by Esther Freud
There were twenty-seven stops before they reached Brixton. Aoife had counted them that morning, in the long-ago time when it was her and Cash. A swirl of nausea caught hold of her, and she closed her eyes, and to distract herself from the creep of sickness, she pictured the delight in Rosaleen’s face when they told her that before too long she’d have a brother or a sister. There was a new bed too, in a room all of her own, and Mrs Winstanley had made curtains. In Harrogate she’d not had her own room. She’d slept in with Mrs Stead, not that Aoife went upstairs, just once when the girl had mumps, and there she was, swollen and lost among the pillows, with Mrs Stead’s stockings – had she forgotten she was coming? – hanging over the side of the chair. Mostly they sat in the parlour that didn’t look as if it was used from one year’s visit to the next, and she spent the hours attempting to coax her daughter on to her knee. She’d taken ribbons for her hair, long and thickly waving even by the age of three, yellow ribbons to plait into the ends, but the girl would not stay still. She wanted to be out, racing away across the country with the cowman’s son, his neck and ears grubby as the earth. Aoife took a breath and remembered herself sweeping the yard, washing down the doorstep, forking straw from the chicken coop, all so she’d be free to tear across the fields with her brothers, where they’d make their own fun over at the creek, or climb into the hay barn and lie in hollows of warm hay, shrieking as they pushed each other off a precipice of bales. She could smell the hot, dry smell of the twine, feel the itch of it in her nose, but hadn’t she got away from all of that? Put herself into college. Walking across those same fields to catch the train from Killumney into Cork, studying, taking jobs, anything that would fit around her classes, saving up her fare to London, avoiding marrying the first one who asked, waiting, waiting, for a man who might rise up in the world with her, make a better future, work hard for their children – not a filthy horde running wild, like this one – but who would get everything that was for the best, good food, smart clothes, an education, a job that meant she’d not be stuck at home, cutting peat from the bog, swabbing floors, old at thirty-five – her mother – with nine children, and those the ones that had survived.
The bus rattled to a stop and, shaken, Aoife twisted around, expecting to find Rosaleen vanished, but there she was, although the man – where had he even come from? – was gone. She eased her hand from her husband’s. ‘Is there room on that seat for your mummy?’ she asked, and the girl looked up, her eyes flecked with fear, and with the smallest quiver of her lip, she nodded.
They sat side by side, not speaking. Four years was too long. Aoife cursed the war, the greed of it, crossing herself as she did so, and thanking God in his wisdom to see fit that they’d survived.
‘Are you getting off, then?’ It was Cashel. ‘Or will you wait and travel back to King’s Cross?’ Aoife looked into his face and smiled, and before the child had time to protest they had hold of a hand each and they were swooping her down the step and out on to the street.
Rosaleen
SUMMER 1959
ROSALEEN KNEW FELIX LICHTMAN WAS DANGEROUS. THAT WAS what she liked about him. ‘Will you have a drink?’ he asked, and before she could answer he’d ordered her a Kir Royale. They’d talked, pressed against the bar of the French pub, and whatever she told him, he wanted more: her family, the move to Ireland, the girl who helped her mother with the paying guests – Frances – one of seventeen surviving who lived in a two-room cottage on the border of their land. She told him the farm had been her parents’ dream; they’d saved the whole of her lifetime, running the Black Horse in Brixton, her father spending every hour between shifts studying Farmers Weekly.
‘And now they’ve gone and left you here . . .’ Felix Lichtman creased his eyes.
‘My father, he’s still . . .’ He mustn’t think she’d been abandoned. ‘I told them I had to finish . . .’ She couldn’t say school, not here, in Soho. ‘We still have the pub, till Daddy sells the lease . . .’ Her body felt heavy with the dread of that. ‘And then I’ll be going to join them, I suppose, unless . . .’
‘Unless?’ She could feel the heat of him through the fine cloth of his clothes.
