As ever, many, many thanks for the reviews. I am glad to here Annunciata suits her environment. I did not intentionally set out to outdo Aunt Mary Maria, and the things Annunciata says she just says -I have little to no control over her. That said, some of the things she comes up with here I would not have dared include if I did not have a great and lasting affection for what Annunciata calls 'Romishness.' I am always looking over the edge of High Anglicanism to Rome, and as Barbara Pym said of her church, 'I am very fond of them really.'
'What was all that clattering about before the sun was so much as up?' demanded Annunciata from the kitchen door. It was then six o'clock in the morning and Peter, with Paul and Caro, was pouring over the sundial, compiling words from that tried and tested verse, 'Jesus wept.'
'Oh –did we wake you?' asked Di with more good will than she really felt for the children's aunt.
'I'm afraid I came in with the milk first thing,' said Peter in what was almost an apology.
"Yes,' said Annunciata decidedly, presumably in answer to Di and quite as if Peter had not spoken, 'and it is my opinion that it is neither godly nor dignified, godly nor dignified,' she repeated for emphasis, 'to get up before six o'clock.' She gave no explanation for this piece of doctrine and Peter looked as if he wanted very much to say something about godliness having nothing to do with the running of a dairy farm. He contented himself with peering closely at the cipher before him.
'Did you hear me?' asked Annunciata with insistence.
'Sorry, did I –neither godly nor dignified yes,' said Peter, 'which, incidentally, is a tremendous help to us, look Paul, Caro, we've missed out 'Just'.' This struck Di as the only sensible way of dealing with the formidable woman, no longer scarlet-clad but now deeply black and glowering, who stood in the kitchen doorway.
'Can I offer you tea, Aunt Nancy?' she asked, hovering over the teapot.
'Not here I think. Are the others about?' and Di took it that Annunciata would eat with the children's parents in the house-space and pouring out an extra measure of tea for herself and Peter, joined him and the children at the trestle table.
'Annun –I mean Aunt Nancy doesn't look very happy,' said Paul, and the others concurred.
She was shortly to be made unhappier. It happened over the breakfast-table the other side of the kitchen. Laura Lee was hovering at Di's elbow gingerly drying the dishes when her aunt could be heard to shout, or at least speak as loudly as one could do and still be civil while at one remove from an actual shout, 'what do you mean you weren't thinking of having the babies baptised –of course they must be baptised, do you want them to be heathens?'
Di and Laura Lee fled to the kitchen doorway and hovered there, while Peter went through and unobtrusively leaned against the vast mantle in the part obscured still by shadow.
'Well we never did anything about Caro, you know,' said Mimi fretfully.
'But Mimi, you must have had Caro baptised, I'm sure you did, I sent a gift especially.' Mimi looked uneasy. 'We thought of it –and then we thought –I thought, we would wait until after the war –until Robert was home.'
'Really,' said Annunciata with a disproportionate sense of righteous indignation, 'what must the neighbours think? Not having the child baptised!'
'It's all right, Aunt Nancy,' said Richard, for once not down at the harbour but building an elaborate layout for his toy train to trundle along, and looking to be helpful, 'Colette baptised Caro in the bath the night she didn't die of fever.'
'Then do you mean to say, Mimi, that you let that yattering parrot from nowhere make your daughter a Roman?'
'Colette's from Burnt Church,' said Richard impulsively, a dangerous look growing in his eyes, 'and Nova Scotia before that –she says her family would have stayed there only England wouldn't let them, and that's why she's so good at moving.'
'Good lad,' Peter murmured from the recesses of the mantle, but so softly that it was quite swallowed by Annunciata's exasperated, 'oh never mind about that Richard –a Roman! What can you have been thinking?'
Mimi, at whom this last was directed looked as if she didn't altogether know what to say. Richard was undaunted, not to say more than a little perplexed.
'I thought you were worried about her not being baptised, Aunt Nancy,' he asked innocently, his train and its track abandoned altogether in favour of this vastly more interesting drama.
'Don't you sass me,' she fiercely said, and Richard almost resumed his train-set. To Mimi Annunciata said, slightly more solicitously, 'it's the child's soul I'm worried about, really –Roman! And you let her?'
