Burden of Memory (20 page)
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Elaine shouted to the winds as the brief moment of serenity cracked apart like the ice-bound lake at spring break-up. “Can’t those dammed dogs keep quiet for ten seconds?”
“Josepheson.” A cool voice sounded from behind an old maple and Alan stepped out, still carrying his saw. He snapped his fingers and growled deep in his throat. The dogs retreated to his side.
“Morning, Manners. Your dogs have frightened Elaine. Can’t you keep them under a bit of control?”
Elaine’s hackles rose as high as the dogs’. “I’m hardly frightened by those two,” she said. “All bark and no bite.”
“Not everyone knows that,” Greg said, his eyes on Alan.
“Better that they don’t,” Alan replied. He turned his attention. “I found a nice bunch of oyster mushrooms, back through the woods a bit. Lizzie does a great job with them. Would you like to help me collect some, Elaine?”
“Sounds nice. Thanks for the drink, Greg,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”
“If not before. Enjoy your mushrooms.” He turned and before Elaine could reply, disappeared behind a stand of pines to be swallowed up by the bush.
“Charming fellow,” Alan said, dryly.
“I like him.”
“I’m sure you do.” He plunged into the woods, Hamlet and Ophelia at his heels, leaving a perplexed Elaine to follow.
***
She had forgotten her promise to meet Phoebe. What with Gatorade in the Josepheson kitchen, the lengthy cottage tour followed by mushroom picking in the woods with a brittle Alan, Elaine was more than a bit late.
But Phoebe didn’t seem to mind. She sat happily amongst the papers while Lizzie huffed and puffed in an effort to pick her way around the obstacles scattered around her kitchen.
Phoebe sat cross-legged on the floor beside one of the salvaged boxes reading a yellowing letter. The box was scorched on the outside and warped from sudden drying out by the kitchen fire, but fortunately still sound, contents safe. “Scandal, scandal,” she screamed as Elaine crouched down beside her. “Listen to this. The gardener, William, and the maid, Sheila, were dismissed on the same day for ‘immoral behavior.’ What do you think of that?”
Elaine settled into her place on the floor. “I think that either Will and Sheila missed church one Sunday, probably having been kept up until all hours by family demands, or they were having a bit of hanky panky on the side, and good for them. It would be fun to find out whatever happened to then. Perhaps they founded a dynasty of mining magnates or some such. Any last names?”
“Nope.”
“Then scant hope, I’m afraid. Whose letter is that, anyway?”
“It is to none other than Mrs. Elizabeth Madison herself, wife of Augustus, mother of Mary Margaret, and thus grandmother of Moira, from her sister in England. The sister is referring to something that Elizabeth told her about.”
Elaine’s heart almost stopped in delight. “A letter to Elizabeth. How many are there?”
Phoebe shuffled through a pile of papers. “This looks like the only one in this box. It’s completely out of date from the rest, maybe got mixed in by mistake. Most of this lot are from Moira to her own mother, when she was in Africa, dated many, many years after Elizabeth’s sister’s letter.”
“We can only hope there’ll be more. What’s the date?”
“November 1939.” Phoebe looked up. “The war had started.”
“Still early for them to be too worried, in England. I wonder what Elizabeth’s sister did during the war. She would have been quite elderly. Let’s keep looking. I’d love to have more letters to Elizabeth and Augustus. Some letters from her would be even better, but that’s unlikely.”
***
They worked for the rest of the morning, checking each piece of paper for damp. Fortunately most of the papers dried out nicely. Moira arrived, Ruth pushing her wheelchair, and instructed them to put the boxes into the library, in order to at least get them out of poor Lizzie’s way. Alan and Brad were conscripted to help with carrying the precious documents from one room to another.
One box of papers, mostly household accounts by the look of them, but intermixed with a few letters, had been almost completely ruined by smoke and water. Elaine sighed in disappointment. “I’ll try to get these cleaned up a bit,” she said. “But it’ll be hard. We’re lucky they were all stored so well. Surprising, considering the way they’re stuffed up in that old loft.”
