Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  “We’ve got a little surprise for you,” Nancy said as she began to hang up the washing.

  “Eh? What sort?”

  “A surprise. You know, open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what God brings you.”

  “What, now?”

  “Oh, Jack, Jack, Jackass, not now. And it’s not something to eat. You wait and see, and before the afternoon’s out you’ll know all about it. You’ll both come back to tea afterwards, won’t you? Good. I got some shrimps off the barrow-man this morning. It ought to be a nice little party. Bring back old times.” She finished her task and stooped to put the basket beneath a chair. Unexpectedly, she turned on him. “Happy, Jack?”

  He answered at once with an alarmed, “Yes.” Then, doubtfully, “Well, I don’t know. I suppose so.”

  She sat down on the chair. For all her bulk, the movement was graceful, as if her body had no weight. She laid her hands in her lap, the palms downward, one hand on top of the other. The gesture reminded him painfully of her mother. “You are, Jack. Don’t let yourself have any doubts about it. You are happy, and you stick to that.” She smiled. Nested in the fat of her face, in the candid eyes and the flawless skin over her cheekbones, he saw her mother’s beauty. He felt humble and loving before her, like a small boy again. “Falling in love,” she said, “I don’t know anything about that. They say it’s not always a pleasant experience. But happiness is nothing like that. It doesn’t happen to you. You have to work for it, and you have to keep trying. It’s like —” she inclined her head towards the flowers on the parapet: the most beautiful of girls could not have made the gesture more gently or graciously — “it’s like a garden, I suppose. Nothing may come up for a while. It does in the long run if you don’t lose heart. Look at me and Tom —”

  He looked at her, and at Tom who was returning along the path below, both of them pink, elephantine, double-chinned. If they had been strangers seen on a bus he would have whispered some gross jest about them to Joyce.

  “— we’re not the most romantic of couples, are we? We started going together when I was up in Oldham. I was in lodgings, and terribly lonely. Tom had a lot of friends, they all liked him, they said he was always ready for a laugh, but he only had the crowd of them, no one person among them, you know how it is. When he first asked me to go to pictures I felt so ashamed. I mean, he’s not exactly a girl’s dream man, and I knew that people — even our friends — would have a quiet laugh when they saw us walking out together. It never occurred to me that Tom might feel the same sort of shame about me. And so it went on, and we got more and more used to each other — more and more dependent on each other, you might say — till Tom popped the question. When we went to the registry office I wanted to die. I felt I was throwing away all my dreams. I looked at him, and I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, to spend the rest of my life with that!’ And then I saw exactly the same look in his eyes. I felt so sorry for him, Jack, dear. I wanted to take hold of him and comfort him. And then he squeezed my hand and he said, ‘There, lass, I’ll do what I can for you,’ and I knew that he pitied me, too. We’ve spent every day of our lives since making things as good for each other as we could. And it’s been so beautiful, every day of it. You’ll have to ask someone clever if you want to know whether that’s love, but I know that neither of us would change for anyone else, and now the baby — oh, Jack, she’s going to be what both of us have always dreamed of being.” She sighed, and looked down at her folded hands.

  Jack felt embarrassed and inadequate. He said, “Ah, I reckon you’re about right, Nance. When you talk like that you remind me of your Mum.” It had been there in her voice the same placid gentleness, the same sad wisdom.

  Suddenly encouraged, he blurted, “Here, Nance. I know what I wanted to ask you. It just occurred to me the other week, we never been to see your dad’s grave, even when we were kids.”

  “My dad?” Nancy, startled, echoed his words to give her mind time to absorb them.

  “Your dad. I can still see his picture on the wall, looking down on us, can’t you? Yet we never —”

  Nancy looked into the parlour, with a light of what seemed like anxiety in her eyes. She closed the french windows, shutting off the murmur of voices from within. “We used to go,” she said. “I used to go with mum. You know, quietly, no fuss. I still go sometimes, with Gran.”

  “Quietly? That’s a bit queer, ain’t it?”

  “Why? There was no point in taking the whole family. You were all very small then.”

  “I know, but it wasn’t like her, to let them forget their dad.”

  “Their dad?” Nancy smiled, with compressed lips. “It wasn’t like her to be a hypocrite.”

