Free A Sudden Sun by Trudy Morgan-Cole Page A

Sydney to work in the mines. But as so often in this last year, Lily felt as if she were only going through the motions. Silver spoons with tarnished edges looked up at her like wide, unblinking eyes, accusing her.
    There would be a rag in the kitchen, but if she went to the kitchen she would have to think of something nice to say to the girl.Nellie. Lily kept calling her Elsie, but that was the last maid, gone and married now. Nellie was fourteen years old and competent on her best days, but she liked to chatter.
    Preparing to polish the silver became a litany of the house. The kitchen: to be avoided because of the girl. Parlour: her usual place to sit, sometimes for hours on end, sewing or doing embroidery. The window looked out on a long green meadow that ran down from the front of the parsonage to the path along by the harbour. Grace once kept up a bit of a flower garden there; Charley used to cut the grass in the field. They had moved to Catalina from Elliston the year war broke out, when Grace was fourteen and Charley seventeen. The children were away at school over the winter. They had both gone to town to live with Papa and Daisy at age twelve to attend the Methodist College. Charley moved on from there to study at Dalhousie up in Canada.
    But in Catalina, just as they had done in Elliston, they came home for summer and Christmas, and Lily liked to remember that first year or so as a happy time. When she sat in the parlour now she remembered looking out on long summer evenings at clusters of young folk sitting on the porch, Grace and Charley and their friends talking and laughing and singing. Then Charley joined the Regiment and all that ended. Though Grace came home to teach school during the war and had had girlfriends over to the house in the evenings, still the house seemed in Lily’s memory to have become silent after Charley left.
    Ghosts paraded on the lawn; ghosts hung on the walls of the parlour. Not only the ghost of Charley, framed in uniform, but of the whole family when the children were very small and they had had a photograph done at Mr. Parsons’s studio in St. John’s. The ghost of an even younger Lily with the Reverend taken at the same studio a few days after their wedding, a stiff formal pose in which they both looked terrified. With good reason , Lily thought.
    Neither silver polish nor a rag would be in the parlour. Lily shook herself out of reverie.
    The cupboard under the stairs was a jumble. Nellie wasn’t keeping it properly tidy, or perhaps didn’t think it was part of her duties to take care of such things. After a little searching around on the narrow shelves, Lily found the silver polish poked behind a bottle of bleach. She pulled the string to turn off the light bulb. Oh, those light bulbs: the shining evidence of Mr. Coaker’s dream-town! Electric lighting all over Port Union and Catalina, not just here in the manse and in Coaker’s Bungalow, but even in the simple homes of the fishermen. Electric lights, books and lectures, a clinic with a nurse brought over from England. How the Reverend and Mr. Coaker could go on about it, by the hour, when the great man visited their house. Still the lights were nothing more than a convenience when all was said and done: a good thing, but not exactly evidence of divine approval.
    She was up the stairs, back up to her bedroom. The master bedroom, where the master had not slept these many years. Lily remembered their wedding night, a big bed in the Cochrane House hotel, in a room paid for by her parents. She remembered how cold the room was, and how she had clutched her nightgown about herself. She remembered lying awake beside him all that night, staring out the window.
    She had no need to go into his study, that austere temple of the learned man. He could work late there on sermons and then go to bed in the adjoining room without disturbing her. That was the official reason for separate quarters. If anyone had asked, which of course no one