How she might have continued there was no telling. But she got no further for out of the shadow of the mantle came Peter's lilting sing-song saying, 'you've already dismantled her language and displaced her ancestors, don't you think you might leave Colette's God –and mine if it comes to that –alone? It's all so many ways to the same Heaven when the day draws in at the last, after all, whatever grander people have been heard to say of it.'
There being nothing Annunciata could answer that would not seem wholly unfeeling she turned the conversation over. 'What does Richard mean, 'when Caro didn't die of fever'?' she asked instead, as if the enlightenment to be found in such an answer might somehow make amends for the sin of Caro's accidental near-Catholicism.
'Just what he says,' said Mimi shakily; she had by now pressed steepled hands to the bridge of her nose and was speaking through them, ignoring Annunciata's injunction to do otherwise ('I can't hear you when you cover your mouth like that').
'Caro had a bad bout of croup after…after we started feeding her on percentages –what was in it Peter, do you remember? –' and before he could answer, 'it was serious, I mean we couldn't get her over it…and then Colette thought to sweat it out of her in the bath. I didn't realize she thought to baptise her.'
'Well,' said Peter, 'that's to say, she made the sign of the cross over her and held Caro's head under the water while she said the blessing. I've an idea that counts in a crisis.'
'How did you come to be there, if it was bathtime?' demanded Annunciata, as if this were the worst offence brought to her attention that morning.
'Peter was always there,' said Richard, 'he used to talk to Colette while she got Caro ready for sleep, and 'cause Caro was still little enough to have her bath in the kitchen sink, sometimes –'
'That's quite enough, Richard,' said his mother, bringing her hands away from her face and beginning to recover.
'Yes, it is,' said Annunciata, for once in agreement with Mimi, for they had spent nearly every minute of the past three days in one kind of altercation or another.
'In my day, I'd have had my ears boxed for talking back like that,' said Annunciata reminiscently.
'You know,' said Mr. Harris to his sister, 'I don't remember ever having my ears boxed by mother -or dad.' If Annunciata had heard him, she evinced no sign of having done so.
'I don't suppose you can have Caro taken to church now,' she said, almost as an afterthought, 'though I'm not sure that bathwater and a blessing, done by a woman too, counts for much, certainly not to the Papists.'
'I'm afraid I'm one of your Papists when I've the time to be anything,' said Peter unapologetically, 'and so far as I can make out, it does count. Anyone and anything will do in a crisis, so my Gran always said.'
'Well it doesn't sound like much of a crisis,' said Annunciata with regret, ' nothing more than a bad fit of croup, not even the diphtheritic sort by the sound of it, and that Colette with sense enough to put the child under steam…but I suppose it will have to do. It would look very odd to have her taken to church for it now. I don't suppose I dare ask what you had done about Paul?'
'Oh no,' said Laura Lee from her place beside Di, 'we did take Paul to church. The minister didn't know how to hold a baby and knocked Paul's head on the font. He cried ever so much over it. Mrs. Olive Abbot says that was when the minister was first married and hadn't had the practice of holding his own –' she might have said more but felt Di's hand on her shoulder and heard her murmur, 'tell me all about it in a moment, darling, but not now.'
'Well that's something, anyway,' said Annunciata, 'now, the babies…'
Di marshalled Laura Lee out of the room and gestured at Richard to leave his trains and do likewise. She would keep one ear tuned, she decided, for the sound of a harangue from the house-space and try to get on with her work. Richard came through.
'Gosh,' he said excitedly, 'she did seem mad didn't she? Does it really matter so much as that? Can I have a biscuit?'
'You can and some would say it does,' said Di, extracting two pieces of shortbread from a tin and handing one to each child before her, in spite of its being only nine in the morning and would have been, any other day, much too early for such a treat.
'Where have Caro and Paul got to, can you tell me?'
'Paul's out in the tree over there,' said Richard round a mouthful of biscuit and waving his hand in the direction of the kitchen garden.
'And Caro's having a doll's tea party upstairs,' supplied Laura Lee. 'Ruthie's with her, though of course she isn't having tea. Why does it matter about the church? Isn't it better to let Colette do whatever it is the minister does if she knows how to hold a baby and he doesn't?'
