The Life of Jane continued

                                Chapter Five - Jane and John continued


           For the four years Jane studied at McGill, she went out with quite a few men. But she remained in a secret engagement with one man, namely John Tytherleigh.
    Every summer, except one, she went back to Fredericton, and every time she bonded with John again. He was now a civil engineer, working for a small firm in Halifax.
     Jane worked summers as a waitress and cleaning lady at the golf club where her father came to relax.But she had a distant aunt on her father's side who lived in Halifax. Jane would stay for two weeks at a time in this woman's house. Maud Roberts was a tall no-nonsense high school teacher with red hair. She'd married once but now was a widow. "Her husband Ralph enlisted in the second world war," Jane's mother told her."He died during the fighting in France. After that Maud stayed single and never had a child."
    Maud didn't mind bonding with Jane. Perhaps Jane took the place of  a son or daughter she never had. The two women became friends. But after meeting John who came to her house, Maud told Jane,"No hanky-panky in my house Jane. I've promised your parents that I''ll  look after you while you're here and I plan to."
     By then John and Jane had already made love in John's cramped untidy bachelor apartment. But Jane was always worried about getting pregnant. "We can't keep doing this," she told John after a bout of passionate love making." I'm scared. Let's put it off again until we're married. I enjoy this a lot but I'm not ready to have a baby yet."
    "Jane, I'm a man," John said, as he lay beside her in his narrow bed. "I need sex. If I don't get it I get all frustrated. Besides I'm wearing a rubber."
    "Rubbers sometimes break. I still feel worried when we make love."
    The year after that Jane didn't go back to Fredericton, possibly to keep John at bay. She went to work in a hotel in the Laurentians, a popular vacation spot north of Montreal. She spoke French  with many of the staff who were French-Canadians. Most of the other staff spoke English as their first language.
    One day a letter came to her at the hotel. "Dear Jane," the letter writer Maud Roberts wrote to her in her neat school teacher's script. "I saw John Tytherleigh in downtown Halifax yesterday afternoon. He was with a young, attractive girl. Just thought I'd let you know."
    "Hope you are doing well. Love / Maud" .
     This letter which Jane read in her bedroom that she shared with another worker, didn't hurt her too much. She knew John had eyes for other women. But she also thought that once they'd marry, he'd stay faithful to her. And how could she complain about John's dating other women. Didn't she do the same?
     "We'll be together one day.Or maybe we won't," she muttered to herself causing her roommate Harriet, who'd come silently into the room in the last minute, to look at her.
      Just talking to myself," she said to Harriet with a smile. Then she thumbed through the daily 'Montreal Star' which lay on the floor beside her bed. In the paper there was a story on two of America's famous singing stars, the Everly Brothers.
     She hummed and sang to herself their big hit of the year or two before . "Bye,bye love/ Bye bye happiness." Harriet joined in "Hello emptiness/ I think I'm a gonna cry."
     But neither Jane nor Harriet cried or felt like crying. Harriet leaned back on her bed and smiled. She was young , and clever she thought. Life was sweet.