Love and Salt Water Read online

  The Author

  ETHEL WILSON was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1888. She was taken to England at the age of two after her mother died. Seven years later her father died, and in 1898 she came to Vancouver to live with her maternal grandmother. She received her teacher’s certificate from the Vancouver Normal School in 1907 and taught in many local elementary schools until her marriage in 1921.

  In the 1930s Wilson published a few short stories and began a series of family reminiscences which were later transformed into The Innocent Traveller. Her first published novel, Hetty Dorval, appeared in 1947, and her fiction career ended fourteen years later with the publication of her story collection, Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories. Through her compassionate and often ironic narration, Wilson explores in her fiction the moral lives of her characters.

  For her contribution to Canadian literature, Wilson was awarded the Canada Council Medal in 1961 and the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1964. Her husband died in 1966, and she spent her later years in seclusion and ill-health.

  Ethel Wilson died in Vancouver in 1980.

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Copyright © 1990 by University of British Columbia Library, by arrangement with Macmillan of Canada Afterword copyright © 1990 by Anne Marriott

  This book was first published in 1956 by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in the case of photocopying or other reprography copying, a licence from Canadian Reprography Collective – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Wilson, Ethel, 1888-1980

  Love and Salt Water

  (New Canadian library)

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-699-8

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8545.I62L6 1990 C813′.54 C90-093966-4

  PR9199.3.W5L6 1990

  Published by arrangement with Macmillan of Canada

  McClelland & Stewart Inc.

  The Canadian Publishers

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  v3.1

  This tale is affectionately inscribed to my uncle, W.H.M., who was young Skookoonia-goose (North West Territories 1884) and to W.M.B., N.D.F., G.L.E. who – with courage, selflessness, good sense and good humour – build

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedications

  PART ONE A Voyage Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  PART TWO A Few Years Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  PART THREE A Scar Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Afterword

  Other Books by This Author

  PART ONE

  A Voyage

  One

  WHEN ELLEN CUPPY was eleven years old and sat on the foot of the bed, getting in the way of her big sister Nora who was packing her suitcases with great care, she thought how sad it was for Nora, who was so fair and pretty, to marry that old Mr. Morgan Peake who was all of forty; yet Nora did not seem to mind, but shook out the crêpe de Chine nightdresses and laid them on the bed and slowly folded them again with tissue paper in between, and Ellen thought that Nora was like a lamb getting ready for the sacrifice; and thinking of lambs and sacrifices she thought of garlands and timbrels and damsels and maidens and vestal virgins, such things as she read about and liked the sound of but did not understand.

  She said, rocking as she sat, “Nora, what is a virgin?”, but Nora gently shook out the silken garment again and did not listen.

  “Listen, Nora, what is a virgin anyway?”

  “A virgin?” said Nora distrait. “Oh, it’s a biblical character.”

  “I know that. But what is it? Are you a virgin, Nora?”

  “Me?” said Nora, looking up. “Certainly not! Well, perhaps, in a way. Will you sit still, or get off the bed … I can’t fold with you jiggling.”

  “Mother,” said Ellen to her mother who came into the bedroom, “what is a virgin? What do they do?”

  “It’s a young girl,” said her mother. “Give me that nightdress, dear, I’ll fold it … they don’t do anything that I know of … you should have put the dress in first …”

  “You mean they just stick around? What good are they? What are they for?”

  “Oh,” said her mother, straightening up, “will you ever be quiet just for a minute, Gypsy! Don’t bother Nora now; get off the bed, Nora needs the space … you little mosquito … time for you to go to bed”, and she took Ellen by the shoulders and ran her out of the room and into her own bedroom. “Good night, pet, and don’t forget to brush your teeth,” she said, and went back to the bride.

  “My goodness,” said Ellen, sauntering about her bedroom and practising fancy steps, “I’d hate to be Nora! I don’t call that a love affair, marrying that old Mr. Peake”, and she stopped her dance steps and took out from amongst her books an adventure story called Wallaby Will and went to bed and forgot about Nora and also about being a bridesmaid the next day.

  Two

  LARGE DEEP-SEA freighters which are also passenger boats steam into Vancouver harbour. Some of the freighters can accommodate about twelve passengers. Some take fifty or even sixty. They come through the Panama Canal, from across the Pacific Ocean, and beyond.

  Long before Nora was married, Mrs. Cuppy used to take the children into the Park. They would watch from the shore, looking westward, a gliding freighter which had just shown its bow around the distant southern point of land. For some time the freighter seemed to ride balanced on the line of the horizon.

  “You could push it off with your finger,” said Ellen.

