He stood upright and, suddenly aware that for the last couple of minutes the many pedestrians who had stopped to gawk at the motorcar were now gawking at them, Rose also straightened up, saying hastily, “There’s no need. I’m sure it’s all right.”
The older young man and the girl had already disappeared into Brown & Muff’s elegant interior and as Nina darted eagerly to Rose’s side, Harry flashed Rose a last, disarming, down-slanting smile, and turned to follow them.
“Well!” Nina said expressively, indignant at Rose’s crassly clumsy behaviour, envious at the encounter the clumsiness had resulted in and crushingly disappointed that she, too, hadn’t managed to exchange a few words with what had to be the most handsome, eligible young man she had ever seen, or was ever likely to see. “You really surpassed yourself there, Rose! Fancy dashing rudely in front of people like that! What must they have thought?”
She looked around for their mother, saying as Lizzie walked up to them, “Do you think we should hurry after them and apologize to them for Rose’s behaviour, Mother? After all, it was very kind of the young man to pick up Rose’s parcel for her and he was… was…” She flushed in confusion. She could hardly say to her mother that he was the most gorgeous looking young man she had ever seen in her life, “… and he was thoughtful,” she finished lamely.
Lizzie, well aware of her sixteen-year-old daughter’s true feelings, said crisply, “I don’t think that is necessary, Nina. And I don’t think we’ll take tea in Brown & Muff’s after all. It’s bound to be crowded with wool-mens’wives. If we walk up Ivegate to Kirkgate Market I can buy some sewing thread from the haberdashery stall.”
Nina’s disappointment was so intense she was robbed of speech. Rose, not similarly inconvenienced, said chattily as they walked towards the bottom end of steeply climbing Ivegate, “That young man was nice, wasn’t he? He’s called Harry, just like one of our cousins, and …”
Nina stopped dead, the blood draining from her face. She remembered the photographs that had appeared in the Yorkshire Observer when the Rimmington family had come back from their Italian trip a couple of years ago. Her Rimmington cousins had altered quite considerably since then, Harry in particular had grown much handsomer, which was why she hadn’t put two-and-two together immediately she had set eyes on them. She knew now, though. Their approximate ages alone were a sure giveaway. William nineteen or twenty. Harry eighteen, the same age as Noel. Lottie fifteen, a year older than Rose.
“It was them!” she croaked, looking almost as if she was going to faint. “It was our cousins!” She turned anguished eyes on her mother who had stopped and turned towards her. “And you knew, Ma, didn’t you?” she said, for once forgetting to call Lizzie ‘mother’. “That’s why you hung back when everyone else was staring at them, and at their motorcar! It’s why we’re now walking to Kirkgate Market instead of going into Brown & Muff’s café!”
Well aware that Nina was on the verge of making a minor spectacle of herself in the street, as Rose had just inadvertently done, Lizzie said unhappily, “Yes, I’m fairly sure it was your cousins, but we could hardly have introduced ourselves to them on the street, could we? And besides, what would have been the point? They’ve been brought up to have nothing to do with us whatsoever, and so our introducing ourselves to them could only have led to deep embarrassment, for them as well as for us.”
“Was that young man truly cousin Harry?” Rose asked, goggle-eyed. “He was very nice!” She remembered her cousin Lottie’s cross exclamation when her collision with her had taken place. “And I’m sure cousin William and cousin Lottie are as equally nice,” she said generously.
“Oh, do be quiet, Rose!” Nina’s voice was strangled with frustrated tears. “You’re such a baby you simply don’t understand!”
“Whether Rose does, or doesn’t understand, I understand that I have no intention of standing in the middle of Ivegate while you make a spectacle of us all,” Lizzie said, her frayed nerves beginning to show. “Unless you begin to walk in a proper manner towards the market I shall simply take you both home.”
As Lizzie turned on her heel and began walking up the steep street with purposeful speed Nina felt tears sting the backs of her eyes. How could her mother be so dismissive of such a wonderful opportunity lost? Didn’t she realize that if they had made themselves known to their cousins they might now be sitting in Brown & Muff’s café, taking tea with them? And that afterwards they might even have been given a ride in Grandfather Rimmington’s sumptuous, wonderful motorcar?