“That would be Aunt Maeve, I suspect,” Phoebe said. “She did give the old things care and attention at one time, although not much lately.”
“Bit hard for her to clamber up the stairs, I expect.”
Once the task was accomplished and all the boxes relocated to the so-called library, the room was bursting at the seams.
Their work was interrupted by Lizzie arriving at the door bearing an antique silver tray with turkey sandwiches, tea, and thick slices of carrot cake.
“Thought you’d be hungry about now,” she said. “Megan is asking what all the racket is down here.” She glanced about for a suitable spot and settled the tray on a fragile, antique side table, out of place in this modern room of Stephen King paperbacks and large screen TV. “Ghosts, I told her, but she went running to complain to Elliot that I’m being cheeky. You’ll no doubt be seeing them shortly.”
After lunch, Moira summoned Elaine to her study, and she left Phoebe immersed in old letters and household accounts.
“Time to get back to work, Elaine,” Moira announced cheerfully. Some of the color had returned to her face and the lines of strain had receded, just a bit. “Can’t keep having this much fun forever, now can we?”
Elaine smiled at her employer’s enthusiasm and pulled a chair up to the beautiful desk. “Any news of Charles? I was sorry to hear that he had to stay in the hospital.”
“He called earlier. The cardiologist has given him the all clear and he can come home as long as he takes it easy for a while. Brad has gone to pick him up. So it looks as if the rest of my family will be staying the week. Blasted nuisance, but I can’t demand that they all leave. Charles has a broken arm, Maeve is shaken up about the fire, and the people from the fire department are still poking their inquisitive heads in and out. And to top it all off, we’re expecting a visit from the police this afternoon.”
“They’re convinced it’s arson then?”
“Absolute rubbish, as I told Charles on the phone. Complete waste of everyone’s time. Although I suppose if there was an electrical fault or something we would want to know about it. So we could ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s rubbish, Miss Madison,” Ruth said from her place in the corner. “If the fire inspector suspects someone set that fire, then we had better be careful. It’s only wise.”
Moira opened her mouth to make a smart retort, caught Elaine trying not to look at her and closed it again. “Perhaps you’re right, Ruth.”
Elaine busied herself with her tape recorder and notebook.
“Hard on Lizzie,” Moira said. “She’s called Patty back to help out and sent Alan and Amber into town for enough food to feed an army.” Today she wore a deep green T-shirt from the University of British Columbia and a well-used pair of sweatpants in an ugly shade of brown. Two enormous diamonds set into drops of white gold glistened at her ears. “Like my shirt?” The old woman smiled brightly, displaying the aged and crooked teeth. “A birthday gift from my great-niece, Andrea. She’s in medical school. I considered studying for a doctor. In my family it was shocking enough to want to be a nurse. But at least that was a woman’s profession. Can’t imagine what Grandfather would have said, had I become a doctor.”
“Do you mean your grandfather, Augustus Madison?” Elaine checked that the recorder had sufficient tape and pressed record. “I’d like to hear more about him.”
“Why?” Moira’s tone was suddenly sharp.
“For background. He did make your family’s money, didn’t he? So he’s important to your story.”
“I suppose he is. Complex man. A domestic tyrant, you could say. He treated his wife and children with less consideration than his pets. But in business, people respected him. I was surprised, when I started to travel, how well people would treat me, simply because I was Augustus’ granddaughter.”
“Maybe they wanted you to influence him on their behalf.”
“When he was alive, perhaps. Yet even after he died, both men and women would seek me out to tell me how much they admired him and that he had helped them or given them a chance. I remember one incident in particular. It was after the war, when I was back nursing in Toronto for a short while, before going to the Territories. I had a patient with a broken leg; she was absolutely delighted to find out who I was. She told me that Grandfather had helped her mother after her father died. He’d been an employee at the store and was killed during some sort of accident in the loading docks. When he died her mother, my patient’s mother that is, was left destitute and Grandfather saw to it that she got a bit of money, and found her a place in secretarial school. When she graduated he hired her at the store. She told me that her mother adored him.”