  “Don’t be silly. You couldn’t,” said Nora, although she was ten years older.

  The freighter, moving slowly along the dividing line of sea and sky as along a tight-rope, gradually turned toward Vancouver and changed its appearance to an amazing degree. The ship which had appeared excessively long and elegant became foreshortened, and wa
s transformed to a large squat black object approaching upon the ocean. It became a different ship. The ship passed Bowen Island, passed the lighthouse, and, travelling with admirable slowness and intelligence, reassumed in front of their eyes its appearance of length and slimness, passed in front of the mountains, disappeared behind the wooded point of the Park, and entered the harbour which is part of the inlet which Captain George Vancouver named Burrard Inlet. The children could not see the freighter now, the high forests of the Park intervened, but they could picture it steaming slowly through the Narrows, proceeding up Burrard Inlet, coming into the docks or, perhaps, anchoring in the stream for the time being.

  Sometimes Nora and Ellen and their mother walked or drove in the Park, and on the inner side – that is, the side of the Park which looks upon the busy harbour, not upon the open sea – they stood, or sat on the grass, and watched the freighters (looking bigger than usual) pass quite close to them and vanish under the Lions’ Gate Bridge and through the Narrows, out to sea. Sometimes the big ships rode high in the water but often they were laden and lay low and handsome. The pleasure of watching the deep-sea freighters in the inner harbour was enhanced by the multiplicity of smaller ships which peppered the water, tugs travelling slowly with their tows or tearing out alone through the Narrows with the racing tide, seiners, and gillnetters, tankers, coasting vessels; but the tugs and the freighters gave most life to the scene. There were also multitudes of sea-birds and particularly the cormorants.

  It was not perhaps strange that the freighters were important to Mother and to Ellen. They were not so important to Nora, whose childhood did not seem to last very long as she was practical by early nature and married young; her dreamy fairness was delusive; she did not really care for gazing at birds and boats. Mother’s bedroom window looked to the south over False Creek and to the west over the open sea, and for as long as Ellen could remember she had knelt on the windowseat, and had called out “Mother, there’s a freighter!” and her mother had come to look, or Mother had called “Look, Gypsy, there’s a freighter!” It seems ridiculous that ordinary ships moving upon the water should exercise a never-dying interest, but so it was with Mother and Ellen, and Mother often said “Some day, when Father has time, Gypsy, we’ll go on a freighter”, and Ellen believed her.

  Ellen and her mother lived very much in each other’s society, because when Ellen was little, Nora had begun to be big, and then, when Nora was not yet twenty-one, to everyone’s surprise she married Mr. Morgan Peake, who was a well-known lawyer and also a Member of Parliament. He was dark and square with jutting eyebrows and was fully nineteen years older than his bride. He was not even a widower and Nora was his first real love, not counting two long-past episodes before he became ambitious. Ambition developed in him fairly early but he was not its slave. As a husband he was admirable, but his devotion to Nora had the effect of spoiling her. She was reasonably fond of him, and, as she did not know the force of passion, she retained her unflawed good looks, and the train of her life in which she sat as a beautiful passenger was drawn as it were by a diesel engine which made travelling too smooth. She became very “smart”, and her smartness had a casual or beguiling quality of indifference.

  Nora was placidly fond of her mother, and of her father too; but as her father was seldom at home and she was used to her mother, and as she had little imagination, her love for her father and mother made few demands upon her. She was not ardent.

