Dinner at Rose's (41 page)

‘She and Matt are in Aunty Rose’s room,’ I said, giving the table top a final swipe with a cloth and going to the sink to rinse it out.

Hazel trotted purposefully across the room. She paused as she reached the hall and looked back for a second. ‘Josie, dear, do you really think you should let that dog eat table scraps off the good china?’

I probably shouldn’t, but he had looked at me with big brown eyes brimful of hope, and I’m a sucker. I hung up my dishcloth, left Hazel’s muddy footprints in the hope she might notice them on the way out and feel ashamed, and followed her up the hall.

‘
There
you are, Kim,’ she said as she reached Aunty Rose’s door. ‘Come along – we’re going home. Hello, Matthew, love.’

Kim had been reading aloud, curled on the bed beside her aunt. She put the book face down on the peacock-coloured bedspread and frowned at her mother. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I handed in my English assignment today.’

‘I don’t want to argue about it; I want you to do as you’re told. Say goodnight to your aunt.’

‘What on
earth
is your problem?’ Kim demanded.

Stretched in the armchair at the foot of the bed, Matt winced.

‘I don’t appreciate that tone of voice, young lady. If I ask you to do something I expect it to be done.’

‘What’s the matter, Hazel?’ Aunty Rose asked tiredly.

Hazel drew herself up to her full five foot three and reached into her handbag. ‘
This
is the matter,’ she said, flourishing a box of condoms before our startled eyes.

‘
Mum!
’ Kim cried.

‘Well?’

Kim opened and shut her mouth for a while without making any sound, and finally managed in an indignant croak, ‘How dare you go through my drawers?’

‘You’re living under my roof, and the contents of your drawers are my business.’

‘That’s right,’ said Matt unexpectedly. His sister gaped at him, and he continued, ‘Drawers are fair game. I can’t believe you haven’t got a better hiding place than that.’

‘Matthew, be quiet,’ snapped his mother. ‘Kim, I am
extremely
disappointed in you. Now get up, and come home.’

‘No,’ said Kim, not defiantly but with a calm consideration that must have made her mother want to slap her.

‘You listen to me, young lady –’ Hazel started.

‘Mum, settle down,’ said Matt. ‘I gave them to her.’

‘
You
gave . . .’ She trailed off, shoulders bowed in despair. ‘Really, Matthew – your poor father would be spinning in his grave.’

‘It would have to be in his urn,’ murmured Kim, heaping fuel on the flames of her mother’s wrath. ‘Just like a tiny little dust storm.’

Aunty Rose frowned at her and she had the grace to look ashamed of herself.

‘I doubt he’s spinning at all,’ said Matt. ‘He gave a box to me, so I thought I’d better continue the tradition.’

‘It’s a
completely
different situation!’ Hazel cried. ‘You’re a man, you’re expected to –’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Sow his wild oats?’ I suggested, unable to help myself.

Kim giggled, and Aunty Rose frowned at me in turn.

‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Kim, you can make it, seeing as you’re in disgrace.’

Hazel sank into a chair. ‘
What
am I to do with that child?’ she demanded. ‘She doesn’t confide in me – she
certainly
doesn’t listen to a word I say . . .’

‘Of course not,’ said Aunty Rose. ‘You’re merely her mother.’ And because she was Aunty Rose she didn’t add that storming into a sickroom brandishing a box of condoms is unlikely to induce a girl to go to her mother for relationship advice.

Chapter 35

‘W
HAT A DAY
,’ said Matt the following evening, stretching out beside his aunt on top of the bedspread and folding his arms beneath his head.

‘What happened, sweet pea?’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Two heifers with mastitis, the met weather reckons we’ll get a hundred mil of rain overnight, lost a silage bale through a fence . . . oh, and the pump’s playing up.’

Aunty Rose smiled, just a twitch at one side of her mouth. ‘And yet people extol the virtues of the farming lifestyle.’

‘What people?’ Matt asked.

I tucked my feet up under me in the chair. ‘The same people who come for lunch and stand on the lawn telling you about the peace and tranquillity of the countryside, when you got up at five in the morning to get all the stock work done before they arrived.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know those people. They have every weekend off and go home at five o’clock every night, and tell you they’re exhausted by the rat race and that they envy you.’

The wind rose sharply and the first raindrops hit the window with angry-sounding splats. ‘Here comes your storm, Matthew,’ said Aunty Rose.

‘Goody,’ he said morosely.

I smiled at him. ‘If you’re really nice I’ll let you borrow the onesie to wear underneath your waterproof leggings.’

‘Excellent plan,’ said Aunty Rose. ‘Take it off her and drop it down a deep hole. She’s wedded to the horrible thing.’

‘Do you wear it, Jose?’ he asked.

‘Damn straight. I’d wear it to work if Cheryl would let me. Want to see it?’ I got up without waiting for an answer and went to put it on.

He raised his head when I came back into the room, looked me up and down and began to laugh.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked, doing a little twirl.

‘It surpasses all my wildest hopes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said demurely, sitting back down and crossing one mustard polar fleece–clad leg over the other.

Aunty Rose sighed and shifted her head on the pillow.

‘Pills?’ I asked.

‘Not yet,’ she said, and there was a comfortable silence while we listened to the wind howling round the eaves of the old house.

‘I believe the boy’s asleep,’ she said softly not long after.

‘He looks very peaceful, doesn’t he?’ I said. ‘Should we wake him up and send him out into the rain?’ This had settled, now, into a persistent steady downpour – I wondered how the newly patched roof would hold up.

