On a Clear Day (5 page)

As the bus turned off the Ormeau Road and into Rosetta Park it suddenly struck her that she couldn’t make dresses for her dolls anymore even though she would have unlimited pieces of fabric. Her dolls were all gone. And not just her dolls. Teddy too. Tears sprang to her eyes and she had to pretend she was blowing her nose so that Auntie Polly wouldn’t notice.

The Princess Elizabeth doll, the knitted golliwog with his black face and button eyes, the china baby doll called Ruby who cried when you laid her down, the square dog with the velvet nose that Daddy had bought from some American soldiers during the war when you couldn’t get toys and Teddy, her very first and only Teddy, that she’d been given as a small baby, they had all been taken away and burnt with her clothes and her books.
Matron had explained it all and said how sorry she was and how sad it was for Clare to lose her special toys, but until now she had forgotten. Until they went to the Fever Hospital she had never spent a night without Teddy before.

She tried to think of something different and remembered that the Christmas visit to Auntie Polly’s in Uncle Harold’s car had been a very happy one. Uncle Jimmy was in much better spirits, he had just started a new job with the Ormeau Bakery and was feeling very pleased with himself. Auntie Polly had gone to such a lot of trouble to make them welcome. The decorations were still up and the house was bright and shining. What Clare loved most was the Christmas tree in the sitting room, a lovely big tree with tiny, gilt-wrapped boxes hanging as decorations in among the silver bells and the gleaming coloured baubles. There were little lights that winked on and off. All different colours. Fairy lights Daddy called them when he and Uncle Jimmy had sat down with glasses of the funny-smelling dark brown stuff with the foam on top they always drank when they met.

Daddy said he was amazed they’d been able to get fairy lights, with everything in such short supply. He hadn’t expected there to be any in the shops. But Auntie Polly explained that she’d brought them back from Toronto with her in 1939.

‘I suppose it was kind of a silly thing to bring,
but I so loved Christmas in Canada and Jimmy and I were so happy those Christmases we had out there when Davy and Eddie were small. I packed up all the decorations and the garland that we used to put on the door, but the mice got that in the roof space of our old house, before we got the mice,’ she said, laughing.

Clare’s two big cousins, Davy and Eddie, weren’t at home that Sunday. Polly laughed and said they both had girls now, they’d gone off dressed to kill and were having their tea with them, but Ronnie, the youngest, who was still at that school called Inst. and wanted to go to the university, came down from his room where he was studying for exams and talked to them. He’d given Clare some books he’d picked up for 3d each in Smithfield and insisted they were a present.

Clare was thrilled.
Coral Island
,
Little Women
,
Swiss Family Robinson
,
Black Beauty
and
Heidi
. She’d read
Little Women
and
Black Beauty
from the school library box, but she loved to have her favourite books so she could read them until she knew them almost by heart. The other three she had seen in the library but hadn’t read. She could hardly wait to begin.

‘That’ll keep you busy for a day or two,’ said Daddy as Ronnie handed them over.

‘Don’t believe it, Sam. There’s no stopping her once she starts. She’ll be finished in no time,’ said
Mummy, turning to Polly who was watching Clare turning the pages to see if there were any pictures or drawings.

They sat in the sitting room with the tree and then had a most marvellous tea in the living room. With both flaps of the table up, it was terribly crowded because of the big settee and the brown tiled hearth of the fireplace which stuck out. Clare and William had to sit on the settee on a pile of cushions because there wasn’t room to bring in two more chairs. Clare thought it great fun, but William slipped off sideways and cried until Mummy took him on her knee.

‘My goodness,’ said Daddy, as Polly set down steak and chips for Ronnie and the grown-ups and bacon and baked beans and chips for Clare and William, ‘Have you had a win on the pools?’

‘No such luck,’ said Uncle Jimmy, ‘But its not often we see you. To be honest it’s a put up job, Sam. Ronnie has a favour to ask you and we thought if we gave you a good tea you’d have to say yes.’

Poor Ronnie was embarrassed but everybody else laughed for what Ronnie wanted was for Daddy to fix his radio. He’d taken it to pieces because he couldn’t get the foreign stations and now he couldn’t get anything at all.

‘Aye, surely Ronnie,’ said Daddy. ‘It’s just a pity I haven’t one of Clare’s feathers with me.’

