On a Clear Day (The Hamiltons Series)

by Anne Doughty

  He outlined briefly the advantages of going to university and then pointed out the further advantages of making up her mind now, even though it would be two years before she had her scholarship. If she decided now, then she could take over this room in two years time, bring his books back down from upstairs and be within walking distance of all the main lecture theatres. Mrs McGregor herself had suggested it when he had talked to her about Clare’s exam results last year. Now, she’d gone so far as to say that the quiet young man on the next floor would be a good person to use the room until Clare was ready to come, as he still had two years to do.

  ‘But me no buts, tonight, Clare,’ he said, when he saw she was about to protest again. ‘I won’t say another word about it till tomorrow’s morrow, as they say in the best of the old romances. I’ll give you a guided tour of the environs first thing in the morning and then I thought I’d take you up to Stormont. Uncle Harry is one of their bouncers. He’s about to retire, so he’s offered a tour on the quiet before he goes. You can tell me what you think of my plan while I’m packing my suitcases on Saturday morning.’

  To her surprise, he stood up, turned towards her with a dramatic gesture and launched into song. His light baritone voice was so tender and full of feeling as he sang The Leaving of Liverpool that she was hard pressed to keep tears from her eyes.

  ‘That was lovely,’ she said quietly, when he finished and strode across the room to draw the curtains and put on the lamps. ‘I didn’t know you could sing.’

  ‘Neither did I, till I had a few too many one night at a friend’s stag party,’ he said laughing, as he dropped a pile of newspaper cuttings into her lap.

  ‘Beauty begins with cleansing,’ she read aloud. ‘The importance of moisturisers? By Doris McGilloway?’

  She looked at him in amazement, knowing from the sparkle in his eyes that he was teasing her and was delighting in her puzzlement.

  ‘Who is Doris McGilloway?’ she asked sternly.

  He clutched his hand to his heart.

  ‘I cannot tell a lie. It is I,’ he began. ‘But I got the idea from you,’ he went on. ‘Don’t you remember Doris Gibb and the beaten eggs to put on your face?’

  She nodded silently. Eddie and his Picturegoer magazines, Uncle Jimmy and his piles of newspaper, the copies of fashion magazines the customers brought, the battered books from the library van, all came into her mind simultaneously.

  ‘You used to read everything you could lay your hands on, even the beauty hints. It was all a bit advanced for a nine year old. Well, I have news for you. The Doris Gibb who wrote those beauty hints was a man. I met someone at the Belfast Telegraph who knew him. He had a whole collection of nom de plume. Which one he used depended on what he was writing. He used to do household hints as Dorcas Something-or-other. “How to look after your fur coat”, “How to remove iron stains from your marble work surfaces”, “How to make your own beeswax polish”. You name it, he did it. So, I thought, “McGillvray, you need to eat. If he can do it, you can do it.” So I did. I used Doris in memory of our past inspiration and McGilloway to conceal my real identity.’

  Clare shook her head and laughed. In this mood, there was something so direct about Ronnie. He was so open and without guile. And yet she sensed he was not as easy as he liked to pretend. It seemed to her his dramatic style and lively manner was one way of distracting attention from his true feelings. The more she saw of him, the more she thought he’d begun to be very unhappy indeed, that something had made him really uneasy, even downright angry.

  ‘But, it wasn’t enough to get you a job, Ronnie?’ she said softly as she leafed through the pile of articles.

  ‘Nope! You don’t want people asking questions unless you’re sure they’ll come up with the appropriate answers and I might have had some answers that didn’t suit. Quite reliable on the beauty front, but a different cup of tea if you let him loose on anything that matters.’

  ‘Like your research on bronchitis?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’ he asked sharply, a startled look on his face.

  ‘You mentioned it in the bus when I said I remembered the Gasworks and it sounded to me as if you knew quite a lot a about it.’

  She watched him look away as if something at the far side of the room required his immediate attention. In the low light from the two lamps he’d made from old wine bottles, his face looked almost haggard, quite unlike the person who’d reminded her of a wartime beauty recipe.

