Rosie

by Lesley Pearse

  She wheeled round, walking down the room towards them. ‘All better now,’ she said soothingly.

  Donald moved first, getting out of his chair and lumbering towards her. His eyes were wide with fright and as he reached Rosie he slid his hand into hers. The door opened and Mary came back with Patty in tow. Archie shuffled his chair along the floor making the feet squeak on the lino.

  The almost palpable tension in the room vanished as the usual noises began again. Alice got up to go over to Patty. George began to creep across the room, Maud started to talk to herself again. But Donald, who was usually quicker than anyone else to adjust to sudden changes, was still clinging to Rosie’s hand. Rosie guessed whatever was troubling him had happened before the screaming started.

  ‘What’s up, Donald?’ Rosie asked quietly. He was hanging his head as if afraid to speak out. Normally he confided in her about everything that happened in her absence. ‘Did something happen while I was out of the room?’

  ‘Jackson s-s-smacked Patty,’ he whispered. ‘She sh-sh-shouted at us all too and told us to sit d-d-d-down or we’d be s-s-sorry.’

  Rosie was still smarting at Maureen’s remark about her nosiness. Hearing she’d hit an old lady just for wetting herself added to it, but as she soothed Donald she noticed Tabby.

  All the other patients were moving again, yet she was still sitting in a chair just staring blankly into space, her knitting lying on her lap.

  Tabby was never motionless. She either knitted frantically or paced about, and Rosie felt a pang of disquiet. Leaving Donald for a moment, she went over to sit beside the woman. When she asked what was wrong, Tabby didn’t reply but caught hold of Rosie’s hand and held it tightly.

  This was entirely out of character. Most of the patients liked to be touched. They responded eagerly to having their heads stroked, their hands held or a hug, but Tabby always shied away from any physical contact.

  ‘What’s wrong, Tabby?’ Rosie asked again.

  Tabby pointed to the ceiling.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s all quiet again now,’ Rosie said. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

  ‘I don’t want to go up there,’ Tabby spat out, her tawny eyes flashing the way they often did just before she lashed out at someone.

  Tabby was one of the patients with whom Rosie had made almost no headway. Although she was articulate and capable of holding a proper conversation when she chose, most of the time she merely grunted at people, Rosie included. Her nature was as fiery as her hair, one minute quiet and docile, the next flaring up for no apparent reason and clawing whoever happened to be closest. All the staff treated her with caution.

  ‘No one’s going to send you there,’ Rosie said evenly, wondering if Maureen might have threatened this.

  Tabby turned conspiratorially towards Rosie, still holding her hand. ‘There’s a bad man there,’ she said in a low voice. ‘He hurt me.’

  Rosie thought she was just confused and after a few soothing words encouraged her to pick up her knitting again. Maureen had left the day room now, perhaps to have a cigarette, so seeing Mary was sitting alone reading a magazine, Rosie went over to her.

  ‘Was Tabby ever upstairs?’ she asked.

  Mary nodded. ‘Yes, just before I came here. Why?’

  ‘Just wondered,’ Rosie replied and walked over to the window to save the necessity of explaining herself, or being accused again of being nosy.

  There were daffodils out in the front garden and a forsythia bush was a mass of bright yellow flowers, but for once Rosie wasn’t heartened by these clear signs of spring. She was all too aware of something ugly lurking unseen in this building.

  She thought that the combination of Maureen shouting at the patients, Patty being smacked, and then hearing that screaming from upstairs, must have triggered off an old memory for Tabby. Could the male chargehand called Saunders who worked up there be the bad man she spoke of? Or had there been a different man working there before?

  In the entire seven months Rosie had been here she hadn’t had any contact with the male chargehand at all. He lived out and came in minutes before seven, going straight to the ward. His dinner break never coincided with hers, the most she’d seen of him was the odd crossing on the stairs. Even at Christmas he hadn’t put in an appearance in the staff room.

