On a Clear Day (The Hamiltons Series)

by Anne Doughty

  ‘Ach, don’t let them upset you, Clare. It’s only a job to them, sticks of furniture that maybe have a price tag and maybe not. Will we have a drop of tea?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘There’s so much to do, Uncle Jack. I’ve got to finish by Sunday night and they’ve not taken half the stuff I expected. I know how dirty it’s bound to be when we take out the beds.’

  She looked around the kitchen and shook her head.

  ‘I doubt if the settle or that corner cupboard has been moved in years.’

  He nodded, tightened his lips and looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘I’m afraid the man’s right. It’ll have to be a bonfire.’

  On the space beyond the house, to the left of the shortcut, where the sodden remains of summer-cut nettles made a damp slime, they piled up the kitchen chairs, the salt box, the old hanging bookcase and some tattered curtains. Jack brought a metal tea pot full of paraffin from its place in the forge and sprinkled it liberally around, lit the end of a newspaper, poked it between the legs of a chair and moved back hastily.

  Flames roared into the chill air, a shower of sparks rose high, dispersing like a spent firework before they reached the branches of the pear tree, as the wood, tinder dry, flared and glowed and collapsed into hot embers.

  Clare stood rooted to the spot, hypnotised by the flames that leapt up and fell again so quickly. Uncle Jack had to call her twice before she heard him.

  ‘Come on, love, we must keep it going.’

  They carried out what they could, broke up what was too big or too awkward to manage between them, kept the hungry flames going all afternoon. Clare thought of Viking funeral pyres, fed with the dead man’s possessions, but all she could think off was poor Uncle Bob, in tears over Robert’s lack of means.

  These few poor sticks of furniture were all a lifetime’s work had left behind. The cheap and nasty three-piece suite, whose rexine covers split with time, so that its stuffing leaked blobs of fluff onto the cracked lino of the sitting-room floor since ever she’d known it. The carved hallstand full of woodworm where she’d set her jars of lilac and branches of blossom. That’s what it amounted to. Hardly a Viking’s hoard. Her tears dried on her face in the fierce heat of the flames as they consumed each new offering.

  Whether it was pure chance or Uncle Jack’s practicality in leaving them somewhere to sit when they took a rest, she never knew, but the very last item to go from the kitchen was the settle. Six feet long, with wooden arms at each end and a high back, it had always seemed so solid she’d assumed it would be too heavy for them to move in one piece. Jack would have to use the axe to break off one end and then lever away the well-scrubbed boards that made the seat. But when they tried it, it wasn’t heavy at all. Not for two. They drew it out into the empty room and lined it up, so they could carry it out into the dark night where the bonfire still glowed orange and blue.

  ‘Hold on a minute, Clare,’ said Jack.

  She lowered her end to the floor and watched Jack bring the Tilley lamp from the deep embrasure of the back window and set it down carefully by the fender.

  From the accumulation of dust and fluff underneath the settle, he handed her the broken stem of a clay pipe, a bent spoon and a blunt knife. She came and joined him, kneeling on the dirty floor and watched him pick out from the dust and dirt which lay directly below where the gap between the two planks of the wooden seat had been, a florin, a penny whistle, a folded leaflet advertising De Witts Little Liver Pills, a garter and a dip pen with a rusty nib. They had all fallen through as the gap widened with years of warm fires and the vigorous scrubbing of the Scott women.

  ‘Goodness, Jack, what’s this?’ she said, startled.

  From a pile of undisturbed dust and fluff, she picked up a loose end of fine cord. Attached to it were two gold rings, the smaller one narrow, the larger one broad. They had been tied together; one within the other, fitting so well they’d not separated as she caught them up and blew away the dust. They lay in the palm of her hand now, gleaming in the light of the lamp, as if they’d never lain anywhere except in their own velvet-lined jeweller’s box.

  ‘Wedding rings, I suppose,’ said Jack, peering at them closely.

  ‘A man’s and a woman’s,’ she said slowly, her eyes drawn by the gleam of gold, by the perfect fit of one ring inside the other.

