A letter always seemed to me like immortality
Everyone Diana wanted to write to was dead.
Walter, what seemed like a dozen lifetimes ago, at Courcelette if his last letter to Rilla was to be believed; Diana had often wondered whether he had already considered himself a dead man walking before the day of the last battle, the boy he’d been destroyed beyond repair or rebirth.
Aunt Leslie, whom she’d found it easier to talk to than her own mother, perhaps because she’d also had a brother she adored. Perhaps because she’d left Glen St. Mary and never missed it.
Perhaps because Leslie liked whiskey better than tea, newspapers better than poetry.
Una, who’d been too pale since she barely survived nursing her father and stepmother through the Spanish flu, who’d been someone everyone underestimated or decided to treat as a martyr, who would not have judged Di the way her own sisters would.
Rosalind Foyle, whom she’d had to ask about as discreetly as she could, counting on her general reception as a cheerful and polite Canadian, not much like a bossy Yank, to yield her the few details she’d squirreled away. An artist, a mother. A beauty. Better-bred than her husband, well-liked, she’d had elegant hands and never forgot to wear gloves.
Diana only wore gloves to operate and if an actual gale was blowing in a blizzard.
Who had thought all she wanted was to go to France, to make something of her life that would last her the rest of it. That might make the rest of it of a duration she could bear, an end her family could cope with or justify why she’d never return to PEI.
Dear Una, You’re the best one to write to, I think. The one who’d mind the least, like it the most. The least awkward for me to imagine reading this, the least likely to tell me something I don’t want to know. I leave for France in a few weeks and now I don’t want to go. Or rather, I do and then I don’t. There’s something holding me in England now, something to do with Walter, a mystery. Men, who’ve died. A man who’s alive, very much so.
A man I want to know. His name is Foyle. Christopher. He knew Walter, said Walter knew him as Kit. Everyone calls him Foyle or sir or Superintendent. Christopher. Oh Una, I thought this was behind me. That it was something I’d never have to deal with, some sort of consolation of being a woman in a world missing a generation of men. I thought I wouldn’t know this and that was a relief, watching you and Rilla and Nan. Faith. Mary. I thought it was fair, that I’d never know heartbreak like this. And now there’s Christopher. A half-dozen dead men. Walter’s poem. And France, waiting for me. I have to go, I know that, but how do I go wanting to stay here, a place I can’t call home. Wanting to come back.
Christopher. I like writing his name because I oughtn’t say it often. That’s what a young girl does, lovesick, dull, embarrassing herself, making everyone around her smile behind their hands unless it’s Miss Cornelia, scolding you for making a fool of yourself and for what, a man? What’s a man worth, I ask you—can’t you hear her say it, tart, ready to wash her hands of us— I don’t care what a man’s worth, Una. Just Christopher. And I can’t answer the question, not to satisfy Miss Cornelia or you or myself.
You’d write me back something comforting, if you could. If you hadn’t died before your time, twice over, after the telegram, after the epidemic. I should have insisted you leave before me or with me. I should have told your father you were worth more than all the rest of them put together or made Dad send you away to convalesce, somewhere warm, where you might have lolled about, turning brown in the sun. I’ve said I’ll go to France and sew up the men who need sewing up. Cut off the parts that need cutting off. I’ve said that’s my life, my vocation, as important as Mother’s poetry, as Walter’s, as the babies Jem delivers and the columns Ken Ford writes, and it must be but now there’s murder and Christopher to contend with, a dozen mysteries at the heart of me. For it seems I’ve a heart after all, Una. It beats and beats and leaps when it oughtn’t. It will break, I know it shall.
Christopher. I’ll take a dream in lieu of a letter. A flower, out of place, in lieu of a word. Answer me if you can, Una. You can’t and I know that, but I’ll still hope, silly Di Blythe.
She put the letter in an envelope but left it unsealed and unaddressed.
Left the envelope in an otherwise empty drawer of the desk in her flat. If she didn’t return from France, well, that didn’t bear thinking about too closely. If her papers were sent back to Canada, her father would likely burn the letter rather than let her mother see it unless if gave it to Nan, thinking her twin would derive some comfort and, happily married to Jerry, the bonny wife and mother Di had not made of herself, could weather any pang it gave her.
If somehow it ended up with Christopher, he’d know how she’d once felt.
She could make that happen, writing his name across the white field of the envelope, but that was too much like a dare, and for all she was her father’s daughter, she still had her mother’s wise fear of the fey.
She’d written his name enough. She’d hope she’d come back to say it.
