Benji! He was the core of the whole ambitious enterprise she had in mind. And at a moment of intense pressure, the thought that he might leave the Lady Lavender, leave her stranded when she most needed him, had been the last straw. Already run down by the chill she could not shake off, she had fainted. Joe would never believe it!
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Joe never opened his letters at the post office, as many people did in their excitement; he waited until he reached the least travelled part of the track home. Then he would dismount, take the letters out of his shirt pocket and, leaning comfortably against his patient horse, would read them uninterrupted by Aunt Theresa or Simon Wounded who, at home, would clamour for news of her. Today, when he read her letter, he was glad of the solitude of the old pathway.
She had mentioned Benji a couple of times before and the reasons for his not inheriting his father’s Estate. Now, she repeated how kind Benji and his mother had been to her, in spite of their disappointment at being left out of the Will; and a nagging fear in Joe’s heart became a torrent of jealousy. He sensed that Benji was courting his precious lover. She had been away nearly three months, an extremely passionate woman, disdainful of church or state or custom, who had expressed that passion with him. He and Wallace Helena had established their own customs, he considered grimly.
But now she had this cousin, of whom she wrote with affection. A young man who spoke her own language! Who would probably enjoy bedding such a beautiful woman! He could barely read the whole missive.
He closed his eyes against the long slant of the late summer sunshine and to keep out the vision of Wallace Helena’s slender legs curled round another man. He wanted to throw something, smash something, weep.
His horse turned to nuzzle him, as if she understood he was upset, and he leaned against her neck for comfort, until he had curbed his wild fury. Then he mounted her and rode slowly home, her reins loose in his hand and her hooves rustling sadly through the crisp, frozen leaves of autumn.
He unsaddled the horse and let it loose in the paddock, and then strode into the cabin. He flung his saddle into a corner, and shouted, ‘Hey, Auntie! Got any coffee? Emily?’ He pulled off his battered wolfskin jacket and flung it after the saddle, kicked off his boots, and went to stand by the small log fire that his aunt had made to cook a stew. ‘Damn her! Damn her!’ he swore under his breath.
‘Shut the door,’ shouted Aunt Theresa from the kitchen. ‘It’s getting chilly – I can feel the draught out here.’
Continuing to swear under his breath, he went to the heavy door and kicked it shut. Then he turned the beam across it to lock it; the beam thudded into its socket with a squeak of complaint.
Aunt Theresa shuffled in with a mug of coffee from the blue-enamelled pot on the back of her iron stove, where she had been preserving berries. Her soft moccasins made little noise.
She took one look at Joe’s darkly flushed face, and asked in Cree, ‘What’s up? Did you get in a fight?’
‘No.’ He took the coffee from her and drank half the mugful, while she watched him, her anxiety hidden behind her blank, seamed face. She sensed a boiling distress which she had not seen since his mother had died of smallpox. ‘A bit more, and he’ll burst into tears,’ she thought.
She moved round him and pushed a chair behind him. ‘Sit down and tell me,’ she ordered, as she lifted another chair close to him and sat down herself.
Joe ignored her, and continued to stand staring into the fire, his great fist clenched around the coffee mug, until the heaving of his chest under his check shirt became more normal.
Without taking his eyes from the fire, he sat down suddenly, as if the strength had gone out of him.
The old Cree sat patiently waiting.
At last he said slowly, his voice constricted, ‘It doesn’t seem as if Wallace Helena will ever come home.’
‘Why not? Of course she will. You’re here, aren’t you? Who else has she got?’
In the flickering light of the fire, Joe’s face had the frightening fixity of an African mask. Then, as if the information were being dragged out of him, he said, ‘Remember she said in one of her letters she’d met a cousin, a white man, who works in the soap place?’
Almost imperceptibly, Aunt Theresa stiffened, like an old brown fox that suddenly smells something in the wind. She nodded.
‘He keeps taking her out – walking with her – and, she says, planning with her.’ He turned his eyes on his aunt, and said with anguish, ‘I’m fifty-one, and my face is pocked – like the face of the moon. She’s found this younger man – a city man – like she is.’ He nodded his head helplessly. ‘I’ve never seen a city. I don’t know anything compared to her – I’m the son of a slave.’
