Come Rain, Come Shine

by Anne Doughty

He looked at her for the first time.

  ‘Not a very brave or responsible thing to do,’ he said harshly.

  ‘Doesn’t that depend on what choice you’ve been given?’ she retorted. ‘Wouldn’t you try to escape from a Prisoner of War camp?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ she said quietly. ‘Every one of us has a right to make as good a life as we can, and we want to make that life together. I can’t do it by myself, I’ve told you that, and you can’t do it either. Just like Hector, you need someone to help you make a go of it. Do you think Hector is no good to anyone because he didn’t manage to do what he wanted?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Andrew replied vigorously. ‘Hector made the best of things when he lost his wife. He’s the one relative I have that reconciles me to being a Richardson.’

  ‘Do you need to be reconciled?’

  He hesitated for a moment and she thought uneasily that she might have pushed him too far.

  ‘Yes, perhaps I do. It was being a Richardson that meant I was sent away. It was The Missus who sent me away, Clare. Away from Drumsollen. Away from my home, which I loved, so now I’m almost a stranger here. People think I’m English because of my accent and the good class way I speak. Oh, not the Wileys and our real friends, but clients and colleagues. I see a wary look in their eyes as if to tell me they know I’m not one of them. And it’s true, isn’t it? I don’t fit in and perhaps I never will. I don’t think I can really forgive the Richardson family for that.’

  By the time they’d talked it all through and agreed they could make things better if they worked at it and that they did have each other, the fish and chips were a bit dried up, but they were so hungry they hardly noticed. When they brought the coffee tray back upstairs, the fire was glowing red and gold and the room was full of the smell of the apple wood logs.

  ‘It’s still hot,’ Andrew said, surprised, as he poured for them. ‘Are you exhausted?’

  ‘Yes, I am. But if you actually mean, Will coffee keep you awake? the answer is No. I could sleep on a bare rock or a wooden board,’ she said, yawning hugely.

  ‘What about a nice, warm bed instead?’

  Nine

  ‘Easter Cards?’ said June, as she looked down at the neatly stacked bundles covering the surface of Clare’s desk. ‘You’re in good time.’

  ‘That’s what Andrew said when they arrived last week,’ Clare replied cheerfully. ‘It was snowing then. Not much I admit but it was snow,’ she added, laughing. ‘Do you recognize the daffodils?’

  June put her tray down on the sideboard and peered at the card Clare had been about to sign. ‘Are those here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Clare nodded. ‘Don’t they look good? Andrew took the photos last year and I found a firm that makes cards by the hundred. They’re not too expensive if you need a lot. I’m sending them to all our former guests. Personally signed, of course,’ she added, flourishing her pen hand. ‘Details of booking discretely included.’

  ‘I don’t know where you get all the ideas from,’ June said, shaking her head. ‘First it was candlelight wedding receptions, then it was office parties . . . I must away on, I’ve a cake in the oven. Enjoy your coffee.’

  Clare smiled to herself. She loved the daffodils at Drumsollen. Left undisturbed for years, there must be hundreds of them by now. Plain, old-fashioned ones, with glowing gold trumpets and nodding heads. She loved them and she loved their message too. Once there were daffodils the worst of winter was over. In this first week of March they most certainly weren’t in bloom, but the vigorous grey spikes were growing fatter day by day.

  After the record breaking snow and exceptional cold of 1963, this year had been mercifully mild, but it was still an enormous relief to see the first hints of spring, an even bigger relief to know the heating bills would soon grow less dispiriting.

  She made a space on her desk for June’s small tray, picked up her coffee cup and took a bite from the buttered scone. Even after all this time, one of June’s still-warm scones seemed the greatest of luxuries. She took a few minutes rest, then returned to the three hundred Easter cards still to do. Despite the effort she’d made to be as efficient as possible, it was still going to take a long time. If there was one thing she had learnt running Drumsollen in the last four years, it was that patience paid off. Large jobs could be done, even by one person, if you broke them down and kept at them, but it didn’t stop the job being as tedious as it was tiring. She had to admit there were times when she did lose heart, times when she felt cabined and confined though she did her best never to let it show.

