The Hawthorns Bloom in May (26 page)

Sarah took the sheets from her mother’s hand, fumbling so awkwardly she nearly dropped them.

The weeks that followed Sarah’s return from Dublin were some of the unhappiest and most exhausting she had ever spent. She started off bravely enough, took Helen and Hugh back to school, visited the Headmaster and explained to him exactly what they had experienced in the last two weeks.

Confident they were in safe hands, she applied herself to the accumulated papers on the dining-room table. Some piles were so high, they were in danger of overbalancing and sliding to the floor. The enormous activity at the mills as a result of War Department orders was generating even more paperwork, and while Elizabeth and Richard had willingly taken on her social work while she was away, neither of them had the experience to handle the documents, order materials, confirm production schedules, or enable shipments to be despatched.

Although Sarah saw no signs of her mother losing the steadiness with which she had borne her brother’s death, her father’s state of mind was a different matter. He seemed to be permanently anxious about one mill or the other. At the same time, the continuous round of meetings necessary before the company finally became public, taxed and wearied him. Alex came to see her almost every evening and freely admitted he was as concerned about her father as she was.

As if this were not burden enough, both Sarah and Rose began to receive distraught letters from Lily. When Sarah and Sam had brought her the news of their Uncle Sam’s death she had been coolness itself. She’d insisted that Bridget and Maureen would help her arrange for Sam to be buried in the Molyneux family grave and not in the hastily organised burial ground for the bodies of unclaimed victims. Sarah’s place was with the children, Lily insisted, she must go home at once to her dear Helen and Hugh.

As the first news came of the shootings of the rebel leaders, however, Lily was inconsolable. She wrote passionately about ‘poor Willie,’ whose only crime, she said, was to be his brother’s shadow. He was a man who had probably never even held a gun, but he was there with his brother, Patrick, in the GPO. So he’d been shot.

Rose and Sarah read each others letters and
asked themselves whether one of them should go down and see her, now the trains were running again. Rose admitted she couldn’t leave John at the moment and Sarah confessed that even a short visit would undo all the hard work she’d put in to catching up on the mill administration.

The news from Dublin city itself was utterly distressing. Thousands of people were in need of relief. As details of Easter week began to emerge, the news came that three innocent people, one a well-known pacifist, had been shot without trial by a British officer, who was thought to be unbalanced.

It came as no surprise to anyone that the signatories of the rebel proclamation were executed, as they had known they would be, but some days later they read that Brendan’s friend, Michael Mallin, had also been shot with two comrades. Thomas McDonagh, the officer who’d ensured Sam’s safe return from Jacob’s biscuit factory was another victim. Through the first weeks of May, the shootings continued. When James Connolly, a Belfastman and a socialist, was shot on the 12th of May, sitting in a chair because he was too badly wounded to stand, Sarah broke down and wept, overwhelmed by the unreasoning retaliation of the military in charge at Dublin Castle and her certain knowledge that what was being done would plant the seeds of future bitterness.

Brendan Doherty was safe and well, though
imprisoned in Wales, and that was a real comfort to Rose and Sarah, but it had little effect on his mother, Mary. She’d responded to her brother’s death just as she had to the death of her two sons, with an inconsolable grief that made her incapable of the slightest compassion for anyone else.

Sarah was surprised when she returned home and found no letter from Simon awaiting her. She’d reassured her mother about the loss of the letter which she’d forwarded to Dublin, telling her that there’d be another one very soon to make up for it. But no letter came.

Day after day, the post brought only receipts and invoices. Letters from Lily and notes from Helen and Hugh. Even some from Sam who was not much given to writing, but took up his pen to ask how they all were between his usual visits. Yet there was still nothing from Simon.

Sarah found herself counting on her fingers. Could he have sent a letter to Dublin to reach her for Easter? Even if he had, he wouldn’t have sent anything after Easter Monday, knowing she was due home the next day. As the first week of May passed and the second one began with no sign of the familiar envelope and his large, generous hand, she became more and more anxious, however much she tried to reason with herself.

