The Denniston Rose (12 page)

‘THEY NEVER COME to the school,’ pleads Brennan Scobie. ‘They won’t be there, Mum; I know they won’t.’

‘Leave your mother,’ says Josiah Scobie. ‘It is her choice. Now, come in the bedroom, lad, and let me hear your scales.’

Mary Scobie looks out her tiny kitchen window and up to the bleak mountains, which seem to press down on the little settlement. In the distance a heavy fog crawls down the slopes of black hills, softening and rounding the ridges. Soon all the Hill will be engulfed, silenced, deadened. She sighs. The landscape fits her mood — or perhaps augments it. Since the deaths, a lassitude that she cannot control has crept through her bones. Mary recognises the signs, has warned other miners’ wives against it, knows that living with the possibility of sudden death must be accepted, but somehow cannot help this endless, slow sinking of the spirit. Back in England
she had been the strong one, the Chapel wife who had used her faith and good sense to haul other despairing wives to the surface again. No one, it seems, can do the same for her.

She stands, now, at the window, her hands scrubbing and scrubbing at the same potato, waiting for the advancing fog.

In the bedroom, brassy arpeggios slide up and down. Young Brennan will be as good as his dad one day; there is music in his bones, no doubt about it. Mary dreams of another future for her youngest son. Not a mining life but one above ground, where the boy goes to work in clean clothes and returns unscathed. Where he walks down a sunny main road to a sunny office, and looks out all day at trees and other green things. Mary remembers the picnics in the bush when Scobies’ gang was scrub-cutting. The softness of the air, the spread of it all. She would be ashamed to mention, in this house, that she misses that time, but there is the truth of it.

Now Brennan is singing and his father is accompanying on cornet. The instrument is muted, allowing the boy’s clear voice to float above.

That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee
, sings Brennan, and his mother, Mary Scobie (not Tralee), cries into the sink.

It is not possible to go to the concert.

‘A brass band is all very well,’ grumbles Con the Brake, ‘but too stiff for an evening entertainment. Who can dance, you know, to a brass band?’

‘Who’s talking dancing? This is a formal occasion.’

‘Mrs C. Rasmussen, you are taking respectable too far. A bit of a clap and a stamp — you expect it if you pay money. Who can sing a good song along with a brass band, you know?’

Bella Rasmussen closes her lovely pink velvet curtains. Her secret bedroom indulgence, which no one on the Hill, except her husband
Con and Rose of Tralee, have seen. In the parlour she has hung proper and serviceable cream cotton duck, 7 ½ d. a yard and easy to wash. She raises heavy white arms and turns her back to Con, inviting him to unlace her stays. He attacks the armour with relish, the rough fingers surprisingly nimble among laces and frills. A seaman can untangle any knot.

But even in this excitement he has not forgotten the argument. ‘We will need a bit more spice in your entertainment or the men will go away disappointed.’

‘This is not a billiard-room occasion, man; there will be women and children. And the Inspector.’

‘The Inspector, I’ll lay odds, will enjoy a lively tune like any proper person. I am not talking bawdy, Bella.’

Bella turns in his arms and strokes her giant’s curly chest. It is rare for him to call her by name. It reminds him of how they met.

‘Tell me, then,’ she says, ‘what you have in mind and be quick about it, man. It is cold standing here in my skin.’

‘An accordion band,’ says Con the Brake. He swings his laughing wife into a step or two of the polka. ‘Squinty Tim has one, and Billy Genesis can pick out a good enough tune when he’s sober. And Tom Hanratty used to drum down in the Westport brass band. I want to grab him before Josiah Scobie finds out.’

Bella laughs out loud. ‘Oho, now we hear it. A competition. Get into bed, man. You are worse than my pupils.’

A little later Con rumbles into her neck, ‘They look down on us, you know, those Chapel miners. Think we are nobody much from nowhere. They should realise.’

‘Well then, gather your band,’ says Bella, softer now, ‘and we will finish with a lighter bracket. But do not expect me to entertain. I will be in an official capacity. And no dancing.’

‘Ah, come on now …’

‘No dancing. It will get out of hand.’

‘Out of hand is good. Kick up your heels, woman!’

‘You are teasing me.’