'I don't know,' said Di, who had never much thought about the nuances of baptism.
'Besides, your Aunt Nancy has quite enough ideas that way to be getting on with for one morning. Richard,' she added, seeing the boy about to escape out the kitchen door, 'if you're on the way down to the water, can you run this note to the fishmonger for me?'
Richard made a face but obediently came back to Di, hand outstretched for the note she offered him, though he did not take it.
'Must we have fish?' he asked mournfully, 'it never seems to taste of anything now,' and Di hid a smile.
'You'll have a terribly hard time going away to sea, dear, if you've taken against fish. You do still mean to go off to sea someday?'
'Yes,' said Richard with a return of enthusiasm, though he still hung back from the slip of paper Di held out to him, 'I'm going to go with Captian Kent out East someday and bring back two silk shawls for mummy…and Laura Lee and Caro too, I guess,' he added as an afterthought. Di shook her head and bit her lip to check her laughter.
'But in that case Richard, don't you think you had better at least try and like fish?.'
'I do like it,' Richard protested, 'I used to like it when…' but then he seemed to catch himself and Di gave up trying not to laugh.
'Richard, you give that to Mr. Martin over the fish counter and I promise I will find out from Colette what she used to do to fish for you, how's that?' He brightened at once, and he took the note she offered him before running out the door into the kitchen garden, calling over his shoulder as he ran at the kitchen door, 'will you really? Thanks ever so much,' and then he was gone, tearing through the garden and down the hill, singing loudly but breathlessly like the men who pulled in the fishing nets,
Oh there's lots of fish in Bonavist harbour,
Lots of fish right in around here,
Boys and girls are fishing together,
Forty-five from Ca-arbonear,
Oh, catch a hold this one…
until he was to far away even for the sound of his voice to be carried back to them.
'Well I'll tell you one thing that woman can't fault our Colette for,' said Peter, materializing in the kitchen as he too escaped the house-space and leaning his elbows on the kitchen counter.
'Annunciata can and no doubt will say just as she chooses about colleen's language and family and I don't know what else, but even she can't say Colette isn't lovely to look at.'
Di came and reaching across Peter for the crockery stacked by the sink, began to redistribute it among the kitchen cupboards. She said as she did so, 'yes, she is certainly that.'
'Especially dancing,' said Peter thoughtfully. 'You've never seen Colette dance, have you?'
'No,' said Di, rising up on her toes in an effort to restore the pudding bowls to their rightful place, 'I don't suppose there's been any occasion to. She dances well then?'
'I don't quite know that there's a word for it –for Colette's dancing,' said Peter thoughtfully.
'I must see if Richard can talk her into dancing for us again –he always could before –and then you will see what I mean. It used to be that if I played she would lead Richard and Laura Lee up and down the floor, almost the way they did the evening Robbie and Ruthie were born –though I don't recall her dancing anything near to Dashing White Sergeant as I had them doing, not as a rule anyway. It was always patterns that looked half wild if you didn't know better with her, but for all that she never turned a step wrongly and kept –likely still does keep – better time than anyone for miles around. Richard could go as badly astray as any sheep trying to waltz, and she would have him back at the beginning in time to start again –never would say how she did it either. Only that she learned as a very little girl, the dancing I think she meant, not the counting –that you can do or you can't, so Gran always said and I don't know as she's wrong, certainly Colette could never explain how she managed that.'
'About Caro, Peter,' said Di, managing somehow to interject herself into his talk of dancing and goodness knew what else and coming and joining him at the counter, 'did Colette really try and baptise her?'
Peter laughed. 'Drown her more nearly,' her said good-naturedly, 'never have I seen a child so short for breath as Caro was coming up from that water, and Colette never pausing long enough to notice. Why Caro looked just like a fish out of water, she was fighting so to breathe –swallowed a good deal of water too, I shouldn't wonder, what with the way she was coughing. But as for the rest, the cross and the oil and the promises, Colette did do it, or near enough.'