“Come on, Neen,” Rose said, entranced at the realization that the young man she had felt such instant rapport with, was her cousin Harry. Her father had certainly been right about the Rimmingtons being men of action. It would be very easy to imagine cousin Harry in uniform and on horseback, or cutting his way through unexplored jungles, or climbing previously unconquered mountain peaks. She remembered the very different impression cousin William had given. Perhaps her father hadn’t been utterly right after all. Perhaps cousin William was more dreamy and artistic; more like Noel.
“Come on,” she said again as they began to lag behind Lizzie. “We don’t want to be taken home without having toasted teacakes, do we?”
Nina clenched her fists so tightly in frustration that she split the stitching on her wrist-length summer gloves. “To hamlet with the teacakes!” she said explosively, using the worst expletive she knew. “Don’t you understand that though we now know who they are, they don’t know who we are?”
Rose’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “But they will one day, Neen,” she said with absolute certainty, “and when they do, cousin Harry will remember picking my parcel up for me. Just you wait and see.”
“I wonder what would have happened if Walter had been with them?” Laurence said musingly to Lizzie as they lay that night in the sublime comfort of their brass-headed, feather-mattressed bed. “I know he’s never risked your father’s wrath by making any communication with you, but surely in those circumstances, taken by surprise as he would have been, he would have acknowledged you?”
“I’m not sure,” Lizzie said, as she lay in the loving embrace of his arms, her white, broderie anglaise trimmed nightdress as demure and virginal as a young girl’s. “If his children hadn’t been with him, he would certainly have done so. But he could hardly have asked his children not to say a word of such a meeting to their grandfather, could he?”
Laurence gave a grunt of exasperation. As far as he was concerned, his brother-in-law could certainly have done such a thing. Why Walter hadn’t stood up to his father years and years ago, Laurence couldn’t even begin to imagine. If he’d done so, he wouldn’t have lost the girl he’d so dearly wanted to marry and he wouldn’t have lost Lizzie’s loving companionship either.
“As far as your Walter’s concerned, all that can be said is that there’s nowt so queer as folk,” he said, grateful that none of their children showed any of their uncle’s spinelessness. He pulled her closer, brushing the top of her hair with his lips. “Let’s be getting a little shut-eye love. I’ve felt a bit under the weather today.”
“It’s the heat,” Lizzie said, wondering if she should mention Nina’s quite obvious instant infatuation with Harry. She shrugged the thought away. The disturbing question of Nina’s fast blossoming womanhood could be left for another day. She closed her eyes, wondering how Harry would have reacted if he had known that Rose was his cousin; how William and Lottie would have reacted.
“Good-night, God Bless,” she said to Laurence, sad that her children, and her brother’s children, were being denied the pleasure of growing up together as loving friends.
“He was very nice and he looked sort of … buccaneering,” Rose said next morning at breakfast in answer to Noel’s query about Harry. “I didn’t notice William or Lottie very much because I didn’t speak to them. I only spoke to Harry.”
Nina cut a slice of buttered bread into ‘soldiers’and laid them on the side of her plate, next to her eg
g and eggcup. She’d given her three cousins a great deal of thought during the night and she wasn’t so sure now that Harry had been quite as handsome as she had first supposed. William, who would one day eventually inherit both Rimmington’s mill and Crag-Side, had really looked very … distinguished. Thoughtfully she sliced off the top of her egg. Yes, distinguished was the word – and sensitive. There was, after all, something just a little common in the way Harry had so swiftly squatted down to scoop Rose’s portfolio case from the flagstones – and he way he had remained in that undignified position when talking to her.
“Do you want a cup of tea, Pa?” Rose was asking their father.
“Yes, pet.” Laurence walked across to the kitchen table, lines of strain edging his mouth. He paused before sitting down, rocking slightly on his feet.
“Steady on, Pa,” Noel said, glancing up at him in concern.
Laurence raised a hand to his high starched collar, as if to loosen it, saying with surprise in his voice, “I don’t feel very well, son.”
