by Anne Doughty
She led the way past the large front rooms that served as schoolrooms and opened the door to a dim and crowded sitting room lit only by one small window overlooking the garden.
Rosie had never seen old Mrs Wilson before. The sight of the small, squat figure filling the armchair by the window distressed her. Like an illustration from an old book, or a painting symbolising age, she was dressed entirely in black except for a startlingly white mob cap. From the way her eyes moved it was clear she was almost blind. From the nature of Miss Wilson’s introduction, it appeared she was also very deaf.
‘Now do sit down, my dear. I want to hear what’s been happening to you. I was so very sad you couldn’t be here for our conversazione and our leaving celebrations. I’m sure Elizabeth will have told you all about them.’
Rosie nodded and smiled, grateful she’d remembered in time there was actually one person in the world who called Lizzie by her baptismal name.
‘Now, how is your grandmother, Rose? Have you been to visit her since her bereavement?’
Rosie shook her head. ‘I’m afraid Granny has been quite ill. Auntie Hannah thinks it’s shock and exhaustion after all those nights she sat up with Granda, but Auntie Sarah says it might just be bad luck. She was perfectly well when she went to London to stay with her, but by the time she’d moved on to Auntie Hannah in Gloucestershire she’d developed some sort of chest infection. She was really very poorly for several weeks. But she’s much better now,’ she added quickly, seeing the look of concern on Miss Wilson’s face.
‘Loss breeds loss, Rose. It is a sad thing to say, but true. When we lose someone we love, we often lose other things as well. Our courage, our hope, our health. I’m afraid I’ve known too many individuals who have become ill after a major loss. How have you been feeling yourself?’
Rose hesitated. She’d not been at all ill herself but she remembered Lizzie had asked her more than once if she was all right.
‘I’m not sure how to answer your question,’ she began, aware of the clear blue eyes that focused closely upon her.
‘I thought I would feel very sad, but I didn’t. I could see that Granda’s going was not nearly as bad as what might have happened. One of his doctors told me what it could have been like. But since I’ve come home, I’ve felt very dull and flat, even when I’m doing things I like to do, sketching, or painting, or writing letters. I can’t quite explain the feeling …’
Miss Wilson was sitting upright in her chair just as she’d taught her girls to sit, back straight, feet placed neatly together, hands folded, her attention alert but relaxed. Poor Lizzie had never managed to sit in the approved manner for more than five minutes. She herself had done better, finding that practice did help. The thought that Lizzie might practise sitting still made her smile to herself, but she didn’t let it distract her from what she was trying to say.
Miss Wilson waited patiently to see if Rosie had anything to add, but in the end, Rosie admitted to herself that she found it impossible to say more about how she felt.
She looked hopefully towards the familiar figure in her rather faded, brown, everyday dress. She’d worn the same dress all through the year Rosie had been her pupil, but then, as now, she’d decorated it each week with a freshly laundered collar embroidered with small, pale flowers and pinned with a little brooch.
‘I had a dear friend once,’ the older woman began when Rosie remained silent, ‘who lost her father when she was in her thirties. He’d been so ill, it was a merciful relief when he died, but for months and months afterwards she felt all the joy had gone out of her life. She was older than I was and fortunately she had a wise friend who said something to her which I have never forgotten. She said, “Grief is not sharp and pointed, it’s grey and flat, like a fog, and because you can’t see it, you don’t know why life seems so dreary”.’
Rosie nodded enthusiastically.
‘That is so exactly right,’ she declared, taking a deep breath. ‘Because I wasn’t crying, or feeling desperate, I thought I was somehow my normal self, though Elizabeth did keep asking me if I felt all right. But what you’ve just said is so true. I couldn’t see anything was wrong, so I didn’t think anything was.’
Rosie had once found Miss Wilson rather formidable, but now, sitting in the small, overcrowded sitting room, the old woman asleep in her chair, she saw a different person, a rather sad, but very kind person who would certainly answer her questions and give her the advice she was sure to need, just like Aunt Sarah had suggested.
