When the pregnant girl comes through the door, Penelope looks in vain for Matt. She cannot imagine that he has sent her along to see her on her own. They barely know each other. Penelope cannot remember the girl’s name, for God’s sake.
“Mrs. Reade?”
Why is it a question? Is the girl as muddled as she?
“I’m Carolyn White. It’s nice to see you again.”
She had thought the name started with A, but at least that is cleared up. “You too, dear.”
The girl seems surprised by this response, as if she expected Penelope to have forgotten her, as if meeting the mother of her grandchild is something Penelope would not remember. “How are you today?”
Penelope cannot tell whether this is a trick question, designed to lead to an admission that she doesn’t know what day it is, or whether it is an avoidance tactic, suggesting they need only address how she is right now and not overall, not generally. “Is Matt parking the car? He has trouble getting it straight between the lines.”
“Your son’s not with me today.”
Shit.
“I wanted to have a chat, just the two of us. Is that okay?”
“Matt hates to be left out.”
“I’ll fill him in later. I’m going to be visiting you regularly now, once a month, just to touch base, just to check in.”
She wants to say something about baseball and hotels and mixing metaphors. Or to tell the girl that once the baby comes there will be no time for idle visiting, though she would like to see the child, naturally.
“We want to be sure everything’s going well, that you’re … that you’re … happy here.”
The girl has a set of brass ones, Penelope thinks. She wonders whether that is what attracted Matt. “I suppose it’s where I have to be, isn’t it?” She doesn’t bother to cross-examine the girl on the meaning of happy. “Is somebody in my house?”
“I think your son is there still, isn’t he?”
Does she really not know? Penelope thinks she divines the purpose of the visit now. Matt and this whatever-her-name-is have had a tiff. They have broken up. She wishes she could tell the girl that the final trimester is very tough on relationships, that she and Matt need to invest in theirs a little — but of course she can’t speak from any experience. “My mother had this room before me, didn’t she? Some of her things are here.”
“It’s nice to have your own things around you, isn’t it?”
Penelope is so relieved to have steered the conversation away from the girl’s romantic troubles that she instantly agrees, even though the things, out of context, mean very little to her.
“Have you been doing some of the activities?”
The girl will have to give her more to go on. The question is both too generic — what activities? — and circular — doing is what you do with an activity. “Mmmmm?”
“The Lodge organizes lots of things. It’s good to participate.”
Good for who?
“I think they are making cookies today. You know what? You could maybe start a knitting group or something.”
Socks for soldiers. She thinks about her mother’s stories of the dreaded knitting machines, the threat they posed to her young business. When the Great War broke out, Thora had seen an opportunity. Trench foot was one of the greatest threats of battle (believe it or not) and extra socks the easiest antidote — armistice apparently being out of the question. Thora had organized the women and approached the army. But then the Red Cross had gotten in on it. They provided families with automatic knitting machines and wool, and set a target. If they met their quota, the families got to keep the knitting machine and could use it to make socks to sell. With a practiced hand on its crank, a machine could turn out a pair of socks in under an hour. There was no competing with that.
“Would you like some tea? I must have some biscuits somewhere.” She remembers being ravenous when she was pregnant.
“Are you eating well? Sometimes it’s a little hard adjusting to having your meals in a big dining room with a lot of people. But it’s important to eat.”
For you, thinks Penelope, not for me. “A full stomach and clean underwear: those are the only things that really matter.”
The girl laughs. Uncomfortably, Penelope thinks.
“My mother used to say that.” She doesn’t know why she says this. Thora had never said any such thing. She made it up herself, on the spot, just now. But it does have a ring to it.
“I’ll remember that. You haven’t lost your sense of humour.”
People who say that usually wouldn’t know where to begin looking for their own.
“Anyway, it’s good to see you are doing so well.”
Penelope wonders when this happened.
“As I say, I’ll be in for a chat every now and then.”
She is a pretty thing, with a kind voice. Penelope hopes she and Matt can reconcile their differences. It can’t be any fun bearing a child on your own. Or raising it. Thank God she had Thora. “Of course, dear.”
“And think about that knitting group.” The girl takes both her hands as if they are going to play London Bridge. Then she smiles — white teeth, wet eyes — and is gone.
She joins the White Feather Girls largely as a form of insurance. It is hard, as the war wears on, to have a foreign-sounding name. She changed the name of the business in the first year of the war. It was too difficult to explain that Håndverket was a Norwegian word and not German. She and her business were swept up by the larger movement that renamed cities, and breeds of dog. But people still remembered they were originally Berlin, and dachshunds, and that her business had started out with a German-sounding name. Her actual origins haven’t helped — when she has dared to mention them. Norway’s decision to remain neutral might as well have been a vote of confidence for the Kaiser. And then there was the business with the damned sock machines, accusations that she was trying to undermine the Red Cross and therefore the war effort. It is best in times like these to join something, to belong to a larger group, the more blatantly patriotic the better.
She tries to ignore the central purpose of the organization. Shaming men into joining up and going to the front has led to so many tragedies, not to mention what happens when a mistake is made. There are dozens of stories of White Feather Girls in London handing the feather to a veteran or a soldier home on leave. In St. Andrews, the chance of such a mistake is slim. Everyone knows everyone. But she has looked on enough times with a shudder as her fellow members bully a young man into a choice that will almost certainly end in the trenches and death. The reports coming back from the Somme are worse than grim.
Not that she would have the nerve to take the side of the conchies. And she certainly wants nothing to do with the efforts she has heard are going on to help deserters cross the border at St. Stephen. There is a cobbler, an American, who is rumoured to provide this service, though he has yet to be caught in the act. She is a believer in seeing things through. If you take the King’s shilling — is that still what happens? — you have made your bed and must lie in it.
