Rosie (68 page)

Thomas arrived at The Grange at midday to find Rosie just as Norah had described on the telephone, almost vacant, as if part of her mind had shut down. The way she showed no real reaction to Thomas visiting again so soon after the last time proved she wasn’t herself.

‘I want you to forget gardening this afternoon,’ he said firmly. ‘We’ll go for a walk instead.’

Thomas hadn’t intended that Donald should come too, but when he tagged along he hadn’t the heart to tell him to go home. Once they were out in the fields walking towards Heathfield, however, Donald bounded on ahead and Thomas began speaking more seriously to Rosie.

‘I’m not going to make light of Gareth rejecting you,’ he said, coming straight to the point. ‘I know it hurts and it’s made you feel worthless. But you must see, Rosie, that he is the worthless one, not you.’

She didn’t reply. In fact it was almost as if she hadn’t heard him. Thomas caught hold of her arm and pulled her round to face him, tipping her face up to his.

‘Do you know what I see in your face?’ he asked, looking right into her eyes.

She shook her head.

‘I see strength,’ he said simply. ‘The very first time I saw you back at May Cottage when you came out of those bushes where you were hiding, I noticed it. Your expression then reminded me of East End kids – defiant and quick-witted. You looked like a little ragamuffin in your big shabby dress and your hair all tangled, but I knew right away that you’d be a force to reckon with.’

Rosie grimaced. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Because it makes me sad that you have all that strength, yet sometimes you just accept things when you shouldn’t. I’m not going to repeat all the old lectures I’ve given you so many times before about your father’s sins not being yours. You know that already. But what I do want to make you see today is that Gareth has actually done you a great favour.’

To Thomas’s delight that defiant look flashed back into her eyes. ‘He’s
what
?’ she retorted indignantly.

‘A favour,’ Thomas repeated. ‘Because of him you accepted sliding into a comfortable rut. Ever since you met him, just seeing him when he had time off, you haven’t had so much as a glimpse of the outside world. You haven’t been to a dance, you haven’t flirted with any other boys or sat about giggling with other girls. In fact you haven’t got a clue about what other girls of your age get up to. You accepted seeing only what Gareth wanted you to see.’

‘That’s not true,’ she said, brushing away his hand from her chin.

‘It is,’ he insisted. ‘And I can tell you too how it would be if you married him. First, you would spend a year or two in a couple of rooms, you’d make it cosy and you’d visit his parents every Sunday. Then you’d get pregnant and Gareth would pull out all the stops to get you a better home. Maybe he’d get enough money together to buy a little house somewhere near his parents, but more likely you’d get a council house. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, so far. But let’s just flick forward a few years. You’ve got your home and a little garden all of your own, two or three small children. But Gareth works long hours to keep all this going; he’s grumpy when he gets home, so he takes off to the pub every evening. He wants his home to be just like his mother’s, everything spick and span, dinner on the table as he gets in, but he doesn’t want to talk to you.’

‘It wouldn’t have been like that,’ she said angrily. ‘It wouldn’t.’

‘Oh yes, it would,’ Thomas went on. ‘But because you’ve got a good mind, Rosie, you’d have woken up one day and seen it for yourself. You’d have realized that you’d accepted second best, and you’d have felt cheated. You’d have wanted your children to be out playing in fields. You’d have wanted passion and new experiences – to see the world.’

‘All women have to compromise when they get married,’ she said stubbornly. ‘That’s what marriage is all about.’

Thomas shook his head. ‘No, it’s not, Rosie. It’s about sharing a life with someone because you can’t live without them. It’s about joy and working together to achieve the same dreams. True, there are ups and downs; few people go through married life without hiccups. But you both have to set out on the same path with the same goal in view. You two were never really on the same path, or if you were you came to a fork in it some time ago and went off in different directions.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ she said sarcastically. ‘Because if it is, it hasn’t worked.’

‘No, it’s supposed to make you look at it all more objectively. You’ve discovered that Gareth doesn’t have much compassion. He’s wooden-headed and blinkered. He wants a wife who will do exactly as he tells her. He only cares about himself.’

