Wednesday, December 3
MISS KEELING WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED, except that Samuel was staying late at school again, finding reasons to drag out his departure long past that of the other children. She had been so close to asking him, but then she thought she really knew. His father would be away at work on the Nelson ferry, and Samuel would be alone until he got back. Under those circumstances he would almost certainly be too proud to complain. She stood now and watched Samuel walk down the road, eating the extra scone she had brought for just this purpose. Shaking her head and resolving that she ought to talk to someone about him, she was just turning away to prepare for the next day’s classes when she saw the car.
It was backing slowly down the hill. Samuel stopped and was looking at it, and then it disappeared from her sight, and Samuel walked on.
She was not prepared for the flood of panic that assailed her so powerfully that she had to sit down and hold the edge of the desk. It was nonsense. Someone lost. She tried to focus on the details of the car to still the rampant beating of her heart. It was an older model. Dark blue, maybe, or black. Some sort of red insignia on the front. The real trouble was that she’d seen it before. It wasn’t someone lost. It had been stopped at the top of the road to the cottage. When? Two days before? She’d given it no thought then. She’d seen it when she was carrying wood from the shed, and she had dismissed it completely as belonging to a local. She certainly didn’t recognize all the cars of the parents yet. People were always pausing at roads looking for addresses because they were so poorly marked. She looked around the classroom trying to restore a sense of the normal. She would mark papers, prepare lessons, write on the board, make sure the fire was damped, and drive home to where Miss Scott was preparing supper. They would chat about the children, and she would imagine what it must be like to be leaving to get married. And she would close her eyes, happy about her assignment here at the Balfour school. Happy, free at last. Her own woman. After all, no one had ever come, just as Mrs. Franklin had predicted.
It was useless. She got up abruptly and paced.
She should have asked for an assignment in the far north, or in the Peace River country. Now look at her! So nervy that she had got a revolver, which she had never told Miss Scott about. She could never use it, she knew, but she had bought it before she left the Island, thinking it would make her feel safe. She would bring it the next day, stow it somewhere secure. She walked around the classroom, opening and shutting the desk drawers. No. A child could find it. In the kitchen she saw the high cupboards. In there. If the car came back, if someone got out of the car, she would just have time to get it.
SUNDAY UNFOLDED IN a way Darling had always imagined Sundays might, if one was with someone one loved. A slow getting up, a shivering run downstairs to heave some coal into the furnace, and a return to bed until it took effect. Sitting in the kitchen in thick flannel dressing gowns, looking out at the change from the icy rain of the previous days back to snow, with thick mugs of coffee in hand and bacon cooking.
They had perused the Fannie Farmer cookbook and found pancakes, which were now staying warm in the oven. Lane dropped eggs into the frying pan and then rummaged around in the cupboard until she found the can of treacle.
“At last, a use for this! Mabel tells me it is a must in ginger cake, but I’ve yet to attempt that. Theirs is so delicious I’m afraid to try.”
“Should we have dressed for breakfast?” Darling asked, with the air of a man who has no intention of budging.
“I am dressed,” Lane objected, pushing her auburn hair away from her face with a spatula-laden hand.
“Do that again, and you won’t be for long,” he said. He wondered when he might tire of her cheekbones and that fall of hair.
The remains of breakfast before them, Lane said, “Angela and I are going up the hill to look at that house and see how the builders are getting on. Want to come along?”
“That’s all right. I’ll do the washing up and keep the home fires burning. And I have to finish this book. It’s due back at the library this week.” He waggled the Steinbeck at her.
“I HAVEN’T HEARD a thing,” Angela said, coming down the stairs from the porch, “so I expect the workers are gone till tomorrow and we can have a good look. We can get to the road through the back here.” The Bertolli collies had stationed themselves, one in front, one behind, apparently bent on herding Angela and Lane through the yard to the road and up to the construction site.
Snow had begun to fall in tiny exploratory flakes, and the sight of it lifted Lane’s spirits to no end. She had loved the long snowy landscapes of her childhood home in Latvia. When she had moved to England to attend Oxford it was, she reflected, what she most missed. It was an irony, she always thought, that all her English relations living in Latvia idealized and missed the English summers. Here in King’s Cove, she thought, she could have both.
As they walked, Angela asked, “Are you still enjoying your stint as a teacher? You must have a real talent for it,” she added. “The children love you.”
Lane smiled. “And I love them. It’s really my first experience with children, and I don’t think I expected it to be such fun. Although, I was thinking how hard it is in some ways. I don’t just mean trying to sort out all the different levels of lessons and trying to be an expert on everything. It’s the emotional part. I think I’m finding it’s very easy to get attached, and that’s mostly lovely, because they are lovely children, but when one of them has an unhappy home life, and you can see it right on his face . . . I don’t know. I feel quite powerless and wish so much I could help. Like little Samuel. Not only was he abandoned occasionally, but I’m certain he’d been struck. And now on top of it, his father has died. It’s heartbreaking.”
“Absolutely dreadful! The boys tell me that he’s staying with Gabriella, so that must help. The Benjamins are awfully good people. I know I shouldn’t speak ill and all that, but that Gaskell was a dreadful excuse for a human being. Nobody liked him. Last year at the Dominion Day dance he got absolutely pie-eyed and made extremely loud, rude remarks to poor Miss Scott. Loud enough for the whole place to hear.”
“Oh? What sort of remarks?”
“I think I put it right out of my mind. I just remember he was disgusting. Honestly, a more blameless and self-sacrificing woman would be hard to find!”
At the top of the road, the dogs abandoned their charges and ran into the yard, which was still full of lumber and tools under canvas tarpaulins, and sniffed earnestly at the new smells.