  ‘And what you knew had upset you,’ she added quietly.

  ‘You don’t miss much,’ he said wryly, as he turned back towards her and stared down at the black marble hearth. ‘That was the last straw, when they wouldn’t publish that particular article. “It wouldn’t look good”, they said. “Controversial”, “Might offend the Ward councillors.” If journalism is about anything, surely it’s about the truth, about pointing out human misery and exploitation. How can you ever change what needs to be changed if all the unpleasant things are swept under the carpet, if only the people who are well-fed and comfortable have a voice?’ he said, making no attempt whatever to conceal his bitterness.

  ‘That’s why you’re going, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes it is, Clare. Part of me doesn’t want to go one little bit. I love this grim, old city in a funny way. I don’t mind being broke. I don’t even mind the place being run down and behind the times, but I mind not being able to say so, not being able to try to change things, to make things better. I thought I could stick it out, but I can’t. I’m getting nowhere fast. And that’s wrong. If you’ve got something you can do then you have to find a place and a time where you can do it, otherwise you let yourself down. And if you let yourself down, then ultimately you let others down.’

  He looked into the glow of the gas fire, defeat on his face.

  ‘You won’t let anyone down, Ronnie,’ she said firmly. ‘You never have, so you’re hardly likely to start now. At your advanced age,’ she added lightly.

  To her delight, he smiled. He reached out, took her hand and squeezed it.

  ‘My father once said you were a lot older than your years. I think he has a point,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘I shall miss you more than anyone else in Ulster, even though I’ve only seen you once in a blue moon. Don’t forget that.’

  He got up, drew her to her feet and kissed her gently on the lips. Without another word he led her downstairs and brought her through to the kitchen where Mrs McGregor was filling hot water bottles on the scrubbed wooden draining board beside her ancient gas cooker.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Clare collapsed gratefully onto the vibrating front seat of the double decker bus and stared down at the continuously changing pattern of pedestrians on the crowded pavements below. Across the square, beyond the heavy-leafed trees, the dazzling white stone of the City Hall expanded outwards in pillared porches. Exotic, turquoise-capped turrets reached upwards from its solid mass. Silhouetted against a pure blue sky they made her think of rock outcrops projecting from a limestone cliff.

  Beside her, Ronnie waited till two women sat down in the seat across the way, then arranged his long legs as best he could in the aisle between. It had been his idea to walk down from Queen’s to their city centre bus stop. That way, he said, they could get a proper look at interesting buildings like the Moravian Church, or pause at the junction with the Lisburn Road to cast an eye down the terraces of Sandy Row towards the red-brick mass of Murray’s Tobacco Factory.

  Although his tour of Queen’s had been very thorough and they’d been on their feet since nine o’clock, she’d been happy enough to walk when they emerged from the main gate and turned towards the city. In the previous two hours, he had shown her all the buildings on the main university site. He’d taken her into the Great Hall to look at the ceiling and the portraits, marched her round the Quad and pointed out the various lecture theatres. He bought them a cup of tea in the Student’s Union, then walked her back to the library and upstairs to the rea
ding room.

  Not satisfied with his whispered tour of the main subject areas and his brief guide to classification, he’d approached a small, grey-haired lady, deployed his considerable charm and got permission to take her into the stack.

  The warm, musty atmosphere of the book stack was totally intriguing. Fascinated by the endless rows of books on subjects she had never even heard of, Clare realised she wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. But when she did manage to say something, she was quite surprised to discover he’d been watching her closely and didn’t mind at all that she’d missed what he’d just said.

  Curious about the circular windows beside the small work areas beyond the metal walkways, she stepped towards one, pulled out a chair and sat peering down at the sunlit lawns and pathways below. The only noise she could hear was the distant mutter of the central heating system keeping the temperature up for the sake of the books and the quiet footsteps of a librarian loading a trolley with the requests from the reading room.

