Work Text:
May, 1936
Shirley knew something was wrong as soon as the telephone rang. This was how he told it afterwards. It was a long distance ring, and it wasn't Mother Susan's night to telephone, ergo, something was wrong. The wringing phone (not Mother Susan's usual night) occasioned the usual confusion of 'I'll get that' from himself, Mara and Mharie, but in the end Shirley was nearest, and Mara's bookmark too elusive. So, Shirley got the 'phone.
'Dad,' he had said, because that was who it was placing the call, and because that was his way. Succinct and to the point. Shirley had been made that way, even before the war, though the war amplified it. His salutation (succinct and to the point) brought his children flocking to his feet, leaping and diving for the mouthpiece.
'All right?' Shirley said next, because so far he could only hear the pips rattling off the seconds in the background and his children clamouring in the foreground. He wondered, for a moment, if the line had crossed or cut out, but then Dad started again, and he sounded so old, so incredibly tired. Shirley never did retain the exact substance of what Dad said. He was aware of the ominous beginning, So terribly sorry, because that was an atypical lead. It made his stomach plummet and his heart tighten. He wrapped his hand around the earpiece to preclude anyone else hearing. So that the children wouldn't hear. Susan Baker…know she was important to you.
Didn't that just fall short of the mark? Not Dad's fault, of course. There was no other, better way to say it. Anyway, it was all wrong, because Mother Susan couldn't be dead. Wasn't supposed to be. Was this, Shirley wondered, the way the twins had felt, when Dad had arrived on the Swallowgate doorstep all those years ago talking of Courcellette and Walter? But no, it was an entirely different colour of grief. It always was.
He was vaguely aware of the pips in the background, chattering and clattering. More immediately of the sudden stillness infecting his house; The way Mharie mutely curtailed the bridge four by the window, Iain grabbed at a leaping Isobel and hugged her to him. Faith with her head tilted in inquiry, and then Mara's hand at his shoulder, the press of her fingers at his neck, all right?
He had to say something. People were supposed to say something, confronted with a death. Only Mother Susan couldn't be dead. Was not supposed to be. Shirley was supposed to know. Dog Monday, for God's sake, had known when Walter died, and Monday was canine, and Walter not even his favourite. He had to say something.
Shirley said, 'She'll have been glad to see the Silver Jubilee, I guess.'
A nonsensical answer, but the best he could muster. Mharie had left the bridge quartet and was even now disappearing with an armful of young niece up the stairs. How had he and Mara managed before she arrived, this young McNeilly sister with her ambitions and her sticktuitiveness? Mara was arguing wsotto voce with Iain, now tugging quizzically at Shirley's elbow. She said something not English that Shirley didn't catch but carried the point. He reckoned it ran the gamut from Go with your aunt to do as you're told. Wonderful language, Gaelic. You could be highly creative with precious few words. Shirley wouldn't like to boast he could speak it, but that much he had learned over the years.
Dad was still talking, something about being sorry. It occurred dimly to Shirley that he ought to be listening.
'No,' he said, 'no, it's not your fault. It was…peaceful?'
'Like falling asleep,' said Dad.
'Right,' said Shirley, not quite believing it. 'That's…that's good.' Out of the corner of his eye he could see Geordie corralling the other children outside. His wife, Judith had shadowed Mara into the kitchen. The pips on the line clattered worse than ever; They were almost out of time. (They were already out of time because Mother Susan was dead.)
'Tell us when the funeral is,' said Shirley, because he had to stop Dad's compulsive apologising. Dad had been there; He had nothing to apologise for. Shirley had been challenging Teddy Lovall to chess and listening to the younger man wax rhapsodic about Kitty's latest column. Dad said they hadn't finalised anything
'No,' said Shirley. 'No, of course. Well, when you have. Tell us and we'll come down. All of us.' And that was that. The usual goodbyes, and Shirley cradled the 'phone.
He stood for a moment in the phone nook, not quite believing. Mother Susan was dead, a thing which was supposed to have been impossible. Shirley could not remember a time she had not been there. Could not remember a time in which he had not brought her his private hurts and triumphs for consideration; Teacher gave me a book prize for moving up a reader, won't Mum be pleased, Susan? They sent me home but only because I wouldn't kiss Dotty Harmer at Green Gravel, Susan. Isn't that terribly unfair? And later, They won't miss me at the Harbour Light, Susan. Doesn't the garden need weeding, or something? But of course Susan had had none of it. How else, she'd insisted, was she going to hear about it afterwards? Vain Shirley's protestations that little Rilla was going to the dance; Susan had harrumphed and said she wanted to believe two words together and not indulge in other people's fancies, adding that anyway Little Rilla was far too young to be going dancing and that Susan would tie to, so that had been the end of that. Then it had been Goodbye, Mother Susan, and that was all right because it hadn't really been goodbye. Later still, much later, with the sting of the Halifax wind still at his neck and he and the girls stranded at Anchorage house, home to the clan McNeilly, I don't think you'll always agree – but I do think you'll like her, Susan. And hadn't he been right? Shirley almost laughed, but then it came rushing back that Mother Susan was dead, that there would never be moments like that between them again. His eyes prickled hotly, traitorously, instead.
