When Bea was small and woke with a fright, it was her mother she’d gone to, crawling out of bed, squeezing past her brother’s trundle into the kitchen where her parents lay heavily sleeping. There, she would lean through the curtain and prod at her mother, who would heave toward the middle to let her in. Her father always smelled of sweat and railway yard, her mother of soap and Colman’s Starch, and one night Bea came upon him moaning and atop her—she looked, then looked away—and the next day her mother told her she was old enough to stay on her own all night. And so she did, that night and the next and forever after, until she grew up and her mother grew sick, and then her father moved in beside her brother and Bea slept with her mother in the kitchen bed, which seemed to grow bigger as her mother grew smaller. And then it was pennies on her mother’s eyes and rest in peace and ache.
It was not that Janie’s mother did not love her. Was it? No, there was love there, but it was of a most peculiar kind. Now and then, Bea would catch Mrs. P. stopping mid-stride to stare at her youngest daughter as the girl sat drawing on the porch or ran across the front lawn. And she read to her, Mrs. P. did, from stories about princesses and India, and books by Mr. Porter’s own mother, who wrote about flowers and ferns. This, the reading, took place in the summer during Bea’s swimming hour. After lunch, Bea would bring Janie to her parents’ bedroom, where Mrs. P. had often drawn the curtains halfway shut and was sitting on the loveseat in the half-light, waiting.
“Hello, Janie.” And Mrs. Porter would pat the space beside her.
“Hello, Mummy.”
“What shall we read today?”
“You choose.”
Have a nice swim, Mrs. P. would say, or Thank you, Bea, or sometimes nothing, turning to Janie and a book. Did they talk or just read, mother and daughter, during this odd, still hour to themselves? Bea didn’t know, but she could tell that for Janie, this was the best time of the day, the thing to wait for, though Janie (so thoughtful already, Bea had seen to that, and some children could be so selfish or unkind) knew better than to say it aloud to her nurse.
Bea would leave them, then, together in the bedroom they’d added on off the living room when Mr. P. could no longer take the stairs. She’d walk away, feeling light and free but also wobbly, untethered, a balloon let loose from its string. Then to Agnes and the others, the chatter and water, the sea’s cold suck. She liked to swim, especially early in the season, the shock of it around your ankles as you descended the ladder at the dock, the way, as you went in farther, it became the thing you were used to, and it was, of course, the same water as the water on the other side. At Arbroath, where they’d taken the train to her cousins’ when she was young, the sea had been colder still, and yet they’d gone in, laughing and squealing (all save her father, who stayed on shore) as the cold hit hard.
From Bea, Janie learned to lace her shoes and plait her hair, to knit and crochet, to sing in tune. She learned bread and butter before bread and butter and jam, and
upsy-daisy hold your nose, swallow hard and down she goes
, and about the Sandman. She learned that a fresh egg sinks to the bottom of a glass of water and a middling egg floats halfway down and a bad egg floats on top. She learned that after breakfast every day, you must go upstairs and do your business, and if your system is sluggish, milk of magnesia will set you right, and if that doesn’t work, an enema. She learned to stand up straight and walk beautifully, as if carrying a creel. She learned steadiness and manners and how to remove herself if her father was in a storm, and how not to follow her sisters—sometimes she learned this—into mischief.
Gay things too, she learned—to skip rope, chanting,
“Old Mrs. Mason broke her basin on the way to London Station”
; to play with her doll, Rose—really play, not just plunk the doll in its cot. Bea helped Janie fold a blanket into a swaddle, and they’d fill a baby bottle with water, and by the time Janie was seven she could do basting and running stitch on Rose’s clothes, and they’d set up tea parties, invite the teddies and dolls that Helen and Dossy had abandoned right out of the box. Sometimes Bea found herself talking for an hour in the voice of a bear or a doll. She’d rarely done this kind of playing as a girl, and to do it now brought her a furtive happiness: the teacups filled with mint tea, the growly American or high-English voices coming from her mouth, and (mostly) the pleasure it gave Janie to pretend like this, to pretend with her.
