Some Sunny Day (33 page)

Tears misted Rosie’s eyes as she put down this last letter. She had been so caught up in the joy of learning that her father was alive that she hadn’t thought until now how he was going to feel about her and Ricardo. Her father would never be able to understand or accept her loving and marrying an Italian. If he knew…
if
he knew. What was she thinking? That she could keep Ricardo and their love for one another a secret from him? That she could marry Ricardo and not tell her father? That she could let her father go on thinking as he did now that she had disappeared and could not be traced? It tore at her heart to even think of doing any of those things.

But it also tore at her heart to think of giving up Ricardo and their love.

Was this how her mother had felt about Aldo? Had she too been filled with despair and stricken with pain at the thought of living her life without the man she loved? Was she after all her mother’s daughter and not her father’s? Admitting that she loved Ricardo had opened a door to a part of herself she had not previously known existed. The coolness and lack of response she had felt towards other men, including Rob, had made her think that she simply wasn’t a girl who was given to falling
in love and passion, but her feelings for Ricardo had told her differently.

Some girls fell in and out of love a dozen times with a dozen different men, throwing off any heartache they might suffer in the excitement of a new love affair, but Rosie knew now that she wasn’t like that, and that she would love only once and so deeply that her love, once given, could never be taken back.

But she loved her father as well as Ricardo, and she had loved him first and longest. He had a father’s right to her love and she felt very strongly about her daughterly duty towards him.

A firm knock on the front door brought her out of the bleakness of her thoughts.

‘How is your aunt this morning?’ the doctor asked her when she had let him.

‘She was asleep when I went in to her earlier,’ Rosie told him as he stood back to allow her to precede him up the stairs.

Previously Rosie had only experienced death in the shocking destruction and violence of war. But she knew immediately she looked towards the bed that her aunt had gone.

The doctor was kind but efficient.

‘You must not be too upset,’ he told Rosie firmly. ‘It is a blessing in many ways that your aunt did not linger.’

Had she slipped away in her sleep, not knowing that her life was over, not knowing that she was dying alone and unloved, or had she roused from
her semi-conscious state and felt remorse for the unhappiness she had caused and regret for what she had done?

She would never know, Rosie acknowledged. She was glad now that she had not been granted the opportunity of challenging her aunt over what she had done, for the sake of her own conscience. She could not mourn her aunt’s death, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t feel pity for her.

By the end of the day Rosie had done everything that needed to be done. It had taken her a long time but she had finally managed to write a letter to her father that she hoped wouldn’t betray to him too much of her bitter anger against his now dead sister. 

Rosie had thought long and hard about how she should write about her aunt’s deliberate deceit, and in the end her love for her father had overcome any desire she might have had for revenge. The most important thing, after all, was that her dad was alive.

 Once she had finished writing the letter, Rosie read it several times before sealing it and then hurrying out to post it, guiltily aware that there was one thing she had not mentioned in her letter to her father and that was her love for Ricardo. A love she would have to deny herself now, for her father’s sake. There could be no other way.

Rosie wanted desperately to find a way to be
both a loyal daughter to her father and to keep Ricardo’s love. But there was no way. She knew that. If she were to marry Ricardo, that would be a constant reminder to her father of her mother’s betrayal of their marriage and her affair with Aldo. In choosing to marry an Italian she would surely, in her father’s eyes, be confirming any secret doubts he might have about her paternity. Rosie couldn’t bear to do that. She couldn’t bear to take her own future happiness at the cost of her father’s pride and peace of mind.

 Two weeks after she had arrived in Liverpool Rosie was ready to leave again. The previous week she had stood in silence at her aunt’s funeral, along with the other mourners – neighbours in the main. Rosie had done everything as she had thought her aunt would have wanted, including arranging for her to be buried in the same grave as her husband.

She had seen her aunt’s solicitor and been informed that she had left everything to her brother, Rosie’s father, as Rosie had expected she would.

