A Sudden Sun

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  Upstairs, she took down her hair, put on a nightdress, and got into bed, but she did not sleep. Sometimes, these last two years since Charley died, she slept far too much. Other times sleep eluded her. She would lie awake through the night, turning the pages of a magazine without retaining anything, watching the moon cross her window.

  Those times, the sleepless times, could linger for days, up to a week, until finally, exhausted, she would sleep through a whole night and long into the next day. She thought of taking a few drops of laudanum but pushed the thought away. She had gone to see a doctor on her last trip to St. John’s, when she could hardly sleep at all in those terrible months after the news had come about Charley. She didn’t like or trust the Bonavista doctor, and didn’t want anyone in Trinity Bay knowing she’d seen a physician. The doctor in town had said laudanum would settle her nerves and help her sleep. But Lily prided herself on a clear mind, on being beholden to nothing and no one. She would never be a ghost in her own house. She would never be Eleanor Hunt.

  Doctors! She thought of that Perry boy, strutting around like a peacock, going to university to become a doctor, coming back from France without a scratch on him. How could Grace hang on such a boy, cling to his arm as if he were worthy of her? Grace, Lily’s only remaining treasure, would go away with that boy if he so much as whistled for her. She would be hurt and used and shattered, and what could Lily do about it?

  Lily didn’t remember getting out of bed but she was pacing, pacing on the rag rug that protected her feet from the bare pine boards. She had made that rug in the first year of her marriage. She had torn the strips of fabric and hooked them through the brin when her eyes were a blur of tears. The rug was a promise, more of a vow than the words she’d said during the wedding ceremony. With every stitch she swore to God she would be a good minister’s wife, that the mistakes of the past would be shredded and torn beyond recognition, worked into a pattern that would be, if not beautiful, at least useful. Lily had hooked a good dozen rugs since then but when she walked on this worn old rug she could still feel the bitterness seeping up through the soles of her feet.

  Somewhere in the house, a door closed. The girl, Elsie, had finished her work and gone home two hours ago; she lived with her parents down in the harbour rather than up in the manse. The Reverend had gone up to his study. He might have gone downstairs for something—but the steps she heard were too light to be his. It must be Grace home from the Perrys’ house. Lily glanced at the clock: quarter to ten.

  Grace was home, going to the kitchen. It was an old habit of hers from when she lived at home. Whether she was at home or out in the evening, Grace would always make herself a cup of tea or cocoa in the kitchen before going up to bed. She was a night-owl and liked to sit up late, usually reading. Years ago, when Grace was young, Lily would go down to join her in the kitchen for a cup of tea. Those ought to have been easy times, warm and companionable. She heard other women talk of sharing confidences and secrets with their daughters and wished Grace would confide in her, but most of her memories of those late-night cups of tea and cocoa ended with harsh words, sometimes tears, Grace striding out of the room and up to bed offended. Lily’s good advice, the guidance she tried to offer, never failed to upset Grace.

  These last two years, since Charley died, Lily hadn’t bothered anymore. When Grace was home she still went down to the kitchen for a mug-up at night but Lily left her to her own devices.

  Now she was back home with a young man—maybe in love with him. Surely it was for the first time. Lily could read her daughter, knew the language of her face and eyes and body. If Grace had ever been in love before, Lily would have known it. She had been alert for danger since the girl was fourteen.

  Lily went downstairs to find Grace at the table, her hands cradled around the teacup. A little cup, with painted yellow roses, one of her favourites from childhood. The last of a service of eight, from Lily’s wedding china. Despite the circumstances of the wedding the Reverend’s mother, formidable old Mrs. Collins of Wesleyville, had ordered a full set of wedding china for her son and his bride. Over the years, various housemaids and Grace herself, as a young girl, had broken one cup after another, ’til only this lone survivor remained.

  “Mother. Can I get you a cup? There’s still some in the pot.”

  Now they sat at either end of the table, facing each other over teacups. Lily turned her cup—from a different set, bought later in their marriage—round and round in her hands, practicing sentences in her head.

