Rosie of the River

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘I laughed outright saying, “All right; we’ll have lunch some day. That’s a promise.”

  ‘“But when?”

  ‘“When I’m back in England and when you’re over from America.”

  ‘He now leaned towards me and in the politest of voices he said, “You know what you are, Rosie Stevenson? You’re a tantalising little bitch. No, not a little one, a tall, elegant one. But wait, I’ll see my day with you; I never break a promise I make to myself.” He moved aside, saying, “Oh dear! There’s someone waiting anxiously for me to tell them more lies.” And I, too, looked sideways, and saw three gentlemen standing looking towards us; so we nodded to each other and went on our ways.’

  ‘Poor Charlie.’

  She was shaking her head at Fred, ‘Poor Charlie indeed! What’s poor about him? He blows his nose on five-pound notes.’

  ‘Rosie! Rosie!’

  ‘Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. I know; she’s still there, the common slut. Poor Miss Barrington, she’s wasted her time, hasn’t she? So did Miss Clarke and the rest of them.’

  ‘Nobody ever wasted their time on you, Rosie,’ said Fred; ‘I said one day you’d get there, didn’t I? That you’d go places? I can see you married to one of the big noises. Oh, yes, I can. Can’t you, dear?’

  Sally looked at him, thought for a moment, and then said, ‘I don’t just want to see her married, Fred, to one of the big noises; I want to see her married to someone she loves and that she’ll settle down with, and make a home for them and have children.’ As if Rosie weren’t there, she continued, ‘She wants to marry someone who needs her.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Mrs C, someone that needs me? I need somebody. I need a shoulder to cry on. I haven’t had one since I cried on yours, and that’s a fact.’ She now looked towards Fred, then back to Sally. ‘I once said to you that the void in me wasn’t filled till that day I lay on your shoulder in the boat and cried. I go home and there is Father who needs me and says why don’t I settle down and stay at home; there’s Miss Collins who needs someone to unburden herself to; even our Phil needs me. He’s shy with girls. And when he says he’s looking for one like me, I say God help him. It’s me who needs someone, and I found someone that day on the boat.’

  She put out a hand and stroked Sally’s face. There were tears in her eyes as she went on, ‘But I’m in all corners of the world when suddenly I need you, because, you know, I’m not just a clever clogs with a good memory, I’m Rosie Stevenson who wants a mother, a sister, a friend, and in that moment in that boat you became all those things to me, and so did Fred.’

  She put out a hand towards him, and he gripped it and said, ‘You say you need us. Well, like the rest of them at your home, we need you. We need to know that you’re there, somewhere in the world bringing brightness into somebody’s life, because you know, Rosie, you have this power; whether you’re swearing and cursing or not you still have this ability. It’s a wonderful thing to have, people needing you. Just think of it that way.’

  And now Sally put in, ‘That’s it. That’s it: think of it that way until you meet somebody that you need in a different way altogether, and he’ll come along, you’ll see.’

  Jerking himself along the couch, Fred said shakily, ‘How the hell is it that whenever we three get together we cry? We’re up the pole, the three of us. Forget now about the men in the future, tell us about the men in your past. One thing I want to know, have you been proposed to?’

  Rosie was laughing now. ‘Yes, twice, and seriously.’

  ‘What were they?’ Sally asked. ‘I mean, what did they do?’

  ‘You’re another one who wants me to marry money.’

  ‘Yes, of course, to keep you in the way you should be kept. Go on, tell me what they were.’

  ‘Well, the first one was nearly old enough to be my father. He was fourteen years my senior, but he was nice. He was charming and he was persistent. But the only thing I don’t want to be in this world is a stepmother, and his wife had died, leaving him with a son of four years old and a girl of six, and although I liked him very much, yes, indeed I did—his position was important enough to satisfy even you, and he had not only a town house but a country house and well—I ask you both, can you see me being a stepmother?’

  After some thought, Sally said, ‘No, perhaps not; but it’s a pity because he sounds nice.’