Rosie sighed. She knew in her heart that everything Thomas had said was true, but she couldn’t bear Gareth to be so maligned. ‘It’s his mother who’s made him like that,’ she said. ‘She tells him how he should live his life.’

Thomas thought for a moment, remembering all the things Rosie had told him about Mrs Jones. ‘Have you ever considered why she is like she is?’ he said quietly. ‘She didn’t want to leave Wales and all her family. She found herself uprooted in a place she never fitted into. It didn’t do her any good ending up in a smart home with every imaginable gadget. She just grew bitter. She is a very good example of what might have happened to you.’

‘But she didn’t have anything back in Wales. They were terribly poor.’

‘Money can’t buy happiness, Rosie,’ he said. ‘That has to come from within.’

They walked on then to catch up with Donald, and to change the subject Thomas began to talk about the impending Suez crisis. Rosie didn’t appear to have been following world news the way she once did, but he supposed under the circumstances that was understandable.

The three of them sat down on the grass later and Donald pulled a bottle of Tizer and some apples out of his knapsack. It was very warm, the sky was cloudless, and in a moment of silence they heard a lark singing somewhere high above them.

Maybe it was the utter peace that prompted it, or Thomas telling her a story about swimming in the East India docks when he was a kid, but Rosie began to talk about how it was in summer on the Somerset Levels: fishing for eels in the rhynes with only a stick, a piece of wool hanging off it, and a worm tied on to the end; cutting peat into blocks for the fire; and picking great bunches of marsh marigolds to take home to the cottage.

Thomas encouraged her. He felt she’d kept all these good memories locked away for fear they might remind her of the bad ones. She needed to re-examine them; it would help her to think objectively about her memories of Gareth too.

Donald lay on his stomach listening to Rosie and Thomas. Rosie had told him many stories but never ones about when she was a little girl before. He found it puzzling that she laughed about her brother called Seth, because that was the same name as the bad man the police were looking for. It was also funny that she talked about someone called Heather, and then Thomas said that was his sister. But Thomas seemed to like Rosie’s stories about Heather and how she found country ways so strange, because he kept laughing. It made Donald laugh too, although he didn’t quite understand all of it.

‘She nearly had a fit when she found the privy didn’t have a flush and that from time to time a new hole had to be dug,’ Rosie said, stopping for a moment to explain to Donald what a ‘privy’ was. ‘She used to be scared to go down there at night because Seth told her there were creatures in there that might bite you.’

Thomas then told them about the latrines in the prison camp. ‘It was just a long, deep, stinking trench. We had a bamboo rail to hold on to, another one to crouch down on, and that was it – one slip and you’d had it. When I got dysentery it seemed like I was out there all night. You’d hear squeaking and rustling, but you didn’t dare look down because if you saw the rats you got so scared you’d fall.’

Donald wondered why Thomas and Rosie were talking about things that had happened a long time ago. Listening to them was a bit like when he tried to read a real book, rather than a comic. He understood some of it but had to keep skipping the big words, and sometimes at the end of the page it didn’t quite make sense. He wanted to interrupt them again and again to make things clearer for him, but something told him to keep quiet. It seemed important to just let these two people he loved talk to each other. It was making Rosie happy again.

It was after five when they went home, and as they walked across the last field towards Mayfield village Thomas glanced sideways at Rosie. Her cheeks were pink again, the slight stoop she’d had when they came out had gone, and she was bouncing along, laughing at something Donald was saying.

He remembered then how he had predicted to himself that she would grow into a pretty woman but would never be sophisticated. He had been right on the second count – he couldn’t imagine any hairdresser completely taming that wild mop of curls, or any elegant dress transforming her country-girl style into city chic. But she hadn’t grown into a merely pretty woman, she was beautiful: long, coppery lashes framing those sky-blue eyes, that determined pointed chin and upturned nose with freckles like gold-dust across the bridge, and such a soft, kissable mouth. He felt a pang of exquisite tenderness for her. He had been so blunt about Gareth today that he wished he dared be equally honest about his own feelings towards her.