A tall man pushed in beside them. Felix turned to him and spoke, and as he did, he reached across and laid his hand on hers. The other man leant forward, intent on telling him some news. Felix’s grip tightened, his thumb pressing warm against her wrist. Rosaleen sipped her drink and did her best to appear calm, breathing in the babble of the room, the doors swinging open on to the street, stray drinkers gathered on the pavement. Her father would be home by now, bleary from the boat train. She’d better not stay out too late, although Margaret would be there to cover for her, telling him what a grand girl she’d been, studying all the hours, going out only once with her friend Michele.
‘We could go somewhere for a bite?’ Felix had turned to her. ‘If you’re hungry?’
Rosaleen nodded, not because she was hungry but because she felt herself hypnotised, her pulse quivering, sparks like darts storming up inside her, and as they snaked their way through the crush of people, his hand on her, she dreaded the moment when he would, by necessity, let go. But he didn’t let go. He held on to her along the street, through the bright glass-patterned door of a restaurant, steering, as if her life depended on it, which quite possibly it did, towards a table where she gratefully sank down.
‘Are the oysters fresh in today, Henry?’ Felix smiled up at the waiter.
‘They are, Mr Lichtman, come in this afternoon.’ Felix raised his eyes to Rosaleen, and when she nodded, he said they’d have two dozen, and a bottle of champagne.
All food should be like this, she thought, as sunshine and sea brine slipped down inside her, and she reached for another oyster and tipped it up.
‘So’ – Felix was smiling – ‘what will you do, when you find a way to stay?’
‘In London?’ She took a sip of champagne. ‘I’d like to be a journalist,’ although really, and she told him this, she’d wanted to be a dancer. Her parents would never . . . they were thinking she might work in a bank! She had to stop herself jumping up from the table and doing a cha-cha-cha right there in the room. A one, and a two, and a . . . His eyes encouraged, and as she looked into the amused blue of his irises, she gulped another oyster, the rawness of it filling her with courage, and confided how she’d been taking classes on a Saturday, paying with money saved from shifts behind the bar. As she talked she felt him with her, travelling towards Covent Garden, tugging on her silver leotard, lacing her shoes. There was nothing like that at the convent, she told him, and she nearly choked on the flute of the champagne as it struck her there were girls at St Joseph’s now, rows of them, tucked into their metal beds, some of them as young as four, crying for their mothers, who couldn’t know, surely, what a desperate place it was.
‘Hey.’ Felix’s hand was stretched across the table, his fingers moments from her own. ‘Where were you?’
‘Nowhere.’ She felt herself chilled, and she looked at him and took a quick sip to bring herself into the glittery now.
FELIX HAD TWO ROOMS at the top of a building opposite the British Museum. You pushed through a heavy door and climbed, and climbed, until your legs were screaming. ‘What will you do when you’re old?’ Rosaleen laughed as she followed him up, the scuffed soles of his shoes slipping away above her, and she bit her lip because, of course, he was already old.
‘What will I do?’ He seized her round the waist, and he said there’d be so little time, he’d run up faster.
There were no curtains in the flat, and the rooms were full of sky. There was almost no furniture – a narrow bed, a chair, one leg of which was loose – but it was crowded none the less with Felix’s work. You could smell it as you neared the landing, the reek of stone and scorching, and as soon as the door opened it enveloped you. In the first room was a stone figure of a man, one knee bent to form a hollow, his mouth open in a roar. The other room was full of animals – frogs, owls, foxes �
� their bodies mottled, their eyes unnaturally large. Rosaleen turned to survey Felix – what could he possibly expect her to say? – but he was filling a kettle, spooning tea leaves into an old pot, and when the tea had brewed he eased up the sash window and lifted in a pint of milk. ‘May I offer you a drop?’ he asked in his elegant old-world accent, and she thanked him, although really she knew that she should leave. The cup he handed her was white and fluted, there was no sign of its saucer, and she sipped from it, spitting small swelling leaves into her hand.
‘That’s it.’ He nodded slowly, his eyes on the work, and when the tea was drunk he escorted her down the stairs, flinging up his arm at an approaching taxi, instructing the driver to take her home to Brixton, pressing the fare into her palm.
