by Nesta Tuomey
‘What am I saying?’ the old lady said jealously, ‘Ten...twelve times!’ It came to her that the meadow her grandfather had cut that day was in all probability the site on which the Rooney’s house now stood. She fancied she saw her grandfather swinging the scythe in the Rooney’s front garden and then she was standing on her own tennis court reducing all around her with the same easy movement. Of course, over time the scythe would have become dull, possibly rusty.
She took a half-step in the direction of the sheds and her foot sank in a runnel created by an overflow from the brimming rockery. Moisture from her hair – she had been standing longer than she realised – dripped on to her neck. All at once that state of trembling indecision caught up with her, revealing all too clearly what she never would have believed possible in the past, her own limitations.
Flora’s strong face changed into a blob of defeat as she gazed at the waterlogged lawn, the beds of sodden dahlias and stringy clusters of marigolds. She was seized by an unaccountable dread. Giddily, she turned and began a leaden journey to the back door. The arched trellis loomed in her path. The petals on a single perfect rose loosened and fell as she blundered slowly past. Upturned flower pots sent flying by recent gales littered the ground. She kicked against them in her panic. Then she was at the door, stabbing the key in the lock. Inside she drew all the bolts and went to sit and tremble.
It was Mrs. Rooney who eventually persuaded Miss Simpson to have a burglar alarm installed.
‘You can’t go on like this,’ she said, finding her collapsed in a chair, staring vapidly. It was another of those days when Flora saw no point in making an effort. ‘It will be expensive but what use is your money when you’re dead,’ she said cheerily. ‘As I always say, we might as well spend it when we can.’
Flora looked at Mrs. Rooney and wondered who it was who had money. Surely not herself. True, she had a number of ornaments and silver left to her by her parents but she doubted they would fetch much money on today’s market. Surely not Mrs. Rooney herself, living with her six children in a poky house, or her husband who had a job in the County Council.
She opened her mouth wanting to be put straight on this point but Mrs. Rooney rushed on, intent on disposing of someone’s wealth – whoever it was – as quickly as possible. ‘I’ll make enquiries,’ she insisted, ‘No trouble. None at all.’
Before long two young men were trooping all over Flora Simpson’s house, sounding windows and jotting measurements. They offered her an inertia sensor system which covered the perimeters and was activated by as little as a knock on the window.
There would be an interior siren, they promised, with personal attack buttons at strategic spots. Flora listened attentively. The whole thing sounded complicated and expensive but she nodded weakly, in no condition to disagree.
Despite the mess and inconvenience she derived a certain consolation from their presence. She made them pots of tea and was encouraged to venture outdoors to clip back the Virginia creeper and gather in bunches of scented herbs for her cookpot. The alarm took three days to install.
When the men were gone she stood in the small alcove under the stairs and stared in awe at the winking control panel. She was reminded of a military phrase of her father’s. Action stations! ‘Go on, girl,’ he urged at her elbow. ‘Don’t stand dawdling. Man the defences!’
She cleared the screen and turned a switch. The staccato warning bleated endlessly. She went to make tea. In the kitchen she placed the kettle on the Aga and sat down. The hot plate sizzled companionably. Her veined lids drooped and she fell into a pleasant doze.
‘Aah!’ Flora awoke with a start. The alarm bell was thundering away outside. Flustered she got to her feet and found herself surrounded by thick fog. ‘Help,’ she moaned pitifully. She stumbled to remove the burned out kettle before fleeing from the horror lurking behind the curtainless windows. The heavily condensed glass offered a clue but all she could see were a cluster of faces menacing her through stretched nylon.
In the hall she crouched, hands to her ears, assaulted by waves of tumultuous sound. Until on a lowered, though no less insistent, note another bell impinged upon her awareness and she tottered to the front door.
Mrs. Rooney stood on the step, her face flushed with concern, ‘Are you all right, Miss Simpson?’ she shouted above the din. ‘We heard the alarm.’
