Rosie paused to stretch her back and Sam parked his wheelbarrow beside her. ‘It’ll look so much better when we get rid of all this mess,’ Rosie said, thinking aloud. ‘It’ll double the useable space and we’ll get the path back again, maybe even open the door up at the bottom so we can get out the back way.’
‘Can we have grass? For football?’ Sam said.
‘Mmm, it’s a thought. Maybe I’ll turf it to make it look tidy to help sell the house.’
‘Can I have goal posts?’
‘Well, I’m not sure it’ll be worth it. There’s no garden to put them in back at the flat, is there?’
Sam looked grumpy. He picked up the handlebars of the empty barrow and began running it at the pile of weeds and rubble, banging it against it with a clang.
‘Don’t do that, Sam. You’ll chip the paint off it and then it’ll get rusty.’
Sam carried on.
‘Sam!’
He stopped.
‘Maybe when we’re back in London we can find a football scheme for you to join. Would you like that?’
Sam shrugged, picked up a stick and dropped it into the barrow.
‘Or when we move back and you start school in September, perhaps they’ll play football in the games lessons. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t want to go to school,’ Sam muttered.
Rosie squatted beside him, getting down to his level. They had had this conversation before.
‘Why not?’
He clamped his mouth shut, pushing forward his lower lip.
‘You’ll have to go to school sometime this year, love. You’ll soon be five. Everyone has to go before they’re five, you know.’
Silence. She put her hand, huge in its leather gardening glove, on his arm.
‘Do you feel a bit nervous about it? Everybody feels nervous on the first day but they soon make friends.’
‘I’m not going there.’ Sam pulled away. He tipped the barrow so that it lay face down on the pile. ‘I’m going in to watch telly.’ He mooched off and Rosie left him to himself. He would feel better when he’d warmed up indoors and forget all about his mood once he was engrossed in a programme. She would leave tackling the question of school for the moment.
She turned back to the task in hand, pulling out handfuls of sticky weed before starting once more to cut back brambles and shift the rubble beneath to a pile behind her, beside the fence. She had cleared a good area this afternoon and had reached as far as the mulberry tree. She hesitated and stood back, considering it. Its boughs drooped to the ground in places, its knuckles in the earth like a gigantic malformed hand. The wintry sun hung low in the sky and the gnarled growth threw long twisted shadows across the undergrowth within its cage.
Steeling herself, she began to work her way in between two branches. She pulled out and cut the tough brambles, tightly wound with crisp, dry twists of old bindweed. Then she chopped nettles back with shears and dragged out the soggy mops of old bluebell plants beneath, their leaves pale yellow and slimy. Clearing the mound of plants from under one of the branches, bowed low to the ground by its own ancient weight, she found a rusty iron stake supporting it.
It reminded her of the old iron stove flue in the cellar and she shuddered. It’s only a piece of metal, she told herself: a gardener’s prop. She must get a hold of herself before she started letting in black thoughts. Yet as she moved past it, stooping to enter the cave of branches, the cold seemed to seep into her, rising from the very earth.
In here, Rosie! Quick! Get under!
Maria’s voice called to her as the years fled away, drawing her into the hiding place under the boughs and gathering her and Lily close, so close that she could smell sherbert on Lily’s breath and feel the warmth of her against her side. She remembered, clear and strong, her mother’s voice, Coming … ready or not … and the delicious terror of being found, the fearful anticipation, their hearts beating fast together, she and Lily pressed against each other tight as pigeons in a basket. The sense of loss was a physical ache, in her chest, in her belly. Oh, where were they now – Lily, Mum? There was no one to find her, however much she longed to be found. She leant against a branch for a moment, feeling empty and desolate.
