On a Clear Day (35 page)

‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid, my safety cometh from the Lord, who heaven and earth hath made,’ she repeated quietly, unaware that she had spoken out loud.

Jack glanced across at her, startled by the sound of her voice.

‘What do you think, Uncle Jack?’ she asked, her tone low, but steady. ‘Is there someone up there to help us? Granda never went to church, but he always insisted I went. I’m not sure what he believed. He never talked about things like that.’

‘No, Clare, he didn’t. None of that generation did,’ Jack replied, regretfully. ‘If you want to know what Robert believed, you have to look at how he lived. He was a good man.’

She nodded and tears trickled down her cheeks.

‘I suppose I’m just worrying about what we have to do.’

‘D’you mean, arranging the funeral and suchlike?’

She rummaged in her jacket pockets for a handkerchief, blew her nose, and admitted she didn’t know where to start.

‘That’ll be the least of your problems, love. There’ll be plenty to see to what has to be done. Myself for one, your Uncle Bob for another. That’s not your problem.’

‘What
is
my problem, Uncle Jack?’

She thought he hadn’t heard her, but her voice had gone again, so she couldn’t repeat the question. Instead, she took a last look at the hills as the road swung away into the gently undulating lowlands beyond Lurgan, where, through a gap in the hawthorn hedge, you might just catch a glimpse of Lough Neagh, shimmering beyond the water meadows.

‘You’ve loved and cared for Robert for half your life, Clare. Your problem is he’ll leave a hole in your heart.’

She hadn’t expected such directness nor such accuracy. She didn’t bother to wipe away the tears, they were flowing far too fast. She just nodded and stared out at the distorted images of trees as Jack turned off the main road and took the road that would bring them home through Loughgall. Already they were in home territory. She and Jessie had cycled, walked, visited and delivered messages over every square mile of it. She knew every house, every tree, every patch of wildflowers. If her world really was a teacup, it was a very full one.

Though the journey from Belfast had taken a long, long hour, the last minutes moved so quickly
she couldn’t keep up with them. Loughgall was far behind. Now they were passing Scott’s Corner, coming up the hill, pausing, turning across the road and bumping into the foot of the lane below the forge. They stopped behind another car already parked there.

It was Charlie Running’s.

She got out, took her suitcase from the back seat, stood looking at the silent forge, the door open as usual. Pale smoke was rising from the chimney of the cottage. It was all so ordinary, so normal, it was just as if Robert had stopped off to have a mug of tea with Charlie. But he wasn’t. There’d be no Robert to greet her, as he’d greeted her last Friday. There’d be no Robert to greet her, ever again.

She walked quickly on up the path, her legs shaking, to the front door, which stood open as it always did.

‘William Perrott of Ballyhenry was fined ten shillings at Armagh Crown Court on Thursday last for driving his horse and cart near Keady without a light …’

She heard Charlie’s voice as she went through into the kitchen. He was sitting beside a coffin which stood on trestles across the fireplace in the sitting room, reading from Thursday’s
Armagh Guardian.

‘Ach, there ye’are, Clare,’ he said, jumping to
his feet. ‘We were waitin’ for you. Just finishin’ off the paper we were readin’ last night.’

He threw his arms round her and she held him tight as he began to sob. Over his shaking shoulders, she saw Robert’s face, the marble skin drawn tight over his sharp bones. He was wearing his best black suit with a white shirt and a stiff collar. She had never before seen his face look so clean.

‘Robert asked me to see to things for him a long time ago, Clare, after yer Granny died,’ Charlie began, collecting himself and wiping his face on his sleeve. ‘He reminded me a couple o’ weeks ago, just before ye went away. Yer not annoyed wi’ me, are ye?’

‘No,’ she said honestly. ‘I’m very grateful. I wouldn’t have known what to do,’ she said quite steadily. And then her voice gave way again. ‘Charlie, what’ll we do without him?’