'Of course, we hadn't proper oil like the priest uses, but Colette made do with castor oil –it wasn't as if she was in the habit of using it for anything else –Richard and Laura Lee wouldn't have taken it even if she had been. It was always a sign of real illness with them if they took a dose of castor oil and never raised a riot over it –on an ordinary day Richard would have seen how far across the kitchen he could send it sooner than swallow it, if Colette didn't keep the spoon in his mouth until he had swallowed it down I mean, and what's more, I'm not sure as I blame him, it is awful… Anyway, Colette certainly made it sound as though she was baptising Caro, said all the right things that is. It sounded like all the things a priest says when he's got the baby at the font. She even remembered Caro's second name and threw it in for good measure, which is more than anyone else to hand would have managed, given how little use we make of the children's second names…but then Colette's always had a long memory for queer things, but that's besides the point.'
'She certainly baptised Caro after a fashion, though more than that I won't swear to because she seemed to switch to what Annunciata would call 'yattering.' I wouldn't mind, there's music in colleen's talk, I've always thought, even if I do only half follow it. But whatever it was she said when she held Caro's head under the water, she was talking so quick there wouldn't have been a hope of making out the words even in English, and that says all you need to know about how frightened she was, because given half the chance I can usually make a go at unravelling most of what she says, and I could have tried till doomsday that evening and been none the wiser.'
Colette came tentatively to them later in the afternoon with a jar of marmalade tucked into a basket on her arm.
'Are you wanting you Willow book?' asked Di, seeing the basket.
'My –no, no, I wrote that out for Caro. Ej me souviens, I have no need for it,' and she tapped her temple, 'it is all here, all that. No, I was bringing a peace offering to you,' she said, and when Di and Caro continued to look utterly perplexed, 'I heard tell that I may have brought rather a lot of trouble on you.'
'Aunt Nancy?' asked Caro understanding before Di. Colette made a face.
'She isn't where she can hear me?' she asked, unburdening herself of the basket that she might better fold her spindly arms around herself and trying to lean against the counter edge, only to right herself a moment later as the lip of it cut into her back.
'No she isn't. If this is about…' Di gestured at Caro over the little girl's head.
'Cherie,' said Colette appealingly to Caro, 'go and find me some marjorlaine in the garden, you know the one I mean? Bien, allez,' and Caro went.
'She was dying,' said Colette by way of explanation, 'really dying. Peter will tell you –and she hadn't been churched –I was frightened for her.'
'He has said all that,' said Di soothingly, taking Colette's elbow and sitting her down at the trestle table. 'And it wasn't you or Caro that set the cat among the pigeons, it was Mimi saying she didn't want the babies brought to church this time round. Well not quite that,' she amended as Colette made a noise in the back of her throat, 'I don't think she had decided.'
'Mon Djieu,' said Collette, provoked to blasphemy in her relief and exasperation both, 'why not? With Caro I almost understood, but those little babies …their papa is here this time. It does not make sense.'
Then she began to laugh and covering her face with her hands said, 'I cannot believe I'm agreeing with that woman –after everything she said –I won't, I won't agree with her. Did Peter tell you? No –no he cannot have done or your eyes would not grow like that. You do not want to know, I meant it when I said Annunciata was haiisable, was hateful.' Colette took her hands from her face and shook her head.
'I suppose now I had better tell you,' she said laughing, but it was the nervous laughter of a creature that has been cornered.
'Not at all,' said Di, turning her head to see if she could still see Caro in the garden. She could; the child was down on her hands and knees among the marjoram.
'You needn't tell me anything you don't like to.'
'No,' said Colette, 'no, after so much fuss I had better. And it isn't so very terrible I suppose –you will know it for the nonsense it is. She came to visit, their aunt you understand, when Paul was still little –really little, he hadn't any words of his own yet, though he was beginning to learn…I think he had almost got my name, though he said it 'colee,' like the dog –halfway between the name my maman gave me and Peter's colleen, I think. But that doesn't matter now. I am telling you about the haiisible Annunciata, n'est-ce pas? She came in here one evening, she was always coming in where she was not wanted, that woman, I expect she still does –you are nodding, she must –we were having tea, the way we sometimes do now…only of course you were not there…' the memory trailed off and for a moment it seemed Colette would not or could not go on. She seemed to shiver with the sensation of it, and Di, reaching across the table, took Colette's hand in hers and became suddenly and acutely aware of how small the girl's hands really were, no bigger than a child's hands.
