That Forgetful Shore (40 page)

“Labrador!” The name sounds like something Rachel would spit out, not fit to have in her mouth. “Everyone gone down on the Labrador. Albert went to Labrador and now he'll never come home. Grace went to Labrador, and look what happened to her! Will went to France, Ruth and Betty are gone to Nova Scotia … nothing good ever comes from going away, maid. Nothing good at all.”

“Grace … my mother went on the Labrador?” Triffie has never heard this, not from Rachel or anyone.

“She went as cook on Josiah Badcock's schooner one summer – the summer she was seventeen. Came back home a disgrace to her family. And no, before you gets on with it, I don't know no more than that. It could have been any one of the men on that schooner or the old captain himself, bad as he was. I told her no good would come from going away and I was right…I was right about all of them.”

With no warning, her sobs start again. She weeps with such abandon that Trif longs to comfort her, wishes she could put her arms around her and hold her aunt's weeping body against hers. They have never been close, yet now she is all Rachel has, the only one who stands by her. She takes one of Rachel's bony, weathered hands across the table and holds it between her own.

All over the Point that week, women weep and hold each other. Everyone is crying when the
Lily
comes into port and the survivors of the
Sea Rose
come down the gangplank. Ki Barbour comes off first, leading the half of his men who survived. He looks broken, this man who survived France and came back a hero, who took such pride in rising to be captain of a fishing schooner.

Trif watches Skipper Ki's face only for a moment before she sees, among the men behind him, the smallest of the survivors, and she breaks from the crowd to run forward and take her son in her arms.

Billy squirms and fidgets as she covers his dark head with kisses. Katie and David go to Jacob John and welcome him home, then it's all five of them together, the children in their parents' arms, Jacob John smiling at Triffie as if he's just come back from a great adventure and had a grand time. Even with the loss of Uncle Albert and the other men, Triffie cannot help but rejoice, cannot help thanking God that her husband and son are home, that her small family is intact.

Over supper in her own house that night, Trif lays down the law. What she promised God that night on the front bridge, she will fulfill. “No more fishing in this house,” she says. “Not a man here will go out in boat, ever again. 'Tis tempting fate, and we've lost too much. I won't risk my boys in the boat.”

They all stare at her, dumbfounded. What can they be, if not fishermen?

“I don't care, ye'll all have to learn some other trade,” Trif says. “Billy, you stay in school, you got a good head on your shoulders and there'll be no more leaving school to go to the Labrador. You'll be back in that classroom tomorrow morning.”

“Can I be a preacher?” Billy says, and now it's him that everyone looks at in surprise. He shrugs. “When we was out there in the dory trying to make her to shore I told God if he got me through it I'd be a preacher, and I means to do it.”

Trif wipes away a tear with the back of her hand. “That you can, my boy. We'll find a way.”

“Good enough,” Jacob John says. “Katie's going to be a Seventh Day teacher, Billy's going to be a Holy Roller preacher – sure we'll make young David a Church of England minister and then we'll have the full set.” They all laugh, even Triffie, and while they're still laughing Jacob John says, “But what are you going to do with me, Trif girl? What would I do, if I didn't go fishing?”

For that she has no answer. But she's made a promise to God, and God will have to help them figure something out.

Kit

St. John's
March, 1931

…You will be most interested, I hope, in this position. Outside of a women's college, I recognize there are few opportunities for women to teach at the college or university level, but that will change; it must. What better place than here, where we are making all things new?

If that is not enough, then I will appeal to you bluntly: These are dark days in the Colony, darker perhaps even than they are in other places. We began this College in a mood of hope and optimism; we carry it on under a government on the point of bankruptcy, in a land where thousands of the people are destitute, and the rabble is ready to riot in the streets.

In such a time, what do we need more than an educated populace? Surely nothing but learning can banish the spectre of another Dark Ages?

It's an oddly passionate letter for someone to write inviting a person to apply for a teaching post. Kit certainly does not have a passionate relationship with this Dr. Paton – she has never met the man, though he has heard of her not only from contacts in St. John's but also from people in his home city of Manchester. But his passion for Memorial College burns on the page. And strangely, in reading it, Kit feels something not unlike the thrill of reading a love letter.

She has accumulated some love notes in her life – hasty scrawls from Ben in their courting days, tender and troubling letters from him while he was at the Front, and, in these last couple of years, a handful of notes from Leo – short, intense, and quite often, frankly indecent. All of them have stirred her in their different ways. Each, she thinks, was fitting for the woman she was when she received them, though of course if anyone among her London acquaintances ever read Leo's notes, “fitting” would hardly be the word that would spring to mind. But this letter from Dr. Paton, asking if she would be interested in a position at Memorial University College, touches another part of her entirely.

She thinks about it; at first she consults no-one. She wishes she could talk to Leo, but he is far away in Manchester, growing more and more frustrated with the impotence of the Party there and the unlikelihood of revolution ever springing up in English soil. How ironic if, after years together of Leo constantly threatening to return to Poland, Kit were the one to go home.

She hasn't been back to Manchester since leaving it, and Leo has visited London only twice. They meet during her school holidays, if Leo happens to be free from his lecturing duties then. To colleagues at her school, Kit describes her holidays as walking tours and brings back vivid word-pictures of remote Welsh or Cornish vistas where she hiked. In reality, though she and Leo take the occasional walk, those vistas are glimpsed mostly through the windows of hotels. They spend most of their rare time together in bed, having never tired of each other's bodies, which amazes Kit now that she approaches her fortieth birthday. After making love, they sit up late in bed at night, talking and arguing and laughing, then sometimes fall asleep in the early morning hours and wake to make love again at noon.

