by Annie Groves
But of course it was impossible for Ricardo to know what was happening and impossible too for her to be able to tell him before she left.
Instead she had to explain as best she could to Sheila that she had been summoned back to Liverpool and that she had no idea how long she would be gone.
‘You’ll make sure that Ricardo knows what’s happened, won’t you?’ she begged her, wishing as she did so that Mary was here for her to entrust her message to.
But Mary, of course, was with Ian. Lucky, lucky Mary to be with the one she loved.
PART FOUR
Summer 1941
TWENTY-SIX
Rosie had known about the bombing, of course, but knowing about it had not prepared her for the devastation and the destruction of her home city. It caught her by the throat and paralysed her with distress and shock; so much so that every time she came to a fresh place where the building she had once known had now gone, she stood and stared, oblivious to the irritation of those around her, who bumped into her and cursed under their breath.
Lewis’s had been bombed out and so too had Mrs Verey’s shop. Rosie shuddered as she looked at the blackened shell of the building where she had spent so many hours of her life. If Mrs Verey hadn’t planned to close the shop she and the other girls might even have been there when the fateful bomb dropped.
Rosie’s pace slackened as she walked up Wavertree Road. The damage was less up here, although still visible in the early evening light. At the end of her aunt’s road she stopped. She didn’t want to do this. She could never forget her aunt’s unkindness to her, and she hated being parted from Ricardo. But she knew it was what her father would have wanted and expected her to do. It was for his sake that she was here, not her aunt’s.
‘Rosie, it is you, isn’t it?’
Rosie stopped to return Molly Dearden’s warm smile.
‘You’ll have come back on account of your auntie, I expect?’ Molly asked her sympathetically. ‘I am sorry. How have you been?’
‘I had a message to say that she was poorly,’ Rosie answered her. ‘I’m in the Land Army now and they’ve given me compassionate leave to be with her.’
Molly reached out and gave her arm a small sympathetic squeeze. ‘If there’s anything I can do, just say the word,’ she entreated before going on her way.
The house still looked the same as when she had left it all those months ago, and Rosie still had the same sickly mixture of dread and misery churning her stomach that she remembered from every visit she had made here. It had been a hot day, and the smell of dust and devastation that hung on the city air stung her nose as though she was alien to it after the long weeks of country living.
Rosie lifted the latch on the gate. It wasn’t too late. She could turn round and go back; tell the warden that she had changed her mind; lie to her even; fling herself into Ricardo’s arms and beg him to let her give herself to him after all.
But she knew that she wouldn’t. Because her father would have wanted her to do what she could for her aunt. And as his daughter she had to prove his trust in her had not been misplaced.
Her throat had gone so dry that she could hardly swallow. She lifted her hand towards the door knocker but before she could use it the door opened.
A small middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform stood in the hallway.
‘You’re the niece, I hope.’ Her voice was brisk and sharp. ‘The hospital said that they’d finally managed to track you down.’
Now Rosie thought that an edge of disapproval had been added to the briskness. ‘My aunt…’ she began uncertainly.
‘Upstairs in bed. The doctor came earlier. He’ll be round again tomorrow so you can talk to him then. She’ll be asleep most of the time from now on.’
Now that she was inside the hallway Rosie could smell the carbolic and what it wasn’t quite masking.
‘What – what exactly is it that’s wrong with her?’ she asked. As she waited for the nurse’s reply Rosie could not quite help looking up the stairs. As though she expected her aunt to appear at the top of them, telling her to leave.
The nurse’s lips folded into a tight line. ‘That’s for the doctor to discuss with you, miss. Now, if you don’t mind I’ll get me coat and be on me way.’
‘No wait…’ Rosie swallowed against the acid taste of her own panic. ‘They said…they told me that…that it was serious, and that—’
‘She hasn’t got much time left, although sometimes they hang on longer than you expect. Why, I do not know when you think of the pain they’re in. You’d think they’d be glad to let go.’
Rosie shuddered, thinking how awful it must be to be left in the care of someone who was so obviously uncaring. Had she loved her aunt she would have been beside herself with guilt at the thought of this woman nursing her. But she couldn’t help it: she could not find any love for her, Rosie admitted. The love that had brought her here was for her father.
‘I think you’d better tell me what I have to do for my aunt before you leave,’ she managed to find the determination to insist to the nurse. ‘I’m not a nurse, of course.’
‘That you aren’t,’ the older woman agreed sniffily. ‘And there’s nothing you can do for her, except follow the doctor’s instructions. She’ll be asleep now until he comes tomorrow.’
‘But if she should wake up…’
‘You can sponge her down and see if you can get her to drink some water. Mind you, she won’t if she thinks you want her to. Never had such an awkward, disobliging patient, I haven’t. Some folk don’t know when they’re well off and that’s a fact.’
It was almost dark by the time the nurse had left. Rosie went round the house putting up the blackout curtains and so putting off the time when she would have to go upstairs and see her aunt. But eventually it couldn’t be put off any longer.
