Burden of Memory

by Vicki Delany

The couple stood at the door, waving enthusiastically until Moira and Jean had crested the hill and disappeared from sight.

  Moira let out a huge sigh. “A bit overwhelming, I would say. What do you want with cigarettes, anyway? You don’t smoke.”

  “Better than money,” Jean replied with a sly smile. “Much, much better than money.”

  Shortly after their arrival, Moira invested in part-ownership of the most precious of all commodities—a bicycle. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1940 she toured the length and breadth of the peaceful Surrey countryside.

  Moira’s original roommate, Marie, a shy woman from Montreal, had taken seriously ill not long after their arrival, and was shipped home, drowning in tears.

  Jean was re-assigned to Marie’s bed. She moved in happily, complaining about her previous roommate as she arrived. “If I had to spend the last few months of this war with her I would simply die,” she declared, dumping her suitcase on the cot.

  “I thought she seems rather nice.”

  “Perhaps. Until you have to room with her. An absolute horror, she never shuts up from morning to night. Even when I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Do you think the war will be over soon?”

  “Of course. Nothing’s happening. They’ll all shake hands and say how sorry they are and that’ll be the end of it. Maybe when I get home, Freddie will appreciate me a bit more.”

  “Who’s Freddie?”

  “I had the most frightful crush on him, all the time we were in school. But he never paid me any attention. When I was home on leave last time, he came around to my house and declared his undying love for me.”

  “Really?”

  “Can you believe it? He finally realized what he might lose. Okay if I put some of my things here?” Without waiting for an answer, Jean swept Moira’s few possessions into a corner of their shared dresser and laid out hairbrushes, bottles of cologne, and pots of makeup.

  “What did you say? To Freddy?”

  “That he’d have to wait for me, of course. I have a duty to perform.”

  Moira lunged for her family portrait, about to be knocked off the edge of the dresser. It was a nice photo of the siblings. Terribly formal. It had been taken at home in the autumn of 1939, the last time they were all together. Megan and Maeve and Moira sitting primly in the front, hands crossed on their laps, Ralph splendid in his uniform, standing tall and proud behind the row of chairs. Moira’s mother had insisted that she put on a pretty dress rather than wear the severe Nursing Sister’s uniform for the portrait. At first Moira refused. She was as proud of her uniform as Ralph was of his, but Mother had dissolved into tears, fled to her room and refused to come down, and Grandmother had suggested to Moira, in her quiet, gentle but firm way, that she grant her mother this one request.

  “And what did he say to that?” Moira asked.

  “He’s real keen for America to join the war. He says he’ll enlist the first day, but he won’t fight for a foreign country. Probably be too late, though. Everything’ll be over.” Jean sighed luxuriously.

  Moira doubted that Freddy was pining away for Jean, but it would do no harm to humor the girl. After all they would be living together for the foreseeable future. “How romantic.”

  Not much more of this war. Moira remembered the conversation as she tried to force herself to fall sleep. Not easy, as Jean had a snore that would embarrass a drunken sailor. Not much more of this war. Then they would all be on their way home. She would be dipping her toes into Lake Muskoka by springtime.

  Chapter Five

  Elaine crawled out of bed and slipped on jogging shoes and an old tracksuit as the first rays of sun touched her pillow. The first night in a strange room never led to a restful sleep. The nighttime temperature was set to accommodate a thin, elderly woman: a degree Elaine found nothing short of sweltering. The storm had returned, and lightning flashed and thunder echoed throughout most of the long night. Enormous ancient trees grew close to the cottage and the winds had them scratching rhythmically against her window.

  Now the house was silent. Augustus Madison watched her, his dark beady eyes brimming with hostility, as she tiptoed down the stairs. Childishly, she stuck her tongue out at him.

  Her foot touched the bottom step and the dogs, shut in the kitchen for the night, howled. Elaine dashed down the hall, struggled to unlock the sliding glass doors leading to the deck and plunged outside, jerking the door shut behind her. For the first time, her heart was racing before she had even begun to run.

  Because she didn’t know where she was going, Elaine decided that the best idea would be to simply run for thirty minutes in one direction, then turn around and jog back. Simple. She rounded the house and headed up the driveway. The trees sloughed off the remainder of the night’s storm and the air was fresh and clear with a hearty autumn bite.

