On a Clear Day

by Anne Doughty

  ‘Ronnie, Ronnie, turn it off. Please, turn it off,’ she begged.

  ‘Does it frighten you, Clare?’ he asked, as he turned it off quite cheerfully.

  ‘It’s so cross, so angry. It’s angry with everything. Even me,’ she said, shuddering.

  ‘You are a strange one, Clare Hamilton. When you’re a big girl I’ll take you to a symphony concert but I’ll make sure it’s not Shostakovich.’

  ‘Will we go to that funny building near your school?’ she asked, her distress forgotten, her eyes shining.

  ‘That “funny building” my dear little cousin, is The Royal Opera House. But I have to admit it is rather idiosyncratic in style.’

  ‘Idiosyncratic? What does that mean?’

  Ronnie laughed and reached for his dictionary, found the place and gave it to her.

  ‘Idiosyncrasy. A peculiarity of temperament or mental constitution,’ she read out cautiously. ‘But you said “idiosyn-cratic”, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did. I did indeed. You have very sharp ears. Most little girls of your age couldn’t even manage to say a big word like that.’

  ‘I love big words,’ she replied giggling. ‘Daddy says the bigger the jawbreaker the better I like it.’

  ‘Right then, tomorrow night we’ll have the odd jawbreaker. It pays to improve your word power, you know,’ he said, as he put the dictionary carefully back in its place. ‘But it’s bedtime now. Pop down to Mum for your orange juice and I’ll see if I can find any pins in your bed. If I can’t find any I’ll put some in myself,’ he said, teasingly, as he opened the door to the tiny sewing room where she now slept.

  Much to Clare’s relief, school in Belfast ended the last week in June just as it did at home. July began with rainstorms and the thunder of Orange drums. Auntie Polly took her to Great-Aunt Annie’s house on the Lisburn Road on The Twelfth so she could watch the procession to the field at Finaghy.

  Clare leant out of the upstairs window and wondered how even the biggest field in all the world could accommodate the endless marching figures. She liked the bands, especially the silver flute bands and the lively tunes they played. She loved the plumes and kilts the bandsmen wore and the brilliant colours in the banners, the very white horses crossing very blue streams against vivid green fields on their way to the Boyne.

  Best of all were the tall figures who twirled great silver sticks, throwing them up in the air and catching them one handed as they fell. Her heart was in her mouth every time they sent them soaring above their heads. If they didn’t catch it as it fell the whole procession would tramp over them as they bent to pick it up. Clare decided they must have been practising for a long time, for not one of them ever showed the slightest anxiety.

  What she didn’t like were the big drums. The Lambegs. Daddy had once explained that there was music in drums if you listened, but Clare couldn’t bear to listen. When a group of perspiring men arrived below the window their arms bare, their faces red with effort, she put her hands over her ears. If Ronnie had been there she might have said the drums were angry like that Shostakovich man, but Ronnie was working in the newsagents for the summer months and today he would be very busy selling ice-creams from the freezer, for very few shops were open.

  ‘D’ye not like the drums, childdear?’ said Great-Aunt Annie kindly. ‘Sure ah niver liked them meself an’ me father usta make them, so I have no excuse. I growed up wi’ them, but the only bit about them I liked was the paintin’ o’ the pictures. Oh aye, I’da had a go at that if anywan had let me. Shure they’ll be past in a minit, niver worry yerself.’

  Great Aunt Annie was Granda Scott’s eldest sister, a tiny bent-over lady with wispy, grey hair and a thin, high-pitched voice. She made them both very welcome and told Clare the story about Auntie Polly meeting Uncle Jimmy and asking him to come for his tea the very next day. Annie hadn’t minded, but her husband had been shocked. He insisted that when he had started ‘walking out’, it was a year or more before you thought of asking someone to come home to tea.

  ‘Shure yer Uncle Thomas was always very particular, God rest his soul. Ye know he useta swear that the only cocoa he could drink was Bournville and that anything else diden agree wi’ him. That was all very well, but wi’ the war on you was lucky to get what you coud lay yer hans on. So what I useta do was always keep an empty tin of Bournville and whatever cocoa I could get, I’d put in it.’ She paused. ‘An’ ye know, childdear, he niver knew to the difference.’