  The image that came to her was irresistible, a pair of lovers, the woman enfolded by the man, their love holding them together over the years.

  ‘They look fairly old to me,’ said Jack, matter-of-factly. ‘Maybe they’ll have an inscription. But we’ll hardly see it in this light. Have you a pocket or will I put them in my wallet for you?’

  ‘I’ve a pocket, thanks,’ said Clare, hastily, grateful there were no holes in the pockets of her oldest trousers, the very first pair Auntie Polly had sent her from Canada.

  ‘We mustn’t let that fire down too far,’ he warned her, as he cast his eyes over the piles of dust and dirt and satisfied himself there was nothing more to be found.

  ‘Right,’ said Clare firmly, as she got to her feet and took up the arm of the settle, worn so smooth over the years by the sleeves of those who had sat enjoying the warmth of the fire, the company and the crack.

  Jack manoeuvred his end till it pointed through the kitchen door, then together they carried it out into the darkness where the fire glowed, a bright orange circle still with eager blue tongues of flame at its heart.

  The next morning, Sunday, was fine and dry. The pale sunlight cast long fingers of shadow from the hedgerows across the silent fields as she and Jack drove back to the house by the forge after an early breakfast at Liskeyborough.

  ‘My very last day,’ she heard herself say, as Jack unloaded cardboard boxes, a basket with a bottle of milk for their tea, sandwiches she’d cut while Jack made their breakfast, and an extra stiff brush from the farmyard, so he could help her sweep out the empty rooms before she started to clean.

  As she lit the fire, topped up the water tank and filled the kettles, she heard the swish of his brush echoing from Robert’s bedroom where they’d dislodged wreaths of cobweb from the walls behind the pieces of furniture the clearance men had been willing to take.

  ‘Are you sure there’s no more I can do?’ he asked, some hours later, as he perched in the back window of the kitchen, a mug of tea in his hands, so that Clare could sit in the one remaining chair.

  ‘No, you’ve been great, Uncle Jack,’ she said warmly. ‘But the rest is my job. I need a few hours yet, but I’ll be ready by dark if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Aye that suits me fine. About five, we’ll say. Will that be in time for your tea in Belfast?’

  ‘Oh don’t worry about that. Mrs McGregor will have gone to church so she’ll leave something on a tray. It’ll be there whatever time I get back.’

  ‘Ye haven’t forgotten the dogs, have ye?’ he asked, nodding up at the mantelpiece as he drained his mug.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, smiling. ‘They’ll be keeping an eye on me till we’re ready to go. That’s why I asked you for a couple of cardboard boxes. I’ll be taking them with me. And Granda’s chair. Do you think we can get it into the car all right?’ she asked, suddenly anxious.

  ‘We’ll manage,’ he reassured her. ‘I think it’ll go across the back seat. But I’ll have to leave your big photograph till another time. The glass might get broken with the legs of the chair. I’ll keep it in my bedroom for you till you’re next up.’

  He looked around the empty room as if there was something else he was trying to remember and then, finding there wasn’t, he straightened up and put his mug down on the window sill behind him.

  ‘I’d better be off or I’ll have them late for meeting.’

  She walked to the door with him, waved as he got into his car and watched as he reversed cautiously onto the road. There were more cars about these days and sometimes on a Sunday a neighbour would go into Armagh for the papers. But no car appeared.
As she stood looking down the path to the forge, not a sound disturbed the quiet of the morning. She put her hand out to touch the arch over the door and made no move to start her work.

  Suddenly the church bell rang out from the hill. It startled her, reminded her time was passing. She hurried inside and got to work. Jack had not wanted to leave her in the empty house, but she’d insisted. She was so grateful for his help, but she knew she needed to be by herself. However painful it might be, there was a goodbye to be said and she could only say it if she were alone, free to move among all the memories of the years she had spent here.

  She worked steadily, methodically, as she had taught herself to do long ago. However hard the work, it left her mind free to plan the weekly essay or to have practise conversations with herself in French or German. Today, however, she wasn’t very clear what was going on in her mind. At times, she thought that getting the job done was taking her total attention. When she finally paused at two o’clock to make tea and eat her sandwich, her back and arms ached, yet there was still so much left to do.