* * *
That summer the sandstone pillars of the museum, illuminated, acted as a lamp, filling the rooms of Felix’s flat with stripes and pools of light. ‘Will you go to hell?’ Felix lay propped on an elbow the first night she stayed, and she watched the smooth planes of his face and said she supposed she might, if she didn’t go to confession first. ‘Well then’ – his mouth was warm against her ear – ‘it had better be worth it,’ and he kissed her, travelling the length of her body, setting off small sparks and shudders of desire.
The next morning Rosaleen was woken early. She lay still, unsure why she was lying alone in this bright room, with no one for company but the back of a stone man, and then, with a sharp pang of remembering, she looked up at the ceiling. There was Reverend Mother, her eyes brimming with disgust. Will you look at yourself? You always were a rotten one, and she assured her there’d be punishment to come. ‘Felix?’ Rosaleen wrapped a shirt around her and, walking through to the next room, found him chiselling a block of granite. Who carried that up here? she wanted to ask, but his back was rigid with intent and she didn’t like to disturb him. Instead she washed herself at the sink, slapping cold water under her arms, between her legs, using the shirt to dry herself.
She made tea as he did, heating water on the gas, lifting in the milk, considering what she would do if she were to live here with him. A small table by the window, another chair. She imagined the two of them sitting on either side, a candle lit, a dish of cauliflower cheese – it was the one thing she felt confident about cooking. I’d buy new cups – she inspected the stained brown chips of these – but then she thought of her parents, the silver service saved for best, smothered in its velvet box, and she decided she’d buy nothing at all.
‘Here.’ She offered him a cup, and he looked at her and his face cleared.
‘Rosaleen!’ Had he forgotten she was there? His smile had mischief in it, his eyes were full of unspoken words, and he leant in towards her, and setting the tea aside, he led her back to bed.
FOR WEEKS, and then a month, she spent her every spare minute with Felix. When she wasn’t standing beside him in the French pub, or eating oysters in his favourite restaurant, she roamed with him through London, examining carvings and statues, seeing the monuments of the city with new eyes. She learnt how Eros had spent the war in Egham, had only been restored to his Piccadilly plinth in 1947, and how when this small winged god had been erected he’d not been Eros at all, but his twin brother Anteros, a symbol of selfless love. But whatever his name, and no one could take the trouble to remember Anteros, the statue had been so ridiculed that its creator was driven to financial ruin and had emigrated to Bruges. In Trafalgar Square they’d examined the four lions that surrounded Nelson’s Column, cast from bronze by Landseer, an artist renowned for horses and dogs, and had made an expedition to the City to inspect two golden unicorns guarding an apothecaries’ hall. He’d taken her to look at an Edwardian pub sign, swinging from its bracket, the sinister face of a fiddle-playing cat crossing its eyes at them, and in turn she’d risked a visit to her own pub, its name carved in the stone parapet above her bedroom window. They’d stood on the far side of the street, in the shade of an awning, and much as he’d threatened to cross and examine the gold letters – HENEKEY AND CO’S PORT WINES AND MADEIRAS – and to explore the side alley with its amusing name of Beehive Lane, she’d begged him to stay hidden.
SUMMER WAS TAILING TO AN END when Rosaleen hurried along the High Street, the heels of her new boots clipping as she skirted the crowds at the entrance to the market. She glanced back at three West Indians, smoking as they leant against a wall, so handsome, so sharp, she caught her breath. ‘Excuse me, sorry.’ She pushed her way through a knot of women huffing up the hill, and fearful that anyone might know her as the daughter of the man who’d placed the sign NO BLACKS, NO DOGS in the window of his pub – would have scrawled ‘no Irish’ if his wife hadn’t been Irish herself – she kept her head down and ran.
It wasn’t easy running in high heels. She should have kept her old shoes on, tatty amongst the rustle of the boots’ white paper, but once she’d seen herself, tall and straight in the shop mirror, she didn’t want to take them off. ‘You like them?’ Felix had asked. He was standing behind her, and she’d met his eye and seen that, more importantly, he liked them. He liked her. ‘I do.’ She was still standing, admiring the brown suede, the zip so neat against her calf, when he went to the till and paid.
‘And what time do you call this?’ Daddy glanced up at the clock, set fast to wish away the drunks, and she saw to her relief that there were still ten minutes till opening.
