Chapter Twenty-five—"Greensleeves"
Christmas morning dawned crisp and white as Una pulled back the curtains of Di's guest room and looked out at the snow-covered lawn. Today's the day, I suppose. It's already been a week. I can't put off telling Shirley that I can't marry him any longer. But I'll wait a while. I don't want to spoil Christmas morning.
She crawled out of bed, shivering in the cold room as she dressed hurriedly in a green and red plaid dress that Nan had made for her as an early Christmas gift. Remembering all the family members that were so far away, Una whispered a quick prayer for them as she descended the stairs to the kitchen.
Di was there already, which surprised Una, since it was still quite early. They had decided not to open presents until Shirley came over from his rooms at the college later on that morning.
"Up so early?" Una asked with a smile. "You informed me on my first night here that no one in this family got up at the unearthly hour of 6:30 and that I wasn't supposed to either."
"I wanted to get the turkey stuffed," Di told her. "Besides, I was remembering all the Christmases at home growing up. They were wonderful occasions, even the year we had Father's Aunt Mary Maria. I swore on my favorite doll that I would never be like her, no matter how old I grew. And I do feel old today. There should be children around on Christmas morning…" A wistful look crept over her face.
Una looked at her friend sympathetically. After eight years of marriage, Di and Philip still had no children, while all the rest of the married members of the clan did. "Perhaps someday…" she murmured awkwardly.
"It's all right, Una," Di said, tossing her red curls—cut in a short bob that none of the rest of the family would have dared—back from her face. "Could you make the crust for the mince pie?"
*************
Upon Shirley's arrival at eleven o'clock, the family commenced to open their gifts. Over the past few weeks, packages had arrived from various provinces in the Dominion for them all—everyone had more than they ever could have deemed necessary.
Una flushed slightly as she opened her package from Walter, not knowing what he would have seen fit to send her. She was surprised to find a delicate pin in the shape of a pale pink tea rose.
"That's lovely," Di told her. "Why don't you wear it today?"
"It won't match my dress…"
Di looked at her oddly. "It's beautiful. No one cares if you match or not. Right, fellows?"
"Of course not," Shirley said, the scarf that Una had knitted for him wrapped around his neck. "That was thoughtful of Walter to send you something."
Di grimaced. "Yes, and I wish he'd put a bit more thought into my gift. A very well-stocked first-aid kit."
Philip's eyes twinkled. "I think I'm to blame for that one, Diana. I was telling him about how you used to teach nursing at Redmond and how we met that summer when I broke my leg at Prospect Point. Perhaps he thought you'd run out of supplies since then."
"Humph!" was Di's only audible comment, but she bent down to where Philip was sitting at her feet and whispered, "Very kind of you, I'm sure."
While everyone else continued to open their packages, Una touched her pin with wondering fingers, her cheeks the same pale pink as the petals. I didn't send him anything. I had no reason to…
**********
After a dinner of roast turkey, mince pie, and various other indigestible but delicious foods, Shirley attempted to coerce Una to go for a walk with him through the park. "I haven't given you my present yet, you know," he said.
"I should really stay and help Di with the dishes," Una protested.
"Oh, go do your courting!" Di laughed, threatening her with a dishtowel. "Philip will help me with the dishes."
Una tried to argue, but the odds were against her. Before she knew it, she was in her green coat and walking hand in hand with Shirley through the streets of Kingsport. As was their nature, neither said much, for which Una was grateful. She wasn't going to marry Shirley—that much she had decided. But how to tell him that was an entirely different matter.
They meandered through the park, silently admiring the snow-covered city on their left, the sparkling harbour on the right with the sun shining on the ice, and William's Island before them, strong and impenetrable as it had always been. But then Shirley turned towards the little pine-fringed hill on the left.
"I want to show you the house I found, Una," he said. An undercurrent of excitement ran through his voice. "It's on Spofford Avenue—from what I've heard, Spofford Avenue was once the elite stretch of road in Kingsport forty-odd years ago. Every tobacco baron and lumber king built his house there. Now it's just a jumble of houses reliving past glories. But this house has been there longer than that. It's a jewel of a place—simply made for us."
"It sounds very nice."
"It is," Shirley told her as they walked up the road towards Spofford Avenue. "My mother, Philip's mother, and some of their friends lived on Spofford Avenue when they went to college here. I like to think that it was this house, but I have no way of knowing for sure. I should ask Mother some time." Just as the road they were on turned into Spofford Avenue, he turned in at a dilapidated gate in front of a little frame house that had once been white. A sign had once been painted over the archway over the gate, but the paint had worn off so that it could no longer be read.
"It'll need a lot of work, I expect," Shirley said apologetically. "No one's lived here for several years, not since the last owner died. She left it to the college—I'm not sure what she thought they would do with it, and they weren't sure either. I can get it pretty cheaply if you like it."
Like it? Everything in Una's heart went out to the little forlorn house. It needed to be loved, to be fixed up. "It's lovely, Shirley."
Shirley grinned with pleasure. "I'll show you the inside. It used to be lovely, but time and mice have taken over."