'Colette, really,' she said gently, 'if you would rather not…' but Colette, ever an instinctive talker, interjected before Di could finish.
'No, no, I have begun now, I may as well tell you the rest of it. Perhaps it is best I tell you –you will be able to be careful, she will not be able to…but you must understand it was all a – it was innocent –you would say a 'nonsense' I think. We were having tea and talking, because it was late, and all of the children had finally gone off to sleep, they do not always go at once –well you know what they are like, I need not tell you. The evenings I sat up with Laura Lee for les cauchemars, or with Paul for his teeth –they all came in at once with him, mon pauvre p'tit and he couldn't sleep for the hurt they gave him. But just for once they were all settled and we were having tea and talking, and I was unhappy because at last Jacob, my favourite brother, he was going to war, to fight for a country that was not even ours, that had displaced us from from home…le grand dérangement they called it then…but he was going, and I could not stop him and I was sure he would be killed. He was not,' and here Colette paused long enough to cross herself in one seamlessly fluid motion, 'but how was I to know? How could I think anything else with the news I was hearing? He had come up in the afternoon looking like a soldier and it frightened me to think of Jacob going like that…mothers are not supposed to have favourites, but sisters –that is different, no?'
'Very different,' Di agreed, her mind straying to the photo on her own night-side table, of a boy with his arms wrapped awkwardly about him, eyes that betrayed the poetry he had harboured.
'Wey, I thought perhaps you would know. He was my favourite –still is. I was frightened for him, I was crying, I think, no I must have been, though it is not a habit with me, because Peter had my hands because of it. He would not have done that otherwise. Annunciata did not think of that when she came in –I would say she did not know if I did not think she were capable of stopping at a closed door to listen. It must have looked…but I do not know how it looked, except that she thought I was farlaque –I do not know what you would call that…'
Colette paused, reaching for a word and failing to find one. She did not need to, because as ever she had given the word its full weight, her fricatives and her metamorphing of the 'Q' sound into a 'K' had done that for her, notwithstanding her musical 'R's,' which continued to sound, in the face of everything, like the sound like the trill of a whippoorwill in evening.
'I think I can guess,' said Di, pressing Colette's hand, still cradled in her own. 'Annunciata misunderstood –am I right?' Colette almost smiled.
'Misunderstood,' said Colette, as one learning the word for the first time, musing on it, trying the shape and sound of it in her mouth, 'wey, yes, you might call it that. I think ...I know... I shall never forget... what Annunciata said when she came in was 'I suppose you are looking to be kissed' –I cannot forget it, because I did not know where to look –neither did Peter. Naturally after that we did not like to have tea without Paul or Laura Lee, or else Richard…not when Annunciata was there anyway. It was all right again once she had gone. But that is why I cannot agree with her –not even over the souls of those babies, though I will worry about them, only you mustn't tell Mimi so. Of course she must do what she likes about your Ruthie and Robbie. They are yours, aren't they, more than hers?'
'And Laura Lee's,' said Di uneasily, uncertain why she didn't contradict the fast-talking girl at the table.
'And Laura Lee's, mon Djieu, it will be Caro next, looking after them if there are any more.'
Colette brought her hands away from Di's own and reaching for and clutching at Di's arm said suddenly, 'you must see there aren't any more, won't you? I wrote that out too. Pennyroyal and rue, in the Willow Book, did you look?'
'Only glancingly,' said Di, who had seen the parenthetical descriptor next to 'Pennyroyal tea,' shuddered over it and moved on.
'I think perhaps I had better, might leave that, to you.' It was Colette's turn to be soothing. She nodded and promised.
'D'accord, you send Laura Lee running to me if it comes to that,' she said.
'It is better that, I think, than that you should go wrong trying with those flowers –with pennyroyal and rue –or that you should leave well alone and have more of her brâilles afterwards…there has been too much already and Laura Lee is loosing the trick of being small because of it…if there is more, Caro will begin to forget too what it is to be little. That is why the twins must always be the babies, why you must see they that they are –I do not think Mimi would argue with you over it, she asked me once how such things were done –and there has already been so much blood on my hands that a little more will not be noticed. You will promise, won't you, tu jures?' It was only when Di had promised that Colette released her to make tea without anything but garden variety tea leaves in it.