Around the trunk of the tree, thick as mistletoe, ivy grew in a great tangled mess, choking it. She bent over it, cutting as low as she could and pulling lengths of trailing growth away, the shadow of the branches above casting their own tangled bars across her back. These bleak thoughts were dangerous. She tried to shut them out, concentrate only on what needed to be done, drown out her feelings through physical movement, but still her sadness deepened, as if in cutting her way to the centre of this neglected ground she had disturbed something that brooded there, the deep melancholy that she had sensed before answering her own.
Gradually, as she worked, she became aware of faint sounds behind her. In her ear was a child’s fast breath, panting, gasping with effort, and then, stronger, a strange, repeated scrape and slide that seemed to echo above it.
Rosie’s fingers stilled. She stood with her hands hovering above glossy ivy leaves, the tough stems a mat surrounding the trunk, squeezing the life out of it. She wanted to clear space and to let in the light but she had begun to tire. It was impossible, the task too big, her will too weak; she was clearing not just stems and shoots but something else, something strong that reached out with grasping tendrils, entwining, covering, burying. I won’t let her come, I won’t let her come, she repeated to herself. This time she wouldn’t be cowed and she would not run. She worked on, ignoring the sounds behind her, labouring breaths with a sob caught in the throat, the scraping sound faster and more desperate. Rosie grasped the roots and pulled upwards, stripping the tough ivy shoots from the bark. They came away, leaving a network of smaller threads and tiny suckers, pale brown needles prickling from the wood. She tore at it with both hands and didn’t stop until she’d pulled the last tangle away and the tree was free of its girdle of green. Sweating and exhausted, she leant her head on her hands against the trunk’s grey bark. Behind her, there was a sound of something heavy thrown down and then nothing more.
Heart hammering, she forced herself to look back over her shoulder. There was nothing but the tangled mass of briar and rubble surrounding her and her own small path cutting through it: no pale face with its expression of appeal, no crouched body barring her way, just silence now and a sense of sadness so intense that it almost overwhelmed her.
Bent double, she came out from under the branches and stood back, panting and drained. She’d had enough. The tree’s broad girth stood naked and open to the air but it still stood knee-deep in weeds on three sides. Still the sadness hung there, dark and chill, like the exhalation from an old vault that has seen no sun for centuries when a slab is pulled away. She picked up her tools and trudged back to the house.
That evening, after she’d put Cara to bed, Rosie went to tuck Sam in. She sat down beside him and read him a chapter of Moominland Midwinter. ‘I’m glad we don’t have to hibernate when it snows, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘It would be very boring with no one to play with.’
‘I s’pose,’ Sam said, still turning the pages and looking ahead at the pictures.
‘The thing is,’ Rosie ventured, ‘I think that now you’re getting such a big boy, you need plenty of friends to play with, and when everyone else goes off to school you would get bored at home.’
‘I don’t want to stay at home,’ Sam said, scowling.
‘But you told me you don’t want to go to school either?’
‘I don’t want to go to that school.’
Rosie was so surprised that all she could say was ‘Oh’. They hadn’t even been to see the school in Streatham yet; how on earth could Sam have got it into his head that he wouldn’t like it? ‘Where do you want to go then?’
‘I want to go to school with Amy.’
‘Aah. I see,’ Rosie said, relieved on one count, for school did seem to hold some attraction,
and worried on another, as separating Sam and Amy when they moved was obviously going to be an issue.
Her phone rang downstairs and she said, ‘OK, we’ll talk some more about this another day. Night night, chump-chop.’ She kissed him and tucked the duvet up to his chin before running downstairs.
She caught her breath and fished her phone out of her bag but she was just too late. Looking at the number, she didn’t recognise it. She put the phone down and started to stack up the plates from teatime and take them over to the sink. A minute later the phone rang again. She dumped the plates with a clatter, wiped her hands on her jeans and took the call.
‘Hello, yes?’
‘It’s Tom Marriott here. I wondered if you got the letter about your settlement all right?’ he said in a cheery voice.
Rosie was puzzled, wondering why he was ringing out of working hours and, more to the point, when he had handed the case over to someone else. ‘Yes, thanks. I did ring and thank Mr Douglas, actually,’ she said rather stiffly.
