Listening to her mother negotiate with the furniture buyer, Lav marvels, as she has before, at the dispatch with which Charlotte disposes of things. My mother the minimalist, she thinks.
“Everything's new except one piece—a desk of no particular value,” her mother says.
A desk of no particular value—her mother has peeled the past, made it flat, one dimensional. Nothing is left—no stories, no keepsakes, not one of Saul's tools, none of his leather-bound books, no wedding certificate, no box of faded photos.
Her mother replaces the receiver, bends over the drawer, flicking through file folders. Lav cannot see her face.
“What's become of that small picture in the oval frame—the one that used to be propped beside Saul's pen holder?” It seems a safe question.
Charlotte looks up, “The picture of the woman and two children,” she says. Her face is blank, guileless. “It's gone.”
Lav feels a surge of anger. Who is this serene woman dressed in the pale wool, a silk scarf draped artfully around her neck, plain leather pumps on her small, neat feet?
The childhood Lav recalls as bare—whose very bareness has become the subject of anecdote, a source of shared amusement for her and Philip—this bleak landscape is suddenly crowded with a multitude of things Lav wants to see, wants to own, to touch, to smell. Where had her mother's velvet, wedge-heel slippers gone? What became of those bits of coloured cloth she used to tie around her hair when she dusted books? Where are the floral, wrap-around aprons? The teapot decorated with ugly purple roses? Where is the green desk lamp, where is the shiny fold-out holder she used to bring toast on? Most of all, where is the picture? The small, brown photo of Saul's first family, his foreign wife and children—dead, tragically dead, though how Lav knows this she cannot say—neither Charlotte nor Saul had ever spoken of the picture or of Saul's having another family.
As a child Lav had spent hours staring at the three faces contained inside that oval frame—a woman and two children. The woman wore a lacy summer dress. Her hands were beautiful, white, tapering, she wore rings, one hand was holding the hand of the boy who stood beside her, the other restrained a blonde baby who was squirming to be off her lap. The baby pressed forward, round-eyed, joyful, reaching towards the camera, toward Saul. The woman and boy are not quite ready. But Saul is looking at the baby, at the round beaming face, at the small fat hands inviting him into the picture—and this is the instant he chooses to capture. The boy wants to be gone, you can see that, see how he hates the starched shirt and short trousers he is wearing. He stands stiffly, impatiently, beside the woman, refusing to respond to the loving, half-coaxing smile she has turned on him.
Those people were her real family. She was the baby, the boy was her brother, the smiling woman her mother. She had known them, known the room—could see things that were not in the picture—tables crowded with keepsakes, an open window, many-paned with billowing curtains. Through the window had come the voices of children—children the boy's age, laughing, playing ball—calling her brother's name. She could almost hear his name.
“Why would anyone throw such things away?” she shouts, so savagely that her mother's head jerks up, hands fly to face, fingers are pressed against bottom lip. Losing her place in the files, Charlotte stares at her daughter with that familiar combination of bewilderment and annoyance, almost horror.
Lav closes her eyes, takes a deep breath: “I mean, if you didn't want the picture I would have liked to have had it. Didn't that even occur to you?”
“But neither of us ever saw the sky over the people in that picture…”
“What does that matter? I always loved it and I don't have anything of Saul's—not one thing!” Plopping herself down on one of the uncomfortable chairs, Lav folds her arms across her chest and stares sullenly ahead. Flushed and awkward, she bears no resemblance to the well-groomed, confident woman who, just minutes earlier, had whirled through fall sunshine admiring the world.
“I buried it with him. I think that's what Saul would have wanted—don't you?” Charlotte says—she who never hesitates, never makes a false step. Pretending to be unaware of her daughter's anger she returns to the drawer, pulls a folded piece of paper from a file. She looks smug, as if she has read Lav's thoughts, as if producing this scrap of the past negates all she has concealed.
“Here—this might be what you need. Anyway, it'll have to do. It's all I have—all I ever had—relating to David Andrews—David Andrews!” Charlotte repeats his name, the echo of a memory flits across her face but is gone before Lav can catch its essence.