There had been the house to empty and clean, and Rosie had been only too relieved when one of her aunt’s neighbours had asked if they might rent it for some of their family who had been bombed out.

But there was one thing she still wanted to do before she returned to her land girl duties.

There was more damage to the familiar network of narrow streets that led down to Gerard Street and her old home than when Rosie had left, more stomach-jolting gaps in the rows of houses; the gaps the raw jagged wounds of war that spoke silently of lives lost and destroyed. She was still not sure why she had felt the need to come down here unless it was in search of her younger self and that young girl and boy who had met at a wedding and not known that they would meet again or what that meeting would bring. With so many of the houses damaged and the ever-present danger of more bombing driving people out of the city, the once vibrantly busy streets seemed empty and silent.

Lost in her own sombre thoughts, Rosie didn’t notice the young woman turning the corner at the bottom of the street, until she heard a familiar voice shrieking excitedly, ‘Rosie? Rosie Price? Oh Rosie…’

‘Bella?’ she responded uncertainly, hardly daring to trust either her ears or her eyes as her old friend rushed across the street towards her.

‘Oh, Rosie.’ Before Rosie could say or do anything, Bella was hugging her excitedly. ‘This is so wonderful. What a coincidence. I’ve so longed to see you again and to tell you how sorry I’ve been about the way things were when we left here. Oh, Rosie.’

There was a wedding ring on Bella’s finger and the gentle curve of her body betrayed the fact that
she was pregnant. She looked happier than Rosie had ever seen her, her face softer and aglow with warmth and joy.

‘We heard about your mother. I’m so sorry, Rosie. We did write, but the letter came back “Gone away” – with so many of the old families gone we hadn’t heard that your house had been bombed. We, Aunt Maria and I, thought that perhaps you didn’t want to keep in touch. We had no idea about the damage to the house. It gave me such a shock when we saw it. What are you doing now? Where are you living?’

‘I…I’ve joined the Land Army,’ Rosie told her. ‘I don’t live in Liverpool any more. I had to come back to nurse my aunt…’

‘And, like me, you couldn’t resist coming down here to reminisce?’ Bella guessed. ‘We had such happy times together, didn’t we, Rosie? I didn’t realise how special a friend you were to me until it was too late and you weren’t there any more. I missed you.’

‘I missed you as well,’ Rosie admitted. It seemed when she said those words that a sadness she had grown so used to carrying that she was unaware it was there, rolled from her heart. Tears filled her eyes when Bella reached out and touched her hand lovingly.

‘What happened to our men affected everyone in the Italian community,’ she explained, ‘and for a while I blamed everyone who wasn’t Italian for it. It took Aunt Maria and then my darling Keith to
show me how unfair I was being. Can you imagine it, Rosie, me falling in love with and marrying an Englishman – and not just an Englishman but a soldier as well?’ Bella laughed.

Rosie was too stunned to be diplomatic. ‘But you were as good as engaged to one of the Podestras,’ she burst out.

Bella rolled her eyes. ‘I know and you can imagine the fuss my mother made, but, Rosie, when I’d gone along with her plans for me, I didn’t know what it was to fall in love with someone, and once I did, well, there was no way I was going to give Keith up. I was lucky in a way that we did move to Manchester. I ended up doing some voluntary war work there – that’s how I met Keith. He was in hospital with a shrapnel wound and I was working there as an orderly. But apart from that, the family in Manchester have a much more modern outlook on life than my mother, so although she swore that she’d never speak to me again if I married Keith, once she knew she couldn’t bully me into doing what she wanted, she accepted that Keith was going to be her son-in-law. Of course, now that there’s to be a baby, you’d think that me marrying him was her idea,’ Bella laughed. ‘Oh, I’m so glad I’ve bumped into you like this. It must be fate, and to think I only came down here because we’re on our way to Aldershot. Keith has been posted there and I’m going with him. We’d got a few hours before our connecting train leaves, so I told Keith that I’d like to come down
here and show him where I grew up. He’s gone to see if he can find a chippie that’s open. Since I started with baby here, all I’ve done is eat. Rosie, Rosie, I still can’t believe that I’ve actually found you again. Aunt Maria will be so pleased. She talks about you all the time, and I know she’d love to hear from you. She misses you a lot. Of course, she always thought of you as the daughter she had never had, we all knew that. It must have been so hard for her, wanting children so much and then finding out after they were married that Aldo was unable to be a father because he’d had measles as a boy.’

