Some Sunny Day (32 page)

How different it felt when Ricardo kissed her rather than Rob. How different
she
felt. A shiver of sweet awareness tingled through her. This was why she hadn’t been able to give her love to Rob, because somehow, deep down inside, her heart had known that she should save her love for Ricardo.

It was the happiest evening of her whole life. Rosie felt as though she was walking on air, having Ricardo at her side, his arm around her waist as he kept her close.

Towards the end of the evening, Ian called for silence and then announced that he had asked Mary to marry him and that she had accepted. When everyone had finished toasting them, Charlie stood up and said bashfully that he and Peggy were also going to be married. How lucky they were, Rosie couldn’t help thinking, a little sadly, even whilst she was so very happy for them. Hers was in some ways a bittersweet happiness. There was her joy in having found love with Ricardo, but there was also her
awareness that the road ahead of them was not an easy one. Ricardo was an internee, even if it was not his fault that circumstances had meant that he had not been able to take British nationality before the war. They were at war with Italy, and Ricardo must be anxious about those members of his extended family who still lived there just as she would have been were their situations reversed.

But still, they were here together now, and they knew how they felt about one another. Whilst everyone was shouting and cheering their congratulations to the two newly engaged couples, Rosie and Ricardo exchanged special looks that spoke of their private promises to one another and their hopes for their shared future.

‘And then Charlie said as how he wants to ask me dad for me hand in marriage proper, like, so I said, and exactly how are you going to do that when me family live in Birmingham and we’re up here in Cheshire and you’re on duty, you know like you would. And then blow me if Charlie doesn’t go and get permission to go home wi’ me to see me mum and dad, so that’s what we’re doing this very next weekend,’ Peggy told them all triumphantly, having come to the end of her breathlessly excited revelation.

‘Me and Ian won’t be able to go and see my family or his on account of him being on duty, but he has written to me dad,’ Mary offered when the girls looked expectantly at her.

They were all in the common room, relaxing after a long tiring week helping to harvest corn.

Both Peggy and Mary were proudly wearing their engagement rings, bought from a jewellers in Nantwich where the two young couples had gone
just as soon as they could. Peggy’s ring had three small diamonds set into a gold band whilst Mary’s was a larger single solitaire. It had given Rosie a small pang to see the way their faces were illuminated by the joy of looking at them and showing them off to everyone, but being the generous-hearted girl she was, she had quickly put aside her own longing to be wearing Ricardo’s ring, to admire theirs.

Ricardo had told her during the week that he had been summoned to see the officer in charge of the camp and told that his name had been put forward to the duke with a good recommendation that he be accepted to work and live on the estate. Rosie hardly dared to let herself hope that the duke would take him, because if he didn’t she didn’t think she would be able to bear the disappointment. It would make such a difference to them and their future together if Ricardo were taken on to work on the estate. They would be able to plan a future together, a future that would be as secure and happy as the futures Peggy and Mary were looking forward to.

‘Shouldn’t Peggy have bin back by now?’ Jean asked. ‘She told me she’d only got the weekend off and it’s Tuesday now.’

‘Perhaps she and Charlie decided to sneak away somewhere private like and not come straight back,’ Sheila giggled.

But there was no place for giggles later on that
day when a white-faced Mary passed on to them the news she had received from Ian.

‘The house took a direct hit, and according to Ian they haven’t found anything, only exceptin’ Charlie’s cap. He must have took it off and left it in the hallway or summat.’

The girls looked at one another in stunned silence.

‘She can’t be dead,’ Sheila burst out eventually. ‘They’ve only just got engaged, her and Charlie. They was going to get married.’

Remembering what Mary had told her about Sheila losing her parents, and sympathising from her own experience, Rosie reached for Sheila’s hand and squeezed it comfortingly. She couldn’t bear to think of Peggy – timid, gentle Peggy, who had been so ecstatic at getting engaged – now cold and for ever still.

As though the dreadful news was some kind of turning point, within a matter of days of them receiving it, Brenda had decided to leave the Land Army and return home, along with several other girls from one of the other groups. The stark reality of war and death couldn’t be ignored.

Rosie found that she was clinging tightly to Ricardo the next time she saw him, her fear for them both and their future bringing a sharp edge of uncertainty and urgency to her love for him.

