At the Break of Day (6 page)

Rosie walked round the plants now, looking closely. There was no greenfly. She drew near the shed which still smelt of creosote but only faintly.

‘I guess we need to do this again,’ she called to her grandfather.

‘If you can find any, go on and do it. Don’t forget we’re rationed even if you haven’t been,’ Norah shouted. Rosie didn’t bother to tell her that America had in fact been rationed. She knew it couldn’t compare with British measures.

In the shed the trunk was laid down flat and behind it was an old upended pram turned into a cart. Rosie edged past the trunk. She had forgotten all about the cart. Ollie and Grandpa had made it and she and Jack had raced it against First Street. Norah wouldn’t race with them. She might get hurt, she might get dirty. Rosie leaned down and smelt the old leather, spun the wheels.

‘I told him to get rid of it but he wouldn’t.’ Norah was there behind her now. She was waiting for her present. Well, she’d have to wait a little longer.

Later, when it was quite dark and the curtain had been drawn round Grandpa’s bed, Rosie called good night.

‘I couldn’t let the pram go,’ he replied softly. ‘It reminded me of you, see.’

Rosie did see and she called, ‘I love you, Grandpa. I’ve missed you so much.’ And to begin with she had.

That night Rosie didn’t shut the door of her bedroom. She hadn’t shut the door on her first night at Nancy and Frank’s either. She had felt too lonely, too homesick and had cried silently. She cried now, silently too, thinking of Frank and Nancy, of Sandra, of Joe, of the lake. Crying more as she thought of this house where she’d been born and which wasn’t home any more, of this country which was strange to her, of the anger, the pain, the confusion which swept over her in waves. And the despair.

She clenched the woollen knitted blanket she had made before she left and sleep would not come as she tried to cling to Frank’s words. ‘The future is yours. Make something positive out of the rest of your life.’

Downstairs, Albert lay back on his bed. He could see the table, the cooker, the sink in the dull moonlight. She was back, his Rosie was back. She had looked like her mother when she came in, her hair short, her plaits gone, but the same love in her face that Martha had always had for him.

He coughed, his chest was bad. He was old. The rubber square beneath his sheet made him sweat and it smelt, but then, he smelt too. He turned from the room, lying with his face to the wall. Perhaps he shouldn’t have brought her back.

He turned again, back into the room. It was hot now and he was tired but he didn’t want to sleep. He sometimes had accidents when he slept.

Perhaps it had been too long, he thought, for he had seen that behind the love there was despair. But he had to believe he had done the right thing as he had had to when he waved her off from Liverpool. It had broken his heart to see the ship becoming smaller and then the loneliness of the war had broken him somehow.

He struggled now, pushing himself up, looking at his books. Maybe Norah had been wrong to think that Rosie would feel deserted if they left her there. And there again she was right, it wouldn’t have been fair if one sister had advantages denied to the other. It was all so confusing. He just didn’t know. Norah was wrong too, about Nellie not wanting to come to London.

Nailing was dying in Bromsgrove, there was nothing to be made from it any more. His wife had wanted to come south and he remembered with bitterness her face that day when she had insisted they move. But then he pushed the memory from him and thought instead of the land of his roots and Herefordshire too; the sweeping hills, the lush green of the fields, the hops strung so high – and he smiled at the comfort the memory brought.

Yes, there had been despair behind Rosie’s love, and he knew it was because she’d left a land and people she’d grown to care for and there was an ache in his chest at her pain. He eased himself back down, pulling the sheet up round his shoulders. He understood that and he would try and take her back to those hills where the scent of the past would ease the present, perhaps for them all, even Maisie and Ollie.

The night had been long, and as Rosie washed in the sink she longed for her own shower and scented soap back in Lower Falls, but there was only the tin bath which hung on the yard wall. Tonight, she thought, she would drag it in when Grandpa was asleep and Norah in bed. Tonight and every night, not just once a week like before she went away.

Grandpa was sitting at the table. Rosie had washed through his drenched sheets and his pyjamas and they were hung on the line, along with his rubber square. She had hoisted them high with the pole but not too high, because he had said that he did not like the neighbours to know.

‘Even Jack’s mum and dad?’ she had asked gently as he dipped his bread in some warm milk after he had sponged himself down standing on newspaper behind the curtain.