Standing by the coffin, looking down at the details of a face never before seen in repose, Clare felt as if time had stopped. There was no moment beyond this moment. The clocks in the house had all been silenced at the hour of his death. She could not imagine them ever striking again. She stared at the satin and lace that overlapped his dark suit, the one she had brushed for every Twelfth, every funeral, for the last nine years. So clean. Pristine.
After all his years of toil and sweat in the soot and grime, he was so clean he would laugh if he could see himself.

‘God bless all here.’

She turned and saw Jamsey lay a large dish wrapped in a clean cloth on the kitchen table. He nodded at Jack who was standing over the kettle, waiting to make a cup of tea, and came to stand beside them.

For a moment, he looked at Robert’s face. Silent tears grew in the corners of his eyes. He held out his hand to Clare.

‘Ellie, I’m sorry for yer trouble. He was a good father to you.’

‘Yes, Jamsey, he was,’ she said, shaking his hand and ignoring her own tears.

She wondered if she dare ask him why he’d gone looking for Robert this morning when normally he would have left the water in its usual place, if there was no one around.

‘He was gettin’ very frail, Robert was,’ began Jamsey abruptly. ‘I coud hardly hear the hammer when he did a wee bit of work. An’ I couden hear a bit of it this mornin’. His hammerin’ days is over, Clarey, an’ he’s in a better place. Will we sing Robert a hymn before I go?’

Clare nodded.

When the new minister from the parish church on the hill arrived a little later to make
arrangements for the funeral service, he was surprised to find three men and a young girl standing by an old man’s coffin singing. It was not the singing that puzzled him, for psalms were sung often enough and prayers said, by grieving families. But he had never before heard ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ sung over a coffin.

As Clare struggled with the hours of that tear-stained Friday, Aunt Sarah’s words of long ago came back to her. ‘All things pass,’ she said to herself again and again. What worried her most was what would happen later in the day and on the following day. Scores of visitors would come, for the forge had been a fixed point in the universe for so long, for so many. She wanted to be able to make them all welcome, but however was she to manage.’

She was standing down by the forge, saying goodbye to Jack who had to go over to Liskeyborough, when a grocer’s van turned into the lane and made its way gingerly towards her. After saying how sorry he was for her trouble, the driver began to unpack and carry into the house enough food to have kept Robert and Clare going for months. Johnny had not forgotten the needs of a wake. As soon as Bob told him of their father’s death, he’d rung the grocer in Armagh with whom he’d served his time thirty years earlier and put through an order.

While Johnny was summoning food, Bob was on the phone to the Railway Bar, placing an order which Eddie Robinson went and collected later that afternoon. When Eddie arrived to stack the boxes in Robert’s empty bedroom, Margaret came with him, bringing all her better china and glass, so they’d not run short.

Bob and Johnny themselves turned up early the next morning with Sarah and Sadie and made it clear to Clare that whatever she wanted done would be done. To Clare’s surprise even Sarah and Sadie made themselves useful without any of their customary awkwardness.

Confused as Clare was by the turbulence of her own feelings, and unsure how she could cope with the days to come, she was soon deeply heartened by those who came to pay their respects. She found herself surrounded by people who would not allow anything to mar the proper and seemly departure of a man whom the whole community had known and respected.

As the hours passed, people came and went. They stood by the coffin in clean clothes and spoke the expected, well-used phrases. Whether they knew her personally or not, all who came offered her their love and support, because they knew Robert had loved her. It seemed as if they spoke to him by comforting her. She knew every soul who had crossed the threshold since she came home,
would have done anything she asked of them and been honoured in the asking.

Late on Saturday afternoon, with all the preparations made for a busy evening and her aunts drinking tea by the stove, Clare slipped out of the house and made her way into the orchard. She went to find some berries or leaves to put in the green glass jar that always sat on the table, something everyday, to compliment the florist’s wreaths, the heavy creations of massed blooms which filled the whole house with the scent of autumn.