  “Has he asked you to marry him?”

  “I—what?”

  It seemed pointless to repeat the question. “Everyone thinks it’s very romantic, war brides, boys in uniform. But there’ll be many a girl sorry because she said yes hastily.”

  “He—Mother, Jack hasn’t asked me anything. He’s only been back from overseas a few days.”

  “Still and all there are plenty who’ll jump into it without thinking. I don’t want you to make that mistake. These boys who’ve been overseas—nobody knows what they’ve seen, what they’ve done.”

  Grace looked down at her teacup as if by dropping her eyes she could hide her answer, but it wasn’t only in her eyes. It might as well have been inked on her skin. You’d have to have been in love like that yourself, once, to see how clear it was written.

  “We’re friends,” Grace said. “I told you, he’s only been back—well, since the day before yesterday.” She looked surprised herself, glancing at the calendar, as if she thought it had been much longer.

  Two days, Lily thought. And hours of that spent sitting on a train together. More than enough time. An hour was time enough; a moment, even.

  “You always think you know best,” Lily said. “But you know the saying: Marry in haste…”

  “I’m doing nothing in haste.” Grace set her teacup down in the saucer with a sharp clang.

  “You never want to listen….”

  “I never listen? Oh, that’s brilliant, coming from you. When have you ever listened to me?”

  “When have you ever tried to tell me anything?”

  Grace had never been one to confide, even as a little girl. She talked to her father if she talked to anyone, but they talked about opinions and ideas and things in the newspaper, not the kind of secrets a girl was supposed to share with her mother.

  “Well perhaps I would, if I ever thought you’d listen instead of telling me what to do, or barring yourself up in your bedroom to cry over Charley!”

  Silence. A sip and another clang of the teacup. Grace swiped at tears with the back of her hand.

  “I beg your pardon,” Lily said. “I suppose there’s something wrong with me because I couldn’t just go on after Charley died, just forget about him like you and your father did.”

  “You know I never forgot, or Father either. But I’m still here. My life is going on, just like his would have, and I don’t want to miss it all!”

  “Big dreams, fine words, grand ambitions. I know what you want—but you can’t have it. The world isn’t like that, not for a girl anyway. Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

  “How would you know? If you’d ever had any dreams or ambitions perhaps you’d understand mine—but all you ever wanted was to have your only son back, your favourite child…”

  Now Grace was crying full-on, her voice trembling, reduced to the language of childhood quarrels. You love him more than you love me. Until Grace bore a child herself she’d never understand, Lily thought—it wasn’t about more; it was different. Loving a son was so much simpler than loving a daughter. It was a straightforward thing, like shooting an arrow and watching it fly. Loving a daughter was a tangle like embroidery, weaving one thing in and out of another, the whole thing wrong-side-up and looking like a mess until it was done and you saw the pattern.

  Of course, Lily had never shot an arrow. She’d done plenty of embroidery, though.

  She finished the last of her tea, watched her daughter cry. Wh
en had she last held Grace on her lap, put an arm around her? Five? Six? Not at seven, no. Grace already had her reserve then, her haughty spirit. Even younger than that, at three years old, she would squirm and pull away if Lily tried to hold her on her lap.

  Lily stood up. “I’m going up to bed.” She reached over the table and picked up the little yellow-rose teacup. “Look, you put a spall in the rim. That’s no good now—and it’s the last one of that set.”

  She went upstairs, closed her door, and listened for the sound of Grace’s footsteps. When she heard them coming upstairs, she let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. Grace was wilful and headstrong but she had always been, in the strictest sense, a good girl, and Lily could not really imagine her going out into the night, running away from the manse, seeking out Jack Perry in the dark spring night. Except that any girl might do the unexpected, if she imagined she were in love.

