As Uncle Joe sat himself down at the breakfast table next morning and gestured at Rosie to hurry up and pour his tea, he commented on the recent activities of Sinn Fein, the Shinners, as he always called them, the failure of the government to throw them out of what was now a Protestant state, and the disloyalty of people like her and her grandparents, who ran off for their holidays to the enemy’s country which was just the very thing to encourage them. Clearly, he was feeling better.
To her own surprise Rosie found she was quite indifferent to the old man’s tirade. She’d heard versions of the same complaint so often, over many years, and it had always distressed her before, yet this morning she saw him mouthing the familiar words as if she were watching a performance in a play.
Sitting in an out-of-the-way corner of the workshop while some neighbour occupied the one and only armchair, she’d heard tales of disaffection often enough. While other men complained of their job, their boss, the unprofitability of their farm, the demands of their family, or even the unreliability of the weather, only Uncle Joe had selected the political state of Ireland. Out of it he had woven a grim and hopeless garment that covered his entire dissatisfaction with the world.
At last, she understood why he never listened to any reply, nor indeed required any answer, to the irritable questions he threw out so freely. She decided she could safely ignore his morning devotions and get on with her work and not allow anything he said to trouble her further.
Her small satisfaction at coming to terms with Uncle Joe’s behaviour and the relief from his nagging tone as he drank thirstily and noisily from the tin mug which he insisted on using, disappeared promptly when she glanced across at her mother. Standing at the far end of the table, wisps of stray hair bobbing up and down with the vigour of her activity, she was cutting slices of baker’s loaf and buttering them for both Uncle Joe and Dolly and Jack. Unlike Uncle Joe, she couldn’t be ignored and left to rant. Her mother needed something much more immediate and tangible as a vehicle for her anger.
Thinking about it now, she could see her father had always been her mother’s chief target, but she’d observed over recent years he’d developed a cool, distancing manner which made it more difficult for her mother to goad him into comment. Looking back, she realised with a shock, how seldom he’d been available in the months before her visit to Kerry.
In the evening when he came home from work, there were farm implements and machinery awaiting his attention, lined up inside and outside the barn. She wondered if it was his absence from the house that had finally directed all the force of her mother’s anger towards herself. At the thought of the awful day of the accident, she felt herself shiver with apprehension. Should her mother treat her again as she had that day, she’d no idea how she would cope.
As to what she might expect or what her mother’s state of mind might be, the previous evening gave her little to go on. Martha had continued to ignore her while her father and some of her brothers and sisters were present. That was usual enough. The real test would come after breakfast when her father and Emily had gone to work and Jack and Dolly disappeared.
‘I’m sorry the place is so dirty, Rosie,’ Emily said in a whisper, as they got ready for bed the previous night. ‘I’d have done a bit more in the evenin’s after work, but she wouden have it. An’ ye know there’s no arguin’ with her.’
‘Never worry, Emily,’ she responded, as she pulled on her nightdress, ‘I honestly don’t mind the work. It just makes me angry the way she’s always looking for something to complain about. I’m afraid I’ll lose my temper one of these days.’
‘Now don’t go doin’ that, Rosie,’ Emily replied hurriedly. ‘It’ll only make her worse. Sure what does it matter for a few weeks if yer gettin’ away to Belfast to do this course ye told me about in yer letter?’
Rosie sighed and dropped down on the side of the bed.
‘Emily, I’m not sure Da will let me go.’
‘What!’ Emily exclaimed, so horrified she forgot to whisper.
‘Sure he wouden keep you here scrubbin’ and cleanin’ an’ runnin’ her messages when you coud be doin’ somethin’ better,’ she went on, whispering now, as Rosie put her finger to her lips and shushed her.
‘He’s worried that it isn’t fair,’ Rosie whispered back. ‘I know he has money saved, but it wasn’t enough to let the boys be apprenticed. You know he wouldn’t do one without the other.’
