Sophie feels Ellie’s fingers clutch her arm. She looks over at her aunt in time to see Ellie’s knees buckle as she slides to the floor like a wilting flower.
‘Aunt Ellie!’ Sophie drops to her knees. Ellie’s face is as white as a winter sky, and the lines that were a thin tracery just the day before are etched deeply into her cheeks. Sophie looks around the room. ‘Sam! Somebody! Call a doctor!’
The cake crashes to the floor.
Chapter 74
Tippy’s Tickle – 24 June 1967
Ellie raises the sash on the attic window and leans her elbows on the sill. The breeze off the ocean brushes against her face, and the sun sits high in the pale blue sky, throbbing with the promise of another warm day. Unseasonable, the weather man has been saying on the new television. One of the coldest springs on record across Canada, fog sitting over Nova Scotia like a soggy blanket, but the sun shining up here on The Rock.
The rhythmic swoosh of the waves against the rocks below the cliff is broken by the scrape of furniture across the floor in the bedroom below. Ellie winces. She’d been on her hands and knees for days sanding and waxing the wooden floor until it gleamed a warm golden brown. Polished Agnes and Ephraim’s Victorian four-poster mahogany bed until the dull white foxing of the years of built-up wax had burnished to a high sheen. It had been her bed after Agnes had followed Ephraim – dead from cirrhosis of the liver back in ’55 – to a plot beside him in St Stephen’s Cemetery four years ago. Ephraim on one side and Thomas on the other. Her mother-in-law’s stubborn, intransigent spirit finally squashed by the cancer that had slowly eaten a hole through her colon as she’d refused to see a doctor in favour of hot mustard plasters and juniper tonic. Until she’d died crying out to Jaysus, God and all the apostles in the back seat of Emmett’s pickup truck on the way to the hospital down in Gander.
The new lodger had arrived the day before. Hitching her way around the island, she’d said. Up from Placentia originally where she’d taught elementary school for a few years, then via a Master’s degree in Education from Memorial in St John’s. She’d turned down a teaching place at Sacred Heart in Halifax to hitchhike her way across Canada ‘for the Centennial’, she’d said. This Florie was a free spirit if ever she’d met one. Ellie smiles. Like she’d once been herself, as an art student all those years ago in Norwich. Before the war. Before Thomas.
Ellie pads across the round rug she braided from clothing scraps, past the brass bed, and over to her easel. She frowns at the painted landscape of the shore, squinting at the sharp yellow dots of the buttercups and the purple crowns of the Blue Flag irises prising their way through the long grass on the cliff, the white bulk of an iceberg in the distance in the blue-green water. The lighthouse is in the distance, the lines of its white tower and red beacon hazy in the incoming fog.
Tucking the painting under her arm, she picks up a folder stuffed with drawings from the top of the old Art Deco walnut bureau. With any luck, the weather will have enticed people up to the north coast from St John’s and Grand Falls for the holiday weekend. She and Bertha Perkins had managed to get an ad at half price into the local papers and one in the St John’s Telegram for a third off, advertising the Tippy’s Tickle Centennial Jamboree. Hopefully, she’d sell some of her artwork. George’s money was long gone. If it weren’t for Emmy’s boat-building … No, she wasn’t going to think about money today. Today was a holiday.
She shakes her head. She’d hated herself for writing the letter to George after Thomas died. But she’d had no choice. Thomas’s war pension had barely covered the essentials, let alone gone anywhere near to paying off all the debt he’d left behind. If it weren’t for the monthly baby-bonus cheque from the federal government, Agnes would have had them all out on their ears after Ephraim’s death.
Sometimes, on the worst of the days just after Thomas’s drowning, when she’d lain in bed stuffing her hands against her ears to muffle the roar of the wind and the crashing of the ocean against the cliff, when the worry of debt collectors, and the constant battle with Agnes over every household expense had dropped her into a well of despair, George’s face would materialise behind her eyes, and she’d wonder what her life would have been life if she’d married him instead. But then, that would never have happened. Not after she’d met Thomas. The man who brought her to this lonely place away from all the people she loved. The man who’d caused the rift with her sister. The man who, when he died, she knew was the only man she would ever truly love. For better or for worse.
George had come good, as she’d hoped – no, she’d known he would – the cheque arriving four times a year. Slowly, month by month, year by year, she’d paid off Thomas’s debt and the interest the scrounging banks and loan sharks had demanded. She’d managed to clear everything except the mortgage. Then, one day, the cheques stopped coming. Just dried up, like a plant she’d forgotten to water. When three months passed with no money, and the mortgage falling behind, she’d written to George. But she didn’t hear from him again, until …
No, it was best not to think of that. She’d go mad if she thought about that.
Taking in lodgers and giving art lessons at the high school down in Wesleyville, with the amount of money Emmy gave her when he could, had helped keep her and Winny afloat after that. Someday she’d pay that final mortgage payment, and the house would be theirs. No one would ever take it away from her. It would be her legacy to her children.
The bedroom door moans on its hinges as it opens. A blonde head, the wheat-gold hair tied into a long braid, pops around the door.
‘Are you ready, Mom? Emmy’s worried we’re going to be late.’
‘Just coming now, honey. What on earth is that on your face?’
Winny lopes across the room with the uneven grace of a colt and gazes into the mirror on the wall above the bureau. She twists her mouth to get a better view of the peace sign painted in bright blue on her cheek. ‘Florie did it. She’s got one too.’ Winny spins around and raises her right fingers in a V. ‘Peace, Mom.’
Ellie rolls her eyes. ‘I’m going to have to have a word with her. I can’t have her turning you into a flower child just because she’s one.’
‘Oh, Mom. She’s groovy. She’s got a guitar – did you know that? She’s bringing it to the jamboree.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Winny. Everyone in Tippy’s Tickle is going to think I’ve turned this place into a hippy commune. I’ll get called up in front of the town council, just you watch.’
***
‘Hey, there, m’dear!’
Ellie glances up from the table where she’s laid out her artwork to the athletic woman of about thirty striding across the field towards the craft tent. She wears a long-sleeved pink T-shirt and dungarees decorated with psychedelic flowers and peace signs. One of the straps on the dungarees is undone, and it flaps across her belly as she approaches.
‘Hi, Florie. You found me.’
‘I certainly did. Winny told me where to find you.’ She holds out a hot dog dripping with mustard. ‘She sent you this. She’s doin’ a grand job over there on the barbecue.’