From her mother, Janie learned, what? The stories in those books. They were nearly all about orphans, from what the child told Bea. An orphan from India, an orphan from Switzerland. One girl slept in a hayloft; another heard screams coming from a locked-up room. They seemed unlikely stories for a child, but Janie spoke of them matter-of-factly and with great interest, so who was Bea to say? From her grandmother’s books, Janie learned the names of plants and flowers: beach peas and heal-all, Plymouth gentian, ladies’-tresses orchid. Janie pointed the plants out to Bea and told her how the apple was a jewel case for the seeds inside and the burrs on her dress were for carrying seeds to a new home, like a tramp stealing a ride from a train. You could make one from your shells, she’d tell Bea when they came across a wildflower, not understanding that Bea didn’t aim for her shellflowers to look real, and burrs were for picking off.
From her mother, Janie learned to play Charades and Murder in the Dark, to run three-legged races, to spot hermit thrushes, towhees (Mrs. P. said the towhee’s call was “Drink your tea!”; Bea said it was “Brush your teeth!”), and tell the prairie warbler from the Maryland yellowthroat and the great horned from the barred owl by their calls. She learned to think always of one’s friends, for Mrs. P. had a great many friends, and when they came (which was not often, that summer), she flitted like a sparrow gathering seeds. From her mother, Janie learned cheerfulness—from Bea too—and never to mention her father’s wheelchair or the sister who had died. Over the mantels, both here and in New Jersey, hung oil portraits of that sister, a gold-and-blue girl who had died in her sleep just months after Helen was born. Her name (somehow Bea knew) had been Elinor, but no one ever said her name. From her mother and Bea both, Janie learned about keeping one’s word. From her mother, she learned to set aside her old toys for the poor children in Newark and go to the store before Christmas to pick out a doll for a child Santa might forget. From Bea, she learned about Scotland, how beautiful it was. Twenty shades of green, Bea told Janie. Twenty shades of green and little lambs.
From whom did Janie learn more? Well, look at her sisters, who’d had a series of nurses before Agnes and more of both their parents than Janie ever did. It wasn’t just good behavior that Helen and Dossy were lacking in. There was ferocity to their actions, an unhealthy desire to be seen. They ran naked across the lawn and no one even noticed. They went camping out of doors one night (they couldn’t have been more than seven and nine) and left a note—
we ran away to sleep outside dont worry dont you wish you knew where we where, HMP, DCP
—and their mother said, Oh, they’ll come in when they’re cold or eaten by bugs. Bea remembered it; she’d been holding Janie, feeding her a bottle, and she’d raised the baby for a burp and thought, Not you.
In the early days, during the long summers on Ashaunt, what she had mostly done with Janie was walk. She’d tie a bonnet on the girl, settle her in her pram and start down the road, greeting anyone who said hello to her: the Porters’ cousins and second cousins; the stable boy leading the ponies; the dark-haired French governess one family brought along, so pretty she turned heads; the local men come to fish; the farmer hauling salt hay for his fields. A child needed daily fresh air, and after Janie learned to walk, Bea would fasten her to a harness she’d bought at a shop in Orange and take her out. People thought it strange at first (“Good Lord, you’ve put my monkey on a leash!” said Mr. P.), but no one told her not to do it, and a child could dart before a car or horse, and anyway Janie liked the contraption, raising her arms for it, crowing “Go!” Sometimes they’d meet up with another nurse, or Agnes would come with the big girls on their bicycles, or Charlie would appear suddenly, swoop upon his sister (Bea had to drop the harness, give her up) and fling her to the sky. Ashaunt, so narrow across, was nearly two miles long, and Bea and Janie would often walk the length of it with Blackie at their heels, stopping to pick blackberries. On sunny mornings, they met up with other nurses and children at Garrisons—the only sandy spot, the rest a pile of rocks—and spend an hour there before lunch and nap.
Then Janie turned four, then five, and now (how fast it happened, even as it felt like several lifetimes ago that Bea had arrived at the family’s door) was eight. She was at school nearly all day during the year. She had a best friend, secrets, a diary with a lock. Moods. She had arithmetic homework that Bea left to the tutor to sort out. She sometimes grew bored with long summer days with her nurse, yet she was too young—and for this Bea was grateful—to keep up with her sisters. “Where
is
everybody?” she kept asking that summer, for there were few children about, just the Andersons, Stricklands and Childs come down for a stretch, and each with only boys.