Aunt Theresa thought this tirade over carefully, her face showing only her usual expression of resignation. She said quietly, ‘I knew your father; he was a clever man. Don’t put him down. He couldn’t help it if he was taken as a slave. Mr Rowand who owned him thought a lot of him. And my father, Two Tailfeathers – your grandfather – taught you well. And you can read and write. You’re as smart a man as she’d ever find in the Territories.’
‘Yeah! In the Territories,’ he repeated, with heavy sarcasm. He banged one fist on his knee and shifted himself angrily on his chair.
After a moment or two, Aunt Theresa went on, as if she had not heard the interjection.
‘If it was looks that Wallace Helena wanted, you’d have been sent packing long ago!’ She smiled faintly. ‘She could have married Gagnon who used to hang around her, when she went down to the Fort. He was really handsome – and French-speaking.’
‘A handsome fool!’ retorted Joe.
‘Right. And she knew it.’ She chewed the end of one of her wispy white plaits. ‘And you stop thinking wrong of her; she’s clung to you like a burr ever since she was a girl, and she’s been good to all of us – like her mother.’
Aunt Theresa rarely spoke her mind. When she did she was straightforward and without censure. Joe rubbed his eyes and his face, as if attempting to dispel his seething anger.
Aunt Theresa watched the play of emotion across his scarred face. She felt a great compassion for her big nephew, and had shared his mother’s worries for him when they were young. He stood astride two nations, Cree and wherever his negro father had originally sprung from, and both peoples had suffered from white intrusion – were still suffering, she considered with a shiver, as she thought of the tattered, starving Crees, who occasionally knocked on their door to beg a little oatmeal or a bit of meat. Joe had been very lucky to have work with the Company and then to have made a good friend of Tom Harding, a simple man, she remembered, generous and outward-looking, who had taken a Cree as his first wife. After his death she had been glad to come to try to knit the shattered household together again; and seeing the affection between her nephew and Wallace Helena blossom had made her glad for both of them. Of course, the priest, who sometimes made the round of outlying homesteads, always said they should marry, but to Aunt Theresa it had not seemed a very important issue – until now.
At the moment, she thought that the added tie of marriage might have made Joe more confident that he would not be deserted, and would have eased the uncertainty within him. Privately, she could not imagine Wallace Helena being satisfied with some bleached-looking white man.
As she looked at Joe’s bent head with its tight grey curls, she said firmly, ‘Come on, boy. You must trust her. Read her letter to me, before Emily and Simon return – looks as if they’re trying to lift all the turnips tonight. Where’s the letter?’
Reluctantly he drew the offending missive from his pocket and, translating into Cree as he went along, tried to render it accurately. His jealousy lay within him like a dark, forbidding pool.
His aunt gestured helplessly with her hands. ‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,’ she said. ‘She’s asking you to go to her. It’s not you who’ve any worry. It’s Simon and Emily and me who should be
worried! What would we do, if you both moved?’
‘I’m not moving. What would I do in a town?’
‘She says what about a little farm? And she wouldn’t be asking you to join her if she was thinking of marrying her cousin.’
He saw the sense in her remarks, but he was not comforted. He had many a time listened to Wallace Helena’s longing for Beirut, heard her rail against the bitter winter, the lack of books, music, sometimes the lack of the basics of life when times had been bad. He judged rightly that, though Liverpool was probably different from Beirut, it might be a good substitute for her own city. And she had a relation to help her to settle there. He sat staring at the pot of stew plopping softly on the fire, folding and unfolding the letter with his long, splayed fingers, as he considered a future which seemed more hostile than the worst winter, the worst prairie fire, the worst invasion of grasshoppers.
He had believed that the soap works would yield some useful money with which she could buy good agricultural machinery, that she would be back home by this time. Instead it was creating a nightmare for him. Who, in the name of Jesus, wanted to live in a country other than his own?