‘Even Ollie and Maisie,’ he had said.

She carried her tea out into the yard, standing by the shed in the spot the sun reached at this hour of the morning. She listened to the sounds of the street, the dogs, the children, the whistling bike-riders, the rag and bone cry. She looked up at Jack’s house. The windows were blank and there was no sound. Before she left there had always been laughter and music and shouting.

Her grandfather walked out now and sat on the bench, his back against the wall. He had a walking stick which he propped between his knees. When she was young he would bring peas home on a Saturday wrapped in newspaper and on Sunday they would shell them, sitting on the back step, eating some, putting the rest into Grandma’s pan.

Jack would come in and pinch five, always five, throwing them up and catching them in his mouth. Then Maisie would shout across the wall that there was bread and hot dripping from around the piece of scrag-end. She, Jack, and sometimes Norah would go while Ollie and Grandpa went to the pub on the corner for a pint.

The pub had gone too, she realised now. She had forgotten that it had existed, down next to Mr Meiner. She fingered the peach rose, The Reverend Ashe, which grew up against the shed. It had taken a fancy to the creosote, Grandpa had laughed in the year before the war. She had made perfume with its petals. The water had gone brown but there had been a weak scent.

She had given a bottle to Grandma, Norah and Maisie. Maisie had laughed and dabbed some on behind her ears, heavy with earrings, throwing back her head, patting her hair, telling them it made her feel like a ruddy duchess. Ollie roared and slapped her on the backside. Grandma and Norah had thrown theirs down the sink.

As Norah grew older she had always copied Grandma, though Rosie could remember that when they were small sometimes they had laughed together. But as Grandma grew more bitter, more angry, Norah copied her. They froze Rosie out. They formed a team. A team ‘who knew better’, who were older, wiser. Just more crabby, Jack had always said.

Rosie drank her tea, which was too cold now, then threw the dregs around the roots.

‘You remembered then, Rosie,’ Grandpa called.

Rosie smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve never forgotten.’ But she had until this moment. She had forgotten that the tea leaves nourished the roots.

She moved into the shadow, sitting with him, tucking her hand in his arm. It was thin and his armbands sagged above the elbows. His cuffs were drooping on his wrists. ‘I’ll sew a tuck in those sleeves for you, shall I?’

She smiled as he nodded and patted her hand. His joints were swollen, his skin was dry and thin, stretched too tight. They sat in silence now and still there was no movement from Jack’s house. At home there would be the smell of waffles cooking and the sound of jazz playing, and she had to talk to muffle the memory.

‘Do you remember the peas, Grandpa?’ Rosie asked as she watched a bee weave in and out of the rose bushes.

He chuckled. ‘They were good times.’

Rosie nodded, looking up into the sky, which was pale blue with small white clouds that seemed to fit the size of England. Yes, perhaps they were but she had seen another world and she couldn’t leave it behind yet. Would she ever be able to? She looked at Jack’s house again.

‘What’s wrong next door? Jack seemed strange. He told me not to go in. There was something in his eyes.’

Grandpa leaned forward, poking the ground with his stick, rubbing it backwards and forwards across the cracks in the concrete. ‘You’ll have to ask Jack. People have a right to their privacy. He’ll tell you what he wants you to know, if there is anything. It’s maybe just the war.’

He brought out his handkerchief and wiped the corners of his mouth. ‘It’s maybe just the war, Rosie. It changes so much.’

‘Yes, Grandpa. But you haven’t changed and neither have I.’ Did he know she was lying?

Rosie left him in the yard then because she was thinking too clearly of Frank and Nancy, of Sandra and Joe, and there was no place for them here where there was no shower, just a tin bath. Where her grandpa’s skin was tight and old, where there was no laughter from Maisie.

She was glad she had to sort out ration cards, jobs, shopping. That would do for now. Later, when the sun was past its height she would talk to Jack. Later still she would write to Frank to refuse his offer of money to finance further education. All that was over. They were no longer responsible for her. She was back in her old world. She looked at the list Norah had written, this was her reality now.