“It’s going to be very nice,” Lane observed. “It looks like they might add another floor. That will lift that gloomy overhanging roof that keeps the sitting room dark all year long.”
They followed the dogs into the yard and around the back. The kitchen had been enhanced by the addition of new larger windows and a porch.
Peering in the window, Lane exclaimed, “Oh, too bad!”
“What?” Angela asked, joining in the peering.
“There used to be a nice wood floor in the kitchen that a little sanding could have really spruced up. They’ve covered it up with linoleum.”
“Yes, but quite nice linoleum,” Angela said. “It’s a very pretty green, that floral sort of design. It’ll be handy in the kitchen.”
“Trust an artist to find the bright side. They have a fancy electric stove. Now then.” Lane pulled away from the window and looked around the yard. “What have they done with the old wood-burning number that was there? I mean, the house was a ghastly mess when I was in here last spring. No one had been in it since before the Great War, but I would have thought a wood stove could still have some use.” She gave a cursory look around the yard, and then wondered if they’d simply thrown it in the woods behind the house. She stood back and looked at the house. Even the work it was undergoing seemed unlikely to lift the pall of sadness she associated with the house. “It’s still hard not to think of this as a place of tragedy, what with that little child.”
“I suppose you’re right, but what house hasn’t had someone die in it, when you think about it? Our cabin already had most of the additions when we bought it a few years ago, but it was once an old settlers’ cabin. People must have died in droves there.” Angela pushed her hands into her pockets and started back toward the road.
“I suppose you’re right,” Lane said, “though ‘droves’ might be an overstatement. Even if whoever is building it is only planning to use it for the summer, I hope it’s a cheerful, happy family that can change the fortunes of the sad place.”
“Now who’s being an optimist? It’s all right for you. You’re two miles away. You won’t hear the fast cars driving up and down the roads, taking the noisy family you so fondly envision to the lake to swim and have drunken late-night picnics. Where have the bloody dogs got to?” Angela turned back toward the house, calling, “Lassie? Sandy? Come on. We’re going home.”
Lane, who could hear the dogs barking at something, waited on the road, looking up past the trees into the sky, where the first tentative flakes of snow had been replaced by larger, fluffier models that promised a lovely white cover over everything. She sighed with contentment, thinking of nestling down by the stove for the rest of the day with her lessons for the children. She turned at the sound of Angela’s voice.
“What on earth are you up to? Come away, you beastly animals!”
Lane started toward the house, meeting Angela and the two dogs, who seemed reluctant to leave. “What is it?”
“They were digging and sniffing along the edge of the house there. No doubt a dead something, speaking of things dying. I’m sure the work on the house has scared out all the rats and God knows what living there. Why will dogs go after carcasses? It’s disgusting.”
“IT’S A RICH Vancouverite!”
“What is?” Mabel asked. The temperature had dropped, and the snow was falling in earnest. Reg Mather was with her in the post office alcove, waiting for Eleanor to pull up the window. Both were muffled in scarves and hats. They could hear Eleanor in the background calling out, “Coming! No, Alexandra, no one needs you right now.”
“That work at the house up the road. I was talking to the workmen last week, and they told me they’d discovered a rich city dweller was behind the whole business. Summer home sort of thing. That’s all we need. Strangers in and out. Good stand of trees there going to waste.”
Mabel abhorred Reg’s views on stands of trees but had long ago stopped worrying about it because Reg, in her view, was too bone idle to start cutting underbrush in his garden, let alone logging stands of trees. “Why wouldn’t they buy one of the houses on the lake? That’s where the summer holidaymakers ought to confine themselves. Ah! Good morning, Eleanor. You hear what Reg is saying?”
“I was saying,” Reg interposed, irritated at having his story whipped away from him, “that the fixing up of that house is being directed by some rich bastard, begging your pardon, who wants a summer home. Utter nonsense. We don’t need that sort of carry-on up here. Respectable families willing to put their backs into things. That’s what’s wanted. We’d be better off if people stayed away altogether.”
Mabel uttered a sound like a punctured tire and turned to Eleanor with a “Yes, like him!” expression on her face.
“Lane came here, and she’s been a great addition. We don’t know these people won’t be the same,” Eleanor said, reaching up into the wooden cubbies to collect the Hugheses’ mail for Mabel.
“Completely different. She’s not a summer visitor. She lives here. She redeemed herself by putting down roots and marrying,” Reg pointed out, completely oblivious to any opinion the eldest unmarried Hughes daughter might have about what constituted being redeemed.
“In my view,” Mabel said, “if whoever it is is only going to be here in the summer, they’ll be out of our hair for the other three-quarters of the year. We’re all too busy in the summer to pay attention to holidaymakers, anyway. We’re about to be enveloped in snow again. I’d best get back.”
“Oh, dear,” said Eleanor, looking out into the yard as the post office door opened and then closed on Mabel. “It makes travel up to town so difficult, all this snow. I feel sorry for Dave Bertolli and the poor inspector, having to go all that way every day.”
“See, that’s another thing. Why can’t people stay put? We didn’t used to have to rush up to town every five minutes in the old days. We got whatever we needed every week on the steamboat. We grew vegetables and fruit and ordered what we couldn’t grow.”
“The world is changing, I expect, Reg. You can’t say life wasn’t a struggle. It’s rather nice to go up to town and shop in the nice new supermarket and see a film. And people must go to their jobs,” Eleanor said mildly, if a little pointedly. Lane was always so generous about offering to take Eleanor to town, and she had to confess she rather liked the diversion.
“That struggle made us strong. How do you think we won the war?” Unwilling to discuss any war with Reg, who had participated in neither one because of a “gamy” leg, Eleanor smiled. “Do give my regards to Alice. She makes the loveliest sugar cookies. I do hope we’ll see some at the Christmas service this year!”