  One of her worst ever weeks had come immediately after their October visit to Fermanagh. The plumber had come to look at the blocked drain on Sunday afternoon as agreed, but he’d discovered the drain was the least part of the problem. While Drumsollen did have a mains water supply, it did not have mains drainage. The septic tank had been adequate for a large family home, but clearly could not accommodate the needs of a guest house. Besides that, the land drains serving it had become cracked by the movement of cars and service vehicles round the back of the house. Some of them had caved in and no longer took away waste water into the adjoining fields. Given the distance from the house to the nearest main drain the only option was a new and bigger septic tank.

  The pneumatic drills that hopped up on down on the concrete like demented creatures had shattered the silence, driven away the birds and landed an enormous bill on her desk. She still didn’t know how she’d managed to keep the final amount a secret from Andrew who would certainly have panicked had he laid eyes on it.

  Time passed, the pile of cards grew taller, and it was almost noon when she caught the swish of tyres. Expecting a parcel of tourist literature and feeling in need of a break, she got up, stretched and headed for the front steps to exchange a friendly word or two with Ernie, who’d been doing this postal round since they’d first opened. The wind was cold and blustery but not unexpected as she stepped outside; the vehicle parked at the foot of the steps was a different matter.

  Where the original bodywork paint remained, it was blue, but well dappled with rust. Even the most disreputable of the vehicles parked at the back when the men were working on the septic tank looked positively new compared with this one. The car’s driver looked equally disreputable. A pair of oil streaked dungarees, also once blue, but now alternately oil-streaked and worn pale, had been pulled on over a crumpled tartan shirt and battered leather boots with wedge heels.

  ‘Hi, Clare,’ the figure greeted her, as he finally managed to close the driver’s door after several hefty bangs.

  Clare’s heart sank. For a moment, she couldn’t remember when she had last seen her younger brother. He had not appeared at her wedding, nor at Granda Hamilton’s funeral, but she was unlikely to forget that in the past he only bothered to turn up when he wanted something.

  As he tramped up the steps, a broad grin on his face, she did remember the last time they’d met. It was when she was working in Paris and came to visit her grandparents after staying with Jessie and Harry in Belfast. That was when he’d asked her for money to buy a car. Having previously broken his leg riding his uncle’s motor bike without permission, she’d refused to give it to him.

  ‘Hello, William, how are you?’

  ‘I’m great. How are you . . . and Andrew?’ he added, as an afterthought.

  ‘Fine. Working hard,’ she replied, as she turned and led the way back into Headquarters.

  ‘I say. Real posh,’ he enthused, trailing behind her to look up at the chandelier. ‘Granny says you’re doin’ great. This your office?’ he asked abruptly, his eye lighting on the bundles of cards. ‘What’s all this?

  ‘Advertising,’ she said briskly, as she cleared the chair beside her desk so he could sit down.

  ‘I hear you were very busy last summer. Granny said you had advertisements in all the papers, Armagh and Portadown.’

  ‘How is Granny?’

&n
bsp; ‘Oh, she’s fine.’

  ‘What about her legs?’

  Clare knew well enough that William hadn’t the slightest interest in anyone but himself but she accepted that she would probably always go through the motions of normal behaviour with him because she found his indifference so hard to accept. She paused, waiting.

  ‘Clare, now that you’re doin’ so well, I thought I’d come an’ see if you could give me a job.’

  So that was it. Clare was torn between relief that she now knew what she had to deal with and irritation that he appeared to have made no progress at all as he grew older. He was now twenty-four and was still behaving just as he had at eighteen.

  ‘What sort of job?’ she asked coolly.

  ‘I thought I could do some drivin’ for you. Collectin’ and deliverin’ stuff. And I could look after your cars, yours and Andrew’s. And the visitors’. Keepin’ them smart.’

  ‘Sorry William. We have only one car and we do our own fetching and carrying.’

