The English Wife

by Adrienne Chinn

  Sophie grabs the handle of her suitcase. ‘Thanks. I’ll remember.’

  ‘Your aunt’ll be pleased as punch to see you. Tell her Phyllis from Budget sends her regards. She don’t know me from Adam, but tell her we all loves her and Florie here.’

  ***

  Sophie steers the car, a Volkswagen Golf in an alarming shade of red, along the bumpy asphalt of a two-lane highway along the coast from Gambo, through a landscape of grey rock and scrubby spruce. From time to time, as she crests a hill, a glimpse of steel-grey water glints below, undulating under the sharp blue sky, its ripples broken by the occasional crest of a wave or a spray of water like a fountain. Here and there a lone scraggy pine leans from a precarious foothold in a rock into the wind blowing in from the Arctic, like an old man fighting to keep upright on a blustery day. Sophie passes lonely clusters of clapboard houses and stores, the wooden sidings painted in vivid hues, the ones closest to the shore propped up on wooden stilts weathered silver grey by the elements. Neat stacks of wooden-slatted lobster traps and circular orange-net crab traps sit ready on the end of wooden piers, and an occasional lone motorboat bobs in a tickle or a cove, moored for the day.

  Sophie slows, trying to remember the turn-off Sam had taken on that first drive from the airport. Her first time on a motorcycle. Her Escada velvet suit never recovered.

  She indicates right and steers the car onto a narrow road, pocked with potholes, leading through a knot of knobby pines. The road winds through the woods and breaks out onto a grassy meadow at the crest of a hill. Far along the coast to her left she glimpses the lighthouse, still keeping vigil over the steely ocean. Several clapboard buildings come into view near the shore as the car rounds the hill and bumps down the road. She stops beside the petrol pumps in front of a one-storey garage clad in yellow aluminium siding. A large blue and white illuminated IRVING sign shines like a beacon over the open garage door.

  A stocky man with an impressive beer belly and a face that looks like it’s been carved and cratered by a lifetime of wind ambles out of the garage, wiping his hands on an oily rag. ‘Hey, there, b’y. How you getting on?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. I don’t need any gas, but could you check the oil?’

  ‘Sure thing, duck.’

  ‘Could I use your loo?’

  He jabs behind him with a greasy thumb. ‘Right round the building. Door’s at the back.’

  ‘I remember.’ She opens the car door and gets out. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you, Wince?’

  The man’s blue eyes, almost as blue as the sky, peer at her between his hooded, red eyelids. ‘Holy God. You’re Sam’s girl, as I live and breathe. What took you so long?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not like that. Sam and I … we’re just friends. Well, we were. I haven’t seen him for ten years.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I just know that. He was a misery guts for ages after you left.’ Wince props up the bonnet and unscrews the oil cap. ‘Said you never called nor wrote.’ He drills her with his blue eyes. ‘But time heals and all that. Life goes on.’ He checks the oil gauge and grunts as he wipes it clean with the rag. ‘Them car people in St John’s never checks the oil. Good thing you stopped.’

  ‘Sam’s still there? In Tippy’s Tickle?’

  ‘Still there. Doing what he does.’

  Sophie swallows down the questions that are rushing up her throat. Is he with someone? Is he married? ‘I’m staying with my aunt there for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Well, I expects Sam’ll know you’re comin’ then. Just don’t expects him to be doin’ a jig about it.’

  ***

  Wince wipes his hands on the oily rag as he watches Sophie crunch across the gravel path and disappear around the back of the building.

  ‘Misery guts?’

  Wince squints over at the tall man in motorcycle leathers leaning against the garage opening bouncing a can of oil from one hand to the other.

  ‘Well, you were a misery guts for an awful long time, Sam, b’y.’

  ‘How’s she looking?’

  ‘Some good, b’y. She was askin’ about you.’

  ‘So I heard.’ Sam tosses the oilcan over to Wince. ‘Doesn’t mean anything.’

  Wince catches the oilcan. ‘All I knows about women, which, mind you, wouldn’t fit on the end of a squid jig, is that if she’s askin’ about you, she’s interested.’

  Sam grunts. ‘You don’t know Sophie.’

  ‘Not so sure you does either, b’y.’ Wince stabs the oilcan with his penknife and leans over the engine, pouring the thick black oil into the car’s oil tank. ‘Why doesn’t you say hello?’

