The Hawthorns Bloom in May (25 page)

After a sleepless night, Sarah felt sure Sam had been injured, perhaps seriously, but to her amazement Lily remained quite unperturbed at breakfast. Even when Helen and Hugh asked if any message had come about Uncle Sam Donegal, she didn’t react, just continued with her toast, though her habit of looking slightly preoccupied was distinctly more marked than usual.

They did not go out for lunch. It was a question of waiting and hoping that a message would come to tell them where Sam was. The telephone was working again and Mrs Norway phoned to ask if they had news, but they had not. Neither had she, though she’d made what enquiries she could.

As Bridget and Maureen were anxious to perform their usual duties Sarah had no work to do and found the passage of the hours even more intolerable. She felt too agitated to read and was reluctant to write to Simon, so great was the weight of anxiety hanging over her.

Sometime after lunch, firing stopped completely. Shortly afterwards Bridget came in and folded back the shutters which they’d kept partly closed since the day before when they’d been unbarred for the first time. The light fell on Helen’s magnolia bud, now slightly open, and the daffodils Lily had brought in from the garden. But for Sam’s absence, the room looked almost as it had done a week earlier before they’d set off on their outing to walk on the beach at Blackrock.

‘Mama, mama. Look. It’s Uncle Sam outside,’ Helen shouted, jumping up from the window seat where she’d been reading.

For one wonderful moment, Sarah’s heart leapt with joy and relief as she hurried to the window.

‘It’s Uncle Sam Liskeyborough,’ added Hugh quietly.

To Sarah’s amazement, she saw the familiar figure of her own dear brother. Never before had the sight of his smiling face been such a disappointment.

She stood, stunned, as she watched not only Sam, but Alex, park the familiar motors in front of the house and lift out baskets and boxes before moving towards the front door.

Helen got there first, with Hugh close behind her, long before either of the two men had freed a hand to ring the bell.

‘It’s my brother Sam and our cousin Alex,’ Sarah said quietly to Lily, who’d dozed off after lunch.

‘How nice,’ she said, smiling sweetly as she roused herself. ‘Though I shall be sorry to part with you. I expect the children really should be back at school,’ she added, standing up to welcome the new arrivals as Helen and Hugh brought them into the room.

Sarah watched as Lily greeted Alex and Sam, rang for tea, and enquired politely about their journey as if it were an ordinary Sunday afternoon. She wondered what on earth she was going to do about her uncle. All she longed for was to be free to go home, but how could she leave the city without ensuring that he was safe?

The children were delighted to see Sam and Alex and Lily was her liveliest self. She loved visitors and Sarah listened patiently as she explained to her
guests that she’d been sadly deprived this week, for ‘all her young men’ seemed to have other things on their mind and none of her women friends had even phoned.

So lively was the conversation that it was Bridget who went to the door when the bell rang some time later. Sarah caught the mention of her own name, so she slipped out into the hall and found Nevil standing there.

‘I think I may have bad news,’ he said quickly, drawing an envelope from his pocket. ‘I once heard you mention Ballydown.’

The envelope was blood-stained. Someone had tried to clean it and the paper was still damp. It was addressed to Mrs John Hamilton, Ballydown, near Banbridge, County Down. The handwriting was unmistakable.

‘Where did you get this, Nevil? Is Uncle Sam injured?’ she asked, her hands shaking as she took it from him.

‘I found it at temporary shelter,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We took someone else there and I saw … someone … I thought I recognised.’

Sarah stared at him, feeling for his difficulty and struggling with her own. Nevil’s job was to collect the fallen. Some were taken to a hospital, others to a temporary shelter, a euphemism for a make-shift mortuary.

‘There were no papers and no wallet in his
jacket. They’d probably been stolen. Just this,’ he said, nodding bleakly at the crumpled envelope.

‘So he’s been badly injured, Nevil,’ she said slowly.

‘No, not very badly injured,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘But I’m afraid we didn’t find him in time, so he’s dead.’

It was no hardship whatever for Rose and John to walk to church on such a beautiful spring morning but once home, the midday meal eaten and cleared away, the long afternoon stretched interminably before them, with an equally interminable evening to follow.