The light was fading, the lank grass already damp with dew, as she made her way along her own familiar path. At every season, the orchard gave her flowers for the table. The celandines and wood anemones in early spring, the primroses and violets in April and May. After them came the turn of the trees in the hedgerow, blackthorn, wild cherry, crab. In May the whole orchard was a cloud of pink and white, the apple blossom itself. Later, after the damson and pear had shed their short-lived blossoms, there were buttercups and honeysuckle to pick. Then came the fruits of autumn, blackberry clusters with tinted leaves, dark sloes with tiny dark green leaves and murderous thorns, and hawthorn, crooked twigs hung with passionate red berries and a few surviving bright yellow leaves.

Only in the deepest winter months was she at a loss to find something for the table. Then she would look hopefully at the geraniums stored in the boys’ room hoping for a late flower and a few spicy smelling leaves, or remember to ask Jessie for twigs of winter jasmine from her mother’s garden. The old green glass jar she found in the rubbish dump had never gone empty. It must not be empty now.

The air was already cool, the sun’s rays slanted at shallow angles, picking up the windfalls, pale globes in the tangled grass, well marked by the boring of insects and the determined pecking of the blackbirds.

She ran her eye over the rough barks of the apple trees and made for the hedgerow, spotted some rosehips well out of reach and the feathery fronds of Old Man’s Beard, which flew away if only you touched it.

Disappointed, she made for the old well in search of the small sharp-toothed ferns that made their home just above the water level. But there were none. The well was low after a dry autumn, what remained of the ferns were dry and shrivelled.

‘There’s always the spindleberry,’ she said aloud, as she sat herself down where she could contemplate the bars of evening cloud reflected in the clear water.

So many people, so many words spoken. Only
when she thought of the spindleberry, a bush which grew right opposite the front door, did it dawn on her it was solitude, not the flowers, that she needed most. Perhaps it’d always been so. Since she’d been a little girl, she’d tramped the lanes and hedgerows ‘looking for flowers’. Often she found them, for she had discovered many quiet corners over the years. She knew what bloomed and when it bloomed, unthought of and unseen. In those walks and searches, she’d put together her thoughts as much as the posies she brought home for Robert.

‘Just one more posy for Robert,’ she whispered.

Tomorrow, somewhere after three, the polished oak coffin would be lowered into the reopened family plot. According to the gravestone, three generations of Scotts had been buried there. But gravestones were recent things and costly. He always said himself he was the fifth blacksmith in the line. Then he’d laugh and say his son Robert was a bank manager and he didn’t blame him one bit.

She could smile now. Last night she’d even found herself laughing as Charlie told stories about the mischief the village boys got up to and how Robert would try to get them out of the trouble they’d landed themselves in. So many who’d sat in the big kitchen in the course of the long evening had similar stories to tell about Robert’s kindness and shrewdness.

The sun came out below a smoky band of evening cloud and turned to liquid gold the pool of water where she sat. Suddenly, she was sitting by a stream with Andrew, throwing pebbles into the shallow water, delighting in their tiny splash, the way the ripples spread in the dappled shade where the trees overhung the riverbank.

‘How long ago was that,?’ she whispered, as she tossed a fragment of twig into the sunlit pool and watched the ripples rush towards her.

‘How I wish you were here, Andrew,’ she said, as she got up, suddenly aware the aunts would wonder where she was.

Deep shadows filled the hedgerows and lay beneath the old trees. She shivered in the chill, misty air and glanced towards the cottage as she made her way back. Through one of the small windows she saw a bent and shadowy figure lean forward to trim a lamp.

For one moment her heart stood still. No, it couldn’t be Robert. Robert’s days of hammering and lighting lamps were over. He was gone. And she was quite alone.

Robert Scott’s funeral to Grange churchyard was one of the largest anyone could remember. For so many who stood in the pale autumn sunshine Robert’s passing was not only an immediate personal loss, but one of those events which they recognised as a critical point in their own history and the history of their community.

The crowds of mourners flowed from the churchyard and spread out over the broad, roughly-surfaced space opposite the church gates. As they made their way slowly towards the ponies and traps tethered across the road, or the handful of cars parked under the wall of the churchyard itself, they greeted each other with nods and handshakes. A phrase as familiar as the time-honoured ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ spoken so often at the wake or at the graveside, echoed back and forth: ‘Ah, ’tis the end of an era, the end of an era.’

