That Forgetful Shore (32 page)

St. John's, Newfoundland
April, 1923

Dear Mrs. Porter:

It is my sad duty to inform you of the passing of one we both knew and loved well. Our dear Miss Matilda Shaw passed from this life on the 31st of March, after a severe bout of pneumonia had laid her low all winter. You will no doubt be touched to learn that in my last visit with her, your name came up. Nothing could have made her more proud than to know that one of her former students was pursuing higher education at that institution which she prized above all others. She truly gloried in your accomplishments, as she did in those of all her former “girls,” as she still called us even when we entered our forties!…

A letter from Maggie Campbell – soon to be Maggie Hamilton, wife of a wealthy businessman in his fifties – and another from her former co-worker Miss Smith of Spencer, sit on top of Kit's pile of mail this week. She reads through those two letters, flicks through the rest of the pile quickly – nothing interesting there – and lays aside the two letters to reread at her leisure. She remembers, years ago, laying letters from Maggie, from Miss Shaw, and from Trif side by side on her desk, weighing and balancing them, symbolic of different kinds of lives.

Ten years and a war separate her from those days. One correspondent's life journey has ended, ended as Miss Shaw would no doubt have wished, with a great funeral in the Anglican Cathedral at which fellow teachers and former students turned out in great numbers to pay tribute to her life of sacrifice and dedication.

Another life, Maggie's, has taken an unexpected turn. Marrying a wealthy widower? Turning from newspapers to novels? Kit hardly knows what to think of Maggie's latest news, but she senses in the letter that same zest for life that she recognized in Maggie from the first time they met. However unexpected the choices, she is glad for her old friend.

But from that old balance, one factor is missing, one letter from her file. Four years after they last spoke, Kit still feels Trif's absence keenly. She has considered breaking the silence, of course. But though she can write learned papers on Spenser's
Faerie Queene
and attempt a half-decent sonnet, she cannot write this one simple letter. The words elude her, though they ought to be easy.
I'm sorry. I should not have said the things I did. You are part of my heart forever, as we always swore, and without you I am slowly bleeding.

Looking again through her small pile of letters, Kit realizes that not only is Triffie missing from her correspondence, but the Point is missing altogether. She used to get other letters from there – from her parents, of course, while they were alive, and from her cousins and old school chums. Once, long ago, letters from Joe Bishop. Those dried up when she stopped replying. Most of her old friends have either moved away from the Point or stopped writing.

She's spent years trying to untangle herself from Missing Point, to cut all ties except the blood ties and the tie to Triffie, dearer than blood. With those gone, she might content herself that she has finally cut herself loose from the place she came from, a place she never wanted to return to. She sold the house and land she owned there, turned her back on it. She worked hard, in Halifax and later in St. John's, to erase every trace of the bay from her speech. Now, here in England, she has worked just as hard to wipe out the lingering traces of Newfoundland, to acquire that mid-Atlantic accent that makes it sound, not as if she is aping an English accent – that would be dreadfully pretentious – but as if she might be a well-educated person from almost anywhere. She wants to tear down and rebuild herself so nothing of the past is left. She wants to be seen not as a clever small-town girl made good, nor as a brave war bride widowed by the 'flu epidemic – nothing at all but a hard-working scholar and teacher.

She is within reach, now, of the Bachelor of Letters degree she has worked so hard for these last two years. Her research is on the
Faerie Queene
. After months of rigorous meetings with her tutor, Miss Jeffries – a rather intense woman whose minute scrutiny of every detail of her research used to annoy her, Kit has learned to become grateful for that level of attention. It helps her deal with the obsessive fear that she has made some dreadful mistake that will destroy all her painstaking work.

“You ought to have this published,” Miss Jeffries says at their last meeting, handing back Kit's latest draft, copiously marked up with red ink corrections. “When you've brought it up to a scholarly standard, of course.” That's as much praise as she's likely to get from the stern Medieval Literature don. It amazes her how being a student can put her, at thirty-two, right back into the classroom, eager for a teacher's approval as if she were a schoolgirl again.

