A Girl Called Rosie (6 page)

By the time they reached their hotel, Rosie understood exactly why, whenever she’d asked Granda what Kerry was like, he kept saying the same thing: ‘Sky and water. Sky and water everywhere you look. Not just the sea, the lake as well and the mountains beyond. Just magnificent.’

She barely noticed the heavy furniture and wide staircase of the reception area as they went upstairs to see the luggage deposited. All she could think of was the sea such a very short distance away. Looking out of the windows in her grandparents’ room, she
could hardly believe it was so close, closer than the bottom of Granny’s garden.

All she wanted to do was stand on the sandy shore and look around her. However splendid the views from the train, it was not the same thing as having your feet on the ground, looking up at the small feathery clouds in the clear blue sky, feeling the soft air on her face and smelling its unfamiliar, salty tang.

‘I think I might just have a little rest before dinner, Rosie. But you and Granda must go and have a walk if you want to. I’m sure he needs to stretch his legs.’

‘Granda, is Granny all right?’ Rosie asked anxiously, as they went down the wide, carpeted staircase together.

‘Aye, she’s fine. Just tired,’ he said reassuringly.

They went out by the main door, crossed the road, and followed the short grass path down to the beach in companionable silence.

‘You’re right enough though, she’s not quite herself,’ he said suddenly. ‘Maybe a wee bit sad for the moment. Sure she has a lot of memories of this place,’ he continued. ‘She’s wanted all her life to come back. I was only here a couple of weeks and I was driving here and there with the lords and ladies who were visiting. Taking them to see the
sights, like I was telling you. I only saw your granny in the evening when we walked out down by the lake. But this place was her life from wee girl to full womanhood. I don’t know just how long,’ he pondered, twisting his face in an effort of memory. ‘Certainly from the time her father died and her mother brought her here from Donegal. That would have been 1861 or ’62.’

‘Donegal?’

‘Aye, that’s where she was born. Did she never tell you about the family being evicted? Thrown out on the street one bitter April. A whole valley full of people …’

He broke off as they came to the soft sand at the highest point of the beach and paused to look around. There were only a few people about, walking down by the water’s edge, their shadows reflected in the damp sand. The sea was smooth as beaten metal. Where the minute waves broke on the shore, they made only the tiniest splash before they ran back silently over the gleaming sand pulling small seashells in their wake.

‘But Granda,
how
did that happen?’

John looked down at her sharply, registered the sudden anxious concern in her dark eyes, the tensing of her narrow shoulders. She was so like the young woman he had first met on a hillside not all that many miles away. A little taller now, but the same
fine eyes and dark hair, the slim waist and womanly shape. What was different about this one was her mind. Unlike her grandmother, who could rest quiet if the chance came to her, this one never rested, always wanting to know more, whether ordinary things like the difference between a male and a female blackbird, or complicated matters like why this poor island had been divided into two parts.

So often now, she reminded him of his youngest daughter, Sarah. She would always ask and ask till she understood. A trial at times he had to admit, when she was very young and sometimes hard to stop, but it stood to her now, the wife of a diplomat, surrounded by the high affairs of the day.

The sand near the water’s edge was firm and rippled, the tiny indentations full of small shells and broken fragments. She stooped to pick up a handful, choosing from the most perfect ones those with faint colour, pink or mauve or purple. She held them out to him arranged in a circle on her palm.

He bent forward to look at them and found her eyes firmly fixed upon him, still waiting for an answer to her question.

He laughed shortly.

‘Greed, Rosie, greed. A man that had money enough to do all he might want, but he wanted more. He put those people out so he could fence the land and make a deer park for his friends to
come and shoot for pleasure,’ he went on, his tone hard and his face grim. ‘But if it hadn’t been for his wickedness, then your granny would never have come to Kerry and we’d never have met each other. And I don’t know where I’d be without her.’

He looked away quickly towards the low cliffs that bounded the far end of the long beach and strode off again. Rosie followed after, but she had not missed the words or what they were saying.

