Just Between Us (47 page)

‘Forget the dramatics, Tara. This isn’t an episode of your show. It’s real life and it’s over.’ With uncharacteristic roughness, he shrugged her off him.

‘Don’t go,’ she wailed. But he was gone anyway and the next thing she heard was the front door slamming. At least he hadn’t taken anything with him, Tara reasoned with herself. He’d be back, she knew it, and then she could make everything all right. She’d tell him that she’d felt lost and alone because of his drinking, but that they could deal with that. She’d been stressed, she’d acted out of character, she loved him and no matter how much he hated what she’d done, she hated it more. And she hated herself.

Still working out what she’d say, she made her way slowly
into the living room but stopped at the door. Something was wrong, where was all their stuff? The stereo, the CDs, the black leather recliner that Finn loved even though it was old and the leather was paper-thin in places: all gone.

Blindly, she rushed into their bedroom. The wardrobe doors were open and Finn’s side was cleared out. The only things left were the shirts she’d bought him, hanging forlornly in the empty space. His clock radio was gone, along with all his books, magazines and photos. He must have done it today while she was at work.

Walking shakily like an invalid on her feet for the first time in ages, Tara returned to the living room and numbly surveyed what was left. She’d spent months remarking that they had too much stuff between them and that the apartment would benefit from a ruthless clean out. Well, it was certainly cleaned out now. Tara sank onto the couch.

Finn was gone for good and it was all her fault.

The weather in Castletown had changed. As if Mother Nature had decided to reflect Rose’s darkening mood, the sun sulked and sent clouds out in her place. Storms wracked the east coast, dispatching punishing winds and torrential rain to keep the locals and holidaymakers indoors.

Rose sat at the window in Nettle Cottage for the third day in a row and watched colossal waves topped with dancing white caps in the distance. There were no boats beyond the shelter of the harbour, not with gale force warnings on every weather forecast.

‘I hate the rain,’ remarked Freddie, pulling on an elaborate dog-walking-in-the-rain costume that included a strange-looking oilskin that Sherlock Holmes might have liked.

‘It’s depressing, all right,’ agreed Rose, still staring blankly into the middle distance. She’d felt so happy to see Stella and Amelia, but now, that happiness had vanished and all that was left was a lingering sense that she’d let everyone down. Tara, Holly, even Adele. They all needed her and she’d swanned off and left them. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known about Hugh for years. She had. She’d just chosen now to make her anger public and they’d all been innocent victims caught in the crossfire.

‘Come on, Rose,’ urged Freddie, jamming a hat firmly down on her snow-white head. ‘Come for a walk with me. It’ll do you good to get out. You’ve been stuck in the house since Sunday apart from yesterday’s meals on wheels.’

‘No,’ said Rose. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Freddie easily.

She was gone an hour and when she returned, wet and windswept with three happy, muddy dogs, Rose didn’t appear to have moved a muscle.

Freddie said nothing but took herself off to the bathroom for a boiling hot bath to ease her aching muscles. Her left ankle twinged where she’d put her foot down on an unsteady piece of bank by the stream and it had collapsed under her. The ankle had hurt when she walked on it, and now, after the long trek home, it felt ominously bigger than the other ankle.

In the bath, it seized up altogether and it took all of Freddie’s strength to haul herself out. Sitting in an ungainly heap on the cotton bath rug, naked, wet and with a throbbing ankle, even the indefatigable Freddie felt a frisson of fear for the future. She would not give up her enormous roll-top bath for some old-lady shower thing with a sit-up bath. She’d die first. She might be getting older but she wasn’t an invalid. After a few minutes rest where she’d given herself a stern talking to for such miserable thoughts, she hobbled out of the bathroom, wrapped in her Chinese silk dressing gown.

‘Rose,’ she said, wincing at the pain, ‘I don’t suppose you’d have a look at my ankle. I seem to have twisted it.’

Rose jumped up in concern. ‘Freddie, what did you do to it?’ she asked, helping her aunt to the couch.

‘Sort of twisted it by the stream,’ Freddie said, as Rose helped her swing both legs onto the couch.

‘That looks very swollen and painful,’ Rose said worriedly. ‘I’d better call the doctor.’

‘Nonsense,’ declared Freddie. ‘There’s not a thing wrong with it that a rest and some arnica won’t cure.’

‘You’re overruled,’ said Rose firmly. Freddie looked mutinous at this attempt to impinge upon her independence, so Rose sweetened the pill. ‘Besides,’ she said airily, picking up the phone, ‘the sooner your ankle heals, the sooner you’ll be back walking the dogs again. They’re never entirely happy
walking with just me, you know. They keep looking back to see where you are.’

