Work Text:
Summer, 1939
Another year, another summer. Another reminder they were none of them any younger, mused Anne Blythe and rubbed at her ankle, which never had mended quite right after last summer's break. It was her bad one of course, had had to be. Little Miss Abby had been so frightened by it, that long-ago afternoon, but afterwards had proclaimed as she brought Anne her breakfast tea, 'I'm going to be a nurse someday, Granny. Not a doctor, like Grandad, because we have lots of those, but a nurse like Alice Caldicote, because I think maybe they're more important.'
She said it with all the wisdom of so nearly thirteen that she called herself that, and Anne had smiled at her over the tea, opened Jo Blake's gift of Out of the Silent Planet to the latest chapter and they had read it together.
Jo was another reminder, Anne thought now, staring into sunny middle distance. If she turned her head she could probably still find Out of the Silent Planet in pride of place on the bookshelf, bequeathed to her forever by little Sam Blake. It was there, Anne knew, flanked by all her best-beloved books; Nan's Lord Harrington mysteries, the Tennyson Gilbert had gifted her for some long-gone anniversary, the well-intentioned and prosy Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner from Marilla, who had thought the combination of Calvinism and high drama would appeal, or at least be suitable. It hadn't but the giver had, so Anne cherished it still.
Anne did not turn her head. She stared steadily on into sunny middle distance and thought it was perhaps better like this, Jo now linked in perpetuity to Phil, also gone these long years. Jo, Phil, Susan, and others too, some lingering hideous, gradual deaths, others dropping into the night as of no note.
Cornelia had gone like that, Anne remembered, not that you'd have known it from the funeral Mary had organised, but she had. There one minute, sitting regally in the parlour of the Young Arnold House, and Naomi Blake as had been offering them both tea. And then next thing anyone knew the sun had come up on a Cornelia-free world, and that was wrong, Anne thought now, as she had then, because Cornelia should have gone with an argument. She had loved them so.
Jo, Phil, Cornelia…but Stella was still in B.C., and Katherine Brooke was back in the country, had telephoned the other day to grumble about how her house was too quiet with the dogs still in quarantine.
'The inhumanity of it!' she had said down the line, none of the heat directed at Anne, not really. 'They can't possibly realise how hard on them it must be, really they can't.'
'Get a cat,' said Anne, 'for the interim.'
A snort. Then, 'Too many moods.'
'Not the Silver Bush cats,' said Anne. 'I'll get you one.'
Katherine, serene and queenly in her authoritative, 'A puppy, Miss Shirley, was more than enough.'
'But you loved it, really,' said Anne, and Katherine had conceded.
Di, dear Di, said Avonlea was the same, and Di was, but Avonlea was not. It was All change, as the conductors were wont to say in England that year Anne and Gilbert had toured Europe. The minister, said Diana, had turned over again, the town hall needed repainting badly, 'And the grandchildren, Anne!' and Anne could hear the exclamation mark, just like that, the way Diana said it, telephone line notwithstanding, 'you wouldn't believe how they've grown!'
Anne could, and did, mostly because she was incredulous at the size of some of her own grandchildren, but refrained from arguing the point.
Anne's reverie, now rapidly heading towards maudlin, was fractured by the squeal of tire treads on the gravel. She blinked into the sunny afternoon, just able to discern baby Rilla and family arriving.
Anne blinked again, caught Gog's eye and shook her head. That wouldn't do. Baby Rilla had a baby on her arm, after all – yet more proof, if Anne wanted it that time marched inexorably on. She felt abstractedly for the gnarled wood of her cane, now an integral part of life, and gripping it, stood gingerly upright, and began to meander unevenly towards the veranda. Though she said it herself the birchwood went beautifully with her hair, mercifully gone to silver.
The girls were out there in a tangle, Nan and Mara Blythe on the steps, Faith leaning careless against the railing, Di relaxed and dreaming on the swing. As Anne paused for breath, leaning against the screen door, someone slithered graceful and silent out of a nearby tree.
One of the girls said, 'What on earth is Iain doing?' so that confirmed the identity of the tree-sprite anyway.
'Company manners, I shouldn't wonder,' said Mara Blythe, not really looking to her child. 'Thinks he should tell the cousins hello, I expect.'
'Iain,' said Di, incredulous, 'has company manners?'
'Ah, they're like milk,' said Faith. 'They spoil if they get too much sun.'
Gentle laughter. Anne eased the screen door open. It creaked in spite of her efforts; Gilbert or perhaps Shirley would have to see to the hinges. Mara said, 'I'm nicking that for later.'
'By all means,' said Faith. She waved lazily at an approaching Rilla and baby. Nan and Mara got to their feet to give Ingleside's spider use of the steps as something other than a creative alternative to chairs. But it was no good; Gilbert had oft remarked how tightly knit were the girls who pinned hopes as had been, back in Swallowgate days. And that, Anne thought, watching them grouping and regrouping now, had not really abated. Thousands might try, but none had ever penetrated that closeness. Well, university and a war lived through might well do that to people, Anne supposed. Rilla passed through them as fish did water, and that was that.