Unable to reply, Flora clung to the door knob, her head nodding as though attached by wires to the vibrating bell. Mrs. Rooney crossed the threshold purposefully and turned off the alarm. In the absence of noise, the old lady’s dog could be heard in a frenzy of barking at the far side of the wall.
Flora came to life. ‘They came back,’ she gabbled. ‘Like I knew they would.’ Her stuttering tongue exposed to Mrs. Rooney’s sane gaze the phantoms which kept tireless watch in the shrubbery, intent on stealing her few remaining treasures. ‘Three of them... maybe more.’ In the aftermath of fear her mood became boastful.
Mrs. Rooney’s stolid features registered admiration. ‘Well, I never!’ she said at last. ‘Lucky you have that alarm.’ Her wondering gaze took in the laocoon of wires and sensors over the doors and windows. ‘Well... there’s no denying you’re safer here than Fort Knox.’
In the following weeks, Flora Simpson’s alarm continued to go off at regular intervals. Sometimes her dog was the culprit – since Judy had discovered she’d only to jump against the basement window to activate the alarm, she was constantly setting it off – at other times there was no discernible reason.
The trilling sound became as familiar in the neighbourhood as church bells on Sunday and Mrs. Rooney answered it just as faithfully. ‘You never know,’ she got in the habit of saying. ‘It might be genuine.’
One evening Mr. Rooney replaced his wife on Miss Simpson’s doorstep. ‘The missus sent me, just in case,’ he explained, when after a precautionary peep through the side window, the old woman admitted him.
It was nice having a man in the house again, Flora thought, watching him going about, sounding doors and windows, even looking into the darkened conservatory, something she would never have dared herself.
‘This could be your trouble,’ he said, drawing her attention to a loose sensor on the pantry window. He stuck it back on with glue while she made a cup of tea and showed him her brother Hubert’s medal, awarded posthumously in the Second World War.
On leaving Mr. Rooney said, ‘Mind you lock the door after me, Miss Simpson,’ and waited on the step until she’d shot the bolts. Flora appreciated that.
Another night it was the Rooney boys who answered her summons. She opened the door to find the eldest boy slouched outside; behind him, his younger brother. Flora snatched the pair of them over the threshold.
‘Quickly,’ she shouted in a state of high excitement., slamming and locking the door in one violent movement. ‘They are at the back!’ she cried, as though addressing the multitudes. Her voice sounded strangely in her own ears, her heart raced beckoning her on. She scooped up a bunch of keys, ‘We must search the house.’ Again it was a stentorian command.
The Rooney boys followed her, the elder with a faintly incredulous look, the younger wholeheartedly caught up in Flora’s drama. In the hall, he plucked what had been her father’s best umbrella out of the stand and flourished it vigorously.
‘Excellent,’ Flora approved, recognising a kindred spirit.
Travelling from room to room, unlocking doors on furniture and emotions unexposed in twenty years, the reason for the search was temporarily forgotten as she experienced little frissons of nostalgia and remorse. With a cry of ownership she rescued a pair of suede gloves from the jumble on a bed and pulled them on, beating the palms free of dust. A moment later she seized upon a china shepherdess.
‘Is that where you had got to?’ she exclaimed as to an old friend. ‘They were a pair,’ she explained, taking it with her
‘I get a lot of homework,’ the older boy complained.
‘Here, take the keys,’ Flora m
ade amends.
She followed him into her parent’s room. In a crepe-de-chine tea dress her mother lurked in the gloom. For a heart-stopping moment Flora waited for her to speak. ‘How foolish,’ she sighed, backing away.
She motioned to the boy and he turned the key, locking the past firmly in its place. From behind an ornamental Japanese screen on the landing Hubert swooped with a wild yell. Flora’s knees buckled. With painful intensity she clasped the shepherdess to her skittering heart. What an aggravating boy! She would almost certainly tell father. Then she saw the younger Rooney boy enjoying his joke.
‘Sorry,’ he grinned unrepentantly.
Boys, Flora supposed, remained the same.
Downstairs again, she got out the lemonade and chocolate biscuits. ‘So no burglars after all,’ she announced almost gaily. ‘Have another,’ she tipped the tin generously. ‘I know what big appetites boys have,’ though long ago she would never have conceded any such thing when it applied to Hubert and herself.
