Rainbow's End (22 page)

‘Now let me see, how far down was Auntie Anne’s shop?’ Ellen asked herself next, starting to walk down Mere Lane. She could see that the houses were a good deal bigger than those in the court . . . but before she had had time to wonder which house was theirs a voice hailed her.

‘Ellie, you’ve tek your time, haven’t you? Where’s Dee and Donny? Come on, Mam’s now puttin’ the kettle on.’

It was Bertie, who had been about to enter the house, she imagined, when he had seen her coming slowly up the road.

‘Oh, Bertie, I haven’t seen hide nor hair o’ the twins,’ Ellen said worriedly. She, the prop and the peg basket sidled in through the doorway, and in a quick glance round Ellen saw that they now possessed a front parlour as well as the back kitchen, the door of which was thrown open to reveal a very much nicer room than the one they had lived in in Prince Edwin Lane. ‘But they know the way, don’t they? Only it’s even longer than I thought.’

‘Yes, it’s a tidy walk,’ Bertie admitted. ‘Pushin’ that handcart was no joke, I’m tellin’ ye. Look, you come in an’ have a cuppa, an’ if the twins aren’t back by teatime I’ll go an’ roust ’em out. They’re probably playin’ with the Harvey kids, knowin’ them.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I asked around,’ Ellen said. She walked into the back kitchen and dumped the peg bag and the clothes-line on the kitchen table, which looked quite lost and lonely in its new, larger home. ‘Mam, Mrs Edwards gave me some raisin buns an’ she said she’d gorra little somethin’ for you, only you hadn’t gone in to say goodbye. So I said you’d go back in the next couple o’ days, say cheerio to her then.’

‘Yes, I mean to do so,’ Ada said, picking the heavy kettle off the hob and pouring water into the old brown teapot. ‘Cut the loaf, Ellen, we’ll have a jam butty to keep us goin’ till supper time.’

‘You’ve done wonders, Mam,’ Ellen said presently, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea before her and carving chunks off the loaf. ‘Eh, in’t it big, though? An’ a parlour – we
are
goin’ up in the world!’

‘I’m goin’ to furnish that parlour real nice,’ Ada said, half closing her eyes and putting both hands round the cup of tea, though it was a warm day. ‘We’re a way from Paddy’s market here, more’s the pity, but we can still lug things back on a handcart. I’m goin’ to have decent chairs, a sofa, all sorts in that room.’

‘How’ll we afford it?’ Ellen said. ‘I don’t suppose Auntie Anne’ll pay us much, d’you?’

‘Well, not at first,’ Ada admitted. ‘But we’ve got the boys’ money comin’ in, queen, an’ we’ve plenty of space. I thought we might have a lodger in a few weeks, when we’ve settled.’

‘Oh Mam, norra lodger,’ Ozzie exclaimed, much dismayed. He had just entered the kitchen through the back door, which was a novelty in itself to someone who had lived all his life in a back to back, Ellen thought, carrying what looked like a sack of coal in his arms. ‘There’s only three bedrooms an’ the garret, we don’t want no one else livin’ here.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ Ada said diplomatically. ‘But three rooms an’ a garret means we do have a room we could let. There’s you big fellers up in the garret, me an’ Mick in the back room, an’ Ellen an’ the littl’uns in the tiny room. That leaves the dacent front one empty.’

‘Wharrabout the twins?’ Fred asked. ‘You can’t count them in wi’ us, Mam. Oughtn’t they to have a room?’

‘Deirdre will share wi’ Ellen, it’s only Donal in wi’ you,’ Ada pointed out. ‘But don’t worry too much about it. We may not need a lodger after all.’

Ozzie muttered something. Ada leaned across the table and clipped his ear, then said: ‘I didn’t hear that, Oswald. An’ just remember, I don’t want to hear it, neither.’

Ellen, who really had not heard what Oswald said, opened her mouth to ask him to repeat the remark, but decided against it. Her mother’s smack had reddened Ozzie’s ear and the side of his face quite remarkably and Ellen did not wish to be the recipient of another such slap. But when her mother sent her up to look at the bedrooms, and Ozzie slouched up with her, she had her opportunity. ‘What did you say just then, Oz? What made our mam clip your lug, I mean?’

‘I said as Mick was all the lodger we needed,’ Ozzie admitted. ‘He’s never here, Ellie! Why, apart from givin’ our mam four kids, what does he do for us? We don’t even get his allotment and I’m norrat all sure I believe in them old parents of his. He’s just tekin’ advantage of our mam.’

‘He meks her happy, Oz,’ Ellen said after a pause for thought. ‘She’s all lit up when he’s home, as if she was a young gel again.’