He was recalled by the rattle of the Mull pottery on its tray, the smell of strong, hot tea and grief permeating the room. Jem was saying something – to him?
'Susan?' he seemed to say and Shirley nodded.
An inrush of apology from Faith, Geordie, Mhaire descending the stairs sans the armful of neice. Then there was Mara's hand at his elbow, deceptively small, but steadying, the lilt and murmur of her voice, 'Here a chuisle,' 'as she installed him in one of the chairs, and just for a moment the world came back into focus. Shirley ought to tell them about Dad. What he had said. How there weren't any arrangements yet. The words didn't come. They lodged painfully in his throat. He felt the press and release of a hand on his shoulder as Mara let him go in favour of crossing the room to the window. It gave its usual rattle, and then the cool of the evening seeped in, pine-scented and musky. Shirley had forgotten one did that – or rather, that she did. Had it really been that long since the shadow of death had chased at their heels?
Someone – Judith? – pressed a piece of Mull pottery into Shirley's hands. It was hot, and it stung his fingers. Almost Shirley dropped it. Who knew one could go cold with grief?
It was easier to cross to the window, to lean his head on Mara's shoulder and inhale the cool of the evening, to try and unravel whatever prayer she was winging out onto the wind. Years, and he still hadn't learned enough to understand the children, much less Mara in a fairie mood. No matter. The sentiment was the same. There were crickets under the sill, humming a dirge of their own. Here and there a fox barked weirdly or an owl cried. Mother Susan dead, and still so much else went on.
'Apparently,' said Shirley to the pine-rich evening, or perhaps only to the plaited coil of Mara's hair, 'Cornelia was very upset about it.'
He risked a sip of his cooling tea. It was easier with Mara's hand laced through his; The chill of the breeze had seeped in to her wedding band, and he rubbed a finger against it to ground him. It became suddenly vitally important that Mara's hands not be cold. Shirley set the teacup down on the sill and enfolded them in his.
Jem was saying something else, and Faith, and then in twos and threes the little party dissolved. Somewhere away, as from a great distance, Shirley heard himself apologise for not being much company. There were gentle dissents, and hugs to be pulled in to, 'Keep in touch,' Faith's parting injunction. 'We'll drop round again soon. Or you must come to us, whichever is easiest.'
Shirley thought that was Judith, but would not tie to it.
'And you?' said Mara, later, in the security of their room. 'Cornelia is very upset about it – and you?'
The lamplight flickered low and orange, clouded where various chimney-pieces had smoked over. Susan would never have stood for…But Susan was gone.
'I did not know,' said Shirley, 'how strange the world would be without her in it.'
'It always is, at first,' said Mara from where she sat at the dresser. She half turned and held out the brush she was using to him, equal parts offering and inquiry. It was an old ritual, and Shirley knew the smoothness of the brush even to the grain of the wood. But he couldn't even manage that now. Mara seemed to sense as much because she set it aside wordlessly and when she met him it was with a kiss. Fleeting at first, almost hesitant in its first iteration, and that was strange too, because that was so rarely the key they played to.
'Please,' Shirley said, running a hand through her hair, which was still loose and unplaited. 'Chase some of the strangeness away?'
'Always,' said Mara.
And just like that, surety revved to life. She kissed him again and it was in the press of her lips, there too, in her fingers where they dug crescents into his back. They prickled, said always and forever as surely as the heat of her kiss said I am here and I love you and I will walk with you. In this. In all things.
'Come here,' Mara said and they half waltzed to the bed with its Steps to the Altar quilt. Shirley indistinctly thought that however strange the world was, there was a world in this too, and this world was safe, secure. He felt it in the heat of her kiss, the smell of her perfume, the coolness of her hands, the warmth of her skin as his own hands negotiated it from clavicle to jaw to the shell of her ear.
'Come here,' said Mara again, 'come home.' And so he did.
Shirley was detailing funeral arrangements to the others when Uncle Jo called. These came from Dad who had finally rung up with them. Fox Corner was atypically quiet for the afternoon, notwithstanding the usual confusion of tea and baking smells. Teddy had got Isobel in hand and had spent the afternoon consoling her with fragmented lullabies and half-remembered hand games. He stuttered his way firs through Miss Mary Mack and then through NMy Mother Told Me while the remaining gremlins were divided between a subdued bout of Circus and a half-hearted attempt at Chinese Checkers. Innocent, resident cat, was weaving around plates of unguarded confectionery with abandon, white tail regally aloft.