‘According to Miss Wilson, it’s because the moist air from the sea rises up the sides of the mountains, cools and condenses and then falls as rain,’ said Rosie solemnly, as she buttered a piece of toast.

‘Yes, that’s all very well,’ said John, eyeing her, ‘but it doesn’t explain why it rains at night.’

‘But it would be cooler up the mountain at night, wouldn’t it?’

Rose laughed, her weariness departed, her good spirits restored by the days just past. She’d had time to rest. To delight in the changing play of light on the mountains, the reflections from sea and lake, the remembered loveliness she had never stopped longing for in one small part of herself.

‘Well, all I can say is,
aren’t we lucky?
This wonderful freshness every morning and not a drop of rain all day.’

‘Was it like this when you were here, Granny?’

‘I can’t remember. I think I noticed if it rained on my afternoon off, but apart from that, work had to
go on, rain or shine. It didn’t make much difference. At least I don’t think it did.’

‘Bad weather would have meant more work, wouldn’t it?’ asked John, looking across the breakfast table at her. ‘Dirty feet on the carpets and suchlike. But then, that wasn’t your job.’

‘No,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘But it was my mother’s job to oversee the whole house.

‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ she went on, as she refilled their cups. ‘I can remember now her saying how worn out she was when we got days of wet weather, or when it was colder than usual. She had to watch everyone to make sure the extra work was done, not just their routine jobs. They weren’t lazy,’ she added, ‘they just didn’t think.’

To Rosie’s surprise, John laughed heartily.

‘Sure most of my life’s work has been clearing up after people who didn’t think,’ he said, still smiling. ‘I remember my father telling me that the old blacksmith he was apprenticed with once told him it was a good thing people were so careless, because he made a living straightening out what other people bent.’

They were still laughing when a pale, uneasy girl, neatly dressed in black, with a spotless white apron and cap, came to enquire if there was anything they’d like. She asked if she could bring more toast, or a fresh pot of tea, or if they’d like her to get
reception to telephone through to another hotel to book their lunch should they be going for a drive.

‘Ah, well now, we haven’t discussed that yet, Bridget,’ responded John. ‘Would you like to come back in a wee while and ask us again?’

Rosie watched Bridget’s face soften into a shy smile. A girl about her own age, daughter of one of the cooks, she’d been sent to unpack Rosie’s suitcase as soon as they’d arrived, but Rosie had so few clothes, she’d emptied the case herself before she appeared, so there was nothing for Bridget to do.

She’d stood by the door so awkwardly not knowing what to do and Rosie felt instant sympathy for her. She asked her about the hotel, about her job, and if she’d mind telling her whether she ought to wear a dress for dinner. She knew perfectly well from what her grandmother had told her, in hotels as grand as this, that people dressed for dinner, but she knew asking Bridget would make her feel easier.

‘Well now,’ said John, breaking across her thoughts, as Bridget bobbed a curtsy and departed for the kitchens. ‘And what would my ladies like to do today? Now that I have my very elegant motor, you can go anywhere you want. The further the better. Valentia Island to see the cable station? Very historical,’ he suggested. ‘Or the Dingle Peninsula? Or Daniel O’Connell’s birthplace?’

He listed the well-known viewpoints on the Ring
of Kerry route, quoting the guide book which he’d read in detail after finding little to interest him in either
The Kerryman
or the
Tralee Clarion
.

Rosie waited to see what her grandmother might say. All week she’d been so excited with everything there was to see and do she never minded what was decided, but she’d begun to wonder why they’d not taken the lakeside road to visit Currane Lodge and the little church a short distance away where her grandparents had been married and where her great-grandmother, Hannah McGinley, lay buried.

‘Well,’ Rose began, ‘seeing my back is behaving itself so beautifully, I thought it would be a good morning for some shopping. There is a birthday present to be bought.’