  She sat by the stove in Robert’s chair and looked up at the china dogs in their solitary splendour on what had once been a crowded mantelpiece. In his honour, she had christened them with both the Scott names, the ones she had found on the lease that went back to 1830.

  ‘Well then, Robert and Thomas,’ she began. ‘How do I do it? How do I say goodbye?’

  Her tears caught her unexpectedly, a mug of tea in one hand, a corned beef sandwich in the other. She parked her tea on the stove and fumbled for her handkerchief. As her fingers closed round it, she touched the solid shape of the two rings she’d kept with her, because she’d found that morning she could not bear to be parted from them.

  ‘I’d say those were a brave age, wouldn’t you, Jack?’ Granda Hamilton had commented the previous evening when she’d brought them out to show to him. Sitting by the fire, both William and her grandmother already in bed, he looked at them with great interest. He fetched a magnifying glass from his workshop and held them up to the new electric light.

  ‘There’s somethin’ there, Clare, but I can’t make it out. Look yerself,’ he said, showing her how to angle the glass. ‘Your eyes are far sharper than mine.’

  ‘Initials,’ she said. ‘I think it’s E. C. B. on the small ring.’

  ‘What about the broader one?’ asked Jack. ‘That might be easier to read.’

  Clare undid the fine twine but when it fell away she found they were still tied together.

  ‘I’ll tell you what that is, Clare,’ said her grandfather, as she looked up at him, puzzled by what she’d found. ‘It’s human hair. It was often used for binding in the old days. It’s very strong if you use a fair sized piece and wrap it well.’

  She was reluctant to unbind the hair, but she so wanted to see what the broader ring might reveal. She released it with a light touch of a sharp razor blade and patiently unwound it, a single long, pale hair with just a hint of red in it. The rings slipped apart and she took up her glass again.

  ‘It’s the same, I think’, she said, quickly. ‘E. C. B.’

  ‘So they belonged to the same person,’ said Jack thoughtfully.

  But Clare said nothing. She was still quite sure the rings had belonged to a man and a woman, that one of them had tied them together so that they would stay together. She had no idea what happened after that, whether they’d been lost, or hidden, but before she got into bed that night she replaced the hair and tied it in place before covering it up again with the fine twine, exactly as it had been when she’d first found them.

  She finished her sandwich, drained her mug of tea and was about to refill her bucket with fresh water when a thought struck her.

  ‘There was something under Granda’s chair yesterday,’ she muttered to herself, remembering the way the clearance man had turned it up to slide off the cushion.

  She stood up and tilted the chair.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ she said, excitedly, as she carried it out into the daylight. ‘R. T. S.,’ she read, ‘Robert Thomas Scott.’

  Pleased as she was that the chair had been marked, or made, by her great-grandfather, it was what was carved below the first set of initials that truly delighted her.

  ‘It wasn’t a C, it was a G,’ she breathed, as she traced out the letters of the second set with her fingers. ‘E. G. B.,’ she said out loud. ‘The letters on the rings.’

  ‘Thank you, Robert, thank you Thomas,’ she said, grinning up at the two guardians of the hearth.

  She could not think of a better gift to have been given on this saddest of days. For the rest of her life she would have a reminder of all that was best, of her own past, and of the long past, of all the evenings when Charlie poked his head round the door and roared out his greeting.

  ‘It has to be, it just has to be,’ she announced to the empty room. ‘ERIN GO BRAGH, Ireland for ever.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Clare didn’t expect the weeks that followed Robert’s death to be easy, but she was quite unprepared for the anxiety and the pervasive sense of loss that overwhelmed her as she tried to take up her life again.

  Every time the phone rang in the dim, echoing hall below her room, she went rigid, fearful lest some new disaster might come upon her. She would open her door and listen intently as Mrs McGregor came out of her sitting room and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Jean dear, it’s your mither. Hurry up now, she’s in a call box.’