‘You’re all right, you clever girl,’ she went on, smiling at her sister, who had stopped applying curlers to her uncompromisingly straight hair and was staring at her open-mouthed, ‘but there’s Bobby and Jack and Dolly as well as me to think about.’
Emily shook her head and went back to struggling with the unyielding metal as Rosie told her quietly about their conversation in the barn.
‘Our da’s a good man,’ her sister said after a moment’s deep thought, ‘but sometimes he thinks too much about things. He shou’d jump at the chance of gettin’ you away to somethin’ you want to do.’
‘He did say he’d take counsel and consult his conscience,’ replied Rosie reassuringly, as Emily got into bed.
‘Aye well, I hope he hurries up about it. Mind you, I’m that fed up with baker’s bread and Ma’s cookin’, I’ll be glad to have you home for a wee while for some decent grub, if ye can put up with it.’
Rosie smiled, as she blew out the candle and climbed into bed beside her.
‘Well that’s something. At least someone will appreciate what I do.’
To Rosie’s surprise, her mother made no comment at all as she set about her normal morning routine, clearing the breakfast dishes, sweeping the floor and putting water to heat on the stove so she could make a start on scrubbing it. Martha herself disappeared to feed the calves and collect the eggs and still had not returned late in the morning when the first of her day’s visitors arrived, knocking at the open door, just as Rosie finished blacking the stove and cleaning the fender.
‘Hello, Rosie. Are ye back?’ a loud, high-pitched voice hailed her from the open door. ‘Sure, your ma’ll be glad to see you an’ her has so much to do. Is she still out workin’ with Uncle Joe?’
Before Rosie had even risen from her knees, the emery paper in her hand, the fender now restored to its silver-like finish, Martha appeared at the door, a warm smile of greeting for the heavily-built, grey-haired woman who was already standing by the stove, her bottom poised over the further of the two armchairs.
‘Sit down, sit down, Mrs Allen,’ Martha cried. ‘I’m sure you could do with a rest an’ you like m’self up from all hours.’
Rosie began to put away her cleaning materials in the bottom of the dresser, her ear already anticipating the familiar line, Rosie was just going to make us a cup of tea. When it didn’t come, she was completely taken aback.
‘I’ll make us a cup of tea in a wee minute,’ Martha began apologetically, ‘but Rosie here has messages up to her uncle’s. We’re right out of flour and bacon. Is there anything she can fetch for you while she’s about it?’ she continued, as she produced her purse, a piece of paper and a shopping bag.
‘Maybe Rosie, before you go, you might pay a wee visit to the wash house,’ Martha went on, smiling indulgently as she glanced at her hands, streaked and smudged with black lead. She cast a knowing glance towards Mrs Allen, now settled comfortably by the stove.
‘Aye Rosie, ye niver know who ye might meet ’tween here an’ the village,’ the older woman said, winking at Martha.
Martha nodded and smiled. The look that passed between the two women was simply to reinforce their often expressed view that all these young girls ever thought about was boys and if you weren’t watching them every minute of the day, you’d never get them to lift a hand to do a bit of work about the house.
‘Hallo, Rosie. Fancy seein’ you twice in one week. What’s got inta her?’
Lizzie Mackay put down the egg from which she’d just removed a speck of chicken manure and a small curling feather and placed it in one of the cardboard trays belonging to the wooden crate the egg man collected every week. She stared at her friend in amazement.
‘I’m not asking,’ said Rosie, laughing as she saw the look on Lizzie’s face. ‘“Why don’t you take a wee run up and see Lizzie?” she said, when I started to get out the baking board, so I did what I was told. I’ve run, before she could change her mind. Though I did meet Mrs Hutchinson on her way down the lane and I’m not asking you to guess where she was going.’
‘She keeps wantin’ to get ye outa the house,’ said Lizzie shrewdly. ‘She’s always sending you on messages or out to look for hens laying away. But that’s just great, for I’m fed up with these. Why can’t hens do what they have to do outside and not get it on the eggs for me to have to rub off?