‘Aldo couldn’t father children?’ Rosie repeated, almost stammering in the wave of disbelief mixed with joy that was surging through her.

‘Yes. Didn’t you know? I thought your mother would have told you, what with her and Aldo being so close.’

‘No…no…she never talked about him to me,’ Rosie told her.

A tall, brown-haired man wearing a soldier’s uniform was hurrying towards them, and Rosie guessed from the look of love illuminating Bella’s face that he must be her husband.

‘Keith, this is Rosie, who I’ve told you so much about,’ Bella introduced them happily. ‘Oh, this is so wonderful. Rosie, promise you’ll keep in touch. Look, I’ve got a postcard here with our new address on. I wrote them out to give to the family and there were some left.’ She dived into her handbag and
handed Rosie a carefully printed postcard. ‘Promise me,’ she insisted.

Rosie nodded, too full of emotion to trust herself to speak.

‘We’d better go otherwise we could miss our train,’ Bella’s husband warned.

Bella gave Rosie another fierce hug and then let her husband take her arm. Within seconds, or so it seemed to Rosie, they had gone, and she was alone in the street, her emotions in turmoil. Of course she was thrilled to have seen Bella and to have mended the rent in their friendship. She was delighted too to know that her friend had cared enough to try to contact her after her mother’s death and that she wanted them to keep in touch. But surely most important of all had been the discovery that Aldo couldn’t be her father. Yet the joy she should have been feeling was shadowed by the knowledge that Bella had done what she could not do, in that she had married the man she loved. Rosie did so envy her that. Lucky, lucky Bella. But for Bella to refuse to do as her mother had wished was a very different thing from Rosie risking hurting her father. The two just could not be compared. But oh, the look of joy and happiness in Bella’s eyes when she had looked at Keith, and the love and pride in his when he had looked back at her. She must not think about what she could not have, nor dwell on the pain of having to end things with Ricardo. She must not think of herself at all but instead she must think of her
father. She must and she would, Rosie told herself desperately.

There was nothing to keep her in Liverpool now and no reason why she should not return to Cheshire. But that meant telling Ricardo that it was over between them and just thinking about doing that made her feel so wretched.

It had to be done, though, Rosie insisted to herself, as she walked to the station to catch her train back to Crewe. It had to be done and she must and would do it for her father’s sake. She owed him that.

Rosie held that thought to her later as her train made its slow stop-start way to Crewe. Sometimes doing the right thing hurt – very badly – but that didn’t make it any less right.

‘Has Sheila told you yet about George Duncan?’ Mary asked Rosie after she had welcomed her back, and discreetly described her little holiday with Ian as ‘perfect’.

‘No. I haven’t seen the others yet.’ Rosie had been up in the dormitory unpacking her things when Mary had come in. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He’s only gone and taken a fancy to our Sheila, that’s all. Making a right fool of himself over her, he is, following her around and looking at her like a lovesick bull. Of course, it’s partly her own fault. She would go flirting with him. She says it were just a bit of a laugh, but she isn’t laughing now, I can tell you. Caused a rare old fuss, he did, down at the dance last Saturday night, when he saw Sheila dancing with one of the RAF lads.’

‘But George Duncan is married,’ Rosie protested.

‘Oh, we all know that, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to him. We’ve heard as how our Sheila isn’t the first land girl he’s chased after.
Got a bit of an eye for the girls, our George has, apparently. I’ve warned her that his sort is always trouble and that she should have seen that for herself, but what’s done is done and he won’t take a hint that she isn’t interested in him, no matter what she does. Your Ricardo has bin missing you, Rosie. He asked me only yesterday if I’d heard from you.’ She frowned when she saw the way Rosie’s face closed up and she turned away from her without saying anything. ‘Now what’s up?’

