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'All right?' This from Teddy Lovall, resident police detective and lodger of Mandy's Uncle Jem from where he sat by the door. He said it as Mandy bedded down the little girls, colloquial language for her baby sisters. Hattie had got her small hands stuck in Mandy's hair, and Beatrice was tangled around her twin's neck. Mandy spared him half a smile and went on with the business of extricating the tangle of small, distraught limbs from her person.
She missed Miri horribly. But Miri was away away in Muskoka with Miss Janey, and since the downstairs parlour of the Manse, Glen St Mary, after a funeral, was no place for young children, here was Mandy with her baby sisters, playing pretend that Susan Baker had not lately died and all was in fact, absolutely fine. She thought Miri would have done it better. Possibly so did the little girls, because they absolutely would not disengage from Mandy. The constant pull of her hair was getting painful.
'Here,' said Teddy. He came and deftly disengaged Hattie's stout little fingers from Mandy's hair. It was an incalculable relief. Her temples throbbed oblique gratitude.
'Sorry,' he said, as he desisted. 'Idiotic question. Kitty's journalistic habit is catching. Of course nothing's all right.'
Mandy elected to give him the rest of her smile and shook her head. 'It's all anyone can say at the moment, isn't it?' she asked. She found another, vacant chair and joined him in vigil over the amassed young people of the tribe of Blythe. There really was an army of them. The room was heavy with the smell of sleep, of baby-down and talc, and the little inconsequential murmurs of its overtired occupants.
'Something like that,' said Teddy.
Mandy nodded. She said, 'Did you know her well? Susan Baker?'
She thought that got her a smile from Teddy in kind. 'Not really,' he said. 'Never could get terribly close, to tell you the truth. She made Mara look positively placid about sharing a kitchen.'
That got a laugh from Mandy, a real, honest-to-goodness laugh, all fluted and silvered. It threatened to wake the little girls, and she couldn't have that, so she buried her face in her elbow and subsided.
'Me neither,' she said. 'Miri and I. We weren't – I mean we don't – well, you probably have been more about here than we have. We don't come by the island so much.'
Beside her Teddy Lovall shrugged. 'Oh,' he said easily, 'I dunno. I must spend half my furloughs with the little boys, or trying to, then rethinking it and trekking out here. My particular trick is to arrive halfway through the holiday, usually when they're all sitting down for a meal or something.'
That got another laugh from between Mandy's fingers, but since she didn't understand about the little boys, she raised both eyes in inquiry.
Obligingly, Teddy said, 'Brothers. Four of them. Probably shouldn't call them little any more – they'd have my head on a platter if they heard.'
Mandy laughed again; it felt good to laugh after so much loneliness. She missed Miri like a drowning man must miss breathing, the way her tame, wide-eyed fawn of last winter had missed security. And then this new thing, the absence of Susan Baker from the world. Mandy hadn't known her, not really, but Mums had, and in her way had loved her, so Mandy was sorry for her without really knowing what she was sorry over, and as ever, all the attendant pieces of church, family gathering and the island seemed terribly, unreasonably complicated. She closed her eyes and for a moment inhaled the smell of the talc and assorted infantine creams, the lavender under the pillows; listened to the sound of so many snuffling small persons. It was reassuring as a heartbeat.
'You know what it's like, then?' said Mandy, seizing on this bit about brothers. She thought they couldn't be all that much different from sisters…even if Teddy had been the one to do the leaving. She was realising too that she did not particularly know Teddy Lovall well, and felt deeply that now more than ever, with Susan Baker lately buried, she must correct this.
'Economics conundrum,' said Teddy, apparently reading her mind. 'Among other things. I wasn't exactly keeping them in food and clothes, home with Mum.'
Oh, thought Mandy. Well. That's all right then. 'Still miss them like anything,' said Teddy, which really did make it all right, Mandy decided, 'if I stop to think too hard about it.'
'But you do go back,' said Mandy. This seemed highly pertinent. She was thinking of Miri and her dizzying, giddy letters from Muskoka. Such wild, ebullient things full of the flush of first love, and adventure and what sounded hideously, traitorously, like home, as if Miri could ever be home where Mandy was not. She was thinking that she had overheard the grandfathers lamenting that perhaps Miri would not come home after all. Hattie twitched in her sleep. Little Baby Bea kicked outward, restless. Teddy made a noncommittal noise.