She had no idea why Miss Wilson had never married, but she suddenly realised that she couldn’t have had a very easy life, working to support herself and her mother and caring for her as she herself reached her seventies. Remembering things she’d said in the last year, little stories she’d told to illustrate points she was making in class, it seemed that friends she’d once had were no more. Either dead or now removed far beyond regular contact.
‘I was wondering, Rose, whether you might do me a small service.’
‘I most certainly will if I can,’ Rosie replied promptly.
‘I’ve been finding it very difficult to go and collect my library books. It’s only a short distance to my kind neighbour’s house, but she has some difficulty with walking and I feel I cannot leave Mother unattended. Were you to come and visit me one afternoon a week, you could collect the books Mrs Rountree’s daughter brings from the library in Armagh while you were here and we might, if you wish, share our literary explorations together.’
Reflecting on her first visit to Miss Wilson, Rosie was still putting plates back on the dresser when she remembered she’d be collecting a new Flora of Ireland for them, this week. It had been on request for some time now. Finally, it had become available. With its help, they hoped to identify not only the plants she’d found in Money bog, but also the pressed flowers she’d brought back from Kerry, now mounted on sheets of drawing paper.
Turning away from the dresser, Rosie caught sight of her mother hurrying towards the house.
‘Ye may come an’ give me a han’,’ she said abruptly, as she arrived breathless at the door. ‘Bobby’s away t’ Portadown an’ Joe’s slipped on the squit the cows left. Not lookin’ where he was goin’ as usual. He’s filthy an’ he says his leg’s broke.’
Rosie followed her quickly as she turned back towards the byre. Obviously in pain and equally obviously in a temper, Uncle Joe sat on the splattered surface of the yard.
‘It’s broke. Ah know it’s broke. Ye may get the doctor.’
It was not the smell of fresh cow dung that made Rosie feel ill as she put her arm round him, it was the stale odour of tobacco and sour sweat from his unwashed body. The stubble on his chin scraped against her cheek as they lifted him to his feet.
‘Sure ye know I can’t walk,’ he said, glaring from one to the other, while he stood on one leg, their arms still supporting him.
Rosie had been concerned they might have difficulty lifting him, for her mother had never had much strength in her arms and always complained she couldn’t carry buckets of water if they were full, but Uncle Joe had been far lighter than she’d expected. Even so, they couldn’t possibly carry him all the way up the yard and over to the house.
‘If we support you, Uncle Joe, you could hop on your good leg,’ Rosie suggested.
He twisted his face towards her and scowled, his tobacco-stained teeth only inches from her face.
‘Or we can set you down again and bring you a chair till the doctor comes,’ she added, glancing up at the sky.
‘Aw, that’s a great idea, isn’t it? What d’ye think of that, Martha? Leave me out here an’ the rain about to pour down.’
‘Well, it would wash the shit off ye,’ her mother threw back, so promptly that Rosie had the greatest difficulty in keeping her face straight.
When he finally agreed to hop, he’d leant on them so heavily they’d ended up half carrying him.
‘Ye may go up to Woodview an’ phone for the doctor,’ Martha
said, as they deposited him thankfully in his chair by the stove.
‘I could go up to Lizzie’s. It would be quicker.’
‘Have Mackay’s got the phone?’
Rosie wondered yet again how her mother could express such a wealth of meaning in one brief phrase. She managed to make acquiring a telephone sound as if it were a deliberately disloyal challenge to the normal and proper way of conducting life.
‘It’s for Mr Mackay’s business,’ she explained.
‘Take my purse and pay for it then. We don’t want to be under an obligation to the Mackays. We’re just as good as they are, phone or no phone.’
Uncle Joe was quite right about his leg. It was broken.
