That Forgetful Shore (3 page)

Aunt Rachel says nothing, that night or any other, about her conversation with Mr. Bishop, about Triffie's excellent report marks, about the possibility of St. John's and teacher-training. A dozen times Trif shapes words, practices what to say, but never speaks the question aloud. She and Kit talk about it, of course, as they talk about almost everything. Kit's parents have agreed that she will go to college; she is packing her trunk, making her plans.

One night, walking back from the Salvation Army meeting in Bay Roberts, arms linked and heads close together, Kit and Trif fall behind the other girls. They go to the Church of England on the Point with their parents on Sunday morning, or on Sunday afternoon if that's when the service is held, the minister dividing his time between two congregations. But on Sunday nights the young people crave a livelier sort of worship than can be found at Evensong, so they traipse off, either to the Methodist Chapel on the south side of the Point or, more often these days, across the causeway to the Salvation Army Citadel in Bay Roberts. There they enjoy loud singing and the clang of tambourines, fervent testimonies and shouts of praise. The air is heightened; it's as good as a play, or as Trif imagines a play might be. Girls and – more rarely – boys sometimes go up to kneel at the mercy seat, tears streaming down their faces. On the way home on fall and winter nights couples pair off, boys linked with girls they have admired from afar, washed up together on a sudden wave of emotion. But on summer nights the group is made up almost entirely of girls; most of the young men have gone fishing, so the delicious edge of romantic tension is missing from the air.

“I asked Pop to talk to Aunt Rachel for you,” Kit says.

“What?”

“About college. About you going with me.”

“She'll never let me go,” Trif says.

“You never even asked her.” It sounds like an accusation.

“I never had to. Mr. Bishop talked to her, and she never said a word to me about it, so I know she said no.” Mr. Bishop gives Trif a sad look every time he sees her in church or on the road. She knows he pities her, the clever girl not allowed to go farther in school. “They don't have the money to send me to town.”

“I'm sure if they really wanted to they could find a way. Mr. Bishop says there's scholarships and the like.”

Trif says nothing, because this is one thing Kit truly doesn't understand. Kit is the only living child, beloved daughter of her father's house, the one upon whom all her parents' hopes and dreams ride. The Saunders family is not poor, and whatever worldly wealth they have will certainly go towards making Kit's path through life as easy and pleasant as possible. Albert and Rachel manage as well as most fishermen's families do, but Trif is not their daughter. She is the illegitimate niece, the unpaid help, and they have three children of their own to provide for. “They put a roof over my head and food on the table,” Trif explains. “That's more than they got to do. They don't owe me no more.”

“Pop's going to talk to her, all the same.”

“Tell him not to, please. It won't do any good.” And it might do harm; Aunt Rachel might take it out on Trif, thinking she had put Kit up to asking.

If Kit's father talks to Aunt Rachel or not, Trif never knows it. Plans for Kit's departure continue and Trif's life continues too, unchanged, the routine that will shape her days till they marry her off. She tries not to think of Kit leaving, of the Point without Kit. Strange to think they have known each other barely three years. All of Trif's life seems to have happened in those three years.

“I wish you were going with me, Posy,” Kit says. They are sitting on the rocks of the Long Beach, three nights before Kit leaves for St. John's. “I'm afraid of it all – everything will be so strange and new, all people I never met before. Townie girls with their fancy airs. It wouldn't be so bad if you were coming with me.”

“Will you write me letters? You won't forget me, Peony?”

“I'll write every day. I'll never forget my Posy, my twin sister.” Kit throws her arms around Trif and they share a long, delicious embrace.

This is the moment Trif wants to remember: she and her Peony in each other's arms, vowing to let nothing part them. The truth is that in after years she will have forgotten their farewell on the beach. What will stay with her always, what lingers in her mind, is the vision of Kit walking away from her on the last day of school, walking down the road side by side with Joe Bishop. It's that moment that will come to haunt her. It haunts her already, as she and Kit stand on the beach, faces buried in each other's hair, while the salt wind blows in off the water.

