When Clare woke the next morning she could hardly believe she’d slept the whole night through undisturbed by dream or nightmare. Her mind was still full of the sight and smell of flowers and of the stillness of the lovely summer evening she and Jessie had shared in the lanes they knew so well.
She decided there and then that Jessie’s Aunt Sarah was a very wise lady. Whether or not what she had asked them to do was what she actually wanted for herself, she couldn’t tell. What she was quite sure about was that the evening had brought healing to the awful hurt Jessie had suffered when she found her father lying dead in the barn. However sad Jessie was going to be, however much she missed her father, Clare felt sure what she had seen would not now haunt her.
She was so absorbed in thinking about Jessie and the difficult time ahead of her, it was some minutes before the significance of the day for herself and her own future swooped up into consciousness and had her out of bed in seconds.
‘Today’s the day,’ she said to herself, as she poured rainwater into her wash bowl, a few little fragments of elder flower swirling round in the clear water.
She knew she was anxious. It was all she could do to eat breakfast normally, so that Robert wouldn’t be concerned about her. She could hardly wait to be on her way into town, so that she could be alone with her thoughts.
It was shortly before ten when she bumped over the level crossing and pedalled steadily up Railway Street. There weren’t many people about. Saturday mornings were always quiet in the city. The horse-drawn Wordy carts that delivered coal and wood, and the heavy items that came by train from the Belfast docks, didn’t deliver on Saturdays. The shops at this end of the town were small and very limited in what they had for sale. There were no queues to be seen.
She smiled as she cycled past the fruit and vegetable shop at the top of Albert Place and free wheeled down into Lonsdale Street. She remembered the day when the little shop had its first consignment of bananas. She’d heard about them on the way from school to the bus and had walked back to join the long queue, sure that Granda Scott would be thrilled to have bananas again. But they’d run out just as she got to the counter. A woman saw the disappointment sweep across her face and gave her one from her own ration. A strange, curved, pale green object. She had said thank you most enthusiastically, taken the precious fruit home to Granda Scott and been told that it wasn’t ripe yet. It never did ripened. It just changed colour slightly and then went bad. Bananas, she decided, had to be added to her list of life’s disappointments.
But what never disappointed her was her new school on the Mall. The buildings were old. Two Georgian stone houses separated at ground level by a carriage entrance that led to the stables behind. Inside, the narrow staircases in both houses connected only at first floor level. There were ancient bathrooms, tiled corridors and open fires that had to be looked after throughout the day. Not the ideal housing for a school, some would think, but its limitations never mattered to Clare. From that first morning when she’d struggled to dry her hair in what had once been a maid’s pantry, she’d been happy there, happier than she’d ever been, since she had lost her parents.
It didn’t matter to her or to Jessie that much of what went on during the school day, actually went on somewhere else. They played hockey on the Mall itself, their pitch marked out to avoid the cricket crease that was used all through the summer. Tennis involved a long cycle out along Lisanally Lane to the courts belonging to the local Lawn Tennis and Archery Club. Gym took place in green knickers in the Temperance Hall in Lonsdale Street. Science meant a walk back up College Hill to her old primary school and when Jessie began Domestic Science she would hurry across the White Walk and up into the town to the old Market house, now the Technical School. For really special events like Prize Day, the whole school wound itself in a long, dark green line, across the Mall, up Russell Street and down English Street to the City Hall, where they climbed the wide, shallow staircase and sat on blue plush seats laid out in rows on the highly-polished and beautifully-sprung dance floor, juniors at the front, seniors behind, parents up on the balcony above and staff and governors on a stage, hung with wonderful red velvet curtains that swept aside dramatically when the proceedings were about to begin.
As she wheeled her bicycle up the entry she saw a blackboard propped up outside the steep steps leading down into the maid’s pantry. The results had been delayed. Would girls please return at 11 o’clock, or expect them to arrive in the post on Monday.
