girls all over Newfoundland wrote, were enjoined to write, to keep up the spirits of the men at the front.

  In the past two years two young men had asked Grace to marry them; she did not think of Jack Perry as being in any way similar to those boys. He did not sign his letters with love or say that he was thinking only of her. He wrote about the things that happened around him, the men in his unit, funny incidents that punctuated otherwise boring days in the trenches. Daisy brought his letters to Grace saying, “Here’s another from your young man!” and confidently expected that Jack’s return would be a lover’s reunion.

  Jack put out his hand and she took it. “You’re looking grand,” she said. “It’s good to have you home.” They all sat down, Aunt Daisy perched on the edge of her chair like at any moment she might take flight and leave the lovers alone, if it weren’t for the rules of propriety.

  Jack was in uniform and he really did look grand. His slender form had filled out, shoulders broader, chest and arms more muscular. His face, though, was leaner, less boyish. Grace thought of Jack as having blond hair but it had darkened to a light brown. His eyes were light blue, very bright as he talked, smiled, laughed, turning from Grace to Daisy and back again. It was impossible not to compare him with Ivan Barry and the other men in the hospital.

  “You haven’t been home yet, then?” she said.

  “No, our ship only docked here in town yesterday. I thought I’d take the train out tomorrow, see Mother and Father and all the family. I wondered if—that is, would you like to come out with me? Have you been home lately?”

  “Oooh yes, Grace, you must, your mother would be so happy—” Aunt Daisy said, but was spared from explaining why exactly Lily would be happy by the arrival of the maid with a tray full of teacups and raisin buns, with rhubarb jam in a little silver pot. If she arrived back in Catalina with Jack Perry, would her parents jump to the same conclusion that Daisy seemed so happy to leap to? And would it please them?

  Lily had said no to the idea of Grace training as a nurse; she had turned up her nose last year when one of Grace’s old teachers at the Methodist College had suggested Grace could win a scholarship to go to college up in Canada. “A college education is no good to a young lady,” Lily had said. The obvious assumption was that she wanted Grace to settle down, be a wife and a mother. But when Abram Russell had asked her father for Grace’s hand in marriage—without so much as a preliminary discussion or even a hint to Grace herself—Lily had not been enthused about that prospect either. “They say he comes from a good family,” Lily said, “and he’s very ambitious, but there’s something common about him.”

  Abe Russell was one of Mr. Coaker’s protégées. He had come from Bonavista North to manage the newly built factory that would manufacture and bottle temperance beverages in Port Union. He had political ambitions too. People said he meant to run for a seat in the House one day. While Mr. Coaker hadn’t moved Abe into his Bungalow the way he had with the Bailey boys—like the sons he never had—he was known to warmly approve of Abe Russell. Grace had spoken to him only a handful of times, and certainly had no interest in his marriage proposal: she was relieved that neither of her parents thought she ought to take it seriously.

  She had not even told them of Harry Gullage’s proposal, which he made directly to her on her visit home last summer. Harry was a nice-looking boy, good for a laugh; she had known him for years. He was a fisherman, son of a fisherman, and no matter how her father supported Mr. Coaker’s desire to dignify the lot of the fishermen, Grace knew her parents would be shocked at the idea of her marrying one. She tried to be gentle in refusing Harry, and he was philosophical: it was as if he’d known he was aiming too high even by asking. He had married Lyddie Carter a few months after Grace turned him down.

  Grandfather drove Grace to the Water Street train station to meet Jack two days later. Grace couldn’t leave town right away; she told Jack she needed time to inform the hospital and the poorhouse that she would be away for a couple of days, and Jack had delayed his return home. Together they sat in an almost empty carriage. The only other passengers in their car sat at the far end so it was almost like having a private car.

  The train began to roll—late getting out of the station, as usual. The route was familiar to Grace by now, but travelling with Jack, their knees almost touching as they sat across from each other, made it seem different, like a journey to someplace foreign. Grace imagined boarding a train at night in a foreign country, surrounded by people who spoke another language. The picture came accompanied by a stab of longing so intense it was almost like hunger.

  “It’s different from riding troop trains in France, I imagine,” she said.

  “It’s a fair bit more comfortable.” />
  “I’d like to see it, though. France, that is. I always imagined I’d go there someday. That was before the war, of course. Is it all ruins now?”

  “Not all. There are still beautiful places. Cathedrals, a few churches that didn’t get shelled. The villages where the fighting was are in shambles. I spent a few weeks in Paris after the Armistice. It’s still lovely.” He was looking out the window at the Waterford River valley rolling by. “Maybe I’ll take you there someday.”

  Grace looked out the window and hoped he wouldn’t apologize for being presumptuous. For two years now she had been building a picture of Jack Perry, piecing together fragments from his letters to imagine what kind of man he was becoming. Laying those fragments on top of the boy she remembered, her brother’s friend.

  At Donovan’s Station the train stopped to take on passengers, then again at Kelligrews. At Avondale there was a longer stop; Grace and Jack walked to the end of the platform and looked down the tracks, watching the line ’til it curved and disappeared in the woods.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll be able to do a Grand Tour of Europe for a few years yet,” Jack said, picking up the thread of the earlier conversation. “It’ll be a long time before it’s business as usual over there. Although already there’s talks of them making the battlefields into parks, so people can go visit the soldiers’ graves.”

  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.”

  Lily

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LILY 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.”