Yorkshire Rose

by Margaret Pemberton

  Walter drove her to Crag-Side on a gloriously hot August day. The sky was a brassy blue bowl, the air milk-warm, the heather-covered moorland a purple-rich feast of colour.

  “I could get used to this, Walter love,” she said, seated beside him in the Renault in her Sunday best. “I’ve been over the top of the moors before, but it was a heck of a hike! Doing it like this could easily make me forget what my legs are for!“

  When they turned in between Crag-Side’s high, wrought iron gates, and she got her first sight of the house, she sucked in her breath, letting it out slowly on a long sigh of wonderment.

  Walter didn’t blame her. Standing four-square, massive and magnificent, Crag-Side was looking its best.

  Her speechles wonderment didn’t last long. “Blooming heck, love,” she said with a little choke of laughter as the Renault came to a halt before the wide and shallow stone steps leading up to the main entrance, “Your father certainly did himself proud when he built this little lot, didn’t he? You could fit Cartwright Hall into it four times over!”

  Later, as he showed off Crag-Side’s splendidly vast interior, she hugged his arm, saying with a throaty chuckle in her voice, “Now I know why you want to marry me, love. You just want me to do the perishing cleaning!”

  Polly wasn’t the only one beginning to enjoy a heady life-style. In London, Lottie was having a whale of a time. Despite their Bohemianism, Nina and Rupert moved in very exalted circles and Lottie happily scampered in their wake.

  The young and glamorous Duke and Duchess of Strachan, and the Duchess of Strachan’s even younger, sizzlingly extrovert cousin, attended summer balls in a string of grand London houses: Derby, Lansdowne, Bridgewater, Londonderry. There were parties in tented marquees in great gardens, and parties on luxurious private launches on the Thames. There were evenings of riotous party games and guessing games and charades and, as autumn approached, much concert and opera and ballet-going.

  Rupert was a young man who could keep even the staidest table in a constant roar and though Noel’s creative juices were in full flow and he was working harder than he’d ever worked before in his life, he often accompanied them, sitting with his arm around Lottie’s shoulders, laughing until his sides ached at Rupert’s magical combination of wit and inspired lunacy.

  Some early mornings before going home the three of them would swim at the exclusive Bath Club in Berkeley Street, Nina and Lottie vying with each other as to who could execute the most perfect swallow-dive or swim the farthest underwater. Later they would disappear for a restorative half hour in the Turkish ‘hot’ room, gossiping and giggling and enjoying ice-creams that Rupert had had sent in to them from nearby Gunter’s.

  Nina’s talent as a designer of lush and exotic day and evening gowns became the talk of what was fast becoming known as the Strachan ‘set’ and everyone who was anyone wanted to wear a gown designed by the sparklingly effervescent, luminously beautiful, young Duchess. Lottie, who had once taken umbrage at Nina using her likeness in her fashion drawings, now happily acted as a live clothes-horse for her, wearing wildly imaginative gowns inspired by the visiting Imperial Russian Ballet, or the latest Art Nouveau exhibition at the Royal Academy.

  As the easy intimacy between herself and Nina increased, Lottie even found herself wondering if it were Nina now, and not Rose, who was her ‘best’friend. She certainly found herself feeling far more at home in London than she did in Yorkshire. Noel, too, despite the flat northern vowels he refused on principle to eradicate from his speech, was firmly entrenched in Nina and Rupert’s glitzy, influential, unconventional, ‘fast’circle of friends.

  Lottie, believing wholeheartedly in his talent, was fiercely ambitious for him.

  “I suggested to the Russian Ambassador that you paint a mural for his Embassy,” she said to him blithely after the Ambassador, Count Benckendorff, had waltzed her nearly off her feet at a ball at Landsdowne House. On another occasion, when Count Benckendorff had introduced her at an Embassy function to his fellow countryman, the great Chaliapin, she had said later to Noel equally blithely, “I told Chaliapin you would be able to do the most wonderful portrait of him. Just think of it, darling! All of London would know about it and you would be inundated with commissions!”

