On a Clear Day (16 page)

‘You’ll be all right, Clare. What are ye worryin’ about? You’ll sail through. I’d bet you five pounds if I had it, I’m that sure.’

Whether it was her friend’s words, or the sudden warm pressure of her hand on hers, Clare couldn’t tell, but she found her eyes filled with tears. She felt herself suddenly wondering if she would ever sit here with her friend, ever again.

‘I suppose we’d better go,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Aye, I have stuff for the tea in my bag, so there’ll be no tea till I get there,’ said Jessie laughing and swinging herself deftly back onto the bank.

‘Me, too,’ Clare added, as she followed more cautiously behind. ‘Though Granda never notices the time when he’s in the forge. It’s not teatime, till I tell him it is.’

‘That’s handy.’

Clare followed Jessie up and across the steep bank until they had almost reached the gap in the hedge.

‘Jessie!’ she whispered hastily.

‘What?’

‘There’s someone doing something to our bicycles.’

‘Is there indeed. Well, I’ll see to them,’ she said angrily, before she had even raised her head to look.

Without further ado, she pushed through the
hedge, marched across the road and confronted the offender.

‘And what do you think you’re doing to my friend’s bicycle?’

Clare paused halfway through the hedge and surveyed the scene. Jessie stood, hands on hips, glowering down at a fair haired boy in an open-necked shirt who appeared to be unscrewing the valve cap on one of her tyres.

‘Trying to put this valve cap back on, but it’s fiddly and I’m not much good at it. Here, you have a go.’

Clare had an irresistible desire to giggle when she saw the look on Jessie’s face. But Jessie was not to be charmed.

‘Are you a Richardson?’

‘Yes, I’m Andrew. How do you do?’

He stood up and held out his hand politely, as Clare crossed the road to join them. Jessie shook his hand and turned to Clare.

‘Clare, this is Andrew Richardson. I’m not sure he wasn’t lettin’ your tyres down.’

‘No. I don’t think so,’ said Clare as she shook hands. ‘There are better ways of letting tyres down.’

‘Are there?’ he enquired, looking at her directly. She was amazed to find how startlingly blue his eyes were.

‘Yes, a good poke with a penknife or a spike of some sort,’ she replied honestly. ‘I’m sure he’s got
a pen knife,’ she added turning to Jessie.

‘Don’t put bad in his head, Clare. He’s maybe done damage enough.’

‘Not guilty, madam,’ he declared, looking at Clare again. ‘There were some boys here when I came down to open the gates. They ran off when they saw me and I noticed the tyres were flat. I’ve pumped up one, but the other was more difficult,’ he explained.

‘That was very kind of you,’ said Clare, feeling strangely uncomfortable.

He was really a rather friendly boy, though he did have a peculiar accent and was wearing very posh jodhpurs and riding boots.

‘Well, if you’ve managed to get any air back in, I think we must be going,’ said Jessie, firmly.

He nodded, straightened up Clare’s bicycle and gave it to her.

‘Have you far to go?’

‘No, not far. Only the Grange.’

‘Should be all right that far.’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much for pumping it up,’ she said as she wheeled it out on to the road and stretched herself up into the saddle.

‘Not at all. It was a pleasure,’ he said, with a grin, as he turned towards the heavy iron gates on the driveway and swung them open just as a large car approached at a leisurely pace from the direction of Armagh.

They stopped by the pump opposite Charlie Running’s cottage, had a drink and splashed their hot hands and faces. They always stopped by the pump to make plans for the next day even when they weren’t thirsty, because Jessie’s road home left the main road just a little further on, where Riley’s Rocks poked their hard-edged shapes through the soft greenness of Robinson’s bog. It ran downhill, struck westwards through Tullyard and then wove its way onward between scattered farms and cottages cut off from each other by the undulations of the hilly countryside and the small plantings of orchard and woodland.

Clare remembered the September morning, four years ago now, when they met up at just this spot for the first time, dressed in the new uniforms that still had some of the original creases from the manufacturer’s box. Clare’s three-quarter length socks wouldn’t stay up and Jessie insisted she’d got bigger since her blouse was bought. It had rained suddenly and violently as they struggled slowly up the Asylum Hill. There was no where to take shelter and no time to waste. They pressed on and arrived at Beresford Row at a quarter to nine, new Burberrys damp, hair dripping beneath the sodden berets, to search for their labelled pegs in a minute cloakroom full of perfectly dry girls, who had walked from Barrack Hill or Railway Street and missed the rain completely.

