On a Clear Day (2 page)

Once the clock was in pieces you had to clean all the bits with methylated spirits. It was purple stuff with a funny smell that came in a big bottle with ribs in the clear glass.

‘You only need a wee drop,’ Daddy explained, as he poured it into an old saucer, ‘but you need to get it into all the moving parts,’ he went on as he poked the feather into the bits of the workings that he couldn’t take apart.

Sometimes Clare wondered how he would ever get all the small pieces together again, especially with his large square fingers, but he always did. He said it was just a matter of taking your time. It was amazing what you could do if you took your time. Just look at the lovely embroidery and crochet work that Mummy did. She’d learnt a bit at school and then she’d taught herself out of a book from the library. And didn’t she win a prize last year at the Armagh show.

‘That tablecloth, Clare, the one with all those wee flowers took such a long time to do. I’m sure she was at it a year or more. But not as long as the sweater with the cherries on it,’ he ended with a twinkle in his eye.

Clare smiled to herself. That was another story she loved and her father loved telling it. When Clare was still quite small Mummy had gone to visit one of her girlfriends and left Daddy to look after her. She’d seen a pattern for a sweater in a woman’s magazine her friend had and she came home full of it. She was so taken with the picture of it that she went out the very next day and bought enough wool to make a start. It looked so lovely with its sprays of cherries across the yoke and little bunches on the sleeves. But, sadly, either the pattern was more difficult than she’d thought or there was a misprint somewhere in the working for the cherries didn’t come out right at all. She’d unravelled the patterned bits and redone them several times but the cherries still looked like lumpy plums. She’d tried and tried until the sight of them so upset her that she unravelled the whole thing and used the ripped out wool to make a batch of crocheted tea cosies for the sale of work at the church.

‘I think it’s about the only time I’ve ever seen your mummy really cross,’ he said, as he wrapped up the dirty feather in the damp newspaper.

‘But the best of it was that those cosies sold like hot cakes. Everyone thought they’d been made especially with ripped out wool and they wanted her to make more of them. So in the end she had to laugh.’

He’d gone out to the dustbin in the back yard and come back into the kitchen still smiling.

‘Sometimes Clare, when all else fails you have to laugh.’

The large black hand of the clock had moved at last. It hadn’t stopped after all. But it was still only five past three. Clare finished the final hem on her piece of gingham, anchored the thread with a double stitch and bit off the piece left over with her small, even teeth. She spread the rectangle on the desk and looked at it, pleased that it wasn’t dirty or crumpled after her efforts as some of the other girl’s work was. Then she caught a glance from Miss McMurray and immediately picked up the two pieces of blue check that she was to join together with a ‘run and fell’ seam.

She knew perfectly well what she had to do but she wondered about the name. She thought of running and falling which she and William often did when they raced each other in the big field in Cathedral Road, just round the corner from where they lived. William always cried when he fell. Even if his knees were only rubbed green from the grass he’d lie there bawling and crying for Mummy.

‘If you want Mummy, we’ll have to go home,’ she’d told him time and time again. ‘Come on then.’

But William would neither pick himself up nor let her take him home. He’d just sit up and start snivelling even though he had a clean handkerchief in his pocket. Sometimes Clare got cross with him and pretended to walk away but it was only pretend for her mother had said she was never to leave him alone. He was too small to come back by himself even though there was no road to cross between the field and the adjoining row of red brick houses.

William was at school now and would soon be six but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the way he behaved. He would still sit wherever he had fallen and cry till his teacher came to pick him up. Then when they came home from school he’d go straight to Mummy and cry all over again as he showed her the graze on his knee or the sticking plaster the teacher had put on.

‘Oh dear a dear, poor old William,’ she’d say, giving him a hug, ‘Sure you’re here to tell the tale, it can’t be that bad, now can it?’

Often her mother would nod to Clare over William’s dark head for she had once told Clare that sometimes boys were far harder to deal with than girls, though most people seemed to think it was the other way round. She said that her own
mother, Granny Scott, had always said it was the boys that had her heart broke with their complaints and worries while the girls just seemed to make the best of things.

