A movement from the direction of the house draws her eye, and she sees Emmett heading through the tufts of long grass sprinkled with yellow buttercups in her direction. He’s grown so tall. Nine years old in August, and already up to her shoulders and as skinny as a reed no matter how much she feeds him.
Emmett flops down on the grass, and she runs her hand over his newly cut hair. ‘You finished your chores, Emmy?’
He nods and reaches into the pocket of his corduroys, pulling out a white envelope. ‘Mr Boyd brought it over. Came in the post from St John’s.’
‘From St John’s? Whoever could that be?’
‘It’s not a Newfoundland stamp.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Could I have it, Mam?’
Ellie looks at the careful vertical handwriting. She’s knows that hand. An English stamp. She turns over the letter. An address in Norwich.
‘Could I have the stamp, Mam? I can add it to the others from Mr Boyd.’
‘Of course, Emmy. Hold on a minute.’ Ellie runs her finger under the envelope flap and carefully tears off the stamp. ‘Here you go. Ask Nanny to soak it in some warm water for you so you can stick it in your scrapbook.’
Emmett holds the stamp between his thumb and forefinger like it’s a delicate butterfly. ‘Thank you, Mam.’ He rises to his feet, unfolding his lanky frame like an expanding accordion, and makes his way back down the slope to the house.
Ellie pulls out the letter.
Pleasantview
Newmarket Road
Norwich
15th May, 1953
Dear Ellie,
I hope you and Thomas are well, and I expect Emmett is quite a young man by now. You’re probably surprised to receive this letter, after all this time, but I do want to thank you for the Christmas cards and the yearly update on your life over in Newfoundland. I’m sorry I have been such a poor correspondent, but it was difficult for me after you married Thomas. I have thought of you often, though, and hope you have found the life you were looking for.
I’m still at Mcklintock’s, but I was made assistant manager last year and I’ve just overseen the reopening of the factory after the bomb damage from the Baedeker raids. It’s nice to have it up and running properly again. We’re launching a whole range of new sweets – Bingos, Whippets and Choccos. It seems everyone wants chocolate now after all the war years with so little.
But I don’t imagine you’re all that interested in the state of chocolate in Norwich. Since your father passed away, I know your sister hasn’t kept in touch. She still seems to harbour some kind of grudge over some imagined slight, though I’m sure she’ll come around one day. You are sisters after all.
There have been developments and I felt someone should let you know what has been happening.
After your father died, Dottie took a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She said there was no reason for her to stay in Norwich with everyone gone, and she was quite right too. She’s done so very well with her career as a pianist, and I saw her in Norwich recently when she was here as the guest pianist with the Norwich Philharmonic Orchestra for the winter season.
We ended up spending a great deal of time together. You wouldn’t recognise Dottie, Ellie. London turned her into quite a sophisticated young woman. She’s so self-assured and—
Ellie, we’ve married. It seems I was meant to be part of your family one way or another! Your sister is now Dottie Burgess. She prefers Dorothy now. And there’s more news. Dottie’s expecting. Emmett will soon have cousins! Yes, cousins plural. Dottie’s expecting twins in November. I’m only sorry your parents aren’t here to be a part of this.
There it is. The news from Norwich. Do take care. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have as a sister-in-law.
Fondly,
George
PS: I’ve often wondered why you gave Emmett my middle name. You would have told me, wouldn’t you, Ellie? Wouldn’t you?
Ellie folds the letter and slips it back in its envelope. There was nothing to tell. Yes, she’d known Emmett was George’s middle name. She liked the name. And it connected her to the life she was leaving behind in Norwich. Emmett was Thomas’s boy. Hers and Thomas’s.
Her eyes scan over the blue-inked writing. Dottie and George. She couldn’t quite believe it. Of course, Dottie had had a crush on George for as long as she could remember. But a schoolgirl crush and a marriage were entirely different things. How on earth had that happened?
Is she so shocked because she’d always seen George as hers? She’d been engaged to him for ages before she’d met Thomas. But that’s ridiculous. She’s a happily married woman now. At least as happy as one could reasonably expect to be, considering … Well, all the men drank in Tippy’s Tickle.
The life she’d found herself living in this remote corner of the world was so much harder than she’d imagined. The fishing money only went so far, and when the sea froze over in the long winter, the men turned to the seal hunt. She hated that. The ice floes were dangerous – men drowned every year. Agnes thought she was a fool when she’d refuse to cook the bloody seal flippers Ephraim and Thomas brought home. Would you have us starve? Agnes would admonish her. So, she’d cook them, but she refused to eat them. She’d had more than one supper of bread and margarine.
They’d only just got the electricity connected in the spring, though indoor plumbing was still a distant dream. And finding a book to read in Tippy’s Tickle was like searching for a diamond in a mountain of coal. It’d been a shock when she’d discovered that most of the locals were illiterate. Though, now that money was coming in from the Canadian government there was talk of a new regional high school down the coast in Wesleyville. Ellie had managed to lobby the village council to ask for Canadian money to sponsor Bertha Perkins, up from Grand Falls, to teach the younger children in the church hall basement, though, admittedly, she’d done that more for Emmett’s benefit than from any altruistic impulse. So, things were improving, but it was a slow road. Newfoundland was hardly the romantic idyll she’d imagined.
And now Dottie had married George. She should be happy for them. She would be happy for them. She’d made her choice. Her life was in Newfoundland with Thomas and Emmy and the new baby. She’d likely never see Norwich or her sister or George again.
Chapter 65
Tippy’s Tickle – 15 September 2011
They turned up in the middle of the night, beaching themselves on the sandy shore below Bufflehead Cottage. Over one hundred of them. Pilot whales. All female. Most of them pregnant.
***
‘Grab the flukes, Becca! Pull them with me!’
Becca looks at Sophie, hesitating as the blood-laced waves beat against her rubber boots.
‘Please, Becca! Please!’
Becca splashes into the water between the whales’ writhing, sleek grey bodies, and grabs hold of the flailing flukes with Sophie. They tug, grinding their booted feet into the shifting sand, but every centimetre of success is countered by the whale thrusting its huge body back onto the shore.
‘Again! Again, Becca!’
‘Over here, Sophie!’ Toby Molloy, his too-long hair plastered back over his head with saltwater, throws Sophie the end of a rope he’s tied to the seat of the rowboat he and Thor are rowing in the pinkening water. ‘Tie this to the flukes. We’ll haul it out into the sea.’