‘Hold on a minit till I tell Ma I’ll be back in a while,’ she went on. ‘She must be havin’ a lie down for I haven’t seen her since lunch time. Sit yerself down a minit an’ wait for me an’ we’ll go for a walk.’
‘Isn’t it a lovely afternoon,’ Rosie began, as she and Lizzie fell into step on the short drive in front of the Mackay’s house. ‘Where shall we go?’
‘What about going over to Sandymount to see if they’re still pickin’ strawberries. Ma gave me money for sweets, but if there’s any still left, I’ll buy her some. She loves strawberries.’
‘How is she today, Lizzie?’
‘There’s no change,’ she said flatly. ‘The doctor says she’ll never be strong. I don’t think they ever knew what was wrong with her when she took so bad, but at least she’s better than she was. Da thought she was a gonner an’ he was near off his head. She said to tell you she was askin’ for you.’
‘That’s nice of her, Lizzie,’ Rosie replied, touched by the sick woman’s thoughts. ‘I’ll come and see her when she feels more like it.’
They walked quickly down the lane and passed the Hamilton farm without even glancing towards the open door. Across the railway line they moved more slowly, following the steep lane up as far as Harry McGaw’s smithy.
They turned left along the gable of the low, whitewashed building with its high-pitched roof. The much gentler slope along the hillside gave them back breath for talk.
‘So have ye heard anythin’ yet from yer man?’ Lizzie asked.
‘I had a letter this morning. It was five pages.’
‘Five!’ she exclaimed, her eyes wide with amazement. ‘What did he say?’
Rosie had considered bringing Patrick’s letter to show to Lizzie. They were, after all, very good friends who shared all their secrets. Unlike many of the other girls at Miss Wilson’s, Lizzie never gossiped or talked behind one’s back and she was far too good-natured ever to be jealous if Rosie had a boyfriend and she hadn’t. But Patrick’s letter didn’t exactly seem the kind you shared with a girlfriend the way she’d seen the other girls do, reading out the ‘good bits’, going into peals of excited laughter, teasing and making sly comments.
Most of Patrick’s letter was about books, telling her at length what he was reading and what he hoped to read. He went into great detail about W.B. Yeats and some argument he was having with the Abbey Theatre and what his friend Sean thought about the matter. About the Abbey, all she knew of it was its reputation for putting on controversial plays. She had no idea at all who Sean was.
To be honest she hadn’t known what to make of the letter. On her first hasty reading, as page followed page, she’d begun to wonder if he would even mention their meeting, the time they had shared, or the events in Kerry that had brought them so suddenly together. She was halfway down the last page, her heart sinking as she realised the letter was almost at an end, when he began a new paragraph quite unrelated to what had gone before and wrote in his flourishing script: ‘I think of you often my lovely Rose and hope you flourish in your far country until we can meet again.’
There followed a fragment of Irish. She recognised some of the words he’d written in her book of sonnets. Then his scrawled signature, Padraig.
‘It’s a pity he’s away in Dublin,’ Lizzie said, puzzled as to what one did when the object of one’s affection didn’t live down the road, over in the next townland, or at least within cycling distance.
The narrow lane was dusty and made narrower still by the untrimmed hedgerows, shaggy with the growth of a hot summer, laden now with ripening berries and threaded with honeysuckle. The hedgebanks themselves were spiked with rosebay willow herb, its drying fragments floating in the warm air like fibres gyrating on a spinning floor. Dark brown stalks topped by fine rayed spikes, the remains of cow parsley already stood out amidst the long, seeding grass, stiff skeletons bearing little relation to the soft fronds of green and cream that in springtime had waved in every breeze like the surging of a stormy sea.
Lizzie looked at her friend curiously
‘Will ye write back? What’ll ye say?’
The idea of writing to anyone, never mind the longed for someone, had never entered her thoughts. But then, Rosie was different from all the rest of the girls at Miss Wilson’s. She was cleverer for a start. She even read books because she liked reading books.