Donald leapt over the last stile and ran on ahead. Thomas went next, slowly because climbing was hard for him. He turned at the other side and instinctively held out his hand for Rosie’s. For a moment she just sat astride the stile looking at him, her hand in his. The sun was behind her, turning her hair into a fuzzy golden halo, and the tops of her arms in her sleeveless cotton dress were golden too. He tried to photograph it in his memory, so he could paint it just as soon as he got back to London. He also wanted to be brave enough to put his two hands on her waist and lift her down into his arms, then kiss her.

‘Thank you, Thomas,’ she said in a soft little voice. ‘You always seem to be here for me just when I need you.’

‘I hope I always will,’ he said, and lifting her hand to his lips he kissed it.

As Rosie lay in bed that night, she found it odd that her thoughts were not of Gareth, as they had been night and day for the past week, but of Thomas. He had been such an important person in her life for so long, and she thought she knew everything about him, but today he’d been different, sort of cruel, yet she liked him even more for that.

He’d pulled a kind of veil from her eyes. Most of what he’d said about Gareth she’d always known deep down, but he’d brought everything to the surface and now she could see it with utter clarity. She wasn’t exactly sure she liked such clarity, though. She didn’t want to remember Gareth urging her to masturbate him almost the second they were alone together, nor the fact that in the last year he had rarely attempted to please her. She didn’t want to think about the nasty jibes he made at Donald or Thomas, and especially not the ones he made about her, that her hair was always a mess, that her breasts were too small and her hands were getting rough like a man’s. Neither did she want to admit openly that Gareth was boring a lot of the time, especially when he talked about trains or motorbikes.

That misty image of their married life in a little rose-covered cottage had always been so pretty and comforting, but she knew now that Gareth wasn’t really the man she imagined sitting across a candlelit table from, or tucked up in a vast comfortable bed with. She still had to find that man. Yet she did feel sort of refreshed by having had that veil pulled down. She could see further and she had an urge to get out into the world and try new things.

What would it be like to go to dances again? To let some new man kiss her? And these girls he’d said she should be out there giggling with, who were they? Where would she meet them?

Sleep overtook her before she could answer the many questions spinning around in her head.

Chapter Eighteen

Three days after Thomas returned to Mayfield, Seth arrived too. He had crept into the garden at five-thirty in the morning, peered through every downstairs window, and now at seven o’clock he was sitting high up on the garden wall, hidden by the dense foliage of a copper beech, staring right into the kitchen. He was waiting for the occupants of the house to get up so he could take a look at them.

His appearance was now as desperate as his state of mind: unwashed, filthy clothes, and a thick growth of black stubble on his chin. He had abandoned the Standard Vanguard back near Southampton, then walked many miles cross-country before helping himself to a green Rover 90 in a small village. The owner had left a tweed jacket and a flat cap in the back, which offered a little warmth at night and some semblance of a disguise. He’d also managed to buy some food and cigarettes in a village shop run by an old lady. She didn’t appear to recognize his face as the one on the front page of every newspaper, but he sensed his luck at evading the police was fast running out.

His heart had sunk when he eventually reached May-field and saw where Rosie lived. He had imagined The Grange to be some sort of institution, a school or a nursing home, tucked away in isolation. Instead he’d found it to be a big, posh, private house, with a sleek Jaguar parked in the drive, slap-bang in the middle of a village high street.

Seth knew that village people tended to be more observant than their city counterparts, and judging by the houses and cottages he’d seen so far, this one had a large proportion of wealthy residents. They were likely to call the police if they so much as caught a glimpse of an unkempt stranger, and that made him very jumpy.

On the plus side, however, there were no police at the gate, no dog either, and the number of bushes in the garden made it easy to creep around unseen. He’d also reconnoitred a way in via the field at the bottom of the garden. He intended to hide his shotgun there later, then drive the Rover away to some woods and dump it.

A noise drew his attention back to the house. A small, grey-haired, middle-aged woman wearing a pink dressing-gown was opening the kitchen window as she filled the kettle. Seth frowned. He had assumed that Rosie must be working here as a maid. But if she was, why wasn’t she up first? Remembering how astonished Miss Marks had been when he showed her this address, he wished now that he’d asked her why. But then, with hindsight, there was a great deal more he should have found out before he allowed himself to become involved with that old bag.