As they all turned to look towards him he said again, “I don’t feel very well at all,” and then, in a moment of horror they were to remember for the rest of their lives, his face contorted and he pitched forwards over the table, sending milk jug and teapot, eggs and eggcups, cutlery and crockery, flying.
Chapter Three
“Run for the doctor, Rose!“ Noel shouted as he leapt to his feet.
Rose was aware of Nina screaming, of her mother crying out “Laurence! Laurence!“ as she rushed ashen-faced towards him.
“The doctor, Rose!“ Noel shouted at her again as he tried to break their father’s terrible slither to the floor amid steaming scalding tea and rivulets of milk and dribbles of egg yolk.
For a second that seemed to last a lifetime Rose was unable to force her legs to move and then, with a choked gasp, she spun on her heel, running as she had never run before in her life.
Dr Todd removed his stethoscopes from around his neck and laid them back in their case. His patient was lying on his side on a horse-hair sofa in the parlour, covered with a light blanket. Not even with the help of Noel and a neighbour would he have been able to manoeuvre Laurence up to a bedroom and nor had he desired to do so. It was his belief that a room central to the day-to-day doings in a house was far more suitable for a bedridden patient than the isolation of an upstairs room. And he had absolutely no doubt that Laurence Sugden was going to be bedridden for a long, long time.
He said now to Lizzie, “Your husband has suffered a severe stroke, Mrs Sugden. He may eventually recover some power of speech, but he’s never going to communicate with ease again. As for the use of his right side …” He shook his head unhappily. “I doubt he’s ever going to be able to use his hand and arm, or leg, again.” He placed his stethoscope case in his capacious black bag. “Your husband’s been very effectively crippled, Mrs Sugden. My advice to you would be to turn this room into his bedroom. A bed positioned so that he can see out of the window and take pleasure and interest in what is going on in the street …”
Lizzie swayed, grasping hold of a winged-back chair for support, wishing that Dr Todd hadn’t asked to speak to her in privacy; wishing that her children were with her. “But Laurence is only forty-three, Doctor! What about his job? What about his talent?“
Her knuckles whitened on the maroon leather of the chair. Until now, all she had felt was dizzying, all-engulfing relief that Laurence was still alive; that he wasn’t going to die; that she wasn’t going to have to live the rest of her life without him. Now, for the first time, a glimmer of understanding of what lay ahead, dawned.
Her eyes were black pits in the chalk-white pallor of her face. “My husband is an artist, Doctor! He’s Head Tapestry Designer at Lutterworth’s! He has to be able to have the use of his right hand!”
Alan Todd sighed and picked up his battered black bag. How was it that shock so annihilated commonsense? Hadn’t he just told her that her husband had suffered a stroke so severe it was doubtful he would walk again? That being the case, how could she still have been under the impression he would one day return to work? Things would be hard for her financially, of course, though if the rumours he had heard were true, not as hard as it was for others in her position. Caleb Rimmington would no doubt ease her now harshly straitened circumstances – and she had two children of working age and one of near working age. With the elder two in the mill the Sugdens would manage all right. It was those who had no such advantages he felt sorry for; those for whom the loss of ability to work meant utter destitution.
“You must reconcile yourself to the fact that your husband’s working days are over,” he said bluntly. “I shall call in and see him regularly, of course, but his general nursing care will be up to you and your daughters. Give him easily digestible food that doesn’t need chewing, pobs will be sufficient over the next two or three days – and change his position frequently so that his paralysed limbs don’t take up unnaturally cramped positions.”
He picked up his Homburg. “There are no hard and fast rules about strokes, Mrs Sugden. If the will-power is there a measure of speech and movement may be regained, but there’ll be no more painting, of that I can assure you.” He nodded a courteous goodbye, put his Homburg on his head, and walked out of the room and out of the house.