  A snake lay in the center of the driveway, flattened right across the midsection, clearly by the wheels of a car. Which might even have been hers. The snake wasn’t big, and no doubt perfectly harmless in life. But in death it filled the lane and her imagination. Elaine cringed and clung to the sides of the road, almost walking through the trees in order to pass the elongated corpse. The image was fixed firmly in her mind throughout her run, enough that she scarcely noticed her surroundings. On her return trip she was alert for the dead creature miles before she reached it.

  Eyes to one side, breathing deeply, and not only from the exercise, Elaine trotted up to the parking area. Her car remained where she had parked it, covered in a sparse blanket of colored leaves. She plucked the dead vegetation off the windows and roof and gave the car a good pat.

  Alan walked around the side of the building, Hamlet and Ophelia at his heels. The dogs bristled at the sight of her, and she was sure that they were measuring her for size and weight. Alan growled deep in his throat and they sat, their sleek haunches twitching.

  “Sorry,” he said with a not-at-all-sorry grin. “They’ll take some time to get to know you.”

  She didn’t acknowledge him, merely lifted her head and followed the flagstone steps around the cottage.

  The sun rose behind the building and this early in the morning long shadows stretched out over the water. Instead of heading inside to get ready for her first day on the job Elaine strolled down to the dock.

  The air was heavy with the scent of decaying foliage and woodsmoke but was, at the same time, light and fresh, free of the odor of car exhaust, overworked factories and too many people confined into far, far too small a space.

  The flowerbeds were neatly raked and tidied, the lawn mowed one last time. The flagstone path wound its way down from the deck to the boathouses and the dock. And there it ended. Abruptly, unexpectedly.

  A line of white pine rose up, blocking the way, the dense forest closing in behind. Elaine loved nature, in all of its costumes, but she didn’t like the feeling of these trees. They crowded her, closed in on her, although she was standing several feet away. Her breath struggled in her throat, the airways fought to stay open. The well-maintained lawns and gardens of the family estate lay behind her.

  Safe.

  Secure.

  But she wanted to step off the path. To see what lay behind the tall white pines.

  She pulled air into her lungs and stepped forward. One hesitant step and then another, and another.

  No one had been here for a long time. The path simply ended where it touched the woods. Nothing but moss and weeds and saplings sprouted between the trees. If the trail had once continued on through here, no trace of it remained.

  There was nothing unusual here, except for the smell. Not pine nor wood nor wet, decaying leaf mulch as she would have expected, but a hint of…perfume? Far too sweet and coy in this setting. Not at all pleasant, like cheap toilet water. A bit of effluent flowing through these beautiful woods? These days anything was possible.

  It was cold; the temperature dropped dramatically once she left the path. So cold that she could see her breath forming in gentl
e puffs in the air in front of her face. A gust of wind picked dead leaves off the forest floor and swirled them around her feet. Through the barrier of untrimmed trees and undergrowth run wild, she imagined that she could see a building. A cabin, standing alone in the dark woods, its outline the same as she had seen in yesterday’s wide-awake dream.

  A children’s playhouse, or guest cottage? Surely it would be visited, enjoyed, loved? Not abandoned to fall into ruin and decay at the end of an overgrown, untrammeled path.

  Elaine placed one running shoe-clad foot in front of the other with great care. Because of the heavy rain during the night, the non-existent path was damp, the carpet of leaves and pine needles soaked with moisture.

  Behind her, one of the dogs barked. Only once, short and sharp, a sound brimming with alarm. The air between two of the larger trees seemed almost to move. It shimmered in space, as if it were struggling to take form. She stepped forward; she couldn’t quite see. She wanted to see more.

  Squelch. Elaine looked down at her feet. One of her top-of-the-line shoes was sinking into a puddle of glutinous, ugly, black mud. She pulled it out with a curse and walked out of the woods.

  ***

  Elaine found the kitchen by the simple act of following her own nose. The fragrance of freshly ground and brewed coffee flowed down the hallway, carrying with it the aroma of breakfast.