There were men who had sat on the hard wooden benches of the Orange Hall with Robert when they were just lads of seventeen and he had already served his time. Women who were infants in the schoolroom, when he was a big boy carrying
turf for the fire. Their grown sons and daughters, who’d brought work to the forge since they were youngsters. All looked around bleakly as they turned their backs on his grave and called to mind friends and relatives already at rest on the hill top behind them.

Their own youth and prime was now long past, but harder still to bear was the disappearance of the world in which they had grown up, day by day. They knew they could no more halt the changes they saw at every turn than wind back the clock, regain their own lost vigour, or bring Robert back to his rightful place in the forge.

‘Ach, the place will be desperate quiet without him,’ said Harry Todd, as he shook hands with his cousin John Williamson.

Robert’s hammer had echoed like a heartbeat throughout Harry’s lifetime, its silences punctuating the weeks as clearly as the church bell.

‘An’ where will we go for the news?’ asked John, a well-off farmer, who didn’t appear to recognise either his telephone, or his new television set, as any substitute for the worn and grimy bench inside the half door.

A sudden chill breeze stirred the dust and blew yellowed leaves against the stone wall below the old schoolroom. Once, long ago now, both men had sat in that large, bare room with Master Ebbitt and young Miss Rowentree, chanting their
multiplication tables, the names of the continents, of the kings and queens of England and of the counties of Ireland. The building was boarded up now, the roof rapidly deteriorating. It was beginning to look like the cottages where they themselves had been born, storehouses now, a short distance away from the newly-built bungalows with running water, electricity and wide picture windows.

‘It’s hard on the wee lassie, an’ her lost her parents not that long back,’ said John, with a slight backward glance to where the family still stood by the graveside, studying the cards on the wreaths laid out on the trampled grass, while the gravedigger and his helper shovelled back and tamped down the dry brown earth.

‘Aye. Clever girl she is too. He was that proud o’ her whin she got the scholarship. Ah niver heard Robert talk so much about anythin’ in all the years I knew him, as he did about that scholarship. What’ll happen to her now, I wonder?’

‘Sure only time will tell, man. But I’d say she’d make her way. She has a head on her shoulders forby being clever, though she’s heart sore at losin’ him. Did ye see her drop in the wee posy of flowers after Bob and Johnny threw down the earth? Fuschies, they were. I wondered to meself when I saw them where she had them growin’, to have them flower so late. But then, that house always was kinda sheltered.’

They paused and turned to watch June Wiley hurry past with her eldest daughter, Helen. They nodded knowingly as mother and daughter disappeared into the lane that ran from the top of Church Hill down past Robinson’s orchard, along by their horse trough and across the front of their potato house and machine shed to come out beside the forge.

‘She’s doin’ the tea for the relatives,’ said John, who was June’s uncle. ‘Bob and Johnny have a fair way to go the night, though I heerd Clarey is for Rowentree’s with her friend Jessie afore she goes back t’ Belfast.’

‘Is that so?’ Tom enquired, as he unhitched his pony and trap from the gate into his brother-in-law’s field and hoisted himself awkwardly into the driving seat. ‘Have ye yer car?’

‘Aye, but I parked it beyond by Colvin’s to be outa the way o’ the hearse,’ John replied, turning on his heel.

‘Ye’ll be down one night soon?’ Tom said quickly, to his cousin’s departing figure.

John raised a hand in acknowledgement, but didn’t pause. His bad leg had started to ache with all the standing. Once it started, it didn’t know when to stop.

‘Ye’ll be welcome,’ Tom called, raising his voice. ‘There’s not many folk call these days. It bees lonely of an evenin’.’

He gathered up his reins and called to the mare. With a last look at the Scotts arranging wreaths on the closed up grave, he turned the trap back the way he’d come, to his own empty house at Ballynick.