Kit

St. John's
October, 1904

My darling Posy,

How I wish you were here with me! How different it would be, living in my cold, bare boarding house, walking the busy streets of town, if Peony and Posy were again entwined in one bouquet. How cruel of Fate
(
or
 
your
 
Aunt
)
to sunder us!

My lessons are progressing very well and I have determined to be ready for my Preliminary exam in one year instead of two. Miss Shaw (the finest teacher here by far!) says it is possible if I work very hard. The other scholars are all very dull and I do not think I shall have any particular friends. Indeed, what friend could take the place of the One who has been
torn
from me? Peony shall be a flower that grows alone, until we are
together
 
again
,
my darling.

The teachers here are very good, clever and mostly kind, though distant. How I miss the gentle words of our Dear Pedagogue, who would speak so kindly to me when I worked at my Mathematics! My only comfort is that he will soon be here in St. John's too, for he has written that he must come to Town in October, and will call on me. I long to see him, for he is my only link to the old life I have left behind.

How I longed to be out in the great world, and how glad I am to be here, yet … how lonely I am at nights, when the moon rises over the ships in St. John's harbour (I can see it through the trees from my window) and I imagine it shining down on the calm, still waters of our cove! How grand to go on to new adventures, but how sad to have to face them alone, without the ones we love!

Ever and always your own,
Peony

For Kit, all her life, first in Trinity and then in Missing Point, “schoolroom” has meant a crowded room with hand-made benches pulled up around the stove, huddled close for warmth. Now her schoolroom at Bishop Spencer College is a large, airy room with tall windows, separate desks for each scholar, and more books than she has ever imagined. Lace curtains cover the windows, and a piano occupies one corner. The room is almost always cold and the other young women look older and more serious than Kit, who still feels like a child. Yet she knows many of them are thirteen, like she is; fourteen or fifteen at the most. Many of them come from outports, some from places smaller than the Point. There is no reason why she should feel young or ignorant in their company, why she should not have the same laughing confidence she had in the schoolroom back home. But she is severed from herself, from everything she knows. From her Posy. She has been here three weeks, and tells herself she is still finding her footing.

Kit has heard that Catholic girls who want to train as teachers, if they don't want to become nuns, must live like nuns anyway, staying at the convent and taking their classes there. Some of the outport girls at Spencer board in a house owned by the school, and surely their lives are little better than those of novice nuns. Kit boards with her mother's elderly Cousin Ethel and helps the old woman around the house in exchange for her room and board. In theory she has more freedom than the girls in the Spencer College boarding house, but what opportunity does she have to use that freedom? She eats, sleeps, studies and cleans the house. Would being a nun be any worse?

On Saturdays she has a little freedom, which she uses, if the weather is good, to walk around the city, learning her way around the winding streets. She walks down Holloway Street through the muddy bustle of Haymarket Square, then along the rows of shops on Water Street, pausing sometimes to go into a shop and browse, sometimes to look at the schooners and steamers tied up at the piers. She rides the elevator in Ayre and Sons department store, and, when she's tired from her walk down the length of Water Street, takes the streetcar back.

If the weather is bad, which it usually is, she reads, devouring books borrowed from Cousin Ethel's shelves. She is glad the old woman's late husband liked novels, for all her old favourites are there – Dickens and Austen and Scott – but she misses having Triffie to discuss them with. She writes long letters telling Trif what she is reading – which is always far more interesting than anything she is doing – but misses the immediacy of Trif's tart replies. “I don't blame Mr. Knightley one bit,” Trif said when they were reading
Emma
. “She deserved a lot worse, if you ask me – he ought to've slapped her.” Kit disagreed passionately, of course – Emma is her favourite of Austen's heroines – but it's that disagreement she misses, the push and pull of their debates.

One Saturday afternoon Kit receives a diversion that a novice nun never would – news of a gentleman caller down in the parlour. It does not, of course, take her completely by surprise. Joe – Mr. Bishop – wrote he would come to St. John's for a few days in October, and she has been trying not to count down the days.