  The kitchen was all wood, stone, and rock. A massive fireplace, rows of logs stacked in neat formation beside it, filled one wall. An antique rocking chair, looking as if it were waiting for a wizened grandmother with a pile of pink and blue knitting, took pride of place in front of the hearth. Elaine settled herself to the big table, and a smiling Lizzie served up a virtual feast: coffee first, then spicy Italian sausages, toast with jam, eggs any way she wanted, crisp home fries. Elaine happily dug in to a meal the like of which she hadn’t dared touch in years.

  “Have you worked here for long?” she asked, through a mouthful of runny fried egg on whole-wheat toast thickly coated with slabs of creamy butter.

  “Coming up to two years. It’s easy and comfortable and pays well and so…here I am.” Lizzie poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and pulled a chair up to the timeworn wooden table.

  “What made you want to be a cook?”

  Lizzie watched the liquid swirling in her cup. “My father was a chef, a good one. My parents owned a restaurant for years. Enormously successful it was too. My mother managed the business end of it, my dad cooked. I’m an only child and they raised me rolling pastry and dodging pots of boiling water and temperamental sous-chefs. My parents always intended that I come into the business with them. Dad had great plans for opening another restaurant and putting me in charge.”

  “But you didn’t want to?”

  “They were killed in a car accident. On one of their rare vacations. They closed the restaurant for a few days and drove down to Florida to visit my grandparents. They never made it home.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I couldn’t imagine trying to run the restaurant without them. I didn’t want to be a chef anyway. I love to cook, but a restaurant is such hard work, absolutely killer hours, stress beyond belief. I was afraid of how to tell them I didn’t want it. Then I didn’t have to.”

  A pot hissed and Lizzie moved to attend to it. “Everything happened so suddenly. I had no idea of what to do. A friend of my dad has a place near here. He knew that the Madison cook had quit and told me about the position.”

  “You were lucky.”

  “If luck had anything to do with it, my parents wouldn’t have died. But I know what you mean. I needed time to decide what I want to do with my life, to sort my mind out. That’s the absolute worst thing about sudden death; the survivors are left so totally lost.”

  Elaine considered herself to be a survivor of a different sort. Survivor of a broken heart perhaps, a ruined life. There were times when, in the dark recesses of her mind, she wished that Ian had been struck dead, perhaps in a car crash like that which took the lives of Lizzie’s parents. But no such luck. They never die when you want them to.

  “Will you stay here?” she asked, rather than contemplate that which hadn’t worked out. In more ways than one.

  “As long as it suits me. And it suits me now.”

  “Moira seems nice.” Elaine dipped a segment of sausage into a red puddle of tomato ketchup.

  “She has her moments.” Crisis taken care of, Lizzie sat back down and added a generous splash of cream to her coffee.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning nothing. She’s a rich old lady. She’s great, but she’s used to having her way. She pays better than anyone else in the area, although I’d be happy to work here for much less. But don’t tell her I said that.”

  “Pardon me, Lizzie, if I seem a bit unsure. I’ve never been part of a household before. It’s all a bit strange.”

  Lizzie smiled. “Not much different from living at home, with Grandma and Mom and older brother. Actually it’s a lot nicer than living in some people’s homes. But wait until the family arrives. Then there’ll be more than enough to do. Those tight-assed old ladies don’t approve of me and they won’t ever let me forget my place.”

  The relaxed, chatty mood shattered. While Elaine finished her breakfast in silence, Lizzie gathered up the cooking equipment and piled it into the sink.

  “I can understand that no one wants to talk about it, but I really want to know what happened to the first woman hired to write Moira’s memoirs.”

  “She drowned.”

  “So I heard. But how?”

  Lizzie sighed and squirted dishwashing liquid into the frying pan. “We don’t really know. I guess that’s why we’re so afraid to discuss it. She’d only been here a few days, when Alan found her floating in the lake at the end of the dock one morning. It was very early, everyone else still in bed. Alan often gets up before the rest of us—he likes the morning light, he says. And there she was, fully dressed, floating in the lake.”

  Elaine shuddered. “How awful.”