Fortunately, since the arrival of the Fourth Overseas Pioneers in May, the White Feather Girls spend at least as much of their energy in good works for those who are already soldiers as they do in recruiting more for the meat grinder. They have set up a lending library where Thora volunteers twice a week and a recreation centre where she goes one other day, and there are picnics and dances practically every week.
She prefers the library to the recreation centre. The soldiers who are looking for books are, predictably, a more thoughtful group. And quieter. She has had some very good conversations with some of them about the classics and Rider Haggard, though she is embarrassed that the majority of the books that have been donated for loan are by writers like G.A. Henty — boys’ adventures for grown men. At the recreation centre, some of the soldiers arrive drunk and, despite the rules, get drunker. You don’t get through an evening without a row or a grope or both. She wishes she could opt out of the table tennis and cards and improvised dancing but is afraid the alternative would be standing on the street corner scouting young men who are candidates for white feathers.
There is a city of tents that went up overnight on O’Neill’s farm, across Katy’s Cove, when the Pioneers arrived. She supposes this feat is not so surprising given what they will be expected to do in France, building bridges and roads and fortifying trenches. Nobody seems to know exactly when that will be. In the meantime, they have given the town a kind of carnival atmosphere. The innkeeper at the Kennedy House thinks he has died and gone to heaven with all the camp followers needing rooms. Thora has had handbills printed up, trying to lure these wives and lovers into the shop. She has experimented, following the latest fashions, with boiled-wool jackets with a distinct, if fanciful, military cut and lots of brass buttons, and she has a line of caps in pastel colours that otherwise look just like what the soldiers are wearing. But either the camp followers care nothing for fashion or they have no money; traffic in the shop remains only a trickle.
She makes the young corporal’s acquaintance at the lending library, which should augur well. He has been in several times before they actually speak. She has noticed what he borrows. It is mostly poetry, books the other girls laughed at when they came in, hooting that no soldier would want to read that stuff. Poetry is not her favourite, English poetry especially, but she is curious and dips into a few of the volumes when he returns them. They do little to change her opinion, but she finds a few poems to like. Henley’s “Invictus” and Kipling’s “If” seem not too bad.
It is late in the summer when he approaches the desk and asks her for a recommendation. This has never happened to her. When she sees it occur with other soldiers and other girls she is convinced it is just thinly disguised flirting, but she is equally sure that in this instance it is genuine literary interest. She has just this morning uncrated a new donation: the works of Ibsen, translated by William Archer. It is a beautiful set with leather spines and corners and marbled endpapers, and only a few years old. She wonders why anyone would give them up.
“Do you read plays?” It seems a safe bet that anyone who borrows volumes of poetry would. “These have just come in.” She suddenly wonders whether, like her, the playwright might have fallen victim to the general hatred of all things Teutonic. “They are in translation. From the Norwegian. Actually, he wrote most of them in Italy.” She thinks the corporal might like Peer Gynt, whistles a little of the Grieg incidental music. He signs the volume out and is back the next day for more. They talk about some of the plays when he returns the books: The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken. Not Ghosts, fortunately; venereal disease is not something she wants to talk about with anyone. She wonders afterward whether Hedda Gabler is responsible for what happens next.
It is time to close the library and they are still talking about the play. Corporal Cooper — call me Coop — shows a sensitive grasp of Hedda’s boredom, Thora thinks, of her ennui, stuck in a place where she barely feels alive. When she tells him she really must turn out the lights and lock the doors, he moans that they have only scratched the surface and asks if he can walk her home at least, to continue the conversation.
She doesn’t like people to know where she lives — strangers, that is, newcomers; everyone who lives in town already knows. It is not exactly that she is ashamed to live above the shop and it is not that she hasn’t made the place very comfortable and attractive once you get inside, which nobody ever does. Rather, it is a pattern she set in those months when she was camped out on the Molly McCann and she hasn’t felt like changing it. But she decides that it is all right for Coop to walk her home. And then — thank you, Hedda — she invites him in, conscious the whole way up the uneven wooden stairs that his face is not three feet from her bottom.
He admires how she has decorated the apartment, stopping to gaze at the felted pictures she has made for the wall and gently handling the pottery animals she has been experimenting with in a makeshift kiln she had put together with bricks left over from the new bank building. Obviously, she has made the right decision. This man reads poetry and plays and has an eye for beauty. He is the opposite of Nils. It has been three years. She asks if he would like to stay for tea, puts the kettle on without waiting for an answer. He produces a hip flask and pours a dollop of rum into each of the teacups she has put on the table. What would Hedda do?
In what follows, there is neither poetry nor beauty, but she does not care. Cooper’s lust for reading pales beside this passion. Nils was sometimes rough, but this comes from a different place. As he tears at her slip, she shuts her eyes to complete the escape, a release for a moment from the wave-battered rock to which she has felt chained. It doesn’t hurt to know that he could be shipped off to France at any point.
“Mamma?”
She is surprised to see Matt. Where has he come from?
“Were you asleep?”
Not exactly. “I was thinking about the war.” She supposes that is true. “We used to entertain the troops.”
“The Mercury Club. You’ve told me about that. It’s where you and Pappa met.”
She flinches when she hears him call Jonathan Reade — a man he never even met — Pappa. “The other war.”
Matt looks at her oddly. Is her nose running, her hair a mess? Then he says, “Really? The other war? Why don’t you tell me what you were thinking about that.”