That Forgetful Shore (34 page)

Trif lays the letter on the table. Behind the flawless handwriting and flowery words, Effie Dawe's message is the same as Amelia Snow's. She sits and looks at the letter for a long time.

Unless God has worked a miracle
. Trif is familiar with miracles. She has prayed for God to raise up churches, to heal the sick, to patch together wounded hearts, and He has always come through. But when it comes to this – to the safety of her beloved only daughter – she is not sure she can leave this in God's hands. He can be trusted, but can He do the job on His own?

If God is going to work a miracle, Trif Russell figures He may need her help.

Kit

“HERE ARE MY letters, Miss Edwards, but none of them is urgent. You may do them tomorrow morning if you wish.” Kit hands a sheaf of handwritten papers to her secretary. Miss Edwards – a pretty young thing who was a student three years ago and came to work in the school office after completing a commercial course – smiles at her, her pretty bow of a mouth discreetly outlined and her hair in marcelled waves. Her skirts are as short as Kit's dictums will allow, though Kit herself still wears hers at the ankle, as befits the Headmistress. Students and office staff – and even some of the younger teachers – rush to embrace new fashions, but Kit, who would love to bob her hair, must present an image of timeless dependability. “Stagnation” is another word for it, but she carefully avoids saying that, even to herself.

Miss Edwards gathers her things – the two of them are the last people in the school, even the wildly disorganized Miss Cunningham having finally finished marking her papers and gone home. “Good evening, ma'am,” Miss Edwards says with something approaching a curtsey, as she goes out the door.

Kit puts on her own coat, looks for a moment at a pile of correspondence and notes before deciding she will take none of it home tonight, and goes out, locking up the doors as she leaves.

St. Margaret's is a day school, so Kit does not live on the premises but rents a flat a few streets away. Sometimes she takes a tram home, but today she walks through streets in the dying hours of an April afternoon. There's little hint of spring in the air yet; it reminds her of April back home, damp and chilly. Many things about Manchester remind her of St. John's; there's no point denying this is not the England for which she crossed the ocean. There's little here of the glories of Oxford or London; it's as if she came all this way to recreate a life very much like the one she had in St. John's.

She's been here two years now, and has settled into her work if not entirely into the city. It surprised her at first how little the job of a Headmistress was like that of a teacher; apparently she spent two years pursuing a Bachelor of Letters so that she could spend the rest of her life behind a desk answering letters, or sitting in meetings. Her greatest pleasure is her higher-form English classes, where she finally gets the rewards she always hoped to find in teaching. Coaching girls to take entrance exams for university, knowing that they have a good chance of actually making something of themselves, is worlds removed from huddling round the woodstove in a one-room outport schoolhouse, dragging the children of fishermen through one Royal Reader after another when almost all of them would rather be somewhere else.

Work keeps her busy, and it has its compensations. Her personal life, on the other hand, is virtually non-existent in Manchester. Her acquaintances are all connected with school, the mistresses on her staff and trustees of the Board, parents of students, all of whom must be kept at a cordial distance for various reasons. She attends church because not to do so would be unthinkable, but is not drawn to the life of the parish in any way; everyone understands that the school consumes all her hours and nobody expects much of her. Apart from reading, the only thing she does for her own pleasure is attend an occasional lecture or debate, telling herself she has an obligation to broaden her mind.

It's easy to see how one's mind, one's world, can become narrow and limited. Kit enters through the front door of the house where she rents the upstairs flat. She has books and time and space of her own, which she once thought was the definition of happiness. And she is not unhappy; it's only that these rooms, which she occupies alone, sometimes seem at once too large and too small. The empty chairs and half-empty bed yawn at her while the walls threaten to close in and trap her.

