Runaway (34 page)

Coral hands her a printout.

“Not much,” she says.

Robin thanks her and folds it and takes it to the closet, to put it into her purse. She wants to be alone when she reads it. But she can’t wait till she gets home. She goes down to the Quiet Room, which used to be the Prayer Room. Nobody was in there being quiet at the moment.

Outrageous.

Brothers.

Twins.

Robin wants to set this piece of paper in front of someone, some authority.

This is ridiculous. This I do not accept.

Nevertheless.

Shakespeare should have prepared her. Twins are often the reason for mix-ups and disasters in Shakespeare. A means to an end, those tricks are supposed to be. And in the end the mysteries are solved, the pranks are forgiven, true love or something like it is rekindled, and those who were fooled have the good grace not to complain.

He must have gone out on an errand. A brief errand. He would not leave that brother in charge for very long. Perhaps the screen door was hooked—she had never tried to push it open. Perhaps he had told his brother to hook it and not open it while he himself was giving Juno a walk around the block. She had wondered why Juno wasn’t there.

If she had come a little later. A little earlier. If she had stayed till the play was over or skipped the play altogether. If she had not bothered with her hair.

And then? How could they have managed, he with Alexander and she with Joanne? By the way Alexander behaved on that day, it did not look as if he would have put up with any intrusion, any changes. And Joanne would certainly have suffered. Less perhaps from having the deaf-mute Alexander in the house than from Robin’s marriage to a foreigner.

Hard now to credit, the way things were then.

It was all spoiled in one day, in a couple of minutes, not by fits and starts, struggles, hopes and losses, in the long-drawn-out way that such things are more often spoiled. And if it’s true that things are usually spoiled, isn’t the quick way the easier way to bear?

But you don’t really take that view, not for yourself. Robin doesn’t. Even now she can yearn for her chance. She is not going to spare a moment’s gratitude for the trick that has been played. But she’ll come round to being grateful for the discovery of it. That, at least—the discovery which leaves everything
whole, right up to the moment of frivolous intervention. Leaves you outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame.

That was another world they had been in, surely. As much as any world concocted on the stage. Their flimsy arrangement, their ceremony of kisses, the foolhardy faith enveloping them that everything would sail ahead as planned. Move an inch this way or that, in such a case, and you’re lost.

Robin has had patients who believe that combs and toothbrushes must lie in the right order, shoes must face in the right direction, steps must be counted, or some sort of punishment will follow.

If she has failed in that department, it would be in the matter of the green dress. Because of the woman at the cleaners, the sick child, she wore the wrong green dress.

She wished she could tell somebody. Him.

M
arch 13, 1927. Now we get the winter, just when we are supposed to be in sight of spring. Big storms closing off the roads, schools shut down. And some old fellow they say went for a walk out the tracks and is likely frozen. Today I went in my snowshoes right down the middle of the street and there was not a mark but mine on the snow. And by the time I got back from the store my tracks were entirely filled in. This is because of the lake not being frozen as usual and the wind out of the west picking up loads of moisture and dumping down on us as snow. I went to get coffee and one or two other necessities. Who should I see in the store but Tessa Netterby whom I hadn’t seen for maybe a year. I felt badly I’d never got out to see her, because I used to try to keep up a sort of friendship after she dropped out of school. I think I was the only one that did. She was all wrapped up in a big shawl and she
looked like something out of a storybook. Top-heavy, actually, because she has that broad face with its black curly mop and her broad shoulders, though she can’t be much over five feet tall. She just smiled, the same old Tessa. And I asked how she was—you always do that when you see her, seriously, because of her long siege of whatever it was that took her out of school when she was around fourteen. But also you ask that because there isn’t much else to think of to say, she is not in the world that the rest of us are in. She is not in any clubs and can’t take part in any sports and she does not have any normal social life. She does have a sort of life involving people and there is nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn’t know how to talk about it and maybe neither would she.

Mr. McWilliams was there helping Mrs. McWilliams out in the store because the clerks had not been able to get in. He is a dreadful tease and he started teasing Tessa, asking her if she didn’t get word of this storm coming and why she couldn’t have let the rest of us know about it, etc. and Mrs. McWilliams told him to stop it. Tessa just looked as if she never heard and asked for a can of sardines. It made me feel suddenly awful, to think of her sitting down for supper to a can of sardines. Which is hardly likely, I don’t know any reason she can’t cook a meal like anybody else.

