On a Clear Day (21 page)

He knocked out his pipe and pulled off his boots.

‘I think I’ll take half an hour before we hear the news. Ye can maybe have a word with them people in Paris to see if we’re missin’ anythin’,’ he said with a short laugh as he headed for the door of The Room.

The King died the following week and Robert could not have been more upset if it had been Bob or Johnny. As if to make up for not going to pay his respects, he listened to every news broadcast, even though they all said the same thing. He perused all the newspapers Clare brought home for him and then asked her to read them aloud as well. He seemed anxious he might miss some detail he felt he ought to know.

Clare felt sad for Princess Elizabeth. It was all very well being a princess, but she’d lost her daddy. Losing someone you loved was the same thing, whoever you were. But it must be awful having to say the right thing and do the right thing as she had to do, when she must be feeling so unhappy. With that schedule she was given every morning, there wasn’t much hope she could have a quiet cry when she needed to.

Standing in the cold wind in front of the Courthouse in Armagh, the High School neatly lined up in the space allocated to them behind the children from the Armstrong Primary, Clare tried to remember that this was a historic moment, a moment one would recall for one’s grandchildren. Or so everyone kept saying. But as she listened to the proclamation that Elizabeth was Queen, all she could think of was a young woman who had lost the father whom she clearly loved, just as she herself had lost her father and her mother, six years earlier.

The week of the King’s death was a long, sad week, it felt as if life had come to a standstill. Jessie’s college closed and she came home unexpectedly. She wanted to take Clare to the pictures as a treat, but The Ritz cinema had closed too. On Thursday evening when Clare read the paper to Robert, she found that a meeting of the Drum Unionist Association in Drumhillery, a few miles down the road, had also been cancelled because the King had died. Until after the funeral, although Robert had visitors enough in the forge by day, anxious to talk about the news, not a single person called in the evenings.

On the following Friday, the day of the funeral itself, while all thoughts turned to London and the silent crowds waiting near Westminster Abbey, Robert limped down the frosted path to the forge
and instead of opening the lower part of the half door and starting work, he closed over the upper part and put a padlock on the end of its large bolt. Robert hadn’t bolted and padlocked the door of the forge since the day of his own father’s funeral in 1920.

Between the bitter cold weather and the sadness that lay like a shadow after the King’s death, February passed slowly. March roared in with westerly gales that tore a branch from the big pear tree half way down the path to the forge and ripped up a corner of the dark felt that covered the low building’s high pitched roof.

When the storm passed, leaving the felt flapping but still in place, Clare gave thanks for Uncle Bob’s Christmas gift. Robert had expected to have to tackle the job himself, but instead a young man came with a long ladder to do it for him.

On a mild Saturday morning with sudden bursts of warm sun and the very first daffodils showing signs of unfurling in the sheltered corner by the old house, Clare carried mugs of tea to the forge and watched him as he climbed down into the pool of sunshine where she stood waiting.

‘Do you take sugar?’ she asked, as she held out his mug.

‘Ah do, if ah ken get it,’ he replied promptly.

‘I
do
have some,’ she said laughing, as she offered him the sugar bowl from the tray. ‘Not more than two, please. I have to make it last.’

He took two well-heaped spoonfuls and stirred them vigorously.

‘How’s it going?’ she enquired, nodding up to the exposed lathes where he had pulled back the torn felt.

‘Rightly. Great view from up there. Ye can see Armagh.’

Clare looked at the long ladder and the steep pitch of the roof against the blue of the sky in which the last fluffy white clouds were dissolving in the warmth of the sun.

‘Could I go and have a look?’

‘Aye, if ye’ve a mind to. Yer not afraid of heights? Some women bees scared.’

‘I’ll have a try, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Aye surely,’ he said agreeably, as he took a great gulp of his tea. ‘I’ll keep a hold of it down here an’ steady it fer you. It’s a bit whippy as ye get to the top.’

Clare gathered up the ends of her skirt, tied them in a loose knot above the knee and checked that she could still step from tread to tread. She thought of all those women in long skirts she and Jessie had watched at The Ritz, hopping in and out of covered wagons, trekking across the prairies, fording rivers and organising themselves
for sudden attacks by Indians. No wonder Annie Oakley chose to wear trousers.

