On a Clear Day (18 page)

‘Jessie, Jessie, my love, don’t cry, please don’t cry or I’ll start and I’ll never be able to stop,’ she pleaded, as she put her arms round her friend.

‘I’ll see him, Clare, I’ll see him every day of my life, lying here with only half his head left and the blood running round all the bumps in the cobbles and making a wee lake over there,’ she gasped, nodding to a damp patch on the barn floor.

Clare stroked Jessie’s hair and abandoned her own attempt not to cry. Her tears poured down unheeded on to the soft brown hair as she knelt in the fresh cut straw where her friend had thrown herself again.

Neither girl heard the door behind them open, nor did they notice the small, weary figure who stood there looking at them intently as they clutched each other wordlessly.

‘Jessie, Clare.’

Clare was the first to hear. Startled, she looked up and saw Mrs Taylor, Jessie’s aunt, standing very straight, a dark outline against the brightness of the sunlit farmyard behind.

Sarah Taylor walked towards them, bent down and kissed Jessie and then, to Clare’s surprise, kissed her too, her lips dry against her wet cheeks.

‘Now, my dears, I have to ask you a favour. I take it, Jessie, this is the place where my little brother died.’

Jessie nodded and drew the sleeve of her cardigan hastily across her eyes.

‘Well, there is something I should like to do, but I fear I have neither the strength, nor the skill,’ she began. ‘I would like to leave flowers here for Jack. When he was a little boy he used to bring flowers for me. He knew I loved flowers, no matter what kind they were. Buttercups or daisies, things from the garden, honeysuckle from the hedgerows, leaves or berries. Anything that grew. And I’d like to acknowledge that. Will you do that for me?’

They got to their feet and looked down at her.

‘Lots of flowers, Mrs Taylor?’ asked Clare who wanted to be sure she understood.

‘Yes, an extravagance of flowers, Clare. So many it will take you both to carry them and the rest of this lovely evening light to find them,’ she said, turning on her heel as if to depart. ‘I’ll tell your mother, Jessie, that you’ve offered to do something for me. I’m sure she can spare you with all these other people who are so anxious to help her.’

Together they rode the lanes. There was plenty of late honeysuckle twining its way through the quickset hawthorn and climbing the branches of the larger bushes and trees planted to give body to the hedgerow. From the damp tangled grass in the hedge bottoms, tall spikes of meadowsweet scented the air. They gathered armfuls of both and then thought of garden flowers they might add. When they called with Charlie Running to ask if he could spare a few roses, he cut them his best, added dahlias as well and sent them on to his cousin Dick Compston for sweet peas. They filled their baskets and carrier bags and tied bundles of foliage across their handlebars to save themselves a second journey back to Jessie’s home.

Dusk was gathering when they arrived back, but to their surprise there were candles burning in the darkness of the barn. Some old stone jars filled with water had been left ready for them together with a cluster of two pound jam pots and an extra bucket of water.

‘Do you think she’s gone a bit funny?’ asked Jessie, as they carried the flowers into the barn and saw the candles flicker in the draught from the open door.

‘Who? Your Aunt Sarah? No, I don’t think so,’ said Clare quietly, as she chose the biggest stems to put in the tallest of the stone jars.

‘What’ll I do with these?’ asked Jessie, doubtfully, holding up a handful of roses with very short stems. ‘They’ll not sit in a jar wi’ stems that wee.’

‘Did your father like roses, Jessie?’

‘Aye, he did. Said it was his favourite flower.’

Suddenly, it seemed obvious to Clare what she had to do.

‘Why don’t we put them here, on the floor itself,’ she said, tipping out water from one of the jars.

The water splashed down and ran into the damp hollow where earlier someone had washed away Jack Rowentree’s blood.

‘Look, we can make a kind of floating bowl, just here,’ Clare went on, taking some of the roses from her friend’s hand.

She placed them with care, the short stems between the cobbles where the water was deepest and waited while Jessie did the same with those she still held.

‘Smell, Jessie, smell,’ she cried, as the last dark
red bloom found its place. ‘Charlie said they’d such a great smell it made up for the poor stems.’

Clare watched her friend as she drew in the heavy perfume and then stood up and looked down at the jars and jam pots overflowing with summer flowers.

‘Mmmm. They’re lovely,’ Jessie said, nodding.

The candles threw light against the massed flowers and spilt over to wink back from a few drops of water lying like raindrops on the petals of the small pool of dark red roses that smelt so wonderful.

Clare waited and watched.

‘I think it looks great,’ said Jessie with a great sigh. ‘Will we away and get Aunt Sarah and show her what we’ve done for Daddy.’

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.