'Darling,' said Anne, extending both arms to Rilla. 'Lissy-Lou.' She dropped a kiss on the baby's head.
'No Jims?' she asked, easing Lissy from Rilla's arms and simultaneously pulling her daughter into a hug.
'Work,' said Rilla. She sounded tired, Anne thought, and looked it in a way that bespoke more than the multiple train and boat exchanges of the Toronto-Island trip. There was something else there.
'Something about a mechanical mishap that…well he did tell me but I didn't nearly get the gist. No Persis, either. Also work. Sounded very exotic. Africa, maybe, or Asia. I wasn't exactly paying attention because I was packing the boys' things and talking to Madrun at the same time. No Dad?'
'Assisting with a Crawford cattle accident,' said Anne. 'Mark Crawford, obviously, not the cattle. Bruce was summoned over-harbour and Alice had to supervise the surgery, so…'Anne shrugged, elegantly.
'So much for retirement, hm?' Rilla said and smiled.
'Inevitable, really,' said Anne.
They moved together into the house, Lissy still on Anne's arm, Rilla holding the door wide for grandmother and infant to pass through behind her. It took fractionally longer than normal because Anne lingered to take in the picture the resettled girls who pinned hopes made. Yes, still impenetrable as ever. Well, excepting perhaps for the Carlisles. And Kitty. And Teddy. Still, a few days and Poppy would join them, and then…
Shirley's Isobel punctured the scene, tearing up the path like a dervish mid-whirl.
'Her hair's going all to red,' said Anne vaguely as the screen door closed with another creaking protestation of overwork.
'Mm,' said Mara, turning towards her, 'I never could be bothered to pull it all out at the root the way Mam did. Witchcraft and all that, you know?'
Anne laughed, but not unkindly. 'Does it work?' she asked, with a thought for the ghost of her former self, shrill cries of Carrots ringing even now in her ears.
'You tell me,' said Mara enigmatically.
Rilla was now fussily hanging her hat and stripping off gloves. Pale green, Anne noticed, to match the ribbon of her straw hat.
'Gertrude sends greetings.'
'Oh yes,' said Anne. 'Well you must send ours back. It's been too long since we've seen those boys of hers.' She lowered herself onto a long, low bench. Gone were the days when she could stand chattering endlessly. Her ankle again. It wouldn't take it.
'Mm,' said Rilla. 'Bet you wouldn't know them now. They've all shot up like sprouts. Oh, and she's dreaming again, too. Gertrude, obviously. Wave after wave of God-knows-what rolling up to Maple St. I couldn't bring myself to ask if it would come to you, too.'
Ridiculously, childishly, Anne was glad. Also gone now were the days of romanticising the Gothic. Like rich chocolate cake, one could have too much of anguish, it turned out.
But that was not their portion, not that summer. The days were long, and fair; Anne idled them away on her window seat, watching her children, grandchildren and family-by-absorption trafficking across her veranda. Sometimes she sat out on the swing, Gilbert's suntanned arm snug around her waist and watched from there. She had always loved people-watching – there was so much scope for the imagination to be mined from it.
She watched babies Hattie and Bea, and thought how like Mandy and Miri at that age they were, chattering in their own private language, oblivious to the incursions of others into their world. She saw how tall and willowy Mandy had grown, how more like herself too, now that necessity had divorced her from Miri. Nothing Anne could quantify, not exactly, except to say that whatever had changed permeated the way Mandy moved, even to the tilted cast of her head and the dimpling of that quiet, serene smile that was all Meredith. Anne watched her and marvelled too at how Mandy gloried in her hair, the sheer red of it astonishing in the summer sunlight. Carrots echoed again, but Anne thought Mandy would have welcomed it, would have acquiesced with a laugh. Where had that come from? Nan's natural pride, perhaps? No wonder, anyway that Mick Challow away in Struan was supposed to worship her. Someone ought to.
Naomi Arnold, Jo's baby, came and went with her children, and Betty Meade as had been too; their triumvirate with Di a comfortable, laughy thing. Now and again Betty broke off to gossip with Rilla, but life was busy and Anne suspected they wrote to one another less than previously. Rilla's hands were full with Lissy and home-schooling Sissy, presumably, while Betty would be preoccupied running a house that had unintentionally become the club house of the Cricket Club – Gilbert-speak for the clique that was Betty's, Di's and Naomi's conglomerate of little ones. Miranda Milgrave came by though, no longer a blue china girl, and she and Rilla swapped war-stories of motherhood. Or else Mary Douglas, ably filling the void Cornelia had left, debating politics with the boys and bossing the life out of anyone who would listen, or trying to.