Reading books didn’t appeal to Lizzie at all. What she enjoyed most was being out and about. Going into Portadown on her father’s lorry; buying things in shops for her mother; making clothes; looking at the film magazines and reading about the Hollywood stars and their frequent marriages and divorces. But, when she thought of her friend, she always remembered what her mother said, ‘Lizzie, people are different. You have to accept them the way they are, otherwise you’ll get very disappointed.’
‘You’ve gone very quiet, Lizzie. Have I upset you?’ Rosie asked anxiously.
It was so unlike Lizzie to be quiet that Rosie wondered if this talk of Patrick had reminded her that she hadn’t got a boyfriend. With her dark curls and large, bright eyes, Lizzie was prettier than most, but Rosie had noticed how often she would laugh and be happy to be the centre of attention when there was a crowd of young people, yet grow shy and awkward should any particular boy speak to her.
‘An’ how wou’d you upset me for goodness sake?’ Lizzie demanded. ‘Sure we never fell out in the whole year we were up at Miss Wilson’s, did we?’
‘No, we didn’t,’ agreed Rosie, taking her hand. ‘But I so hate upsets and arguments and I wouldn’t for the world upset you of all people. Oh how I wish we could just all say what we wanted and agree to differ if we couldn’t agree in the first place,’ she went on, releasing Lizzie’s hand to sweep stray hair back from her cheeks.
‘Sure there’s people thrive on argument,’ Lizzie came back sharply. ‘It’s just you’re not one of them. It’s one reason I like you.’
She looked away and studied the lane ahead. There was nothing out of the ordinary anywhere on the lane ahead, but Lizzie was sure she’d seen tears as Rosie brushed back her hair, tears that had come unbidden, prompted by the very thought of ‘argument’.
They could see the gate to the strawberry field stood wide open as they came round a bend in the lane and gazed across to the sloping fields where the pickers had been at work day after day. The freshly gathered fruit was sent down by the cartload to a special halt on the railway line used only during the short strawberry season, or direct to the factory at Fruitfield.
‘C’mon, Rosie. I think they’re still pickin’,’ Lizzie cried, surging ahead enthusiastically.
Rosie had just spotted a flourishing clump of blue Scabious in the hedgerow and was lost in thought, wondering if she should take some home to paint. It was some moments before she collected herself, hurried after her friend and almost collided as she shot out of the field, red-faced and flustered.
Lizzie pulled her away from the gate and back into the lane.
‘Whatever’s wrong, Lizzie?’
‘There’s someone there. A boy. But I don’t think he saw me,’ she went on. ‘He was lookin’ up at the sky.’
‘But what was he doing?’
Lizzie blushed yet more deeply.
‘You know,’ she said, nodding her head, as if her meaning was perfectly plain. ‘In the hedge.’
‘You mean he was having a pee?’
Lizzie was so upset, all she could do was nod again.
Rosie slipped an arm round her waist and gave her a little hug.
‘It’s all right, Lizzie. Boys go behind hedges all the time. If you had brothers, you wouldn’t pay any attention. Mine used to have contests to see who could pee the farthest or go on the longest, or hit a tin can or knock the clock of a dandelion. Why were you upset?’
‘He might have seen me,’ she said breathlessly.
‘And why does that matter?’
‘Well, he might have been annoyed if I’d seen him.’
Her voice faltered and her face crumpled as she bit her lip.
‘Lizzie dear, he might not have been bothered at all. He’d probably have pretended you hadn’t seen him. But even if he knew you had, what does it matter?’
‘I don’t know, Rosie. I don’t know,’ she replied, near to tears.
‘Now, come on Lizzie. We can go back home or we can go and see if there’s any strawberries. He’s only a boy and he can’t hurt you if I’m with you. Did something frighten you?’
‘No,’ she admitted, collecting herself quickly. ‘Let’s away an’ see if there’s any left.’
When they went into the field, Rosie recognised the boy at once, one of the Loneys of Tullygarden. He was stacking wooden boxes inside the gate and looked up as he caught sight of them. A tall, ginger-headed lad with blue eyes, creamy skin and freckles.