Clare moved on to the old stables now a bicycle shed and found a crop of bicycles most of which she recognised. She parked her own and stood looking around her. Since the end of June, the small plants that made their homes in the crevices of the old walls had really come on. Herb Robert cascaded down the rough, worn stones, its leaves already tinged with red. Ivy-leafed toad flax showed minute purple blooms, and here and there, with a fine disregard for the season, bright bunches of wallflower flourished wherever the mortar was loose or a piece of coping had fallen away and left a gravely hollow in the top of the wall.
She climbed the steps which led on through the stable block into the open space of unkempt grass where they walked and talked in the lunch hour on fine days. It was only a broken path now, through what had once been a productive garden, but on either side neighbouring houses still kept their fruit trees and current bushes, their cloches and cold frames, their patches for vegetables and their lines of flowers for cutting, sweet peas and dahlias, roses and chrysanthemums. Watching their progress from day to day was one of the delights of the summer term.
She found she had the old garden all to herself. All the other girls in her class must have gone to sit on the Mall or spend their sweet coupons at the little shop on the far side, beside the five storey warehouse that had just re-opened as a slipper factory.
So glad to be alone, she picked a tussock of grass in a sunny spot and sat down.
‘What’s the worst that can happen, Clare?’ she whispered to herself.
That’s what Ronnie would say. Dear Ronnie. What a good friend he’d been to her. He’d written her letters and sent her books. Once when he was on a cycling holiday with some friends from Queen’s, they’d arrived to visit her and Granda Scott and thoughtfully brought their rations with them. He’d wanted her to come up to Belfast for his graduation just last month, but it had been too difficult. Though he’d found somewhere for her to stay, she’d had to think about the train fare and what to wear. But what settled it was the July date so close to The Twelfth. She knew Granda Scott needed her to get him ready for the one great occasion in the year when he wore his stiff collar, his one and only suit and his well-brushed hard hat.
Clare heard the cathedral clock strike the half hour. The morning was so fine and pleasant the chimes seemed as close as when she heard them from the field on the Cathedral Road where she’d played with William, long ago.
The thought of William made her feel both sad and uneasy. She had tried to keep in touch with him for she was sure that was what her parents would have wanted, but her efforts hadn’t been very successful. After the first visit to the farm when Uncle Jack had come and taken her and Granda Scott over for tea, there had been other Sunday visits when Uncle Billy or one of the visiting brothers came and collected her on their motorbike. As far as seeing William was concerned those were just as unsuccessful. If William had anyone else to play with he ignored her. Indeed, whenever they joined the other cousins at the tea table, both her grandparents had to check him for being rude to her.
That was nothing new with William and Clare felt she should ‘make allowances’. Her mother had always taught her that some people have difficulties that we don’t really understand, like Granny Scott who had always complained all her life, even when she was young and hadn’t anything wrong with her at all. But after Clare’s next attempt to visit William she felt that even her mother might be upset by his behaviour.
One Saturday at the end of October she set off for the farm on her newly-delivered bicycle.
‘Yer sure ye can find yer way?’ asked Granda Scott, anxious as always when she did something she hadn’t done before.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, spelling out the route with all the landmarks and the names of each of the larger farms she would pass.
She remembered now how he had laughed and said she’d a powerful memory. He couldn’t mind the half of what she’d just told him.
As she turned into the yard, she spotted William poking a stick down one of the gratings that drained water away from the house. Although she’d rung her bell and called hallo as she came through the open gate, he didn’t bother to look up.
‘Whose is the bike?’ he asked abruptly as she got off and wheeled it over to where he was standing.
‘It’s mine,’ she said, propping it carefully against the whitewashed wall of the house so that the handlebars wouldn’t scrape.
‘Where did ye get it?’ he went on, crossly.
‘Uncle Harry reconditioned it for me so I could cycle to school and save the bus fares.’
‘Where’s mine?’
At seven and a half William was small for his age and certainly too young to go to Richhill school on the much busier Portadown Road, but Clare knew from long experience that William never listened to reasons. She could see he was angry and was still wondering what to say when Granny Hamilton appeared.
‘Ach, hello Clare. Is that the new bike? Have you come to give William a ride on the pillion?’
