Читать книгу Playing Sarah Bernhardt - Joan Givner - Страница 11

Harriet always knew her real life began when she was twelve years old. She’d known at the time that something important had happened, but it wasn’t until much later that she understood she’d started out then on the path she would tread as long as she lived.

Before she was twelve, Harriet had never had a proper holiday — the kind where you went to the beach and swam in the sea. She’d never even been off the prairies before. And then suddenly they let her go for two whole weeks to stay in a huge house by the ocean. It was almost like going to another country, because it was on an island off the west coast where there were whales and cougars and bears. And she went with her aunt Nina, who was the person she admired most in the world.

Even now, she couldn’t figure out why her mother had allowed it. Perhaps it had to do with her mother’s operation and her need for peace and quiet when she got out of hospital. But that wasn’t the real explanation, because Harriet at twelve would have been a help rather than a burden. Perhaps her aunt had paid for something and done so on certain conditions. It was all part of the undercurrent of tension that riddled the relationship between her mother and her aunt.

Aunt Nina came out regularly every spring before they went out to the acreage for the summer. The whole time she was with them, the house was fraught with tension that mounted gradually and resulted in at least one big explosion. It was so uncomfortable that Harriet couldn’t understand why her aunt kept putting up with it.

“Why do you hate her?” she asked her mother.

“I don’t hate her,” her mother said. “She’s my sister, isn’t she? She gets on my nerves is all, same as you and Donna.” That seemed reasonable enough because Harriet and Donna fought all the time.

“Why does she keep coming out here?” she asked.

“Because we’re family. The only one she’s got.”

Her mother said it with contempt, the same tone she always used for speaking of Aunt Nina. Harriet had been afraid her aunt would stomp out and they’d never see her again. But she never fought back, and Harriet often felt sorry for her, alone in the world and treated so badly by the only family she had. There was something pathetic about the way she hung about the house on sufferance, knowing she wasn’t welcome.

On the other hand, it was hard to feel sorry for Aunt Nina for long because she was so elegant. She held herself erect and walked with such an air in her high-heeled shoes that people turned to stare at her. Even if she did live alone, she had plenty of money, wore beautiful clothes, and drove a big car. She was a private secretary to a rich man in British Columbia. Harriet wasn’t sure of the details and didn’t exactly know what a private secretary or a pulp mill was.

“Do you wish you looked like Aunt Nina?” Harriet once incautiously asked her mother.

“We could all look like that if we lived the way she does,” her mother concluded when she finished blowing off a head of steam.

Her mother held it against her younger sister that she was single and worked for a living. That didn’t seem fair, because it wasn’t Aunt Nina’s fault that her fiancé had been killed in a farm accident. One of the neighbours was a widow who lived alone and had a job, and Harriet’s mother said she was very brave, but she never praised Aunt Nina. She just hinted that if Harriet spent too much time around her aunt some kind of contamination would rub off and she’d end up being an old maid and a career girl.

Anyway, it was a huge surprise when they told Harriet one night while they were having supper that her mother had to go into hospital and she was being sent to stay with her aunt. Donna didn’t mind that she wasn’t going too; she had a boyfriend and she didn’t like being separated from him for a minute. Besides, they all knew Harriet was her aunt’s favorite. That was another thing her mother held against Aunt Nina. She talked about favouritism as if it was one of the seven deadly sins, even though she favoured Donna in a hundred different ways.

The main thing Harriet worried about was travelling by herself on the train. A woman from church was going to a convention in Vancouver, and she promised to keep an eye on Harriet, but the woman was going to sleep in her seat on the train, while Aunt Nina had booked a sleeper for Harriet.

“There’s only a curtain separating those sleepers from the corridor,” her sister said. “What’ll you do if you feel a hand creeping up your leg in the night?”

“I suppose she’ll spoil you rotten,” her mother said, “and nothing’ll be good enough for you when you get home.”

“A couple of weeks aren’t going to change her,” her father said.

In spite of all her fears, Harriet enjoyed the journey to the coast and slept well at night, lulled by the steady rhythm of the train. It seemed no time at all before they were in Vancouver. She had no problem spotting her aunt at the train station, because she stood out in the crowd, being so well dressed and wearing a perky hat on her head. She knew how to dress because she’d been to Paris once and picked up a lot of hints. She put dabs of rouge on her earlobes and had bottles of French perfume on her dressing table. She showed Harriet how to put just the right amount behind her own ears, and she let her try on her hats. Harriet even met her aunt’s boss.

The day after she arrived there was a thump at the door, the sound of a key turning in the lock, and there he was. Aunt Nina looked astonished.

“I have my niece here,” she said.

“Ah yes,” he said. “It slipped my mind.”

“Well you might as well come in now that you’re here,” her aunt said. “This is Harriet.”

“I have an aunt called Harriet,” he said.

“Everyone has an aunt called Harriet,” her aunt said very tartly.

Harriet wondered how she could talk to her boss like that. She thought he was stupid, and she didn’t appreciate comments on her name.

It was the first time Harriet had seen anybody rich and famous close up, and he was a big disappointment. He looked like any other middle-aged man, and she thought he was uglier than most, with not much hair and great bushy eyebrows. She changed her mind when they stood at the window and watched him stride down the street to his car. It was twice as big as any other car on the street, and a man in a uniform jumped out, ran around, and opened the door for him.

Harriet’s father sometimes drove a cab in winter, but he didn’t wear a uniform and jump out to open doors for people. It was dangerous work because he never knew who’d jump in the back seat or what state they’d be in.

Mr. Herbert seemed even less ordinary when she saw the house on the beach he was letting them have all to themselves. They went by ferry to Vancouver Island, took another small ferry when they got there, and then drove up the coast a short distance to the house. It was a huge place, and it wasn’t even his main house, just his summer home. There was glass all along the front so they could look out at the sea, and it was surrounded by little cottages. There were two guest houses, two cottages for the help, and a kind of greenhouse with an indoor swimming pool inside it.

At first it felt to Harriet like going into one of her friend’s houses and raiding the fridge when their parents were out of town. She thought her aunt felt the same way, because she tiptoed around looking at everything as if she’d never seen it before. She said that she’d once stayed for a whole winter in the gardener’s cottage when she was working on a project for her boss.

There were photographs in silver frames on the tables. One was of the queen, not in evening dress like the one on the wall of the principal’s office at school, but in summer clothes in the garden of this very house. There was a photograph of Mr. Herbert on his yacht with a huge fish he’d caught, and there were a lot of photographs of his wife and two sons. In the pictures Mrs. Herbert was always sitting down or lying in a deck chair, and Aunt Nina said she was ill with MS. In one photo she was in evening dress in a wheelchair. Her aunt said that was all right because Roger didn’t care for dancing. He said, “Why dance when you can hire someone to do it for you?”