  “Hypocrite?” The word offended him.

  “Trailing the kids about and doing the loving widow act. She did enough, Jack. She kept the grave tidy. She paid her respects. You see —” she hesitated “— well, they weren’t the happiest of couples.”

  He said, stupidly because of the shock, “Who weren’t?”

  “My mother and father.”

  The words, evenly uttered, penetrated his consciousness as quietly and rapidly as four drops of some corrosive liquid. For a moment he felt that the whole fabric of moral certainty on which he based his life was endangered by this scar that burned and spread. He wanted to ask more questions, but he was afraid. The idea that Kate, the perfect Kate, the dream Kate against whom he measured everything in the world, might lack perfection in her relations with any other human being — it was an impossibility, a sacrilege. He hesitated wretchedly.

  Nancy sighed. “Well, let the dead rest quiet. Talking won’t serve them. Alf didn’t answer my letter, but I was hoping he’d come.”

  From inside the flat they heard sounds of movement. Tom was helping Gran to the door.

  “Oh,” Jack said bitterly, “he loved his brother all right. But what’s a bloody graveside get-together compared with the beginning of the football season?”

  Tom called out that the taxi was waiting at the gate, and they followed him downstairs.

  At the gate of the cemetery they bought big bunches of chrysanthemums, bronze, white and yellow. Jack walked on, flanked by Nancy and Joyce. Tom followed, with Gran leaning on his arm and smashing at the gravel with the point of her walking-stick.

  Talking quietly, but with the extraordinary levity that afflicts peoples in such surroundings, they followed a path through a clutter of monuments that was as ugly and overcrowded as any city street.

  They turned a bend in the path. Jack said, “That’s it, over there.” A woman, her back to them, stooped at the foot of the grave. She straightened up. A red splash of flowers remained on the brown mound at her feet. Jack recognized from behind the queenly set of head and shoulders. Joyce was chattering at him, but he could no longer make out what she was saying. His feet were so heavy that he could hardly lift them. There was a pain across the top of his chest, beneath the collarbone. He was conscious of not a single thought or emotion, only a numbed thickness in his head. The command centre of his body was out of action but his legs, like dogged soldiers, bore him on.

  Hearing their footsteps, the woman turned to meet them just as Nancy said, “Rose, my darling. I’m so glad you’ve come.”

  Jack and Rose were face to face. He could see nothing of her but her frank and smiling scrutiny, which cowed him. He lowered his head. He forced his mouth to move, mumbling gluily, “ ’lo, Rose. Beenlongtime.”

  Rose said, in a soft, kindly voice, “Hallo, Jack. I’ve been wanting and wanting to see you.”

  He could not absorb the sight of her, let alone assess her. She had always been one of those people who seem firmer, clearer-cut against the daylight, than anyone around them, who impress themselves on the vision with the impact of metal stamps. Now, to Jack, the impact had been too great: she was like someone seen in a doorway from a dark interior, only a shape black-rimmed between him and the light. He could not seize on a single detail. Around her, the sunlight seemed to break up
into countless points of brilliance.

  People were talking. He heard Nancy’s gurgling laugh, and her voice, “I promised him a surprise!” Joyce was speaking in tones of delighted astonishment. The voices in the sunlight were as confusing as water splashing and flashing in sunlight. He mumbled, “This is Joyce.”

  Rose laughed. “Silly, you don’t think I’ve forgotten Joyce. I wish I had a pound for every pennorth of fish and chips we shared when we were kids.”

  Joyce added excitedly, “And you never liked vinegar and I did!”

  They were laughing. Jack was outside the laughter. He was as remote from all this as the dreamer from his dream. He felt no hatred for Rose, no love, only a paralysed fright and the sense of a great weight upon him.

  The old woman had been standing in silence, gripping her stick with both hands and grinding the tip in the gravel. Her dead, grating voice startled them all. “You’re at your brother’s grave.”

  The grave had been a forgotten background to their happiness. In abashed silence they turned to look at it. Nobody knew what to say. Joyce and Nancy laid their chrysanthemums by the side of the cluster of red roses.