Clare had agreed warmly that she had. She was grateful that Granny Hamilton had worked out that William always had to be the centre of attention. But her relief was short-lived.
‘I want a bicycle too,’ he said quite quietly, as if he was talking to himself.
Clare shivered as she thought of him and the way he began to stiffen himself.
‘I want a bicycle too,’ he repeated, an ominous tone in his voice as he began to chant, his voice getting higher and higher.
Granny tried to get him to stop. She caught his arm, but he punched her and she was so taken aback that she let him go. He went racing up the yard still shouting and disappeared into the adjoining field, scattering in all directions the cattle that had been peacefully grazing there.
‘I’ll have to go after him Granny.’ she burst out.
‘No, you won’t. Let him be. Run down to the workshop and see if your Granda or your Uncle Billy is there. Tell them William is off again and I can’t run after him. I’ll away an’ make us a cup o’ tea. A nice welcome that an’ you took the trouble to come over t’see him,’ she muttered, as Clare ran down the yard as fast as her legs would carry her.
William would soon be twelve but he hadn’t improved much over the years that Clare could see. These days he usually did what Granda Hamilton told him. Her grandmother said that she didn’t know where Granda found the patience to deal with him for William never did anything without being told. You could tell him a hundred times to wash his hands or tie his shoes, she said, and he still wouldn’t do it unless you stood over him and told him again.
Suddenly, a large ginger pussycat appeared. Clare sat quite still and watched it as it walked along the top of the wall dividing the school grounds from the garden of its nearest neighbour. It walked as if it knew just where it was going, stepping delicately over the occasional projecting branch and bending its handsome head where the boughs interrupted its pathway. Almost at the top of the garden it paused, turned, and retraced its journey, a determined look on its face. Clare was intrigued. What could it have been up to? Had it some inner plan or was it just patrolling its territory?
Time had slowed down. She’d discovered that it did that sometimes. Like when you were bored, or when you were unhappy, or like now, when you were waiting for something to happen. When you were busy, or engaged, and especially when you were happy, time just slipped by. It disappeared before you could even look at it. It happened with the minutes, the hours, and even the days of her own life. She wondered if it might even be able to happen with the years.
She thought of the way Robert would say to some visitor, parked on the settle by the fire on a winter’s night, ‘Ach, sure you’d wonder where the time goes.’
‘Aye, it seems no time at all since we were trying to set a trap to catch Master McQuillan on his way to school,’ would come the reply.
Sitting quietly in her corner, she’d heard stories enough of Robert’s childhood escapades. She treasured them. From them she’d put together parts of his life that through a mixture of shyness and reticence he never thought to speak of, even when she encouraged him.
The theme of all these conversations with his contemporaries was always the same. Life sweeps you forward and before you’ve really got the measure of it, you find you’re getting old. As she listened on the long, dark evenings, she observed how some of those who sat by the stove were wryly regretful about growing old, others were resigned, while some few were angry and bitter, behaving as if somehow life had cheated them. It often seemed that a single event was the focus of all their discontent. It kept coming into whatever story they told. Always they spoke as if the whole of their life would have been different, so much more to their liking, had the particular event not happened.
‘Sure if I had my time over again, I’d not do …’
Almost like a refrain, the same phrase ran through her winters at the cottage.
Some of the men who sat back on the settle laid the blame on marriage and the demands of rearing a family, some spoke of the lack of opportunity in the countryside, even in the Province itself. There were those like Granny Hamilton had planned to emigrate and changed their minds. There were some who had come back home in the end, but now wished they’d stayed away. There were men who blamed the war for taking away the jobs that were beginning to open up for them when it began and women who said that it was children tied you to a grindstone of hard labour.
From beyond the steps, floating up from the entry, Clare heard the sound of voices and high, forced laughter. It must be almost time. She felt so reluctant to move. It was such a short distance, the path and the entry between where she now sat and the doorway where the school secretary would pin up the results on the old blackboard, but once she travelled that short distance, the world would change for ever, one way or another.