  In vain Noel tried to make her understand that he wasn’t a mural painter, nor a portrait artist. He might as well have been speaking to thin air. Lottie continued her self-appointed task of being a one-woman Noel Sugden publicity band, determined that his name should be on the lips of everyone who was anyone of consequence.

  She was also determined to be worthy of him. In an effort to make up for an education that had consisted entirely of being tutored at home, and that she now knew to have been pitifully inadequate and shamefully skimpy, she set about educating herself. She attended lectures at all the leading art galleries and museums, went to concerts, learned reams of poetry and chunks of Shakespeare off by heart and, to Noel’s vast amusement, even attended drawing classes at the Slade.

  They were lovers now. In the sophisticated, unshock-able circle in which they moved, no eyebrows were raised. Unknown to Walter, and with Nina’s connivance, the live-in housekeeper at the Battersea house was dismissed and Lottie spent more and more time there with Noel, only gathering up her belongings and bolting back to Nina and Rupert’s town house when Walter made a fleeting parental visit.

  By the end of the year, as William and Sarah moved into a small flat conveniently adjacent to the Houses of Parliament and Harry received his officer’s stripes and Rose increasingly became Walter’s right-hand where the running of Rimmington’s was concerned, Lottie was knee-deep in highly eligible prospective suitors.

  Idolizing only Noel, she rejected them all, but was vastly pleased by their attentions.

  “Count Benckendorff says my hair is like spun gold,” she said, her legs curled beneath her as, from the comfort of a battered chaise-longue, she watched him work on a large canvas.

  Any hope she had had of trying to arouse his jealousy died an instant death.

  “Benckendorff would think differently if he knew the gold came from a bottle,” he said with a chuckle, not taking his eyes from his work. “Can you get me some more turpentine, love? I’ve run right out.”

  “Just because we’ve got through the year without war being declared doesn’t mean to say there isn’t still going to be a war,” Harry said to Rose as he drove her back to Crag-Side after a visit to Beck-Side Street.

  It was the New Year and he was home on leave. They had just spent a very jolly evening with her parents and with William and Sarah and little Emma Rose, and Rose was splendidly wrapped up against the cold, a cossack-style hat crammed low over her ears, her gloved hands buried deep in the silk-lined warmth of a fur muff.

  “But what if there isn’t a war this year either?” she asked, hoping passionately that there wouldn’t be. “Will you still stay in the Army? Your Father is hopeless at running the mill,” she added as they sped out of Bradford on the Ilkley road. “He just has no enthusiasm for it.”

  Harry grimaced. “I can’t just bob out of the Army at a moment’s notice, Funny-Face,” he said, well aware that his Father wasn’t doing an ace job where Rimmington’s was concerned. “And even if I could, now isn’t the time for me to be doing so. There’s still trouble in the Balkans …”

  “But no one’s taking it seriously, are they?” Beneath the stylishly elegant hat, a hat which had been his Christmas present to her, her gamine-like face was all eyes and mouth. “The diplomats have had the situation under control for so long, they‘re not likely to let it get out of control now, are they?”

  It was a brilliantly clear night. In the velvet-dark sky the stars looked bright enough, and near enough, to touch. Rose burrowed her hands deeper into her muff. She didn’t want to waste part of their precious time together, talking about the likelihood, or non-likelihood, of war. Ever since he had arrived home on leave her heart had been singing with happiness. He hadn’t visited Leeds o
r Manchester. He’d spent all his time with her at Crag-Side, Beck-Side Street, or the mill.

  Although it had been wonderful having a family get-together at Crag-Side, spending the evenings in the Chinese drawing-room in front of a roaring coal fire and playing word games and guessing games and charades, their visit together to the mill, when he had asked her to take him around it, had been an experience so special she knew she would never forget it.

  “Getting the dyers to dye the tops in that dazzling shade of midnight blue and emerald green was a masterstroke, Rose,” he had said admiringly. “Did you have to stand over them to get such unusual shades?”

  “I told them I wanted the tops to look like Lister Park lake under a hot summer sun,” she had said, delighted he was so pleased with the colour mix in the finished, woven cloth.