  Lily Hunt Collins had been afraid as long as she could remember, of too many things to count. A particular kind of fear came with having children: she remembered the years of thinking of everything that could go wrong in the birthing bed and afterwards. Cot death, and diphtheria, and whooping cough; the myriad terrors of childhood. She had thought the fear might retreat when they grew up but if anything it became sharper. She imagined Grace in a boy’s arms, embracing, yielding, then lost and abandoned and alone. Images of Grace in trouble turned easily to images of Charley dead on a French battlefield, lying in a cold grave far from home, and Lily sat on the edge of her bed and put her hands over her face. She was not such a fool as to think that because you had suffered one terrible loss, God would spare you a second. She learned long ago that was a lie.

  Turning back the covers, she thought of the laudanum bottle. Perhaps just tonight, a little dreamless sleep.

  Grace

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I SPOKE TO someone today who wants to meet you,” Daisy told “ Grace. “Mrs. Parker—Abigail Hayward, she was. John Hayward’s daughter. You know,” she added, turning to her husband, “Hayward the lawyer? Abigail’s lived in New York ever since she was married, but she’s home visiting, now that her father’s so ill.”

  “I remember John Hayward’s girl,” Grandfather said, ladling gravy over his roast chicken. “Flighty little thing. I never thought she was a good influence.”

  “Well, perhaps not—but she’s over fifty now, I don’t imagine she’s flighty anymore.” Daisy turned back to Grace. “She and your mother were great friends when they were girls. I told her all about you and she said you sounded like the spitting image of your mother. She’d like to see your mother again too, of course. I wonder could we convince Lily to come out here for a week or so?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Grace said. Lily’s visits to town were few, and Grace had the clear impression she did not enjoy staying in the house under Daisy’s cheerful regime.

  “Well, anyway I’ve invited Mrs. Parker and her sister—Violet Golding, you know her from church, of course—for dinner tomorrow night, so at least she’ll meet you. And your young man as well, naturally.”

  Daisy adored Jack. Shortly after Jack came home, one of Grandfather’s proofreaders had come down with pneumonia and Grandfather had hired Jack to replace him. As the proofreader was nearly as old as Grandfather himself, there was no telling how long the job might last, but of course Jack only wanted temporary work, to earn money towards his return to medical school in the fall. He boarded with his married brother, Earl, who ran the St. John’s office of the Perry family business, but he spent many evenings at the Hunt home.

  “He’s not really my young man, Aunt Daisy,” Grace said after her grandfather had excused himself from the table and the women lingered over their tea.

  “You only mean he hasn’t asked you to marry him yet—but he will. I hope your mother didn’t scare him off too badly when you brought him home.”

  “My…my mother? Did she write to you?” Grace had, of course, said nothing to Daisy or anyone else about her conversation with Lily.

  Daisy laughed. “Oh, Gracie, I know your mother. Sure I knew her back when her and Abby Hayward was girls, before your grandmother died. Your mother had some fine ideas of her own back then. Don’t pay too much mind to anything she says about you and Jack. She’s not a happy woman, is Lily, and you can’t blame her too much.”

  “You mean…because of Charley?”

  Daisy looked startled. “What, poor Charl? No, no, not that—I mean, that’s a pity, of course, it’s a tragedy. It’d be a setback for any woman. But poor Lily, no, that only knocked the last bit of life out of her. She had the good took out of her years before that, long before you was born, even before Charl was born, if you ask me.” The more comfortably Daisy settled into a conversation, the more her Bonavista Bay accent came to the fore.

  “What do you mean? When she married my father…?”

  Daisy stared at her for a moment and then the expression on her face completely changed, like a child in school who has been daydreaming and has now been called to attention by the teacher. “Now, I’ve gone and said more than I should,” she said. “It’s running into Abby Hayward, that’s what it is, is got me digging up old foolishness from the past. Don’t you mind me.” She stood up with her teacup, forestalling as she often did the maid’s efforts to clear the table. Before marrying Grandfather, Daisy had lived in genteel poverty and had never gotten used to being waited on.

  But she played the gracious hostess the next evening when everyone arrived for dinner. It was not difficult even before introductions were made, Grace thought, to guess which of the two visiting ladies had spent her married life in New York. Abigail Parker talked more loudly than her sister, her speech full of sharp American vowels. Grace knew little about fashions but even she could tell Mrs. Parker was more fashionably dressed than Mrs. Golding, her short beaded jacket neatly hugging her waist, her skirt reaching just to the ankle.