  ‘Did you work up here?’ she asked abruptly, aware she hadn’t said a word for ages.

  ‘In my final year, yes.’

  She saw him look at her quizzically, but he said nothing. He just waited till she stood up, then said: ‘Come on, I told Josephine we wouldn’t be long.’

  ‘Is that her name?’ she asked, surprised they should be on such intimate terms.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ he replied, smiling, as she followed him back towards the entrance. ‘But the Chief Librarian is known as Napoleon. He’s not on this morning or you’d see why.’

  She grinned back at him as they came through the door of the stack and headed for the request counter. The top of a grey head was the only sign of the lady in question.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Ronnie, as the head responded immediately to the sound of their approach. ‘I’m touting for new business so you won’t be out of a job,’ he added cheerfully, as she cast an appraising glance at Clare, then attempted to look severely at him.

  As they were crossing Shaftesbury Square to get to the Dublin Road, Clare realised she shouldn’t have worn her best shoes. The little pair of Louis-heels had had several recent outings, but visiting Aunt Sarah, or going to the Ritz with Jessie, didn’t exactly involve much walking.

  ‘Queen’s Bridge,’ said Ronnie quietly as they crossed the Lagan. ‘That’s the Liverpool boat berthed down there. They’re probably checking out their red carpet for tomorrow night,’ he added.

  ‘Don’t say things like that, Ronnie,’ she replied hastily. ‘You’ll make me cry and I mustn’t. I’m a big girl now.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he said seriously. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so grown up.’ He paused a moment and added, ‘Sweet sixteen and all that. It’s not even your birthday till October,’ as if his problem with her grown-upness was a matter of arithmetic.

  She looked away and studied the rows of tiny shops lining the Newtownards Road. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Was that what he was thinking? But she had been kissed. He’d kissed her himself last night and now he looked as if he might like to kiss her again if only they hadn’t been on a bus surrounded by women with shopping bags.

  As the thought struck her, she had no idea what to say.

  A moment later, Ronnie had to give his attention to his legs as the two large women in the nearby seat began to manoeuvre their persons, bags and parcels into the narrow aisle. As the bus juddered to a halt, Ronnie collected himself and continued his commentary on the passing scene.

  ‘It gets posher as you get further out,’ he began. ‘Higher density of trees whacks up the property prices. By the time you see Castlehill Road leading to Massey Avenue you’re in Nob’s Hill. Minister of Education, Under Secretary of This and That, you know. They live there to be near the job. Walk to work on the chauffeur’s day off,’ he added casually. ‘If you see policemen around, then some big shot has been sent from Head Office to make sure they’re doing it right. But mostly in July they all go on their hols. That’s why it gets so quiet the likes of us can sneak in the back door and get a shufti.’

  ‘Golly, is that it?’ Clare asked in amazement.

  Suddenly they were past the substantial suburban houses with neatly trimmed hedges and old roses and a huge building perched high on a hillside shone white in the brightness of the sunlight.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. The seat of what this benighted province chooses to call “democracy”. Looks quite impressive now they’ve got the cow dung and black paint off. You probably don’t remember that.’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘Camouflage. During the war. They wanted to put the Air Force and a whole lot of top brass in there. Sounded like a bad joke. The place made a wonderful target. Absolutely marvellous bomb run up any of the approach avenues and a vast, shoe-box of a building gleaming white in a bomber’s moon.’

  The bus stopped. They got off and stood gazing up the long, tree-lined drive that climbed steadily towards the imposing front of the building beyond the heavy wrought-iron gates.

  ‘So they painted it and covered up the avenues with cinders,’ he went on. ‘It’s taken them years to get it cleaned up again.’

  ‘Did they really use cow dung or are you pulling my leg again?’

  ‘Yes, honest Injun. I do not tell a lie. Uncle Harry was in on the job. He’ll tell you. Some chemist or other worked it out. But the mix didn’t come off as well as it was supposed to. They’d awful trouble with streaks.’