‘Oh, right,’ he said. He recovered his stride. ‘Well, I was just ringing to see if I could take you out to lunch to celebrate, maybe some time next week?’
Rosie thought this rather cheeky considering he’d dropped the case. Surely if she celebrated with anyone it should be with the man who’d done the work, although the thought of having lunch with the ancient Mr Douglas with his droopy moustache and clipped manner seemed unappealing, and also very odd. ‘Do you do this for all your clients?’
‘Well, no …’ He sounded amused.
‘Well then.’
‘You’re a hard woman, Rosie Milford! If you don’t want to celebrate your good news, how about joining me to celebrate mine? I’ve finally got my own flat again so I’m out of my mum’s and Viv’s hair at last.’
Rosie was puzzled.
He went on, ‘I’m not sure how much help I was there, really; I’m all fingers and thumbs with babies. David’s back now anyhow.’
‘Who’s David?’ she said in confusion.
‘Oh, sorry, he’s my brother-in-law. He works overseas; that’s why my sister was staying at Mum’s for a while to get a bit of help from us with the baby.’
Sister! Rosie did a mental double-take. So the baby stuff he’d bought at the supermarket had been for his niece, not his daughter, and the Christmas card … well of course that was only from him – he wasn’t married. He wasn’t married. A sudden burst of excitement at the possibilities warred with crushing embarrassment at the way she’d behaved. Whatever must he have thought about her frostiness?
Her silence had lasted so long that he began again. ‘Look, I know you probably felt let down when I transferred the case. The truth is I wanted to ask you to have lunch with me but I didn’t feel I could while I was acting for you – you know, fraternising with a client, ethics and all that – and then when I told you Mr Douglas was taking over and I walked you to your car, you seemed so cross I couldn’t get out what I wanted to say so I just stood there like an idiot and watched you drive away.’ He paused. ‘Are you still angry?’
Rosie, who found she was holding her breath, gasped, ‘No.’
There was a moment’s silence in which Rosie felt he might be smiling. ‘So, will you have lunch with me to celebrate my new flat?’
‘Like a date …’
‘Yes.’ He was definitely smiling. ‘So like a date, in fact, that it’ll be exactly that.’
‘Sorry, I’m a bit out of practice.’ Why on earth had she said ‘like a date’? She sounded about fourteen. She felt about fourteen, she thought ruefully. ‘Um, where did you have in mind?’
‘Say, La Pergola, on Friday? One o’clock?’
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, slipping back into adult politeness. They said their goodbyes and she hung up.
Blimey. A date. With Tom Marriott of the crinkly eyes and the gallant manners. She sat down on a kitchen chair and ran through her itinerary for the week ahead. Could she get into town to get a new top, or maybe a dress? And perhaps get her hair cut – it was a bit dry and frazzled-looking at the ends. Maybe there was a good side to feeling like a teenager; she hadn’t felt this bubbling, lifted feeling, this fizzing excitement, for years. It was nice. Even if it came to nothing, it felt good.
TWENTY-ONE
1822
A young woman stands at a gate on the ridge, looking out over the village of Weedon Royal. Her skin is as brown as a cobnut and she is dressed in the gypsy fashion: her skirt above the ankles and her boots laced tight, the better for running when there’s the need. Her clothes are ragged at wrists and hem and a triangle of blue cloth is tied over her hair, which is braided and hangs down her back.
On the other side of the valley, the barracks and arsenal rise from the water meadows in redbrick, foursquare solidity: angular blocks at odds with the soft rounds of trees on the slope below. They impose upon the landscape, a physical expression of power: storehouses of potential destruction filled with soldier after soldier, thousands of muskets, and barrel after barrel of powder.
Below them, the village lies in a pool of early-morning mist. The slate roofs of the taller buildings float above it like open books laid face down and the church tower is truncated to a dumpy lookout post.