The cathedral clock struck the hour just at that moment. It didn’t take her by surprise. Having no watch, she’d grown so practised at judging time she was seldom wrong. If she was paying attention that was. Only when she felt free to let her mind follow its own paths did time steal away on her unobserved.
As she stood up, collected herself, and began to walk steadily down the path, she remembered that Uncle Jack had promised her a watch if she passed. He insisted he’d been saving up for some time now.
The disorderly mass of girls clustered around the board in front of her suddenly dissolved, as they dived into the building to collect their individual slips of paper. Heart in mouth, she stared at the scatter of F’s in the right hand column. There were quite a few who had failed, and as Jessie herself had guessed, she was one of them. A distinction in Art, which she loved, a credit in Domestic Science, which she was good at, a scraped pass in English; and then the single figure percentages in the subjects she hated or found boring.
Alison Clare Hamilton came just above the crease across the middle of the big sheet of paper. For a moment, Clare wasn’t sure if the black stars beside some of the marks were hers or belonged to the person above. Gradually she made out that they were indeed hers. She had distinctions in six of her ten subjects, good credits in the rest, even in geometry, which she always found difficult. And as if to confirm the obvious, at the end of her row, it said PASS in big letters.
Jessie was right. Only yesterday she’d said; ‘If I had a fiver, I’d bet you’d pass, I’m so sure.’
She stepped down into the back entrance of the left-hand house in which the headmistress had her rooms and made her way along the dim corridor to the staircase that led to the office. The girls ahead of her had dispersed. She heard their footsteps echo on the bare boards of the art room as they followed the one way system across into the other house and down its matching staircase into its maid’s pantry which led out through a tiled lobby into the carriage entrance.
‘Well done, Clare. I knew you’d do well, but you’ve done even better than I expected. How did you manage those wonderful marks in French and German?’
Clare shut the door with a clatter, surprised to hear the familiar voice when what she’d expected was one of the office staff. A slim, dark-haired woman with bright, mobile eyes, held out a brown envelope with her name written on it.
‘I think we might apply for one of the overall prizes on those results,’ she went on cheerfully. ‘I can’t imagine many people doing better than you’ve done. Especially in German. After only two years. There are some very nice, large, book tokens,’ she went on, knowing only too well Clare’s weakness for books and her slender means.
‘I haven’t quite taken it in yet,’ admitted Clare weakly.
‘But you are coming back, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes, I wanted to come back. But I knew I had to have a scholarship.’
‘Well, you have that now. No doubt about it. And really, on those results, you ought to start thinking about a University Scholarship. If you go on like this, they’d certainly have you at Queen’s,’ she added, as she turned to greet the next girl who had just pushed open the door.
She freewheeled down Asylum Hill, as she always did. As she began bumping fiercely on the rough surface opposite Mill Row, suddenly the penny dropped.
‘I’ve done it,’ she said to the empty road. ‘I really have done it,’ she announced, as she whizzed past Richardson’s gates. She was glad there was no one about, for she knew she was grinning like an idiot and she couldn’t do a thing about it.
‘I must write to Ronnie tonight,’ she declared for the benefit of a large crow that regarded her thoughtfully from the roadside verge and made no attempt to fly off.
It was because of Ronnie she’d managed such good marks in French and German. He might not believe her, but she’d tell him anyway.
She slowed down as the road steepened and passed between the railway bridge and the low mound where Mosey Jackson’s cottage stood hidden among the trees.
A few months after she’d begun at the High School, Granda Scott’s wireless packed up. He’d been very upset about it. The wireless was an important part of his life. He listened to the news first thing every morning and then again at midday. At night, he set his erratic, old alarm clock by the time signal at nine o’clock. They both knew it couldn’t be the battery, for Clare had taken it into Armagh to have it recharged quite recently. And if it wasn’t the battery, it had to be something in the works. That meant getting the wireless itself into town for a repair and there was no knowing how much that might cost.
‘There might be dirt in around the valves, Granda,’ Clare said tentatively.