  ‘He was nice. He still is nice, and he still keeps asking me.’

  ‘What about the other one?’ said Fred.

  ‘Oh, there was a different kettle of fish! He was only two years older than me, the youngest son of a county family. There were five brothers, no girls at all. He was in the Diplomatic Service; a bit like myself, he had gone in for languages. We went out to dinner and then saw quite a lot of each other, when he talked much about his family. They lived in an old manor house. Only two of the other brothers were married; his father who used to deal with stocks and shares or something like that, was eaten up with arthritis and so was bound to a wheelchair; his mother was a very busy woman. He’d like to take me down there as his prospective wife, he said, to meet her and the rest of them. However, I didn’t go down there to meet her and the rest of them, because I found he was much more interested in my father’s factory than in me; and when he eventually found out the factory would be left to my brother—I had told Dad I never wanted anything to do with it—he definitely cooled off towards me. But, of course, there is still the widower hanging on, and I have promised to give him my answer when he returns from abroad next year.’

  With all their talk and revived memories, it had been a wonderful weekend. Sally and Fred were not to know that it would be nearly another ten years before they’d all meet up again, and that many things were to take place before that, not only in Rosie’s life but in their own.

  Chapter Ten

  Rosie’s work meant that she was endlessly travelling and was more often outside the country than at home. When she telephoned it was often from remote cities, and when she was on leave there somehow seemed very little time to get down to visit them. She said nothing more about the widower, and Sally quietly noted that she had obviously decided against marriage to him.

  Sally herself was increasingly busy. When her assistant, Janice, married and moved to Brighton in the early sixties, Sally had offered to open a new branch of Eve there that would cater for the tastes of the younger generation if Janice would manage it. This had turned out to be such a success that two more shops were opened, in Eastbourne and Canterbury, and now the size of Sally’s orders to the dress manufacturers was such that she had become a valuable customer, whose opinions they listened to. She left the ordering of the younger styles to Janice after she made her a partner in 1965, but still ordered for a slightly older market herself for all the shops. As she said to Fred, in her thirties and forties she had spent many hours searching for stylish and pretty clothes that were suitable for her own age group, and she still had a good eye for what she could sell in an increasingly prosperous market.

  The years of hard work came to an end in 1967, when a retailing group based in London that was looking to expand its fashion side made her an offer that she, Janice and Fred decided they couldn’t refuse. The Carpenters were now able to contemplate a comfortable retirement free of worry, and Fred gave up work too.

  It was at this point that a telephone call came from Rosie.

  ‘I rang to congratulate you, Mama and Papa, but mostly Mama, on this splendid sale. I just cannot get over it that you did it all on your own, you clever woman.’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly nice to feel that all our financial worries about the future are at an end. We still can’t really believe it’s true, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that it is. When you can get down here what we want to do is celebrate it properly, just the three of us.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will, I certainly will, though it may take a little time to organise that, but I’ll be in touch just as soon as I can.’

  ‘We know
how busy you are, but we’ll really look forward to it. What’s the news at your end?’

  ‘You’ll never guess what happened yesterday. I ran into Charlie again, you know, Whalemouth.’

  ‘Yes; yes,’ Sally said. ‘I know. And did you go out to dinner with him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, although he persisted. He’s been married again.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Yes, he has, and divorced.’

  ‘No!’ Sally laughed. ‘Not again!’

  ‘Yes. This one lasted only three months.’

  ‘Surely not? She couldn’t divorce him, or he couldn’t divorce her in three months.’

  ‘My! You don’t know what goes on in America. She did, dear. Yes, she did. But this time she got only three million dollars out of him. “Poor sod!” I said. “That’s all you gave her?”’

  Sally had always winced when someone used the word ‘sod’, but when Rosie said it she burst out laughing and repeated, ‘And she only got three million?’

  ‘Yes; I called him a mean scrub. Three solid months of her life and only three million dollars for it.’

