Thank you again for the feedback. I do look it over and write with you in mind, or try to. I'm pleased to find 'Lilacs' makes a sort of sense to people other than myself.


The New Year came in inauspiciously, while no one was paying it much attention. The days were short and cold and the Manse cat curled up close to the hearth, refusing to resent that she could not go outside for more than minutes at a time. It was with effort that Una remembered that in Epiphany-time the days begin to stretch again, for they were doing so lugubriously, the sky watery and grey on a good day, and darker and mizzling on bad days. There was no chance of a walk in such weather, and even if there were, she would not trust him to the uneven muddiness of Rainbow Valley. So it was over tea and scones with currents that she learned he has let go of an old wish to farm in favour of negotiating figures and sums for other people. It was pleasing, he said, to balance these things and make them come right.

'What about the aeroplanes,' she said, because it had never occurred to her before –why hadn't it ? –that he might prefer the groundedness of the earth, its easy and reliable rhythm.

'They were for wartime,' Shirley said.

'You'll think this silly, but it was a way of distinguishing myself from Jem and Walter, they had both gone into the army and I never seem to do nearly so well if I follow them too closely. I thought if I went, I ought to make the experience mine.'

Una thought of her sewing, of the things she confided in Rilla as they poured over her 'work,' and said it didn't sound silly at all.

'Just so long as you're happy with figures and equations,' she said, and he assured her he would be.


It was not long after this that Carl came into her room as she was making ready for sleep, and sat on the foot of the bed, watching as she combed out her hair.

'Isn't combing your hair out at night supposed to send sailors to their death?' he asks companionably.

'What a frightful thing to say Carl, where did you pick that up?' Una did not stop , he noticed, and he was glad because he hadn't meant to put her off. It was important he talk to her.

'One of the nurses when I was recovering after…'he trailed off and spreads his hands and it was enough. They have both had enough of ghosts and shadows to last a lifetime.

'Some superstitions I can see the root of,' said Una, 'but not that one. I think, if you'll forgive me being practical, I will go on combing it out at nights to stop it tangling while I sleep.'

Carl laughed and they sat in unnatural silence while he worked out what it was he wanted to say. Long ago, he remembered, they talked often and easily about things that mattered to one another. He reached now for the way to frame the problem he wanted her help with.

'I've had a letter,' he said, 'from a professor who remembers me from Redmond. He is organising an expedition to study birds and bugs and things in the Amazon and he wonders whether I'd consider going.'

'But that's good news surely, Carl? You've always dreamed of going to exotic places.' Una had never understood her brother's love of 'all things that creepeth upon the earth' or his dream of seeing far-away places, but in that moment she was more confused by his obvious hesitation than either of these things.

'I don't know. I haven't made up my mind about it.'

'What do you mean you haven't made up your mind? I thought 'one eye was enough to watch bugs with'?'

'It is,' he said uncertainly.

'Well then?'

'I'd like to go,' he ventured, and Una thought of course you'd like to go, and so help me that is not why you came in here with the look of a chastised dog about you; we both know you've never needed help before making up your mind when those beastly insects are involved, but she only says,

'Then oughtn't you write and say as much?'

It's –they've –he goes on to ask if I would be bringing a wife.'

'I see,' and the piece of the jigsaw that Una had been missing fell into place.

She looked at him thoughtfully. Have they grown so apart that she hasn't noticed his acquisition of a sweetheart? She was overcome with a wish to have back the little boy that curled up on her bed during the days of the Good Conduct Club and cried till his eyes were red at the thought of sitting out in the Methodist graveyard till midnight. It was so much simpler then.

'Will you?' She asked instead.

'I don't know,' he said miserably and he looks so like that little boy of long ago that she put her hairbrush down and came to sit beside him, wrapping her arms round him as she did so.

'This isn't like you. You're making me look decisive, Carl, and that takes doing.' She was relieved when he laughed.

'It doesn't seem fair though,' he said, 'it's a very big ask, between the going hither, thither and yon and my eye on top of all the rest of it and I don't know if she would want to or if –and there are lots of better, more suitable -'

'Carl, do start at the beginning. I'm not naturally clever.'

But you understand things, he thought. Still, he humoured her and went back, telling her things that have never come up before; his time in Toronto where he was trained before the war, the parades down Bloor Street, cups of jasmine tea in enamel tea bowls too hot to hold, something of the letters that had been exchanged between himself and Persis Ford, and an evening not long ago when he had gone back to the house on Sussex Avenue and found a candle in the window of it's front room, and her waiting, much as she had once promised.

It was Una who picks the conversation back up, saying, 'but surely then that doesn't leave any room for uncertainty?'

'I thought it didn't,' said Carl, 'only afterwards I remembered..'but he stopped, suddenly hesitant.

'Remembered what? Not about your eyes, surely? It's healed over so you wouldn't notice and anyway, I don't think it's fair to decide it matters for her. It seems to be the only thing you have decided in any of this and it's the one thing you have no business to decide. You forget I know her Carl, and she strikes me as the sort of person who would resent more you making her mind up for her than the prospect of going round the world six ways from Sunday and having to do half your seeing for you.'

'No,' said Carl, 'not that -it's the travelling really -because I know she's had more than her share of it, for her father's books, you know, and I've an idea she didn't always like it.'

'I think you may find this is different, Carl, though I couldn't hope to explain to you why i should be.'

'Do you think so?' he said now, sounding almost cheerful for the first time since he came in talking nonsense and superstitions from Heaven-alone-knew-where.

'Do I usually give you advice I don't mean?' Una says, not liking to admit that she is only now realizing how much she meant it.

He disentangled himself then, tucked her hands into his and looked at her thoughtfully. He wondered…but he knew better than to ask. She would tell him if she wanted to, he knew this. He knew too that he was right to come to her, not so much because she understood, although she did, but because now that she's given him an answer, he cannot shake the feeling that she has answered out of her own experience.

'No,' he conceded now, 'I don't believe you ever have. I'll write her tomorrow then?' He was not sure why it came out a question, although Una seemed to understand that too.

'Do,' she said, 'and no more nonsense. Good night, God Bless.'

'Goodnight, God Bless,' he said in his turn, kissing her head as he rises to leave.

'And thank you, you always make life seem so much clearer.'

'You know I'm here to listen,' she said and he nods. He had got as far as the door when she said,

'And Carl? Good luck in the Amazon.'

It is not until she is burrowed under her quilt that it occurs to her she never thanked Carl for helping put her own thoughts in order.