‘Ah, my Bella, Bella.’ He kisses her gently, hums a tune, his fingers accompanying on the broad expanse of her bosom. ‘We will show them anyway. You will see. Every Chapel foot will be tapping in spite of itself.’

Just before Con crashes into sleep, Bella slips in the news she has been holding back for months, fearing another loss.

‘Conrad, I am with child again.’

Con the Brake says nothing. Bella thinks she has missed the moment; he is asleep. But slowly the big man’s arms close around her. He rocks his beloved wife and they cling together like two lost children.

‘MY ASSISTANT, MRS C. Rasmussen, will announce the items,’ says Totty, trying not to grin. Deceiving this pompous little Inspector is adding spice to the whole evening.

All day the children have been on their best behaviour: sitting up straight, answering as best they could the Inspector’s curly questions. Totty has stood up at the front like a teacher, while Mrs C. Rasmussen has kept order from the back. Once, under cover of a cough, Mrs C managed to pass the answer to Rosser Scobie, who piped up, wide-eyed and innocent. The Inspector did not see through the game, although any mother would sense immediately that something was up; the held-back laughter in their faces has been transparent.

Now Totty, in fine cream taffeta sent by her mother from Westport, sits next to the Inspector in the front row at the Volunteer
Brigade Hall, which is still unfinished but at least closed in, and the only hall on the Hill big enough to hold a sizeable slice of the Denniston population.

Tom, who has built himself a cart and commandeered a pit pony to pull it, has driven around the community collecting chairs. Latecomers will have to stand.

Bella’s hopes for a united community are not quite realised. A dark, respectable and silent phalanx of Burnett’s Face miners and their families fill one side of the hall. The rest chat and laugh on the other side, displaying odd quirks of behaviour and clothing: Lord P’s scarlet cravat, Con the Brake’s outrageous waistcoat (embroidered by Bella), Totty’s finery, Old Huff McGregor’s huge braying laugh. It’s like two families at a wedding. But there’s goodwill in the air, for the sake of the children. No hint of how the evening will end.

The Inspector, dead centre in the front row, sits on a fine carver from Hanrattys’ dining room. All day he has been fidgety. Trying, no doubt, to regain his dignity, lost somewhere halfway up the Incline. He had appeared over the brow, crouched inside the wagon and clinging desperately to young George Abernethy, who does maintenance on the Incline. Eight interested and experienced Denniston children, though strictly on their best behaviour, could not quite disguise their scorn. Riding the Incline was part of life.

However, a good meal of corned beef and a steamed raisin pudding seem to have smoothed his ruffled feathers somewhat. Tom, sitting on his other side, engages him on the subject of government funding for school buildings. Totty hands him a programme, hand-written by the older children, in a very creditable script, though this Inspector would not notice. He has been mean with praise all day. Tom Hanratty, stiff with pride, points out to the Inspector the amazing fact that his six-year-old son has written a poem, and will read it himself:

On a makeshift platform the eight pupils of Denniston school are lining up. All are in white shirts. Rose wears a white smock — a surprise, as neither Totty nor Mrs Rasmussen has had any response
to their efforts to include Rose’s mother in this event. To the left of the stage seven men of the Denniston Miners’ Brass Band, three of them Scobies, are seated importantly. Each wears a miner’s cap to which Mary Scobie has sewn a brass button. Outside the lugubrious moans of a tuba can be heard. The eighth bandsman, young David Scobie, is nervously warming up his dead uncle’s instrument.

The hall is overflowing. Eddie Carmichael has allowed the skipway to operate an hour after closing so the families further up the plateau can ride it into town. Going back will be another matter.

Mary Scobie is not here. She has never ridden the skipway and has even less reason now. But unknown to her family, who consider her appearance a lost cause, she is plodding steadily through the dark towards Denniston. Brennan, in his excitement, has left behind the little waistcoat he is to wear for ‘Rose of Tralee’ and Mary is bringing it to him.