  ‘What about the visitors?’

  ‘What about them?

  ‘Who cleans their cars?’

  ‘They probably do it themselves before they come on holiday. Besides William, I’m afraid we can’t afford extra staff.’

  ‘But you must be rolling in it,’ he protested, casting his eyes round the room.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ she said firmly. ‘We just, only just, break even.’

  ‘You’re mean, that’s what you are,’ he spat out, jumping to his feet. ‘You always have been. You wouldn’t give a body daylight, you and that fine English husband of yours,’ he went on, his face screwed up in a nasty leer. ‘Well, I’ll be able to tell Granny all about you and how nice you were to me.’

  He spun on his heel and made for the door, pausing only to turn and make a rude sign. She heard him stride across the hall, throw open the glass doors and run down the steps. By the time she’d reached the open doors, he’d driven off in a cloud of fumes, his tyres squealing. She shut the doors behind him, but not before the stiff breeze had blown the smell of burning engine oil into the entrance hall to linger there long after he had gone.

  ‘How go the daffodils?’ asked Andrew, dropping his briefcase and coming over to kiss her. ‘I left the car out front in case you wanted us to go back into town and post them.’

  ‘Thanks, love, that was kind,’ she said wearily, as she pushed another bundle into a plastic carrier bag. ‘I think they’ll have to go to the Post Office. Too many for a pillar box,’ she continued, nodding to the pile of carriers already stacked beside her desk. ‘How was today?’

  ‘I had a letter this morning making enquiries about my wife,’ he said sharply. ‘I’m trying to be amused about it and not succeeding. In fact, I think I’m furious and I am about to write a very sharp letter, icily polite of course, and wrapped up in impeccable legal language, but actually saying, Piss off.’

  ‘About your wife?’ she repeated, bursting out laughing. ‘Andrew, what are you talking about?’

  ‘You may well laugh,’ he said more moderately, ‘but I was so cross I had to go and walk briskly round The Mall in my lunch hour so as not to bite the head off poor Thelma. Do you want to see it for yourself or shall I give you a synopsis?’ he asked, his tone softening a little. ‘I’m good at synopses, or synopsisisis as Thelma calls them.’

  ‘This I must see,’ she declared, overwhelmed by curiosity as she got up from her desk.

  The text of the letter was brief, but the engraved and illuminated heading was most impressive and the sheet of paper she held in her hand the thickest she’d ever met.

  ‘It is incumbent upon us as executors and administrators of the Rothwell estate to ascertain the religious proclivities of both the potential contenders themselves and of their spouses . . .’ She broke off, quite overwhelmed.

  ‘What on earth do they mean?’ she asked, sitting down opposite him, the document still in her hand.

  ‘Simple,’ he answered, amused by the look on her face. ‘No Taigs here. Only good Prods need apply. Check out the wives as well. Make sure they’re kosher,’ he added, just to make the point quite clear. ‘Just what our late unlamented Prime Minister used to recommend: Don’t have one of them about the place.’

  ‘But what on earth has it got to do with us, Andrew?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just routine,’ he replied dismissively. ‘I must be somewhere in the line of succession to the title, every male Richardson would be. In the legal business, we always assume death and disaster, you know that. I suppose if Australia sinks into the Southern Ocean it might kill off a few of Hector’s grandsons.’

  ‘But I thought Hector only had daughters,’ she protested.

  ‘By his first wife, remember. The second one produced a son, then upped and went taking son with her. Hector told me way back that he was raising sheep in Australia. He’s a bit older than me, married very young and has several sons and daughters.’

  ‘So if Australia sinks, as you put it, you could be in the running for Killydrennan?’

  ‘Theoretically yes, however unlikely in practice. There can’t be all that many male Richardsons around. Maybe one’s just died and that’s why they’ve got the wind up. So they are checking out to make sure you have not converted to the Catholic faith.’

