A Girl Called Rosie (5 page)

Richard Stewart arrived shortly before noon, parked his motor outside John’s workshop and came in by the back door.

‘Richard, how lovely to see you,’ exclaimed Rose. ‘How are my dear friends at Dromore?’

‘Both well and they both send their love. It’s you we’re all concerned about. When is it you and Uncle John are planning to go off?’

‘Some time this week or early the one after. As soon as he can organise a particular Lagonda he’s set his heart on. Don’t ask me for its model and number, I’m just so relieved that you and your father managed to persuade him to hire in Kerry. He really was quite prepared to drive all the way there and back.’

Richard smiled and followed her through the kitchen, down the hall and into the sitting room.

‘And what about
your
back, Auntie Rose? Do you think the journey will do it any good?’

‘It’s getting better, Richard. I
have
done what you told me, really I have. Mrs Love said I was walking much better this morning than I was when she went off to see her sister on Friday.’

He shook his head.

‘I know how much it means to you both, but you really must take it gently. It is a long way.’

‘It’s another world, my dear. But I’ve wanted to go back all my married life and we’ve never managed it. This might be our last chance,’ she said quietly, looking up at the long, sensitive face and the grey eyes.

He was just so like his mother, in manner as well as looks. Cool, calm, competent on the surface but underneath full of restless energy. There was nothing that passed before his sharp gaze that he did not observe, question and try to understand. It
had been no surprise to her when he’d won the gold medal for the best student of the year on the results of his Finals in Edinburgh.

‘And what about your wee granddaughter, Auntie Rose? Is there anything you want to tell me about her?’

‘No, Richard dear. It’s the other way round. I need
you
to tell me all you can about her and this accident she’s had,’ she explained, looking up at him. ‘I’m not coming up with you. You know your way.’

She followed him as he moved towards the sitting-room door.

‘She’s not usually shy or awkward,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘If she’s uneasy, it’ll tell
me
something.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Uncle John seemed more concerned about her mother than about the bang on the head.’

Rose laughed as she left him at the foot of the stairs.

‘Like your dear father, Richard, you don’t just look at a set of symptoms. I confess freely that I think my daughter-in-law Martha is probably a greater danger to my granddaughter’s health than any bang on the head.’

Rosie looked up from her book as she heard a light tap on her door. In answer to her soft ‘come in’ a tall, trim, young man with thoughtful grey eyes
slipped quietly into the room and crossed to her bedside.

‘Good morning, Rosie. You look very comfortable.’

‘Yes, I am. It was worth a bang on the head just to be here,’ she responded cheerfully, as he picked up the battered leather-bound volume she had just put down.

‘
Pride and Prejudice
,’ he commented, as he ran his eye over the bruise that stood out so sharply from the creamy skin.

‘Granny and Aunt Sarah’s favourite book. I always read it when I come here,’ she said, answering his unspoken question and beaming at him, as he drew a chair across to her bedside.

‘And what do you read at home?’

In the two years since qualifying as a doctor he had become adept at asking innocent questions, but even with two years’ experience he was shocked at the effect of his words upon this young girl.

The whole set of her face had changed. The bright sparkle in the dark eyes disappeared. Even her shoulders, draped in a light bedjacket, took on a rounded shape quite out of keeping with her years.

‘I don’t have much time to read,’ she said awkwardly.

‘You live on a farm, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I expect it’s very busy at times.’

She nodded, her face closed, the bright smile so completely erased he began to wonder if he had imagined it.

Deciding that only a professional approach would now serve, he asked her what exactly had happened.

‘I tripped and hit my head against the door,’ she said quickly.

To his ear, there was something about the way she said it that wasn’t right at all. It sounded too pat, too practised.

‘May I have a closer look?’

He took his time examining the bruise, touching it gently and asking her where it hurt most. He took her pulse and looked at her tongue, though he knew they’d tell him nothing he didn’t know already.

‘Rosie, when someone suffers a bad fall there are a number of possible causes,’ he began, grateful to see how intently she was listening. ‘Some of them are quite simple and obvious, like tripping over the cat. But some are more complicated. With older people there’s often a momentary blackout. That’s unlikely in your case, but one has to be very cautious with head injuries. It would help me if you could remember exactly what happened?’

