Rosie

by Lesley Pearse

  It hurt Rosie to see that Alan had transferred all the love he once had for her to his new family. She was sure he hadn’t forgotten that she had once been important to him, because on several occasions she noticed him looking at her thoughtfully. But if he recalled any incidents he didn’t speak of them, and Rosie didn’t dare prompt memories in case it upset him.

  Mr Hughes came back later with the other two children and it was almost a relief to have the pressure of talking to Alan alone lifted from them. Seen together, the Hugheses looked like the kind of ideal family portrayed on holiday posters: Mrs Hughes in twinset and tweed skirt with tightly permed hair; her pipe-smoking husband a head taller, wearing a handmade Fair Isle pullover; Jennifer a dimpled five-year-old blonde in a blue wool pinafore skirt; and Raymond, typical of all nine-year-old boys with thin much-scarred knees and drastically cut hair.

  Alan made it quite clear where his affections laid. He climbed on to Mr Hughes’s lap and leaned back comfortably against his chest, smiling rather smugly at Thomas. Jennifer was more interested in Rosie, admiring her hair and her costume and asking if she had any lipstick in her handbag that she could try.

  As they all had tea and a slice of fruit cake, it seemed to Rosie that she had at last stumbled on the kind of happy, warm, uncomplicated middle-class family hitherto only glimpsed in Enid Blyton books. Alan fitted in as if he’d always been one of them, he even spoke like them now. He had a slight West Country accent but not the broad one he once had. She felt a stab of envy, yet the sorrow at losing him was greater. In her heart she knew this was the last time she’d see her little brother.

  When they got back to the cottage Thomas saw to lighting the fire while Rosie helped Miss Pemberton prepare ham, eggs and mashed potato for supper, and although all three of them chatted comfortably, about the cottage, living in the country as opposed to the town, and the forthcoming Coronation, Alan wasn’t mentioned.

  ‘Well, I think it’s time we discussed Alan,’ Miss Pemberton said as she handed round cheese and biscuits. ‘One of the main reasons Mr and Mrs Hughes are anxious to adopt Alan now, rather than waiting a few years, is because they fear as he grows older he might begin to ask difficult questions about his family.’

  ‘Adopting him won’t stop that,’ Rosie shrugged.

  Thomas and Miss Pemberton looked at one another and Rosie suddenly realized what she meant.

  ‘You mean, if he doesn’t see Thomas or me there’s no reason for him to ask questions?’

  Miss Pemberton nodded.

  Thomas put his hand over Rosie’s on the table. ‘So you see the Hugheses’ point?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie said in a small voice. ‘I don’t want him ever to know either.’

  Helping Miss Pemberton clear away the supper things later, Rosie mulled things over again in her head. She found Thomas confusing. Each time she’d seen him he’d been slightly different. In some ways he was very assertive, in others he seemed weak. Sometimes he was boyish, sometimes like an old man. She had thought at first that she knew so much about him and his character, but now after all these months away from him she felt she didn’t really know him at all. It bothered her.

  The next morning, after Miss Pemberton left the cottage, Rosie made another pot of tea for herself and Thomas. It wasn’t nine yet, a cold but sunny morning. Miss Pemberton had just gone into her office for a couple of hours, but would be back in time to take Thomas to the station at eleven.

  Thomas was prodding a little more life into the fire and Rosie brought the tray of tea over to him.

  ‘When will Alan’s adoption be?’ she asked. Yesterday she hadn’t been totally convinced it was the right thing to do, but she’d woken this morning knowing for certain it was.

  ‘I think it ought to be as soon as possible, don’t you?’ Thomas said with a sigh. ‘But let’s leave that subject for another day. I want to know about your job. You haven’t said a word about that.’

  Thomas had sensed Violet had gone out specifically to give them time to talk alone. He had no idea what she thought he ought to discuss with Rosie, but he knew it wasn’t just Alan’s adoption.

  ‘There’s nothing much to say,’ Rosie shrugged. ‘I’m going to look around for a new job when I get back.’

  ‘That bad, eh?’ Thomas pulled a face.