The young woman, Beulah, is searching for one roof, one particular building. The mist changes the topography; the houses no longer huddled and crowded together. There is white space between the occasional buildings that rear through it, so that bearings are lost. Nonetheless, despite this and the lapse of years, once she finds the long straight run of the roof of a three-storey building she instantly knows it for the silk factory. She leans her elbows on the bar of the gate, which is coarse-grained with pale green lichen, and looks out over the place that haunts her, remembering …
She can hear the clack and clatter of the looms that seemed to vibrate the very bricks and timbers of the place. The smell of the cellar, the sweet, musty scent of herbs barely overlaying the odour of rot, is in her nostrils, and the feel of Fowler’s grip as he shoved her against the wall is on her flesh. Sliding to the ground, she had cowered down; her hands travelling over the brick floor, feeling for the metallic scrape of the scissors and then grasping them. In terror, she saw the Master’s intention in his eyes as he turned the whip around and knew she had but a moment to act.
As he covered her mouth she brought the scissors down upon his forearm with all her force. He cried out and let his hand drop. In the second that he stood staring at his arm in stupefaction, she scrambled away from him and was at the cellar steps before he had dashed the scissors to the ground, and up them before he had roared after her, clutching his wound and bellowing like the very devil. Then she was out, out into the bright sunlight and running for her life, past the carpenter’s shed, past the end of the building, round the corner to the street where a cart was pulling away, and on, to the road out of the village.
She ran uphill until her mouth tasted full of salt and she felt her chest would burst. She crouched over with her hands on her knees, gasping until she got back her breath, and then slipped through a field gate and ran again, heading across country to home and to Effie, who would know what to do.
There were men at the cottage. She hid in the hedge at the back of the house, watching one hammering boards across the windows and another catching the hens. When he caught one, he held it upside down by the feet. The man examined each bird, pulling its wings wide and prodding its breast. He shoved some, squawking, into a crate and pulled the necks of others with a sharp twist and a snap and then dropped them, limp, into a sack. She thought of Alice holding up the baby and saying, ‘There’s no life in it,’ and felt sick.
She stayed under the hedge, curled up tight with her arms around her knees. She was afraid of what might happen, with the men there, if Effie came back. She wondered if Effie had already returned and was hiding in the house and would be trapped there. At last, the other man stopped hammering and put his tools into his belt. The two of them went of
f together, one carrying the crate and the other with the sack over his shoulder, chatting amicably as if this ruin of her home, her life, was all in a day’s work. Their voices faded away down the lane. She waited, shivering, until it was utterly silent and then a little longer until the sounds of the songbirds returned, before coming out.
As she crept down the path alongside the washing that hung all haphazardly from the line, her steps raised tiny white feathers from the ground. They floated around her and fell again to catch in the glistening grass. She went to every boarded window, tapping and calling, ‘Effie! Effie! It’s only me, Beulah,’ but there was no answer. She called louder through a crack in the planks across the door, ‘Are you in there? It’s safe now – they’ve gone!’ The evening settled back to stillness, the peaceful murmuring of the doves in the hawthorn thicket at odds with the scene of desolation.
She sat on the doorstep and, after a while, played a game, idly throwing pebbles at a gap between the slats of the gate. She waited and waited. The air began to cool and she started to be afraid of night coming. She got to thinking that Effie must have been caught. She knew that having a baby without being wed could mean you were sent to gaol. The thought of being locked up made her mortal afeared. What if they were to come for her too? She didn’t want to stay there, with the bats flitting around the eaves and an owl calling from the thicket, wondering all night if every squeak or crackle was the creak of a horse’s harness or the rustle of a man’s coat. There was no one to go to. Tobias was lost to her and she could go to no one at the factory for fear that the master would hear of it and find her; in any case, Biddy would have less idea what to do than she did. But soon she would lose the light … She hesitated and then decided. She would go to find Hanzi at Castle Dykes.
The Silk Factory Page 33