Annabel - Kathleen Winter [12]
Unlike Eliza Goudie in her seersucker and white sandals, unlike Joan Martin with her bulb-planting tool for her Emperor tulips, Thomasina would not fall apart at the loss of her husband. Though they complained about their husbands, the first two would have looked at a dripping tap, a leaky ceiling, a tree fallen on the property as insurmountable difficulties over which they had no control. They were the kind of women of whom the Apostles had written that it was necessary to help from a safe distance. They had not, during their marriages, held any part of themselves in reserve. They joked, when they got together, of how easy their lives would become if they did not have to cook for the men, but if these women ever lost their husbands, they would themselves be as lost as orphaned whitecoat seals.
Thomasina was no whitecoat; she was a fierce grey and silver grown-up who had held her entire self in reserve for a day such as this. Jacinta she felt, lay somewhere between those other women and herself: self-containment was half-formed in Jacinta; she had depths of judgement to which she could turn but did not fully trust them. She had surrendered part but not all of herself to the wisdom of her husband. Jacinta, Thomasina felt, would never be wholly at ease with any decision about which she and Treadway had differing ideas. Thomasina and Graham had married late. Perhaps that was why each never thought to question the judgement of the other. Thomasina had never questioned Graham’s blind hunting or his taking Annabel out in the white canoe or any other boat, and he had not questioned Thomasina when she went on her own journeys alone or with Annabel into the interior, which no other white women did. Danger faced Graham and Thomasina and their child equally at every turn, as did discovery, and this was something each faced for himself or herself. In her misfortune, Thomasina did not blame Graham.
None of the townspeople knew the extent of Thomasina’s grieving because she did not fall apart in front of them. Nor did she fall apart alone in her house. She sat on the daybed under a small window that looked over the backyard and the inlet and stared for half an hour the morning after the drowning of Graham and Annabel, and she did the same that evening, and the next morning as well. She sat on the daybed because that spot was an in-between place, not a living room or kitchen where scenes of family life had played out. This was a passage in which everyone moved and was unfathomable, which was how Thomasina saw people. She was not a person who froze someone’s character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one truthful or untruthful. To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming. It was unbearable to her that she had lost Annabel and Graham, but she had borne unbearable things, and she knew how to keep going. She had her own way of saying goodbye to her lost beloved, and she said it in private. Then she went about the business of being around for those who were living. Especially, she decided,