‘Not just yet.’ She turned her head painfully and looked at the lean brown face beside her. ‘I used to get up to him in the night when he was tiny. It doesn’t seem very long ago. He was such a funny scrap – bald as an egg with great surprised brown eyes, and he would hold his little arms out to me and coo.’ A tear ran down each wasted cheek. ‘I used to pretend he was mine.’

My heart gave a little savage twist. ‘He was,’ I said. ‘He still is.’

‘Sometimes Pat was getting up to milk, and he would make a cup of tea while I gave Matthew his bottle.’

I blinked hard. They would have sat in Pat and Hazel’s ugly kitchen, not talking; drinking their tea and cuddling the baby and pretending for just a little while that there was no Hazel sleeping down the hall.

‘Sweet pea,’ said Rose gently. ‘It was all a very long time ago. Don’t look so tragic.’

I nodded, and pressed my eyes against my fuzzy mustard-coloured knees.

She raised her voice. ‘Matthew, my love, wake up. You’d best go and see to your cows.’

‘Don’t want to,’ he muttered, not opening his eyes but stretching his arms above his head.

‘Life is hard,’ said Aunty Rose. ‘Chop chop.’

‘Alright, woman, I’m getting there.’ He rolled to his feet and came around the edge of the bed to kiss her cheek. ‘And now will you take your bloody pills?’

‘I will,’ she said, reaching up with a shaky hand to touch his cheek. ‘Goodnight, sweet pea.’

‘’Night, Aunty Rose,’ said Matt. ‘See you tomorrow.’ He reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.

In the kitchen he took my face in his hands and kissed me, and then held me tight against him. ‘You weren’t asleep, were you?’ I asked, and he shook his head. I hugged him, hard.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome. Why?’

‘For – for understanding that not everything needs to be discussed.’

‘That’s what comes of being raised by a man who tries never to discuss
anything
.’

‘Good man, your father.’

I smiled. ‘I’m sorry you had such a lousy day.’

He rested his forehead against mine. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said quietly. ‘I was thinking about you.’

Having kissed me goodnight in a comprehensive sort of way, he let himself out into the rain. I took an armful of stock pots and preserving pans and went on a little tour of the house, ending back in Rose’s room. ‘Dad’s fixed the leak in the hall,’ I announced, ‘but the one in the end toilet is much worse.’

‘Don’t tell him,’ Aunty Rose said. ‘He was trying so hard to be helpful. Help me to the bathroom, sweet pea?’

I did, weaving our way around pots, and then helped her into one of the adult nappies we had got from the district nurse. ‘Not very dignified, is it?’ she remarked.

‘Who cares? No-one can see it, and your nightie’s pretty.’

‘You’re a good nurse, Josephine.’

‘Now
that
,’ I said, ‘is a serious compliment, coming from you.’

‘Like having Delia Smith praise your scones?’

Aunty Rose’s scones were small windowless buildings – if you could manage to worry one down it sat and sulked at the bottom of your stomach for hours, impervious to the processes of digestion. I giggled, and she said haughtily, ‘My scones are very nice.’

‘We could bury you with a batch,’ I suggested as we went slowly back down the hall. ‘And if archaeologists opened your grave thousands of years in the future they’d find them there, just as good as on the day they were cooked.’

‘Ill-mannered wench,’ Aunty Rose said. She sank onto the edge of her bed and reached up to touch my cheek as she had Matt’s. ‘I’m glad the pair of you finally sorted yourselves out.’

I smiled at her. ‘
You
sorted us out, didn’t you?’

‘I swore I wouldn’t interfere, but I couldn’t stand it any longer.’

‘Thank you,’ I said soberly.

‘You’re welcome. Honestly, Josephine, for an intelligent girl you can be appallingly dim at times. Couldn’t you have fluttered your eyelashes at the poor boy?’

‘He had a girlfriend!’

Aunty Rose dismissed poor Cilla with a flick of the wrist. ‘He would have sent her packing months ago if you’d given him any encouragement. However.’ She lowered herself back against her pillows with a little grunt.

I had learnt by now not to remark on her pain, and merely pressed two pills out of their wrapping in an off-hand sort of way.

‘I
said
I’d take them,’ said Aunty Rose. ‘Leave them on the bedside table.’

‘Yes, Aunty Rose,’ I said meekly.

‘Humouring the invalid?’

‘Yep.’

‘Go away and let the invalid sleep,’ she said. And then, as I reached the door, ‘Josephine, I can’t tell you what it’s meant to me to have you here.’

Chapter 36

I
WAS WOKEN
by a long, drawn-out, fingernails-down-a-blackboard screech that cut through the background roar of the storm. For a few seconds I lay listening to the insistent slam made by a sheet of corrugated iron that had shed most of its nails and was making a bid for freedom from the roof. Then I opened my eyes, which made not the slightest difference to the view, sat up and groped for the bedside light switch.

Nothing happened, and I flicked the switch back and forth a few times before gathering enough wit to realise it wasn’t going to work. I got up instead and felt my way towards the door of the Pink Room. The main light switch by the door didn’t work either, which meant the power must be out. Presumably at least one tree was down across the line.

Trailing the fingertips of one hand along the wall I made my way down the hall to the kitchen. Of course the lights didn’t work there either, but embers flared in the glass-fronted wood stove as gusts howled down the chimney, filling the room with a flickering pinkish light. Spud met me at the door and pushed a wet nose into my hand.

‘I hope we’re not going to lose the whole roof,’ I told him, and he gave a short hoarse bark.

I would have to go out there and look, I supposed, and probably call Matt to come and help pin the roof back down again. Lucky Matt. But first I would go and see Aunty Rose – even after her pills she couldn’t possibly be sleeping through that demented crashing overhead.