John suppressed a sigh as he caught his wife’s fleeting glance towards Rosie. Shopping in Cahirciveen or anywhere else for that matter, was not at all what he’d choose, but he knew she’d Rosie’s birthday in mind. She’d mentioned several times already that her only dress, a green and white check gingham she’d had to have for Miss Wilson’s, had never suited her and now no longer even fitted her properly.

‘An hour or two is as much as I could manage, I think,’ Rose continued, ‘so I thought after lunch we might go to Currane Lodge and take a picnic tea. The hotel does a very nice one, I’m told. And you and I could sit in the sun and let Rosie explore all
she wants. They say the road is much improved,’ she added, as she saw him brighten.

‘Well, it would need to be better with all the visitors these days driving their motors along the lake for the scenery or going there to fish. Sure wasn’t it the roughness of that road that made Pegasus lose his shoe in the first place?’

‘Not a word, not a word,’ Rose said quickly, putting her finger to her lips as Rosie opened her mouth to speak. ‘We’ve a busy morning and it’s time we were moving. You can ask Granda all the questions you like when we get to Currane Lodge.’

‘Well, that’s fine by me,’ John said agreeably. ‘I found a book in the visitors’ sitting room about this man Lindberg and his flying machines. I’ll just park outside the shop and read it like the way your old friend the coachman used to sit reading his paper waiting for the ladies. What was his name?’

‘Thomas,’ she said promptly. ‘Isn’t it funny how some things come back without you even having to think and others have you puzzling for days?’

The little grey church stood back from the road, a rusted iron gate leading into the churchyard, most of it overgrown, the paths barely visible, the lush vegetation smothering all but the taller gravestones.

Rosie led the way while Rose and John followed more slowly.

In the shadow of the boundary hedge tall spires of foxglove reached up through the tangled grass and bloomed in a profusion of colours. Their first faded blooms had been wafted away to fall among the bright faces of buttercups growing in the sunlight beyond its shadow. The hedge itself was thickly entwined with wild clematis, the fluffy seeds rising like a swarm of exotic insects whenever there was a more vigorous movement of air in the soft breeze from the lake.

Close to the church itself there were new graves, the turned earth still bare, planted with posies of bright flowers in jam pots. Rosie saw her grandmother pause, heard her repeat a name that seemed familiar, but she herself pressed on. Stepping carefully along the overgrown path, drawn by a group of white marble stones, still visible above the sea of ripening grass and wildflowers.

As she had guessed, the slabs were engraved with names she knew. Servants from Currane Lodge from her grandmother’s time lay among neighbours who’d lived in the scattered habitations further along the lakeside. Somewhere, further into the long grass, would be the graves of Lady Caroline’s sons, the longed-for boys who never lived for more than a few months.

She stood reading the dedications, totally absorbed in the lives of these unknown people
who had once been an everyday part of her grandmother’s world here at the opposite end of Ireland. Behind her, she heard the low, sad tones of her grandparents. Among the new graves, they’d found a young man whose father and grandfather they had known. He’d been killed the previous year, a victim of the Civil War.

She moved further away, drawn by the older stones where the lichens grew more profusely, spreading their delicate colours so deeply into the cut stone that she could no longer trace the words even with her fingers. She found the grave of Thomas the coachman and his wife, another handsome white marble slab. The dates and places still perfectly legible. Low down on the stone, she read:
Well done thou good and faithful servant. This stone was erected by Sir Capel Molyneux in grateful thanks
.

A short distance away the upper part of a similar memorial was just visible above a huge mound of briar rose that almost completely obscured its white marble face with its prolific stems and masses of tight pink flowers.

She made her way across the humps of vegetation cautiously, for the strong stems were spiked with jagged thorns. She picked out a stem close to the marble. Taking hold of it by a mass of bloom, she pulled some of the vigorous growth away from the
stone. At last, she had found what she was looking for. Protected by the rose, the words on the still-white marble were free from lichen and perfectly legible.

The intertwined stems and dense blooms obscured the rest of the inscription. Should she be able to clear away all of the growth, she was sure she would find Sir Capel had had the same words inscribed, for Hannah too had been ‘a good and faithful servant’.