Normally, he wrote a little every day, posting his missives every three or four days, as she herself did.
Even allowing for the mail, which had remained remarkably consistent despite the war, she could no longer manage any simple explanation to account for this absence.

On a beautiful May morning almost halfway through the month, the trees fully clothed, the cow parsley a froth of white in the hedgerows, Sarah walked down the hill to see her mother without noticing either the warm sunshine or the bright faces of buttercups.

‘Any news?’ Rose asked.

She shook her head dejectedly as she sat down.

‘Sarah dear, there’s no point waiting if there’s anything you can do to ease your mind,’ she said, looking down at Sarah’s pale, shadowed face. ‘Why don’t you telephone Teddy and ask him to contact the Foreign Office? He’s almost certainly got a friend there who can help him.’

Sarah smiled wryly.

‘Ma dear, why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Because, my love, you are tired out and you have too much on your mind already.’

‘And what about you?’ she protested. ‘Da’s not himself, Lily writes to you every two days and Aunt Mary sends messages demanding you go and see her …’

She was about to say
‘and you’ve had no letters from Uncle Sam’
, but she stopped herself in time.

He was the one subject she couldn’t bear to talk about, not because of her own sadness, but because of the message he’d left for her in his last letter. ‘
Tell Sarah she must go
.’

The words had echoed and re-echoed in her mind for days now. He’d said he hoped Simon would come and claim her and that she would find happiness again. That was not what disturbed her, for he’d said as much to her himself many times, but the letter insisted she must go
even if there were no Simon
.

Did he have some intuition Simon would not survive the chances of war? The thought appalled her. She could face leaving her home and the place she loved, however bitter and angry it often made her, to follow the man she’d committed herself to, but where could she ever find the strength of spirit to leave if she lost him? Besides, could she now find happiness in a world that had no Simon?

Her mother was quite right. She simply had to find out why there were no letters. She went straight back up to Rathdrum, took out the car, and drove over to Millbrook to telephone Hannah. Tom’s office was private and welcoming and a few minutes after she arrived she found herself talking to her sister.

‘Oh, Hannah dear, how lovely to hear you. I wish I could pop in for tea,’ she said, amazed that the line was so clear her sister’s voice sounded as if it were in the same room with her.

‘Sarah, I wish you could,’ Hannah responded vigorously. ‘Ma’s told me what an awful time you’re both having, though you were so good about Dublin in your last letter. I’m sorry I haven’t replied. Perhaps we should use the telephone more often.’

‘Yes, we should. Even a few minutes would help.’

‘But tell me quickly why you’ve rung in case we get cut off. It happens here quite often.’

She told her about her anxiety over the lack of letters from Simon and registered her crisp tone as she promised to contact Teddy immediately. Then there was a significant pause.

‘Sarah, I would’ve been writing tonight or tomorrow, but there’s something I need to tell you,’ she began, catching her breath.

‘Go on, Hannah dear.’

‘Harrington had a heart attack yesterday. He’s still with us, but the doctors say there will probably be another one.’ She paused again. ‘If you saw him, Sarah, you’d hope it would come soon.’

‘Poor Harrington,’ she replied sadly, thinking of the failed, but welcoming, figure she’d last seen nearly two years ago. ‘How is Anne?’

‘Brave. But she’ll be heartbroken.’

A whirring noise on the line warned them they
were
about to be cut off. ‘I’ll ring or telegraph the moment I have news for you. Bye, Sarah,’ she
added hastily, just before the phone went dead.

Sarah placed the large, black receiver back on to its stand, sat down at Tom’s well-ordered desk, dropped her face in her hands and wept.

The telegram which arrived next day brought absolutely no ease of mind, but it did provide some information.

A further telegram appeared the next day. Sarah tore it open before the delivery boy had even got back on his bicycle. It said:

Sarah immediately abandoned her papers, spoke a word to Mrs Beatty and followed the telegraph boy back down the hill to break the news to her mother.

‘It may have been a blessed release for Harrington, but it’s heartbreak for Anne,’ she said, wiping a tear briskly from the corner of one eye. ‘She always loved him so.’