  Jack stood side by side with Rose. He was afraid to look at her. So far he had received absolutely no impression of her. A terrible self-consciousness had taken hold of him, so that he felt every movement or attitude of his to be a foolish and unsuccessful pose for her benefit. He dared a furtive peep at her. Her cheeks were fuller, her skin was of the same misty pallor as of old. Her clothes set her apart from the women he saw in workaday streets: a long skirt that made her look more tall and slender than anyone else in the group, a jacket that fell in loose, flaring folds from shoulder to waist like a short cape, a hat (to Jack a strange sight on a woman) and long cream gloves. She turned her candid gaze on him and smiled, and he jerked his head away ridiculously. He stared at the grave and longed for deliverance from his embarrassment.

  Joyce said, “It’s a lovely grave.” The headstone was of plain white marble, inscribed with Chris’s name and the dates of his birth and death: no rhymes and no gilt. The brown mound was surrounded by a low white wall of marble, and there was a bank of little flowers, blue and white, at its foot. “It must have cost no end. Who paid for it? Chris’s wife?”

  “Her!” Jack said bitterly, “She was in another man’s lap before she’d paid the undertaker. I reckon she chose her mourning clothes to go courting in.”

  His own words aroused in him a mournful feeling of defeat and desolation. This was how the past had petered out. The laughing children, the happy household, the flashing lightness of youth — all these were innocence, and innocence had died. One life had led to this grave, before which none of them had felt any recognition; another to Alf’s beer-bloated face; another — he sneaked a second sidelong glance at Rose’s smart clothes, and thought with sickness of some man’s thick, nicotine-stained fingers creeping over her body to exact the price of them. All life, after childhood, ran downhill. More painful than articulate thoughts, these fragments of comprehension struggled for release within him, and failing, died, leaving him puzzled and upset.

  “Mum saw to the grave,” Nancy said quietly.

  “She must have been a wonderful woman,” Joyce said. “I don’t know how she managed it, on her money. I mean, the way she was able to take the children on holiday every year, and keep them in clothes, and help Chris when he was ill, and everything like that. She must have had a magic purse.”

  Gran uttered a bitter cackle. They looked at her in surprise. She stood crouched over her stick, looking past the grave with an abstracted glare. Her head was shaking.

  Jack, who was still groping after his own fugitive halfthoughts, said, “It was his politics that done for Chris.”

  “Day and night,” Nancy said, “he never would listen. All his politics and his war work. It was wet clothes and snatched meals and not enough sleep for him all the time, ill as he was. I begrudge it when I see him forgotten and all the clever ones up the top getting the praise.”

  “Why begrudge it?” Rose said. “There ought to be more like Chris.”