  ‘It’s not all bad,’ she smiled. ‘One patient called Donald I really love, some of the others I’ve got quite attached to. I like the other girls and there are times when it’s quite good fun. I’ve learned a lot there. Last year when I saw you I thought I’d never get used to some of the awful things. But I have.’

  ‘All of them?’ Thomas raised one eyebrow.

  ‘No.’ She dropped her eyes from his. ‘There’s Matron, and the secrecy about what goes on upstairs.’ She told him just a little, but brushed it off with a tight little laugh. ‘The trouble with me is that I am a nosy parker. If I could be like everyone else and just do my job without wanting to know the ins and outs of everything, I’d be a whole lot happier.’

  Thomas thought Miss Pemberton would probably winkle all this out of her and she was better-placed to advise Rosie what to do about it. ‘Well, I’d be a whole lot happier if you’d meet me in London,’ he said. ‘How about we arrange a regular evening, say once every three weeks or so, and I’ll take you out to supper somewhere?’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I think we need one another.’

  Rosie looked at him and frowned. She knew she wanted to see him, but she couldn’t imagine why he should want to. ‘To talk about Alan, do you mean?’

  ‘Well yes, but not just that. There’s a great deal of unfinished business between us. I haven’t told you why I didn’t contact you before.’

  ‘But I know why that was,’ she said.

  All at once Thomas knew what Violet wanted them to talk about. ‘Maybe you think you do, but we haven’t discussed it,’ he said. ‘Perhaps too I just want you as a chum. Or don’t you fancy a one-legged old crock as a friend?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said indignantly. ‘I just don’t see how we can be, not after all that stuff in the trial.’

  ‘That’s exactly why,’ he said, his voice dropping. ‘Have you told anyone how you felt the morning Cole was hanged?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘And I couldn’t tell you either, because we’re on opposite sides of the fence.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘No, we aren’t. We both loved Heather, so how can we be?’

  Rosie felt a sudden surge of anger. She was prepared to spare him hurtful details of things she’d witnessed between Heather and her father, but she wasn’t going to pretend she was glad Cole had been hanged just to make him feel better.

  ‘Well, you tell me how you felt the morning Cole was hanged then,’ she retorted. ‘Can you talk about that?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’ He frowned at her sudden hostility. ‘If you really want to know, I wanted to feel elation. I believed I would gladly have been there to see him drop. But at the end it wasn’t like that at all. I felt absolutely nothing. I lay on my bed watching the hands of the clock tick round and I felt numb. I thought a big weight would rise from my shoulders, but it didn’t. I felt more when your bloody brother got off. That made me so angry I could have killed him if he’d come anywhere near me.’

  Rosie stared at Thomas. She knew that remark came straight from the heart.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better, that made me angry too,’ she blurted out. ‘I don’t know whether he really was guilty, but I hated him so much I wanted him to hang.’

  ‘And your father?’

  He immediately regretted asking such a question. She hung her head and twisted her fingers together.

  ‘I cried for him,’ she finally burst out defiantly. ‘I loved him, whatever he was.’

  Her words seemed to hang in the room. They couldn’t look at one another and only the crackling of the fire muted their heavy breathing.

  Thomas spok
e first, his voice hoarse and rasping. ‘Rosie, I want to be able to forgive him. I know I must if I’m ever to get over it. Could you help me?’

  For months now Rosie had kept her feelings about her father squashed down so low, that at times she believed she had actually eradicated them. But Thomas’s plea had the effect of a knife being pushed under the lid of a jam pot to let the air in, and suddenly they sprang up, as sharp as they had been on the morning of Cole’s death. ‘How can I help you?’ she shouted at him through tears. ‘I can’t even help myself.’

  ‘We can help each other,’ she heard him say, then his arms went round her and he was holding her to his chest, smoothing her hair, just the way Heather used to. She realized he was crying too. ‘We can recover,’ he whispered. ‘I know we can if we learn to trust one another and become real friends. We do need each other.’

