Chapter Nine—The Play's the Thing

London was more fascinating than Una had ever dreamed.  She toured the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, and Charles Dickens' house, drinking in the sights and sounds of hundreds of years of history.

"Give me my island any day," grinned Valancy.  "I couldn't breathe here."

"I suppose I couldn't live here forever," said Una thoughtfully, "but it would take me a long time to see everything I wanted to see."

"I've seen it, and now I'm getting ready to go home.  There's something about Muskoka that draws me to it, makes me feel homesick when I'm away for long."

"I've never felt that strongly about a place," Una confessed.  "I love Glen St. Mary's, but it's not in my blood as much as that island's in yours."

"Oh, I suppose it's more that Barney's there than the virtues of the island itself, however wonderful they are.  I'd live in a tent in the Sahara Desert if he was there."

"Maybe that's my problem," Una mused aloud.  "Maybe if there was someone in the Glen who meant to me what Barney means to you…"

"Perhaps," Valancy agreed.  Then, switching topics, "What are you going to going to wear to the play tonight?"

"The green, I think.  I'm excited…I've never seen Macbeth before.  And they say that Sara Stanley is one of the best actresses since the days of Fanny Kemble and Mrs. Siddons."

"It's something, all right, to see her on stage.  I saw her two years ago…in Hamlet, I think it was.  She was Gertrude, and Gertrude simply stole the show.  Miss Stanley must be in her sixties by now, but she seems ageless.  She comes from PEI too, you know," Valancy told her.  "Her cousin, Beverly King—he owns some big newspaper—wrote a book about a year he spent there as a child.  Barney knows him fairly well…they have the same publisher.  That's how we got these tickets.  Bev offered them to us—he said he doesn't like to watch a play by himself."

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"Dear Shirley," Una wrote later, sitting at the roll top desk in her hotel room, "I went to see Macbeth tonight.  It was wonderful.  Sara Stanley is a tremendous actress…you feel that she's really Lady Macbeth, or whomever she's playing.  And then, after the performance, we had dinner with her and her cousin, Beverly King.

"Miss Stanley has a sort of presence about her—and her voice!  I don't know quite how to describe it; all I know is that it's more rich and vibrant than any other voice I've ever heard.  But for all that, I think that she wishes, sometimes, that she'd made different choices, maybe had a family or at least a husband.  She was talking about her cousin Felicity, who's a minister's wife—Peter Craig, maybe Jerry knows him.  She said that part of her, even though she loves her career as an actress, wishes that she was like Felicity, with 'nothing more than the next church supper to worry about', and I quote.

"And Bev King, the author, you know…I think he loves her, Shirley.  They grew up together, and maybe I'm just mistaking cousinly concern for something more, but his eyes seemed to say what he won't. 

"It is three o'clock in the morning, and I have no idea why I'm writing all of this to you, except that I'm scared that I'll be all alone at age sixty without anyone who cares about me.  I'm not saying 'yes' to your proposal yet, but I am getting closer to it.  Oh, Shirley, I have this feeling that I'm just writing a whole bunch of nonsense that will give you false hope…but I'll send it anyway.  Thinking of you and home, Una."