She climbed the stairs, tensing as the forgotten stair halfway up creaked, still expecting, despite what the nurse had told her, to hear her aunt calling out sharply, demanding to know what she was doing. But there was only silence.
The sickly smell of decay the carbolic had masked downstairs was stronger up here. Rosie closed her mind to what it meant as she pushed open her aunt’s bedroom door. Ignoring the bed, she went first to the window to sort out the blackout before turning back to the bed.
Her first shock was seeing how small her aunt had become, her body barely lifting the bedclothes, as though all her flesh had melted from her bones. Her second was the sight of her aunt’s face, with its yellowed skin drawn tight to the bones. One frail hand rested on top of the bedclothes, its fingers curled into a small claw.
Rosie remembered that there had been a woman in the street when she had been a child who had died like this, the flesh falling from her bones whilst her disease ate away at her.
Suddenly she was trembling so much she could hardly stand. She needed desperately to get out of this room but she made herself stay until she was sure that her aunt was, as the nurse had said, deeply asleep and as comfortable as someone in her situation could be.
There was hardly any food in the house and Rosie’s first task was to go out and do some shopping. She was standing in a queue outside a greengrocer’s in the city when she heard a familiar voice hailing her.
‘Rosie!’
‘Rob!’ She had tensed when she heard Rob saying her name, reluctant to turn round and wishing that he had not seen her. Now, knowing what love was, she felt even worse about having hurt him.
But when she did turn to look at him, Rob was smiling warmly at her and standing next to him, holding tightly to his arm, was a small pretty blonde girl.
‘I thought it was you. This is Angela.’ Rob introduced the girl proudly, adding in a softer voice, ‘my angel.’
‘Oh, go on, you,’ the girl giggled, but Rosie could see how much in love with one another they were.
They chatted for a few minutes, then said goodbye and turned to leave, but just before they did, Rob told her quietly, ‘You were right to
do what you did about us, Rosie, and I’m glad you had the courage to do it, especially now that I’ve met Angela.’
She was pleased for him, of course she was, oh, but seeing another couple so happy together did make her heart ache for Ricardo.
‘You’ll be the niece, I expect?’ The doctor’s words might be the same as those of the nurse, but the doctor himself looked far more approachable than she had done, Rosie decided thankfully as she held open the front door to let him in.
She had slept in her old room, finding bedding for its narrow stripped bed, knowing even as she made it up that she wouldn’t sleep.
‘How is your aunt?’
‘She’s awake,’ Rosie told him, ‘but she doesn’t seem to know me. I tried to give her a drink of water like the nurse said, but she wouldn’t let me.’
‘It isn’t unusual for patients in her condition to behave that way. She is very poorly, I’m afraid. I don’t know how much you’ve been told…’
He was younger than Rosie had expected, and he walked with a slight limp.
‘Not much. Only that her condition is…that she’s dying.’
Would he hear the relief in her voice?
‘Yes, she is. The tumour was very large and although she’s had an operation to remove it…I’m sorry. All we can do now is make her as comfortable as possible. I’ll come every day to see her and if you think you might need me in between times, you can send a message to the surgery. I’ll go up now and take a look at her, shall I?’
One day slid into two and then three, and Rosie’s life became her duties in the sickroom and her care for her dying aunt. Physically her time was occupied, but nursing her aunt couldn’t occupy her thoughts or keep them at bay. Guiltily, Rosie admitted to herself how much she longed to be back in Cheshire, with her friends and Ricardo. She missed them all so very much. The girls from Birmingham had become as close to her as though she had known them all her life; her love for Ricardo couldn’t have been stronger if they had been courting for years. The bonds she had formed with her friends, and most especially with Ricardo, strengthened and supported her and without them she felt vulnerable and alone.
She had been back in Liverpool four days when the letter arrived. It was lying face down in the hallway along with some others, so she picked it up and carried it into the kitchen, putting it on the table, and that was when she saw the familiar handwriting on it and felt the kitchen floor tilt violently beneath her feet with the shock.
Her father’s handwriting. How could that be? It wasn’t possible.
The letter was addressed to her aunt. Rosie had never ever contemplated opening someone else’s mail nor ever imagined that she might do so, but she didn’t hesitate for one second in tearing at the manila envelope. Her hands were trembling as she removed the letter that was inside it.
My dear sister,
Have you heard anything from Rosie yet? I keep hoping that she will have been in touch with you. I know you said you would try to find out where she was for me, and I am grateful to you for that. I am sorry she caused you so much distress, speaking to you the way she did and saying that she wanted nothing more to do with you. That isn’t like my Rosie but then she’d had a lot to bear before I left. I think of her all the time, tell her if you should hear from her, and I love her dearly.
I’m getting used to managing on the one leg now, and the doc here says that I’m lucky I didn’t lose the other, what with me being in the sea for so long before I was picked up and the frostbite.
I’m a lot better now, though, and now that I’ve got a bit of a job here in Canada I don’t mind so much having to stay here until after the war’s over.
Don’t forget: tell Rosie I love her if she should get in touch.