‘Nothing. It’s just…well, I’ve been thinking whilst I was back home in Liverpool, and I’ve realised that…that me and Ricardo, it just isn’t going to work.’

‘Rosie, what on earth are you saying? That’s rubbish. You love him and he loves you.’

‘No!’ Had she betrayed her real feelings to Mary with the force of her denial? ‘I thought I did, but I – I was wrong.’

She had been away only a fortnight but it was surprising just how much had changed. But not as much as she had changed herself. She had gone away one Rosie and come back another. The Rosie who had gone away had been happy and laughing, and so very much in love. The Rosie who had come back couldn’t bear to think about that love.

‘Oh, no, not the ruddy potato fields again.’

Sheila wasn’t the only one who wasn’t looking forward to the week ahead, Rosie acknowledged, as they all climbed out of the lorry.

‘You’ll have to have a word with that foreman admirer of yours, Sheila, and see if he can’t give you summat you’d fancy a bit more,’ one of the girls teased.

Sheila pulled a face and glanced over her shoulder, obviously wanting to check that George Duncan wasn’t around before she told them, ‘He gives me the creeps, he really does. Always staring at me and watching me.’

Rosie wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sorry when she saw that the Italians had arrived and were already hard at work. She hadn’t slept at all hardly last night for thinking about what she was going to have to say to Ricardo. But the sooner it was said the better – for both of them. She wanted it over and done with. Because she was afraid she might change her mind? She forced herself to think about her father, but somehow all she could do was look helplessly across the field to where Ricardo was looking back at her.

It was dinner time before they could speak to one another. The joy Rosie could see in Ricardo’s eyes as he came up to her almost destroyed her resolve.

‘Rosie, good news. The duke—’

‘Ricardo, I’m sorry. There’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Something is wrong. Your aunt…?’

‘She died.’

Another minute and he would take her in his arms, and she couldn’t let him do that because
once she was there she knew she would never want to leave.

‘Whilst I was at home, Ricardo…I’ve changed my mind. I…I don’t love you after all.’

She couldn’t bear to look at him as he absorbed her words. Hurting him was worse than hurting herself. And worse than hurting her father? She must not let herself think that.

‘No. You are joking. You do not mean that. You can’t mean it…’

‘I’m sorry but I do.’

‘No.’ His shock had given way to angry male pride now. ‘No. I do not believe you. You were ready to give yourself to me. You wanted me to—’

‘There’s a war on, Ricardo. People say and do things they don’t always mean…’

‘There is someone else?’

Rosie hesitated. How much easier it would be if she were to say yes. She could already see the jealousy smouldering in his gaze. He was a proud man. He would not want to be second best. But she just couldn’t bring herself to speak the lie.

‘No, no, it isn’t that. It’s just…The foreman’s coming,’ she told him, recognising that this was the first and probably the only time she was ever going to be glad to see George Duncan heading towards her.

‘It’s over, Ricardo,’ she told him quickly, before turning round to join the other girls. ‘It’s over.’

‘You’ve told Ricardo then?’ Mary demanded tersely.

Rosie nodded her head, but couldn’t bring herself to look at her friend. They’d arrived back at the hostel an hour ago, tired and dirty, and Rosie had gone straight to have a shower. Now she and Mary were alone in the dormitory.

‘I don’t know what’s up with you, Rosie, really I don’t,’ Mary continued. ‘That poor chap. He thought the world of you, he did, and you knew it. I didn’t think you were the sort who would treat a decent chap like that—’ Mary broke off as she heard the muffled sob Rosie couldn’t control. ‘Aw, Rosie…’ Her voice was softer now. ‘You do love him, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Rosie admitted, unable to pretend or lie.

‘Then why have you gone and told him that you don’t? Come on, you can tell me.’ Mary cajoled her when Rosie shook her head.