The big news I heard at the store was that the roof of the Knights of Pythias Hall has caved in. There goes our stage for The Gondoliers, which was supposed to go on at the end of March. The Town Hall stage is not big enough and the old Opera House is now being used to store coffins from Hay’s Furniture. So tonight we are supposed to have a rehearsal but I don’t know who will get there or what will be the outcome.

Mar. 16. Decision to shelve The Gondoliers for this year, only six of us out to rehearsal in the Sunday School Hall so we
gave up and went over to Wilf’s house for coffee. Wilf also announced that he had meant this to be his last performance because his practice was getting too busy, and we would have to find another tenor. That will be a blow because he is the best.

I still feel funny calling a doctor by his first name even if he is only around thirty. His house used to be Dr. Coggan’s and a lot of people still call it that. It was built specially to be a doctor’s house with the office wing out to one side. But Wilf has had it all done over, some partitions knocked down altogether so that it is very roomy and bright and Sid Ralston was kidding him about getting it all ready for a wife. That was rather a touchy subject with Ginny right there but probably Sid did not know. (Ginny has had three proposals. First one from Wilf Rubstone, then Tommy Shuttles, then Euan McKay. A doctor, then an optometrist, then a minister. She is eight months older than I am but I don’t suppose I have a hope of catching up. I think she does lead them on a bit, though she always says she can’t understand it and that every time they asked her to marry them it came like a bolt out of the blue. What I think is that there are ways you can turn everything into a joke and let them know you wouldn’t welcome a proposal, before you let them go and make a fool of themselves.)

If ever I am seriously ill I hope I am able to destroy this diary or go through and stroke out any mean things in it, in case I die.

We all got talking in a rather serious way, I don’t know why, and the conversation got on to the things we learned at school and how much we had already forgotten. Somebody mentioned the Debating Club that used to be in town and how that all got scrapped after the War when everybody got cars to run around in and the movies to go to and started playing golf. What serious subjects they used to talk about. “Is Science or Literature more important in forming Human Character?” Can anybody
imagine getting people out nowadays to listen to that? We’d feel silly even sitting around in an unorganized way and talking about it. Then Ginny said we should at least form a Reading Club and that got us on to the important books we always meant to read but never got down to it. The Harvard Classics that just sit there on the shelf behind glass doors in the living room year after year. Why not War and Peace, I said, but Ginny claimed she had already read it. So it came down to a vote between Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy and the Divine Comedy won out. All we know about it is that it is not much of a comedy and written in Italian, though we will naturally be reading it in English. Sid thought it was in Latin and said he had read enough of that in Miss Hurt’s class to last him all his life and we all roared at him, then he pretended he knew all along. Anyway now that The Gondoliers is on hold we should be able to find some time and will meet every couple of weeks to encourage each other.

Wilf showed us all over the house. The dining room is on one side of the hall and living room on the other and the kitchen has built-in cabinets and a double sink and the latest electric stove. There is a new washroom off the back hall and a streamlined bathroom and the closets are big enough to walk into and fixed up with full-length mirrors in the door. Golden oak floors everywhere. When I got home this place looked so poky and the wainscoting so dark and old-fashioned. I got on to Father at breakfast about how we could build a sunroom off the dining room to at least have one room bright and modern. (I forgot to mention that Wilf has a sunroom built out from the opposite side of the house to his office and it makes a good balance.) Father said what do we need that for when we have two verandahs to get the sun in the morning and the evening? So I see it’s not likely I’m going to get anywhere with my home improvement scheme.

Apr. 1. First thing when I waked up I fooled Father. I ran out into the hall screaming that a bat had come down the chimney into my room and he came tearing out of the bathroom with his braces down and lather all over his face and told me to stop hollering and being hysterical and go and get the broom. So I got it, and then I hid on the back stairs pretending I was terrified while he went thumping around without his glasses on trying to find the bat. Eventually I took pity on him and yelled out, “April Fool!”

So the next thing was Ginny phoned up and said, “Nancy, what am I going to do? My hair is falling out, it’s all over the pillow, big clumps of my beautiful hair all over the pillow and now I’m half bald, I can never leave this house again, will you run over here and see if we can make a wig out of it?”