'It doesn't fit,' said Teddy. 'I'm not sure it ever did, but when I'm back with Mum it definitely doesn't fit, not mum and her fussing, or the man playing father to them all now. None of it feels right, and I can't stay. Don't stay. Because I love those boys and they don't want me at odds with their people, and I don't much fancy actually doing anyone harm, so…I don't stay. Which is possibly worse.'
Mandy hadn't thought about that. She had only thought of the hole in her heart where Miri had gone, and how even Aunt Faith with her medical expertise couldn't have sewn it shut again. She had not thought of how wrenching it would be to meet and part again and again and again in a maelstrom of indecision on Miri's side, confusion on hers and…would the little girls even be all that fussed? Or would they mind only that Mandy minded, in the way Mandy now minded that Susan Baker was dead not so much because Susan Baker was dead, although that was sad, but because it had made Mums sad? She looked at the little girls asleep on the bed, Beatrice with her thumb in her mouth, Hattie with her fingers now fisted around Beatrice's hair, and wondered if it was the same with Miri. If Miri would know them – and they her – if she were suddenly to come back through the door tomorrow. If Miri would stay, if she did.
'Why policing?' Mandy asked, instead. It seemed a safer question.
'Because the inspector plucked me off of the pavement and stuck me in a constable's desk, didn't he?' said Teddy, and grinned at her, all white teeth and laughing eyes. He really was strikingly like Uncle Jem, when Mandy got down to it. Funny to think that in the strict names-in-a-bible sense they weren't really, properly even a paper family. Which only went to show it was even more complicated than Mandy had supposed it.
'Terribly irregular,' of course,' said Teddy companionably. 'But there was a war on, you know? And he was short-handed, and I had brothers, so…we wrangled it.'
Mandy nodded. She did know; Miri was a first-rate wrangler of things. Always had been. The trip to Muskoka with the Janeys was only the most recently wrangled situation. She had wrangled Mandy in to all sorts of adventures before that. Beside her, Teddy was looking at the cuddle of children on the bed. Beatrice with her glossy brown hair, so like Mums and Miri, and little Hattie all russet curls and freckled complexion, more Mandy's double in looks than Miri had ever been. It wasn't the same. Isobel began to cry, disconsolate in her sleep. Teddy crossed the room and deftly scooped her out of the confusion of limbs and overlapping quilts. Then he sat and rocked with her in his wicker chair, one large, tanned hand smoothing her hair.
'S'all right, Cricket,' he said companionably, conversationally, to Isobel's hair. 'We'll just go back to sleep, yeah? No need to pull your Mama away – she's doing good work down there, important.' Isobel hiccoughed, and Teddy went on smoothing her hair, now and then humming something that sounded entirely too Scottish to be his musical inheritance from mother and brothers. It made Mandy think of New Brunswick, of the piper calling in the sunset, and of long ago visits with smiling Aunt Poppy. Of the squeal of the violin, the spring in the floor and the sweet smell of tablet all co-mingling at church-hall dance affairs. It made her think with a pang of how she and Miri had whirled like dervishes around the hall as the evening drew to a close, arms entwined, feet kicking, the floor bouncing under their leather-shod shoes. Teddy went on humming, and Mandy went on watching, feeling intrusive in her spectator capacity. But then Isobel subsided to snuffling, and Teddy recrossed the room to burrow her back down among the surplus quilts and cousins.
'Love those girls for Miri, yeah?' said Teddy as he settled Uncle Shirley's girl. Needlessly, Mandy thought, but he seemed so earnest about it that she forbore to comment. She must have looked it though, because he shrugged – another Uncle Jemism – and said, 'Not that you don't, but Miri, well she's away. I know with the little boys…I'd like to think there's someone doing the thing I haven't done, I guess I mean. It's not the same, when you're away.'
'Oh,' said Mandy, and reached for his hands. 'I do. I mean, I will. They're mine more than anyone's. If I didn't have them…'
'But you do,' said Teddy. 'You do. And they have you. There's an awful lot to be said for that.'
Mandy nodded. She rubbed circles into a sleeping Bea's back and thought that perhaps, with the wold all akimbo as it was, there was much, much more than even Teddy supposed to be said for loving the people close to you. It might even, on the wintry days of the soul, be enough to love them, and to know they loved you. So she smiled at Teddy again in the Manse's unassuming upstairs bedroom, and told him thanks, and meant it.