Reach for Tomorrow (31 page)
‘Aye, I think you’re right. So long, Annie lass.’
‘Bye, lass, an’ thanks, thanks again.’
By the time Jessie was halfway down Chapel Lane the first fat raindrops were beginning to fall from the low heavy sky, and several growls of thunder had rent the air. She saw the tram trundle to a halt at the end of the street but she didn’t hurry - it had to go two more stops to the terminus and turn round so she had plenty of time - but as she neared the corner of Chapel Lane and Mapel Avenue the rain really took hold. It obscured the billboards on Garrison’s wall opposite, advertising Remy’s Starch and Batey’s, John Bull’s favourite ginger beer, and, as the little group of passengers who had alighted from the tram began to disperse, the pavements were awash.
In spite of the downpour Jessie recognized Shane immediately; he was a good-looking lad and taller than average. But when she spoke to him as he went to pass her without a word, saying, ‘Hallo there, lad, I’ve just bin to see your mam,’ his face was blank as he turned towards her. It was a good five seconds before he said, ‘Oh, Mrs Ferry, it’s you. Hallo,’ before continuing on his way down the street, his broad shoulders hunched against the driving water.
By, he was in a right spin about something or other. Jessie stood stock still and stared after him. He looked as though he’d had a shock, a bad one, she thought musingly, and it was only when the rain began to drip off her felt hat down the back of her neck that she turned and crossed the road to the tram stop.
But all the way back to Hendon, as the tram rumbled and creaked its way along, her mind chewed at the conundrum, and even when she was in the house and stripping the soaking wet clothes off her back she was haunted by the look on Shane McLinnie’s face.
On Monday, 24th August, Rosie got home from work to find Zachariah sitting in the garden. It was her custom to call to him as soon as she entered the house, and his to answer immediately, and so she had been perturbed until she spied him from the kitchen window sitting under the shade of the beech tree.
She made a pot of tea and put it on a tray along with a small plate of oatmeal biscuits she had made at the weekend - they were having panhaggerty for dinner later that night with some of the leftovers from the weekend - and then took it out to Zachariah in the garden. He didn’t notice her until she was almost upon him, and then his smile was strained as he said, ‘Hallo, lass. Good day?’
It was his usual greeting and she smiled as she bent and kissed him. ‘Typical Monday. Fred dropped one of the butter casks, and half the cheese we had delivered was off. Joseph is furious. And Sally was forever nipping over to the stables because Mick’s favourite horse has got colic and they didn’t know if she was going to pull through, but she’s all right now, thank goodness. Sally reckons if she learns to neigh and snort through her nose she’ll get a lot more sympathy from Mick when she’s ill. Zachariah . . . ?’ His silence finally registered. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothin’, lass.’ And then he shook his head at himself as he said, ‘What am I sayin’? Of course somethin’s wrong. What I mean is, it’s nothin’ to do with us, you an’ me.’
Something had happened. There followed a stillness which was broken by Rosie saying, her voice soft, ‘Zachariah? Can you talk about it?’
‘It’s Janie. You remember, the lass I used to see a bit of at one time.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Apparently she was found in her house sometime over the weekend. They reckon she fell an’ bashed her head in on the bedroom grate.’
‘You don’t mean . . . ?’ Rosie stared at him aghast. ‘She’s not dead, is she?’
‘Aye.’ He shuddered, shaking his head again as he said, ‘She wasn’t old, Rosie, she’d still got half her life afore her. It was her pal who found her, Peg Keel. The two of ’em used to go out of a Saturday night an’ when Peg called round the back door was unlocked but there was no answer. She found her in the bedroom an’ the police reckon she’d bin gone a good few days.’
‘Oh, Zachariah.’ Rosie swallowed hard. ‘How . . . Who told you?’
‘The constable.’ And at her start, ‘It’s all right, lass, don’t worry, but apparently in a case like this, when no one sees what happens an’ all, they check everyone who’s had a bit to do with her.’