But that worked out all right, for Ronnie had a wee brush from an old paint box he’d had when he first went to school and Jimmy had plenty of oil in his toolbox. After tea, Daddy took the radio to pieces and sorted it out. Clare had watched and held some of the tiny gold screws in her hand in case they dropped them and when it was all finished and switched on it went beautifully.

Ronnie was delighted and showed her how to tune to the different wavebands and they took it in turns to pick a station and see what it was doing. They found all sorts of different music and foreign stations broadcasting in different languages. Ronnie could pick out French and German but there were others he couldn’t make out at all even when they got the call signal and he looked it up in a special magazine he had.

‘Here we are, Clare, down you go. Mind you don’t fall now.’

The bus drove off leaving them on the pavement near where two roads went off at an angle to each other. Between them was a white building with black paintwork that called itself The Tudor Stores. Clare looked around wearily.

‘You know where you are now, don’t you?’ said Auntie Polly encouragingly.

But Clare didn’t know where she was. There were just houses everywhere, semi-detached and
detached and a road leading on through yet more houses. As they began to walk, she saw a street sign saying ‘Mount Merrion Park’. She knew that was where Auntie Polly lived because she had written the addresses on the Christmas cards while Mummy wrote the message inside, but she still didn’t see anything she remembered or recognised.

All the houses looked the same except that half of them had the front door on the left and the other half had the front door on the right. Only when they came to a bend in the road and she saw a gate, unlike any of the other gates she had passed as they tramped up the park, did she recognise something that she knew.

The gate was one of Granda Scott’s. She’d seen gates like this one lying in bits on the ground outside the forge while he cut the pieces of metal to size, she’d seen them propped up on billets of wood while he coated them with red lead and then, a couple of days later, with silver paint. She’d seen him hammer the twists and curlicues on the anvil before they were welded onto the topmost member. Never before had she seen a finished gate anywhere except in the fields and farms near Salter’s Grange where most of Granda Scott’s customers lived.

She felt a sudden overwhelming longing to go straight back to the station they had left over an hour earlier.

Tired and weary and wanting only to go to bed
she stood on the doorstep waiting for Uncle Jimmy to come and let them in.

‘Ach, hello Polly, hello Clare. Sure we weren’t expectin’ you till tomorrow,’ he said, taking Clare’s shopping bag as he stepped back awkwardly into the hall and edged his way round a brand new bicycle which was parked against the banisters.

‘Sure I rang you las’ night from the box at Woodview,’ said Polly, an edge of irritation in her voice. ‘An’ whose, might I ask, is this?’

‘It was an awful bad line, Polly. Ah coulden make out the haf o’ what ye were sayin’,’ he said sheepishly. ‘An’ that’s Davy’s,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘He says he’ll put it in the shed when he gets a chain an’ lock for it. He doesen want it pinched. It cost a fortune.’

There was a funny smell at the bottom of the stairs and as they went into the living room, Clare was sure she smelt bacon and egg. The kitchen door was open, she could see the draining boards were stacked with dishes. There were saucepans parked on the floor and on top of the meat safe. It looked as if no one had washed up for days.

In the living room, Eddie sat with his feet on the mantelpiece, a stack of
Picturegoer
magazines beside his chair. The table was covered with sporting newspapers where Uncle Jimmy had been studying form before he filled in his Pools coupon. A teapot, an almost empty bottle of milk and a couple of large
mugs had been parked on the polished surface of the sideboard. Clare knew what her mother would say if she saw the room in a state like this.

‘Can I go to the bathroom, please?’ she said, grateful she had remembered that Auntie Polly had a proper bathroom and not just a lavatory outside the kitchen door.

‘Yes, love, you know where it is.’

Clare nearly caught herself on the pedal of Davy’s bike as she hurried past the table where the telephone sat.

As soon as she stepped into the bathroom she sneezed. She saw immediately what it was she’d smelt the moment they came through the front door. The bath was full of sheets steeping in Parazone. Auntie Polly must have been in such a hurry to get to Armagh when she heard about Mummy and Daddy that she hadn’t time to rinse them out. They’d be very clean by now, but as her mother always said, ‘Overnight is one thing if they’re in a bad way, but more than that you’re just wearing them out’. These must have been here for days.