Rosie spent an hour at the Food Office waiting for a ration card, then joined a queue forming outside a small shop and waited for half an hour shuffling forward slowly while the sun beat down. Norah had said, join any queue you see, there’ll be something at the end of it, but today it was dog food and they didn’t have a dog. She bought a pound anyway and gave it to the woman at the end of the queue with two crying children. She knew Jack would have sold it to a man without a dog for twice as much and she smiled at the thought.

She registered with Norah’s grocer round the corner whom she had known as a child, collecting tea and cheese at the same time. The shop seemed so dark, so small. The goods on the shelves were dull, meagre. He nodded to her. ‘Back then. Norah told us you’d had it easy.’

‘I guess I did,’ she replied and watched his tight withdrawn face, wanting to apologise, wanting to take the years back, stay here, be one of them again. But at the same time, wanting to shout her anger at him.

‘Next please,’ he called, hurrying her, looking past her.

‘I’d like some Players, please,’ she said, resisting the push from behind.

‘Only available to our regulars.’ He was reaching forward for the next customer’s ration card.

‘They’re for Grandpa,’ Rosie insisted, not moving over. She had just enough for a packet and then her money from Frank was gone.

The man sighed. His brows met across the bridge of his nose and his eyes were tired. He bent below the counter and passed her one pack.

‘Thanks.’ She paid and walked past the queue which was jostling behind her.

‘These Americans think they can come here and throw their money about. Isn’t right, it isn’t,’ one old lady said to the woman next to her. Rosie didn’t look at them, she didn’t look anywhere but in front, thinking of the lake, of the sloping lawns and the soaring music. I didn’t choose to go, she wanted to scream at their shadowed faces and resentful backs.

She walked back down the street towards the Woolworths in Albany Street. She wouldn’t cry, she mustn’t. Whatever she did, she mustn’t let these Britishers see her pain, or even her anger because she had no right to that. They had stayed and endured. She had fled.

Outside Woolworths she stopped, looking in through the glass doors, seeing the lights, the long alleys of counters. She and Jack had pinched a 6
d
car from here when they were eight. She’d longed to work in amongst it all. But that was then.

At eleven she stood in an office before a white-haired supervisor, her hair permed like Norah’s.

‘So, you’re Norah’s sister. Good worker, that girl.’

The woman had run her lipstick outside her top lip to thicken it. Her breath smelt of tea as she moved behind Rosie to take out a file from the cabinet and then returned to her seat.

‘Sit down then.’ There was a cup half full on the desk with a cigarette stub floating in it.

‘Thanks,’ Rosie said, smoothing her skirt, not looking into the cup.

The woman brushed at the corners of her mouth with her little finger. There was a brass ring with a bright red glass stone on her wedding finger. ‘Well, you’ll have to do something about your voice, if you know what I mean.’

Rosie looked at her. ‘No, I guess I don’t.’

‘Well, listen to that. You sound like a Yank. I don’t know what our customers would think, I really don’t. This is Albany Street, not Hollywood.’ The woman frowned. ‘But Norah did put in a good word for you. You’ve got that old man at home to support, haven’t you? Need all the help you can get, I should think.’

‘My grandfather, you mean. He has his own money. He doesn’t need ours. Norah and I have to work to keep ourselves, not him. It’s his house, you know. He gives us a home.’ She was tired now, so goddamn tired of it all, so sick of Norah. ‘He’s a real nice man. Kind of quiet but nice.’

She looked out across the store with its counters glistening with goods. Norah was on jewellery, leaning back talking to the girl at the other end. She was smiling, her mouth a slash of red.

‘Oh well, we need someone on records anyway though the stock is very limited these days. Maybe the voice will fit in there. All American anyway, aren’t they, these singers?’ The woman’s voice was slower, kinder. When she smiled the lines cut deep. ‘My dad was a nice man too.’

Rosie looked at her closely now and felt her face begin to relax.

‘We had a lot of Americans here in the war. They’d come and talk. My friend married one. She’s in California now.’ The woman was pulling her overalls across her breast. ‘Yes, proper little meeting-place in here. It’s very dull now. England is very dull. I expect you’ve found that.’

Rosie looked out again, across the aisles. ‘I only got in yesterday and I guess it’s real good to be here.’ If she said it often enough it might help it to be the truth.