A bit to do with her. This Janie had loved him, Tommy had said so. Had he loved her? Rosie gave herself a mental slap on the hand as she told herself harshly, What are you thinking of, what does it matter? She’s dead, dead, and that’s a big enough shock for anyone who knew her. ‘I’m so sorry, Zachariah.’ She bent down and put the tray on the grass at the side of his chair, and then knelt in front of him, taking his hands in her own. In spite of the muggy warmth of the evening his flesh was cold. ‘When did the constable call?’
‘About an hour ago.’ His voice was dull and quiet.
Rosie tightened her hold on his hands as she whispered, ‘Oh, Zachariah. I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing to happen.’
‘She was a nice woman, was Janie. Kind, you know? An’ she’d had a rum deal one way or the other. Her husband, he was a flamin’ maniac; used to knock her about an’ all sorts, but she stuck with him ’cos she’d got married in church an’ it meant somethin’ to her; chapel, she was.’
When he stopped speaking there was a tense, pulsating silence, and then Rosie, her voice quiet, said, ‘It wasn’t your fault, Zachariah. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Aye.’ He swallowed. ‘In me head, lass. In me head, but me heart is tellin’ me I’m all sorts of a swine.’
‘No, not you.’ She hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘It was because of me that you finished with her, wasn’t it? I didn’t understand that until I realized how you felt about me. But feeling like that you couldn’t have continued to . . .’
‘Aye I know, I know.’
‘So you did the only thing you could.’
There was no denial from him, only a slow nod of his head, but she could see he was still torturing himself.
‘Zachariah, in telling her, you left her free to have the chance of meeting someone else. There’s that too.’
‘Aye.’ He raised his head and looked at her now. ‘The constable reckons she’d bin seein’ someone the last few weeks; she’d told this neighbour of hers about him. A young bloke, a lot younger than her, but he’d taken a shine to her, she said.’
‘There you are then.’ It was scant comfort but Rosie clutched at it, her voice eager. ‘It’s awful, terrible, but she was probably happy, Zachariah.’
‘Aye.’ He shifted restlessly in his seat, shaking his head as he said, ‘By, the questions he peppered me with, lass, they don’t leave a stone unturned, but maybe that’s a good thing.’
‘It
was
an accident?’
was
an accident?’
‘Oh aye, aye. Well, it couldn’t be anythin’ else, could it, no one would want to hurt Janie. Aye, it was an accident all right, lass, but it’s true what they say, the good die young.’
Rosie sat with Zachariah in the pleasant warmth of the quiet garden for some time, the sounds from the promenade beyond the front of the house barely penetrating the idyll, but through all their conversation, when she let him talk about Janie and his past life with just the odd monosyllable from herself to keep the therapeutic flow going, her mind was working on quite a different plane. What was happening? Molly running away had been bad enough; she didn’t dare let her mind picture what might be happening to Molly. But now Davey had returned, and Shane, and then this terrible tragedy with Janie. It was as if the ordinary humdrum world she had known for the last few years had been rent apart and everything had been turned upside down. And Flora. Her stomach churned at the name. What had happened to Flora? She had known things would be different once she was married, she hadn’t expected to see Flora several times a week, but apart from that one time when Flora had come to the house she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her. It was as though she had ceased to exist for her friend.
Rosie’s soft mouth tightened as the possibility she had tried to ignore for the last few days tugged at her mind again. Flora and Davey? Well, they were both free agents. The truth was inescapable. And she had no right to object. Poor Peter, he’d be devastated if it was true. Although there had been nothing definite between them, no ring or anything, she knew Peter had expected he could persuade Flora to marry him in good time. But she was running ahead of herself here, she didn’t know anything about Davey and Flora, not for sure, but her gut instinct was telling her that Flora liked him. Liked him very much. She breathed in deeply as she realized her hands were clenched at her sides and forced herself, very slowly, to uncurl her fingers.
It was over an hour later that Rosie left Zachariah still sitting in the small garden and went indoors to begin preparing their evening meal, but all the time she grated the cheese and sliced the onions for the panhaggerty her mind was chewing things over. Davey had left Sunderland - and her - without a second thought all those years ago. She didn’t mean a thing to him and she had faced that fact within weeks of his leaving, so nothing had changed. Not really.