Ruthie and Robbie were baptized in the Sunday of Eastertide called Good Shepherd Sunday. From the beginning the occasion was fraught. The car would not start and so the family had had to process down the hill as a body in the face of an undecided and unrelenting mizzle. It was a rimy morning and the Laura Lee complained of cold and Paul of earache. Richard was sombre and Caro was so quiet that Di began to be genuinely worried about her and might have lifted her up and carried her close to ward off some of the chill if it hadn't been for the redoubtable Annunciata, arrayed as Judith in gold silk and finery but with none of that warrior's redeeming features, looking with regularity over her shoulder to ensure Di and Caro were keeping up. For Annunciata was convinced that left to her own devices Caro, by virtue of being simultaneously heathen and Romish, would find a way to be late to church. If they were, and admittedly that they were slightly late, it was only because Annunciata refused to take Mr. Harris's word for where to turn for the church and so led them quite the wrong way before acceding to the right one.
It was only a matter of minutes and the organ was still convulsing its way through a particularly fussy piece of Bach and going wrong with it when they slipped in at the back of the church. Annunciata, seeing the young man who served as minister, turned to Mimi and hissed, 'I don't wonder he couldn't hold a baby when you brought Paul to him –he looks much to young for a minister, however did he come to be here?'
While Mimi was reaching for an answer that woman went on, 'can you be sure he won't drop the twins this time?' and getting no answer from Mimi, 'I do wish you would speak up, Mimi, my hearing's not so wonderful as all that.' Mimi was far too nervous to answer and only gave the suggestion of shaking her head, which might have been taken for either an affirmative or negative as suited Annunciata.
They needn't have worried. In the first place, Young Rev. Pollock, who would never, even should he live three-score years and ten, be anything but 'Young Rev. Pollock,' had had sufficient baptisms to contend with since that of Paul Temple Harris as to master the art of holding a baby, and in the second place, that he had dropped Paul at all had been the result of that child's determined wriggling. The Harris twins were prone to nothing so anxiety-inducing, though from the moment the liturgy for the blessing of the water commenced little Robbie positively wailed. Ruthie might have been content to have her chrism oil, water and candle without complaint, but she could not, even then, sit idly by while her brother was unhappy, and so she wailed in sympathy. The good Rev. Pollock passed it off with a joke, and said it was only the devil leaving the children, as he always did at a baptism, and the congregation laughed good-naturedly, as did the family, all but Anunciata bristled at the implication, coming from this underdeveloped example of a minister that there was anything devilish about a niece or nephew of hers and looked daggers at him all the rest of the service.
Annunciata could have, in all probability, forgiven the babies if it had not been for the behaviour of the other children. They were all gathered around the font because the minister had thought it might be nice for the whole family to say the responses as a collective and Annunciata, then at least, had agreed with him. The Rev. Pollock, whatever he had learned about how to cradle a child's head, had had no reason to learn that the only thing he might be expected to rely on about this pack of impish children, true indeed of most children, was their unpredictability. To begin with, it went well. Dutifully the Harris family and Di and Peter with them, promised to renounce evil, to turn to Christ without difficulty. Then the Rev. Pollock said, 'do you promise to help bring Ruth Rosalind and Robert Alexander Harris into the Family of God?'
'No,' said Paul solemnly, 'they don't need God's family because they already have a family.'
There was more good-natured laughter from the other congregants –it was sweet to see a little boy so fond of his baby brother and sister. Richard thought it a great joke and joined in the laughter, as did his father. Annunciata turned a thousand shades of red, Caro, catching her aunt's eye, looked suddenly on the edge of tears and buried her face in Di's skirt so she could not see the people around her and how they must be staring; Laura Lee looked only marginally less horrified than her aunt. It was a thing of a moment, the others promised accordingly, they got on with the service, wailing or no, and one way or another Ruthie and Robbie were baptised with names that sounded so terrifyingly grand no one could ever bring themselves to use them except on very formal kinds of invitation, and Annunciata always said afterwards that she never felt they had been properly baptised after Paul's shocking bout of manners, and wasn't it dreadful when his nearly-heathen little sister could be relied upon to have more presence and manners inside a church?