‘Are ye workin’ for Margaret tomorrow?’ asked Jessie, as she pushed her hair back from her damp face.

‘Yes, I’m looking after the children. She wants to go into town.’

‘Pity. No Ritz this week,’ she said sadly.

‘I can’t afford it anyway, Jessie. I’ll need black stockings if I go back. The forge is very quiet.’

Jessie nodded and said nothing. She was a lot better off than Clare. There was pocket money from her father every week, regular bits and pieces of money from her mother for doing jobs and the occasional half crown from Auntie Sarah, but as often as not Jessie was broke too. Unlike Clare, who always had an eye to the future, never knowing what she would have to find money for, or where it was going to come from, Jessie was unthinking. If the money was there, she spent it. Come easy, go easy was her way. If she had it, that was fine, but if she didn’t, she never complained.

‘Will we go for a walk tomorrow evening?’

‘Aye, why not. I’ll call for you about seven. We’ll maybe pick up a couple of good-lookin fellas and go off to a dance.’

Clare giggled. The chances of meeting anyone on a Saturday evening were so small even bumping into an elderly neighbour was a major event.

‘Make sure you put your nylons on, Jessie,’ Clare laughed, knowing that Jessie, like herself,
had never even seen nylons, let alone be able to afford the price of those smuggled over the border from the Republic.

‘Time I was away,’ said Jessie, looking at her watch.

‘What time it is?’

‘Quarter past five.’

‘Me too. See you tomorrow,’ called Clare as she swung herself into the saddle.

She caught sight of Jessie’s flying figure for a moment before she was hidden from view by the scatter of young trees around the old quarry. She felt suddenly sad and anxious. Tomorrow the exam results would be out. If she did well, her scholarship would be renewed and she would stay at school. If she didn’t, she must leave and get a job.

If Jessie failed to get Junior, her family could afford to pay for her to stay on in the hope that she might scrape through Senior Certificate in two years’ time, but that was out of the question for Clare. Thirty pounds a term was an enormous sum to find and then there was the lunch money and all the other expensive things that kept cropping up, from hockey sticks to educational outings.

She made a final effort on the hill past Robinsons. Perhaps it was just her period and the pain in her back that was making her feel so low. She’d have to put herself in better spirits before she looked in the door of the forge.

She wheeled her bicycle up the bumpy lane and smiled as she glanced up at the house. In one of the window boxes Uncle Jack had made for her, something new was blooming. It was too far away to see exactly what it was, but it certainly hadn’t been in bloom when she left just after their midday meal.

‘Hello, Granda, are you dying for your tea?’

‘Ach, yer back. Did ye see Jessie?’

‘Yes, we did our shopping and then we sat and gossiped.’

‘Any news?’ he said, putting down his hammer and leaning against the bellows.

‘I brought you the
Guardian
and the
Gazette
both so you’ll be well newsed,’ she said with a laugh, ‘and I saw Mrs Taylor, who was asking for you. And Jessie’s father’s had his tests done. Good news. They say his heart’s all right. He had to go to the hospital again today though.’

Clare saw how tired he was. He had a way of leaning against the bellows, even when they didn’t need pressing and there was a look below his eyes that made him seem pale, though his skin was always brown beneath the layer of grime his sweat trapped as he hammered. So often these days, she knew he was glad to stop work when she appeared, so she tried to think of anything else that would prolong his brief respite.

‘Have you had any callers yourself?’

‘Aye, one or two. Mosey Johnston paid me for his gate, so we’re all right for the rent for a week or two. Ah thought he wasn’t goin’ to pay me atall, he’s been that long. And yer friend John Wiley was here. He says there’s some big bug from across the water comin’ to Richardson’s for the weekend. His wife’s landed him with the childer for the whole time an’ he’s not well pleased.’

Clare laughed. Dear John. The older the children got the less he liked looking after them, but June was chief helper to the housekeeper at Drumsollen and working all weekend would be extra money for the family.

‘I think maybe I saw the big bug arriving, Granda. There was a very posh car coming out from Armagh and the gates were open at the foot of the drive.’