And Shane McLinnie’s sudden reappearance in the town? This question, apropos of nothing she had been thinking of a second before but which was somehow intrinsically linked with everything, caused Rosie to bite on her lower lip as she opened her eyes wide. This worried her more than anything else. She couldn’t speak of it to anyone, they would think her deranged if she did, but she felt deep in the heart of her that Shane’s dark propinquity bore no good for any of them. There was no way that man was coming within six feet of her or hers.
She flexed her shoulders at the thought, almost as though she was preparing to do battle, and it was that frame of mind that caused her to finish preparing the evening meal in half the time it normally took.
Part Four
Till Death do us Part
Chapter Sixteen
It was the middle of December and Rosie was twenty-one weeks pregnant. The child had been conceived on their honeymoon, and once Rosie’s initial surprise had faded she found she was pleased, very pleased. She had paid a visit to Dr Meadows and he had put her - until then unspoken - fears to rest that Mary Price’s attempted abortion would in any way affect Rosie’s unborn child. ‘Not possible, not possible as far as I know, lass,’ the good doctor had said cheerfully. ‘She damaged herself as well as Zachariah with that devil brew she took, but I’ve never known it to affect future bairns. Don’t let it prey on your mind.’ It had been good advice and Rosie was determined to live by it.
The baby cemented her marriage in a way nothing else could have done. It was a statement, a declaration of the abiding nature of her and Zachariah’s union. Rosie didn’t ask herself why such a declaration was necessary, neither did she question why she had allowed any contact with Flora to lapse without demur since the summer. She had seen her friend once since the fateful Sunday, and that had been three weeks after Flora had brought Davey to The Terrace when Rosie had been looking at curtain material in Blackett’s store. In the course of their conversation it had emerged that Davey had made the decision to stay in Sunderland for a while, and that he was working at Baxter’s shipyard. The latter fact was more portentous than the first to Rosie, along with Flora’s edgy manner and over-bright voice.
When Rosie had got home she had spent some ten minutes in the bathroom, eventually emerging with a scrubbed face and slightly pink-rimmed eyes but with her shoulders straight and her chin high. She had not discussed the meeting with anyone, nor had she ventured into Bishopswearmouth again for a good few weeks.
How long this state of affairs could have continued is uncertain, but on Tuesday, 15th December, just two weeks after the more unpleasant manifestations of her condition had ceased and Rosie was feeling well again, there was an urgent knocking at the front door of number seventeen The Terrace just as she and Zachariah walked from the sitting room into the hall preparatory to retiring for the night.
Rosie was feeling more relaxed that evening than she had in weeks. She had finished work the week before and she had arranged to collect Hannah that morning and take her sister into Bishopswearmouth as a Christmas treat.
The two of them had had lunch at Binns in Fawcett Street and then wandered round the shops so that Hannah could choose her Christmas present from Rosie and Zachariah. Most of the stores had paper chains hung in loops from the ceilings along with brightly coloured concertinaed paper balls and bells, and in Binns store, next to the cake shop and restaurant, the decorations included beautiful little glass swans, fairies, horses and all types of animals hanging on fine threads from the ceiling which waved in the air and made a tinkling sound when they touched. Hannah had been entranced.
The sisters had looked at miniature sewing machines, smiling dolls in all shapes and sizes, tram-conductor sets of hat and ticket puncher, boxes of mosaics with their horde of small coloured balls, toy shops with ‘real’ scales, kaleidoscopes with their mirrors and pieces of coloured glass that produced such wonderful patterns, tiny carousels with little painted horses that really moved, picture books with stories of Little Black Sambo and Mingo and Quasha, wooden-handled skipping ropes and fat teddy bears and a hundred and one other things besides, but Hannah had eventually chosen her heart’s desire - a doll’s house complete with furniture and a tiny family, which Rosie had paid for and arranged to collect the following week.
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