  ‘Honestly, Andrew, I am sorry. I think I’ve not been as sympathetic as I should have been over your family. It’s such a nonsense in the twentieth century, all this business about male inheritance and religion. I think you’re quite entitled to tell them to mind their own business.’

  Andrew laughed, the ominous shadow lifted, and he looked a whole lot happier than he had since he arrived home.

  ‘Except, of course, my beloved, it is their business, and very lucrative it must be too,’ he said, taking the letter from her. ‘Just look at their notepaper and the engraving of their premises in London.’

  ‘Let’s leave the Post Office till the morning, Andrew,’ she said quickly, as she picked up the edge come back into his voice. ‘One day isn’t going to make any difference. You can do the post on the way to work,’ she went on, the weariness of the day now printing out in her own voice. ‘How about opening one of Robert’s more modest bottles? It’s a beef stew with dumplings and mashed potato. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Ravenous. And wine would be lovely. Shall we drink to their confusion?’

  ‘Who’s confusion?’

  ‘The gentlemen in the Inner Temple with the posh notepaper.’

  She laughed and nodded vigorously, bent down and put a match to the fire. At some point in the evening, she would tell him about her contact with her own family, but certainly not till a glass or two of good red wine had softened the edges of the day’s vexations.

  March continued to blow in vigorously, bringing with it the first scatter of guests, but it was the end of April before there were enough to require regular wash loads of sheets each morning. Clare was especially grateful for a small number of commercial travellers who had become regulars. They were happy to drive a mile out of town to a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and avoid the problems of trying to park in the city centre.

  They were also happy to chat about their own concerns. Listening to them Clare noted both the changes in their work and the changes they’d observed in their usual customers. Most of them, it seemed, were heartened by the positive tone of government pronouncements about attracting new industry and reducing unemployment. Whatever their own particular line of business they all agreed that new investment from abroad at a time when Ulster’s traditional industries were visibly fading was just what the Province needed.

  Clare had always hoped they could eventually offer evening meals to their guests, but the cost of employing a chef and the provision of choices of food when bookings were so light argued against it. One evening as they sat over coffee she was turning over the problem in her mind once more, when Andrew came up with an idea.

  ‘If June cooks something for us or leaves us a cold meal on a tray, sh
e could probably do the same for our regulars, couldn’t she? She used to do it when we had those two surveyors when we first started.’

  Clare had to suppress a smile at the thought of adding one more job to June’s long list, when she spent her time trying to ensure they didn’t exploit her endless goodwill. Nevertheless, she reckoned Andrew had pointed the way to a solution, but only if she could find the money for an extra pair of hands. Within the week she’d found a young woman urgently needing part-time work in the afternoons.

  When she arrived to be interviewed, Bronagh had such a lively, easy manner that Clare took to her at once. Sitting opposite her, the dark eyes that looked out from under a mass of dark hair met hers so candidly as she explained the situation and the needs of the job. It was agreed she begin work the very next day. Clare would be able to offer a buffet meal on a tray to any guest who didn’t want to drive out to a local hotel, or go back into the city for dinner that evening.

  Bronagh turned out to be an even better idea than she had seemed at first, for she was willing to tackle whatever work was needed when her own work was done, and she was good enough to satisfy even June’s rigorous standards. Clare overcame any reservations she might have had over creating another addition to the wages bill when she saw how Bronagh’s unforced gaiety, her way of laughing suddenly at little things had made June smile more often. The burden of cleaning and maintenance which Clare and June had previously shared between them now seemed a good deal less than before.

  But despite the success of adding Bronagh to what she and June laughingly called The Staff, adding up the figures at the end of April was not encouraging. Back in October, after meeting the cost of the septic tank, she’d made an extra effort to recover their position by advertising for the coming season and promoting Drumsollen as a venue for special occasions. Looking at the figures, she had to accept that those efforts were certainly not yet making a significant difference to their overall position. In fact, as if that were not disappointing enough, there were fewer bookings for the months ahead than at the same time the previous year, or the year before that. The critical summer months, in which the takings would normally be at their highest, were looking very flat indeed.