Rosie looked him in the face and was surprised to find he didn’t turn away. Very few people ever
looked straight back at you. Apart from her father and Granny and Granda, in fact, she couldn’t think of anyone. Then she remembered Miss Wilson and Lizzie Mackay, but that still wasn’t very many.

She glanced down at the cover of her book, aware he was still looking at her, waiting patiently for her reply. She sighed and took a deep breath.

‘I can remember exactly what happened, so it wasn’t a blackout.’

‘Good. That’s splendid. You should be as right as rain in a day or two and Uncle John will be able to take you home.’

He stood up and walked across to the open window, looked up at the blue sky and down into the cobbled yard where his motor was parked near the little gate that led to the garden. He said what a lovely day it was, how well the garden was looking and that she could go outside now if she wanted to. He turned round just in time to see her hastily wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

He crossed the room and sat down again by her bed.

‘Perhaps Rosie, just to be on the safe side, you should tell me every detail of what you remember. Then I could be quite sure I was prescribing the right treatment for you.’

Less than a week after her arrival at Rathdrum, her bruised face healing rapidly and her good spirits completely recovered, Rosie found herself sitting beside her grandmother in the back seat of her grandfather’s motor.

‘Are you right there, ladies?’

‘Yes, we’re fine,’ they chorused.

Uncle Alex, friend and neighbour of Rose and John, touched the accelerator gently and moved out of the yard and under the heavy shade of the limes.

‘Kerry, here we come,’ he called out vigorously, as they turned left down the hill, past his own home at Ballydown, as excited about the journey as if he himself were setting off to drive the whole way there.

The July day was hot but not oppressive. Although the brilliant light reflected from the lush grass by the roadside was dazzling, great white clouds had built up on the horizon and there was a pleasant breeze as they drove to Portadown Station to catch the Dublin train.

Even when they followed the porter through the booking hall and she saw her father standing on the platform watching for her, a small suitcase in his hand, she couldn’t believe she wasn’t going home with him on the local train.

‘Ach yer lookin’ well,’ he said, as he bent towards her, put an arm round her and kissed her. ‘Aren’t you the lucky girl?’

He moved forward to greet his mother and shake his father’s hand.

‘It’s very good of you,’ he said, looking from one to the other.

‘Not a bit of it,’ John responded vigorously. ‘Sure isn’t she the one will have to do all the work looking after the pair of us?’

Sam laughed, relieved and pleased. Rosie would certainly make herself useful and she’d be good company.

The bang of carriage doors from the further platform, where the huge engine of the Dublin train gleamed in the sunlight, hissed slightly and sent sudden clouds of steam swirling up into the metal rafters of the train shed high above her head, told them it was time to go.

‘See you’re a good girl now,’ Sam said, hugging his daughter.

Rosie smiled up at her father. He still said the things he’d said to her when she was a child, but
whether she was sixteen or twenty-six, she’d never mind, for the gentleness in his tone was the one sure comfort she had always had.

He was watching for them as they walked down from the footbridge to the further platform.

‘See ye enjoy yerselves,’ he called across as they paused outside their reserved carriage where an elderly porter was loading their hand luggage on to the racks.

‘Giv’us yer wee case, Miss Hamilton,’ the man said, touching his cap as he climbed down on to the platform.

She handed him the case without a word, gave a last wave to her father, standing quite alone on the far platform, and got in quickly beside her grandparents, her eyes suddenly misted with tears.

She had never been further from home than Banbridge, nor left him for more than a week. She had never before been called ‘Miss Hamilton’ except when her mother was being especially sarcastic.

Suddenly, the carriage jerked and slowly began to move. She leant out of the carriage window as far as she dared and went on waving to him till he was long out of sight.

‘You sit here by the window, Rosie, and I’ll sit beside your granny,’ John said suddenly, as she turned away, grateful the clouds of steam could be blamed for the tears streaming down her face.

‘I’m all right, John. Really I’m all right,’ her grandmother replied, as she straightened herself up in her seat.

Rosie looked from one to the other. No, her grandmother was not quite her usual steady self and there was a note in her grandfather’s voice she’d not heard before. Perhaps they were as anxious as she was, going so very far away. It was easy to think you might never come back. Something might happen to them, or to her father. They might never see each other again.

‘Ye needn’t be one bit afeard,’ he said softly. ‘Sure this engine could pull two trains and sure there’s hardly anyone on it.’

Rose shook her head and smiled across at Rosie.