He nodded in a friendly way to Rosie, whom he knew by sight from bringing tools to her father’s workshop and turned shyly towards Lizzie who’d recovered her usual liveliness.
‘Are ye’s lookin’ for strawberries?’ he greeted them easily. ‘The field’s finished,’ he explained, ‘not worth the pickers comin’ again, but there’s plenty o’ wee ones if ye know where to look. I’ll give ye’s a hand,’ he went on, addressing himself to Lizzie.
‘So you’re still open to sell?’ asked Rosie.
‘Ach no,’ he said, shaking his head and looking puzzled. ‘I asked Mr Lamb what to do if people came and he started to tell me this story about a woman in the Bible called Ruth. She was a cleaner, he said. But then he got called away, so I didn’t hear the end of it. But as he was goin’ out the gate, he called back that if anyone wanted fruit for their own use they were welcome.’
Rosie tried not to smile, but Lizzie burst out laughing.
‘Have you never been to Sunday School?’ she demanded.
‘Not unless I could help it,’ he replied, beaming at her cheerfully.
‘Well that would explain it. Ruth was a gleaner, not a cleaner.’
‘An’ what’s that, when it’s at home?’
‘It’s someone who gathers up what’s left after the pickers have been.’
‘Like we’re goin’ to do now?’
She nodded her head and waved her hand at him, waiting for him to lead the way to whichever part of the field he judged most promising.
Rosie hitched up her skirt and got down on her knees in the dry, sandy soil. Other people might bend over to pick, but she found it made her back ache. Besides, she liked the feel of dry soil, even if it got into her shoes and she loved searching for the small, bright berries hidden under the ribbed leaves.
To her surprise, she found late flowers and green berries on the plants as well as the sweet-tasting strawberries. As she dropped the shiny, red berries into the punnet Hugh Loney had provided, she thought of placing dark, pointed leaves behind the fragile white flowers with their yellow stamens and then adding in some long, curling tendrils with their hint of pink.
She’d always loved flowers. Even as a very little girl, she’d picked twigs and leaves and whatever blooms or berries the season offered to put in a jam pot in the workshop or a vase in the kitchen window. She’d taken flowers to her teacher at Richhill Public Elementary and at Miss Wilson’s she’d won little prizes for the best arrangements of flowers from the large, rambling garden behind her house. But she’d never thought of painting flowers.
During those first days in Kerry she’d taken out the paint box her grandparents had bought her. She’d worked on both landscapes and seascape, but although she loved the idea of painting, and thought longingly of her cousin’s watercolours at Rathdrum, she admitted she couldn’t get the feel of either. It was then her grandmother suggested she try her hand at painting flowers in the hotel garden. Once she began, it came so easily, and now, everywhere she looked, she saw shapes and colours she longed to paint.
From a little distance away she heard the sound of laughter. She glanced up, but immediately dropped her eyes again. Sitting on either side of a row of plants, their hands reaching across the small distance between them, mouths and fingers stained with juice, Lizzie and Hugh were dividing strawberries with their teeth and passing them across to each other in some private attempt to find the sweetest fruit.
Rosie felt her spirits rise so much she felt happier than she could ever remember. Completely overwhelmed by a sudden and unexpected joy, she got up and moved further away from Lizzie and Hugh, so bound up in themselves they didn’t even notice her going. She settled herself again on the warm earth, her eyes moving over the receding lines of plants as they followed the curve of the hillside and led her eye down to the valley below.
The shadows were lengthening as the afternoon moved on, but the sun was warm on her hands and face, the far hillside patched with pale gold where the stubble left from the hay harvest had not yet sprouted new growth. Further away, beyond orchards and stretches of woodland, a finger of stone stood on the flattened summit of a green hill, its sharp outline gleaming in the sunlight as it pointed up at the clear blue sky.
‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of delight,’ she whispered to herself, laughing at the picture she must present, a girl sitting in the middle of a strawberry field, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, the warmth of the sun on her face. Even as she whispered the familiar line, the dark shadows which had clung to her through these two long weeks back at the farm dissolved into warmth and laughter.