After the crowds of people who had packed the house since Friday evening, Clare found it strange to walk into the big kitchen with her Scott uncles and aunts. Uncle Jack had said he thought he ought to stay with Granny and Granda Hamilton when he took them back to Liskeyborough. Jessie said she’d be down when she’d seen Harry off. But Clare knew no one else would call today, not even dear Charlie. In the unwritten rules of the community, only ‘family’, or those especially invited by the family, might visit between the laying to rest of a loved one and the necessary taking up again of life on the following day.

‘There ye are, love, it’s all ready. There’s a second pot just brewing,’ said June Wiley as she greeted them at the door. ‘Now be sure ye eat somethin’ for I’m sure ye had no lunch.’

‘June, I don’t know what I’d have done without you. You’ve been so good,’ said Clare, as she walked outside with her. ‘And you too, Helen,’ smiling at the tall, fair-haired girl who’d so brightened the days for Robert, these last three weeks.

‘Aye, well, Clare, you’ve done your share t’
help yer friends. It’s a small thing to help you now. Come up if there’s anythin’ you want or if you feel lonely. You know yer way.’

She turned back into the house. Sarah and Sadie were handing round sandwiches. Bob and Johnny had brought extra chairs from the sitting room, but Sarah and Sadie seated themselves on the settle when they finished pouring tea. They looked as awkward as ever.

No one sat in Robert’s chair. The clocks were silent still but the kettle singing on the stove raised her spirits, a small continuing thing in a world that seemed otherwise to have stopped. She drew it aside before it boiled up and started rattling its lid and pouring out steam.

‘Desperate big crowd,’ said Johnny, when the silence grew too much for him.

‘And such a lovely lot of wreaths,’ added Sarah.

Clare listened as they repeated all the comments they’d already made at the graveside while they’d read the labels on the wreaths. That had been her own worst time. Even worse than seeing the coffin lowered into the dry earth. Her eyes were so misted with tears, she couldn’t read the words out loud, which they expected her to do. All she could think of were the cards once written for Ellie and Sam.

It was Jessie, dear Jessie who had stepped forward and read out the tributes for her in a voice Clare hardly recognised.

‘Clare dear, I don’t want to upset you on a day like today, but I think I ought to ask you about my father’s will,’ began Bob, tentatively, as he put his empty tea cup back on the table.

Clare smiled at him and shook her head.

‘I don’t think he had one. He never mentioned it.’

Bob nodded. It was no more than he expected.

‘Would there be anywhere he kept papers or money? I think we should just make sure.’

They left Sarah and Sadie to search the Bible and the huge Bible commentaries, between the pages of which Robert sometimes kept a spare pound or two for emergencies and went into his bedroom. It was already dim and shadowy for as the afternoon drew on towards dusk the heavy furniture absorbed what little light filtered in through the tiny orchard window.

‘I think there’s an Ulster bank book in one of those tiny drawers,’ Clare said, pointing at the dressing table. ‘If there was a will, he’d have put it there.’

‘Have you the key?’

Clare shook her head and pulled opened both drawers. One contained his pension book and the freewill offering envelopes from the Presbyterian Church, the other held a battered bank book and a yellowed policy document. Provincial Friendly Society Burial Fund, it said. It was dated 1904, the year Robert was married, and was fully paid up in 1929.

‘As far as Johnny and I are concerned, Clare, anything father left is yours,’ he said quietly, as he picked up the bank book and opened it.

He smiled wryly and handed it to her.

The account had been closed a month earlier with a withdrawal of twenty-one pounds, two shillings and elevenpence.

‘Ye’ll need to be buying books and suchlike,’ Bob said, as she opened the envelope he’d handed her the night before she left for Belfast.

When she drew out the four papery fivers and protested that it was too much and too good of him, he’d laughed and said what he’d always said whenever he’d given her money, even as a very little girl: ‘Ah, sure there’s corn in Egypt yet.’

She stood leafing through the bank book, aware that Bob was watching her. The entries were almost all in the same hand, a flowing copperplate in black ink that had faded only slightly. The book began in 1931 with a Brought Forward entry of forty-seven pounds, two and tenpence. Over the next fifteen years, Robert’s saving had grown to three hundred pounds. In 1946, there were a cluster of withdrawals taking the account right back to fifty pounds. Then there was a deposit of two hundred and sixty. That would be the money for Granny’s funeral. She would have had a Burial Fund policy too. The next withdrawal was in August 1947. She knew from the amount that it
was for her school uniform. From then on, Robert had made regular small withdrawals. Perhaps some of those payments for gates which Robert had said would cover the rent for weeks hadn’t actually turned up after all.