‘It’s years since I’ve been on a train,’ she explained rather brightly. ‘It was 1916 after your Uncle Sam was killed in Dublin. We went down to see his grave and stay a night or two with a woman friend of his. That’s eight years ago now. Time goes so quickly when you get older,’ she added, her smile fading as she noticed how closely Rosie was watching her.

‘She’s not telling you the half of it, Rosie,’ said John quietly. ‘But we’ll not say another word about it.’

‘That would be best, John. For now,’ she said, as she turned away to gaze unseeing across the passing countryside.

They all fell silent. John unfolded his newspaper. Rose leant back in her seat and closed her eyes. Rosie looked out of the window, absorbed and fascinated by houses and fields and hedgerows she had never laid eyes on before. She saw strong farms with well-tended stables and barns, poor houses with grass grown thatch, paths and lanes and cart tracks. Golden fields of cut hay, the after-grass sprouting bright green in the stubble. Wheat and oats not yet ready to cut, shimmering like a
green-gold
inland sea, rippled by the breeze. In the dense shade of a mature chestnut, horses swished their tails. Cows gathered in the short noonday shadow of a hawthorn hedge.

I’m going to Kerry, she said silently to herself. I’m going to the furthest corner of Ireland to stay in a hotel and we’re going to drive round and see the sights and go and look at the big house where Granny used to work and where she and Granda met.

She’d been through it a hundred times since the morning Rose had suggested it, coming up with her breakfast tray herself to show her how much her back had improved and to tell her what she and John had decided the previous evening.

Even when all the arrangements had been made, when Emily had been phoned at work and asked to pack her case, a single room requested from the
hotel in Kerry, the hire firm contacted about a larger motor than the Lagonda John had already booked, she still could not believe it. But here was the proof. The green fields of Ulster, its villages and towns, streaming past her eyes, names she knew only from Miss Wilson’s battered atlas. Poyntzpass, an unknown place as exotic as Paris or Prague.

Down there in that narrow main street people lived and worked and bought their groceries just as she did in Richhill. But these people were separate and as completely unknown as Poyntzpass itself. She wondered if they went for Sunday walks to the strange, broken earthwork called the Black Pig’s Dyke. Looking down from the high embankment, she saw its random shape breaking across the smooth landscape of small fields. She’d read that the dyke was thrown up as a defence against raiders from the south. There were those who declared it was made by a huge, angry monster furiously gouging the earth. But surely that would leave a trench, not a ridge.

She was still thinking about stories and legends and where they came from when she became aware that the countryside had changed. Now the fields were full of rushes, the cabins scattered and poor. On the horizon mountains rose, peak behind peak in shades of grey, their heads in cloud. The Mournes, Granny’s mountains. The ones you could see on a
clear day from the bottom of her garden or from the lane running down the hill from Rathdrum to her old home at Ballydown. Sombre now seen from this distance. Their outline unfamiliar from this different angle.

She glanced across the carriage. Her grandfather was absorbed in the
Banbridge Chronicle
. Her grandmother had fallen asleep, her head to one side and her mouth slightly open. With a chilling shock, for the first time Rosie realised her grandmother was old. Without her quick smile and the twinkle in her eye, the wrinkles of her seventy odd years spelt out the length of her life rather than the quality of her living.

She looked from her grandmother’s face to the face she saw above the rim of the newspaper. White-haired now, but still broad-shouldered and fit, her grandfather was a year or two older than her grandmother. He was still absorbed in his newspaper, reading methodically from front to back. He liked to know what was going on in the district and still kept in touch with the mills, though he’d retired from his directorship when he was seventy. She knew how much he enjoyed being called upon when there was a particularly difficult problem with the machinery.

She wondered what it would be like to be old. It must be strange to have most of your life behind you,
seeing your youth from far away, instead of looking forward to having all your real life in front of you. Perhaps it was like seeing the mountains from a completely different angle. They were the same rugged peaks, but you were standing somewhere different.

As the train slowed down on the outskirts of Newry, a cloud passed over the sun. As if a giant hand had covered the globe of a lamp, the sunlight was shut off. The fields lost their glow. The mountains retreated further from view. With a sudden gasp, as if her heart had stopped, she realised that being old, her grandparents would die. Unless there was some awful accident, they’d not die together, so one of them would be left alone, desolate, after a whole lifetime of loving.