The bathroom was in a mess. There were shaving things everywhere, foam on the mirror and shirts and socks lying all around the laundry basket. It was true Uncle Jimmy had a bad back, but surely Davy and Eddie could pick things up. And where was Ronnie?

There was no toilet paper left so she had to do
without and she felt very damp and uncomfortable as she went back downstairs. She had to squeeze past Auntie Polly at the foot of the stairs because she was in a hurry too.

In the living room, Uncle Jimmy was gathering up the things on the sideboard, but Eddie hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said hello either.

‘I’m sure yer tired out, Clare. Would ye like a drop of milk before ye go tae bed?’

‘No thank you, Uncle Jimmy. I’m afraid I don’t like milk. Mummy says I’m a nuisance because it means William won’t drink it either. She gives us orange juice instead. We get bottles of it from the Dispensary on the Mall and you have to mix it with water. It’s really quite nice.’

‘Is that so?’ asked Uncle Jimmy kindly.

He looked at the child perched on the settee, her legs dangling inches above the floor and reminded himself that Ellie and Sam were dead. Gone. He couldn’t rightly take it in. Maybe he should have gone to the funeral, back or no back, they could have scraped up the second train fare somehow.

Auntie Polly hurried in and Uncle Jimmy grasped his newspaper as if its flimsy pages might deflect what he feared was to come.

‘Could you not even have done that much?’ she began crossly. ‘I told you the wee bed wasn’t fit to sleep in. Where’s Ronnie? I thought at least he’d do it if none of the rest of you could be bothered.’

‘Sure he’s away at camp with the school, Polly. Had ye forgot?’

She shook her head and muttered under her breath.

‘Come on, Clare dear,’ she said, putting an arm round her, ‘Come on away upstairs, these big men might want to rest themselves, they’ve been so busy all evening.’

Ronnie’s room was beautifully tidy. He had lined up his books on the windowsill and the mantelpiece and his radio still sat on the small table where she and Daddy had helped him to mend it in the Christmas holidays.

‘You can sleep in Ronnie’s bed tonight. You won’t mind, will you? The bed in my wee work room is covered with sewing and there might be the odd pin there as well,’ she explained, as she took out the new pyjamas they’d bought only that morning. ‘Will I come and tuck you up when you’re into bed?’ she whispered, as she kissed her.

‘Yes, please.’

It was longer than she intended before Polly got back upstairs to tuck Clare in. By then Clare was fast asleep. Polly noticed that she had fallen asleep clutching Ronnie’s copy of
The Swiss Family Robinson.
What Polly didn’t notice was that the pillow below the much-loved book was sodden with tears.

Clare woke next morning refreshed in body but sadly depressed in spirits. As she lay looking up at the unfamiliar ceiling, she listened to the sounds of the household as it began its morning round.

‘What’s keepin’ you in there? I haven’t all day to stan’ here.’

She recognised the voice though she had not seen its owner for a long time. Davy must have been out with his girlfriend last night. There was a hasty but muffled reply from the bathroom. Later, the door banged and there were trampings up and down the stairs. Clare would have liked to go to the lavatory but the thought of bumping into Davy or Eddie intimidated her so she waited till all was quiet before she slipped out of her room and across the landing.

On her way back she saw that the two older boys had left the door of their bedroom, the largest bedroom of the three, wide open. The beds were unmade. Beside each bed a high-backed chair was draped with clothes which spilt down onto the floor which was already covered with random shoes and odd socks. Surely they tidied up before they went to work. Even William, who was not the tidiest of little boys, knew not to leave shoes for someone to trip over.

As she walked away from the open door it dawned on Clare that Auntie Polly and Uncle Jimmy must sleep downstairs. That big settee, on
which she and William had perched at Christmas, must be one of those put-you-ups she had heard Mummy and Daddy talking about. Poor Auntie Polly. She had the living room to clear every morning before breakfast and then all this mess waiting upstairs even before she started her sewing. Mummy would be so upset when she told her how Davy and Eddie behaved.

And then she remembered she wouldn’t be telling Mummy. She knew she could manage Davy and Eddie for a week if she was going home at the end of it, but she wasn’t going home. She had been so looking forward to seeing Ronnie but now she thought about sleeping in the tiny sewing room and walking down to that bus-stop, past all those houses, and going to that awful school with no playground and no trees for ever and ever amen.