  “Why begrudge it?” Jack answered. “Because he begrudged it, at the end, that’s why. Know the last time I saw Chris? I was on leave, in, — ooh, it must have been in forty-two, sometime. I gets off a bus in Old Street, all loaded up with clobber, pack, rifle, the whole bloody performance, you know — I’m walking past a block of buildings to the trolley stop when I hear a voice up on a landing. ‘Hallo,’ says I, ‘I know that voice.’ I look up. You know those buildings. Falling to bits. Iron landings. Smell ’em a mile off. And there’s this voice up on the landing, all hoarse like, nagging, that nasty husky cough every other minute. ‘Don’t give me your excuses,’ the chap’s saying, ‘I’m sick of listening to ’em. Think you’re clever the way you play me up?’ Nearly in tears the bloke is, by the sound of it, although he’s bullying away for all he’s worth. ‘I’ll have that rent off you,’ he says, ‘if I have to make you pawn every stick you possess. I told you, don’t start that hard luck stuff again. I’ll lose my job over you and your rent if I’m not careful, and I’m bloody sure I’d sooner see you in tears than my own wife and child.’ I can hear a woman crying her eyes out and saying, ‘Have a heart, can’t you? What you want to come here for shouting at us and making my life a misery?’ ‘Making your life a misery,’ the bloke bloody nigh screams, ‘it’s you who’s doing that to mine, all of you, all the lot of you, you’re all as bad as each other. The way you play me up. I’ll have it out on you, by God I will.’ And he comes down the stairs, shouting and coughing and grumbling, and he comes out into the street, and sure enough it’s Chris. You should have seen him. Thin. Yellow. Face like a bloody skull. All stooping, like — a nasty, cringy sort of stoop. Shabby. I tell you, it broke my bloody heart. I wished I could have cleared off without him seeing me. Well, it’s too late. He gives me a scared sort of look, then his face lights up, and he says, ‘Hallo, Jackie boy.’ Well, we stand there talking for a bit, ordinary things, like, as you might with anyone, then I come right out with it. ‘Look here, Chris,’ I says, ‘what’s all this lark in aid of?’ He says, ‘What lark?’ ‘This rent collecting lark,’ I says. ‘It ain’t exactly a bloody picnic by the sound of it.’ He laughs, gets all mixed up coughing, and then he says, ‘Too bloody true, boy. It’s the bane of my life.’ ‘Well, then,’ I says, ‘what you do it for?’ ‘I’m in a bad way,’ he says, ‘they’ve turned me off war work because of my lungs. I can’t get anything else. Every time I cough it’s a dead giveaway. I see the doctor every week, on the panel, and I get my sick benefit, but that doesn’t go far, not with my Estella, she’s a lady, she is, she’s not the kind to count pennies. Well, to be frank, Jack, since I haven’t got long, I thought I’d put a bit aside for her and the child while I could, so I took this on.’ ‘What about mum?’ I ask him, ‘she’d help you, wouldn’t she?’ ‘I’m fed up with sponging on her,’ he says, ‘I’ve got my pride.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘what about your Labour lot? You’ve done enough for them in your time.’ ‘Them,’ he says, ‘here,’ he says, ‘that’s the bloody working-class, that lot up there —’ and he points up at the flats — ‘the swine,’ he says, ‘driving me to my grave, they are.’ From what I heard, he’d been doing his bit to drive them to theirs, but I don’t suppose that occurred to him, poor devil. ‘I’d sell the lot of them for the price of a good dinner,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a right to, I tell you, after all I’ve been through.’ And that’s what poor old Chris thought about his life, at the end of it.”

  Nobody spoke for a while. Nancy wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. Rose said, “It makes no difference. He failed, but he did put up a fight.”

  Nancy sighed, and said, “Well, you’ll all come back to tea now, won’t you?”

  Their feet scraped in the gravel as they collected themselves uncertainly, preparing for the departure. Gran looked up, with a darting movement of her head. “Not with her,” she said suddenly, “not with he
r I won’t.”

  Jack exclaimed, “Here —”

  “You keep quiet. You know nothing. I’ve stood it long enough. I’ve stood here with my mouth shut out of respect for the dead. Why didn’t she have the decency to keep away? It was an insult to this one, yes, and to my own poor boy.”

  Rose began, “Please, Gran —”

  “Don’t you Gran me. I’m no Gran of yours.”

  Jack muttered to Joyce, “Oh, crumbs, what an afternoon it’s turned out.” The day’s tranquillity was gone. One shock, one mystification was following another.

  “Broken spine,” the old woman said, “it was a broken heart my poor son died of, not a broken spine. He lay there on his deathbed and he didn’t say a word. Oh, no, he didn’t say a thing. You needn’t worry. He couldn’t, poor child, dying there in torture. But he looked at me with his poor eyes, and his mother knew what was killing him. Yes, I knew as sure as if I had the proof for a court of law. Her!” she hissed. “Her and her mother! Not with her I’m not going. That’s flat. Not if you bring a pair of brewer’s horses to drag me.”

  Jack whispered to Nancy, “Here, what’s this all about?” She did not answer. Everything was happening around Jack as if he were not there. Nancy was crying. Tom was soothing her. Joyce was standing apart, displayed a frightened stare. Jack realised that Rose was speaking to him; he did not know what she was saying, nor what reply it was that he heard himself mumbling. Rose said to Nancy, “It’s all right, Nance, it’s nothing to cry about, darling. I should have come on my own some other time. It’s best if I go now. Don’t you worry about me. You go off home to tea.”

  Jack looked around. She was gone. It was incredible. The rest of them were standing there, in a dream, and she was gone. He could not convince himself, with any certainty, that she had been there at all.