Her eyes focused on the damp, green-streaked gable in front of her. She climbed slowly and steadily, until she could grip the edge of the roof itself. Only then did she let herself scan the horizon.

To the west, Armagh was outlined against the brilliant blue of the sky, the twin spires of the new cathedral so sharp they seemed to have been etched in with the aid of a ruler. On the hill opposite, less dramatic, more earth-bound, the square tower of the old cathedral rose out of its enfolding trees, its heavy stonework dark with age. Around both great buildings, like currents of water eddying where they will, the small stone houses and later brick terraces curved and wove as they followed the contours and the slopes of the hills on which they stood.

In the brilliant light, everything looked fresh and beautiful. Across the road from the forge, Eddie Robinson’s fields were a rich, velvety carpet, on which his cattle, a motley collection of different breeds, appeared trim and well-fed. The Robinson’s square farmhouse was dazzling white. Beyond its stables and byres, long, low, whitewashed buildings with red doors and shutters, the mossy branches in the orchard stretched their thickening grey buds skywards. And everywhere the hawthorn hedges were misted with green.

Most of the road to Armagh was visible, but to her surprise Clare found she could see part of Drumsollen House, on the Richardson’s estate. Usually only its tall chimneys were visible, rising clear of the surrounding trees, but from her viewpoint, she could actually see its gardens splashed with sunlight, though normally they were completely hidden by the long, curving driveway which led up from the gates on the Loughgall Road.

She twisted round carefully till she could see Grange Church pointing its spire into the blue, well clear of the ancient yews in the churchyard, where at least three generations of Scotts lay buried. Cottages marched, one beside the other down the hill, low-roofed, the wispy smoke from their fires rising vertically in the still air.

She shaded her eyes and looked south-eastwards across the main road and beyond Eddie’s water meadows. The hedges were white with the earliest of the flowering thorns, but the low hills blocked her view. She wished she could climb higher, for somewhere over there, below Cannon Hill, lay the farm at Liskeyborough, only a mile or two away for the jackdaws who played round the church tower. Her grandmother would be feeding the hens or the new calves, or peering at the old wooden barrel in which she’d planted daffodils to have them near her front door.

If she could have seen Liskeyborough, the whole of her world would have been spread out before her, from her own front door to the furthest points of her travels. And on a clear day, too. A day for making up your mind, Granny Hamilton would say.

She remembered the young man drinking tea and leaning against the ladder to steady it. With a last glance behind her, down at the cottage itself and the tumbled ruin opposite where she shut up the chickens at night, she began her descent, her eyes still dazzled by the light, her mind preoccupied by the map of her world her climb had set out before her.

‘What’d ye think?’ he asked, giving her his hand on the uneven ground.

‘Great, just great. I wouldn’t have believed you could see so much. The forge isn’t that high,’ she said easily, as she took his empty mug and put it back on her tray.

‘No, it’s not, but it’s clear of trees and suchlike. You only need a wee bit a height to see a brave way if there’s nothin’ comin’ between you an’ it. Especially on a clear day.’

She smiled and thanked him for holding the ladder and left him to go back up and finish securing the new piece of felt.

‘You only need a wee bit of height to see a brave way if there’s nothing coming between you
and it,’ she said to herself as she went back into the kitchen to get on with the weekly scrubbing of the floor.

‘Especially on a clear day’, she added as she filled her bucket.

It wasn’t a very exceptional remark, but it echoed in her mind, stirring up feelings she couldn’t properly place. After this long, weary time with all its troubles and sadnesses, she felt as if something had been cleared out of her way on this lovely spring-like morning.

It might be the turn of the season, or her own joy in the springtime to come. Whatever it was, there was no point puzzling about it. When the young man spoke about seeing from a clear space, she’d felt her heart leap, her spirits rise. For the next hour, she scrubbed her way across the kitchen floor without noticing the dark foam she was producing, the grit accumulating in the piece of old towelling she was using to rinse, or the redness of her own hands from the hot water.

In her thoughts, she was circling the tiny world in which she lived and giving thanks for a decision she had made nearly six years ago, on just such a clear day.