Into this came Uncle Jo, looking, if not exactly dishevelled, then not exactly shevelled either. Mara got to him first, handing off what must surely be the last piece of the Mull pottery. Shirley watched from his inglenook as Uncle Jo took it and proceeded to weave through the usual detritus of feline, limbs and furniture to join him. Mechanically, Shirley reached for and offered a platter of lemon loaf. He had forgotten who baked it. Teddy possibly, or Judith. But it could just as easily have been Rachel and Helen, newly thirteen and initiates now into that vast army of Women Who Bake in Crisis. It hadn't been Mara; Shirley knew that much. That he would tie to. He watched as Jo took a slice, halved it and offered him a portion.
'How are you?' said Shirley, accepting his portion of loaf. 'Bearing up I mean. Without Aunt Phil and Martyrs?' It was easier to say than the other thing, namely that Susan Baker was impossibly dead.
'I haven't decided yet,' said Uncle Jo, considering a piece of his lemon loaf thoughtfully. 'Ellie and the girls are coming to sort Phil's things in the summer, you know, and I'm not at all sure I want them to. Oh,' with a shrug, 'they ought to go somewhere – someone needs them more than I do, I'm sure. But, you know, I'm not sure it ever goes away. I think the best anyone can do is learn to live around it. Sorry,' elevating another piece of loaf, 'that probably wasn't the answer you were after.'
Shirley mustered a smile for him. He said again, because he could not seem to get past this, 'I did not know how strange the world would be without her.'
Uncle Jo nodded. Shirley risked a piece of lemon loaf. It was tart and well-zested, some might say overley zested, though Shirley would not tie to that. Even so, Shirley's mouth puckered, be the cake ever so light. Definitely a Helen and Rachel project, then. Ah well, at least no one had added liniment.
'We never do, I think,' said Uncle Jo. 'Anticipate the strangeness. It's strange enough to put the world in someone else's hands. We don't calculate for what it looks like – feels like – without them.'
'The perils of trusting to earth over Christ?' asked Shirley, wryly.
'The peril of loving,' amended Uncle Jo and squeezed Shirley's hand. 'And the risk we take doing it. And you and Mara wonder where Iain gets that metaphysical streak.'
That almost got a laugh, a sharp, hollow thing that collided with Shirley's soft pallet and stuck there. So did the lemon loaf, and for some seconds thereafter he could only choke.
'Iain,' he said, recovering 'gets to take it literally. They all do.' He inclined his head in the direction of the assembled tableau, and amended, 'Well, all of mine, anyway. That isn't – we don't do that, do we?'
In the ensuing silence, Shirley thought he'd asked a question too far. Perhaps grief paired badly with nuances of theology. Disparate pieces of Mull pottery chattered across the room, Mara and Judith ferrying it back and forth between kitchen and sitting room. Someone – Christopher? – scored a victory in Chinese Checkers to the collective exasperation of assorted gremlins. Teddy coaxed Isobel into the ongoing game of Circus.
'We trust to Christ,' said Jo, finally. 'And we go on loving, or daring to, because that is the way to the Easter Resurrection. I think.' He shrugged again, and said, sheepishly to the depleted contents of his teacup, 'The cross upon Golgotha thou lookest to in vain/ unless within thyself it be put up again. We do our best to choose Heaven over Earth, because that is the way to eternal life – the thing your Susan understood so well. She was always doing it – from running up the flagpole when she thought your family needed bolstering, in the endless baking and the knitted socks for the war…she wept over Walter and Joy with your parents, and she was heart-glad at Ingleside's weddings. Her weddings, I think she felt they were. I still think of her at yours, ' said Jo, here pausing to offer up the last of his lemon loaf to Shirley, who declined it with a gesture.
'She was horrified at least six ways from Sunday,' said Shirley, even as he smiled at the memory. Impossible not to, thinking of Mother Susan scandalised by God Tuesday and the elaborate altar frontal at St. Margaret's, and of the way she spent half the service all but looking through her fingers.
'She was happy' amended Uncle Jo, 'and desperate to tell anyone who would listen. Without, of course,' with a smile of his own, 'letting on that the Episcopalians had the honours of the service.'
Jo took one of Shirley's brown hands in his and pressed it, saying in that apologetic way that Shirley imagined got regular airing during prison visits, 'You never wanted a sermon. Forgive me. But if you ever do – or even if you just want a place to sit with it all, you know where to find me.'
Then he was gone, with more apologies all round, citing looming prison visits and assorted parochial mundanities. Life, as ever, persisted in going on.