Freddie grinned and relaxed back against the cushions. ‘That’s a classic piece of manipulation,’ she said, ‘but as it was so expertly done, I won’t complain.’

The doctor arrived late that afternoon. He strapped Freddie’s ankle up, gave her painkillers and drugs to take any inflammation down, and told her to stay off it for as long as possible. He also checked her blood pressure and chest.

‘Fit as a fiddle,’ he remarked, putting his stethoscope back in his bag. ‘Freddie, you’re living proof that lots of wine, fresh air and not worrying are the secret to a long life.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Have you stopped smoking those cigarillos yet?’

‘No,’ said Freddie defiantly.

The doctor laughed and Rose joined in. ‘My other patients all lie when I ask them things like that, but you’re always brutally honest.’

‘I have a couple every day and they haven’t killed me yet,’ Freddie pointed out.

The doctor refused a cup of tea because he was on his way to the Albertine Nursing Home, which was on the far side of Castletown.

‘They do such wonderful work there,’ he said, ‘and they’ve lost another care worker this week. Without volunteers, I don’t know how they’re going to stay open. The staff are fully stretched as it is. I don’t know what’ll happen to all the patients if they have to close.’

‘Blast this ankle,’ said Freddie furiously. ‘If I wasn’t laid up, I could help.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘But if you got me some sort of crutch, I could hobble around…’

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Rose. ‘You’ll rest until your ankle’s better. I’ll help. I’ve no experience of nursing homes, but I can make beds and that sort of thing,’ she said to the doctor. ‘Would that be any good?’

Both he and Freddie looked delighted at this offer.

‘You’d be perfect,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone the matron and get her to call you. In the meantime, you rest up, Madam,’ he said to Freddie.

It was nice to be looking after someone again, Rose thought on Thursday morning as she made breakfast for Freddie. Under normal circumstances, Freddie required absolutely no looking after and prided herself on fierce independence.

‘You’re a natural at this,’ Freddie said as Rose laid a tray on her lap.

‘At making scrambled eggs?’ laughed Rose.

‘No, looking after people. You need people to look after,’ Freddie said. ‘It’s the motherly instinct.’

‘I suppose I do.’ Rose finished her own coffee and got ready for dog-walking duties. Then, she was off to do the meals on wheels run on her own. Being busy was invigorating, she decided. She’d forgotten how good it felt to feel in charge of a host of things, things that would fall down like a house of cards if she wasn’t around. In Kinvarra, she’d been running the house, taking care of Hugh and taking responsibility for her various charities. Here, she’d had no real responsibilities at all.

Freddie, on the other hand, couldn’t conceal her growing impatience at being stuck on the couch with her ankle up. By the time Rose came back from meals on wheels and the supermarket, Freddie was bored rigid.

‘I hate this!’ she groaned. ‘Lying on a couch reading is no fun unless you’re
not
supposed to be doing it. And I can’t do anything.’

Rose, with many years of rearing small fractious children behind her, racked her brains for something to occupy her aunt.

‘Your box of photos!’ she said, in triumph. ‘You said you’ve been meaning to date and sort them into albums for years.’

Freddie brightened.

‘I’ll rush down to the town and see if I can buy some
albums,’ Rose volunteered. Before she went, she found the big dusty box which Freddie had stored on top of her wardrobe for decades. She settled the box on a low table beside the couch so that Freddie wouldn’t have to move to go through the photos.

‘When I get back, I’ll get dinner started. I bought some lovely lamb pieces and you can tell me how you’d like them. I’ll help with the photos then.’

Freddie didn’t answer, already lost in sheaves of sepia-toned memories.

In Castletown, Rose met the doctor who wanted to know if Freddie was managing to keep off her ankle. Then, she bumped into a posse of her aunt’s poker friends who promised they’d be up on Friday night for a game.

When she got home, Freddie had abandoned the couch and was sitting at the dining room table with her hoarded photos spread all around. Her strapped-up ankle was resting on one of the dining chairs.

‘Look, Rose, pictures of Anna. I thought I’d lost these ones.’

Rose leaned over the table and looked at three tiny black and white photos of her mother. She looked younger than Rose could ever remember seeing, her dark hair girlishly loose, her figure slight and youthful.

‘I’ve let her down,’ Rose said, unable to take her eyes from the photo.

‘In what way?’ Freddie asked idly.

‘By not staying married. I did my best to keep it going, Freddie. Mother was so happy when I married Hugh, it was what she’d always wanted, to see me move up in the world.’

Freddie took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose where the glasses had made an indentation. ‘I still don’t understand why you stayed with Hugh. If you knew he’d had affairs with these women, why didn’t you confront him? Because you did mind, didn’t you?’