‘I’ll change.’ She moved towards the stairs.
‘A word with you, young lady.’ He stepped out from behind the bar.
‘Yes?’ She held her head up and found she could look him in the eye.
His face turned red, his hand sprang up, and before she could back away he’d slapped her, hard, across the ear. She staggered, one ankle buckled, but she stood her ground. ‘Is that all you have to say?’ She held his stare, and it wasn’t until she was in her room that she allowed herself to cry.
All evening Rosaleen worked, clearing glasses, replacing spirits as the bottles emptied. She poured a pint of Guinness for Mr Moynihan, who sat on his same stool, and served a pickled egg to Tim O’Doyle, who had no one to feed him now his wife had run off home.
‘So what’ll happen to Frank here’ – Moynihan wiped the froth of Guinness from his lip – ‘once the establishment is sold and himself away to Ireland?’ Frank was her mother’s youngest brother. Twelve months in, and he still had the same surprised look as when he’d first arrived.
Frank shrugged, although he must have thought about it, and continued counting out the change.
‘He should marry Margaret’ – O’Doyle nodded – ‘then they could keep the old place going.’
Frank’s face blazed.
‘So how’s yourself this evening?’ O’Doyle turned his attention to Rosaleen. She had her admirers among the regulars, although there were some, more than others, that she dreaded.
‘Be civil,’ her father hissed as he passed her with a pair of dripping pints.
‘I’m grand, thank you.’ She smiled swift in his direction and moved through to the saloon bar where there was a party of four, dressed in their finery, the women with matching shoes and bags, ready for a refill.
As Rosaleen sliced lemon and scooped ice into glasses, she considered how Felix might fit in. Would he choose the saloon bar, or sit with the working men next door? Neither, she thought, and smiled. Or both. It was what was most remarkable about him. He didn’t fit, and yet he was comfortable anywhere at all.
‘And something for yourself,’ O’Doyle called after her as she took the money for another pint, and she added a tomato juice and put the price for it on a shelf. Always choose something inexpensive, Margaret had told her, but not the very cheapest; that would offend. She’d smiled at her then: We don’t want that. Margaret was small and freckled. Her hair, which she wore parted to one side, was dark and light as straw. She had a strong flat body, with bowed legs under her flowered dress, and never once had Rosaleen thought of her even needing to be married. She looked differently
at her Uncle Frank as she passed him in the galley between bars, and catching her staring, he blushed and his ears, two jug handles on either side of his head, tinted red.
When every last customer had gone, her father sat himself at the table by the fire and took out his glasses. ‘Young lady.’ He sounded cheerful enough.
Rosaleen draped a towel over the pump and slid her tips into the pocket of her skirt. ‘Daddy?’
He had a whisky in a cut-glass tumbler and the smell of it was high as peat. ‘Young lady,’ he said again, and she saw his good humour was a trap. She dropped her eyes, and there it was, a pale blue sheet of paper printed with squat words.
‘Dear Mr Kelly,’ he began to read. ‘I thought it would be of interest to know your little girl is thought to be carrying on with an unsuitable person. A foreigner, twice her age – dirty fellow, taking advantage I should say – and if it was my daughter, I’d want to know.’ He looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘Ask her if she was up West, at dinner last Thursday evening with a Mr Felix Lichtman, a Jew of no known occupation, and see if she denies it.’
Rosaleen held his hard green stare. ‘It isn’t even signed.’
‘Right from the start, disobedient, rude, and now . . . What will I tell your mother?’ He raised himself up on his stool, and if it wasn’t for Margaret sallying in with her broom, she was sure he would have knocked her to the floor.
‘It’s not your business.’
‘It’s my business, all right. You’ll see.’
Rosaleen took off her apron and hung it on a peg, and as slowly as she could, she walked out through the double doors.
* * *
The Loreto convent was opposite the sea on the road leading out of Youghal. It was tucked into the hillside, a long low building, the nuns’ accommodation at one end, the girls’ at the other. ‘It’s not so bad,’ Angela told her, ‘now that we don’t have to board, and anyway, it’ll only be a year, and you’ll be done.’