  Considering that men were the main topic of conversation amongst the chargehands, it was odd that they didn’t speak about the only male one. Rosie had always assumed that the lack of information about him – whether he was married, where he lived and suchlike – was just because he was so unattractive. He was a big, heavily built man with short cropped sandy hair and pockmarked skin. She certainly hadn’t been interested enough herself to ask anyone about him.

  But then, now she came to think about it, Staff Nurse Aylwood who worked alongside him was equally mysterious. A tall, gaunt-looking woman in her forties with slate grey hair, she had her breakfast before anyone else, had dinner sent up to the wards, and often took her tea up to her room. In the evenings she always shut her door firmly with a bang, then switched on her wireless as if to drown out the noise of the younger members of staff’s chatter. Rosie hadn’t even discovered her Christian name.

  In the light of what Maureen had said just now about Aylwood not being likely to thank her for sticking her nose in, it now seemed more probable that these two members of staff kept their distance because any familiarity with other staff might expose the way they ran that ward.

  Rosie frowned; that didn’t really make sense. After all, Gladys Thorpe, Linda and Mary all spent several hours up there each week too. Yet as she mulled it over in her mind she realized that floor must be seriously understaffed for most of the day, because the other girls only went up there at meal times.

  A horrifying image of people locked in cages like animals, shot into her mind. She tried to shake it out, sure her imagination was getting the better of her, and she vowed then silently to herself that after Easter she would find a new job.

  It was a bright, sunny but chilly afternoon when Rosie got off the train at Bridgwater two weeks later. Miss Pemberton was waiting on the platform wearing a tweed coat and a brown felt hat. Like many people she had a black band sewn on her coat as a sign of mourning for Queen Mary, who had died just a few days before.

  Rosie’s emotions had swung like a pendulum between joy and apprehension on the long train journey. She was excited at having a holiday, and at seeing Miss Pemberton and possibly Alan, but coming back to an area which held such a wealth of memories was frightening. After Bristol she had her nose pressed up against the window, anxiously awaiting the first glimpse of the Levels. As the train chugged across the familiar flat landscape, her mouth had become dry with nerves, yet her eyes prickled with tears as she saw again the place she loved.

  The sun glinted on the rhynes and patches of floodwater that were still lying in the fields. She saw new lambs gambolling around their mothers, herons standing like statues on the banks of the rivers. There was blossom on fruit trees and clumps of primroses were growing on banks, all so beautiful and serene. Yet everything she saw was a reminder of her father and brothers. She knew too that down here people had long memories: they wouldn’t have forgotten the brutal murders as had the people in London.

  ‘You look marvellous,’ Miss Pemberton exclaimed, taking Rosie’s small case from her hand and putting it down on the platform for a moment. Then taking both Rosie’s hands in hers, she smiled warmly. ‘Let me get a really good look at you!’

  Violet hadn’t actually recognized the chic young girl with an urchin haircut and an apple-green costume getting out of the train. Not until Rosie waved and she saw the familiar cheeky grin. This new Rosie looked like a fashion plate.

  Rosie giggled with embarrassment as Miss Pemberton studied her. ‘You look like a real city girl,’ she said. ‘I’m proud of you, Rosie.’

  A lump came up in Rosie’s throat, not so much at the praise but at the warmth in the older woman’s eyes an
d voice. It made her feel as if this really was her auntie, welcoming her home after a long absence.

  Rosie didn’t speak as they drove out through the town because she was so engrossed in looking at everything. Bridgwater had seemed a magical place to her as a child, bustling with people, cars and buses and dozens of exciting shops. There was the barber’s shop she took Alan to, the gunsmith’s where Dad bought his shot, the greengrocer’s who sold home-made toffee apples and the little flower stall where she used to stop to sniff the flowers and ask the names of ones she didn’t recognize.

  She remembered standing on the bridge watching the river and the boats, wishing she could live here. It was less than a year ago that she’d last seen it, on leaving the hospital, but it wasn’t as she remembered.

