“Did you really?” Elly said. “How exciting!”
Covey revealed that she really was from the north coast of the island and not the south, as she’d told everyone who’d asked. “We had the most beautiful bay.”
Until then, Covey had stuck to the invented story about her past. She had never told Elly or anyone else about the forced marriage to Little Man or his murder or even Gibbs, though she’d told Elly that she’d left home because of an unhappy family situation. She willed herself, now, to say no more.
“Have you tried to swim here?” Elly asked.
Covey scrunched up her face. “I tried but I couldn’t. Too cold. Not for me.”
“I’ve never learned to swim,” Elly said. “I’ve only been to the beach once.”
Covey’s mouth softened into an oh. It was something she couldn’t imagine, especially not on a small island like theirs.
Elly told Covey then that she’d grown up in the interior, high above the sea where cockle shells had been left in the ground by a prehistoric ocean. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan then, eyes gleaming.
“Look.” Elly opened her palm to reveal three pink-and-white shells. “This,” Elly said, leaning closer to Covey, “is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to do after nursing school.”
“Collect shells?” Covey said.
“No,” Elly said, laughing. “Study them. Geology. Everything about the Earth. The oceans and volcanoes and glaciers,” Elly said. “Only I’ll need to get a recommendation first, to convince a university to let me study there. They’ve had some women, but…” She stopped short, breathed out sharply. Covey nodded. Elly didn’t need to say it. By now, she knew what was often left out of their conversations. The way people saw them and how it determined the roles that they were expected to play in life.
In lowered voices, they shared their dismay at some of the name-calling and other forms of prejudice they had faced in the mother country. Because that was what Great Britain meant to them, the mother country, even five years after the island’s independence. They had spent their childhoods under British rule and had received a British education.
Covey and Elly agreed that they belonged, first, to the hills and caverns and shores of the island where they had grown up, but they also felt that they were part of the culture that had influenced so many aspects of their daily lives. Moving to Great Britain was supposed to be like coming to stay in a relative’s home. A safe harbor for two young people who had lost everything else.
Of course, it wasn’t quite that way once they’d crossed the Atlantic. In London, Elly said, she had discovered herself to be a dual entity, a sort of hybrid, someone who was both at home and foreign, someone who was both welcome and not. At the end of the sixties, postwar relief and optimism were beginning to wear thin. People were worried over limited resources. This added fuel to ongoing bigotry, despite repeated reports of labor shortages, which the government had called on immigrants to help fill.
“Don’t worry, Elly,” Covey told her. “You’ll find a way.”
“I know,” Elly said, folding the map now. “I will. But what about you?”
“Me?” Covey breathed in slowly, deeply. Say nothing, Covey. Say nothing. “Well, the nursing is a fine opportunity for me.”
“But with the certificate that you’re getting, you won’t get the better wages and you won’t get the promotions. You know they won’t let many of us island girls go for the higher-level certificates.”
Covey looked down at her hands, dry and cracked where her fingers met her palms. She seemed to be spending more time cleaning bedpans and commodes than treating patients. Was Elly right?
“It’s fine for me, for now,” Covey said. She kept looking down. “I’m not sure what I would do otherwise.” Which was the truth.
But Coventina wasn’t cut out to be a nurse, Elly could see that. Just as Elly was not. For Elly, the nursing was a means to an end and she was already planning her next steps. She had never shared her ambitions with anyone until the night she told Covey about her plans to study geology. She’d never even told Sister Mary.
When the time came, Elly approached her advisor about helping her to enroll in a university course in geology. True, her science background was limited to mostly biology and chemistry, she said, but she had done quite a bit of reading in geology on her own. She was convinced that she could qualify for the course of study that she wanted.