John fell asleep in his chair after lunch, his face slack, the wrinkles more pronounced in the absence of his usual animation. At sixty-five he was still a fit and active man, she thought, but he tired more easily, was grateful for Alex’s unbounded energy and sometimes now took the motor into Banbridge when once he would have enjoyed the walk. Still, she sighed, he was here, alive and well, when others younger than him had gone. She could only give thanks.

For herself, the idea of sleep never entered her mind, for she felt a tension that could only be
sustained by waiting and watching patiently for what was to come. Her part was to hold her family in mind for as long as this journey took. Others might call it prayer, she thought to herself, and perhaps it was, as she imagined the two motors moving ever southwards to the violated city where once she’d come as a bride and marvelled at its beauty.

When John woke, he buried his nose in the Sunday papers, but she wasn’t surprised when he said suddenly that he wanted a word with Michael Jackson. When he came back, she suggested they walk up to Rathdrum House to see Mrs Beatty who’d gone to visit her sister earlier in the week, but had now returned and been on her own since Saturday morning.

Slowly, so slowly, the hours passed. Rose was grateful for a visit from Emily, bringing a gift of eggs from her aunt. ‘Rose might have a housefull for a very late supper,’ she’d said. ‘They might come in handy.’

She stayed a while and made them laugh, telling them about the people who came to the studio in Banbridge to have their pictures taken. It reminded them both of the days when Sarah came home and told them just such stories before she made her move to Belfast.

As the day faded to a pale, golden sunset, bands of cloud appeared in the west. Blue grey against
the setting sun, they lay like islands in the sky. As dusk deepened, a fine rain began to fall and John stood at the open door eyeing the gathering clouds uneasily.

‘They’ll have to stop and put the top up,’ he said, as he closed it against the sudden chill of the evening and came back to the fire, picking up the paper he’d already read from corner to corner.

‘What’s the shortest time they could make
if
there were no delays?’ Rose asked, just to break the silence.

He considered carefully. ‘I’d say about five hours each way. They’ll keep up the best speed they can and they’re both good drivers, but it’ll be slower now it’s dark, even with the new headlights. Sam knows the road like the back of his hand, but it’s all new to Alex.’

It was now after nine. Some fourteen hours had passed since their early departure, so something
had
come to delay them.

‘What about a drop of tea,’ she asked, when another hour passed with no sight or sound of a vehicle.

‘Aye, that would do well,’ John replied wearily, putting down the service manual for a new delivery vehicle at Ballievy.

As she stood up to draw the kettle forward on the fire, she caught a sound, but John was already out of his chair, the door open, striding out into
the teeming rain that glinted grey in the flare of headlights.

‘Alex, good man. Are y’all right? Where’s Sarah?’

‘She’s fine. She’s behind with Sam,’ he said, lifting Helen out of the back seat and handing her to John, still asleep, while Hugh scrambled down from the passenger seat and ran along the streaming path to his grandmother. She held out her arms.

‘Are you tired out, sweetheart?’ she asked, gathering him in a hug.

‘Yes, I am,’ he said directly. ‘Mama said we could stay the night with you if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,’ he added politely, while trying to stifle a huge yawn.

Helen was reluctant to wake. She clutched John round the neck and would have gone on sleeping on his shoulder if Rose hadn’t asked him to carry her upstairs to the room Sarah and Hannah once shared. Hugh followed his grandparents silently and was sitting on the bed in Sam and James’s room taking his shoes off, when Alex appeared with their two small suitcases. He opened both, searched through them and found Hugh’s pyjamas and Helen’s nightdress.

‘So yer all safe,’ John said, as he and Alex came downstairs, quickly followed by Rose, after tucking both children into bed.

Rose glanced at him as he was about to speak.
She knew immediately something was wrong. She waited patiently, watching him.

‘There may be bad news, Rose,’ he began cautiously. ‘We think your brother Sam has been wounded. Sarah’s gone to the hospital.’

Rose felt a great silence well up inside her, a strange feeling that someone had already told her this news, but she hadn’t been listening properly.

‘To the hospital, Alex?’ she repeated, looking him full in the face.