She studies herself in the glass before going downstairs, praying she looks like a young woman now and not like a schoolgirl any longer. He used always to refer to her, gravely, as a young lady even when her skirts were short and her hair long. Now she walks as gracefully as she can into the parlour, her skirt almost brushing the floor, her braided hair carefully pinned on top of her head. She holds herself as straight as if she had books on her head, practising her smile.

His smile is ready, eager and open. He looks like a young man greeting an old friend, surely not like a teacher visiting a former pupil. As he holds out his hands she takes them both, moves involuntarily as if into an embrace. Then they both step back a little, flushed, embarrassed, but they don't let go of each other's hands.

“It's so very good to see you,” says Joe. Mr. Bishop. Dear Pedagogue.

He offers her his arm as they walk down Gower Street. As soon as her fingers touch the fabric of his sleeve memory floods in. His hand on her shoulder as he bent over, helping her with a difficult proof in Geometry. His hand taking hers as she turned to go, last to leave the schoolroom. Hints and suggestions. Gestures she took as promises:
when you are older, when you are out of the schoolroom…

These are the memories she cherishes, the only memories she allows. These are her daylight memories.

The memories, those she acknowledges and those she doesn't, create a link between them.
An intimacy
, she thinks. Chooses to think of that word, its precise and delicate sound, to counteract the pulsing movement of her blood created by the sense of his skin and muscles underneath the cloth, beneath her fingers.

A stroll up Water Street on a Saturday afternoon. The shops and buildings, even the wharves, look more glamorous than they do when she is alone. She remembers to lift her skirt clear of litter and horse dung. The streets are busy, the wind off the harbour chilly, but the surrounding buildings offer a kind of shelter. It's so different from the outports she grew up in; the city is like being indoors even when outdoors. She never feels truly exposed to sky and sea and wind as she did on the Point, and has not yet decided if she likes the feeling or not.

Her Dear Pedagogue asks about her classes at Spencer, talks about the Missing Point school, where this year he is dealing with a record number of a hundred and seventeen students.

“What if I gets – if I get sent to a school like that?” Kit wonders aloud. The lively chaos of that busy, smoky schoolroom seems an ocean away from the quiet, high-windowed rooms at Spencer. She remembers Mr. Bishop's – Joe's – voice straining as it rose above the babble, quieting the little ones, leading them in the Lord's Prayer at the start of the day. “You were always so sure of yourself,” she says. “All us youngsters, even the wild ones that never listened or paid any mind. Like you were born knowing what to do.”

His laugh is low and husky and makes her shiver for no reason, like he's laughing as he walks across her grave. “Oh, that's very far from the truth. Very far, indeed. Truth is, half the time I'd stand up there talking away and think, Why are any of this crowd listening to me at all? Why don't they turn tail and run out the door, down to the wharves? It's a strange thing, the power that keeps a child in the classroom. A funny kind of power for a man to wield when he's not much more than a boy himself. As I was, when I started teaching.”

He speaks as if he's old, but she and Trif have figured it out, pieced together clues: he is twenty-four years old. Not yet married, though surely he must be ready for it now.

Kit is ready for something, though if she pulls it apart and looks at it sensibly she knows she is not ready to be married, nor to be a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse with fifty or sixty young ones of all ages, never mind a hundred and seventeen. She is barely ready to be in St. John's, at Spencer College, studying for her CHEs. Barely ready to be away from Missing Point and her parents and Triffie, from everything familiar and loved. But she is ready for something. She doesn't know what till the walk ends and Joe Bishop says goodnight to her at Cousin Ethel's door.

He has been a model of propriety all afternoon, walking a fine line between a schoolmaster visiting his former pupil and a young man visiting a young lady he might, someday, consider courting. For that, Kit has decided, is what's happening here. She is too young, school still too recent, for Joe to court her. But he's making his interest plain. When she's home next summer, then it will be suitable. Then he will politely ask if he might come calling, and there will be more evenings like this one.