Birmingham Rose (51 page)

‘Oh, thank you!’ Rose actually clapped her hands together with delight.

‘Paulo!’ She shouted across to him. ‘Catherine is going to send Grace over to see us!’

He smiled and waved back, and was promptly toppled to the ground by the two four-year-olds who shrieked with laughter. Rose and Catherine laughed too.

‘I can’t get over how fast Birmingham is changing,’ Catherine said. ‘All those tall buildings going up. Real skyscrapers. Of course you’ll have seen a lot of it, but the centre of the city seems to be altering almost beyond recognition. They’re going to redo the Bull Ring completely you know.’

‘I know.’ Rose sighed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’ll know any of it if I go back. In a way I’m glad not to see it happening.’

‘But the big news is that they’re going to demolish Catherine Street and all the others round it.’

‘What? Grace never told me.’

‘She’s only just heard. Apparently they’ve got the choice of moving out somewhere on the edge of the city or having one of the new flats close by. Grace says she’s determined to stay near the same spot. She thinks the suburbs will be all kippers and curtains and your father would embarrass her by still insisting on cutting up his squares of newspaper for the lavatory. She made me laugh over it in fact. And he seems prepared to do whatever she wants. To tell you the truth, he barely said a word the whole time I was there.’

‘That’s Dad for you,’ Rose said. ‘Poor old Grace, though. He always had a soft spot for her and she’s never really had a break from him. I don’t s’pose he’d have lived for long with me even if I had stayed around to let him. We’d have fought like blooming alley cats.’

‘Grace seemed remarkably cheerful, I thought.’

‘I don’t half miss her,’ Rose said thoughtfully. ‘Fancy the old place going, though. I knew they were going to get round to it some time, but it really will be the end of an era. Can’t picture Grace in a new flat. But then I ’spect she can’t picture me over here either.’

‘There is one piece of bad news,’ Catherine said hesitantly. ‘Your brother George has been arrested. In Glasgow.’

‘Glasgow?’

‘That’s where he went, evidently, on your money and mine. Oh yes, Grace wasn’t going to let me go without putting me straight about that. For goodness sake, Rose, you should have told me. I wouldn’t have been angry. Anyway, for some reason he gave the police the Birmingham address. Perhaps he hasn’t got a fixed abode up there.’

‘What’s he done this time then?’

Catherine shifted her gaze to the ground. ‘I’m not certain.’

Rose looked at her closely. ‘You
do
know, don’t you?’

Catherine gave a painful sigh. ‘Well, all right, yes. He’s been acting as a pimp. Lining his pockets quite successfully I gather.’

Rose’s mouth fell open. ‘A pimp? My God. All that time he was with me! To think – what did I have in my house?’

She sat silent, shocked, until Catherine thought of something else.

‘A more cheerful piece of news. Grace said she’d heard from Alcester. One of the twins? Apparently she’s recently had her first baby. A little boy called Jimmy.’

Rose smiled, shaking her head in wonder. ‘Dear little Susan. Fancy.’

*

They spent an uproarious few hours when the older children arrived back from school. Hilda, a tanned and healthy ten-year-old, was thrilled to find someone else in the house who spoke English, and chatted away nonstop to Catherine.

Once they were all fed and in their beds and Anna Lucia had gone home, Rose cooked a meal for the three of them. They ate in what was still the dining room of the house, with its dark, formal furniture. Rose put candles on the table. A bowl of nectarines and green grapes glistened in the light at the centre of it.

They ate tagliatelle and fried fish, with a salad of huge, succulent tomatoes by the side of it, and drank the rather harsh local red wine.

Catherine watched Rose and Falcone together. She found she liked him immensely. Though most conversation had to take place through Rose, she noticed that he listened attentively when she talked, as if eager to make out her words. Every so often he would join in a joke with them, exploding into wholehearted laughter which transformed his rather serious face. Sometimes when he laughed he would reach over and touch Rose’s hand for a second, and Catherine saw her smile back at him, the shadows from the candles moving tenderly over her face.

She asked Falcone, ‘How are people reacting to you now that you’re back here? They must know you’ve been a priest?’

‘There’s been some disapproval, from a few. Those who did not know my family mainly. But the welcome we have had I owe entirely to my father.’ He laughed softly. ‘It’s the reverse of what it says in the Bible – that a prophet is never welcome in his home town.’

‘Also you’re a doctor and you and your wife are caring for children who would otherwise be destitute?’

‘I’m sure that also helps,’ he agreed.

‘And you have made an old woman from England very happy with your Orfanotrofio Diana,’ she told them, slightly self-mocking.

‘Old, my foot,’ Rose interrupted.

Looking at the two of them and what they were creating here, Catherine knew she had before her a strong couple. She was longing to tell Ronald about them already. It was all so right. So improbable at first sight, but so entirely right.

‘I must toast your future,’ she said, raising her glass of the inky red wine. ‘Here’s to the Orfanotrofio Diana – and to you both, with all my heart.’

They raised their glasses.

It was a time of night that Rose always loved, and on this night it was particularly special. When her husband was asleep, his hands resting softly against the curve of her back, she slipped off the huge, lumpy bed and went to sit for a while by the window. She opened the shutters a crack so that she could just see the half-moon casting its light on the trees behind the house.

She was excited and stirred up by all the news from England, and at the same time had a sense of enormous joy in her life. She was becoming certain that she would have another piece of news to tell first Paulo and then Catherine this week: that soon she would be adding another child to the household, a real brother or sister for Hilda after all this time.

She sat for some time with no clear thoughts in her head, just fragments of the day passing through. Then she went quietly out of the room and through the upper floor of the house, looking in on all the children who lived here in their care. Every bed was full tonight with Catherine sleeping at the end of the corridor.

Finally she climbed back into bed beside Falcone’s warm body. Impossible as she knew it to be, she fancied as she lay down that she could feel the child moving inside her.

A
NNIE
M
URRAY
was born in Berkshire and read English at St John’s College, Oxford. Her first Birmingham novel,
Birmingham Rose
, hit
The Times
bestseller list when it was published in 1995. She has subsequently written thirteen other successful novels, including, most recently,
A Hopscotch Summer
and
Soldier Girl
. Annie Murray has four children and lives in Reading.

A
LSO BY
A
NNIE
M
URRAY

Birmingham Friends

Birmingham Blitz

Orphan of Angel Street

Poppy Day

The Narrowboat Girl

Chocolate Girls

Water Gypsies

Miss Purdy’s Class

Family of Women

Where Earth Meets Sky

The Bells of Bournville Green

A Hopscotch Summer

Soldier Girl

For John

With special thanks to: Carl Chinn, Tom Golding, Barbara Martin, Pat Oakes, Betty O’Brien, A. M. O’Meara, George and Jackie Summers and Eric Taylor.

First published 1995 by Pan Books

This edition published 2010 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-330-53467-3 PDF
ISBN 978-0-330-53466-6 EPUB

Copyright © Annie Murray 1995

The right of Annie Murray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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