‘Aye,’ he replied, in a tone which wasn’t so much agreement as a hope that he might receive some further information.
‘If it was, we could clean them with methylated spirit and a feather,’ she went on, watching him closely.
When he was anxious the whites of his eyes always seemed more prominent and she was more conscious of the stoop of his shoulders.
‘Daddy showed me how to do it,’ she went on firmly, ‘but we’d need to bring it onto the table for the light.’
‘Well, sure we could do that,’ he said, sounding relieved.
He lifted the wireless from its dark corner on to the table by the window and then looked at it helplessly.
‘It was yer father got this wireless for me,’ he began. ‘He bought it off some man second-hand an’ did it up. The wood of the case was all scraped an’ he revarnished it. Made a lovely job of it,’ he went on, running his hands over the greasy but undamaged surface. ‘I’m sure he took it to pieces as well.’
‘Oh yes, he did. I remember it now. There’s four wee screws so you can take the whole back off.’
‘Well …’
Poor dear Granda, Clare thought as she pedalled on. He was always so afraid of things being broken, for he had never succeeded in fixing anything very much himself. However skilled he was in the forge, he was no use at all at mending even the simplest household object. Over their years together she had seen him try but in the end she had to agree with what her mother had said long ago and admit that he had no hands.
Clare had cleaned the inside of the wireless exactly the way she’d seen her father clean Ronnie’s. Robert watched anxiously. When she switched on and produced a blast of sound much louder than she’d expected, he’d shaken his head and laughed.
‘Sure you’ve great hands, Clarey. You can put them to anythin’ takes your fancy,’ he said, beaming with delight.
They moved the wireless from its old place on his table by the stove and put it on top of the floor-standing gramophone, which had finally given up the ghost. Away from the stove, it wouldn’t get so dirty. And it was much easier to see the numbers on the dial.
Some days later, alone in the cottage, Clare turned the knobs, found dance music, classical music and a babble of foreign languages. She remembered her evenings with Ronnie in Belfast and the fun they’d had trying to pick up foreign stations. On this set, she found Paris was amazingly easy.
From then on, when she was alone, or in the evenings when Robert dozed by the fire or read his paper, she would tune in to whatever French or German station she could best pick up. News broadcasts she particularly liked, for after a little while she was able to work out what was going on. She made a game of picking up new words and searching for them in her dictionary. Often, she’d get distracted and end up making a lovely collection of new words, but forget the one she’d set out to find in the first place.
Robert was curious. No longer anxious she’d break the precious wireless by twiddling the knobs, he wanted to know what she was listening to. Sometimes, she’d turn the volume right up so that he could hear for himself. He would sit, his best ear cocked toward the set as if he were taking in every word.
‘D’ye mean to say ye know what them people are sayin’ to each other?’ he asked in amazement.
‘Not all the time,’ she replied, laughing. ‘But you get used to words if you keep on hearing them. The French are having awful trouble with their government. I hear about that so often, I can nearly always follow it.’
‘Aye, I’ve heard tell o’ that. But you’re hearin’ it from the French themselves, aren’t ye?’
When she had the chance to join the German class, a year later, Clare jumped at it, her ear already familiar with the sound and pattern of the language, even if she knew only the call signals of a few stations, the names of the broadcasting orchestras and a handful of words.
‘Well, what’s the news?’ Robert asked, putting down his hammer and leaning against the anvil as she reached the door of the forge.
By the smile on his face, she was sure he’d guessed.
‘I passed.’
‘Aye, ah know. An’ came out up at the top of yer class forby?’
‘Who told you that?’ she asked in amazement, as she sat down on the bench inside the door.
‘I heerd it on the wireless.’
She laughed in pure delight. She could see he was as pleased as punch.
‘Missus Rowentree phoned the school to see about Jessie an’ she knows that teacher ye talk about, so she asked how you’d done an’ got all the details. She says yer language teacher is powerful pleased.’
‘Did she come down to see you?’
‘Aye, she came to leave a message to say thank you for helpin’ Jessie out last night. She says she’s a differen’ wee girl the day. But she’s askin’ if you’ll sit with her at the funeral on Tuesday.’