During those times together, Leo is the centre of Kit's world, but for the rest of the time, he is peripheral. He lives on the margins of her world, and she on the margins of his. At the centre of Leo's world is the Party, the hope of building a better society, the articles he churns out for radical newspapers. At the centre of Kit's world is her teaching, which she thoroughly enjoys now that she is in an excellent school and no longer burdened with the duties of headmistress. Edith Stone is a good Head, and Kit is free to do what she does best – work with bright girls who actually care about learning, who have a hope of making something of their lives. Oh, there are dull and careless girls too, and she is stern with them while at the same time hoping to inspire them to care just a little about literature. But most of her energy is focused on the clever girls, the ambitious ones.

She sees herself in them – of course she does. But these are girls from well-off London families, and their ambition lacks that edge of desperate hunger that drove her and Triffie when they were the top students in the one-room school at Missing Point. Still, she is often reminded of her own girlhood. The endless pashes and raves of schoolgirls falling in and out of love with one another remind her of the notes she and Trif used to exchange, their teary farewells in each other's arms and promises of eternal loyalty whenever Kit left the Point to go to school in St. John's. They didn't know the language of English schoolgirls, never talked of having a pash or a crush. But being plunged once again into the intense emotional world of adolescent girls can't help but make Kit think of her own adolescence.

She has had two good years in London, likes her students, likes her fellow teachers. She would be happy to stay for several more years, yet that letter from Dr. Paton sits on her desk and draws her like a magnet every time she walks into the room. Finally she talks to Edith Stone, weighs the pleasures of her life in London with the possibilities inherent in a college position back home.

In the end, she makes her decision, and the letter telling Leo of it is the second one she writes. It, and her letter to Dr. Paton, go into the same post.

A week after the letters are posted – far too soon to have heard anything back from Newfoundland – Kit wakes at one in the morning to someone hammering at the door of her flat.

She goes to the door, wrapping her robe around herself as she walks, knowing who it must be. “What are you doing here?”

“A nice welcome for your lover,” Leo says, stumbling across the threshold and into her room. He's drunk, and Leo is not a hard-drinking man.

“Lower your voice,” she hisses, closing the door behind him. “Bad enough you come here in the middle of the night, do you want to announce at the top of your lungs that I have a lover?”

“Oh, of course, sorry. I forget that love is a shame that must be hidden.”

“If you're a schoolmistress, yes, it certainly is. I can teach
Romeo and Juliet
, but I can't have men crawling up my balcony at two in the morning. What's the matter, Leo?” Although even as she says the words, as he moves awkwardly around the room and finally collapses into the wingback chair, she knows it's a stupid question. She sits down across from him on the settee. He looks exhausted, red-eyed, disheveled. He's not as drunk as she first thought – he's been drinking, but he's also genuinely distressed and that adds to the impression of mania. He sits now with his elbows resting on thighs, running both hands through his tangled hair.

“I got your letter,” he says finally.

“Yes, I gathered,” Kit says. “Was it really such a shock that you had to come tearing down here on the first train?”

“I never thought you would go.”

“Yet you talk all the time of leaving me. Am I not allowed to be the one to move first?”

“You did move. Down here, away from me. That was bad enough. If you go back to Newfoundland we will never see each other again.”

“If you go to Poland we won't either,” Kit points out.

“I have told you I want you to come with me.”

“And I've told you I can't. Anymore than you would want to come to Newfoundland with me – though that would be far saner than going to the Continent. It might even work, if we were married.” She has her doubts about the position at Memorial being as freely offered to a married woman as to a widow, but a widow with an unemployed Polish Jewish Communist lover would be beyond the pale entirely. It's a safe proposal to make as he'll never say yes. Still, the idea of being with Leo in St. John's, making a new start in the new world, is not without appeal.

But of course he won't go. They argue for two hours till Kit insists they go to bed – not to make love, but to fall into an exhausted sleep in each other's arms. Despite her weariness she wakes at dawn, fearing someone in the house will deduce that a man has spent the night in Mrs. Porter's flat.

Leo stays in London for a fortnight after his abrupt arrival, though at Kit's insistence he moves into a cheap hotel. “I've still got a job here for three more months, and I need a good reference,” she says. “I can't be seen to be a loose woman now.”

Leo has left Manchester for good, it turns out, quitting his lodging and job there at a moment's notice when he got her letter, packing all his belongings into one small battered trunk. He says he is definitely leaving England, though whether for Poland, Russia or Germany, he isn't certain.

Kit again makes her argument about this being the worst possible time for a man like Leo to be in Europe. In Russia, even Party members are no longer safe – Leo himself has told her that, under Stalin, you can be a hero one day and in prison the next. In Germany, which Leo once believed would be the next home of a Socialist revolution, new powers are rising, violently anti-Communist right-wing parties. And his home country of Poland lies between those two old enemies like a bone between two hungry dogs. Leo is not a man to be cautious – even here in England he has been questioned by the police several times. In Europe, anything might happen to him.

Leo shrugs. “What is life, Kit? Something to hoard like a handful of coins, spending carefully, never losing a minute, so you come to the end with – what? Empty hands? I'd rather throw it away in one grand gesture.”

“Which is exactly what you might be doing.”

“Perhaps not. You may be a cynical Englishwoman, but I still believe in revolution.”

They wrangle out their last days together like this, arguing about politics and class and the stupidity of each other's decisions. They do not talk about love or passion or how much they will miss each other, about the terror of knowing they may never see each other again.

On the night before his ship leaves they make love in his shoddy hotel room. It makes his rooms in Manchester seem palatial by comparison, but Kit will not have him back to her flat. “Proper to the very end,” he says, but his tone is teasing rather than accusing.

“Proper? Really?” She sits up in bed naked beside him. “Is that how you'll remember me, the proper English schoolmistress?”