  Clare looked longingly at the green slopes running parallel to the handsome avenue and the grey pavement now growing steeper by the minute.

  ‘Do you think we could walk on the grass?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ he replied promptly. ‘They can’t put you in jail, you’re under age. I’m being transported anyway. What the hell!’

  Clare stepped onto the grass, took off her shoes and felt the soft, cool turf under her hot, swollen feet. She felt better immediately.

  ‘Ah, these country colleens,’ said Ronnie, looking down at her with a exaggerated sigh. ‘I’m sorry we’re late for the morning dew. You could have bathed in it.’

  She giggled and trailed her feet as they slowed down on the steepest part of the slope. Ahead of them, the right arm of a huge statue was raised against the blue of the sky in a fierce, menacing gesture. A few vehicles loaded with tree prunings and gardening equipment were parked on the roundabout at his feet, indifferent to his protest.

  ‘Worth it for the view, isn’t it?’ he said, as they stood catching their breath on the wide stone terrace in front of the main entrance.

  The city with its encircling hills was laid out below and beyond them. Only the beginnings of heat shimmer softened the sharp outlines of the edge of the Antrim basalts, the strong lines of factories and mills, churches and warehouses, docks and gantries and the massed ranks of back to back houses that had spread outwards from the flat land around the docks and the city centre as industry demanded more and yet more labour.

  From this distance, the unhealed gaps left by the bombing were almost invisible, the shabbiness of buildings untenanted or awaiting demolition masked by sunlight and trees. Clare looked up at Ronnie and saw his face crumple. He’d said last night that he loved this city, but now she saw so clearly just how much it meant to him. She turned away and looked along the terrace towards the car park in case her seeing his distress would make it even worse for him.

  Ronnie gave his uncle’s name to the doorman and they went inside. She took in the vast sweep of the entrance hall, stared up at the elaborately decorated ceiling and looked longingly at the marble tiled floor. She couldn’t quite believe it. She thought of ballrooms on the screen at the Ritz Cinema, remembered the Churchill’s ball in Emma.

  ‘Just perfect for ten couples,’ she whispered, as the doorman disappeared in search of his colleague.

  ‘Da ta da, ta ta ta ta ta,’ sang Ronnie loudly.

  To her utter amazement, he caught her in hi
s arms and swung her across the floor to the unmistakable rhythm of ‘The American Patrol’.

  ‘Ronnie,’ she gasped, as he executed a skilful reverse turn in the midst of the empty space.

  But his only answer was to move them in even wider circles towards the impressive staircase at the far end of the brightly-lit hall.

  She had no idea Ronnie was such a good dancer. The further they went, the more elaborate his footwork became, but his hand on her waist was so firm that she reckoned if she missed her step he’d just pick her up and put her down again. Ronnie swung her towards the foot of the great staircase just as a figure appeared on the half landing and began to make his way down.

  As they came to a halt, she followed Ronnie’s gaze. A young man in a very white shirt was descending slowly, his jacket hooked on one finger over his shoulder, his eyes flickering casually around the empty space behind them. For one moment, Clare thought she was imagining things. The figure stopped beside them.

  ‘Hello, Clare,’ he said, smiling at them both.

  She was quite sure now from the quizzical look in his eye he’d seen them dancing.

  ‘Hello, Andrew,’ she just managed to reply. ‘This is my cousin, Ronnie McGillvray. Ronnie, this is Andrew Richardson. He lives up the road from us.’

  Ronnie looked doubtfully at Andrew Richardson and then smiled suddenly.

  ‘Clare and I are about to have a free, conducted tour of the premises,’ he began. ‘Would you like to join us or have you done it all before?’

  ‘No, this is my first time here,’ he said easily. ‘I’m on chauffeur duty for Grandfather and I’d love to see round the place.’

  ‘Well, now’s your chance. That tall, grey-haired man by the entrance looking this way and wondering what on earth’s keeping us is my uncle. The bigger his audience, the better he likes it. What we lack in numbers, we must make up for in intelligent interest. Come on.’