  Now he said in answer to her last question, “I think diplomatic neutrality may have gone as far as it can, Rose.” The hard, exciting line of his mouth was sombre. “When people flout all the principles of civilized behaviour so openly, there comes a time when it’s impossible to stand back, hands in pockets. When it comes to right and wrong, what do you do? You have to be on the side of right, don’t you? There’s no other option.”

  They had driven the rest of the way to Crag-Side in unhappy, contemplative silence, she knowing that of course under those circumstances there would be no option for him, and that there would be none for William or Noel, either; he more certain than ever that within the year he would be in full battle rig, fighting the Germans and their allies.

  The next day, despite the harsh cold, they went for a walk on the moor.

  “I think I love the moor even better in winter than I do in summer,” she had said, striding out beside him over the rough, hard-frosted ground, “There’s an extra grandeur about it in winter, isn’t there?” She was buried deep in a heavy tweed coat, swathed in woollen scarves, cossack-hatted and muffed. “It’s so … lonely. It seems to roll on endlessly.”

  “Even to the crack of doom?” he had asked, laughing down at her.

  She was holding his arm so as not to twist an ankle on the frozen, hummocky ground and she hugged it tighter, laughing back at him, her eyes sparkling with happiness, her cheeks rosy with cold.

  He halted, as if a thought had suddenly robbed him of breath, staring down at her with a dazed expression in his eyes.

  Her laughter died an instant death. “What is it?” she asked anxiously, hoping he wasn’t going to start talking about a possible war again; hoping he wasn’t suddenly feeling ill.

  His mouth tugged into a smile. “Nothing, Funny-Face,” he said reassuringly, patting her gloved hand. “Shall we try and walk as far as the cairn? Have you enough breath for it?”

  She nodded, her breath smoking in the freezing air, wishing with all her heart that his pet name for her were ‘sweetheart’, or ‘dear love’, or ‘darling.’

  There had been a moment, when he had given her the fox fur hat and matching muff, when she had almost been able to pretend that she was his dear love. They had been the kind of presents she could imagine him giving Nina. They had made her feel wonderfully feminine and wearing them, feeling as if she had stepped from the pages of a Russian novel, she had been able, for the first time in her life, to believe herself beautiful.

  When he returned to camp she had felt utterly bereft. The weather hadn’t helped. Snow had fallen heavily, making the roads between Ilkley and Bradford impassable. When it had first been forecast, she had returned to Beck-Side Street with enough clothes to see her through a few short weeks. Together with Jenny she tramped every morning through knee-deep drifts as far as Toller Lane where they would say goodbye, Jenny then ploughing on towards Lutterworth’s while she struggled in the direction of Rimmington’s.

  The misery of the weather wasn’t helped by the fact that her father wasn’t very well, and hadn’t been ever since Christmas.

  “I’m ju … st tired, li … ttle love,” he would say to her whenever she expressed concern. “Dr Todd says I’ll be fi … ine and dandy by the spri … ing.”

  He wasn’t. He was worse. In April, when international as well as home news reached a new all-time low, Albania threatening war on Greece, Russia announcing it was quadrupling its army, Germany announcing it was launching fourteen new warships, suffragettes setting London buildings on fire and civil war breaking out in Ireland, Dr Todd announced that the infection Laurence had been unable to shake off was, in fact, tubercular.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Nina had wired frantically from Paris where she and Rupert were staying at the George V.

  ‘How ill is Dad?’ Noel had wired from London. ‘Should I come home?’

  ‘Keep me in touch with what’s happening,’ Harry had wired from deepest Surrey. ‘I’ll be with you within a few hours if you need me.’

  On the first of May, as Beck-Side Street children and their schoolteachers partied in a field adjoining the Beck, taking it in turns to dance around a gaily decorated maypole, the long colourful ribbons they held weaving exotic patterns as they did so, Laurence smiled up at Lizzie in whose arms he was lying, patted her hand lovingly and, as peacefully as he had lived, died.