  Chapter Nine

  Rosie shivered with excitement as she watched the huge crowds of people packed shoulder to shoulder down below in Piccadilly. It was Coronation Day, the 2nd of June 1953, and later today the royal procession would pass right by this very window on its way back to Buckingham Palace. She could hardly believe that she had been singled out by Donald’s parents to see something so momentous and thrilling.

  Even the heavy rain couldn’t put a pall on the day. Here she was in the comfort of a very grand apartment, a guest at the Cooks’ family party, with an enviable front-row seat. Looking down into the crowd it was impossible to see as much as a spare inch of pavement behind the barricades. Across the street, even the railings of Green Park were almost hidden by people who had found ingenious methods with lengths of rope and boxes to get to a higher vantage point. Beyond them, still more people were coming across the park. The noise was incredible, a roaring sound of hundreds and thousands of voices, shouting, laughing and singing. Many of them had camped out overnight on the pavements to make certain of getting a good viewing position. They had primus stoves to make tea, deckchairs or boxes to sit on, blankets to wrap round them and umbrellas to protect them from the rain.

  It was a sea of red, white and blue. Hats, ribbons, streamers and crêpe-paper wavers. And as if that wasn’t enough to show patriotic fervour, a great many people had gone beyond a few accessories and dressed themselves in the three colours too.

  Rosie dragged her eyes away from the view out of the window and back to the people she was spending the day with. Mr and Mrs Cook sat together on one settee, Mrs Cook cradling her youngest grandchild, a fourteen-month-old baby called Robin. Michael, Donald’s older brother, and his wife Alicia sat opposite them, with the other two children, Clara and Nicholas aged eight and six respectively, squeezed in beside them. Donald was sitting quietly in an armchair, and Susan, his sister, perched on the arm showing him a picture book. Susan’s husband, Roger, had slipped out for a walk.

  Rosie had never known a family quite like the Cooks. She thought the Hugheses, Alan’s new parents, were nice, but they were a little prim and restrained. The Cooks were very open, warm and jovial, so interested in one another and her. They’d even suggested she called them all by their Christian names as so many Cooks were confusing. Several times this morning she had found herself wishing that she could miraculously become a permanent member of their clan instead of just a guest for the day.

  Michael was thirty-eight, Susan two years younger, and they were both very like Donald. All three were tall and shared the same floppy blond hair, blue eyes and wide mouths. If Donald was able to control his loose, wet mouth, and his jerky movements, no one would guess he was any different from his older brother and sister.

  The three grandchildren had the same blue eyes too, but they had their mother Alicia’s dark brown hair and smaller features. Clara and Nicholas were chatty and sunny. Rosie was touched they didn’t seem to find anything odd about their Uncle Donald whom they’d only seen once or twice before.

  Mr Cook had borrowed this second-floor apartment from a friend who was in America on business. He must have been a very good friend as Rosie had overheard Mr Cook telling Michael that rooms with such excellent views of the procession route were being let out for as much as three thousand pounds for the day. She also thought that the Cooks’ own home must be every bit as splendid because they were all so casual about it. But she, on the other hand, was astounded. To her mind it was fit for royalty or at least a film star.

  The drawing-room they were in was big enough to hold at least twenty-five people. Decorated in pale blue and cream, the armchairs and settees had the softest cushions Rosie had ever sat on. There were beautiful landscape paintings framed in gilt and a luxurious cream carpet. She was particularly impressed by the curtains; she thought there had to be a hundred yards of blue velvet as they were at least ten-foot long and there were three wide windows. She had never before seen such pelmets either. The velvet was draped in soft swirls, each one held up by a slightly darker blue rosette. She wondered what the owners of the flat did when the curtains got dirty. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could wash and iron them.

  On top of all this magnificence there was also television. Although Rosie had heard and read a great deal about this amazing invention in the last two or three years, it was the first time she’d actually seen one, other than in shop windows. When Mr Cook opened the cabinet doors and turned it on this morning, she had gasped aloud at the miracle of seeing a close-up of Queen Elizabeth in the state coach on her way to Westminster Abbey.