‘Of course I minded,’ said Rose. ‘I adored Hugh, I was devastated when I found out the first time but who could
I talk to? Who could I tell? Adele? Hugh’s mother? My mother?’

‘Why didn’t you confront him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Pride, Rose. Pride kept you from saying anything. You didn’t want to admit that there was anything wrong in the Miller paradise. You clearly got all the pride out of your system when you flipped at your ruby wedding and gave the locals something to think about. Now you’ve got to continue the work.’

Rose began to feel irritated at this attack on her. She hadn’t cheated on anyone. Hugh was the person at fault here. ‘You said you wouldn’t get involved,’ she said.

‘No, I decided not to until you were ready for some straight talking,’ Freddie said. ‘Now, you’re ready. Go back to Hugh and talk to him, for God’s sake. Even if you kill each other within five minutes, at least you’ll have faced up to it. You can’t run away forever, Rose.’

‘I’m not running away,’ protested Rose.

‘You are. You ran away from your past, you know. You could never reconcile your new life with your old one, I could see that.’

Rose stared at Freddie, shocked now.

Freddie spoke sensibly and kindly, the way she always did, but the words still hurt.

‘Rose, you have to heal yourself before you can move on,’ Freddie continued. ‘I know this is painful, but let’s keep going. You never confronted Hugh because you didn’t want his family to think that you’d failed somehow, and you had to prove that you were just as good as them. And, Rose,’ Freddie was gentle, ‘you never seemed to realise that you were always just as good as the Millers.’

The truth of her words were like little chinks of light in Rose’s mind. She had done her best to prove that everything in her life was perfect; it was her defence. She’d done it when Holly had been born and Rose had somehow kept her misery and depression to herself. Nobody must know. There could
be no visible cracks in Rose’s life. Because of that, the misery lingered for years and poor Holly had suffered. Rose’s pride had hurt her darling baby.

‘Anna was happy because you didn’t have to work your fingers to the bone like she did,’ Freddie went on. ‘She was proud of what she’d done, that was an achievement to her, getting you out of the poverty our family had grown up with. But you felt ashamed of having left, didn’t you?’

‘Yes and no,’ said Rose thoughtfully. ‘It was just that I never felt I quite belonged anywhere.’ She remembered how her mother had insisted she stay on at school when most others of her age had long since given up. Anna Riordain had given birth to three children and had seen one of them die as a baby. Stoic in the face of this tragedy, Anna was determined that nothing would touch Rose and her brother, James. Six years older, James had grown up with a plan to emigrate to Australia, and when he was just seventeen, he had. Bereft of her beloved son, Anna set her sights high for her only daughter.

Rose could have helped out on the farm as a teenager; indeed, most young girls left school in their early teens to work on the land. Not Rose. ‘Lady muck, aren’t ya?’ the other local children yelled at her when she returned to school year after year, while they gave up their books to help their fathers.

‘Don’t mind them,’ Anna would say proudly to Rose. ‘You’ll do well for yourself and they won’t be laughing then.’

When the headmaster told Anna that Rose was his prize pupil and that she should go to the convent fifteen miles away if she was to fulfil her potential, Anna started piece work, knitting jumpers for the big tourist shops and their stream of wealthy customers who wanted hand-knit Irish sweaters. Ruining her eyes with bad lighting and complex stitches, Anna made enough money for Rose’s school uniform and her books.

She’d been paid buttons for her work, Rose thought bitterly. But that work had given Rose the education that allowed her to enter a different world.

‘I know you won’t like me saying this, Rose, but you are partly to blame for what went wrong with yourself and Hugh.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. You should have put a stop to it years ago or else left him. Hugh loved you but he was always a bit of a charmer.’

‘That’s ridiculous. It wasn’t my job to police him,’ Rose said heatedly.

‘True. But you could have told him that he had a choice: you and your family or other women. Not both.’ Freddie’s expression was noncommittal and she went back to sorting through the old photos.

There was silence in the room after that, with just the ticking of Freddie’s old clock breaking the silence. Glancing at Freddie, Rose saw that she didn’t seem the slightest put out by the exchange of views. She was quite comfortable working on her photos and stroking Pig’s ears every few moments when she leaned her furry head back against Freddie’s knee specifically for that purpose. There was nothing wrong, in Freddie’s eyes, with saying what you thought. Not saying what you thought was a far greater crime.

Maybe this was why she’d been so eager to forget about Castletown, Rose thought grimly. Both sides of her family were such combative people. Her mother had been the same, a blunt talker. Her mother, she realised with startling clarity, wouldn’t have put up with infidelity. She’d have held her family together by putting her foot down. But then, Rose’s father would never have dreamed of straying. Not like Hugh. The injustice of it all struck Rose. Freddie couldn’t blame her, Hugh had been the one who’d failed.