“Quite enough melodrama, Mrs. Porter,” she says to herself now, flicking through the day's mail as she lays her umbrella, misted with the afternoon's drizzle, near the radiator to dry. Pinned above her desk is a notice for the lecture she plans to attend this evening: something about Marxism, which intrigues her. She likes to learn about things well outside her area of expertise and has attended lectures on Theosophy, gardening and the archaeological discoveries in the pyramids of Egypt. Everyone she knows through school thinks the Bolshevik threat is a greater danger to the world even than the war was, but Kit also knows there are labouring men and women in the factories whose lot in life would be far worse than it is if not for the unions. She knows, too, that there are those in the city who think a Marxist revolution is exactly what England needs.

Her tea is a boiled egg and a sandwich of thinly sliced cucumber, eaten while reading
Barchester Towers
: she is working her way through Trollope. After tea she makes a note in her journal about the upcoming lecture: she tries to make her journal more a record of her life and activities than simply the outpouring of emotion it was at first. She has also kept up the habit of sketching in the margins, the kind of caricatures she used to draw in her letters to Trif. She notices, flipping through the pages, that her Oxford journal was full of sketches of her friends and fellow scholars as well as the tutors and dons, while the Manchester pages contain only a few sketches of students and co-workers, and many still lifes: the view from her window; a pile of crockery on her table.

Seven o'clock draws near. Kit lays aside introspection and changes from her severe office clothes to a slightly less severe skirt and blouse. For evening wear she allows herself a hemline an inch or two higher, though still considerably less daring than many of the skirts she sees on young women at tonight's lecture. One has, after all, an image to maintain in the community.

The visiting lecturer is a Cambridge man who has recently returned from a visit to Russia – or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as he calls it. He explains the basics of Marxism and describes what he saw of the rule of the recently deceased Lenin and his successor, Stalin. Though he admits it is a harsh regime, he urges cautious tolerance of the Soviet Union. England, he says, should not cut all ties with Moscow as it is far too soon to tell how the great Socialist experiment will work out.

“But surely he's not advocating that sort of upheaval here,” a man says afterwards. Kit is one of a group of people standing about in the hall afterwards. She goes to lectures because she is hungry for the kind of conversations she became accustomed to at Oxford, lively debates about books and ideas that were heady at the time and have now, in memory, been burnished to a higher gloss.

“Of course not.” Julia Maynard, wife of a Church of England vicar whose daughter attends Kit's school, waves a dismissive hand. “It's all very well to talk Bolshevism over coffee, but do you think there's one person in this room who would mount the barricades and cry out for the blood of the upper classes?” She waves again, vaguely, indicating the assortment of middle-class people all chattering about the lecture. “Everyone here would have far more to lose than to gain from a revolution. We might be intrigued by socialist ideals on paper, but in reality? We'd run to the manor house and ask the squire to let us hide behind the battlements.”

“But the people who would fight on the barricades are not the people in this room,” another man said. “It's the factory workers and miners. The miners are already calling for a general strike, and where might that lead? That's what happened in Russia – a few intellectuals stirred up thousands of workers to action.”

“And is that what we are – the intellectuals?” trills Mrs. Maynard, putting a gloved hand to her throat in mock horror at the idea of being either a revolutionary or an intellectual.

“Mrs. Porter certainly is,” says the first man, who is a professor at the university. “Like a true intellectual, she remains silent listening to our babble. No doubt she forms her own opinions.”

Kit smiles, trying to look enigmatic. “I think the workers in the factories have far more to gain by working through the system as it now exists, than by overturning it.” Her comment draws a chorus of approving nods and harrumphs from her hearers. In her position, it's very important that any views she does express be mild and uncontroversial. Not that she actually is a Communist, but if she were, she'd certainly make every effort to keep it hidden.

Mrs. Maynard's green eyes flash wickedly at Kit. “Ahh, that's a very safe answer, Mrs. Porter. We'd hardly like to think you're teaching Marxism to our daughters, now would we?”