‘Not all wee boys are like William, Clare, just some of them. Your Daddy would never have been like that, but your Granny Hamilton said that your Uncle Jack was never away from her skirt tail till he got his first job in the fruit factory. And look at the age he’d have been by then.’

There was no doubt, Clare agreed, boys were funny. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha, as her father would say. You could never tell what they were going to do next. Whatever it was, it was usually a nuisance. But, as her mother always said, what you can’t change you must thole.

The last of the line of big girls had reached Miss McMurray’s desk. She stood awkwardly as she presented her work, the ‘garment’ which represented the culmination of the years of sewing samples and the previous year’s effort of making an apron with two pockets outlined with bias binding in which to place dusters.

Mary Bratten’s garment was large and shapeless and although Clare knew that it was either a blouse or a pair of knickers it was quite impossible to tell which. Of course, if it were knickers the elastic would go in last. But, even allowing for that, the voluminous spread of green gingham looked
more like a laundry bag than either of the possible garments it was supposed to be.

Clare knew exactly what her mother would say if she saw it: ‘It would fit Finn McCool and leave room for Mary as well’.

Miss McMurray spread the fabric out, surveyed it wearily and reached for a box of pins. Mary shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other and tried to avoid the glances of her friends sitting in the back row. She looked all around the room as if desperate to escape the sight of the green shape that twitched and writhed below Miss McMurray’s pins.

Clare felt sorry for Mary. It was all very well if you liked sewing or were good at it, but it wasn’t very nice for you if you didn’t. And it was clear that Mary didn’t like sewing and was no good at it at all.

The clock clicked audibly in the quiet of the room where even the senior girls had fallen silent, their gossip expended or their observation of Miss McMurray judging it expedient.

From the corridor, footsteps sounded, firm and measured. As Clare glanced towards the window on that side of the room, she caught sight of a blue figure. The dungarees were a blur behind the moulded glass of the lower panes, but where the panes reverted to plain glass above the level at which pupils could be distracted from their work, the head and shoulders
of Mr Stinson, the school caretaker, were clearly visible as he moved steadily past.

Clare didn’t know Mr Stinson very well because his store room was on the Senior corridor and he was seldom to be seen in her part of the school. Occasionally he would appear with a bucket and mop when some child had been sick in the classroom and every few weeks he would arrive with a huge bottle of ink to refill the inkpots. She always liked seeing him because he wore exactly the same blue overalls her father wore for work, and like her father, they nearly always had marks of grease or oil from some job they had been doing.

‘I’m sorry Ellie, they’re a bad job this week,’ her father would say when he came downstairs on Saturday afternoon wearing his old trousers for the allotment and carrying the blue overalls on his arm. ‘Ye may put in a drop of that stuff I got from Willie Coulter down at the depot.’

‘Never worry, Sam, there’s no work without mess. I’ll soak them in the children’s bathwater tonight and they’ll have all Sunday to loosen up. Sure the better the day, the better the deed. Your other pair came up a treat last week even after you working on Jack’s car. That car grease is far worse than bicycle stuff.’

‘That’s true, Ellie. It’s far heavier, it has to be, for the moving parts are so much bigger. But it’s hard on you, love, that has to wash them.’

‘Never worry yourself. Sure when you get the shop won’t I send it all to the laundry and act the lady?’ she’d say, laughing at him.

Clare loved to hear them talking about the shop. It would be a bicycle shop because that was what Uncle Harry had and he was going to retire one day and Daddy was going to buy it and it would have Samuel Hamilton over the door instead of Harold Mitchell. Her father had all sorts of plans for when he took over. Most of all he wanted to branch out into the sale and repair of motorbikes. He loved motorbikes and in the photograph album there were pictures of him in the Isle of Man at something called the TT which was a race. He said he never won but that wasn’t the point, it was experience. You learnt more about a bike by riding it than by stripping it down and putting it together again.