  “The police looked into it, of course. The coroner said it was an accident, no signs of foul play or anything like that; apparently the body had been there all night. When her family came to collect her, her father told Moira that she couldn’t swim, not one stroke. So it was assumed that she’d walked out to the edge of the dock and somehow fell in. Although the coroner said that she hadn’t had a heart attack or anything like that. It’s very deep at the end and a good distance to the rocks and the ladder out of the water. Next summer, Moira’s going to have a ladder put in at the end of the dock. The coroner recommended it. Bad things happen, that’s all. Why did some redneck drunk kill my parents?”

  Lizzie scrubbed furiously at a bit of grime stuck to the bottom of the pan. “Anyway, Donna’s death had nothing to do with you, so why worry about it?”

  Chapter Six

  September 1940. The peaceful serenity ended, and the Battle of Britain began. The soldiers and Nursing Sisters of Hospital Number 15 sat alongside the people of Southeast England in grandstand seats to the spectacle, cheering on R.A.F. Spitfires in their aerial dogfights against Luftwaffe fighters escorting the waves of bombers to their targets and standing with hearts in their mouths as a tiny aircraft would plunge downward, spiraling back to the arms of mother earth, trailing long plumes of fire and smoke.

  At night the eastern sky glowed red, telling the tale of another heavy raid on the city. The nurses lay awake in their hard, narrow cots, listening to the sound of planes overhead. German bombers flying to or from their targets, English fighters in urgent pursuit.

  One perfect, crisp day in early autumn Moira took her bicycle out to get some exercise. It had been a hard duty shift. A young soldier, famous around the camp for his easy laugh and sense of fun, fell off the roof of the barracks during a childish prank and rather than foolishly breaking a leg or two, had fallen onto an iron spike lying abandoned in the long grass. The spike pierced his chest and he died on the
operating table. It was a horrible, foolish, tragic waste, and Moira had been brought to tears.

  She cycled through a small path cut around the farmers’ fields. The sun shone bright overhead; the crops were lush and full. She stopped pedaling to wave enthusiastically to the Land Girls bringing in the harvest. She was still waving when the whine of an airplane engine in distress sounded directly overhead. It was a German bomber, no doubt about it; they had all been trained to recognize the distinctive appearance of enemy aircraft. Smoke billowed from under the wings and, as she watched, minuscule figures leapt from the undercarriage and drifted on billowing clouds to the outstretched arms of a welcoming green earth. There was nothing for her to do: excited Land Girls and angry farmers armed with pitchforks descended on the fluffy parachutes. Moira watched as the aircraft spun out of control and crashed into a far distant field, exploding in a ball of flame. It was too far for her to reach, across the farmers’ ploughed fields, on her ancient bicycle, in time to offer aid. If indeed aid should be required. Heavy of heart, she turned and headed back to the barracks. There was nothing she could do, she was too far away, and help (if needed) was on its way, but for many years after, she berated herself for her selfishness, because she did not want to see the face of the enemy.

  Chapter Seven

  At eight o’clock sharp, Elaine tapped on the study door and edged it open. Moira’s chair was pulled up to the ornate antique desk, and Ruth, dressed in a different dress than yesterday but still proper servant’s black, stood stiffly beside her.

  “Good morning, dear. Did you sleep well?” Moira asked. Today’s T-shirt proclaimed support for kidney research. Ruth nodded once in greeting.

  “Very well, thank you,” Elaine lied. “And I’ve already been out jogging and had a lovely breakfast. So I’m more than ready to get to work.”

  “Sit down then and let’s do just that.”

  Elaine sat in the straight-backed chair pulled up beside the desk. Nothing in the room would put one in mind of the early 1900s except for Moira’s desk. Carved out of solid oak, it was coated with a patina of decades of love and care and attention. The rest of the furnishings and the room itself could have substituted for a spread in this month’s issue of Modern Home. Sofa and chairs, piled high with white cushions, were upholstered in a fresh shade of blue. The walls were painted white, decorated with large, colorful pieces of modern art, and one heartbreakingly beautiful painting of the lake outside the study window, but as it must appear in deep winter—a lone moose crossing the endless white expanse of ice and snow in search of enough food to see his massive body through to the plentiful days of spring. The carpet was a thick soft cream with a touch of blue edging. Navy blue horizontal blinds had been pulled back to let the morning light stream through two bay windows. Pillows were piled invitingly on the window seats in the bays. Luscious philodendrons sat in white wicker pots on either side of the windows, drinking in the morning sun.