  ‘I expect you think everything’s shrunk. As I’ve found, some places improve by leaving them and then going back. Others are best left in memory,’ Miss Pemberton said drily. ‘I felt just as you must now when I came back here in 1947. I had a wonderful memory of a sweetshop with rows of gleaming glass jars filled with every kind of sweet you could imagine. The old lady who owned it wore a big white apron, and when I was a young girl she used to tell me to close my eyes and open my mouth, and she’d pop something delicious into it.

  ‘I couldn’t wait to find it again. During the war I’d dreamed of her toffees and coconut ice. I planned to go in and buy pounds and pounds of different sweets –’ She broke off to laugh.

  ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘I did, but what a disappointment! It was dark and dingy, hardly any stock what with sweet-rationing. There was another old lady in there, in a rather dirty overall. All I bought was two ounces of bull’s eyes.’

  ‘I wonder what I’d think if I went by May Cottage,’ Rosie said thoughtfully.

  ‘There’s nothing there now. They pulled it down back in January,’ the older woman said hurriedly. ‘I drove past the other day and I couldn’t pinpoint where it was exactly: weeds and grass had covered any bare soil.’

  Rosie knew she would be able to pinpoint it. She knew that even when she was as old as Miss Pemberton she’d be able to pace out exactly where the front door of May Cottage had stood. But she made no comment.

  *

  ‘So what do you think of my little home?’ Miss Pemberton asked once she’d taken Rosie on a quick tour of the little two-bedroom cottage in Chilton Trinity. They were in the tiny kitchen and she was lying a tray with tea things.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Rosie said with enthusiasm. ‘Can I go out in the garden?’

  The cottage wasn’t quite as old and quaint as Rosie had expected. Miss Pemberton said it had been built in 1880 and it had the plain no-nonsense look of the artisans’ cottages of that period. Grey stone, a trellised porch around the front door. One window up, one down. Inside there was one big room with the staircase going out of it and a small lean-to kitchen. Originally there had been no bathroom, but Miss Pemberton had had the back bedroom divided in two to put one in. What Rosie liked best about it was the simplicity: walls painted white, polished wood boards downstairs and a thick colourful fringed rug to make it cosier. Each piece of furniture looked as if it had a story attached to it. There were a couple of low carved tables Miss Pemberton said she’d brought back from India, a highly polished desk with a leather top which had been her grandfather’s. The settee was an old brown leather one, and two armchairs which didn’t match had buttoned backs and looked very old.

  Miss Pemberton unlocked the back door. ‘I’d forgotten how much you love gardening. I wish I had more time to spend in it. But spring is always a good time to see it, with all the bulbs coming through and before the weeds shoot up.’

  The moment she stepped outside and saw the secluded garden surrounded on all sides by six-foot-high thick hedges, Rosie knew that she and Miss Pemberton had far more in common than she’d originally supposed. Only real flower-lovers planted their daffodils in clumps in the grass that way; pretend gardeners put them tidily in beds. It made her heart ache to see that mass of yellow against the lush lawn. As she walked down the path with Miss Pemberton just in front of her she noted with approval the bird table with a hunk of coconut for the blue tits, the way purple aubretia was pushing its way out of the crazy paving, and the dozens of rose bushes with shiny new leaves.

  She stopped to take a deep breath, savouring the clean, sweet-smelling air, with just a faint whiff of farmyard manure coming from the fields beyond the hedge. It took her straight back to May Cottage; if she closed her eyes she could imagine she was down in the orchard. Then she saw the tree beside the shed.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked in awe. Pinkish-white candle-like flowers were just beginning to open on almost bare branches.

  Miss Pemberton turned and smiled. ‘It’s a magnolia. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen,’ Rosie whispered, and to her embarrassment she felt tears well up in her eyes.

  Miss Pemberton slid her arm around Rosie’s shoulder. ‘There’s not a lot wrong with your heart and soul,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘That tree has moved me to tears many a time. To me it’s God made visible. And you’ll see it in all its full glory too before you have to leave.’

  Later that evening as they sat companionably in front of the fire, Miss Pemberton told Rosie she was taking her to Taunton the next day to see Alan.

  Rosie yelped with excitement and hugged the older woman impulsively.