  Since Mr. Cuppy was usually in Mexico or Persia or New York or in such nextdoor places as Alberta or Northern Saskatchewan – anywhere where the presence of oil was suspected or decisions about oil could be made – the result was that although he and his wife loved each other dearly, he was an absentee husband. That being the case, Mrs. Cuppy had spent barely one-third of their married life with him. One result of this was that she and their little daughter Gypsy were indispensable to each other. Fortunately Gypsy had many school friends too. Her chief friends were Isa Graham and Billy Peake, who was the eldest of the three sons of Mr. and Mrs. Dick Peake who were relatives of Morgan, Nora’s husband. At first, Mrs. Cuppy was not pleased about Nora’s marriage, and neither was her husband. They thought Morgan was far too old for Nora – and so he was – and that she could not really love him. Therefore was the marriage wise and safe? It was no good worrying, because, although Nora did not seem to know what love was in Mrs. Cuppy’s sense of the word “love”, her mind was set to Morgan and she was gently obstinate. She seemed happy, and as Morgan’s young wife she was very successful. Much of her time was spent in Ottawa when the House was sitting. Father was away; Nora was away; and fortunately Ellen and her mother were the best of companions. Never was there a luckier girl than Ellen Cuppy with such a merry dear mother.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Cuppy were first married, Frank Cuppy intended to take his wife always with him on these journeys as soon as they could afford it. But before they could afford it Nora was born, and when they could afford it Susan Cuppy was occupied with looking after their two girls. She put away, as well as she could, the regrets that were sometimes uppermost that she had been deprived of going with her husband to strange and distant places. She would have liked to see these uncomfortable places. She would have liked to meet the men of all kinds, foreign and domestic, distinguished and ordinary, that her husband met in these places, and sometimes the women too; and she would like to have surveyed those peculiar scenes. Frank was not interested in women as women; he much preferred the company of men; but his wife did not take her immunity from trouble entirely for granted, as Frank was too good-looking. When he came home it was nearly his greatest pleasure in life to be with his wife Susan and his tall fair daughter and his little dark daughter. Perhaps it was his greatest pleasure. He did not care for society at large and was apt to become glum in the presence of people in whom he was not interested. When he was glum he was strikingly handsome but forbidding. Although his wife was for these reasons somewhat deprived of the society of men (which she very much enjoyed), and of women, she said to herself that you can’t have things both ways and thank goodness I have Gypsy, and Frank cares most for me and for the children – and, of course, for finding oil. He did not at first really care about money. When, on his returns home, he almost immediately departed again, she did her best to be philosophical.

  As Frank Cuppy became rich or, at least, comfortable, he suggested to his wife that she should move into a new part of Vancouver, but she said No. She said that she preferred to stay beside False Creek and English Bay for otherwise she would miss the view of the ocean from the windows, and the nearness to the Park where she could drive and walk so easily. At the weekends Gypsy went with her unless she stayed with Isa Graham as she often did. When Frank went away again he was not quite content about his wife Susan. He bought her a nice new roadster which emancipated her a good deal, and he often sent strange and beautiful presents to her and to the girls and then felt easier in his mind. He could not say when this section of his life would end. He put away the thought of it because he honestly knew that it would never end but would become more and more continuous and exacting and successful. When Gypsy grew a little older and went – perhaps – to a university, Susan would at last come with him sometimes; and so we confidently plan our lives.

  “Some day, darling,” said Susan, looking up at him as they stood watching a great white ship glide below the Lions’ Gate Bridge and vanish – their vision blocked by forest – out to sea, “some day we’ll all go off on a freighter together – anywhere – anywhere … you and Gypsy and me …”

  “We will,” said her husband (when?).

  “Promise, Daddy! Promise!” said Ellen.

  “Promise,” said her father.

  When these three went walking in the Park together they were better to look at than most people. Mrs. Cuppy was small and slim and tossed herself gaily along as she walked with her husband. She was completely happy. Frank Cuppy was tall, erect, and spare. Ellen was a leggy child with a small good head a
nd bright dark eyes. They walked well. No wonder people liked to look at them. There should be many more people to look at like Mr. and Mrs. Cuppy and their daughter Ellen walking so well together, what with modern advantages, and if Nora had been walking with them in her tall fair beauty they would have looked finer still. Morgan would have pulled the average of looks down, but not if his mind and judgment could have been made visible. Morgan and Nora did not enjoy walking in parks. Morgan was only a few years younger than Frank Cuppy but in his weighty oracular way he was as old. The two men were companionable on the rare occasions when they saw each other, talking as two men and not as father-in-law and son-in-law, but Frank Cuppy at first felt the situation to be a little silly.

  Susan knew that as they walked, and as she and Gypsy talked, Frank did not always hear what they said, although his hearing was perfect. He habitually thought of other things, she was sure, but she could not alter that and, as she loved him and he loved her, she did not mind much. She was right. As Frank walked with Susan and Gypsy he was continuing his disagreement in opinion with Dr. Antonio Mattaneo whom he neither liked nor trusted, and he was summoning a further argument. The sound of his wife and daughter talking was a pleasant accompaniment as long as he was not required to listen and answer, which it never occurred to him to do. Men are driven to this in self-defence.

  “Listen! Listen! Answer me at once! You’re not even listening!” said Ellen, dancing round in front of him and walking backwards. “What kind of a father are you that doesn’t even listen to his own daughter!” and Frank came back from where he had been glowering at Dr. Mattaneo with whom he continued to disagree.

  Next day Father had to return unexpectedly to Mexico and so Nora, arriving from Ottawa, missed him after all.

  “If I’d only known, I’d have flown on Tuesday,” she said.

  “But he didn’t know,” said Mother.