The apple blossom had come and gone. With its falling petals passed the first warm days of the year and the first of the long, quiet dusks that seemed to go on for ever. Clare found it heartbreaking to have to sit at her table, evening after evening, shut up with her revision for the June exams. She thought of the times, now long past, when she had slaved over her spellings and what a difference that had made to her future. But it wasn’t easy.

The sun was now so high it slanted through the tiny windows of ‘the boys’ room’ at the back of the house, where she worked, her books and papers spread out on the bed that had been Bob and Johnny’s, a long time ago. As the hours passed, the heavy shadows under the old trees in the orchard deepened and a blackbird sang his heart out from the highest branch of the one pear tree that threw its branches up and over the surrounding apple trees.

When her restlessness and the beauty of the evening got too much for her, she would walk out to the front door and stand under the rose covered arch, the pale petals of Albertine unfolding around her. She would breathe deeply, grateful to escape
for a little the confinement of the small back room where the window hadn’t opened for years and the aura of damp and dry rot never faded, even in summer.

The evening air was so full of scents and perfumes, the heavy smell of elderflower from the huge flat blooms on the tree by the gable, the tang of cut grass from Eddie’s meadows, the lingering aroma of turf smoke from the sunken metal circle in front of the forge, where an old cartwheel had been re-hooped earlier in the day. There were hints and murmurs of forgotten aromas, the dark perfume of the old roses her great-grandmother had grown and the tang of herbs whose names she didn’t even know. Behind her on the hall-stand stood a great jug of double white lilac from the tree by the old house, to judge by its size a tree her great-grandmother might well have planted.

Sometimes she wondered what she herself might leave behind, what trace of her life, of her being, in this place, a grandchild might find, something she had made, or planted, or set going. And then she would remind herself of the exercise book open on the old washstand, the novel in English, or French, or German she was currently studying, the notes to be gone through, the dates and definitions to be learnt by heart.

The month of May, Clare decided, was a wistful month, a month that stirred up longings
one couldn’t even name and made the longings one could name even harder to bear. But, as Mrs Taylor always said to both her and Jessie, ‘All things pass, both pleasant and unpleasant’.

And May and June did pass, the exams safely and successfully completed. Term ended and suddenly she was free. She could do whatever she wanted to do. She had time. Time that felt like a huge legacy of hours and days, weeks and weeks of them, to spend as she chose.

‘Great, just great,’ said Jessie. ‘You’ve been a right pain this last six weeks. Gettin’ you out of that room was like gettin’ blood out of a stone. C’mon we’re goin’ to live it up. Roy Rogers in
Trail of Robin Hood
Monday or Tuesday,
The Underworld Story
, Wednesday or Thursday,
Tomahawk Trail
on Friday. An’ we’ll go to the field in Armagh on The Twelfth an’ make sure Robert doesn’t have one too many while he’s listenin’ to the speeches.’

Clare laughed and thought how wonderful it was to have Jessie home. She, too, had her summer holiday, nearly as long as her own.

‘I take it you’ve won the pools,’ she said wryly as Jessie finished outlining her plans for the following week.

‘No, I’ve done far better than that. I’ve made a fiver,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘My treat. We’re goin’ upstairs. Ice cream in the interval and
chips on our way home. How about that?’

Clare was intrigued. Since Jessie’s father died her mother had gone back to teaching and one or two relatives had contributed towards the cost of Jessie’s secretarial course, but Jessie certainly hadn’t appeared to be any better off than before, for she still had her old habits of spending money whenever she got her hands on any.

‘So how did you manage that?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Tell me the secret. I could do with a fiver or two myself.’

‘Ach, sure it was the cat did it.’

‘What cat?’

‘Yer woman that I stay with. Mad about that cat, she is. If you heard her talkin’ to it you’d think she was mental.’

‘Yes, but what about the fiver?’ Clare persisted.

‘I was at a loose end one evenin’ an’ I did these sketches of dear pussy. I left them lyin’ in what she calls the “guest’s lounge” an’ when she sees them, she wants them. I told her I only do sketches on commission and that I charge five pounds a sitting. I was only pullin’ her leg, but she’s that daft she thought I was serious, so she asked me to do a sittin’. D’ye believe me or do you want to see it?’