Elaine tried not to snort in derision.
Moira read her mind. “Of course I thought the same as you. But she assured me that she was old enough to know that Grandfather asked for nothing in return. He came to their apartment one time only, after the funeral. Had a weak cup of tea out of a chipped cup and a stale cookie, and left an envelope with money and the address of the secretarial college.”
“Quite a story.”
“I was afraid of him when I was young. He didn’t have much to do with us, but he was so cold and distant when he was around. He was quite terrifying.”
Elaine could believe it: she had spent long enough staring at that portrait at the bottom of the stairs.
“He loved Ralph. Much more than he did any of the rest of us. But he could be so terribly hard on him. Fredrick, my father, was his only child, so all of his other grandchildren were merely girls.”
“Did he think of you that way—merely girls?”
“Yes, he did. He simply ignored us girls. But Ralph, he did love Ralph.”
When she spoke of her childhood, Moira’s voice was thick with wounds never healed, remembered pain, and pent up anger. But it always softened when she mentioned her brother. Elaine wanted to explore that more, but knew that this was not the time to interrupt the flow of narrative. Instead she scribbled wildly, thinking all the time that Moira had an amazing grasp of human nature. She hoped she could bring that out, in the writing of Moira’s life.
“But he was hard on Ralph. Difficult for anyone to live up to such expectations. I sometimes think that is why….”
Elaine looked up. Moira was sitting still, her chair half turned, staring out the window at the naked trees beyond. A red squirrel perched on a branch, looking in, the little face scrunched up inquisitively.
“You think…?” Elaine prodded.
“Nothing. He died in 1944. Grandfather did. The day after they got the news about Ralph. I wasn’t there, of course, but they told me that he was walking in the woods, overwhelmed with grief, and his heart simply stopped. He was dead when they found him.”
A knock at the door, and Lizzie’s frazzled head appeared around the frame. “The police are here, Moira. They’d like to talk to us all. I’ve put them in the front room. They’re asking for Elaine first.”
“Very well.” Moira sighed theatrically. “And we were getting so much accomplished. Is Charles back yet?”
“Led the police up the drive.”
“Nothing for it, but we’ll have to continue later, my dear.”
September 1944. An exceptionally hot day in a summer of hot days. Moira was writing up her notes on the day’s shift, but her mind was in Muskoka. Where her mother and sisters would be trying to find someone to pull up the dock, bring in the boats, and shut the boathouse for the winter. Her mother tried (and failed, but she did try) to be cheerful. But her sisters’ letters were full of complaints; the best of the servants had left—the men for the army, the women for factory jobs, only the old and unwanted remaining—the shortage of nice clothes and men under fifty at dances or boating parties, always ending with “but we mustn’t complain.” Rather than being offended by their petty concerns, their letters amused Moira enormously. Nothing like having one’s opinions of others so completely verified. She wiped sweat from the back of her neck and dreamt longingly of gigantic plates of ice, water frozen solid, shifting and heaving with enough force to twist and tear rock: never mind a puny rowboat or manmade dock.
Jean burst into the tent. She had long ago lost the devil-may-care persona of the crafty businesswoman and party girl. Like the rest of them, the new Jean was all work.
“Put that book down, Moira. You have to come with me.”
Moira looked at her friend stupidly. Her eyes were so tired the lids felt like industrial strength sandpaper rubbing against her eyeballs. She had worked for thirty-six hours straight, standing beside Dr. Reynolds until the surgeon could scarcely hold his scalpel straight. They tended to one critically wounded soldier at a time. Some had been awake and aware, crying for their mother or cursing God. Most were, fortunately, unconscious. Many died without seeing light again, and a few would wish that they had. They were all young and brave and they all loved mothers and fathers or children and wives or girlfriends, some of whom remained faithful and some of whom did not. Moira closed her heart and tried not to love them all.