They went through the front door directly into a large living room with a fireplace. Una could see another door opening into the pines and, in one corner, a staircase going up with a window seat at the first low turn.
"There's no furniture, of course. Miss Maria—they say that was her name—left all the furniture to her church. I don't know what they did with it. At any rate, it wouldn't have survived this long in the house without proper care."
"What other rooms are there?" Una asked eagerly. A house of her own—a house that needed love and care. What more could she ask?
"There's a kitchen and a bedroom down here, and one large and two small rooms upstairs. Not a big house, but I think it would suit us admirably."
Una poured over every nook and cranny of the house. It was really the most darling place. And they could fix it up so easily. The room upstairs with the diamond-paned window only needed a new coat of wallpaper—and she could see that it had once been blue, which suited the room—to make it into a perfect guest room. And white ruffled curtains for the kitchen, with pale yellow walls—or would red and white curtains with white walls be better? No, that would show spots too much for a kitchen.
"Come back, Una. You're a million miles away in a jar of wallpaper paste," Shirley teased, touching her lightly on the shoulder. "I want to show you the apple orchard out back."
"There's an orchard, too?" Una asked in amazement. "What doesn't this place have?"
"A chicken coop," Shirley said dryly, "and we're not installing one. I have no desire to be awakened every morning by a cantankerous rooster." They walked out into the orchard and sat down on a large grey boulder that Shirley dusted the snow off of.
There was a comfortable silence as they sat there, and suddenly Shirley laughed. "We pass the test, I see. What's the saying? 'If you can sit in silence with another person for half an hour and be comfortable, you can be friends. If not, don't waste your time trying.' Well, we haven't reached the half-hour mark yet, but it'll be dark soon." He stood up and caught her hands to pull her up into a kiss.
Una forced herself to not be pulled in. She suddenly felt as if she were drowning in icy water. What was she doing?
Apparently, Shirley was wondering the same thing. "Una, what's wrong?" He looked at her puzzledly. "Why won't you let me kiss you?" He paused, thinking. "I don't think you've ever let me kiss you."
Una's breath was coming out in ragged gasps. "I…can't…marry you. I thought…I could. I really…thought I could. But—but I…can't."
"What?!"
"I—I don't love you."
"I knew that. But it never seemed to make a difference before." Shirley's face looked old in the late afternoon light.
"It does, though. I'm sorry." She laid her hand gently on his arm, wishing that she could take back her words, wishing that she could comfort him somehow.
"There's someone else, isn't there?" he asked after what seemed to be an eternal silence—this one not comforting at all.
Una said nothing, hoping that her face would not betray her. Apparently, it gave away enough that Shirley was able to come to a conclusion.
"I wish you'd never gone to Europe!" he snapped, pressed beyond all endurance. "Or at least that we'd gotten married before you went and had gone together."
That, as Susan Baker would have said, "got her dander up". Una's eyes flashed. "I will never regret going on that trip!"
"But he doesn't even love you! And he sounds so…so bitter!"
"What business is it of yours?"
"None, I suppose, except that I care for you and don't want you to get hurt," Shirley said more quietly. "He's too old for you, anyway."
Una almost went into hysterical laughter at that point. "What on earth do you mean? He's no more older than me than I am than you!"
Shirley looked confused. "But you said he was. You said that he was almost sixty."
"What?" Illumination dawned over Una's face. "You thought I meant Dean Priest? That I love him?"
"Don't you? You wrote about him in almost all of your letters while you were staying in Blair Water."
"No, I don't love Dean Priest! He's ages too old for me, and I'd never fall in love with him anyway."
"Then—" An odd look was in Shirley's eyes that combined anger and hurt, a look reminiscent of Walter's when he had told her about Faith. Una couldn't tell if he knew her secret or not, but she wasn't about to ask.
"Shirley, I don't want to discuss it any more. I though I could marry you. I can't. I'm sorry…" Una slipped off the sapphire ring—no longer a fetter!—and forced it into his clenched fist. "You know, the first time I met Dean, he wished that this ring would bring me happiness," she said bitterly. "He was wrong. It's brought me nothing but trouble and hurt." As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them—but there was no retraction possible.
"God go with you, Una. You know I love you. We can still be friends, I hope. At any rate, we're family, which will keep us on amiable terms, I hope."
Una almost gave in at that point. It would be so easy to marry Shirley, rather than to be on her own for the foreseeable future. But she couldn't. "Someday you'll find the person who can make you happy," she whispered. "I only pray that I will as well."
"Can you find your way back to Di and Philip's?" he asked. "I want to make sure all the doors are locked before I head out, and I don't think I'll join you for supper. Give Di my regrets and say that I had no desire for left-over turkey." A ghost of his old smile flickered over his face.
"Goodbye, Shirley." Tears were welling up in her eyes.
"Goodbye, Una." He watched her walk away into the park in her neat green coat and jaunty cap. The bells in a nearby church began to play an old Christmas carol—"What Child is This". But the words running through Shirley's head were of a different song set to the same tune.
"Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
For I have loved you oh, so long,
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves was all my joy,
And, oh, Greensleeves was my delight.
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my lady Greensleeves?"