She stood staring down at the words the dense growth masked. ‘Thou good and faithful servant’. Was that what her own life was to be? Her schooldays were over. She’d stayed on into the senior class at Richhill Public Elementary and then she’d had gone to Miss Wilson’s for a year. But that was over now.

Not a day had passed since Dr Stewart sat by her bedside encouraging her to talk about her family and her plans for the future that she had not thought what was to become of her. When she’d owned up to her anxiety, her grandmother had been reassuring. Told her to forget all about it till she was quite recovered from her fall. She herself had thought it might be easier to forget about the future when she came to Kerry. Every day she promised
herself she’d push the question out of mind and then she’d see Bridget in her black dress and white apron and back it would come.

What was there for her beyond the work of the farm? She wasn’t old enough to be a governess like those in the novels she’d read, even if there were any families that needed one these days. So far, the only prospect of a job had been the one in Richhill castle. She’d refused to go to work there and had been roundly abused by her mother for upsetting her Uncle Henry, who had ‘put in a word for her’.

But what else was there? An assistant in a shop in Portadown or Armagh? A worker in one of the mills or the fruit packing factory? The question of whether the jobs appealed to her or not simply didn’t arise, for there was so little possibility of her getting one. Jobs were so scarce, mostly they were filled without any need to advertise in the local papers. Emily got hers because her father worked at Fruitfield and heard about the vacancy in the office from the girl who was leaving to get married.

Her brothers had found out how hard a time it was for everyone, but it was even harder for girls. It was as if no one really expected girls to be fit for any job other than domestic service or shop assistant. If you went into service, you had to accept the regime of the big house, as her grandmother had had to fifty years before, or find one near enough so you
could go on living at home, for jobs paid so little there was no possibility of setting up on your own.

She sighed and looked down at the mass of tiny pink roses. Was it a floribunda? It might be. She ought to know its name for she’d seen it before in the garden at Rathdrum, but there her grandmother had trained it to climb a wooden trellis and she pruned it vigorously each autumn so the blooms were bigger and the thorns not quite so fierce.

Currane Lodge was less than a mile from the churchyard. Set back much further from the road, it had once had a driveway curving through well-kept shrubberies beyond handsome wrought-iron gates. It was no surprise that the gates were gone, that even the pillars supporting them were crumbling, their capstones removed, a generous growth of grass and foliage well-established in the decaying mortar.

After his wife died, Sir Capel had moved to Dublin with his unmarried daughter, Lily. The house continued to stand empty for many years after his death, for none of the English relatives to whom it was entailed had any wish to bury themselves in this remote corner of Ireland.

Only for some years at the turn of the century had the house been wakened from its long sleep. A returned emigrant, his fortune made in the motor industry in Detroit, bought the place, repaired the
roof and outbuildings. He then invited his remaining relatives to come and live with him only to discover none of them wanted to leave the homes in which they’d spent their lives any more than they’d wanted to seek a new life in America.

Rosie wondered if her grandfather would risk his handsome motor on the grass-grown surface of the driveway, but he turned between the massive pillars quite confident it would take no harm. The chassis was high off the ground, he told them, and the springs far superior to his own vehicle at home. But he still drove very slowly.

None of them were prepared for the sight that greeted them as they emerged from the shady tunnel made by the over-arching trees and unpruned shrubs. Currane Lodge had been burnt. Only part of the front facade still stood, the windows dark staring eyes, blackened with soot. Most of the roof had gone, except for one fragment, its surviving timbers dividing the startling blue sky into tiny rectangles, its jagged beams in silhouette.

‘Oh my goodness,’ gasped Rose. ‘No one told us there’d been a fire.’

‘Sure who would there be to tell us now?’ John said softly, as he stopped the car on the charred and littered space in front of the stone steps. ‘We never thought to ask at the hotel. They might not have known anyway.’

‘No, why should they?’ she agreed. ‘It’s well out of the way and no one lived here. I wonder what happened.’