Let’s sew a pillow for Rose, Bea would suggest. Let’s go for a swim. Or walks and baking, checkers, shell crafts; like a suitor, she offered things forth. Sometimes Janie would frown or shake her head, but other times she’d sit by Bea and stitch her rows, or jump her checker piece across the board, or walk (skip, scooter, jump rope, as Bea hurried breathless behind) along the road. Once in a while, Janie would even ask Bea to play Rose and Teddy, or Rose, Annabel and Laura, though not if her sisters were around. Still, it was not like other years when they’d been, well,
in love
was the way Bea had once described it to Agnes, then wished she had not, for something—jealousy? judgment?—had crossed Agnes’s face. Agnes was, of the two of them, the more professional, the crisper; if you didn’t know her, you might even be afraid.
In love
, but in the easiest, most companionable way.
Lately, Janie’s blue eyes had darkened in color, becoming cloudier, almost bruised and who could blame the child, with everything going on and the push and pull of growing up besides? But what to do? And did anyone notice? Janie might have been a half-tamed hedgehog for all her parents seemed to worry about her whereabouts or even Bea’s role in looking after her. Set out a bowl of milk; keep an eye out for foxes. But she would grow wild, but she would turn rude and prickly like her sisters. The family would (as was their right; still it felt like thievery) claim her as their own.
When Bea was Janie’s age, she had minded her brother each afternoon while their mother finished her shift. She had put the ticket in the window, spread newspaper on the floor for the coal man, taken Callum round to the shops and Green, done everything but iron and cook, as her mother did not let her near the stove. At her grandparents’ in the country, she’d fetched water from the well, the buckets attached to a metal hoop that kept the splashing from your legs. In town, she had run messages to her mother’s sister in one direction, to her father at the goods yard in the other. She’s built like a boy, her father said once in front of Callum, insulting both of them at once. Bea had known how to swim—her mother, who’d lost a sister to drowning, had seen to that—and Janie was a strong swimmer herself, though she was not to go in alone (about this, both Bea and her parents stood firm). At eight, Janie still listened, but there was an out-of-sorts-ness to her that summer, an itchiness, that later Bea would view as partly her own fault—first, for hovering too close, then for letting her attention split in two.
YEARS LATER, BEA, AGNES AND MRS. P.
were drinking sherry in Bea’s room before lunch—it had become a habit they all looked forward to—and that summer came up, and Bea confessed that she worried she’d not watched Janie closely enough and had let things slip a bit. Jane was twenty-four by then, married to Paul Strickland, a boy she’d met on the Point, expecting her first child.
“There was a war on,” said Mrs. P. Just that.
Perhaps it was forgiveness Bea was looking for. Or perhaps a part of her wanted to tell the whole story; even Agnes never knew it all. But it was not her way to hold the past up to the light, any more than it was Agnes’s or Mrs. P.’s. “I hope she doesn’t name the baby something dreadful,” said Mrs. Porter cheerfully, and they went on to talk about nursery colors as Bea knitted a sweater—yellow, with white edging—for Janie’s baby. “It will be a boy,” said Agnes (a girl, it would be, named Elinor). Together, they drained their glasses, then rose for their separate lunches.
There was a war on
—as if that explained everything.
And in a way, perhaps, it did.
I
T WAS A SUMMER
of waiting, eyes fixed on the sky. Grandmother Porter had given Helen a pair of birding binoculars for her sixteenth birthday, and she wore them around her neck, training the lenses on sky, sea or in between. My spyglass, she called the binoculars, and though she’d entered the summer with an interest in bird-watching, it evaporated before the twin pulls of men and war. You could look and look so hard you thought you spotted something ominous, but then the plane behind the clouds would be another cloud, the hump rising in the water a rock made visible by low tide. You could, if situated right (her bedroom window worked; so did the bow window in the attic), aim the binoculars at the soldiers manning the gate—here, one scratching under his arm, there, one cleaning his gun as he chewed gum. “He has a gun?” Dossy would grab the binoculars, try to focus, close one eye and try again. “He’s a
soldier
,” Helen would say, though her pulse had sped up, as much for the hands on the gun as the gun itself, as much for the face, which had turned in her direction while she watched, rotating toward her as if the soldier (handsome in a blocky, ordinary way) felt the heated pressure of her gaze.