  “My dear! Lily’s daughter!” Mrs. Parker launched herself at Grace, grabbing both her hands and pressing them to her own beaded bosom. “I would have known you anywhere, no mistaking those eyes and cheekbones. And you carry yourself just like her—a beauty completely unaware. Turn around and step back, darling, so I can get a proper look.”

  Aunt Daisy introduced Jack as “Grace’s friend, Captain Jack Perry. They grew up together in Catalina before the war. He was a great friend of poor Charley.”

  “Oh, poor Charley!” Mrs. Parker pressed her own hand, now, to her breast, and turned to her sister. “I told you, didn’t I, Vi, about Lily’s poor boy—lost in France—I’m so sorry for your loss, my dears,” she finished, with a glance that swept from Grace to Grandfather, taking in Jack and Daisy along the way.

  Once it had been commonplace for people to offer sympathy over Charley’s loss: it happened every time Grace spoke to someone in the year after his death. Now it had been a long time and she realized with a start that she had, not exactly forgotten Charley, but had stopped feeling his loss every day. It was as if Charley had been moved to a different room, the room full of dead people, and she no longer expected to hear his voice or step among the living. That realization struck her like a second loss.

  At dinner, Mrs. Parker carried all before her on a wave of conversation, and Aunt Daisy, who loved talkative guests, rose to the challenge. They talked about the flu epidemic and the difficulties of men returning home from the conflict, which drew Jack into conversation. Jack was the sort of man with whom older ladies were always charmed, Grace had noticed, and Mrs. Parker engaged him in a discussion of the differences between the American veterans and the Newfoundlanders. Then she asked Grace about her volunteer work at the hospital. Mrs. Parker herself, it appeared, volunteered in some capacity with the Red Cross in New York, “but not, of course, the sort of work you do. Mrs. Hunt has told me so much about how you are right in there working with those poor wounded men, and all the rest. You’re like your mother in spirit, too—always going about doing good, as it says i
n the Good Book.”

  “Oh well—there’s such a great need, you know,” Grace said. “I do the little things—change sheets, and bring dinner trays, and sometimes read to the men to keep their spirits up.” An image of Ivan Barry’s ruined face appeared in her mind; she felt small, as if she were using his suffering to make herself look brave and generous. “The doctors and nurses do all the real work, of course.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t train for a nurse yourself.”

  “I thought of it, during the war, but …”

  “But you’d have wanted to go overseas—so many girls did—and it would have been too hard on your parents—especially on your poor mother. Losing her boy overseas was bad enough. A mother is almost prepared to lose a son in war, but a daughter?”

  Mrs. Parker steered the conversation in Grandfather’s direction next, asking what he thought of President Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations. She herself thought it was a grand plan, though she knew many people in New York who disagreed. Jack and Grace joined the discussion, leaving Daisy to talk with Mrs. Golding about mutual acquaintances, of which they fortunately had several.

  In the parlour after supper Mrs. Parker positioned herself next to Grace on the small settee, and leaned in close. “You must come and see me while I’m here,” she said. “I’m in town for another month at least—well, of course how long depends on what happens with poor Father. I’ve cabled your mother and she sent back a message that it’s impossible to come this time of year. Is that true? There’s a railway line all the way out there now, isn’t there?”

  “There is,” Grace said. Honesty, and perhaps a desire to tarnish Mrs. Parker’s warm memories of Lily, drove her to say, “It’s not impossible. But Mother doesn’t like to go anywhere much anymore.”

  “How sad.” Mrs. Parker looked down at her own plump, pretty hands, playing with her fan. “I would go out to see her, but—dear Papa, you know. I must stay near him…. But I would so love to see your mother again. I feel she’s had a hard time. There’s no life without sorrow, is there? My own has been that I have no children alive—only two sweet angels in Heaven. Say you’ll come to see me while I’m in town, darling, even if your mother won’t.”