Lizzie stared after him, numbed by the horror coursing through her. On the sofa Laurence lay immobile, no longer a man in the prime of life, fit and virile, but a man suddenly old before his time. His eyes were closed, but whether he was asleep or not she wasn’t sure. Had he, perhaps, heard all that Dr Todd had said? And if he hadn’t, how would she be able to bring herself to break the news to him? Distraught sobs rose high in her throat. Why, oh why, hadn’t it been his left side that had been affected? If it had been his left side he would still be able to draw and paint and life would be bearable for him. As it was …
The pain she felt on his behalf was so intense she didn’t know how she was going to bear it. “Oh my love,” she whispered brokenly, sinking down beside him and taking one of his inert hands in hers. “Oh, my dear, dear love!”
There was a nervous tap on the parlour door and Noel put his head around it, his face almost as ashen as his father’s. “We heard the doctor leave. What did he say? Is Pa going to recover? Is he going to have to go into hospital?”
Lizzie rose heavily to her feet. “It’s best if we talk in the kitchen,” she said, not wanting to discuss things in Laurence’s inert presence.
The short walk into the kitchen seemed to take forever for she knew that at the end of it, when she had told Noel and Nina and Rose of the dependent, disabled future their father faced, nothing would ever be the same for them again. Noel’s dream of becoming a working artist and Nina’s ambition of becoming a dress designer would be ground into dust. They would have to leave art school and find jobs in order to bring money into the house.
She stumbled, feeling as if her heart was being squeezed dry in her chest. Noel and Nina in one of the local mills? It didn’t bear thinking about, not after all the soaring dreams she and Laurence had encouraged them to have. Yet if they didn’t go into a mill, what was the alternative? She couldn’t go in a mill in their stead. She was too old old to begin to learn spinning or weaving or even burling and mending, and besides, she was going to have to nurse Laurence.
As she entered the kitchen Nina and Rose turned pinched, frightened faces towards her.
“What did the doctor say?” Nina demanded quaveringly. “Is Father going to have to go into hospital? Is …”
Rose ran towards her, throwing her arms around her, both giving and receiving comfort and Lizzie hugged her close, shaking her head in response to Nina’s question.
“No,” she said in a cracked voice. “Your father isn’t going to have to go into hospital.” As she felt Rose’s tremor of relief and saw the same vast relief flash through Nina’s eyes, she added swiftly, “But that’s only because there’s nothing that can be done for him in hosp
ital, or at least nothing that we can’t do for him ourselves, at home.”
Rose looked up at her, her toffee-brown eyes almost black with concern. “Shall I go and sit with him now, Ma?”
“It’s apoplexy, isn’t it?” Noel said tautly. “Pa’s suffered an apoplectic stroke, hasn’t he?”
Lizzie nodded. Noel would probably know what that signified, but would Nina and Rose?
She sat down at the kitchen table, waiting until they were seated around her before saying, “Your father is going to need a very great deal of care …”
“I’ll help care for him!” Nina was almost buoyant at the thought. Caring for a sick father seemed so romantic somehow. Perhaps her cousin William would hear of it and …
Lizzie clasped her hands together very tightly. There was no easy way of saying what had to be said, and the sooner it was said the better. “Your father’s stroke has paralysed his right side …”
“But it will get better, won’t it?” Rose’s voice was thick with urgent hope. “When I sprained my wrist I couldn’t move it for ages and ages it was so painful, but the swelling went away eventually and—”
“A stroke isn’t a sprain, darling,” Lizzie kept her voice steady only with the greatest difficulty. “There may eventually be improvement, but Dr Todd doesn’t think your father will ever speak clearly again or … or …” her hands were clenched so tightly together the veins in them stood out like those of an old woman’s, rigid and blue, “… or walk again, at least not unaided.”
There was a choked, incredulous cry from Noel. Nina’s jaw sagged. Rose didn’t move a muscle. It was almost as if she had stopped breathing. Somewhere in the background a clock ticked. Through the open window there came the sound of a distant lawnmower being trundled up and down.
“And nor is he likely to ever recover the use of his right arm and hand again,” Lizzie finished.
The clock chimed the half-hour. The lawnmower grated on the edge of a flagged pathway. Three blank, uncomprehending faces stared at Lizzie.
Yorkshire Rose Page 4