‘Oh aye. But you notice she din’t say she couldn’t mek a move wi’out askin’ him this time,’ Oswald said. ‘If you ask me, our mam’s gettin’ fed up wi’ havin’ a feller she hardly sees. He came back when Tobe was a couple o’ weeks old, an’ we’ve not seen him since. Mam’s done this move all by herself as far as she could . . . we helped, acourse, but it ain’t the same. Mam needs her husband now an’ then.’

‘Oh well, he’s a seaman,’ Ellen pointed out. ‘They’re hardly ever home from what I’ve heard. Which is my room?’

‘That ‘un,’ Oswald told her. ‘We’re up that ladder . . . it’ll be grand, bein’ up there, just us fellers.’

‘And Donal,’ Ellen reminded him, peering into her tiny room. ‘Oh, Oz, ain’t it grand? Just me an’ Dee in here.’

‘An’ Sammy. An’ Tobe when he’s big enough to leave Mam,’ Oswald reminded her. ‘Mek the most of your room, Ellie, ’cos it won’t be yours alone for very long!’

‘I never knew we had so much stuff, Mam,’ Ellen said wearily that evening, as she began to unload another orange box crammed with bits and pieces. ‘Aren’t you glad we’ve gorra bigger house, eh?’

‘I am, but I’m deathly tired,’ her mother said, collapsing on to a chair. ‘Oh, I just hope Bertie lays a good one on those twins when he finds ’em. How could they stay out so late an’ worry us so?’

‘You know the twins. They won’t have spared a thought for us till supper time,’ Ellen told her mother. ‘Oh! What’s this?’

She held the small object up. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied with pink string and it was about twelve inches long by nine inches deep. ‘Is it a book?’

Her mother glanced at the parcel, laughed and shook her head. ‘No, it’s norra book, queen. Unwrap it. If you like it you might as well have it on your bedroom wall. It was me mam’s, and her mam’s before her, I believe.’

Ellen was just beginning to untie the pink string when the back door burst open. Bertie entered the room, dragging a twin by either hand.

‘They were dawdlin’ along Heyworth Street eatin’ oranges as though they had all the time in the world, Mam,’ he said indulgently. ‘I wouldn’t waste me breath worryin’ about kids like these, I never knewed ’em to get lost yet!’

‘We
were
lost,’ Deirdre said indignantly. ‘As lost as anything, weren’t we, Donal? Mam said Heyworth Street but we couldn’t ’member nothing else, so we axed people where was the Dochertys’ new house an’ they didn’t know an’ when I cried ever such a nice lady bought us a wet nellie each an’ the man in the shop said we could have a norange, too. You have to
eat
oranges, you know,’ she added, staring haughtily at Bertie. ‘Even when you’re lost an’ frighted, you have to eat an orange or it goes bad on ye.’

‘You’re really very . . .’ began Ada, to be interrupted by a squeak of excitement from Ellen.

‘Mam! Oh, Mam, it’s the prettiest thing I ever did see! Can I really have it to hang on me bedroom wall? Where’s it of?’

Ada was opening her mouth to reply when Deirdre, who had gone over to see what Ellen was exclaiming over, spoke. ‘That’s the Burren,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I wonder who drew it? I wish I could have it, Mam.’

There was a moment of complete, total silence, when Ellen felt she could hear the new house holding its breath. Then she said slowly, ‘The Burren, Dee? Where’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s Ireland; in Clare,’ Deirdre said. ‘We’ve gorra pal who telled us about it.’ She turned to Ada. ‘What’s for supper, Mam? That ole orange din’t fill us up proper, did it, Donny? We’s starvin’, so we are.’

‘Mam?’ Ellen said, bemused by all this. ‘Mam? Is it what she said? Is it Clare?’

‘That’s right, it’s the Burren,’ Ada said, frowning. ‘But how on earth did Dee know that? Or . . . have you seen another picture of it, queen?’

Deirdre shook her head. There was an orange line round her mouth, Ellen saw, and her face was grimy with the day’s doings, but she wasn’t messing about, she was quite serious. She had never seen another picture like this one, she just . . . just knew.

‘But it isn’t drawed, nor yet painted,’ Ellen said, after looking carefully at the picture again. She would not have been surprised had she seen, printed in a corner somewhere, the words
The Burren
, which would account for Deirdre’s unusual knowledge, but a closer study had proved the picture to be untitled. And what was more, it was, as she had just said, neither drawn nor painted. It was embroidered with what looked like very fine, soft wools, in the most glorious autumn colours. It glowed . . . that was the best way to describe it.

‘Nor it is, it’s wool,’ Deirdre said after another glance at the picture. ‘Mam, what
is
for supper? I s’pose you’ve had yours,’ she added in an injured tone. ‘I s’pose you couldn’t wait for Donny an’ me.’

