Reach for Tomorrow (48 page)
And then, at the beginning of November, when the approach of the harsh northern winter was already beginning to make itself felt in hard white frosts and frozen pipes, Rosie received an urgent message one morning that Annie had collapsed and was asking for her. She flew to Annie’s bedside, arriving just as the doctor was insisting Annie be taken to the Sunderland Infirmary. Rosie knew Annie’s abiding fear of any sort of institution - to Annie every one smacked of the workhouse - and once she had Dr Meadows alone in the kitchen she spoke frankly. ‘What’s wrong with her, doctor? Is it serious?’
Dr Meadows knew Rosie; he had watched her grow up and had admired the way she had fought back against circumstances that might have ground another young lassie into the ground, so now his voice was quiet and he answered candidly. ‘Annie is a very ill woman, Rosie, and has been for some time. When she started to lose weight a few months ago I suggested a specialist but she wasn’t having any of it. I think she knew then what she’d got.’
‘But . . . but she will get better?’
He looked at her, a long look, and as her hand went to her throat he said, ‘There now, don’t upset yourself.’
‘How - how long?’
‘A month, maybe two, but she will need round-the-clock nursing sooner or later and the best place for her is in hospital. It’s in the stomach and that can be pretty unpleasant towards the end. Perhaps you’d have a word with her, she’s got a soft spot for you, and you might be able to persuade her to see sense. Arthur and the lads mean well but the sort of nursing she’ll need is beyond them even if they felt inclined to attempt it, which I doubt greatly.’
‘She’ll hate going into hospital.’
‘It can’t be helped, I’m afraid.’
‘What if . . . Dr Meadows, I’ve room for her at my house. Why can’t she come and stay with me? I can nurse her.’
‘Rosie.’ He paused, choosing his words carefully as he said, ‘You’ve no idea what you would be taking on, my dear. It’s beyond one person’s capabilities and you have a child, haven’t you? It really isn’t possible. You have to be sensible.’
‘I can pay for a nurse, two if necessary, whatever’s needed. I would like to do that for her, really.’
‘But why would you want to do that?’ Like most people in the district Dr Meadows was aware of the circumstances of Rosie’s husband’s death, and although very little surprised him after forty years of working as a doctor, he was finding this young woman’s concern for the mother of the man who had effectively made her child fatherless was beyond his understanding. Not that it wasn’t commendable of course; it was, very, but not bearing a grudge was one thing, this was something else.
Rosie looked at him, and then she said, very simply, ‘I can’t bear the thought of her going into hospital knowing how she’ll feel about it,’ her calm countenance belying the fierce beating of her heart. ‘Please, Dr Meadows.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘It will be expensive.’ ‘That’s all right.’
‘And there is no way a nurse could stay here, you understand that? There simply isn’t the room.’
‘I’ve said I’ve plenty of space in my home.’
Dr Meadows opened his mouth to speak and then shut it again. Looking after a terminally sick patient was the last thing he would recommend for someone who had only recently been bereaved in such appalling circumstances as this young lass, but one thing life had taught him was that everyone was different. What crippled some folks made Samsons of others, and maybe this was just what was needed for this particular situation. But if he was wrong . . .
His mind was made up and the thing settled when Rosie said, her eyes holding his and her voice resolute, ‘Please, doctor. Please agree to this. She needs me.’
‘All right. If Annie wants to come to you and Arthur has no objection I won’t stand in your way, but if at any time it gets too much for you you must promise me now that you will ask for help.’
‘I promise.’
‘And if she gets difficult, awkward - and they can you know, this thing affects the mind as well as the body - you must be prepared to let her go to the hospital. It’s a matter of a few weeks at most.’
Annie didn’t die in a few weeks, and at Christmas, when Rosie had her mother and Hannah to stay, Annie was still very much in the land of the living. She slept a great deal of the time, mainly due to the high quantities of morphine necessary to control the increasing pain, but when she was awake she was quite lucid and always, in spite of the circumstances, amazingly cheerful.
Rosie had one nurse living in and another who came during the day, and it was they who did all the heavy work involved in turning and washing their patient and other such necessary duties. Rosie cooked the meals for them all and dealt with the mountainous pile of dirty bedding every twenty-four hours produced, along with the normal running of the house and caring for Erik.
Arthur and the lads visited Annie every day, often having a bite to eat in the kitchen and invariably going home laden with fresh bread and cakes and other tasty morsels. The routine was very strenuous and life was hectic, but in spite of that there was the odd time when it was just Rosie and Annie in the pretty double bedroom at the back of the house overlooking the garden, and even with the prevailing situation the sound of laughter could occasionally be heard.
‘You’re a grand lass, Rosie. You know that, don’t you?’ Rosie was sitting by the side of Annie’s bed, a roaring coal fire in the basket-style grate across the other side of the room casting a cosy glow over the furnishings. It was six o’clock on Christmas Eve.
After a word with her mother Rosie had decided she and Jessie could cope without the services of the live-in nurse over the Christmas weekend, although her associate would still be calling each day as usual, and Rosie had given the grateful woman the time off to see her elderly parents in Newcastle. Now Rosie had just finished washing Annie after giving her a few mouthfuls of soup which was all her grossly distended stomach could take. There were carol singers in the street a few doors away, their voices pure and clear in the cold frosty air, and the two women had been sitting listening to the strains of ‘While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night’ before Annie spoke.
Rosie now looked at her old friend, the once plump face skeletal from the illness which had ravaged Annie’s flesh, her eyes dark and sunk back in their sockets, and she smiled as she said, ‘Go on with you. You just want your Christmas box early, I know you. You think a bit of flannel will work wonders.’