Shirley had not meant to take Uncle Jo up on the offer. Not on the sermon or the sympathy – and yet, confronted with the austere exterior of Hope Park and Martyrs, it was suddenly too much to be again the grieving relative to the assembled masses. He caught Jem at the gate, made his apologies and promised Faith they would, as ever, keep the usual Sunday dinner appointment, could she tell Teddy?
Jo was on the doorstep when Shirley arrived, so naturally this necessitated a whole other round of apologies, from Shirley this time. Shirley got the distinct impression - he might even have tied to it - as he was taken in hand and led through the sitting room with its clutter of domineering, old-world furniture, that he wasn't really being listened to. They didn't stay in the sitting room either. Jo soldiered stubbornly on to the kitchen, so that Shirley was forced to follow him if he wanted to talk. He hadn't decided if he did want this, but he followed anyway.
'I had half an idea,' said Jo, from where he was rattling around in the cathedral-ceiling affair that was the Martyrs' kitchen, 'you'd be on your way to Sacred Heart with yours.'
'Have I ever,' said Shirley, watching in mesmerized perplexity as a teapot manifested followed by chipped piece of china after sill more chipped piece of china, 'defected there?' He found he was smiling in spite of himself.
'I seem to recall that in the affair of Isobel's baptism...' began Jo reminiscently, but Shirley curtailed him.
'Out of my hands,' he said. 'Iain got your Presbyterian dousing, remember?'
'Vividly. Your Susan was delighted about it.'
'Wasn't she just?' said Shirley.
He forbore to ask when in the course of Presbyterian service tea came into effect. He began hunting about in drawers for a strainer; The thought they would need one had evidently not occurred to Uncle Jo. Still, he must have looked suitably baffled, because Uncle Jo said, unbidden, 'People talk more with something warm to sip at. Phil taught me that. Or did you want that sermon after all?'
'I don't know,' said Shirley. 'Neither. Both. The understanding, I think.'
The kettle protested such wishy-washy unPresbyterian assertions. Jo, extracting it from its perch, said, 'Yes, of course.'
They sat down by mutual agreement at the work-worn kitchen table, the sitting room now long-forgotten. It was a relief that Uncle Jo did not ask, as surely Rev Hannigan of Hope Park and Martyrs' would have, what Shirley meant. It wasn't that the others didn't understand, in their way. Because of course they had; They had all looked Death in the eye over someone or something. Mara had done it any number of times as the war was wrapping up, God knew. It wasn't even that they all had touchstones to turn to – windows to open and prayers to say – because if it came to the point, Shirley had those, too. But they were not all of them now, undone. The world had not spun spectacularly off-axis, which was good, because otherwise Shirley thought the mutual planet of Fox Corner and Larkrise would have ceased to function. Someone, Shirley reasoned, had to keep their little fiefdom running, and it couldn't all be Judith and Geordie Carlisle. They had their own mundanities to see to.
Isobel was perhaps the closest of anyone else to being swallowed whole by the sting of death, and she was still entirely too little to walk that narrow edge of grief with anyone as a companion. Nor should she have to. It was Shirley's job, come to that, to pull her back from it, make everything right. And how, wondered Shirley, as Jo poured out a haphazard tea – strainer woefully neglected – could he possibly begin to do that when he was himself on the verge of being devoured? Jo asked none of this, nor even prodded at it. The tea smelled of broken leaves and the metal of the tin it had come from. Shirley risked a sip and found it tasted that way too, almost like industrial grade coffee. It set his teeth on edge, but it seemed a better alternative to the stifling stillness that had been chasing at his heels since the news broke.
And it did make it easier to talk. Uncle Jo grimaced comedicly over the taste, but then said it was still better than what Phil could conjure, and Shirley found he remembered. Could almost taste the over-tannined bite of a pot of Aunt Phil's imperfectly brewed tea. Shirley lost track of how long they talked for and what of. Aunt Phil was some of it, and Susan, more, and so was God, though not the usual Sunday School verse stuff about the valley of the shadow of death, or even about God wiping away all tears, and the coming of the kingdom. There was only Uncle Jo with his quiet conviction and a heartfelt prayer, that somehow culminated in the pair of them at the kitchen sink, rinsing the teacups.
At the door, Shirley hesitated and said, 'Aunt Phil's things…would it help if I came along? We could make an afternoon of it, sometime.'
Uncle Jo folded Shirley's hands in his and squeezed them. 'It makes the girls feel useful,' he said. 'I think they need to do it.'
'And you?' said Shirley.
'Oh,' said Uncle Jo, disarmingly, 'I'll do something else. Maybe give you tea another Sunday hence.'
It was a good promise to end on. 'I'd like that,' said Shirley, and they clasped hands over it. Then he smiled - a really, properly smile - and said for the ghost of what had been, 'and that you may tie to.'