Jean plucked the notebook from Moira’s fingers and lifted her friend to her feet. “Moira. Ralph is here.”
“Ralph, my brother? How nice,” Moira said, failing to understand. “But this isn’t a good time for a visit.”
“I think it’s your brother. His tags have that name. You have to come with me.”
Understanding at last, Moira ran out of the tent. Jean followed.
He lay in the pre-operative tent. The orderlies had scrubbed the dirt from his face and wiped up most the blood. He was as pale as a Muskoka moon shining on the lake when it was covered with fresh snow, his eyes mere dark hollows in the achingly familiar face.
“Oh, Ralph. God, no.” Moira fell to her knees beside the cot. He was conscious, pumped full of morphine, thank goodness. Her expert eyes ran over his body, seeing the uniform shirt soaked red, ripped open, the stomach wound roughly bandaged, still leaking blood.
The orderlies arrived. “Stand back, Sister. We’ll take him in now. Doctor’s waiting.”
“M.” He reached out one hand. The first few gentle drops of rain fell on the roof of the hospital tent. The officers were worried about the rains. These flat plains and reclaimed swampland would turn quickly into seas of living mud.
“She’s gone, M. Amy’s gone. She’s left me. Thank you.”
Moira leaned over the stretcher to catch his words. “I’m glad, dearest. They’re going to take you to surgery. We’ll talk when you get out.”
“I’m sorry she died, M. I should have helped her.”
“Yes. You should have. But it’s all over. You stay strong and get better, and we’ll talk about her then.”
“Sister,” the orderly said, his voice breaking with kindness, “we have to go.”
Ralph smiled a dreamy morphine smile as his stretcher was hoisted high. “Tell Charlie I don’t blame….”
An ambulance pulled up; the back doors flew open, orderlies rushed to unload more wounded. Ralph’s words were lost.
He died on the operating table while Moira paced outside in the driving rain. Someone had told Dr. Reynolds of their relationship and he came himself out to tell her. He was a kind man, who hated every minute of this war.
Warm comforting arms enveloped Moira and led her back to the nurses’ tent. The staff of Number Four Casualty Clearing Station stood silently as they passed.
Jean held the flap of the tent back and Moira bent automatically to enter.
“Oh, Moira. What can I say?”
She straightened. It was Charlie Stoughton. His uniform was torn and filthy, and a cut over his right eye had dried into a caked mess. His face twisted with the strength of his emotions, and he gathered her up into his arms. They clung to each other for a long time, while Jean fluttered about, patting backs and whispering platitudes, and the rain fell, and the war raged all around them.
Charles Stoughton received the George Cross for his actions that day. Ralph Madison received a grave in Europe, one in a row upon row.
Moira Madison refused to take leave and worked herself around the clock.
The family was at the cottage when the news arrived. Old Augustus Madison died the next day, his heart just giving up. Ralph’s mother collapsed and never quite recovered. His two sisters in Canada mourned, but did appreciate the gestures of sympathy from all their friends. His father went to Ottawa and negotiated a new contract for the output of his munitions factories. Mrs. Brooks, mother of no children of her own, who had warmed Ralph’s milk when he was a baby, and tested its temperature on her bare arm, draped black crepe over the pictures in the house as had her grandmothers for generations uncounted, then walked out to the precipice overlooking the lake, for once forgetting to prepare afternoon tea, and howled into the wind.
The family, gathered in the drawing room, heard her, and tried not to look at each other in embarrassment.
Only Ralph’s grandmother, Elizabeth, received the news without shock. Days earlier, while she was working in her patch of garden, a piercing cry rose from the woods behind the servants’ cottages, abandoned since the beginning of the war. A single cry, so loud, so full of pain, it had the birds flying out of the trees, the squirrels scattering for shelter, the boat bobbing on waves on a lake that moments before had been as still as glass. The old woman remembered her own mother’s tales of the banshee, gathered up her gardening tools into her neat basket and returned to the cottage. She was dressed in full mourning and waiting for the telegram when it arrived.