  She laughed her thin little laugh and Clare wondered if when you were very old your voice wore out like your eyes and your hair and your teeth. Her great-aunt didn’t seem to mind that her voice was funny and her legs were stiff and her hands had funny-looking bumps on them, not like Granny Scott who seemed to mind everything. Mummy said it was a pity to be such a complainer but everyone’s temperament was different and her mother had always complained, even when she was a young woman and was no worse off than any of the other mill girls, who had been breathing tow for years and all had trouble with their chests.

  ‘Och it’s a thousand pities about your Mummy and Daddy, childdear. Your poor Granda is in a bad way about her,’ Annie began, when the three of them came downstairs to make a cup of tea.

  Clare shivered and wished the kettle would hurry up and boil for the kitchen was chilly and dim. Only a feeble north light penetrated the tall, dirty window that looked out over the jaw box into a yard bounded by a high brick wall with fragments of glass on top. The gas pressure was low, so the kettle was sulking, a few spilt drips of water hissed as they fell on the wavering blue flames. Clare perched on a kitchen chair out of the way, looked around her and wondered how Auntie Annie ever got anything down from the top of the huge cupboards that climbed up the walls, or how she managed with her thin arms to pull the rope for the clothes airer that hung suspended over the sink. Everything in the kitchen was either dark or greasy and there was a smell of drains mixed with the odour of unburnt gas. Clare longed to go back upstairs into the sunlight.

  ‘He actually wrote me a letter, Polly, and ye know yer father’s no scholar, saying how he missed his wee Ellie,’ she went on. ‘An’ now, of course, he has this other trouble. It’s looking very bad with yer mother. Have ye heard anything more recent-like than me?’

  At that point Clare was despatched upstairs with the tray and cups while Polly made the tea, but the sound of Aunt Annie’s voice was surprisingly penetrating. As Clare put the tray down, her thin, piping tone echoed in the narrow, uncarpeted stairwell.

  ‘Am afraid, Polly, if she gets the pneumonia again with the state of her poor lungs, we can’t hope for much.’

  Clare rattled the cups as she put them on their saucers for she knew she hadn’t been meant to hear what they said. But she had heard. Suddenly, as if a great dark cloud had rolled away, she knew she would be able to go home. When Granny Scott died she would go and look after Granda just like Heidi had done. She would pick flowers in the orchard and in the old overgrown garden that had once been her great-grandmothers, she would feed the hens and brush the old black spaniel and hold the reins of the big horses when they came to be shod. And she would cycle to school in Armagh and be back in Miss Slater’s class again. When she sat beside Margaret Beggs again she would tell her all about the awful school in Belfast.

  When Polly and Annie came back upstairs they were surprised to see Clare leaning out of the window, smiling to herself, as if enjoying the lively music, when, in fact, the band that was passing on the road below was having a rest, with only one of its kilted and beribboned members playing a single note on a side drum to keep the brothers of their lodge in step.

  If it hadn’t been for the thought that she would be going home again one day, July would have been an even worse time for Clare. The weather broke again after the Twelfth and day after day was wet and sodden. Ronnie had found a holiday job at the Tudor Stores. It wasn’t far away and Auntie Polly let her go and do messages for her there, but the hours were long. Often Ronnie didn’t get home
till almost bedtime. She would look forward all day to seeing him and then the time they had went so quickly.

  Auntie Polly had two wedding dresses to finish for the second Saturday in August and they were not going well. The awkwardly-shaped sisters arrived for fittings at regular intervals, leaving Auntie Polly anxious and agitated. At night, the dresses hung from the picture rail over Clare’s bed. As the linings went in to support the heavy brocade of the crinoline skirts, they grew larger each day, taking up more and more the space in the small room. When she woke in the night, Clare had to remind herself not to be frightened of the ghostly shapes that loomed over her.