‘It’s my dad,’ Rosie told her reluctantly.

‘I thought he was dead.’

‘So did I. But I found out before my auntie died that he wasn’t and that he’s been writing to me.’ Rosie reached behind herself to the small bedside table and opened the drawer to show Mary her father’s letters as Mary shook her head in astonishment. ‘He loves me, Mary, and I can’t let him down. He would hate it if he knew about Ricardo, with him being Italian, you know, because of my mother.’

‘But, Rosie, if your dad loves you as much as you say—’

‘He does.’

‘Then he’ll want you to be happy, won’t he? And if he’s in Canada then, who knows, by the time the war’s over, if Hitler hasn’t done for us all, when your dad comes back here you and Ricardo could be married and your dad could be a granddad. I can’t see him being too bothered about you being married to an Italian then.’

‘I could never do that,’ Rosie told her, shocked.

‘Well, perhaps not,’ Mary conceded. ‘A person’s got to respect their parents, we all know that, but you’d never catch me letting mine or Ian’s mum and dad come between us.’

Rosie shook her head. ‘It’s different for me, Mary, what with my mother getting herself involved with an Italian and everything. I know what I’m doing is the right thing, but oh, Mary, it does hurt so much.’ Tears trickled down Rosie’s pale face.

‘Well, I don’t know as I believe that you are,’ Mary told her promptly but she hugged her none the less. ‘I do know that I couldn’t give my Ian up, and by the looks of you, what you’ve done is half killing you, Rosie, and I can’t think that any loving dad would want to see that happen to his daughter, no matter what your mother might have done. See, you aren’t her, are you? You’re you and Ricardo is Ricardo. And…’ Mary shook her head. ‘Well, I just think that there’s a war on and when you meet The One you’ve just got to grab happiness together whilst you can. Look at poor Peggy and Charlie.
That’s why me and Ian are getting married just as soon as we can.’

‘Where’s our Sheila?’ Mary asked tiredly, sticking her potato fork into the ground and sinking down onto the grassy verge by the hedge. ‘Only I’ve got her sandwiches here as well as me own.’

‘She said she was just going to nip behind the hedge for a cigarette,’ Rosie answered.

They weren’t supposed to smoke when they were working and it had still been ten minutes away from their dinner break when Sheila had announced that she was desperate for a smoke.

‘I’ll go and get her, shall I?’

‘Oh, thanks, Rosie, would you? And tell her to get a move on. I’m that hungry I’ll end up eating her sandwiches as well as my own if she doesn’t watch out.’

The ground dropped away to a farm lane on the other side of the hedge, and as she climbed over the stile and then slithered down onto the track, at first Rosie couldn’t see Sheila for the sweeping branches of the chestnut tree several yards away, but then she saw the back of her blonde head and realised that she must be leaning against the trunk of the tree.

Rosie waited until she had almost reached her before calling out her name, and then came to an abrupt halt when she realised that Sheila wasn’t alone and that the reason she hadn’t come back to join them was because the foreman, George
Duncan, was virtually imprisoning her against the tree, his arms resting on the trunk either side of Sheila’s head whilst she looked up at him in fear.

‘Rosie.’

Rosie could see the relief in Sheila’s face when she saw her, she could also see the anger in the foreman’s, but she didn’t think twice about her own safety as she rushed to her friend’s side, demanding, ‘Let her go.’

She tugged at George Duncan’s arm as she spoke, trying to pull it away from the tree so that Sheila could escape, but he shook Rosie’s hand from his arm with a roar of fury, and then grabbed hold of her, shaking her furiously.

‘You dare interfere wi’ me. Why, you little bitch, I’ll learn yer to put your nose into my business.’

Rose could hear Sheila screaming but the sound was blurred by the pain in her own head as the foreman pushed her against the tree where Sheila had been, banging her head violently against the wood. Rosie could taste blood in her mouth. She felt sick with the fear that she might faint. When she saw the foreman raise his hand she turned her face to one side to avoid the blow. But the blow never came. Because suddenly the foreman was being wrenched away from her and she was safe in Ricardo’s arms.