The thought appalled her and she had to look yet more vigorously out of the window in case either of them should notice how upset she was. She was grateful when the train whistled and slowed to a halt alongside a more crowded platform. The carriage door opened and a man and woman got in, apologising politely for having to step over their feet in the narrow space between the seats.

Rose woke up and collected herself as the newcomers settled by the window at the far side of the carriage.

‘Goodness Rosie, I must have fallen asleep. How rude of me. Were you bored?’

‘No, not a bit. It’s all so new and so interesting. I wish I had Miss Wilson’s atlas so I could follow where we were.’

‘Remind me when we get to Dublin, Rosie, and I’ll buy you a map of Ireland,’ John said, folding up his paper. ‘It might come in handy for your granny as well,’ he added with a smile. ‘She’s been up and down to Dublin a few times now, as well as the first time we did the journey together, but she’s not been back to Kerry since she came up to Dublin in a coach. I was out with the driver that time, but I’m not sure how much chance she got to see where she was going. She had a ladyship for company.’

To Rosie’s delight, her grandmother laughed and caught a hand to her mouth in sudden recollection. Her own dark thoughts disappeared as rapidly as the shadows off the land when the sun broke through again. Her grandmother began to tell her about the longest journey she had ever made, by coach and train from Currane Lodge in Kerry, to John’s mother’s house at Annacramp, a few miles outside Armagh.

‘In a coach, Granny? But weren’t there any trains?’

‘Oh yes, there were trains, but the old families went on using their coaches. If they hadn’t had coaches, your grandfather and I would never have met. You don’t need a groom with you when you travel by train.’

‘But were you a groom, Granda? And how
did
you meet him then?’ she asked excitedly, turning from one to the other.

‘Well, ye see, it was like this,’ John began, angling himself in his seat so he could look across at his granddaughter more comfortably.

Rose smiled and said nothing. John was happy to tell the story yet once more. Whatever reservations she might have about the details which had been added over the years, she’d certainly not spoil his pleasure in the telling, nor his enjoyment of his granddaughter’s response by pointing them out.

Rosie too sat back in her seat, the broken hill country of southern Armagh forgotten for the moment. Just sometimes she had managed to get her father to tell her stories about the past, but it was always difficult. He would never talk about his experiences if her mother were there, so it was only if she could go over to the barn that there was any hope at all. Getting him started depended on the job. It was no good if the job was complicated or noisy, it had to be something simple and routine. But when he did begin, he’d use exactly the same words as her grandfather had just used: ‘Well, ye see, it was like this.’

Her mother never had any time for stories and got very angry if she found her husband telling the children about what happened long ago. She’d say
he lived in the past, that he needed to move with the times, shake himself up a bit.

It wasn’t just telling stories that made her angry. There was something in the way her father did things, perfectly ordinary things like cutting a loaf of bread, or cleaning his boots, that her mother couldn’t tolerate any better than his talking about the past. He was so calm and steady, so methodical, in every-thing he did, his very calmness, his steadiness, seemed to exasperate her.

She’d often seen her mother look across at him from her seat by the fire, her face taut with displeasure, then jump up and busy herself with jobs she hated and normally left for Rosie herself to do. She’d work quickly, sweeping the floor so vigorously she knocked the brush against the table or dresser. She’d clean the windows and rub so hard they rattled, or blacken the stove fiercely, or polish its silver edges so rapidly the emery paper tore.

Hastily, she put her mother out of mind and concentrated on what Granda was saying. He’d got to the point where Sir Capel Molyneux asked him to go to Kerry as a groom, because the groom’s old mother was ill and a coach can’t manage without someone to help the driver.

She listened hard, already aware she could easily persuade him to tell her many more stories, now he had time and leisure for a whole fortnight, and
Granny too. She was sure Granny had stories to tell, but when she and Emily visited, there’d never been the opportunity, for Emily always wanted to do things and go places. She hated listening to anyone, even Granny. She said it reminded her of school.

The July sunshine sparkled on the Irish Sea and turned the empty beaches to pale gold as they steamed south towards Dublin. It continued to shine through their brief stay in the city and was still unbroken on the long day’s travel from Dublin southwards to Cork. Then onwards from Cork, ever westwards, till they finally reached the small station at Kenmare and drove the last miles of their journey to Waterville, the little town that had grown up on a narrow neck of land between the shimmering waters of Ballinskelligs Bay and Lough Currane itself.