Being a college student in mid-life has been, in some ways, an odd experience. When she first arrived at Somerville, Kit found it strange, as a woman who owned her own home for many years, to reduce her living space to a single bed-sit in a hall shared with dozens of other women. But she has come to enjoy the simplicity of college life, thinking of herself as a nun in a cell, a votary of Learning. She likes the college arrangement far better than the boarding houses where she lived when she actually was an undergraduate, a time that now seems very long ago.

She feels too old for many of the highlights of the life of an Oxford undergraduate, though she finds herself wishing she had attended Somerville, or a similar women's college, as a girl. She debates a few times, writes the occasional piece for a college magazine, but the Dramatic Society, the Going-Down play, the Bach choir, tennis parties and cocoa parties are the preserve of girls of nineteen and twenty. Kit and her closest friends – Miss Stone, Miss Pennyweather and Miss Harriday-Heath – lead a more sedate existence centred on essays, lectures and research in the Bodleian Library. She enjoys the buzz of activity around without needing to be intimately involved in it, feels as if she is at the centre of what Somerville and Oxford are all about.

Lately, though, Kit has had to think again of the wider world. She has applied for several teaching positions here in England; she feels nothing drawing her back to Newfoundland. This week she has two interviews, one as headmistress at a girls' school in Manchester, and another teaching English at a prestigious London school. Though the Manchester position would give her more responsibility and, incidentally, more pay, she covets the London position. She wants to live and work in the city that is, she believes, the heart of the world. To be a part of London life would be almost as good as staying in Oxford.

On a spring afternoon she lays aside her books and papers and goes to meet with the chairman of the board of governors for the London school. At first, the interview goes well. The chairman, Reverend Kensington, asks her about her studies at Oxford, whether she has considered publishing her research. He asks her a little about her B.A. degree from Dalhousie, and about the classes she taught at Spencer. He asks about her future plans, and she says she wants to continue teaching.

She is by no means certain of this. While she loves the work, and the subject matter, Kit sometimes thinks she lacks the lively interest in people that allowed a natural teacher like Miss Shaw to follow the lives of her “old girls” for twenty years and more. But of course she does not say this to Reverend Kensington, and anyway, what's to be said? What other path is there for an over-educated female, but to teach? Apart from Maggie Campbell's choice – marry a millionaire and start writing novels – she can't think of another way for a woman like herself to live.

She wills her voice to show only eagerness, none of the ambivalence. But Reverend Kensington soon turns from talk of her career to what Kit thinks of as unnecessarily personal questions.

“So … Spencer College is in … St. John's, Newfoundland?” He pronounces Newfoundland the way the British do, swallowing half the letters as though the place doesn't matter enough to say the whole name aloud. “What brought you there?”

“It's where I was born,” Kit explains.

“Ah…born there, I see. In the capital? St. John's?”

“No, I was born in a place called Trinity. My family moved from there to a town called Missing Point. I went to grammar school there, and then into St. John's to attend Spencer myself, before I went to Dalhousie to take my B.A.”

“And these towns where you grew up, they were – what? Farming villages? Fishing villages?”

“Fishing.”

“Your father was not a fisherman, surely.”

“No, he worked as a clerk and bookkeeper for my uncle, who was the local merchant.” Back home it was a point of pride to have come from a merchant family, even the family of a small outport merchant. Saying the words in this setting, Kit realizes how provincial she sounds. The word “merchant” has an entirely different ring in Oxford than it did in St. John's.

“How very … ambitious you have been, to come from such humble beginnings to a place at Oxford,” says Reverend Kensington, nodding. The words are more approving than the tone. “And you, Mrs. Porter, are – a widow, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“The War?”

“Just after it, actually. My husband served from 1914 till he was discharged with an injury in 1918, but died in the 'flu epidemic a few months later.” When she first came to Oxford, she thought it was necessary to get through the relevant information as quickly and efficiently as possible, to forestall the possibility of pity. Now she sees it differently; it's important, she's learned, to clarify that although her husband did not have the great good fortune to lay down his life for his country, he did serve and was honourably discharged, that his death might even be connected, however tangentially, to his war service. Such things matter more here than they do at home: everyone is passionately interested in what everyone else did during the war.