  ‘Bike’s fixed,’ Sam says as he heads back into the garage. ‘I’ll see her soon enough.’

  Wince shrugs and tosses the empty oilcan into a rusty rubbish bin. The motorcycle engine roars to life inside the garage and Sam rides out on the gleaming black and red Kawasaki. Pausing at the road as he checks for traffic, he waves at Wince before turning right towards Tippy’s Tickle.

  A crunch on the gravel. Wince looks over to see Sophie pulling a wallet out of her shoulder bag as she approaches. ‘All done? How much do I owe you?’

  ‘It’s twenty-two, but if you gives me a twenty, and we’ll call it square.’

  ***

  A car door slams and Ellie glances up from the watercolour she’s working on and out of the shop’s bay window. She drops her paintbrush into a jar of water and wipes her hands on her apron.

  ‘She’s here!’

  Florie emerges from the back room wearing a red T-shirt, jeans and a checked lumberjack shirt with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows. She balances a mixing bowl full of icing sugar and butter against her left hip and clutches a wooden spoon in her right hand. She joins Ellie at the window.

  ‘Took her long enough.’

  Ellie glances at her wristwatch. ‘What do you mean? She rang only two hours ago from Gander.’

  Florie grunts. ‘Ten years, Ellie. Not two hours.’

  Ellie looks at Florie over the top of her horn-rimmed bifocals. ‘Don’t be like that, Florie. She’s a busy woman. She’s practically running that architecture firm in New York.’

  ‘A phone call more than a couple of times a year would’a been nice, even if she couldn’t haul her arse up here. We didn’t even gets a Christmas card last year.’

  ‘Yes, well. People don’t always act the way you expect. If there’s anything I’ve learned in all my eighty-odd years, it’s a waste of time to feel disappointed about things like that. I’m just delighted she’s here now. That’s the important thing. She’s come for my birthday, and I think that’s lovely.’

  Florie shrugs. ‘Just seems funny after all this time, her comin’ up here like this at the last minute. You’d think she’d be plannin’ her life a year ahead if she’s so busy. Don’t people like her have diaries and PAs and all that?’

  ‘Florie. Be nice. She’s my only niece.’

  ‘Well, you could’a knocked me over with a feather when she said she was comin’, that’s for sure.’ She frowns at the icing bowl. ‘Where do you suppose Sam is with that cream cheese? Carrot cake’s just not the same without it.’

  ***

  The screen door squeaks open and Sophie looks up to see Ellie step out onto the landing at the top of the steps to the general store. She wears a purple embroidered smock top and jeans rolled up over red plimsolls, and her dark green apron is spattered with colourful blotches of paint. A pair of horn-rimmed bifocals sits on the tip of her nose. Her aunt holds out her arms, which shake with a slight tremor.

  ‘Sophie! There you are! What a treat this is! My favourite niece here for my birthday.’

  Sophie smiles up at her aunt and waves. She’s so tiny. So much smaller than I remember. A flutter of nerves travels up Sophie’s body. I should have kept in touch. Why did I stop writing, for heaven’s sake? Why didn’t I just pick up the phone? She’s family. My family. And she’s so frail. What was so bloody important that I didn’t even call until I needed someth
ing? Until I needed Kittiwake?

  Sophie runs up the steps and embraces her aunt. ‘Your only niece, Auntie Ellie, unless there’s something you haven’t told me.’

  Ellie squeezes Sophie tight and kisses her on the cheek. ‘Come inside. Florie’s making a carrot cake in the shop kitchen. If Sam gets back in time with the cream cheese, we’ll have cream-cheese icing. Becca insisted that ordinary icing just wouldn’t do.’

  Inside, the store looks exactly the same as the day Sophie left Tippy’s Tickle back in 2001 – the walls and shelving the same sage green, the wooden floor polished to a bright shine, the two long wooden counters either side of the narrow room still painted white, with the wooden tops laden with boxes of Ellie’s art cards, jars of partridgeberry and bakeapple jam, and red paper bags of Purity hard tack bread for the stewed brewis everyone up here liked to eat with cod and fried pork-fat scrunchions, and for which she had yet to develop a taste.