Alex glanced at the stove where John had stopped in the middle of making tea, the kettle in his hand.

‘He’s dead, Alex, isn’t he?’ she said, waiting for him to turn back towards her, her voice as normal as if she were enquiring for the well-being of a friend or acquaintance.

There was never a problem with Alex. He could never lie. The answer would be there in his eyes.

‘We’re not absolutely sure, Rose,’ he said firmly, ‘but I wouldn’t want to raise your hopes. Sam should be here in another hour or two. He’ll know for sure.’

‘What about Sarah?’ said John sharply, his voice rough with emotion.

‘Sarah’s grand,’ Alex replied, nodding vigorously to reassure him. ‘But she wasn’t sure she could leave Lily if the news was bad,’ he went on, his face now pale and strained. ‘She told me you’d understand,’
he said softly, looking across at Rose, who stood immobile by the table.

‘Of course I do. Do you think she’ll be safe if she stays?’

‘Yes,’ he said honestly. ‘We met a whole column of rebels who’d just surrendered. All the barricades have been cleared and she told us herself it had been quiet there most of the day.’

‘Here, love,’ said John suddenly, drawing his eyes from Alex’s face and looking round at her. ‘Come an’ sit by the fire.’

He drew her over to his chair and let Alex finish making the tea.

‘Your hands is stone cold,’ he said, rubbing them in his own large, warm ones, desperately trying to comfort her. ‘Maybe your Sam’ll be all right.’

‘We’ll have to wait and see, John,’ she replied, in the same calm tone. ‘Do we know what happened, Alex?’

She paused, as he fetched milk from the dairy and then curled her cold hands gratefully round the warm mug he handed her.

‘We think he may have taken clothes to Brendan to help him get away before they surrendered. No one knew he’d gone till one of Lily’s girls found he hadn’t slept in his bed and his old clothes were missing.’

Rose dropped her eyes and drank carefully.

‘I can imagine that,’ she said slowly. ‘He once
admitted to me he felt closer to Brendan than to any of his own sons, but then Brendan was more like him than any of his sons were. He always wanted to change the world and so did Brendan. They didn’t agree about the means, but they did agree about what needed doing.’

They sat in silence for some minutes until the American clock on the wall by the dairy door gathered itself and struck eleven, its strange, muted note echoing in the silence of the gas-lit room.

‘Alex, do the Jackson’s know you’re safely back?’ Rose asked.

He nodded but said nothing more, wondering if she had guessed Emily was sitting up, waiting for the sound of the motor and for the brief note on the horn which he’d promised to sound for her before he left.

‘Then I think, John dear, you should go to bed. You’re tired out and you have to go to work in the morning,’ she said firmly. ‘Alex will keep me company till Sam gets here, and maybe Sarah too, if all’s well,’ she added, with a lightness that amazed her. ‘If that’s all right with you, Alex?’

Alex nodded gratefully. After all his years of loss and loneliness, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for this woman, who’d made him feel he had a place in the world.

It was after midnight when Sam stopped briefly outside the post office in Newry to allow Sarah to
drop three fat envelopes into the box. A squall of wind and rain followed her back into the car and she shivered as she drew the travelling rug back round her.

‘Are ye right?’ Sam asked, as she settled herself.

‘As right as I can be,’ she said wryly. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m
very
sorry about Uncle Sam, but it’s Ma I could weep for,’ he said slowly. ‘How’re we goin’ to tell her?’ he asked, without taking his eyes from the wet road.

‘She’ll know as soon as we cross the threshold,’ she replied simply.

‘D’you think she’ll still be up?’ he asked, surprised. ‘It must be after midnight.’

‘She’ll be up. She’ll not go to bed till she knows we’re safe.’

They drove on in silence, Sarah grateful it was Sam at the wheel for the wind had risen and small twigs were blowing into the windscreen. The moon was now completely obscured and the headlights cut a broad swathe through the deep, rain-sodden darkness, the road a glistening strip that looked as if it might end abruptly at any moment.

To prepare herself, Sarah went through the events of the afternoon yet again. Together, she and Sam had gone to the old warehouse where bodies were laid out in numbered rows. It was her uncle all right. Even as they approached between the rows,
they recognised the thinning red hair and the hand woven tweed jacket he’d bought in Donegal when he first came home.