‘Of course, I believe you. You always were marvellous at sketching. But I can’t let you spend your money on me.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s not fair.’

‘Would you do it for me, if you had a fiver?’

‘Yes, of course, I would.’

‘Then what are you bletherin’ about? Now which nights are we goin’ to the Ritz? I can’t go tomorra night, worse luck. Mammy’s for Hockley to see the other oul’ aunt an’ she says I’ve to go with her.’

Clare laughed at the wry look on her friend’s face. Jessie never minded going to visit Aunt Sarah with her mother, though she said the crack was always better if she went on her own, but visiting Sarah’s older sister Florrie was definitely not Jessie’s idea of fun.

‘We might see each other on the way there. I’m heading Hockley direction to go to a dance,’ she said lightly.

‘Yer not? Where’s the dance?’

Jessie face fell, her disappointment so clear she looked an absolute picture of misery.

Clare relented. She’d intended to tease her friend a little, but seeing her looking so let down, she hadn’t the heart.

‘Oh, it’s nothing much, Jessie. Only the Orange Hall. Uncle Jack’s lodge,’ she began. ‘That’s why I couldn’t ask you to come with me. It’s invitation only. I only got one because Aunt Minnie wants me to help her with the sandwiches and Jack said
if I stayed for the hop he’d run me home. I’m really sorry I couldn’t ask you to come with me.’

Jessie shook her head and looked at her sharply.

‘You’ll tell me next they’re unfurling a new banner.’

‘Yes, they are indeed,’ said Clare, surprised. ‘How did you know?’

Jessie shook her head impatiently.

‘Ach it’s the season for it. Sure they’re all at it, any that kin afford it. Have you any idea what one o’ these do’s is like?’

‘No,’ said Clare honestly. ‘I’ve never been to anything like that before. I thought it might be rather interesting.’

‘Interesting,’ Jessie repeated carefully. ‘They say there’s one born every minit,’ she went on raising her eyes heavenward. ‘Sure they’ll speechify half the night, ye’ll be starved by the time ye even see a bully beef sandwich an’ there won’t be a man there under forty. Or if there is, he’ll be with his Daddy and he’ll hide in a corner till it’s time for them both to go home. I think I’ll be better off with Florrie.’

Uncle Jack collected Clare the next afternoon, waited patiently while she put her freshly-ironed dress across the back seat and drove her off at speed to Liskeyborough. He had to see a man about a lorry for the field, he said, as he dropped her in the farmyard, her dress over one arm, Jessie’s new
Louis-heeled shoes and her purse in Granda Scott’s shopping bag.

Aunt Minnie was already installed at the broad table under the kitchen window, bowls of mixture and a pile of sliced loaves at the ready. At the far end of the table, Granny Hamilton sat and watched, her hands so bent now with arthritis that she could no longer grip a knife.

‘Hello, Clare, how are ye?’ she said, smiling up at her. ‘Is that the wee dress you were tellin’ me about? The one Polly sent you?’ she asked, her sharp eyes running over the navy blue fabric with its pattern of white spots. ‘Away an’ put it in the bedroom before we get butter on it. There’s a wire hanger on the back of the door.’

Clare got to work, grateful for Granny Hamilton’s company – for Minnie was a large, silent woman whose most frequent conversational utterance was ‘Really’. She was, however, a dab hand at making sandwiches. She’d reduced the first stage to two efficient movements. One spread the butter generously and evenly across the slice from crust to crust, the other removed as much as possible while leaving a layer sufficient for the filling to stick to. It was some time before Clare mastered the technique, but after all, she reminded herself, Minnie had been doing it for years.

Granny Hamilton entertained them as they worked. She passed on the news from the aunts
and uncles scattered around the province and brought them up to date on the large number of cousins now leaving school and finding their first jobs. Every so often she interrupted herself to comment on the assorted men who came to the kitchen door enquiring for Jack or one of his brothers, in connection with the preparations for the evening.