‘We’ve got to be going,’ the older boy poked his brother.
‘Oh, must you?’ Flora’s face fell. She had an inspiration. ‘Do you play draughts?’ she asked. ‘There’s a box somewhere about.’
November began and frost reduced the dahlias overnight to blackened spectres. Mrs. Rooney sat once more in Miss Simpson’s drawing room watching her pour the inevitable cups of tea which rounded off each rescue mission.
‘Such devotion,’ Mrs. Rooney said, assuming a sentimental expression as she gazed at Flora’s dog. ‘Judy again,’ the old woman had greeted her at the door as though it were a cause for celebration.
‘Cupboard love,’ chided Flora, flicking a proprietary finger along the terrier’s rough coat. ‘Bad girl,’ she scolded, rewarding her with a biscuit. The terrier snuffled at the fallen crumbs, her muzzle leaving a dark stain on the pale rug. ‘It’s always dear Judy during the day,’ Flora smiled. ‘Such a relief when you think of it.’ Her look became faraway as she thought of her attackers, just lying in wait.
‘I expect you keep Judy in at night,’’ Mrs. Rooney ventured to suggest, her face assuming the expression of one struggling with a new and radical thought.
‘Oh, yes,’ Flora agreed, gladly letting go of night time horrors. She sipped her tea and experienced pleasure at the prospect of lifting the dahlias that afternoon. She was no longer, she realised, burdened by the prospect of so many jobs outstanding, seeing them now as challenges and she had always loved a challenge.
‘I’d best be going,’ Mrs. Rooney waited deferentially for her hostess to guide her back through the mine of glass and chinaware. ‘Quite her old self again,’ she reported back to her husband. ‘Like a child with a new toy. You wouldn’t know her. And if you heard her language. ‘Action stations’ and ‘Man the defences’ whatever that means.’
‘Military terms,’ said Mr. Rooney knowledgeably. ‘She comes of army folk.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Mrs. Rooney, relieved. ‘I thought she might be going a bit queer on top. If you ask me, that alarm’s changed her life. Given her peace of mind, just like I said it would.’
Peace of mind! Flora Simpson’s feelings bordered on a kind of godlike exaltation, nothing so passive as mere peace of mind. She stood at the window gazing out. Through the trees on her domain she saw the lights of the neighbouring houses twinkling distantly. A sense of community enveloped her. ‘We not me,’ she thought companionably.
Then her feudalistic upbringing reasserted itself and she fell to imagining how she must appear to her neighbours. Her brain threw into relief against the night sky what she now saw as the ‘great’ house, with its Ionic columns and domed porch.
Over all she conjured up a flashing orange light and a stupendous clanging bell summoning them to support their lady in her hour of need. Too fanciful! She sighed and turned away.
Now where should the attack come from tonight, she wondered. The back or the front? But first to man the defences. Her skin shivered deliciously as she heard the staccato warning beat. In the pantry she lifted the window latch as though to let in some air. ‘Nineteen...twenty,’ she sighed, and wantonly dropped it.
Gratifyingly, a slave to her whim, the siren and bell exploded into simultaneous clangorous life.
Flora trotted animatedly from room to room. She took down the lemonade, opened the biscuit tin and laid within easy reach the dominoes, the draught board and chess set. As an afterthought, she added her brother’s military decoration and then, considering that she had catered for all tastes from the youngest to the eldest of the Rooneys, she went out to meet her rescuers.
Milkshake
The last time I gave birth my labour seemed shorter, less acute than any that had gone before but mercifully such details are blurred. Since then in my dreams I’ve experienced the birth process over and over again but with one difference, my child always lives. The boy is handsome, articulate too. You’ve never heard anything like the wisdom that comes from his lips. Only a few hours old and he expatiating like Solomon on every subject under the sun. That the doctor and nurse are impressed is plain to see. ‘Truly amazing!’ they say. ‘Not at all what you’d expect from...’ leaving unsaid what’s in their minds. But in my own I complete it for them. Not what you’d expect from seeds planted so late in life. Never mind, I think. Maybe I’ll hold on to this one. But alas, with the dawn’s first cold kiss on the windowpane he goes the way of all the others.