Feeling that some of the tempest had passed over, Aunt Theresa heaved herself out of her chair and shook out her black skirt. ‘You think carefully, boy, before you write back to her. She wants to stay there, I’ve no doubt. If you want her back here, you’ve got to tempt her, like you would a mare that’s got loose and is running with a wild herd. Remind her of her warm stable and her bag of oats.’ She allowed herself a small grin, and added, ‘And the stallion in the paddock.’ She unhooked a ladle hanging from the mantelshelf and bent down to stir the stew.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Though Wallace Helena had noticed, when visiting Mr Benson on other occasions, that he had a typewriting lady at work in a corner of the general office, she had never spoken to her. When they were ensconced in the hackney together, however, she asked the woman how long she had been working for Mr Benson, and then leaned her head in a corner to rest, while she listened to the whispered flow of Miss Williams’s confidences. She gathered from them that Miss Williams found herself the target of a great deal of hostility and misunderstanding, because she worked amongst men. ‘But I felt that the shift-key typewriter was the coming thing. Miss Harding, and I have to keep my dear mother, so …’
Wallace Helena roused herself sufficiently to respond that she fully understood Miss Williams’s difficulties, because she herself was aware of similar attitudes to her ownership of the soap works. ‘We shall have to teach men that we are to be respected, shall we not?’
Miss Williams agreed unhappily that they would have to be teachers. When they arrived at The Cockle Hole she refused an invitation to take tea, saying that she would like to go home to her mother as quickly as she could. ‘Mother is an invalid, and she gets very lonely at times.’
Wallace Helena shook her hand and thanked her for her kindness, before descending carefully onto the cobblestones. She felt unusually weak.
She was surprised to find Elsie’s front door open. To get out of the way of the hackney driver turning his horse around, she stepped quickly inside and found the house in turmoil. Sharp, short cries came from upstairs, as Mrs Barnes emerged from the kitchen-living-room at the end of the narrow entrance passage. Her hair hung in wisps from her bun and she seemed agitated. Two small boys were fighting over marbles in the hall, and a strange young woman was running up the stairs.
As Mrs Barnes saw Wallace Helena, she bent to slap one of the little boys and told him to be quiet or he’d have to play in the square. ‘Our Elsie’s in labour,’ she told the Lebanese. ‘I’ve got your tea ready, though.’ She opened the door of Wallace Helena’s living-room and bade her enter.
Wallace Helena went in and sat down thankfully. She took off her hat and laid it on another chair. Seeing her face, Mrs Barnes inquired kindly, ‘Are you all right, Miss?’
Wallace Helena made a face. ‘I fainted in my lawyer’s office.’
‘You’re not well, Miss, I can see that. Elsie was sayin’ as you’ve been coughing somethin’ awful. You might like to walk up to see Dr Biggs, after you’ve had your tea. He has an evening surgery at seven o’clock. He’s just round the corner, like. No distance, and he’s proper kind. He’ll see you all right – you might have to wait a bit.’
Wallace Helena nodded, and inquired how Elsie was.
‘She’ll be a while yet. It’s her first and she’s scared.’
‘May I go up and visit her after I’ve had tea? It might take her mind off her pains.’
‘For sure, Miss. The midwife’s gone to have her tea – she reckons she’ll have a long night of it. She’ll be back in an hour. Don’t make yourself too late, if you want to see the doctor, though. He shuts his door at nine o’clock.’
Aware that she had not eaten much lunch, Wallace Helena asked that her tea be brought in. She hoped that food might make her feel a little more energetic, though she felt more like taking to her bed than anything else.
Tea proved to be a filleted kipper on toast, followed by bread and butter and jam and a plain cake. It was tasty without being very fatty, and Wallace Helena ate all the kipper and then some bread and butter. She drank several cups of tea from the shiny brown pot. Feeling stronger, she found herself a cigarello and sat at the table smoking it with her last cup of tea. The smoke made her cough once or twice but she had no violent spasm.
She ground out the stub in a pottery ashtray liberally decorated with gold paint, and then went upstairs to wash her face and see Elsie.