‘Sure that poor man has himself worried silly about the night,’ she began, as she craned her neck to see who it was that was tramping down the yard, knowing that the most likely place to find Jack was in the workshop. ‘If he’d known he’d be Chairman in the year of a new banner, he’d never have taken it on. But there was no talk of that until a few months ago and now he can’t get out of it. He’s that shy, he’d go half a mile out of his way to avoid speakin’ to a stranger.’

‘Will he have a lot of speaking to do?’ asked Clare, as she carefully cut open the waxed paper on a sliced loaf so they could reuse it for the finished sandwiches.

‘Ach, yes. There’ll be thanking brother This for the loan of the field and brother That for the loan of the lorry to stan’ on. An’ then he’ll have to thank the Reverends for dedicating the banner and addressin’ the assembled company. After them, he’ll have the bands to thank for comin’ from Rockmacreaney, or Richhill, or where ever indeed
they’re comin’ from. An’ after that he’ll have to thank the lady that cuts the cord an’ give her a wee box with a pair of silver scissors in it. And then he’ll have to do the Women’s Committee and thank them for makin’ the tea.’

‘That’s about half the Women’s Committee you’re buttering bread with, Clare, in case you didn’t know,’ she added with a grin, when she saw the very serious look on Clare’s face as she took in all she was saying.

The kitchen had grown warm and stuffy, even with the stove low and the door propped open. Clare looked out. The sunshine had disappeared since she’d arrived. Dark clouds were piling up on the horizon. It would only be a matter of time before it rained. And it would be heavy.

‘Aye,’ said Granny Hamilton, looking up at Minnie, ‘forby your Harry, there’s his cousin Sam from Stonebridge and his other cousin, Billy Hamilton from Four Lane Ends. Oh, they’re well pleased at the way the lodge is growin’ and bringin’ in the young ones,’ she said, pressing her lips together and nodding sharply. ‘That, I heer tell was why they made the effort for a new banner. The aul’ one would have gone on a while longer, but some of the senior men in the lodge made a brave bit in the war. Sure the prices was sky high for farm produce, an’ one or two did a nice wee sideline with men from Belfast who had their
own customers, if you understan’ me. It didn’t hurt them to put their han’ in their pockets,’ she went on, looking out the window where the first sixpenny-sized drops were beginning to fall.

‘It’ll be a big night for the young ones, shakin’ hands with the Chairman and the County Grand Treasurer,’ she went on, one thought leading to another. ‘But they’ll have their father’s with them to keep them straight,’ she added thoughtfully.

She frowned at the rain and turned back to Minnie, who had not uttered a word for the last hour.

‘Is your young Harry nervous about tonight?’ she asked agreeably.

Minnie twitched, pushed back a straggling lock of greying hair and added another slice to the pile in front of her.

‘Not really,’ she said slowly, as she buttered the next.

Clare bent her head lower and spread faster, because she was afraid she might laugh. It wasn’t just Minnie, poor thing, who’d never uttered two words if she could manage with one, it was the whole prospect of the evening as it now unrolled before her. Jessie was going to have such a good laugh.

Not that she ever minded when Jessie laughed at her for getting things wrong, for Jessie wouldn’t know how to be unkind, but sometimes Clare was glad Jessie didn’t know the half of what went
on inside her head. It meant she felt less of a fool when her imagination got the better of her.

The longer Clare went on buttering and listening to Granny Hamilton the more she could see that she’d really had let her imagination run away with her this time. She’d been so excited that Sunday afternoon when Granny asked her if she could come and help Minnie.

‘You’ll stay for the do, won’t you?’ said Jack, who’d just come into the kitchen. ‘I’d like a dance with my young niece.’

Although she and Jessie were practised dancers neither of them had ever danced anywhere but the Temperance Hall in Lonsdale Street where the high school girls went for gym and games. The thought of wearing a dress and dancing with a proper partner instead of another girl in green knickers was very appealing. Clare could imagine the band playing a lively quickstep, herself spinning round the lamplit hall in the arms of a handsome young man, raising the dust from the wooden floor as they wove expertly in and out of the other, less practised dancers.

She had entertained her dreams on many a boring journey home from school and across many a yard of dirty floor to be scrubbed, but it had never entered her head that Auntie Polly would send her a dress for her birthday a whole three months early.