The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [6]
This was the case with the Chaddeley family, my mother’s family. Isabel and Iris were not Chaddeleys by name, but their mother had been a Chaddeley; my mother had been a Chaddeley, though she was now a Fleming; Flora and Winifred were Chaddeleys still. All were descended from a grandfather who left England as a young man for reasons they did not quite agree on. My mother believed that he had been a student at Oxford, but had lost all the money his family sent him, and had been ashamed to go home. He lost it by gambling. No, said Isabel, that was just the story; what really happened was that he got a servant girl in trouble and was compelled to marry her, and take her to Canada. The family estates were near Canterbury, said my mother. (Canterbury pilgrims, Canterbury bells.) The others were not sure of that. Flora said that they were in the west of England, and that the name Chaddeley was said to be related to Cholmondeley; there was a Lord Cholmondeley, the Chaddeleys could be a branch of that family. But there was also the possibility, she said, that it was French, it was originally Champ de laiche, which means field of sedge. In that case the family had probably come to England with William the Conqueror.
Isabel said she was not an intellectual and the only person she knew from English history was Mary Queen of Scots. She wanted somebody to tell her if William the Conqueror came before Mary Queen of Scots, or after?
“Sedge fields,” said my father agreeably. “That wouldn’t exactly make them a fortune.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know sedge from oats,” said Iris. “But they were prosperous enough in England, according to Grandpa, they were gentry there.”
“Before,” said Flora, “and Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t even English.”
“I knew that from the name,” said Isabel. “So ha-ha.”
Every one of them believed, whatever the details, that there had been a great comedown, a dim catastrophe, and that beyond them, behind them, in England, lay lands and houses and ease and honor. How could they think otherwise, remembering their grandfather?
He had worked as a postal clerk, in Fork Mills. His wife, whether she was a seduced servant or not, bore him eight children, then died. As soon as the older children were out to work and contributing money to the household—there was no nonsense about educating them—the father quit work. A fight with the Postmaster was the immediate reason, but he really had no intention of working any longer; he had made up his mind to stay at home, supported by his children. He had the air of a gentleman, was widely read, and full of rhetoric and self-esteem. His children did not balk at supporting him; they sank into their commonplace jobs, but pushed their own children—they limited themselves to one or two apiece, mostly daughters—out to Business School, to Normal School, to Nurses Training. My mother and her cousins, who were these children, talked often about their selfish and wilful grandfather, hardly ever about their decent, hard-working parents. What an old snob he was, they said, but how handsome, even as an old man, what a carriage. What ready and appropriate insults he had for people, what scathing judgements he could make. Once, in faraway Toronto, on the main floor of Eaton’s as a matter of fact, he was accosted by the harness-maker’s wife from Fork Mills, a harmless, brainless woman who cried, “Well, ain’t it nice to meet a friend so far from home?”
“Madam,” said Grandfather Chaddeley, “you are no friend of mine.” Wasn’t he the limit, they said. Madam, you are no friend of mine!
The old snob. He paraded around with his head in the air like a prize gander.