The doctor was a man in his fifties. His hair had receded creating a long, gleaming forehead that looked as if he might have polished it each morning at the same time as he shone up his spectacles and his gold watch. Rosie heard him mutter to himself about a ‘greenstick fracture’, but she judged he was not the kind of doctor who would welcome questions or be very forthcoming with his explanations.
‘I’m afraid we’ll need X-rays, Mrs Hamilton. That means Armagh Infirmary. Do you have transport?’
‘What kind of transport?’
‘A motor car would be ideal,’ he replied, with an unpleasant smile, clearly indicating that he felt he was dealing with one of the less able-minded of his patients.
Martha shook her head.
‘Then I’m afraid it’s a matter of waiting for the ambulance. I’ll telephone the hospital when I get back to my surgery this afternoon. They might be able to come today. If not, sometime tomorrow.’
Rosie didn’t have to look at her mother or Uncle Joe to know how they’d react to this. It was still only mid morning and Joe was clearly in considerable pain. Richard P. would be horrified. In this situation he’d take Uncle Joe to hospital himself, cow shit or no cow shit.
She took a deep breath, picked up the old jotter in which she made lists of things needed in the house and smiled at him sweetly.
‘Perhaps I could make the telephone call and save you the trouble, doctor. We don’t have a motor, but we do have a kind neighbour with a telephone. If you would just tell me who to ask for at the hospital, I can find the number myself in the telephone book. I expect they will need your authorisation,’ she added, her pencil poised. ‘Just tell me what I’m to say.’
He did as he was asked without further ado, collected his fee and disappeared while Rosie ran up the hill and made the call. The ambulance arrived less than an hour later driven by a large man with an even larger young lad as his helper. They picked up Uncle Joe as if he were an overgrown child.
‘Ye spoke up rightly to yer man,’ Joe said, eyeing Rosie as she and Martha went out to the ambulance with him. ‘Maybe a bit of education comes in handy after all. I’m beholden to you, as the sayin’ is.’
They banged shut the heavy doors of the ambulance and drove off. Rosie thought how out of place it looked, still painted camouflage green, for it was one of those paid for by the people of Armagh in 1914 and given to their local regiment.
Two weeks later, Joe died in Armagh Infirmary. Not from the leg injury which had taken him to hospital, but from a cancer, probably long established, they said, which became suddenly active, turning his face to a sickly yellow and dropping off what little flesh remained on his gaunt frame.
On a damp and misty December afternoon, Rosie saw him carried up the hill on the shoulders of her father and brothers to the quiet Quaker graveyard, where, years earlier, some more devout member of his family had ensured burial rights, even for those, like Joe, who had not set foot in a Meeting House since his boyhood and who had never to the best of her knowledge managed to say a good word for the Quakers who now provided his resting place.
Joe’s departure inevitably meant there would have to be changes in the routine of the household, but at this low point of the year, with the cattle stalled for the winter months, there was little obvious change to the farm routine for Martha and Bobby. Recently, Joe had avoided the milking and he’d left all the heavy work to Bobby.
Rosie did sometimes feel there was an easier atmosphere in the house. For a start, her father came over from the barn in the late evening more often to sit by the fireside in the chair Uncle Joe had habitually occupied. She herself was glad enough not to have to wash his smelly underclothes, when he could be persuaded to change them, and even happier to escape having to clean his room. While he would not spit in the kitchen under Martha’s eye, he had observed no such limitation in his room.
No, she could not be sorry he was gone and yet she found herself puzzling over his life, fitting together the few fragments she’d picked up about his adventures as a young man prospecting in Alaska and working on the Canadian railways with his brothers.
Why he had come home no one knew. Some said there was a woman in it, as so often in these stories. Others said he was homesick. But nothing anyone said about Joe suggested he’d ever made any contribution to the happiness of another human being.
If the details of Uncle Joe’s life puzzled Rosie, her mother’s reaction to his death puzzled her even more.