  When the rain stopped and the sun came out, Clare had the idea of digging the garden and planting some seeds. As soon as Uncle Jimmy had finished helping his neighbour to rewire his house she’d ask his advice about where to start. She was sure that if she did the digging he would be happy to get some plants from his friend’s gardens like her father used to do. But the lull in the wet weather was only temporary. Before the rewiring job was finished she could see water lying in all the hollows between what had once been Uncle Jimmy’s potato rigs. There was nothing else to do except go back to her reading, lying on the sitting-room floor, ready to jump up and answer the phone should it ring or slip her book neatly under the sofa if someone should arrive early for a fitting.

  When she ran out of library books and had to wait till someone could take her down on the bus to get some more, she read whatever she could lay her hands on. Uncle Jimmy’s few books were all about biplanes and monoplanes and had been written before the war. Clare marvelled at the pictures of the flimsy craft that had first flown across the Atlantic, so different from the deep-bellied Sunderlands Uncle Jimmy had worked on at Shorts and the famous Flying Fortresses he so admired.

  She finished Uncle Jimmy’s handful of books and started on Eddie’s copies of Picturegoer. She was amazed to find that film-stars kept getting married and divorced. Some of them had had as many as seven husbands. The idea struck her as very confusing. She wondered how they managed when they all lived in the same place in Hollywood, starred in the same pictures and appeared to go to the same parties.

  But Eddie’s magazines came in handy when Ronnie took her to see The Wizard of Oz on his Saturday afternoon off. She thought Judy Garland was so marvellous that she looked up the address of her fan club in England and wrote her a letter asking nicely if she could have a signed photograph. She sent it off with a stamped addressed envelope and watched every post for it to arrive. She was so disappointed when it never came. She felt particularly upset as it had needed two tuppenny-halfpenny stamps which Ronnie had bought for her.

  When there was nothing else to be found, Clare read the women’s magazines that one or two of the nicer of the customers brought for Auntie Polly. Some of the stories were quite interesting and she liked the descriptions of rocky coastlines and heather-covered slopes and dimpled fields with streams babbling along. The stories always seemed to happen in quaint little villages by the sea, or overlooking the lough, or in a hollow in the hills where the heroine had grown up. Now she was famous but unhappy, or rich but unhappy and had come back to be by herself. Usually she fell in love with her childhood sweetheart who was a farmer, or a postman, or a struggling artist, but whatever he was, it always ended happily. Clare did wonder why so many of these pretty, young women hadn’t found a boyfriend in the city where they lived, as there were bound to be far more young men there than in their own village, where there only ever appeared to be the one.

  Ronnie teased her one evening when he arrived back from work and found her sitting at his table reading his Mum’s magazines.

  ‘How about this, Clare,’ he began, opening the newspaper he had brought home with him and turning to the Beauty for You page. ‘Doris Gibb says that “despite the shortages of beauty products in the shops you can still look your best by using simple remedies and a little ingenuity. Eggs are a wonderful asset in the beauty battle.” Do you hear that, Clare? Pin your ears back. “For a reviving and stimulating face pack take the whites of two eggs, whisk briskly and cover the face lightly avoiding the eyes. Leave in place for thirty minutes.”’

  Ronnie raised his face from the newspaper, fluttered his long, dark eyelashes at her and collapsed into helpless laughter.

  ‘How about it, Clare? Shall I whisk for you?’

  ‘I’d rather have my egg boiled. With toast,’ Clare replied with a perfectly straight face.

  ‘Yes, I thought you might. You’re distinctly weak on vanity. Shall we have a jawbreaker from V tonight? How about vainglorious, verisimilitude, versification? Take your pick, as the gaffer said to the navvy.’

  ‘What’s a gaffer?’

  But before Ronnie could reply, the phone rang loudly, but not loudly enough to be heard over ITMA which he knew his Mum and Dad were listening to in the living room.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Clare. I’d better answer that,’ he said, crossing the room in two of his long strides.

  It might only be a customer, some of them did ring in the evening which annoyed Auntie Polly, but something told Clare that it wasn’t. It was a strange feeling she got sometimes, as if she knew something important was going to happen next, except that she didn’t know what it would be.

  She leant over the banisters and saw that Ronnie was listening hard, his body very still, quite unlike the way he usually stood when he was answering the phone. She’d watched him often, seen him move from one foot to the other, scratch his back with his free hand or make faces at himself in the mirror that hung above the telephone table.