‘I still can’t take it in,’ she had told him sadly. ‘Poor little Peggy. She was so happy, Ricardo, and she had so much to look forward to.’ Thinking
of Peggy brought back memories of her mother’s death, but that wasn’t something Rosie could bring herself to discuss with Ricardo. Her shame over her mother’s behaviour was still with her, and so tied up with her feelings about her father, and the guilt she still sometimes felt at loving Ricardo, that, like the skin over a newly healed wound, Rosie felt it was safer not to disturb it.

Her love for Ricardo was opening her eyes to so much, including the unexpected strength of her own physical longing for them to be together in every single way.

Even so, she was still shocked when Mary took her on one side when they were alone in the dormitory.

‘There’s a favour I want to ask you to do for me, Rosie,’ she began. ‘Me and Ian are going away together for the weekend. I’m not going to tell anyone, especially our Sheila, because of all the fuss, but just in case anything should happen, I wanted someone to know.’

‘But why don’t you want anyone to know?’ Rosie began naïvely and then blushed when she saw the look on Mary’s face. ‘Oh, Mary.’ She took hold of her friend’s hand. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I mean, if Ian is pressing you to do this…’

‘It isn’t Ian wot’s doing the pressing, it’s me,’ Mary told her flatly, ignoring Rosie’s small gasp of shock. ‘See, the way I see it, Rosie, is that after what’s happened to Peggy and Charlie, and with
me and Ian not being able to get wed for a good few weeks yet, I don’t want to wait. We could be dead tomorrow, either of us, and if that’s going to happen then I want at least to know what’s it’s like, you know, being with a man. My man. I love him, see, Rosie, and I want him to know that. I want to hold him close and I want him to hold me in the same way, and…’

‘But, Mary, what if something should go wrong and you were to—’

‘Ian says that it won’t, and if it did, well, then we wouldn’t be the first couple to be registering their first kiddie’s birth less than nine months after the wedding.’

Rosie knew that there was nothing she could say that would change her friend’s mind. And a part of her actually envied Mary the chance and the freedom to do what she was doing. She tried to imagine herself in Mary’s shoes and knew with a sharp pang that if she were to be offered the chance of being with Ricardo as his wife and then losing him before they could be married, or losing him but keeping her virginity, she would, like Mary, have opted for the former.

But she wasn’t going to lose him. As an internee, Ricardo was relatively safe, since he would not be called upon to fight, and neither would he be sent back to Italy in a POW exchange.

‘Now, think on,’ Mary urged her. ‘Not a word to anyone else about this, especially not our Sheila. She’s that gobby she’d be spilling it all
out back home before she realised what she was doing.’

‘I won’t say anything,’ Rosie assured her.

‘Rosie, the warden wants a word with you,’ Sheila announced breathlessly, bursting into the common room where Rosie was mending a tear in her dungarees.

Putting down her mending, Rosie got up and smoothed off her clothes. The warden was kind but stern, and had no qualms about fining those girls who broke the rules about smoking in the dormitories, or giving those who came in after curfew a sound telling off, but it was so unusual for her to actually send for a girl that Rosie couldn’t help but worry that she might somehow have broken some rule without realising.

Mrs Johnson’s office was tucked away off the main entrance, and Rosie knocked on the door and waited to be told to enter.

‘Ah, Rosie, you got my message. Good. Come in and sit down.’

The warden was smiling so she could not have done anything too dreadful, Rosie comforted herself, doing as she had been instructed.

‘I don’t want to alarm you, my dear, but I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

Rosie gripped the sides of her chair. Something had happened to Ricardo. She could feel the sick fear clogging the back of her throat.

‘We’ve received a message to say that your aunt
has been taken ill and that she needs you to return to Liverpool to look after her.’

Rosie stared at the warden. ‘No,’ she protested. In her agitation she had risen to her feet without knowing she was doing so. ‘No. I can’t…I don’t…’ she began, and then stopped when she saw the way the warden’s smile was giving way to a frown.

‘Mrs Leatherhall is your auntie, isn’t she, Rosie?’ the warden questioned Rosie sternly.