With love, Gerry
Her father was alive! Her aunt had known that and yet she had never told her. Rosie remembered how she had been driven by her conscience to slip that piece of paper with her new details as a land girl on it through the letter box of this house before she had left Liverpool. Her aunt could have traced her if she had wanted to do so. But she hadn’t. Cruelly, instead she had let her continue to think that her father was dead.
She picked up the letter from her father that she had just put down, holding it as tightly as though it was his hand. She was still too shocked to feel any joy. Shocked and, yes, angry too. She looked up at the ceiling.
Putting down the letter she went to the door and made her way upstairs.
Her aunt lay unmoving on the bed, her face almost waxen and her eyes closed. What went on inside her head? Did she feel any remorse at all for what she had done? Had she ever lain here at night, tormented by feelings of guilt or regret? There was so much Rosie wanted to say to her, so much anger and hurt within herself that she wanted to rid herself of. But her aunt was dying, and even if she could have heard her Rosie couldn’t bring herself to darken the dying woman’s last hours with angry words and bitterness. No matter how justified they might be.
Her aunt was barely breathing, and lost to what was going on around her, but Rosie still lifted the blackout blinds, and opened the window to let in the warmth of the sun-scented air – not properly fresh like country air, but still preferable to the sickly, unmoving and heavy sweetness of the air in the bedroom.
When she was satisfied that she had done as much as she could to make her aunt’s room comfortable, Rosie went back downstairs. She couldn’t leave the house until the doctor had been but she desperately wanted to write to her father.
She went to the sideboard and pulled open the drawer where she remembered her aunt had kept her writing paper and envelopes.
The drawer wouldn’t open properly. Rosie could see the writing paper but she couldn’t get it out because of a thick pile of envelopes that were jamming the drawer. It took her several minutes to work them free and remove them. Tied together with a piece of ribbon, which had now come unfastened, the letters had all been opened, and Rosie saw that they were from her father and were all addressed to her.
An hour later she had read them all, from the first, explaining how he had survived the sinking of his ship and been picked up by another ship and taken to Canada, after several dreadful hours in the icy cold sea, to the latest, reassuring her yet again that he had never been in any doubt that she was his daughter.
I’m not denying that I felt very bitter about what your mother did when she took up with that Aldo, and then started taking you round there to that Italian lot, like you was theirs and not mine. Many a word we had about her doing that, but she never paid me any mind. I’ll be honest, Rosie. I was glad when they moved away, and I didn’t have to see them any more and be reminded of what your mother had done. But that’s in the past now. Your mother’s gone, but you and me are still here. I keep thinking of you, Rosie, and imagining you marrying that nice young chap of yours. A good decent lad he is that I’d be happy to see you wed to.
Tears misted Rosie’s eyes as she put down this last letter. She had been so caught up in the joy of learning that her father was alive that she hadn’t thought until now how he was going to feel about her and Ricardo. Her father would never be able to understand or accept her loving and marrying an Italian. If he knew…if he knew. What was she thinking? That she could keep Ricardo and their love for one another a secret from him? That she could marry Ricardo and not tell her father? That she could let her father go on thinking as he did now that she had disappeared and could not be traced? It tore at her heart to even think of doing any of those things.
But it also tore at her heart to think of giving up Ricardo and their love.
Was this how her mother had felt about Aldo? Had she too been filled with despair and stricken with pain at the thought of living her life without the man she loved? Was she after all her mother’s daughter and not her father’s? Admitting that she loved Ricardo had opened a door to a part of herself she had not previously known existed. The coolness and lack of response she had felt towards other men, including Rob, had made her th
ink that she simply wasn’t a girl who was given to falling in love and passion, but her feelings for Ricardo had told her differently.
Some girls fell in and out of love a dozen times with a dozen different men, throwing off any heartache they might suffer in the excitement of a new love affair, but Rosie knew now that she wasn’t like that, and that she would love only once and so deeply that her love, once given, could never be taken back.
But she loved her father as well as Ricardo, and she had loved him first and longest. He had a father’s right to her love and she felt very strongly about her daughterly duty towards him.
A firm knock on the front door brought her out of the bleakness of her thoughts.
‘How is your aunt this morning?’ the doctor asked her when she had let him.
‘She was asleep when I went in to her earlier,’ Rosie told him as he stood back to allow her to precede him up the stairs.
Previously Rosie had only experienced death in the shocking destruction and violence of war. But she knew immediately she looked towards the bed that her aunt had gone.
The doctor was kind but efficient.
‘You must not be too upset,’ he told Rosie firmly. ‘It is a blessing in many ways that your aunt did not linger.’
Had she slipped away in her sleep, not knowing that her life was over, not knowing that she was dying alone and unloved, or had she roused from her semi-conscious state and felt remorse for the unhappiness she had caused and regret for what she had done?
She would never know, Rosie acknowledged. She was glad now that she had not been granted the opportunity of challenging her aunt over what she had done, for the sake of her own conscience. She could not mourn her aunt’s death, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t feel pity for her.
By the end of the day Rosie had done everything that needed to be done. It had taken her a long time but she had finally managed to write a letter to her father that she hoped wouldn’t betray to him too much of her bitter anger against his now dead sister.
