There was also the matter of Mrs. Erskine’s French: My mother could read and speak it but had nothing of her friend’s intolerable fluency. Nor could my mother compete with her special status as the only English and Protestant girl of her generation to have attended French and Catholic schools. She had spent ten years with the Ursulines in Quebec City (languages took longer to learn in those days, when you were obliged to start by memorizing all the verbs) and had emerged with the chic little Ursuline lisp.
“Tell me again,” my entranced mother would ask. “How do you say ‘squab stuffed with sage dressing’?”
“Charlotte, I’ve told you and told you. ‘Pouthin farthi au thauge.’”
“Thankth,” said my mother. Such was the humor of that period.
For a long time I would turn over like samples of dress material the reasons why I was sent off to a school where by all the rules of the world we lived in I did not belong. A sample that nearly matches is my mother’s desire to tease Mrs. Erskine, perhaps to overtake her through me: If she had been unique in her generation, then I would be in mine. Unlikely as it sounds today, I believe that I was. At least I have never met another, just as no French-Canadian woman of my period can recall having sat in a classroom with any other English-speaking Protestant disguised in convent uniform. Mrs. Erskine, rising to the tease, warned that convents had gone downhill since the war and that the appalling French I spoke would be a handicap in Venice, London, Paris, Rome; if the Ursuline French of Quebec City was the best in the world after Tours, Montreal French was just barely a language.
How could my mother, so quick and sharp usually, have been drawn in by this? For a day or two my parents actually weighed the advantages of sending their very young daughter miles away, for no good reason. Why not even to France? “You know perfectly well why not. Because we can’t afford it. Not that or anything like it.”
Leaning forward in her chair as if words alone could not convince her listener, more like my mother than herself at this moment, Mrs. Erskine with her fingertips to her cheek, the other hand held palm outward, cried, “Ah, Angus, don’t ask me for my life’s story now!” This to my father, who barely knew other people had lives.
My father made this mysterious answer: “Yes, Frances, I do see what you mean, but I have a family, and once you’ve got children you’re never quite so free.”
There was only one child, of course, and not often there, but in my parents’ minds and by some miracle of fertility they had produced a whole tribe. At any second this tribe might rampage through the house, scribbling on the wallpaper, tearing up books, scratching gramophone records with a stolen diamond brooch. They dreaded mischief so much that I can only suppose them to have been quite disgraceful children.
“What’s Linnet up to? She’s awfully quiet.”
“Sounds suspicious. Better go and look.”
I would be found reading or painting or “building,” which meant the elaboration of a foreign city called Marigold that spread and spread until it took up a third of my room and had to be cleared away when my back was turned, upon which, as relentless as a colony of beavers, I would start building again. To a visitor Marigold was a slum of empty boxes, serving trays, bottles, silver paper, overturned chairs, but these were streets and houses, churches and convents, restaurants and railway stations. The citizens of Marigold were cut out of magazines: Gloria Swanson was the Mother Superior, Herbert Hoover a convent gardener. Entirely villainous, they did their plotting and planning in an empty cigar box.
Whatever I was doing, I would be told to do something else immediately: I think they had both been brought up that way. “Go out and play in the snow” was a frequent interruption. Parents in bitter climates have a fixed idea about driving children out to be frozen. There was one sunken hour on January afternoons, just before the street lamps were lighted, that was the gray of true wretchedness, as if one’s heart and stomach had turned into the same dull, cottony stuff as the sky; it was attached to a feeling of loss, of helpless sadness, unknown to children in other latitudes.
I was home weekends but by no means every weekend. Friday night was given to spoiling and rejoicing, but on Saturday I would hear, “When does she go back?”
“Not till tomorrow night.”
Ruby, the homesick offshore import, sometimes sat in my room, just for company. She turned the radiator on so that you saw a wisp of steam from the overflow tap. A wicker basket of mending was on her lap; she wiped her eyes on my father’s socks. I was not allowed to say to anyone “Go away,” or anything like it. I heard her sniffles, her low, muttered grievances. Then she emerged from her impenetrable cloud of Newfoundland gloom to take an interest in the life of Marigold. She did not get down on the floor or in the way, but from her chair suggested some pretty good plots. Ruby was the inspirer of “The Insane Stepmother,” “The Rich, Selfish Cousins,” “The Death from Croup of Baby Sister” (“Is her face blue yet?” “No; in a minute”), and “The Broken Engagement,” with its cast of three — rejected maiden, fickle lover, and chaperon. Paper dolls did the acting, the voices were ours. Ruby played the cast-off fiancée from the heart: “Don’t chew men ever know what chew want?” Chaperon was a fine bossy part: “That’s enough, now. Sit down; I said, down.”
My parents said, “What does she see in Ruby?” They were cross and jealous. The jealousness was real. They did not drop their voices to say “When does she go back?” but were alert to signs of disaffection, and offended because I did not crave their company every minute. Once, when Mrs. Erskine, a bit of a fool probably, asked, “Who do you love best, your father or your mother?” and I apparently (I have no memory of it) answered, “Oh, I’m not really dying about anybody,” it was recalled to me for a long time, as if I had set fire to the curtains or spat on the Union Jack.
“Think of your unfortunate parents,” Dr. Chauchard had said in the sort of language that had no meaning to me, though I am sure it was authentic to him.
When he died and I read his obituary, I saw there had been still another voice. I was twenty and had not seen him since the age of nine. The Doctor and the red-covered books had been lost even before that, when during a major move from Montreal to a house in the country a number of things that belonged to me and that my parents were tired of seeing disappeared.