  It was some two years later that Fred and Sally received a long letter from Rosie. She was in France, where she’d had another proposal of marriage, which she had refused. But she said she realised she was thirty-five now, and she wanted children.

  However, there was a sequel to the story of Whalemouth, though it was not to come for another six months, when one night Rosie phoned, as she often did at weekends.

  ‘What I’m going to do is to come down to you on Friday night and ask if you can put me and my friend up for the weekend.’

  ‘Of course. Of course, my dear. Bring as many friends as you like.’

  ‘I have only one and we shall appear on Friday evening about six o’clock. All right?’

  ‘All right, my dear. Yes, of course, all right.’

  ‘Bye-bye, Mama. Give my love to Papa.’

  ‘Bye-bye, you little devil,’ Sally said, and put the phone down.

  Within another hour, they received a call from James Watson, asking if they had heard from Rosie and if she had given them her news. When they said no, he replied, ‘Good! I can tell you that I’m very happy.’ That’s all he would say. She had said there was another man in her life and she must have found love. Apparently the man was James.

  Why were they both disappointed? It was Sally who voiced it, saying, ‘She’s throwing her life away, living down in the East End with her talents. All right, she might love him—who wouldn’t?—but if only he’d move to a different parish and give himself a break. She’ll need a break, too, working down there after the life she’s led for so long. Do you know? She’s been in practically every quarter of the globe, except perhaps the very Far East. She’s lived among very clever and important people, and she’s been treated like someone with a brain. She looks like a model but she has a brain. No wonder James is happy.’

  ‘You always said it didn’t matter about position or anything else so long as she was happy. Now you have to let her see that you were right. Let them both see that you were right,’ said Fred mildly.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Sally said. ‘Yes, I said that. But somehow I saw her living in a nice house and going places. I wonder what her father will think. It’s a good job her granny’s dead for I don’t think she’d welcome a parson into the family, not in this way anyhow, not for her Rosie. I can’t help it’—she stood up—‘I think she’s going to waste her life.’

  ‘Now, look here! You’ll have to get out of that mood before they come. And it will likely be in that old boneshaker of his. We’ve also got to get that drain cleared, at least part of the way, because it’s so full of soil now that if it rains it’ll pour over and down the drive and into the kitchen. Not to say that his old boneshaker won’t slide down the drive with it.’

  They lived on a private road and had to keep clear the two-feet-deep ditch that ran alongside it. It passed the three large houses above them further up the road. When they didn’t bother about the ditches the rain poured down the middle of the road until it came to the Carpenters’ drain, which it filled, and if the houses below them didn’t clear their part of the ditch the water just flowed over in front of their gates and down their very winding drive that led straight into the kitchen. It was navvies’ work clearing that ditch, but all the work they did outside seemed to be navvies’ work and Fred would not have help…

  So there they were, on the Friday morning, Fred shovelling the grit and dirt out of the ditch and Sally putting it in the barrow and wheeling it away.

  Few cars used the road, but one was now coming in sight. It was a very large one and Fred said, ‘If he drives too near the edge of the ditch and pushes this mess back into it I’ll pull him out and rub his nose in it.’

  The big car continued slowly on. It caused them to straighten their backs and look at it. Fred said, under his breath, ‘It’s a Daimler. I wonder where that’s for?’

  The car stopped a few yards before their own gate, which was very like a field gate. As far as they could see there were two people in it. The far door opened and a man got out. He was very tall, broad, and smiling. He went round to the other side and out stepped a lady, and they both stood on the path and looked towards the two labourers who were staring at them, before they both cried together, ‘Rosie! Rosie!’ Then they were running towards their visitors, only to stop dead and for Fred to put his hands up, filthy with mud, and cry, ‘Don’t come a step nearer. Not now! Not now! My God, the condition we’re in! You weren’t supposed to be here till late this afternoon.’