“I don't even remember what he looked like—but then, I didn't know your father well.” She passes Lav a single sheet of pale blue tissue, brushes invisible dust from her dress and goes to sit in a chair across the room.
It is a short letter, written on one side of the paper and folded to make its own envelope. It is addressed in green ink to Mrs. David Andrews, c/o Mr. and Mrs. Ki Andrews, Cape Random, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. Below the address two black-smudged marks indicate that the enclosed message has been read and censored by the War Bureau of Great Britain.
Lav unfolds the limp tissue and reads aloud: “My Darling Lottie.” An unexpected salutation. She glances up, hoping to see some acknowledgement of this younger self, this darling Lottie, on her mother's face. But Charlotte sits unsmiling, detached. Her daughter might be reading yesterday's newspaper or a discarded shopping list.
I know my darling you must have had a rough crossing. I did not dare tell you how rough it was going to be. But now you're home and it is such a comfort to me knowing you're there. I am sure Mamma and Pop will take good care of you. There is no safer place in the world than the Cape. It makes me feel better just to think about you there—looking out to sea from my room or walking up the beach behind our house. Sometimes I wake up thinking this is all a dream—or one of them stories poor old Sollie Gill used to read out to us in school. I wish it was. Tell Sollie I spoke kindly of him, that will tickle him.
Here at [a small hole has been razored out of the letter] we are still training and still all together but will probably be split up soon. The Limies have great sport making mock of the way we people talk and the things we do not know about. We Newfoundlanders can hardly wait to get them in boats—then they will see what we are good at! Tell Cle I said he is not to join up.
Tell Mamma I misses her meals. We're getting whale meat every second day. They calls it something else altogether—but that's what it is—whale meat. Jim Way says it must be stuff harpooned before we was born!
I think about you all the time—about being with you on the Cape when this is all over.
Love, David.
It is more than Lav had expected—much more. Her hand holding the blue paper begins to shake. She can see him—a boy, almost a child—tongue between teeth, considering each formal sounding word, scratching each round careful letter in green ink on the blue paper—probably both borrowed.
She reads the letter again, slowly. She feels old, tired—she is old—thirty-seven—infinitely older than this homesick, lovesick boy.
“Who was Cle?” she asks.
“His younger brother. Cle had already gone in to St. John's—lied about his age and signed up. That letter took five months to get from England to the Cape. You'd already been born and your father was probably dead by the time I read it.”
“I see.” She waits, hoping her mother will say something more. She doesn't. “Why did you leave?”
“Anyone in their right mind would have left.”
Their business together has been attended to. Charlotte drops the empty folder into a wastepaper basket. “Keep the letter if you like. Your father's name was David Andrews, his father was Hezekiah—they called him Ki. His mother was called Cass—Cassandra. They had a liking for long names in that place. It was Cass who made me name you Lavinia—after some old aunt or grandmother who'd died donkey's years ago! Here, have this too.” She slips something into Lav's hand, sliding it down behind the letter.
Without looking Lav knows she's been given Saul's folding bone, the little stick he used for bookbinding. She rubs the worn ivory across her cheek.
“Have a cup of tea before you go,” her mother says.
Lav takes the cup and they sit, one on either side of the table that resembles a roughly hacked block of ice. She sips the tea slowly, holding the folding bone and the letter, muttering awkward thankyous. There is a long silence. Dislike of her mother has become one of the certainties of Lav's life and this kindness leaves her feeling naked.
Charlotte brushes thanks aside, “You might as well have keepsakes from both of them,” she says. She is sitting like a school girl, feet together, back not quite touching the black leather.
Lav senses that her mother's discomfort is equal to her own, hears herself say: “I want to know things about my father. I want to know what he was like.”
“Shouldn't you be getting back to work?”
Lav shakes her head, she settles down into the seat, stubbornly, permanently present. “This might be the last time I'll get a chance to ask—I want to know about him.”
“There's nothing to know. No big secret. No story. I don't have any idea what you're talking about, what you're after,” Charlotte says. She goes to refill their cups, brings apple and cheese cut up on a plate, sighs and returns to her chair: “What is it you want? What is it you've always been at me for? I've already told you I hardly knew the man—and what I did know I've forgotten!”