  She’d breathe a sigh of relief, go back to whatever piece of work she’d been struggling with, and give herself a severe talking to. She was letting things get on top of her, she’d say. Going to lectures had become an effort, writing essays an interminable chore. All she felt up to was sitting in her room, staring into the orange glow of the gas fire or watching the laden clouds move steadily past the bare branches of the rain-soaked trees.

  Evening after evening she would sit by the fire, comforted by its warmth and its friendly roar, absorbed in her own thoughts. The loss of Robert was a shock and a blow but, even in her worst moments, she knew she would not wish him back to face another winter, however bad a time it gave her.

  ‘His hammering days are over.’

  She wept every time she thought of Jamsey going to look for him in the forge, because he couldn’t hear him hammering.

  ‘Ye’d not wish to see him poorly.’

  She would weep each time she remembered John Wiley taking an old tin box from his pocket, and showing her the fuchsias packed in moss Senator Richardson had sent her.

  But her tears brought real relief from the pain of her loss. She grieved for Robert as she had grieved for her parents, sensing the hurt would heal as the wisest of her friends said it would. But there was another hurt that the tears did little for. Once again, with the death of someone dear to her, she had lost the home she loved.

  The only person who seemed to understand how she felt about that was Andrew. He wrote often and phoned at an agreed time every two weeks. She knew how truly concerned about her he was and his efforts to cheer her touched her, but he seemed so far away, so remote, a part of a world full of warmth and sunshine as completely lost to her as the summer itself, now long gone.

  Friday nights were the worst times, she decided, as she walked back from the last lecture of the week, the rain mizzling down, the street lamps reflecting in the wet road.

  ‘All trying to get home early,’ she said to herself, as she glanced at the line of tail lights disappearing up the Malone Road, before she tramped over the pedestrian crossing and turned into Elmwood Avenue.

  She had a roof over her head, yes, but she had no home. No lane, no forge, no orchard, no smoking stove, no floor to scrub. She turned her key in the front door and ran upstairs, knowing she couldn’t cope with any friendly greeting.

  As week followed week, it got so bad she could hardly bear to leave her room. She forced herself to go to lectures, but shook her head and said no to all the offers of outings or p
arties. When Jessie and Harry insisted she go out for a meal with them she told them she had an essay to write. The very thought of the restaurant, brightly lit and decorated for Christmas, was more than she could manage.

  The only time she felt any ease at all was when she was surrounded by her precious possessions, her own books, those she had inherited from Ronnie, the few objects she’d brought from the home she had lost.

  Whenever she did try to work, she sat in Robert’s chair, the green glass jar she’d used for posies beside her on her table in the window, the sitting room clock and the two white dogs with black shiny noses on her mantelpiece.

  Yet people had been so kind to her. She’d been touched by the way Henri Lavalle assured her of his help at any time. Mrs McGregor told her to come down whenever she felt lonely. If her grandparents weren’t able to have her to stay over Christmas, she said, she’d be more than welcome to join her small family.

  The last week of term arrived, but the first solitary days of the vacation brought no change. Indeed without the pressure of work to keep her going, they were even worse.

  ‘Clare dear, it’s your Uncle Jack.’

  She raced down stairs, a towel round her wet hair. She hadn’t even heard the phone ring as she lay in front of the gas fire combing it through to help it dry.

  ‘Hallo, hallo, Uncle Jack? Is something wrong?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about, love,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Granny asked me to give you a wee ring. She needs a bit of help and she thought maybe you’d go up for a few days. Sure we haven’t laid eyes on you for weeks you’ve been that busy.’

  Clare felt ashamed. Uncle Jack had rung several times to see if he could collect her for the weekend, but she’d made excuses. The farm had only three bedrooms. If Auntie Dolly went off to visit friends, then it wasn’t too bad, for she’d have Dolly’s room, but if Dolly was at home and Jack went fishing, she had to share a room with William. If Jack was at home as well, then it was a folding bed in Dolly’s room and having to listen to her talk about her boyfriends far into the night.