  ‘Yes, yes. I’ll get her right away.’

  Clare waited and listened as Auntie Polly emerged from the living room.

  ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.’

  Clare recognised the familiar complaining tone of Mona Lot. Daddy so enjoyed Mona Lot and he could imitate her perfectly. Every Saturday at lunchtime he would listen to the repeat of his favourite programme even if he’d heard it at its usual time. ‘Some of the jokes are so quick, you can’t catch them the first time,’ he would say.

  There was a burst of laughter from the audience, cut short as Uncle Jimmy managed to pull himself to his feet and turn the knob on the wireless.

  ‘Is that you, Bob? And you’re in Armagh?’

  If it was Uncle Bob then it was bad news, for Uncle Bob and his wife seldom visited either Polly and Jimmy or his old home at Salter’s Grange. Mummy said Bob was the best at all but his wife was a social climber. She hadn’t much time for Bob’s family but Bob was good to his parents in his own way. A phone call could mean only one thing and it was only moments before Clare heard what she had been half expecting from the moment the phone rang.

  ‘What did the doctor say? Daddy always lets me know when the chest starts up. He hadn’t sent me any word.’

  Ronnie had slipped back upstairs and now sat down beside her on the top step. He put his arm round her.

  ‘Poor old Granny,’ he whispered. ‘Looks like her ticker packed up.’

  They listened together as Polly asked about the details of the funeral. Clare wondered if she should be crying, but she didn’t feel at all like crying. Perhaps, after all, she hadn’t much liked her Granny Scott. Not that she knew her very well. Whenever they went to see her she never talked to her, she always spent the time complaining to Mummy about her legs and her chest and someone called Jinny who was nothing but a sluter but who could close her hand on her money as quick as the next one.

  Auntie Polly wasn’t crying either as she put the phone down and when Uncle Jimmy came and put his arm round her she just said ‘Up early tomorrow Jimmy dear. I’ll have to go up and give Bob a hand before the funeral. Do you think one of your shirts would fit my father? He might not have a clean one to his name.’

  Clare missed her aunt badly while she was away in Armagh at Granny’s funeral, but she missed her even more when she arrived back tired and anxious and shut herself up in her room every day with th
e wedding dresses not yet finished and the bridesmaid’s dresses not even begun. Even at mealtimes, when she came down and cooked for the family, she was silent and unapproachable, not her normal self at all.

  Clare waited and watched. Whatever was upsetting Auntie Polly would make it more difficult for her to talk about her plan. She would have to be good and wait till Auntie Polly felt better. Perhaps it was just the wretched wedding dresses. She’d be very glad herself to see them gone.

  She found the days passed very slowly. Nothing interesting ever happened, unless you could count customers arriving at the door, or phoning to see when they could come. Now that she answered the door and the phone some of the customers knew her name. Auntie Polly said that was something at least. While they were busy being nice to Clare they forgot to be as awkward as possible with her.

  One evening, something unusual did happen. Uncle Jimmy arrived back from helping his neighbour much later than usual. Clare knew her aunt was cross from the way she walked and the way her mouth looked smaller, but Auntie Polly said nothing and when Uncle Jimmy handed Clare a paper bag she watched carefully.

  ‘I came across that on me way home. D’ye think it woud be any use to ye?’ he said in a most off-hand manner.

  Even Eddie looked up from his ham salad to see what was going on.

  ‘Uncle Jimmy!’ Clare exclaimed, as she opened the bag and drew out a teddy bear, a brand-new teddybear with bright, shiny eyes and golden brown fur.

  She went and put her arms round him, meaning to give him a kiss and say a proper thank you. She promptly burst into tears. She cried as if her heart would break and was still crying until Ronnie said; ‘Clare, if you don’t stop crying, that poor bear will get mildew on his fur. Bears don’t like water.’

  Then she laughed and said she was sorry she was being silly. Auntie Polly told her she wasn’t to mind one bit, that she’d been such a good girl and such a help with the phone and the door, but she did wonder where Uncle Jimmy had found such a lovely bear and him so new too.