  A huge black Newfoundland dog with a red kerchief tied around its neck bounds towards them from the back room and rushes past Sophie out the screen door.

  ‘That can’t be Rupert.’

  Ellie shakes her head. ‘No, no. Rupert passed away some years ago. He’s buried under the old tree up past the house. That’s Rupert’s son, Rupert Bear II. We call him Bear.’

  Florie walks away from the bay window, carrying a large yellow bowl with a wooden spoon sticking out of what looks like vanilla icing. ‘Well, would you look what the cat dragged in? You gots fed up with New York finally? Decided to make your way back to Paradise?’

  Sophie kisses Florie on her cheek. ‘Lovely to see you, Florie. How are the dachshunds?’

  ‘Best kind, duck. I’ve got people comin’ all the way from Halifax for my dogs now. Even had a fella email me the other day from Toronto, can you imagine that? Comin’ all the way from Toronto to Tippy’s Tickle for a dog?’ She looks over her shoulder at Ellie. ‘You’ll have to be printin’ up some more of your art cards, Ellie, for all these CFAs coming into town. Getting lots of publicity since Hildegarde won Best of Breed for dachshunds last year.’

  Sophie raises her eyebrows in a question. ‘CFAs? I’ve forgotten what that stands for.’

  ‘Come From Aways.’ A man’s voice from the doorway.

  Sophie spins around. Bear thunders back into the store, his tail wagging like a flag. Sam stands in the doorway, a silhouette against the late summer light streaming in from outside. The same leather jacket. Still lean in jeans and a white T-shirt.

  Oh, God. Her stomach flutters and she takes a breath to calm her nerves. No man she’d met in the past ten years had stood a chance. She’d measured them all against Sam. Every single one of them had come up short. So, why hadn’t she done anything about it? She should have returned his calls, but there didn’t seem to be any point. She could have visited. People have long-distance relationships all the time. She’d thought Sam would just fade away. But he never did. Bloody hell, Sophie, you’ve been sleeping for ten years.

  He sets a plastic Foodland bag on the counter beside the sign advertising hot chocolate for a toonie. Folding his arms, he leans against the counter. The stubble is flecked with grey, now, and threads of silver pepper his black hair. His brown eyes sweep over Sophie.

  ‘It’s anyone not from around here. You’re a CFA until you get Screeched in.’

  ‘Screeched in?’

  Ellie grabs Sophie’s arm and leads her towards the battered wooden table and mismatched chairs in front of the bay window. ‘It’s a silly thing they started doing in St John’s some years ago for the tourists. It’s a bit of fun, really.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that, Ellie girl,’ Florie says, wrinkling her nose. ‘Kissin’ a cod! Whoever heard of such a thing? Eatin’ them, yes. Kissin’ them, not on your life.’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough for yourself, Sophie. It’s my eighty-ninth birthday on Friday and I’m having a party. We’ll have a Screech-in then.’ Ellie sits down in an old wooden chair painted purple. A web of lines fans out from the corners of her eyes as she smiles at Sam. ‘You can play the Ugly Stick this time, Sam.’

  ‘That’ll be the day, Ellie.’

  Sophie sits beside Ellie at the table, which is covered with stacks of art cards and jars of watery paints. ‘Where’s Becca? I have a surprise for her.’

  ‘She went off with Toby Molloy after lunch,’ Florie says as she peeks into the Foodland bag. ‘Said they were goin’ to check out the iceberg over by Seal Point. Don’t usually see them this time of year, but they’re coming around more often now. Breakin’ off from the glaciers up in Greenland. Said she’d bring back some ice to make some ice cream with. Betcha that’d cost a bomb in New York, wouldn’t it, Sophie? Imagine eatin’ iceberg ice cream in Central Park. Purest ice cream you’d ever hope to eat.’

  Sam sits on a red-painted chair, leaning back until it tilts precariously against the wall. ‘I hope he knows what he’s doing. It’s choppy out there today. She should be studying for her university entrance exams.’

  ‘Oh, Sam, don’t be an old fuddy-duddy. They’re eighteen,’ Ellie says. ‘They’re young. Let them enjoy themselves.’

  ‘That’s just what I’m worried about.’