Rose is the only girl on stage. It is a mystery, the way people up here have sons. Perhaps the women’s bodies know. Totty makes good daughters, of course —two so far —but then she’s not bred to mining. Now five years a citizen of Denniston, Totty has become a handsome woman, forthright as ever but steadier. Everyone says she and Tom will go far. From the comfort of Westport, Totty’s parents have never let up the pressure on her and Tom to leave the plateau and return to ‘civilisation’. Mrs McGuire, habitually unwell, writes yearning letters to her daughter. Rufus McGuire feels insulted and in some uneasy way threatened that his pretty daughter should choose to consort with the rough trade on Denniston rather than adorn the family home.

Perhaps it is that Totty’s independence needs to be challenged and sharpened by a place like Denniston; perhaps it is her good solid Tom who keeps her so contented. There is no doubt anyway that Totty loves this difficult, damp, back-breaking, isolated life.
Five years ago Bella Rasmussen, noticing soft white hands and delicate bones, gave her three months at the most, and is pleased now to admit how wrong she was.

Apart from little Elizabeth and Sarah Hanratty, Rose is the only other girl at Denniston. Not a single one up at Burnett’s Face. It makes you wonder, Bella has been heard to say darkly when Burnett’s Face women are not around.

Rose is as excited as the boys. She hops from one foot to the other, chatting to Michael and Brennan, while Mrs Rasmussen has a word with the band.

‘I trust we will start on time,’ says the Inspector, fiddling with his fob watch. ‘Punctuality is a trait that cannot be learned too soon.’

This constipated little outsider can’t see what a milestone for Denniston the concert is. Totty says, with a painful smile, ‘I expect we are about to begin. Here comes the final member of the band.’

David Scobie, his lips swollen and red from practising these last weeks, takes his place beside his brother. He sits up straight and proud as his father has taught him, though the great precious tuba almost obliterates him from view.

The concert begins. Even the men are moved by ‘Bread of Heaven’. The fervour in the children’s faces and the way the Scobie twins lower their heads and frown like men to roar out their ‘Ever more!’ have the audience stamping and whistling at the end, with no care at all that this is a hymn. Men outnumber women four to one in the hall, but over on the miners’ side are at least five new women, pale and thin from the journey out. The community is forming.

Tom gives a good-natured speech, joking with the miners, to free up the money in their pockets. The miners respond with a bit of good-natured heckling. The Inspector is invited to say a few words. He fiddles with his watch again, clears his throat, and then
abruptly declines. A low growl, like a distant roll of thunder, sounds in the room. Any visitor here is expected to perform. Mrs C. Rasmussen quickly announces the next item.

Michael’s poem, ‘Sunrise’, is a hit. Totty is in tears; she can’t hold them back. What gives her son this bright confidence? His fair hair, falling finely over a high forehead, shines in the lamplight —he is like a sunrise himself.

‘Very creditable,’ says the Inspector through pursed lips as if he is judging a slice of lemon pie. Tom and Totty take no notice. They are too busy gathering, like a bouquet, the generous praises of local friends. The evening is going well.

But at item seven, ‘Rose of Tralee’, tension in the hall is palpable. An invisible but chilly wall separates Burnett’s Face people from Camp and Brake Head. Rose and Brennan, County Cork and Scobie, step forward to stand side by side. They can feel that the silence is different. Animation drains from their two faces. It is as if two flowers —one fair, one dark —are fading, drooping before the stony wall of colliers’ eyes.

The Inspector clears his throat. He has no idea.

Totty shifts on her chair, willing the music to start. It is clear the duet has been a mistake; Bella’s instincts have been wrong this time. Bella, too caught up with Rose, has misread the mood of the people. Their readiness to forget.

Then Brennan’s solemn face opens into a wide grin. He is looking to the back of the room. There is a stir as something is passed forward, hand to hand, over the crowded heads. Mrs Rasmussen, smiling broadly herself now, retrieves the waistcoat and helps Brennan into it. The audience laughs and claps to see the boy strut. The ice is broken.

‘Rose of Tralee and Brennan Scobie,’ announces Bella Rasmussen in a firm voice, ‘with Josiah Scobie on the cornet.’

Rose smiles. It is a straightforward, hopeful offering. With a rustle as soft as leaves, the audience accepts it.