‘I’ve a good mind to send you to bed without another bite,’ Ada said, remembering her grievance. ‘But you can have the same as us – jam butties, a cut of cake and some cold apple pie. I’ve not had time to cook since unlike some, I’ve been busy moving us in all day.’

Donal sat himself down at the table and reached for the jam butties, but Deirdre lingered a moment to look around the kitchen. ‘It’s big,’ she said, sitting down on her stool and helping herself to a buttie. ‘Bigger’n the other house. You’ll have to get a bigger table, Mam. An’ more proper chairs, ’stead o’ these stools.’

‘When you’ve eaten, you can go straight up to bed,’ Ada said, refusing to be drawn into light conversation. ‘And tomorrer the two of you are bleedin’ well goin’ to help for once in your lives.’

‘And you aren’t goin’ to bed until you’ve had a good wash in nice cold water,’ Ellen said cruelly. ‘You’re sharin’ my room, Deirdre Docherty, so you’ll be clean if nothin’ else.’

She was still very curious as to how Deirdre had recognised the picture so unerringly, but she was also cross. Trust the twins to come in late and take everyone’s mind off their lateness and naughtiness by doing something as strange as recognise a picture of a place they had never so much as set eyes on before. Trust them to wriggle out of so much as laying a table or washing up a cup or a plate!

But later, when she was getting the twins to bed, she gave voice to her curiosity. ‘Dee,’ she said, whilst scrubbing her small sister’s filthy face and hair with red carbolic soap and a good deal of cold water. ‘How come you knew that place, the Burren? I mean what did your pal say about it so’s you knew it at once like that?’

‘Dunno. He said slabs of limestone . . .
ouch
, that was me eye, Ellie . . . an’ lots of rocks . . . Ellie, if you put soap in me bleedin’ mouth how’m I s’posed to answer you? . . . an’ heaps an’ heaps o’ wild flowers,’ Deirdre said. ‘Aaaargh, you’re takin’ the skin off me nose . . .’

‘Oh, is it skin? I thought it was more filth,’ Ellen said cheerfully and rinsed her little sister so thoroughly that Deirdre was wetted all over. ‘You are a funny kid, Dee. Now get into bed and go to sleep; the rest of us have had a very tiring day.’

‘So’ve I,’ Deirdre said, jumping into bed in her white cotton shift. ‘Bein’ lost is awful tirin’, Ellie. Where’s the picture goin’ to go?’

‘Over me bed, when I can get Dick or Fred or Ozzie to hammer a nail into the wall for me,’ Ellen said. But actually she hammered the nail in herself, with the heel of her boot, as soon as she had seen Donal into bed in his shared garret. He was inclined to be tearful at being parted from his sister until Bertie told him it was a sign that they were both growing up, then he climbed into bed and pulled the blankets up round his chin quite happily, though he warned Bertie, in all seriousness, that he kicked and sometimes bit in his sleep, as well as shouting out and occasionally punching anything near him.

Bertie, who was no fool, said amiably that he was the same himself, which caused Donal to look a trifle alarmed, but by the time Ellen left him he had apparently realised that Bertie had been calling his bluff and settled down to sleep.

In the tiny room, with Sammy in his orange-box cot already fast asleep, Deirdre lay on her back in their bed watching her sister hanging the picture and telling her whenever it hung crooked, and just as Ellen was seriously considering losing her temper and shouting at the younger girl Deirdre suddenly fell asleep and rolled on to her side, snoring slightly.

‘Well, thank God for that,’ Ellen muttered and stood back to admire her handiwork. The picture looked really good against the whitewashed wall; you would never have known that it had been wrapped in newspaper and shut away in an old box for years and years.

Later, downstairs in the back kitchen once more, Ellen got out her work and sat down opposite her mother. The lads were all out, so it was peaceful, with just the two of them working away in the fading light. Presently, Ellen got up and lit the lamp, then she asked her mother why she had never brought the picture out and hung it before. ‘It seems such a waste, because it’s so pretty,’ she said. ‘I know you said our old house was small, but there were plenty of bare walls that it would have looked nice on, Mam.’

‘Yes, to be sure it would, if I hadn’t forgot all about it,’ her mother agreed. ‘I brought it wi’ me when I first got married because me mam said I could, but your da couldn’t abide it. Said it depressed him. An’ I was keen to do what your da wanted, so I put it away, thinkin’ I’d bring it out again when I had kids of me own an’ one of them could have it. Only somehow, I never did,’ she ended.

‘Wasn’t it strange, Dee recognising it?’ Ellen said, picking up her knitting. She was making a wool blanket out of knitted squares and whenever she had a few pence, which wasn’t often, she would buy old woollen garments at one of the markets and unravel them, then wash and stretch the wool and knit it up once more.