She was in too much of a state of shock to be able to speak and could only cling to Ricardo in relief whilst he murmured words of love and concern against the top of her head.

‘You’re all right,
bambina
…tell me that you are all right. If he has hurt you…’

He sounded so anguished that Rosie had to find the strength to raise her head from his shoulder so that she could look at him and reassure him, ‘No, he hasn’t hurt me, Ricardo. I’m fine…I…’ Out of the corner of her eye Rosie saw a movement over Ricardo’s shoulder. The foreman had picked up the potato fork Sheila had left when she had fled from him and now he was advancing on them, the fork raised.

As she cried out a warning, the foreman flung the fork at Ricardo’s unprotected back like a spear.

The speed with which Ricardo moved her, snatched Rosie’s breath away. She could hear the sound of tearing cloth and felt Ricardo release her. His shirt was ripped and blood was dripping from his arm but to her relief she saw the fork was buried in the earth and not him.

‘Go back to the field,’ he told her. ‘Go back now, Rosie.’ He had turned his back to her and was advancing on the foreman who standing waiting for him, a malicious sneer of anticipation and excitement twisting his mouth.

‘Think you’re up to it, do you, Eyetie? Well, come on then, let me show you what it means to get a real man. And then afterwards, it will be her turn…’

‘Ricardo, no,’ Rosie begged. He might be taller than the foreman but he was nothing like his weight
and nor, Rosie suspected, did he have the armoury of dirty tricks the other man would possess.

She was right. The moment Ricardo got close the foreman reached up and grabbed a branch of the chestnut tree, levering himself off the ground and aiming a kick at Ricardo’s body with both his feet.

Somehow, though, Ricardo managed to avoid it and somehow too he managed to drag the foreman down off the branch and hold him with one hand whilst he punched him swiftly with his other hand.

‘That’s for Rosie,’ Rosie heard him saying thickly, ‘and this is for me…’

The foreman staggered back, clutching his face. ‘Get him, lads. Get the bugger and lock him up…’

Until that moment, Rosie hadn’t realised that other people had come running from the field, alerted by Sheila to what was going on.

‘You’ll pay for this, Eyetie, by God you will.’

The soldier who was in charge of the Italians had come running up out of breath demanding, ‘What’s going on?’

‘The bloody Eyetie attacked me. I caught him and her here, having a bit of you-know-what, and—’

‘That’s not true,’ Rosie protested, turning to the farm hands. ‘Tell him. You saw.’

They were looking away from her, no doubt too afraid of the foreman to tell the truth, Rosie realised sickly, and now the soldier was already taking Ricardo by the arm and sternly marching him away.

‘He’s lying,’ Rosie sobbed to Mary. ‘It’s all my fault. Poor Ricardo. All he was doing was trying to help me. Oh Mary, what’s going to happen? Ricardo was so pleased because he had been picked as one of the men the duke wants to work here permanently and live here, and now—’

‘Don’t go getting yourself upset, Rosie. Sheila told us what was going on. Them cowardly farm hands might not have what it takes to stand up to George Duncan but me and the other girls know what he’s like. I’m going to have a word with my Ian about all of this and, if necessary, I’ll go and see the duke meself.’

Rosie sobbed with relief on her friend’s shoulder.

‘For someone who reckons she doesn’t love a certain someone any more, you’re getting yourself in a bit of a state, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ Mary pointed out.

‘I never said I didn’t love Ricardo, only that we couldn’t be together,’ Rosie corrected her. ‘Is Sheila all right?’

‘That one will always be all right. Gave her a bad scare, of course, and no wonder. And she’ll have to do summat about the buttons he tore off the front of her shirt. Dirty pig. If I had my way I’d do to him wot farmers do to them male calves they don’t want as bulls. Serve him right, an’ all. I’ve told Sheila that she’s got to report this to the warden, and I’m going to make sure that she does.’