The song wavers into life. Rose’s voice is true but thin as paper. Josiah is hardly breathing into his cornet but still he drowns her. Mrs Rasmussen frowns at Rose; touches plump hands to her own taffeta-clad diaphragm. Rose nods, her eyes round and clear as marbles. She takes a deep breath.

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer
, she sings,

But it was not her beauty alone that won me
.

Brennan joins in under her, stronger to match Rose’s growing confidence. Josiah’s cornet notes curl around the voices, a simple, beautiful thread binding them.

Oh no,’ twas the truth in her eyes ever shining

That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee
.

The audience is entranced. Rose looks steadily at a far corner of the hall. Totty glances quickly in the direction. Can the mother be here after all? But she sees only the crowd of latecomers standing along the wall.

At the end of the song Rose and Brennan turn to each other as Mrs Rasmussen has taught them. Brennan pecks Rose on the cheek.

Every heart in the hall melts. An encore is demanded, but Bella, unwilling to jeopardise her triumph, announces supper.

The Inspector helps himself generously to scones and fruitcake. Josiah bales him up in a corner. The miner’s flat nasal voice can be heard above the chatter.

‘It is buildings we need, Mr Sinclair, not bureaucracy. It is stupidity to expect our children to travel to Waimangaroa. In two years the school population will have trebled up here, man. Give us a building now!’

Josiah already has a reputation as a crusader. There will be a
Miners’ Union soon, no matter what the Company or Eddie Carmichael have to say about it, and Josiah will be at the forefront, you could put money on it.

Finally the Inspector breaks free and slips away to his bed at Hanrattys’.

‘Good riddance!’ roars Con the Brake. He has been drinking from some secret source. ‘Now we’ll have a bit of real music! Move back the chairs!’

‘Conrad!’ says Bella, but the men are already heaving chairs. There is a great rubbing of hands and stamping of feet.

Totty looks for Mary Scobie. There she is, sitting quiet and pale by the door, ready to slip out at any moment. Some have tried to speak with her but now have drifted away. In this crowded, rowdy hall she is surrounded by a small empty space. Misery and bad luck are contagious.

Totty sits down beside her. She is shocked to see how far Mary Scobie has slipped. Surely a miner’s wife must be hardened to death?

‘I’m glad you came,’ she says. ‘The Scobies were a great contribution to the concert. You must be proud.’

‘Yes,’ says Mary. She looks ahead and slightly down, focusing on a patch of bare floor.

‘Your twins are doing well at school now. After a reluctant start. They will get their Certificate.’

Mary’s bleak eyes look up for a moment. ‘Good.’

Totty wades on. ‘Brennan and Rose sang beautifully.’

‘Yes. They are a brave pair.’

‘Rose has much to be brave over. I hope you do not hold it against her?’

Totty has pushed too far. Mary Scobie rises slowly, like an old woman.

‘Well,’ she says, finally, ‘I do not wish to hold it against her.’ She sighs. ‘It is time for me to go.’

‘At least wait for the music …’

‘The walk home is long, Mrs Hanratty. And work to be done in the morning.’

‘Mrs Scobie,’ says Totty. She has a strong instinct to rescue this drowning woman. ‘I would be grateful if you could spare some time in the next day or two to look at my youngest. She is not well. Perhaps your experience might throw some light.’

This is not a complete fiction. Sarah has been flushed and feverish for two days.

Mary is only half caught. ‘Not well in what way?’

‘I fear it is her throat.’

Mary sighs again but there is a little animation, perhaps, in the formal smile.

‘It is hard on the little ones up here,’ she says. ‘I will come tomorrow if the weather permits.’

She drifts into the doorway. Totty is relieved to see that Josiah is watching. He moves out quickly to take her arm.

Con the Brake is watching too.

‘Josiah Scobie, man!’ he shouts. ‘I have sat through your Chapel music. Enjoyable too, in its way. Have the courage to stay for a band of a different sort!’ The accordion in his hands opens; a long, singing, sighing upbeat. Con’s head leans back, teasing the audience, prolonging the moment until all are listening. Josiah and Mary stop in the doorway. Squinty Tim and Billy Genesis unfold their accordions too, enriching the upbeat; Tom Hanratty hastily reaches for his drumsticks. Then Con’s head snaps sideways and the rollicking wash of a hornpipe fills the hall.