Questions swallowed since childhood fly, black as screeching crows, from her mouth: “Who am I? What am I? That's what I'm asking. How can you not remember? You must remember! For God's sake! What are you? Fifty-six—fifty-seven? Not old—not senile!”
Forgetting to be grateful for the relics in her lap Lav flings these questions at her mother. She longs to shake the older woman, to rattle information out of her, to once-and-for-all satisfy her famished curiosity.
“It was long ago—I was young, he was young—children, for God's sake!”
Lav is ruthless, she stares at her mother, stares silently, insisting that she remember.
“We were young,” Charlotte repeats, she holds herself tight, shoulders pressed back into the chair, face turned aside. “We were a lot younger than you are now—yet in some ways we were old—hundreds of people our age were getting killed every night. My own mother had been dead since I was fourteen and my Da had gone off soon as the war started.” She pauses and frowns, as if it really does take her an effort to remember.
“I'd been on my own for years by then—working in a boot factory in Portsmouth—stuck in a great grimy warehouse nine hours a day with no prospects of ever doin' any better. I was glad when war came, when they turned the old fort into a naval base. It was exciting, planes fallin' out of the sky, bombs burstin' down by the docks, thousands of sailors—young boys in uniform, bell-bottoms and tight jumpers—roving the streets. He was just like all the rest but something made me notice him—maybe the odd way his sailor hat perched on top of his great mop of red curls.”
Charlotte's voice has changed, taken on a kind of careless harshness her daughter has never heard before: “He used to tell me stories about this wonderful place he come from—Cape Random. He used to call it ‘The Cape,’ as if there wasn't any other cape in the world. Not a bit like Portsmouth, he said—a clean place, with long empty beaches and sunshine and the sea rolling in. I thought it would be heaven—
it wasn't
!”
“You got married. Did you get married?”
“Of course we did—had to be married for me to be a Navy dependent and get passage over. He took all kinds of trouble to get me out of England before he was assigned to a ship. And I left, all hopeful, thinkin' it was a real lark. Thinkin' I was coming to some modem place, a new world—some place like I'd seen in films—some little American town by the sea, with trees and white houses along the streets. Sweet God!”
Her mother is talking—sitting primly upright, feet together, hands clenched in lap, she is talking. Afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid even to look, Lav stares at the great, blood-red poppy and listens.
“We travelled in convoy, zig-zagged across the ocean to keep out of the way of U-Boats. It took three weeks and I was sick as a dog—most of the women were, especially us who were expecting. The ones who already had babies were even worse off.”
Charlotte tells of crying babies, of the dank hulk of the transport ship, the monotonous food—tinned tomatoes for almost every meal during the last week! Then, when they docked in Halifax and they all thought it was over, a Naval Officer came aboard to speak to the women who were married to Newfoundlanders.
“He got us together—not even sitting down, just standing around in a circle, fifteen women, some like me already pregnant, others with small children—told us we should think long and hard about what we were doing. Newfoundland was a day's voyage away, a strange place, a different country from Canada, he said. And once we got there, that would be it! Scared us half to death. Said we'd be going back to the last century—to this god-awful place where half the population had TB. Covered in fog, surrounded by fish and inhabited by fools, was how he put it. Then he looked at us and laughed, like he thought it was all a great joke.”
“He'd been directed, he said, to inform us that there was no divorce in Newfoundland and we should think long and hard about that. If we got off the ship there in Halifax the Navy would try and help us but if we went on they would not accept responsibility. One girl went with him—got off right then and there. The next morning before we sailed two more left the ship.”
But not Lottie Andrews. Lottie, seasick as she was, pregnant and frightened as she was, went on to Newfoundland, to St. John's, where she was transferred to a small coastal ship.
A month and three days after leaving England she climbed up onto the wharf at Cape Random—a sand-bar jutting out into the North Atlantic. She did not know it, but her husband's ship had already been torpedoed in the same ocean his darling had safely crossed.