‘Yes, yes, she is,’ Rosie admitted. ‘But—’

‘Well, that’s all right then. For a minute I had begun to worry. The poor lady’s been very poorly, you see, and she’d put you down as her next of kin. And of course you must go to her. You do understand that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Rosie felt as though the admission was being wrung out of her. She couldn’t go back to Liverpool. She couldn’t leave Ricardo, not now that they had found one another and resolved all the problems between them, and especially not because of her aunt, who hated her and who did not even accept that they were related.

‘You’ll be given a travel warrant to get home and as much compassionate leave as you need. It seems that your auntie is not going to get better, my dear. I’m so very sorry. You can leave first thing tomorrow morning.’

First thing in the morning. But that meant that she wouldn’t be able to tell Ricardo what was happening. Rosie could feel all her old anger and
resentment for her aunt boiling up inside her.

‘I don’t want—’ she began, but then stopped when the warden fixed her with a stern look.

‘You don’t want to cause anyone any problems; I know that, Rosie. But we all understand that it is your duty to go to your aunt, don’t we?’

There was to be no escape for her, Rosie could see that, and yet she still looked despairingly towards the window as though somehow, if she wished for him hard enough she would see Ricardo there and she could run to him, and beg him to hold her and keep her safe so that she would not have to go to Liverpool.

But of course it was impossible for Ricardo to know what was happening and impossible too for her to be able to tell him before she left.

Instead she had to explain as best she could to Sheila that she had been summoned back to Liverpool and that she had no idea how long she would be gone.

‘You’ll make sure that Ricardo knows what’s happened, won’t you?’ she begged her, wishing as she did so that Mary was here for her to entrust her message to.

But Mary, of course, was with Ian. Lucky, lucky Mary to be with the one she loved.

Rosie had known about the bombing, of course, but knowing about it had not prepared her for the devastation and the destruction of her home city. It caught her by the throat and paralysed her with distress and shock; so much so that every time she came to a fresh place where the building she had once known had now gone, she stood and stared, oblivious to the irritation of those around her, who bumped into her and cursed under their breath.

Lewis’s had been bombed out and so too had Mrs Verey’s shop. Rosie shuddered as she looked at the blackened shell of the building where she had spent so many hours of her life. If Mrs Verey hadn’t planned to close the shop she and the other girls might even have been there when the fateful bomb dropped.

Rosie’s pace slackened as she walked up Wavertree Road. The damage was less up here, although still visible in the early evening light. At the end of her aunt’s road she stopped. She didn’t
want to do this. She could never forget her aunt’s unkindness to her, and she hated being parted from Ricardo. But she knew it was what her father would have wanted and expected her to do. It was for his sake that she was here, not her aunt’s.

‘Rosie, it is you, isn’t it?’

Rosie stopped to return Molly Dearden’s warm smile.

‘You’ll have come back on account of your auntie, I expect?’ Molly asked her sympathetically. ‘I am sorry. How have you been?’

‘I had a message to say that she was poorly,’ Rosie answered her. ‘I’m in the Land Army now and they’ve given me compassionate leave to be with her.’

Molly reached out and gave her arm a small sympathetic squeeze. ‘If there’s anything I can do, just say the word,’ she entreated before going on her way.

The house still looked the same as when she had left it all those months ago, and Rosie still had the same sickly mixture of dread and misery churning her stomach that she remembered from every visit she had made here. It had been a hot day, and the smell of dust and devastation that hung on the city air stung her nose as though she was alien to it after the long weeks of country living.

Rosie lifted the latch on the gate. It wasn’t too late. She could turn round and go back; tell the warden that she had changed her mind; lie to her
even; fling herself into Ricardo’s arms and beg him to let her give herself to him after all.

But she knew that she wouldn’t. Because her father would have wanted her to do what she could for her aunt. And as his daughter she had to prove his trust in her had not been misplaced.

Her throat had gone so dry that she could hardly swallow. She lifted her hand towards the door knocker but before she could use it the door opened.

A small middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform stood in the hallway.

‘You’re the niece, I hope.’ Her voice was brisk and sharp. ‘The hospital said that they’d finally managed to track you down.’

Now Rosie thought that an edge of disapproval had been added to the briskness. ‘My aunt…’ she began uncertainly.