  ‘You’ll find him very different,’ Miss Pemberton warned her. ‘He’s grown in every direction, bigger, more confident, sometimes even a little cheeky. You may find he ignores you, as he does Thomas.’

  ‘Does Thomas still come down here to see Alan then?’ Rosie asked. As the social worker hadn’t mentioned him, Rosie assumed he’d cut himself off entirely since the trial, just as he had with her.

  ‘Of course, my dear.’ Miss Pemberton seemed surprised by the question. ‘In fact he’s coming down tomorrow too. We’ll be meeting him at the Hugheses’ and I offered him the couch here for the night so you’d have the opportunity to see him again.’

  Rosie was astounded. When she hadn’t received so much as a Christmas card from Thomas she’d presumed that her brothers’ lies in court had killed any interest he’d once had in her. Just the thought of meeting him again made her feel jittery.

  She explained this to Miss Pemberton and asked why he should want to see her now.

  ‘I think you are forgetting what an honourable and courageous man Thomas is,’ Miss Pemberton said soothingly. ‘I think once he’d hit rock-bottom emotionally he realized just how bad it must have been for you too. He said he needed to face you again if only to square things up.’

  Rosie took a deep breath to try and stop the butterflies in her stomach. ‘He’s probably right, we ought to meet again, but I’m still scared of seeing him.’

  ‘You don’t need to be, my dear. Although I haven’t yet met Thomas in person, I’ve come to know a great deal about his character from our correspondence. He’s a gentle, lonely man; the many tragedies in his life have given him great reserves of compassion and endurance. You won’t find him hostile towards you. Besides, the greater part of this meeting will be to discuss Alan’s future, and I’m sure that is one area where you will be in complete harmony.’

  ‘Alan’s future?’ Rosie sat up straight. ‘Does Thomas want to take him back to London?’

  ‘No, my dear, Alan is far too happy to even consider that as an option. Mr and Mrs Hughes would like to adopt him legally.’

  Rosie gasped.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, Rosie, by throwing something like that at you,’ she said quickly, patting the girl’s hand reassuringly. ‘Wait till you see Alan with his new family, and discuss it with Thomas before you pass judgement. Alan is very, very happy and settled with them, my dear, and the Hugheses adore him. Adoption would give him absolute and permanent security.’

  Rosie’s first thought when she saw Alan was that this
sturdy little boy was an impostor, not her baby brother. Nothing was the same. His hair was a shade darker, more brown now than red, he had rosy plump cheeks and the dark brown eyes which met hers were bold and fearless. Even his clothes were different – smart grey shorts which fitted properly, a neat little checked shirt and navy blue handknitted jumper.

  ‘Hullo, Alan,’ she said, almost overcome by emotion. She wanted to scoop him up in her arms. ‘Do you remember me?’

  The Hugheses’ sitting-room was like one from an Oval-tine advertisement. Very post-war, chintzy and comfortable. The garden beyond the french windows had a swing and a sandpit. A tricycle stood on the path, washing on the line.

  ‘You’re Rosie,’ he said, without smiling. ‘But your hair’s different.’

  ‘I had it cut because it got so messy,’ she said. ‘Yours has got darker. And you must be two inches taller.’

  He came and sat next to her on the settee later. He told her about his school and demonstrated that he could read with his Janet and John book. Thomas sat in an armchair watching. Miss Pemberton had gone out into the kitchen with Mrs Hughes.

  It felt very strange too to see Thomas again in such unfamiliar surroundings. She wished they could have met up before being confronted with one another here. He made her feel jumpy and uncomfortable as they’d had no opportunity yet to clear the air. He looked strained and pale and she couldn’t tell if that was because he was tired or nervous.

  It wasn’t helping that Alan was totally ignoring him. He hadn’t spoken to Thomas directly at all. He said things politely for both their benefit. But when Thomas asked him questions, he looked at Rosie as he replied. Mr Hughes had apparently taken his son and daughter out soon after Thomas arrived, because he thought it would be easier for Alan with less of a crowd. But Alan only seemed to want to talk about Jennifer and Raymond and the dog Rex.