From the moment the news of his death arrived, she’d been in the best of good spirits. Naturally, she’d gone through the appropriate rituals with her neighbours. Poor Joe was lamented as a man who hadn’t made much of his life. God Bless the crater. Thus the pieties were observed, but with moderation. Martha did not try to soften the picture of a waspish and egocentric man. Rather, she took the line that we all have it in us to make a poor job of life and, but for the grace of God, we any of us might end our days like Joe.
More relevant to Rosie than merely the lift in spirits which Joe’s death had produced in her mother, however, was the change in her behaviour towards herself. It came as a shock the first time Martha was polite to her. Where once she’d replied to any enquiry about a meal or a job with a sharp, ‘Suit yerself’, she would now say, ‘Whatever suits you best’.
She was baffled and for once Lizzie could think of no possible reason, even though she did manage to forget about Hugh for long enough to give the matter her full attention.
The respite was invaluable to Rosie. There was no objection now to her spending a weekend with her grandmother when she finally arrived home just after Christmas, to escape the predictable January storms.
Back at the farm again, much encouraged by her grandmother’s obvious pleasure in her return to Rathdrum and her modest plans for occupying herself during the worst winter months, she was able to redecorate Uncle Joe’s bedroom. She suggested to Bobby and Jack that they share the room. There would then be space in the barn for a long workbench where Charlie and Sammy would have a much better place for their new wireless receiving set. Already, the previous September, they’d managed to pick up the first Northern Ireland broadcast.
After a little good-natured teasing Charlie and Sammy, delighted by this plan, agreed that a small area of the new work bench, just under one of the two small, north-facing windows would be kept free of wires, aerials, soldering irons and valves, so that Rosie had a space were she could work.
Even with the paraffin heater lit and a rug round her knees, it was very hard to keep warm in January, but having a place of her own with a piece of bench where she could paint, or write letters, was such a pleasure that she used it every afternoon until the point at which her hands got too cold to hold either brush or pen. A hundred times better than writing by candlelight sitting up in bed with a coat round her shoulders, she thought, every time she started out on another letter to Patrick.
Writing to Patrick was not as easy as she’d imagined it would be. At first, she thought it was because the shadow of her grandfather’s death had come so soon after the happiness of her time in Kerry. As time passed, however, and Patrick’s letters grew less frequent, she realised how anxious she was as she took them up.
Always they were lengthy, as much as a dozen small, closely written sheets, bu
t each time, as she read, she felt a strange disappointment creep over her.
It wasn’t that what he wrote wasn’t interesting in itself and quite new to her. Yeats and Joyce and Synge he’d studied closely. He had so much to say about them, but they were simply names to her and when she asked questions so that she might understand better, he never answered them. He just went on about the literary scene in Dublin and his own observations on it, as if she knew the people he mentioned and was as involved in their disagreements as he seemed to be.
She wondered why he never took up any of the things she said about her own life, never asked what she was doing, or even what she was reading. More than once, it came into her mind that it was so different from the way Richard P. related to her. But then, she told herself, she had to accept her talk with Richard had always been face to face. Letters couldn’t be expected to have that kind of immediacy.
Then there were passages where Patrick rode off, as she put it to herself, saying such extravagant things about Ireland and its past, or about love and its transforming power. Scattered with phrases in Irish, she wondered if she should find such passages romantic, but sadly, she had to admit to herself, they just made her feel uneasy, even a little cross as she’d said she couldn’t read Irish. Sometimes it felt as if he were addressing someone she simply didn’t recognise.
She encouraged herself by considering that he might have problems with being direct, just like Emily. Meantime, she did her best. Writing letters was one of her pleasures and she continued to write in the hope that she might begin to understand better someone who was so different from anyone she had ever met.
It was a bitterly cold morning in February when the happy state of affairs that had existed since Uncle Joe’s death came to an end. Walking cautiously back from the ash pit, her eyes scanning the yard for any telltale gleam of ice, Rosie saw the postman leave his bicycle by the gate.
‘Hallo, Rosie. You’re outa luck today,’ the young man greeted her.