  ‘Toby’s a responsible boy, and Becca’s always been a good student here at home,’ Ellie says. ‘She’ll do fine on those tests, though I’m still surprised she wants to go to medical school. She’s such an artistic girl. And the clothes she makes!’ Ellie holds up an embroidered purple sleeve. ‘Just look at that embroidery, Sophie. It’s beautiful.’

  Sam tips the legs of the chair back onto the wooden floor. ‘It’s hard to pay bills with art, Ellie. You know that for a fact. Being a doctor will give her some security.’

  Florie sets the icing bowl on the table and pulls up a blue chair. ‘Honestly, these universities all seems to think home-schooled kids are a bunch of illiterate streels. Makin’ her sit these tests when she should be enjoyin’ her youth, it’s a sin.’

  Sam sweeps his finger along the edge of Florie’s bowl and licks the icing. ‘From what I can see, Toby’s just been hanging around on unemployment insurance doing not much of anything all summer since the plant closed. Nothing except getting under my feet in the store. He’ll be off to the Alberta oil fields like all the others before you know it, and that’ll break Becca’s heart.’

  He gets up and heads towards the door, grabbing a bag of hard tack bread off the counter on his way out. ‘I don’t like Becca wasting her time with him.’

  ‘Ellie’s right, b’y. You’re soundin’ like a right old fogey,’ Florie says as she dips her finger into the icing bowl. ‘You comin’ for supper? I’m makin’ Jiggs dinner.’ Sticking her finger in her mouth, she sucks off the sweet icing.

  ‘Yes, come, Sam,’ Ellie says as she collects the shopping bag and hands it to Florie. ‘We’re giving Sophie a proper Newfoundland welcome.’

  Sam glances at Sophie. ‘Don’t see why you’re going to so much trouble. She’ll be off and gone for another ten years soon enough.’

  Sophie glances from Sam to Ellie and back. ‘I’m sorry. My job is so busy … Time just flew.’

  Sam nods at Sophie as he stands with his hand on the screen door. ‘Too busy to return a phone call? Last I heard they still had phones in New York.’

  The door slams shut behind him, rousing Bear from a doze in front of the cash till. The dog lumbers to his feet. He lopes past the three women, his shiny black coat of hair swishing in the air, and pushes out through the screen door after Sam.

  Chapter 50

  Tippy’s Tickle – 12 February 1946

  Ellie leans over the child, who is asleep on the seat opposite them, and tucks the white blanket she’d spent the winter so carefully crocheting snugly around Emmett’s sleeping face. She brushes his soft cheek lightly with her fingertip. Such a good boy. He’d barely made a squeak the five days the Mauritania had spent climbing and plunging over the angry Atlantic waves. When he was awake he’d sit on her lap a
nd survey the chaotic goings-on with an expression of world-weary resignation. ‘’E’s the spit of that ol’ geezer, Winston,’ Mona had said when Emmett had fixed his steely blue eye on her. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt.’

  She glances at Thomas who is deep into the Fisherman’s Advocate newspaper. Her eyes stray to the pinned-up trouser leg before she hastily sits down and turns her head to the dirty window and the view trundling past at a moderate jog. View is too grand a word, Ellie thinks, for the barren wasteland of snowdrifts, wet rock, wind-slapped firs, and the occasional lonely clapboard house with its ubiquitous peeling paint and thread of smoke trailing from the chimney.

  She feels like she’s been travelling for years. From Halifax there’d been a bone-rattling nine-hour train journey up through Nova Scotia to North Sydney. Then, after an uncomfortable night in a hotel room shared with another couple who’d made no effort to hide their amorous fumblings, they’d taken the overnight ferry to Porte aux Basques. A horrible journey, almost worse than the Mauritania. She’d had to abandon the baby to Thomas’s anxious care, as she spent the night being sick in the stinking communal toilet.

  They were on the penultimate leg now, on the Caribou train – or the Newfie Bullet as Thomas told her the American GIs had ironically dubbed it because of its dawdling progress across the island. Heading to some place called Gambo, where Thomas’s father, Ephraim, would meet them with his fishing boat and take them up the coast to Tippy’s Tickle.

  With every frantic transfer, juggling Emmett, and the luggage, and Thomas’s frequent stumbles, her past slipped further and further away, until her life in Norwich with her father and Dottie and George seemed like something she’d once dreamed.