There was no Persis that summer, nor Leslie, but Leslie had long since given up the cross-country trip, so that was no great shock. Persis though…Anne thought the little Fords missed her spark, thought Anthony was atypically subdued as he ambled after the others towards Rainbow Valley of a moonlight ramble. She thought Anthony sang less, too.
'So like Walter,' Anne said, safe in their bedroom to Gilbert, still thinking of Anthony. It had hurt to recognise the sight of it but it hurt worse to say it aloud. But Gilbert was writing up notes for Bruce Meredith anyway, so probably hadn't noticed. Probably he had no idea who she was talking about. Perhaps hadn't even heard.
He wasn't supposed to say, 'Like Walter right before…' but he did. Gilbert did not finish, did not add, The War but then, he did not have to. The ghost of it pulsed nebulous and dense in their private haven.
'God, Anne-girl, they weren't supposed to know what that was like. Not ever.'
'Maybe they won't,' said Anne, not meaning it. She wished she could, because she could tell looking at him that Gilbert didn't believe it either. She wished Liam Ford would stop reading the papers compulsively and that Helen Blythe was more interested in dancing than what went on at the medical surgery – not because it was what girls should do, but because if Gilbert was right, if her own gut was right, and politics did boil over, well it was harder to conscript dancers to the cause, wasn't it?
But even that was wrong, Anne thought, with a sudden and vivid memory of Rilla in her first grown-up gown, her hair full of the flowers Gertrude had woven into it. It was an easy segue to those English conductors again, calling the stops. End of the line. All change.
Still they gathered on the veranda in the gathering gloaming, moths swirling about the lanterns, and there was poetry, and laughter. Sleek, dark-haired Poppy might say from the shadows, 'Tell us one of your economies, Catkin,' and Nan was off like a horse from the proverbial stable. The grandchildren were off to Rainbow Valley by then, no doubt mining trout and building fires, their laughter drifting sometimes raucous, sometimes harmonically up the hills and across the Glen.
Sometimes Fred Arnold came with Naomi, a reminder of those days when she had boarded at Ingleside and he had courted her there, and on those evenings they regaled the others with talk of Singapore, of Carl, Una and family. Always on those nights John and Rosemary came too, John that bit more present than normal as Fred began, 'It started because Puck thought he could bake a birthday cake…'
Or Naomi, placidly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, which presumably it was, 'Well, anyway, once the buffalo had decided…'
And Teddy Lovall, at chess with Kitty Forster, would nudge her across the table and say, 'Better listen, Kitten. Your landlady might be relieved you only brought home God Wednesday and not a buffalo...'
'Hush, Teddy,' as Kitty quelled him unconcerned. And to Naomi, 'Go on then, the buffalo…'
Or perhaps, as darkness thickened around them, Gilbert would say, 'Read something for us, Anne-girl.'
Anne would riffle through her increasingly burgeoning notebook, pregnant with the wistful, sepia-coloured poems of the season, and they would all draw that bit nearer; Stiffly straight-backed Jerry, dreamy Rosemary Meredith, Nan with her writerly kinship and snub-nosed Naomi Blake as had been with her staunch love of just the facts. Rilla would shift baby Lissy on her arm, or perhaps Ken would reach across to take a turn with the baby, and Kitty Forster would settle about as much as one could reasonably expect, while beside her Teddy Lovall ceased to consider his move in one of their ongoing chess-games and acquiesced with the kind of easy listening Anne supposed made him such a good police officer.
'Nothing soppy, Mums,' little Jem might say with a grin. Faith didn't really need to elbow him for Anne to see he didn't mean it, not really.
Tonight was such a night. The air heavy with the smell of the calceolarias, which were not as they had been under Susan's ministrations, but which Mara and Di between them kept respectable. The ivy did better, rampant on the lawn and winding around the pillars of the veranda, Anne having let it flourish in a benevolent mood. Here and there an owl hooted, or it might have been only Christopher Blythe, shockingly good at mimicking nature for a city-dweller.
'Give us a poem, Anne o'mine,' said Gilbert. The others clamoured lovingly in their agreement, yes dos and other affirmatives mixing amicably with the might-be-owl cries. Duly Anne reached for the ever-present folio and rummaged through it, prevaricating. To find exactly the right poem for this particular moth-heavy, owl-laced evening, now that was a trick. Echoing the thoughts that had dogged her all holiday her eye lighted on All Change, but that wasn't quite right. Nor was Walter's In Golden Days, reverentially pasted onto the verso of the subsequent page. But – ah, here. Gilbert had loved this – had grinned wickedly over it in fact.
'Not a poem,' Anne said, smoothing the relevant page. 'More of a recipe.'
She had called it Recipe for Perfect Happiness in a whimsical turn, but that was an oversimplification. It was the summation of years; the composite findings of so many living epistles and life experiences, and it began, To start, you must find a suitable person...