“I can assure you I'm not, ma'am, though the subject is covered in the history course – from a purely objective point of view, naturally.” Kit smiles; she's not entirely sure what to think of Mrs. Maynard, who's been in the parish for less than a year and so is even more of a newcomer than Kit is. The two women are close in age and Kit admires Julia Maynard's keen mind and acerbic wit. She also admires Julia's occasional lapses of judgement, even more damning to a vicar's wife than to a headmistress. Kit imagines if there is one woman in Manchester she might actually be friends with it is probably Julia Maynard, though her being the vicar's wife and the mother of a singularly recalcitrant pupil does complicate matters.

She knows most of the people in the circle, though she can't remember the names of two of them – both related to governors on her School Board. Only one person is a complete stranger: a rangy, rumpled-looking man in a knit pullover and heavy wool pants who stands next to Mrs. Maynard. He hasn't said a word so far and his casual style of dress makes him look a little out of place in this rather stuffy gathering.

Just as she's thinking that, Julia Maynard leans forward, tugging the man by his sweater-clad arm. “Mr. Lanski, is there anyone here you don't know? I'm being terribly rude – I ought to have introduced you round – you haven't met Mrs. Porter, have you? Mrs. Porter, headmistress of St. Margaret's school – Leopold Lanski.”

He leans forward to shake her hand. His grip is firm as she says, “Pleased to meet you, Mr … Lanski.” His accent as he says, “The pleasure is mine, indeed,” confirms her suspicion that he is not an Englishman.

“So, what did you think of tonight's lecture?” she asks the newcomer.

He rolls his eyes. “It is very easy for those who are warm and well-fed to talk about socialism in the abstract. It sounds a bit different when the words come from men who are hungry and desperate.”

“Like the factory workers and miners, you mean? Or the Russian workers?”

He smiles apologetically. His English is excellent, but his accent lends something exotic to his voice. “No doubt there is real poverty here in the North of England, Mrs. Porter. But what I saw in my home country before the war was far worse. It is true, people do reach a point where revolution seems like the only option.”

He pitches his voice low and the rest of the conversation flows around them. Kit wants to know who he is, where he came from, if he's really a Communist and if so, why is he here rather than in Russia, building the new revolutionary society. She suddenly realizes she's far more keenly interested in the topic than she was a few minutes ago, and is honest enough to admit to herself that Comrade Lanski's rather intriguing face – not handsome exactly, but interesting, dominated by a crooked nose, a long, mobile mouth, and liquid brown eyes – probably has something to do with her sudden interest in Marxist theory.

“But of course, you have already said you believe in working within the system,” he goes on. “Even if the system is rooted in injustice?”

Kit pauses a moment, collects her thoughts. “I have seen a great deal of good coming from collective action,” she says. “Not just in factory cities like Manchester, but back home, among fishermen in rural areas,” she adds, thinking of Coaker and the Fishermen's Protective Union.

“Ah yes. I was going to ask you where you had come from.”
I vass goink to ask.
“I have not much of an ear for English accents, but I think yours is … what do they say? Of the colonies?”

She moves a step closer without knowing she's doing it. There's something electric in the man's presence. It reminds her of the long-ago morning when she came to the schoolhouse in Elliston and saw Ben standing outside. Of course, that's not the only time. She's felt the same magnetic presence, the same attraction from other men over the years, though she's moved in so many all-female circles that there haven't been many opportunities to be overpowered by the nearness of an attractive man. When there have been such opportunities, there's often been a complication, such as the man being someone else's husband. Which this man might very well be, for all Kit knows about him.

“Mrs. Porter, dear, we're about to get a cab – do you want to share a ride?” Julia Maynard lays a gloved hand on Kit's arm. Kit hesitates, and Leo Lanski says, “I had hoped to ask for the honour of seeing Mrs. Porter to her home, if that is not too bold.”

“No, of course, thank you very much,” Kit says to Leo, and smiles at Mrs. Maynard, who raises her eyebrows almost to her hairline and makes a tiny O of her mouth. Was Kit thinking just a few moments ago that this woman might be a friend?

Leo escorts her, not home, but to a nearby café. They aren't long into their conversation before he asks, “And is there, I should inquire, a Mr. Porter?”