‘I’m sorry Clare, I could have done more. I didn’t realise things were so bad,’ said Bob, leaning against the chest of drawers by the door.

‘You’ve always been kind and very generous,’ she protested. ‘He was always saying how good you were, particularly at Christmas.’

For a moment, Clare thought Bob was going to cry himself.

‘He was very independent, in his own way,’ she went on quickly. ‘He wasn’t ungracious, just quietly determined. I think maybe I’m a bit like him.’

Bob smiled warmly.

‘Clare, will you let me pay the rent for you till you’re through university? You won’t want to give up the house will you?’

‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that,’ she burst out, horrified at the thought of it. ‘It’s my home. It’s all I have now,’ she added more quietly. ‘But I can manage the rent. My grant is far more than I imagined it would be.’

‘That’s because it’s a full grant,’ he said, knowledgeably. ‘The grants are means tested and my father had no means. No means at all,’ he added, ‘and him worked that hard all his life.’

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, Bob did burst into tears and Clare put her arms round him.

‘Oh yes, he had, Bob,’ she insisted. ‘He had all the means he needed. When he said “We’ll get what’ll do us,” he meant it. I don’t think he’s ever wanted anything he couldn’t have. At least, not while I’ve known him.’

Bob mopped himself up on a large white handkerchief and nodded.

‘I think you’re right, Clare. It may not always have been like that, but I’ve felt he was content these last years. There’s not many end their life in as good heart as Robert. That’s worth more than a fat bank book,’ he ended as he put the tattered book back in the drawer. ‘What about this?’ he asked, picking up the policy.

‘I think he asked Charlie to see to that.’

‘And what about his clothes? Would you like us to take them all away with us, so you won’t have to go through them?’

Clare shook her head.

‘That’s very thoughtful of you, but Charlie knows an old man in Ballybrannan whose badly in need of them. He says he won’t mind all the darns and mends, he’ll be only too glad to get them.’

‘So that’s everything then?’

Clare smiled weakly.

‘No, you’ve forgotten one thing,’ she said, as she pulled out the wide central drawer in Robert’s
wash stand and handed Bob his silver fob watch.

He turned it over in his hand and read the inscription on the back;

‘Robert Scott 1902, From C. R. who will never forget.’

‘C. R.?’ he asked, surprised. ‘I though my mother gave him that as a wedding present.’

‘So did I,’ she admitted honestly, as she surveyed the other items in the drawer, hoping to find a keepsake for Johnny. ‘What about these for Uncle Johnny?’ she asked, producing a velvet lined box with matching tiepin and cufflinks. ‘Auntie Polly sent them from Canada and he was very proud of them.’

Back in the kitchen, Sadie and Sarah were brushing dust and fluff from their black suits. The Bibles and Bible commentaries were piled high on the table with the remains of the sandwiches and cake. Sitting beside them was a single pound note, streaked and grimy from the pocket of his working trousers.

‘It really is time we were going, Bob’, said Sadie sharply, as they came back into the kitchen.

Johnny was jingling his car keys when Clare offered him the box with the tiepin and cuff links. He looked at Sarah dubiously but thrust them into his coat pocket with a hurried word of thanks as his wife walked past him into the hall to use the mirror and the last of the daylight to put on her hat.

‘Ring me, Clare, if there’s anything either of us can do,’ Bob said, as he kissed her goodbye.

‘Yer a great girl, Clare,’ Johnny said, hugging her awkwardly.

‘I hope your studies go well, Clare,’ said Sadie, tottering slightly in her very high heels, as she followed after Bob into the gathering dusk. ‘There’s nothing like a good education to help you get on in life,’ she added as Clare walked down the lane with them to where the cars were parked below the forge.