‘Aye, that’s likely it, for John said he had to away back quick once I’d done the bit of a weld for him. He asked for you. He said to ask you how your flowers were doin’.’

‘I hope you told him they’re doing well. Something else is out since that rain this morning, but I can’t see what till I go up and look.’

She paused, suddenly made anxious by the dragging weariness come into his face now that the pleasure of her return had passed.

‘Would you like a glass of the spring to keep you going till the tea’s ready?’

‘Ach, no. I’ve near finished. I’ll not start anither job the day. I’ll be up shortly. Did ye say ye’d got both papers?’

‘Yes. I was lucky. There were still some left. I think I should order them, then we’d be sure of them. Whoever’s in town could collect them, Jessie, or me, or the Robinsons.’

‘Well …’

Clare smiled warmly, said the tea wouldn’t be long, picked up her bicycle and manoeuvred it past a field gate for Harry Nesbitt. Of all the expressions and customs she’d had to learn since the day she and Edward James Bear walked up the path to the house for the first time, Granda Scott’s way of saying ‘Well’ had puzzled her most and taken her longest to work out. But once she’d observed for a while there was no further difficulty. ‘Well’ said with that slight upward inflection, meant exactly what most other people meant by ‘Yes’. So she would order the Armagh weekly papers and a Sunday one as well. It would mean going in especially to fetch it, but what did that matter. It was one of his few pleasures, and surely they could find tenpence a week.

She unpacked her shopping onto the hallstand and parked her bicycle under the elderberry bush beside the far gable. So thick was the canopy of a huge beech tree arching above the bush itself that even in the wettest weather she seldom had to wipe
the saddle dry in the morning, and if she forgot to collect her underwear, hung there to dry, then it’d be no worse off than leaving it over the back of a chair in ‘the boys’ room’. This was the small room beyond her own bedroom where she had set up the old wash stand under the window, so she’d have a place to do her homework should anyone come to call on Robert before she’d finished, or when she was able to find him brass band music or a talk about Ulster customs to listen to on the radio.

The dazzling splash of brightness she’d seen from the forge was in the green-painted box on the sitting-room window sill. In a moment, she was close enough to see it was a fuchsia. As she put out a tentative finger to touch it, she laughed, and remembered precisely what fuchsia it was.

‘What a strange coincidence,’ she said quietly to herself as she stroked the waxy petals.

The cutting that had produced its first glorious bloom, a purple corolla with long orange stamens, surrounded by a milky white skirt like that of a ballerina, John Wiley had brought her from the small bush in his own garden.

‘Here ye are, Clarey. Niver say where ye came by that fellow, but I promise you, you’ll like him. Most beautiful thing I iver saw in a garden in all my life.’

‘Why can’t I say where I got him, John?’ she said, taking the moss-wrapped fragment from his
large hand and settling herself to listen to the story she was sure he had to tell.

‘Well, d’ye see, Major Richardson, he went off to England on some business or other and when he came back, he had this bush. Said it was a new variety. Made a great fuss about it. Wouldn’t let Old Harry touch it. Had to plant it himself. And I can see why he was so particular. Ach, when it first came out up at the house, I thought it was lovely, so I asked Old Harry for a wee cutting. But he said it was more than his life was worth an’ he wouden give me as much as a leaf.’

John hung his head in despair, then grinned at her mischievously.

‘Well, that’s all right, thinks I, and waits my time. And sure enough one day Harry’s mowing the lawn an’ somethin’ goes wrong with the mower. It jumps outa his hands and knocks a brave wee branch off the fuchsia an’ then stops dead. Well, when he called me to get the mower going for him, I saw the branch in a jar of water. I knew rightly what it was, so we “did a deal” as they say at the pictures. I’d not say a word about the damage to the bush an’ he’d not say a word about the bit of that branch in my pocket.’

Clare wondered what Andrew Richardson would think if he knew a piece of his uncle’s precious plant was growing on the windowsill of the forge house at Salter’s Grange. And that
cuttings from it would soon be found in every cottage and farm where there was someone with an eye hungry for colour and fingers green enough to coax one more to grow.

Strangely, she didn’t think he would mind. Despite his strange accent and his posh clothes, he’d been very kind. If those boys he’d seen were from the Mill Row, they’d not be beyond pinching the pumps and her precious back carrier bag, though they wouldn’t risk lifting the bicycles themselves.