‘Upstairs in bed. The doctor came earlier. He’ll be round again tomorrow so you can talk to him then. She’ll be asleep most of the time from now on.’

Now that she was inside the hallway Rosie could smell the carbolic and what it wasn’t quite masking.

‘What – what exactly is it that’s wrong with her?’ she asked. As she waited for the nurse’s reply Rosie could not quite help looking up the stairs. As though she expected her aunt to appear at the top of them, telling her to leave.

The nurse’s lips folded into a tight line. ‘That’s for the doctor to discuss with you, miss. Now, if you don’t mind I’ll get me coat and be on me way.’

‘No wait…’ Rosie swallowed against the acid taste of her own panic. ‘They said…they told me that…that it was serious, and that—’

‘She hasn’t got much time left, although sometimes they hang on longer than you expect. Why, I do not know when you think of the pain they’re in. You’d think they’d be glad to let go.’

Rosie shuddered, thinking how awful it must be to be left in the care of someone who was so obviously uncaring. Had she loved her aunt she would have been beside herself with guilt at the thought of this woman nursing her. But she couldn’t help it: she could not find any love for her, Rosie admitted. The love that had brought her here was for her father.

‘I think you’d better tell me what I have to do for my aunt before you leave,’ she managed to find the determination to insist to the nurse. ‘I’m not a nurse, of course.’

‘That you aren’t,’ the older woman agreed sniffily. ‘And there’s nothing you can do for her, except follow the doctor’s instructions. She’ll be asleep now until he comes tomorrow.’

‘But if she should wake up…’

‘You can sponge her down and see if you can get her to drink some water. Mind you, she won’t if she thinks you want her to. Never had such an awkward, disobliging patient, I haven’t. Some folk don’t know when they’re well off and that’s a fact.’

It was almost dark by the time the nurse had left. Rosie went round the house putting up the
blackout curtains and so putting off the time when she would have to go upstairs and see her aunt. But eventually it couldn’t be put off any longer.

She climbed the stairs, tensing as the forgotten stair halfway up creaked, still expecting, despite what the nurse had told her, to hear her aunt calling out sharply, demanding to know what she was doing. But there was only silence.

The sickly smell of decay the carbolic had masked downstairs was stronger up here. Rosie closed her mind to what it meant as she pushed open her aunt’s bedroom door. Ignoring the bed, she went first to the window to sort out the blackout before turning back to the bed.

Her first shock was seeing how small her aunt had become, her body barely lifting the bedclothes, as though all her flesh had melted from her bones. Her second was the sight of her aunt’s face, with its yellowed skin drawn tight to the bones. One frail hand rested on top of the bedclothes, its fingers curled into a small claw.

Rosie remembered that there had been a woman in the street when she had been a child who had died like this, the flesh falling from her bones whilst her disease ate away at her.

Suddenly she was trembling so much she could hardly stand. She needed desperately to get out of this room but she made herself stay until she was sure that her aunt was, as the nurse had said, deeply asleep and as comfortable as someone in her situation could be.

There was hardly any food in the house and Rosie’s first task was to go out and do some shopping. She was standing in a queue outside a greengrocer’s in the city when she heard a familiar voice hailing her.

‘Rosie!’

‘Rob!’ She had tensed when she heard Rob saying her name, reluctant to turn round and wishing that he had not seen her. Now, knowing what love was, she felt even worse about having hurt him.

But when she did turn to look at him, Rob was smiling warmly at her and standing next to him, holding tightly to his arm, was a small pretty blonde girl.

‘I thought it was you. This is Angela.’ Rob introduced the girl proudly, adding in a softer voice, ‘my angel.’

‘Oh, go on, you,’ the girl giggled, but Rosie could see how much in love with one another they were.

They chatted for a few minutes, then said goodbye and turned to leave, but just before they did, Rob told her quietly, ‘You were right to do what you did about us, Rosie, and I’m glad you had the courage to do it, especially now that I’ve met Angela.’

She was pleased for him, of course she was, oh, but seeing another couple so happy together did make her heart ache for Ricardo.

‘You’ll be the niece, I expect?’ The doctor’s words might be the same as those of the nurse, but the
doctor himself looked far more approachable than she had done, Rosie decided thankfully as she held open the front door to let him in.