He had sold his motorbike when they got married. Her mother didn’t want him too but they needed the money to buy furniture and besides, in Edward Street, there was nowhere to keep it. But one day when they had a house with a garden and a workshop, he would have his own motorbike again and she and William would go for rides on the pillion. That was what you called the seat for the passenger and when you rode you would have to put your arms round his waist and hold on tight.

There was a knock at the classroom door. Surprised, Clare looked up and saw that Mr Stinson had come in. He didn’t have an inkbottle or a window pole in his hand but when Miss McMurray handed Mary Bratten back her work and looked up at him he took a piece of paper from his top pocket and said something to her in a low voice with his head turned away towards the blackboard.

Miss McMurray stared at him and shook her head.

‘Alison Hamilton,’ she said aloud, as she turned back to scan the front desks and the unfamiliar faces of the juniors who sat there.

No one moved and although Clare was quite sure the message was for her, for a moment, she was too surprised to put her hand up.

‘Please miss, I’m Clare Hamilton.’

‘Have you a wee brother called William in the infants?’ asked Mr Stinson quietly.

She nodded and watched as the two adults exchanged glances.

‘Clare, the principal wants to see you in his office,’ began Miss McMurray. ‘Leave your work here and take your schoolbag with you. Mr Stinson will go with you.’

There was complete silence in the classroom as Clare put down the joined fragments of blue fabric, run but not felled, and fastened the buckles
on her schoolbag. She stood up and found her legs were shaking. Something was wrong. Something had happened to William. He’d fallen down and broken his leg and he wouldn’t stop crying or he’d forgotten where he lived. This was what happened in books. They always sent someone to fetch the hero, or heroine, like in
David Copperfield.
But that was his mother.

An awful thought hit her. Maybe it was her mother who was ill. She’d not been well this morning. She’d had an awful headache and in the middle of washing William she’d had to run outside to the lavatory. When she came back she was pale and her forehead was damp but she’d said she was fine.

‘Women sometimes feel bad at certain times, Clare. You’ll understand when you’re older. I’ll away and lie down when you go off to school. I’ll be as right as rain by the time you come home.’

The principal’s desk was empty when Mr Stinson knocked and opened the door but the school secretary was at her typewriter under the window and sitting on one of the hard upright chairs by the door was William. He appeared to be completely absorbed in studying a marble he had taken from his pocket.

‘There ye are,’ said Mr Stinson quietly. ‘I’ll leave you with Mrs Graham and your wee brother.’

‘Sit down, dearie, the principal’ll not be a
minute,’ Mrs Graham called over her shoulder as Clare sat down beside William.

Clare heard a car stop outside the main entrance and the heavy tread of the principal as he came up the steps. He looked hot and uncomfortable as he stepped back into his office. His large, bald head was sweating as profusely as his forehead and the remains of his hair was damp.

‘Ah, there you are, Clare and William,’ he said jovially. He put out his hand to pat their heads, a habit he had when he spoke to children. He paused, withdrew his hand abruptly and stepped backwards.

‘Now I want you two good children to come for a little drive with me. I’m afraid Mummy hasn’t been too well today and she’s been taken to hospital just so that she’ll be more comfortable. I’m sure it’s this heat has made her feel so unwell. Now you’re not to worry at all. I’m going to take you to the hospital and when Mummy is feeling better you can go in and see her.’

‘But what about Daddy’s tea,’ Clare burst out, without a moment’s thought. ‘Who’ll make Daddy’s tea if Mummy’s in hospital?’

The principal took out a large, white handkerchief and mopped his brow. He looked even hotter, despite the fact that his office had no south facing window and was always cool, if not actually chilly, even in summer.

‘Don’t worry about Daddy’s tea, Clare. Daddy was feeling a bit sick too so he’s gone to the hospital as well. He’d want to be with Mummy wouldn’t he? So they are both quite safe and sound with nice nurses to make their tea. Why don’t we go off and see them,’ he said encouragingly, as he waved them through the door of his office. ‘Now we don’t want any arguments about who sits in the front seat with me, so why don’t you both sit in the back like grown-ups in a taxi,’ he added as they went down the steps.