Now Reverend Kensington nods. “No plans to remarry?” he says. “You are still a relatively young woman, Mrs. Porter.”

“No plans at all,” Kit says decisively. She is prepared for this question: schools do not want to hire a woman only to have her disappear a year or two later to get married and have a baby. “I revere my husband's memory, and I am dedicated to my career.”

Once the interview is over, Kit feels she has done well. When she tells her friends about it in the common room that night, Miss Pennyweather listens with bright-eyed approval, but Miss Harriday-Heath, whose father is a baronet, and the older and wiser Miss Stone both shake their heads.

“Oh, how very unfortunate,” Miss Stone says when Kit recounts being asked to tell about the town where she was born, and what her father did for a living.

“Unfortunate? How do you mean?”

“Well, they'll have known you were a colonial from your C.V. and from your accent, of course – you can't help that,” Miss Stone says, “but it's a question of
how
colonial you are. A clerk's daughter from a fishing village – that's perhaps a bit more colonial than a posh London school can stomach.”

“But I'm going to be a B.Litt of Oxford University!” Kit protests. “What does it matter where I was born, or what kind of work my father did?”

The other three women exchange glances, but only Miss Stone says what they are all clearly thinking. “My dear Mrs. Porter, the very fact that you would ask that question demonstrates better than anything else that you
are
a colonial.”

She looks from one to the other, helpless. Can they really be serious? Even Miss Pennyweather, whose father is a butcher, nods. “People say so much has changed since the war, and I suppose in a way it has – it's not as bad as it was in my father's day, but people still care what your family name is and what schools you went to and – well, you know. Class.” She says the last word apologetically, like a mild curse, but the other Englishwomen in the room all agree. Kit, who once believed St. John's society was snobbish, is at a loss for words.

“But – but Reverend Kensington said I was ambitious,” she protests. “To come up from such – humble beginnings.” His words, repeated now in this room, suddenly sound quite different. The emphasis, she sees, is not on the rising up but on the humility of the starting point.

“I doubt Reverend Kensington believes ambition in a woman is entirely a good thing,” Miss Stone says, “though in hiring mistresses for a girls' school, he is no doubt constrained to rub shoulders with more ambitious women than he would personally prefer.”

They all laugh at this, united again by the common enemy of male prejudice. Kit tries only one more brief protest. “When I was interviewed for the Manchester school, they didn't ask all those questions about my background.”

“Ah well, I'm sure it doesn't matter as much in the North,” Miss Harriday-Heath says with a shrug.

Sure enough, a letter of offer comes from the school in Manchester. Discreet enquiries reveal that another Somerville woman has been offered the London post. The last draft of her thesis submitted, defended and approved, Kit takes her B.Litt. at a ceremony attended by her fellow scholars but not by a single other person she knows. Then she packs her bags for Manchester.

Triffie

“MAMA, I'M TIRED. And my pail's full. Can I stop now?” Billy's voice has an edge of whining to it, something Trif can't abide.

“That pail's no more than half full, and a big boy like you shouldn't be getting tired after a couple of hours of berrypicking,” she snaps.

“Can we stop for our lunch soon?”

“We'll have our lunch when I say we'll have it. Now, back to work.”

“I wanted to stay home with David,” Billy mutters. But he says it low, almost under his breath, so Trif can ignore it. For the sake of her sanity, she does.

She has left two-year-old David with Aunt Rachel for the day while she took her two older children along with Ruth, Betty and their children to pick blueberries out past Country Road. Trif always enjoys a day out berry-picking; like most women, she thinks of it as almost a day off, despite being coopied over the low bushes for hours in the sun, combing for the small, flavour-filled fruit. She's a champion picker – not just blueberries but partridgeberries and even bakeapples in season. She always picks enough to have extra to sell at the Mercantile, and makes more jam than any woman on the Point. It's the one thing Trif can do that directly contributes to the family income, since she still refuses to take her children to Labrador for the fishing season. She puts heart and soul into berrypicking.