When she knocked at Elsie’s door, she was bidden to come in by her landlady, in a gasping, hoarse voice.
Elsie lay on the bed, her fair face flushed and perspiring. She was covered by a sheet and blanket, which had become tangled, as she heaved herself round in an effort to make herself more comfortable. Like the rest of the bare room, the bedding was spotless. On a table, the midwife had put a bowl, a pile of newspapers and some neatly folded clean rags. An empty bucket stood under the table and a flower-wreathed chamber pot was visible under the bed. A small fire had been laid in the fireplace; it had not yet been lit. A wooden chair stood by the bed.
Elsie smiled at her visitor and half rose, only to wince and fall back on her pillow. ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘Did Mrs B. give you your tea all right?’
‘Oh, yes. Don’t worry your head about things like that.’ Wallace Helena approached the bed and sat down on the chair. ‘I just came to sit with you for a few minutes, if you feel able to have a visitor. I believe the midwife will be back in a little while?’
Elsie agreed that she would, and added, ‘Our John’ll be home from work soon – and he’ll sit with me a while later on. He’s bin real good, helpin’ me and having a real midwife and all.’ She arched her back suddenly and cried out
‘Let me rub your back for you?’ suggested Wallace Helena.
‘Oh, I couldn’t let you, Miss.’
‘Why not? It’s very comforting.’
‘’Cos you’re a Miss, Miss.’
‘Don’t let that worry you,’ Wallace Helena said with a laugh. ‘I’ve helped many a cow calve. Turn on your side and we’ll tuck the blanket under your stomach to support it. Now, then.’
Wide-eyed and doubtful, Elsie did as she was told, and long capable hands smoothed and soothed. After a minute or two, the girl was persuaded to sit up and Wallace Helena hitched her nightgown higher and eased and kneaded round the waist and down again. Elsie began to relax, and breathe more easily.
Wallace Helena kept it up until she herself was seized with a fit of coughing, and had to stop. It was her turn to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ as she fumbled for her handkerchief. ‘Mrs Barnes says there’s a doctor near here. I think I’ll go up and see if he can give me a cordial to ease this stupid cough.’
Elsie caught her lower lip between her teeth, as she lay back again on her pillows and pain shot round her waist. When it had passed, she confirmed that
Wallace Helena should see the doctor. ‘We’re all afraid of coughs round here,’ she said, ‘’cos of T.B.’
Mrs Barnes could be heard slowly climbing the stairs, so Wallace Helena took Elsie’s hand and said goodbye. From Mrs Barnes she obtained exact directions to the doctor’s house, and, with a quick smile to Elsie, she went to put on her hat and shawl.
As she was about to descend the stairs, she had a sudden thought, and she put her head round Elsie’s door to ask, ‘Can I get your mother or your mother-in-law for you – take a message to one of them?’
Elsie smiled sadly from the bed. ‘Me ma lives in Dublin and she hasn’t got the money to come – she sent me that lovely shawl hanging on the hook there – knitted from wool she got from the walls and hedgerows, where the sheep rub themselves; spun it, she did, and then knitted it. And our John’s mam’s crippled with the rheumatism – you should see her hands. She’s comin’ to live with us, once the baby’s born.’
‘My, you’re going to be busy,’ Wallace Helena said with a smile, as she pulled on her black cotton gloves.
‘Oh, aye, but she’s a real nice woman.’ She winced, and Mrs Barnes leaned over to hold her hand.
Wallace Helena went slowly down the stairs, thinking soberly that wherever women lived, their lives were not easy.
The doctor’s wife let her into the house and ushered her into what looked like a dining-room. A huge, polished oak table took up the centre of the room and matching chairs with seats covered in black oilcloth were ranged round the walls. At the door of the room, she said, ‘He’s nearly through. You won’t have long to wait.’
‘That’s O.K.,’ Wallace Helena responded.
The American phrase aroused the woman’s attention. She had realized that Wallace Helena was a foreigner, and now she inquired, quite politely, if she was from the United States.
Wallace Helena glanced at the pallid, lined face turned up towards her. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’m from Canada.’
The Lemon Tree Page 27