  ‘Where’s…?’ Sally just stopped herself from saying James as she looked at the tall man. He looked at her, and putting out his hand, he grabbed her dirty one, saying, ‘Hello, Mrs C.’

  She nearly said, ‘Whalemouth!’ Instead she stammered, ‘You’re…you’re Charlie.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, indeed I’m Charlie. And you’ve heard a lot about me, right from the time my wife put her foot in my backside.’

  ‘Your…?’ But Rosie was upon Sally now, her arms around her neck.

  Fred said, ‘For God’s sake! Let’s get out of this and indoors and cleaned up. Well, I’ll be damned!’

  Charlie was now shaking Fred’s muddy hand and Fred was saying, ‘So you’re Charlie!’ followed yet again by, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’

  ‘Well, let’s all be damned but let’s get inside. I’m frozen,’ Sally said.

  It was half an hour later when Fred and she were cleaned up and he had made coffee and they were all sitting in the drawing room, the Carpenters to one side of the fire, Rosie and the handsome brown-haired man on the other, sitting very close on the sofa.

  Fred was saying, ‘You know, this is the first time we’ve ever clapped eyes on you, really. Your voice and your singing we heard from the boat as it went up and down the river, and we saw you standing on top of that sandbank on Breydon Water, still letting off steam; another time we heard you pass the cabin in good voice.’

  ‘Oh, Mr C, don’t remind me, please, that I was nothing but a drunkard in those days.’

  At this point Rosie said, ‘Don’t be so modest, you haven’t said the half of it. You weren’t just a drunkard, you were a big-head and a womaniser and the most spoilt individual in this world. You must have been born with the idea that you were number one and that you came first in everything, and your command was law. Huh! Calling yourself just a drunkard, that’s just the beginning.’

  ‘Oh, Rosie.’ Sally shook her head at her, and Fred was laughing too. And now he addressed Charles. ‘Do you really know what you have taken on?’

  ‘Yes, Fred, I do; and I’ve been trying to do so for the last two years. She doesn’t know it, but I’ve chased her around different countries until my feet are sore.’

  She moved from him, saying, ‘You what?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Charles McHannen. I’ve actually known every step you’ve taken for the last seven years, from the first time we met again. You
remember? And you used your old language on me regarding my meanness: I had allowed my ex-wife five million dollars only. You recall?’

  Rosie was wide-eyed now as she looked at this man, whom she imagined she had dodged for only two years, until she came to herself during the third year and knew what she really wanted. She cried, in no small voice, ‘And you had me followed?’

  ‘No. No, not followed, just taped. I knew what country you would be in and when you were likely to leave, and where you would be making for next; how long you’d be staying there.’

  ‘How did you get to know all that?’

  ‘Believe it or not, my dear Rosie, I am not unknown in the circus in which you moved. Might be news to you but I’m of assistance to them from time to time, and when I need anything they help me.’

  Both Fred and Sally sat looking at her. She was really open-mouthed and for the first time, to their knowledge, she was amazed. And then she said slowly, ‘Well, as Granda Stevenson would have said—and he never knew what it meant, and neither did I, we only knew it expressed deep feelings at the moment when it was needed—but now I say it, bugger your eyes to hell’s flames, Charlie McHannen; and let me add to that, in Mrs Charles McHannen’s voice, if I had been acquainted with the fact that you’d had me taped for the last seven years that would have been the last of you.’

  ‘I only followed you for two of them,’ put in her husband, ‘the last two.’

  Impatiently, she shook her head, then said, ‘Whatever…if I’d known you would not have got me where you did last Saturday morning.’

  The ensuing silence was broken by Fred. ‘Where was that, Rosie?’

  And Rosie replied in the same tone, ‘At a blessing before the altar in the church of the Reverend James Watson who himself gave me over to this great big sneaking lout here.’ Then she looked directly at Sally and said, ‘Having me taped! Following every step I took. Made legitimate. It’s going to be some time, I can tell you, Mrs C, before I get over this. What must they have thought I was? A Russian spy?’