The dreams are my one consolation, filling me with new kinds of hope, new belief that there might be, no, shall be, a happy ending to my quest for the perfect child. Irrational you might think to base so much on a feeling of physical wellbeing in the aftermath of what is, after all, merely a dream.
True, after they had delivered me of my child, after they had scrubbed my insides out and left me squeaky clean, I was sunk in a slough of despond. My arms with nothing to hold, my body plundered. As the luminous fragility of early morning light displaced the sleepless hours of darkness despair entered my soul. Before long the ward maids came clattering in, carrying pails of milk for the nursing mothers, their ear-splitting cry, ‘Milk for the breasties’ one more cruel reminder of my loss and causing the demented woman in the adjoining bed to stir fretfully beneath her blanket. She, likewise pipped at the post with the delivery of her stillborn child, added her lamentations to mine. She was not long arrived in the country. I knew this because we had shared an alcove in the emergency department for some hours when she had raved of ambush and treachery.
In the struggle to give birth her hair had escaped from its frizzed loops and snaked Medusa-like across the pillow. Her skin was deeper than the deepest café au lait with the deceiving sheen sometimes seen in tubercular patients or on the skins of thoroughbreds. In her sleek plumpness Rosa brought to mind a dark feathered, full-breasted, bird slowly fattening for the Christmas market; strange in one who had so recently fled from a ravaged, war-torn zone. Concealed under a rick of hay Rosa had been smuggled out of that troubled city whose new laws were dictated by the controlling Ubermenschen. Travelling across the plains she found asylum with two British doctors, a husband and wife team. Hence her fair knowledge of English. In the home of her protectors she had passed the months of her pregnancy, opening doors to patients. Until impressed by her intelligence the married medics began sharing their knowledge, teaching her to sterilise instruments and to seam torn flesh with catgut. And all the while she carried out her duties her bump increasing so gradually it might have been inflated by single, spaced-out puffs of air.
That was my own interpretation inspired by her poetic, not always inaccurate, use of our confusing language. From Rosa’s own account she was happy and well cared for as she serenely awaited the emergence of her child. Until one unsuspecting day her past had relentlessly overtaken her forcing her to flee that comparative haven and take refuge in our green isle. That the child she carried was not her first conception came as a shock. Somehow I’d envisaged her as the virginal victim of some brutal, late-night m
arauding patrol. I’d imagined her carrying that first fruit snugly in the sling of pelvic muscle, until the moment when her contorted limbs and heaving breath brought her to the final panting expulsion of an infant who had not lived to register vocal appreciation of his mother’s supreme birth-giving act.
But this was not the case.
Rosa revealed that she had already given birth to three healthy children, all of them girls and all sired by different partners, confiding in me her sorrow that the child the fates had seen fit to deliver stillborn had been a boy. She laid no claim to have wedded any of the fathers, affirming only that each one had made good babies. In my own quest for good baby-makers I too, had favoured the best of healthy young males none of whom exhibited any visible disability. But in every instance once conception occurred, doubts set in convincing me of the existence of some hidden genetic disorder and compelling me, regardless of pain, to root out what had been so hopefully planted. Better sure than sorry has ever been my way of thinking. And yet at no time my sufferings so intense, so extreme that they could not be eased by contemplation of that perfect, as yet unborn, dream child of mine.
In those bereft hours Rosa and I were joined closer than any set of Siamese twins, linked by our common bond of sorrow. The ward women, you could tell, were moved by our plight, if unsure which of us deserved sympathy the most. Even Sadie, round-the-clock feeder of strapping twin boys, found time to slosh milk on cornflakes for the traumatised refugee. ‘Human, ain’t she? Even if she’s black,’ doubtfully defending her Samaritan act before the jeering milk maids.
‘Sister says yer to get outa bed if yer rainbow-coloured,’ their only response, as they clattered off yodelling their obscene cry.