There was a stain on the jacket where the bullet had caught his bad shoulder, but his face was unmarked, so pale that the freckles of his creamy skin had faded to nothing. They stood together looking down at him until a young man brought a form to fill in, asked his questions, then handed it to them to sign. He’d brought a luggage label which he also filled in and attached it to Sam’s foot. It said, simply, Samuel McGinley, Swillybrinnan, Donegal, c/o Lady Lily Molyneux, Dawson Street.

‘If we park on the hill, we wouldn’t wake the Jacksons,’ Sarah said abruptly as they turned on to the Ballydown road.

‘Aye, I’d thought of that. I can chock the wheels if Alex is still there,’ he replied, almost as though parking the motor on the steep slope was the only thing he’d been thinking off in the last silent hour.

When they finally heard the motor, Alex let Rose go to the door ahead of him. She met Sarah halfway down the sodden garden path, the rain still gusting round them, fallen petals of camellia strewn across the path.

‘I’m sorry, Ma, so sorry,’ she said, as they hugged each other.

‘He’s gone, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he has,’ she said simply, as her mother drew her indoors and brought her over to the fire.

John didn’t even stir when Rose finally slipped into bed, after Sarah and Sam had gone to their own old rooms where Helen and Hugh had been fast asleep for hours. She didn’t move towards him, for her body was so icy cold from tiredness she was afraid she might startle him from sleep.

As she lay wide-eyed, listening to the wind, his warmth began to enfold her and her mind began to move back, far, far back.

She was in a turf-cart, creaking slowly along a rutted cart track, a red-headed baby in her arms, sleet blowing in her face, its icy points sharp as pins. The only warm bit of her was where she cradled the baby in her arms, her mother’s shawl draped over them both. Babies were always warm, she thought, as they made slow progress, her father leading the donkey, her mother and Mary carrying bundles, their heads bent, her brothers leading the cow, who didn’t want to go.

‘Don’t look back,’ her mother said. ‘Don’t look back.’

She didn’t know why, but if her mother said she was not to look back, then it was for the best.

Rose dreamt the short night through. She woke to the alarm and the knowledge of what had happened with a calmness that amazed her. It
was her dear John who showed such great distress when she had to tell him, comforting him as best she could before a day’s work he couldn’t set aside.

At breakfast, Sam seemed to be his unperturbable self, Sarah composed, the children silent and sad, but not shocked or surprised. They’d waited the two long days for news of Uncle Sam Donegal and neither their mother nor Maureen and Bridget concealed the truth from them.

The storm had blown itself out and brilliant shafts of sunlight came and went between the ragged clouds as Sarah drove the children up to Rathdrum, spoke to Mrs Beatty and then walked back down the hill to spend the morning with her mother.

As she stepped into the kitchen, a single glance told her the morning jobs had been done, the floor swept and the fire made up. On the table, two camellia blooms, broken off by the wind but still undamaged, sat in a saucer of water. Her mother sat by the fire knitting another sock for the Red Cross parcel.

‘How are you, Ma?’ she asked gently, as she sat down opposite her.

Rose smiled.

‘I’m perfectly well, but I’ve not lived in this new world for very long yet. I’ve loved Sam for even more years than I’ve loved your father or any of you children. I’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out what it’s like.’

‘There’s something I didn’t tell you last night, Ma,’ Sarah began uneasily. ‘Maybe I forgot or maybe I just couldn’t manage to tell you. I hope you won’t be annoyed with me. Sam wrote you a letter. It was in his pocket when the stretcher party found him.’

She took the stained envelope from her pocket, handed it over, and watched as her mother opened it carefully and took out the two closely written sheets inside.

How often she’d seen her mother open Uncle Sam’s letters, scanning them quickly to make sure all was well, then sitting down to read them carefully, or putting them in her pocket to enjoy when the house was quiet, with everyone at work or school. She waited patiently for what seemed a very long time.

‘How like him,’ Rose said smiling, as she handed over the pages to her. ‘Read it for yourself.’