Annie smiled back. ‘There’s one who can’t wait for her stockin’, that’s for sure. You’d think the bairn was three instead of twelve years old. She’s bin on the go all day long an’ she still can’t sit still. She’ll be straight back up once she’s done her cookin’, you mark my words.’
Hannah was downstairs with her mother, the pair of them making Hannah and Erik’s Yul-doos - baby figures made from Christmas dough with the arms folded across and two currants for eyes. There had certainly been no possibility of anyone in the house brooding over Christmas with Hannah about. The young girl had been dizzy with excitement when she and Rosie had decorated the downstairs of the house and Annie’s bedroom earlier, hanging paper chains and honeycombed paper bells from the ceilings and placing berry-encrusted holly over the mirrors and pictures. She and Rosie had built a snowman that afternoon in the sparkling crisp snow, Erik - muffled and cocooned in his pram like a baby Eskimo - looking on, and talking away to them in baby gibberish to which they had replied perfectly seriously.
‘I want to thank you, lass, for all you’ve done.’ Annie reached out and took Rosie’s hand in her two frail ones, her eyes soft. ‘I’ve always looked on you as a daughter, right from when you was born, I couldn’t help it, an’ no daughter could’ve bin better. It might sound daft, lass, but these last eight weeks or so have bin the happiest of me life.’
‘Oh, Annie.’
‘No, I mean it, lass.’ Annie lay back on the heaped cushions. She had been sitting forward and any slight exertion exhausted her. ‘You don’t know, you see, no one knows, but I want to tell you if you’ll listen? It might help you understand about . . . about Shane.’
In all the weeks since the tragedy neither of them had mentioned him by name, and now, as Annie felt Rosie’s fingers jerk in hers, she said, ‘I don’t want to upset you, lass, that’s the last thing I want, but if you understand it might help in the future. Not now, it’s too early now, but later. I’m ready to meet me Maker when He calls me, there’s nothin’ atween me an’ Him that I knows of, but bein’ here the last few weeks it’s bin like He’s tellin’ me to get it off me chest. Will you listen, lass?’
The last thing in all the world that Rosie wanted to talk about was anything connected with the events of the summer, and especially Shane McLinnie, but as she glanced down at the feeble hands holding hers she knew she couldn’t refuse Annie anything. And later, when Annie had unburdened herself about her suffering at the hands of her brother and the terrible night Shane had been conceived, both their faces were wet.
‘It’s strange how things work out you know, lass.’ Annie was tired, her voice slurred from her last heavy dose of morphine. ‘He was gettin’ near the truth an’ he’d have bin like a terrier with a bone, he wouldn’t have let go. He’d have seen his day with me all right an’ it’d have destroyed Arthur, findin’ out he weren’t Shane’s da. An’ Shane knew, that night in the kitchen; he clicked on he wasn’t Arthur’s, an’ he wanted to do for me then. But I found the strength, and the good Lord only knows how, to hold him off - persuade him he might be wrong.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Annie, none of it. You do know that, don’t you? You do see?’
‘I dunno, lass. If I’m bein’ truthful, I dunno, but I’m content to leave it in the hands of the Almighty now. He’ll judge aright. I just wish . . .’
‘What?’
‘Oh, lass, I shouldn’t be sayin’ it to you, not after what he did to your man.’
‘Go on, Annie, it’s all right.’ Rosie held the terribly frail body close as though her old friend was a little girl. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t mind.’
‘I just wish I could take him in me arms one more time, like I did when he was nowt but a bairn, an’ tell him I love him. An’ I did you know, bad as he was.’
The power of love . . .
Rosie continued to cuddle Annie close as she gazed unseeing across the room, and like a small child Annie had gone off to sleep without her next dose of morphine and slept all the night through until Christmas morning.
It was another six weeks before Annie died, and despite what Dr Meadows had feared the morphine went a long way to controlling the pain right to the end. It had been expected Annie would become comatose but her will to remain with Rosie as long as she could triumphed over her mortal body. She died looking up into Rosie’s face and cradled lovingly in her arms, and in the last minutes her face was wiped clean of all pain and anxiety and became that of a young girl again, a peaceful young girl; and such was her expression that it went some way to quieten the agony Rosie felt at her departure.
The announcement of Annie’s death was almost lost in the one thousand people a week dying from the influenza virus that was sweeping the country and creating havoc, but to Rosie, and Jessie, and Annie’s family and other friends, the world was less rich without her indomitable presence.
There was a special message in the little card attached to the wreath of pure white roses that Rosie laid on her friend’s coffin.
Your purity was never besmirched in His eyes, and now you are like a young girl again, washed clean in the blood of His Son and forever lovely.
I love you and I miss you.
Your Rosie.
Part Five
Tomorrow
Chapter Twenty-Two
The last twelve months had seen a great change in Rosie, and when she thought about the woman she had been before Annie’s death it was as though that girl was a stranger to her.
Oh, she’d all but raised a family when her father and the lads had died, she had married Zachariah and borne him a son, she’d been a friend and comforter to Flora in her troubles and a support to her mother, but she knew now that Annie’s revelation about her childhood and the conception of her youngest son had opened a door in her mind that had hitherto been closed. Before then, she had seen the world very much in stark black and white. Even when Molly had left them, and she had faced the fact that her sister had embraced the oldest profession in the world, she had still retained an element of naivety deep inside.
It embarrassed her now to think about how she had blamed Davey, if only in part, for Zachariah’s death. She had transferred her own feelings of guilt to his shoulders and she knew he’d guessed that. They had never spoken of it, however, and in the first few weeks after Annie’s passing, when she had been quite desolate, Flora and Davey had been wonderful to her - like a sister and brother in fact.
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