‘With Jessie?’
‘Aye. An’ why not? Sure the pair of you might be sisters for all yer that different.’
‘Jessie didn’t get her exam, Granda,’ said Clare sadly.
‘No, she diden. An’ the mother’s not one bit put out. She says Jessie is no hand at the books, but it did her no harm to have her four years at the High.’
‘How was Mrs Rowentree? I hardly got speaking to her last night.’
He considered for a moment. She saw him make up his mind to speak and turn to look her straight in the face.
‘She was rightly considerin’. She said Jack had an awful fear of illness, an’ that his own mother died in agony with cancer. If he had to go it was better for him. She’d been in a bad way over Jessie findin’ him, but she’s over that now. Missus Taylor is staying with her an’ is a great help to her, she says.’
‘Mrs Taylor has been very kind to me too, Granda. If it hadn’t been for her encouraging me I’d not have got the Qualifying.’
‘Aye, an’ now I heer ye can think of the university,’ he said, looking pleased again.
‘I doubt if we could afford that, Granda, even with a scholarship,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Not at all. Sure we’ll get what’ll do us. Haven’t we managed fine since ye came with yer Auntie Polly and Uncle Jack and yer wee bag o’ clothes an’ the teddy-bear? We’ll manage fine,’ he said with surprising firmness.
He moved across to the bellows and leant gently on the long, smooth handle. The fire on the raised hearth had dropped so low that only a fine thread of pale smoke showed it was still alight. He pressed again and the embers glowed briefly. She watched as his arm rested on the shaft. The gentle pressure increased, the glow strengthened. In a few moments, the fire would be ready to work again.
‘Did you have any other callers?’
‘I did indeed. Sure I’ve two bits of news for you,’ he laughed, pushing his cap back and scratching his forehead. ‘Eddie Robinson was here and had great news. The we’ean arrived at breakfast time. It’s a wee girl and ye’d think Eddie had won the Irish Sweepstake, he’s that pleased.’
Clare clapped her hands together.
‘Oh that’s great. Just great. Margaret was afraid it’d be another boy and her with three already. She says three was quite enough, but Eddie was mad for a wee girl.’
‘Well, he’s got his wee girl an’ Margaret’s fine. She’s expecting you after dinner as usual.’
‘It’s all good news today, isn’t it, after such bad news yesterday,’ she said slowly, as she got to her feet.
‘That’s always the way. It’s always a mix. Never all bad, but never all good,’ he said as the fire broke into an orange and gold cavern ready to take the half-finished decoration for the top of a garden gate.
‘If I’m going to Margaret as usual I must get the potatoes on.’
‘D’ye not want the other message I was bid give ye?’
‘What other message?’
‘The one from the young man on the chestnut mare?’
She giggled.
‘D’ye think I’m jokin’?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ he said with a grin. ‘A nice young man, well-spoken. Knew yer name an’ that I was yer Granda. D’ye not mind him?’
Clare was baffled. Apart from Jessie’s older brother John, and Eric, the youngest of the Robinson brothers who was about her own age, there were no young men in Clare’s life. There were certainly no young men with chestnut mares.
‘He came to ask if you got home all right. He said you had a wee bit of a problem with your bicycle.’
‘Oh … Andrew Richardson,’ she gasped, as light dawned. ‘Some boys from the Mill Row let our tyres down when we left our bikes up against the wall by the Richardson’s gate and he pumped them up again.’
‘Aye,’ said Robert, as he pressed the iron bar into the heart of the fire. ‘Well, it’s good for business. He said he was for England in a day or two, but when he was next back he’d bring the mare for her new shoes.’
He looked at her sideways and smiled to himself.
‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think it was shoes for the mare he was after atall. But we’ll see. We’ll see,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Give us a shout when the dinner’s ready.’
Clare wheeled her bicycle up to the house. As she parked it under the gable, she wondered whether or not, given the dimness of the forge, Robert had managed to see that she was blushing.