She glances at Thomas who is deep into the Fisherman’s Advocate newspaper. Her eyes stray to the pinned-up trouser leg before she hastily sits down and turns her head to the dirty window and the view trundling past at a moderate jog. View is too grand a word, Ellie thinks, for the barren wasteland of snowdrifts, wet rock, wind-slapped firs, and the occasional lonely clapboard house with its ubiquitous peeling paint and thread of smoke trailing from the chimney.
She feels like she’s been travelling for years. From Halifax there’d been a bone-rattling nine-hour train journey up through Nova Scotia to North Sydney. Then, after an uncomfortable night in a hotel room shared with another couple who’d made no effort to hide their amorous fumblings, they’d taken the overnight ferry to Porte aux Basques. A horrible journey, almost worse than the Mauritania. She’d had to abandon the baby to Thomas’s anxious care, as she spent the night being sick in the stinking communal toilet.
They were on the penultimate leg now, on the Caribou train – or the Newfie Bullet as Thomas told her the American GIs had ironically dubbed it because of its dawdling progress across the island. Heading to some place called Gambo, where Thomas’s father, Ephraim, would meet them with his fishing boat and take them up the coast to Tippy’s Tickle.
With every frantic transfer, juggling Emmett, and the luggage, and Thomas’s frequent stumbles, her past slipped further and further away, until her life in Norwich with her father and Dottie and George seemed like something she’d once dreamed.
She’d feel disheartened if her body hadn’t succumbed to the numbness that had taken hold on the Halifax dockside. When Thomas had kissed her, the kiss she’d spent hours imagining, it’d been like kissing a stranger. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? They hadn’t seen each other for over two years. She was a mother now, and Thomas was …
Ellie licks her chapped lips. She’s made her bed and now she has to lie in it. Isn’t that what Dottie had said to her that last night in the house? Dottie was furious with her. Yes, they’d always had their squabbles growing up, but sisters do. But then things had become so much worse after she’d met Thomas. Stealing a lipstick was one thing, but stealing her engagement ring and hiding Thomas’s telegram were really beyond understanding.
Why was Dottie so upset that she’d married Thomas instead of George? Was it because she was jealous of Ellie’s imagined life on the other side of the ocean? Maybe it was just that Dottie was caught in that awkward age between childhood and adulthood. Almost seventeen. About the same age she’d been when she’d met Thomas.
Ellie glances at her husband. At the shock of ash-blond hair grown darker now in the winter gloom. At the thin white scar on his left cheek and the fan of fine lines etched into his skin either side of his eyes. What had happened to him to leave these marks on the handsome, youthful man she’d fallen in love with? Why had he told her so little in his letters from Newfoundland? Why hadn’t he told her about—?
She glances at the pinned-up trouser leg. Maybe it was better that she hadn’t known.
Reaching into the net bag of oranges, she takes out a fat round fruit. She runs her thumbnail along the dimpled skin and pulls away the rind. Splitting the orange into segments, she holds one out to Thomas.
‘An orange for your thoughts.’
Thomas glances at the orange and back at Ellie. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. ‘Don’t mind if I does.’
She smiles at him as they eat the sweet orange. They’ll find their way back to each other. One segment of orange at a time.
***
‘Well, here it is. Tippy’s Tickle. Home sweet home.’
Ellie jiggles Emmett in her arms as her thin-soled English boots sink into the wet snow. She shivers as the damp, cold air rolls over her face and stockinged legs. In front of her, a tall wooden house with two round turrets perches on a snow-covered hill overlooking the ice-strewn, grey Atlantic. The clapboard house, like all the others she’d seen on her journey, is wind-battered, and its yellow paint is a ghost of its original incarnation. An ancient grey wooden fence missing several pickets separates the property from the roadside.
‘It’s … it’s larger than the other houses I’ve seen.’
‘Belonged to my fadder,’ Thomas’s father, Ephraim, says, setting Ellie’s trunk in the snow. Ellie looks at the tall, wiry man, still handsome in the weathered way a man who’s led a physical life can be.
‘Da’ ran a good business with the fisheries back in the day, but times isn’t whats they used to be. He wasn’t much of one for pushin’ paper around, not like his fadder who was captain of a sealer – that’s why we has the big house. It’s called Kittiwake after the sea birds round here. My da’ started fishin’ when he was a b’y. I joined him on the boat when I was fifteen.’ He nods at his son. ‘Just like Tommy joined me.’
‘Dad closed off the top floors years ago,’ Thomas says as he points at the house with his crutch. ‘Too dear to heat. We just lives on the ground floor now.’ He looks over at his shivering wife. ‘Let’s get the baby inside. It’s cold enough to freeze the arse off the devil out here.’
Ellie frowns at her pile of luggage, which is accumulating a light dusting of snow. ‘What about the luggage?’
‘Don’t worry, Ellie Mae. I’ll come back for it.’
‘But your—’
The warmth in Thomas’s gaze turns frosty. ‘I still gots my two arms.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry, Thomas. I didn’t mean—’
Ephraim picks up Ellie’s suitcase and several bags of provisions they’d bought in Halifax. ‘Don’t you worry, maid,’