‘Do you want to go over and see her?’ Sarah asked. ‘I’d look after Da. Or I’d try to,’ she
corrected herself, knowing that clean shirts and food wouldn’t go far to comforting her father.

‘No, this isn’t the time,’ Rose replied, shaking her head. ‘She’ll be busy and she has Hannah to help her. It’s later she’ll need me. And your father’s still in a bad way, what with Uncle Sam
and
the launching of the company. You know how he hates meetings and all the effort of selecting these bright young men for the new accounts department. He’ll not be right till it’s all over and he becomes an employee of Bann Valley Mills.’

‘It’s taken so long, Ma. I thought it would be months, but its been nearer a year. I began to think it would never happen.’

‘Waiting is hard work,’ said Rose smiling. ‘You know that yourself.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Sarah agreed. ‘But I forget,’ she added, smiling herself. ‘I thought those days in Dublin would never pass, shut up in the back room because the sitting room was too dark with the shutters closed. Cold, because we had to ration what fuel we had, and hungry, except in the afternoons after our dash to the Royal Hibernian.’

‘All things pass, both good and bad,’ said Rose thoughtfully.

‘Is that another one from the copy-book?’

‘I was wondering about that myself. Sometimes it’s the copy book, sometimes it’s the voice of my own mother, other times I’ve no idea where the
thoughts come from, but they come. And sometimes they do help out when one is perplexed, troubled and dispirited.’

The next day, at long last, a letter arrived from Simon. It was loving and full of joy as he told her with delight the news of his recall to London, but it had been posted in Stockholm all of twelve days earlier.

Harrington was buried in the graveyard adjoining the little church where Hannah and Teddy had been married some eighteen years earlier, the church full of friends and former colleagues from Westminster and the entire staff of his estates. Hannah wrote a full account of the funeral for her mother and Sarah, and confessed to them her apprehension for the future now that she and Teddy had become the Earl and Countess of Bridgehampton, titles which Harrington and Lady Anne used only on state occasions.

As for Simon’s whereabouts, there was still no news, though Teddy rang a colleague in the Foreign Office every morning.

Helen and Hugh came home from school for a weekend and Sarah did her best to be enthusiastic about all their news. Hugh was most concerned when he inspected his seven oak trees on Saturday morning. They’d grown so vigorously in the warm weather, they would
definitely need transplanting in the autumn. Helen was disappointed that more of her flowers were not in bloom. She’d wanted to make a bouquet for Grandma, but Grandma’s flowers were nicer than her own, she declared.

It was Alex who solved the problem of Hugh’s oak trees. He said they were just what was needed to strengthen the hedgerows around Ballydown. Together, they spent a long afternoon marking out the positions with bits of wood from the workshop. Come the autumn, Alex promised, they’d lift the young trees and take them to the places they’d chosen.

‘I’ve had another letter from Auntie Lily, Mama,’ announced Helen over breakfast on Sunday morning.

‘Have you?’ Sarah asked cautiously, suddenly anxious that Lily might have written to her about ‘poor Willie.’

‘Yes,’ she went on enthusiastically. ‘I was worried about the ducks, so she went to see Mr Kearney and asked about them. He said they were all fine. When the Army and rebels were shooting at each other, they had a cease fire twice a day, so he could go out and feed them. He says there are some ducklings now as well.’

Another telegram arrived on Monday afternoon. It said:

Sarah was torn between sheer relief to hear something of Simon and renewed anxiety. Ships that hit mines usually sank, but they sank slowly and Dogger was on the edge of busy shipping lanes. On the other hand, it was near enough to the German Bight to be a bad area for submarines. And she could never forget the first reports from the Titanic that declared so optimistically that all passengers had been rescued.

‘Well, any news?’ asked Alex, as he came to find her in the garden.

She took the crumpled telegram from her pocket and handed it to him, watching the expression on his face as he read and reread it. Why was it, she wondered that the fewer the words, the more often one seemed to need to read them.