  Rose couldn’t believe it. It was as if the world had ended. She was so shocked she couldn’t cry; so shocked that even when Harry arrived, hard on the heels of Noel and Lottie and William and Sarah, she barely noticed his presence. Like a mantra, the words, ‘My father’s dead. I’m never going to see him again. Not ever!’ beat round and round in her brain as ceaselessly as waves pounding a beach.

  She remembered how, when she had been a very small girl, he had taught her to see the beauty in simple, everyday objects; how he had taught her that even mill chimneys could be beautiful. She remembered their photography expeditions together; the way he had so gallantly come to terms with his cruel disablement; the way he had never once raised his voice, much less his hand, to her.

  The whole of Beck-Side Street turned out for the funeral. “He was a gent,” Gertie said, weeping into a ragged piece of white cloth that, saved from an end-piece at the mill, served her as a handkerchief.

  “Your Pa was a real trouper,” Albert said, his eyes overly bright, the same battered trilby he had worn the day he had moved them into the street, crammed on to the back of his head. “In his own quiet way he was a hero, a real hero.”

  Nina and Rupert arrived, Nina so distraught as to be on the point of collapse.

  Walter helped Noel and William and Harry to carry the coffin. A sheaf of white, hot-house roses lay on top of it.

  “Rosa alba,” Harry had said thickly, his arm around Rose’s shoulder’s. “The White Rose of York. Yorkshire flowers for a true Yorkshireman.”

  The mourners following the horse-drawn hearse to the church were the most motley collection Beck-Side Street had ever seen, or was ever likely to see. A widow who enjoyed the reputation of being the neatest dressmaker in west Bradford and who looked, and carried herself, like a dowager duchess. A pukka young duke and duchess. A red-haired young man who, even dressed in mourning, carried the stamp of ‘artist’all over him. An ex-weaver from Rimmington’s, so vast in bulk she resembled a moving mountain. The wealthy owner of Rimmington’s, astrakhan-coated and black top-hatted. An elderly removal man cum rag-and-bone man, black ribbon tied around one arm of his shabby coat and around the crown of his even shabbier hat. A young lady whose mourning clothes shrieked out that they had cost more than the average working man earned in a year, her hair, beneath her black veiled hat, the improbable colour of sun-ripened barley. A young weaver from Lutterworth’s and her middle-aged, still pretty, mother. A young army officer wearing the distinctive uniform of an élite regiment. A Labour Member of Parliament and his wife. A locally well-renowned and respected Methodist lay-preacher. A young man with a pugnacious set to his lean shoulders and a faint, lingering smell of horse about him. An array of mill-working neighbours, some wearing clogs because they possessed no other footwear.

  United in a sense
of loss they followed the coffin and, afterwards, all crammed into the Sugden’s back-to-back for a traditional funeral repast of ham salad and cups of scalding hot tea.

  “What will Mother do now?” Nina asked Rose, her skin still as flawless as finest porcelain despite the river of tears she had shed.

  Rose, aware that her own grief had physically done her no favours whatsoever, and uncaring, said bleakly, “I don’t know. I suppose she’ll stay here. I’ll come back and live with her, so that she won’t be on her own and—”

  “There’s no need.” The speaker was William. “Mother wants to move in with us. It’s a good idea, if you think about it. Sarah’s often without adult company when the House is sitting and I’m in London, so Mother will be company for her. And Mother adores Emma Rose and will be kept busy, helping to look after her.”

  It was a good idea, but it did absolutely nothing to ease the heavy burden of Rose’s grief. It meant there would no longer be a home for her in Beck-Side Street. Never again would she live in back-to-back cosiness with Polly and Jenny, nor in a house where Albert and Gertie called in unexpectedly at any times of the day, for a cheery word. From now on, her home would be at Crag-Side. And when her Uncle finally married Polly and moved to Scarborough? She closed the thought from her mind. It was enough, at the moment, that she had lost her dearly loved father. Compared to that loss, everything else was trivial.

  Chapter Fourteen

  For the next few weeks, with Harry back at camp, William irregularly commuting between London and Bradford, Noel, Nina and Lottie in London and her mother living with Sarah, work was Rose’s salvation.