She had slept in her old room, finding bedding for its narrow stripped bed, knowing even as she made it up that she wouldn’t sleep.

‘How is your aunt?’

‘She’s awake,’ Rosie told him, ‘but she doesn’t seem to know me. I tried to give her a drink of water like the nurse said, but she wouldn’t let me.’

‘It isn’t unusual for patients in her condition to behave that way. She is very poorly, I’m afraid. I don’t know how much you’ve been told…’

He was younger than Rosie had expected, and he walked with a slight limp.

‘Not much. Only that her condition is…that she’s dying.’

Would he hear the relief in her voice?

‘Yes, she is. The tumour was very large and although she’s had an operation to remove it…I’m sorry. All we can do now is make her as comfortable as possible. I’ll come every day to see her and if you think you might need me in between times, you can send a message to the surgery. I’ll go up now and take a look at her, shall I?’

One day slid into two and then three, and Rosie’s life became her duties in the sickroom and her care for her dying aunt. Physically her time was occupied, but nursing her aunt couldn’t occupy her
thoughts or keep them at bay. Guiltily, Rosie admitted to herself how much she longed to be back in Cheshire, with her friends and Ricardo. She missed them all so very much. The girls from Birmingham had become as close to her as though she had known them all her life; her love for Ricardo couldn’t have been stronger if they had been courting for years. The bonds she had formed with her friends, and most especially with Ricardo, strengthened and supported her and without them she felt vulnerable and alone.

She had been back in Liverpool four days when the letter arrived. It was lying face down in the hallway along with some others, so she picked it up and carried it into the kitchen, putting it on the table, and that was when she saw the familiar handwriting on it and felt the kitchen floor tilt violently beneath her feet with the shock.

Her father’s handwriting. How could that be? It wasn’t possible.

The letter was addressed to her aunt. Rosie had never ever contemplated opening someone else’s mail nor ever imagined that she might do so, but she didn’t hesitate for one second in tearing at the manila envelope. Her hands were trembling as she removed the letter that was inside it.

Her father was alive! Her aunt had known that and yet she had never told her. Rosie remembered how she had been driven by her conscience to slip that piece of paper with her new details as a land girl on it through the letter box of this house before she had left Liverpool. Her aunt could have traced her if she had wanted to do so. But she hadn’t. Cruelly, instead she had let her continue to think that her father was dead.

She picked up the letter from her father that
she had just put down, holding it as tightly as though it was his hand. She was still too shocked to feel any joy. Shocked and, yes, angry too. She looked up at the ceiling.

Putting down the letter she went to the door and made her way upstairs.

Her aunt lay unmoving on the bed, her face almost waxen and her eyes closed. What went on inside her head? Did she feel any remorse at all for what she had done? Had she ever lain here at night, tormented by feelings of guilt or regret? There was so much Rosie wanted to say to her, so much anger and hurt within herself that she wanted to rid herself of. But her aunt was dying, and even if she could have heard her Rosie couldn’t bring herself to darken the dying woman’s last hours with angry words and bitterness. No matter how justified they might be.

Her aunt was barely breathing, and lost to what was going on around her, but Rosie still lifted the blackout blinds, and opened the window to let in the warmth of the sun-scented air – not properly fresh like country air, but still preferable to the sickly, unmoving and heavy sweetness of the air in the bedroom.

When she was satisfied that she had done as much as she could to make her aunt’s room comfortable, Rosie went back downstairs. She couldn’t leave the house until the doctor had been but she desperately wanted to write to her father.

She went to the sideboard and pulled open the
drawer where she remembered her aunt had kept her writing paper and envelopes.

The drawer wouldn’t open properly. Rosie could see the writing paper but she couldn’t get it out because of a thick pile of envelopes that were jamming the drawer. It took her several minutes to work them free and remove them. Tied together with a piece of ribbon, which had now come unfastened, the letters had all been opened, and Rosie saw that they were from her father and were all addressed to her.

An hour later she had read them all, from the first, explaining how he had survived the sinking of his ship and been picked up by another ship and taken to Canada, after several dreadful hours in the icy cold sea, to the latest, reassuring her yet again that he had never been in any doubt that she was his daughter.