  But after two hours, the novelty of watching the small screen was beginning to pall for everyone. They had all marvelled at the pageantry and imagined the colours of the ermine-trimmed coronation robe, the golden coach, the plumed horses and the heralds in their scarlet and gold ceremonial uniforms. They had spotted each member of the royal family, but everyone was becoming a little fidgety and they had begun to chatter amongst themselves, and even made irreverent jokes.

  ‘I wonder what would happen if the Queen wanted to spend a penny?’ Alicia said, looking thoughtfully at the screen. The choir were singing an anthem and the cameras kept homing in on the young queen who still managed to look as serene as if she had only been there for ten minutes.

  ‘Only you would wonder about that!’ Michael laughed and playfully slapped her knee. ‘You have an extremely lavatorial mind.’

  Rosie laughed too, she thought Alicia was fun. Although she was over thirty with three children, she was still very slender and girlish. She wore her long, dark hair loose, and her pink dress with a sweetheart neckline and puffed sleeves gave her a look of an American high-school girl.

  ‘Well, it would be very difficult,’ Alicia retorted indignantly. ‘Imagine trying to cope with that long dress and the cloak?’

  ‘I expect she’s been trained to wait,’ the elder Mrs Cook said. In fact her daughter-in-law had voiced her own thoughts. She had come to the conclusion that Elizabeth had probably been denied anything to drink until the ceremony was over. ‘Royalty aren’t like us after all.’

  Mr Cook snorted with laughter, and everyone joined in except Donald who looked puzzled.

  ‘Has she g-g-got legs?’ he asked.

  Donald’s innocent question prompted another hilarious burst of laughter from everyone.

  ‘Of course she has, dear, they are just hidden under her long dress,’ his mother said, picking up a magazine to show him a picture of Elizabeth wearing a knee-length costume, coming down the steps of an aeroplane. It was taken the previous year after she was called back from Australia following the death of her father King George.

  Donald looked at the picture, but he frowned. ‘B-b-but why did you say she isn’t like us?’ he said looking intently at his mother.

  Rosie smiled. She had known Donald now for nine months. In that time he’d surprised her many times with questions that proved he was as capable of reasoning as she was. The years he’d spent at Carrington Hall with no stimulation had clearly stunted him, but just as soon as he was with someone prepared to explain and discuss things with him, he seemed to
take great leaps forward.

  Rosie moved across the room to sit in a chair beside him. ‘Your mother means that she’s led a different life to ordinary people,’ she said. In the last week, in preparation for today, she had spent some time explaining to him the purpose of the royal family and what the Coronation meant. He was a bit confused now that the conversation had turned to the Queen having bodily functions just like anyone else. ‘She is just a lady, the same as Susan, Alicia, your mother and me. She eats dinners, goes to bed and has baths just like we do. But because she was a princess and they knew that one day she would be Queen, she has ladies-in-waiting and servants to help her dress and do everything for her. She doesn’t go out on her own, go on buses or to the shops. That’s what your mother meant about her not being like us.’

  Donald looked at Rosie for a moment and then gave a huge grin. ‘She’s the same as me then,’ he said. ‘I d-d-don’t go out on my own, and p-p-people help me with everything.’

  ‘Yes, you’re very special too,’ Rosie said with a smile. ‘And when the Queen comes by this afternoon, you can wave to her from the window.’

  Norah Cook held her grandchild in her arms, but she was watching and listening to this exchange between her son and his friend with great interest and affection. On the face of it, Rosemary Smith was just an unusually kind-hearted, pretty young girl, filling in time at Carrington Hall until she was old enough to train as a nurse. Norah had imagined until today that she came from a fairly large, lower middle-class family, where a scarcity of money yet a great deal of love had produced a capable, intelligent and caring person.

  It was only this morning that a chance remark revealed she was an orphan. This was something of a surprise and Norah would have liked to find out more, but the speed at which the girl managed to steer the conversation away from herself made her suspect that Rosemary’s childhood wasn’t a bit as she had supposed.

  Since then Norah had been observing Rosemary closely, analysing everything. It was the first time she’d seen the girl since she’d had her hair cut, and without the unflattering maroon uniform and cap to distract her, she felt far more able to accurately assess Rosemary’s true character.