The Rosary Garden by Nicola White (best books to read now TXT) 📕

‘And what about yourself – any children?’

He recoiled inside. He didn’t want to tell her about his personal circumstances, nor did he want to take her upstairs to some sagging clutter-draped bed. Not in this life. He tried to imagine Elizabeth in a dressing gown, entertaining some caller with a glimpse of her breasts over burnt coffee. Never.

Deirdre Hogan took his silence to be an admission of romantic failure.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.’

His disdain vanished. What was the good of having such an admirable wife when she was rarely at home, and hardly spoke to him when she was. They had a chasm between them. That’s what it was getting like, a black pit with no crossing place.

‘Tell me, Deirdre …’

She smiled at the intimacy of her name.

‘What would you do if your daughter came to you and said she was pregnant?’

‘Oh God, is that your trouble?’

‘No, it’s just a question. I don’t have any children.’

If we don’t try again, we’ll never know.

‘Well, I always say to Ali, she should come straight to me if anything like that happens; and, God, it can happen so easily, but I would never kick her out.’

He was inclined to believe her good intentions, but a parent’s intentions didn’t always impact on reality. He had a feeling the mother didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought.

17

Butterflies skittered about the purple thistle heads rising here and there above the grass and the frothy meadowsweet of the field. The sun suddenly broke through the clouds and Joan looked around and smiled. Beyond her curly head Ali could see the line of trees that marked the edge of the river.

Ali looked back towards the road. She could make out the whole top floor of Caherbawn above its surrounding hedges. She wished Joan hadn’t been so insistent that they come here for their picnic, so close to her aunt’s. She walked on, following in Joan’s tracks until they reached a bend in the river, screened by saplings.

A tongue of butterscotch-coloured sand jutted into the slow, dark water. The opposite bank was undercut, a ledge of rough grass hanging over a mud wall pocked with holes and burrows above the waterline. In the shadows of the trees, midges swirled like sparks.

Ali kicked off her sandals and bundled up the skirt of her dress, tying it in a knot in front, so that it hung in a baggy puff above her knees. Joan sat cross-legged on the river sand, beside the bag she had brought with her, squinting up, smiling.

‘It must be nice for you to be out in the open air.’

‘I’ve been out loads,’ said Joan. ‘My mother takes me shopping on Fridays, and I’ve been home for a few Christmases. I’ve even tried to stay out a few times, but something always happens.’

‘Like what?’

‘I lose the run of myself. I get panicky, and they take me back.’ She shrugged, then flicked her chin up. ‘Hey, do you see that?’

Ali turned to where Joan indicated. A frazzled grey rope hung over the water from a nearby branch.

‘That was your cousins’ swing. They’d stay down here for whole days in the summer, and me minding them, if your aunt could spare me. Make sure they don’t drown, she’d say. I hadn’t the nerve to tell her I couldn’t swim meself. But sure, they all grew up, didn’t they, though the twins had me terrified. Savages, they were.’

‘I remember Roisín talking about the river,’ said Ali. ‘But I never came down here.’

‘Were you never here in the summer?’

‘No, this is the first time I’ve stayed with them since, you know, my dad …’

Ali stepped into the water. It was the colour of strong tea, giving her legs an orange cast. Muddy sand oozed between her toes. She walked back and forth, calf-deep.

‘Are you coming for a paddle?’

But Joan was off on more memories, suddenly streaming with talk after her silence on the bus – things that the twins did to scare her, Brendan’s fishing exploits and how, if Roisín got splashed, she would squeal in a way that would make you deaf.

‘Did Davy not come down?’

‘Too grown-up he was. Or thought he was.’

Ali’s feet had numbed, so she came out of the water and sat down to unpack their picnic onto the fringed scarf she had brought to serve as a rug. Joan talked on. Two boiled eggs. Ham sandwiches that she had made behind her aunt’s back and wrapped in a bread packet. A bottle of lemonade and a yellow brick of Battenberg cake she had bought from the shop. Nothing looked as nice as she thought it would.

‘I’m famished. Have something, Joan.’

‘I need to tell you something.’

‘Oh?’ Ali rearranged the food and waited.

‘It wasn’t until I saw you. Standing in that corridor, tall as a woman – I realised how much time had passed. And now that it’s sunk in, it’s all different.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You saying there was no job at Caherbawn for me. I was waiting to get back to it all this time, waiting for your aunt to give in, waiting to get better. I’ve spent years up in Damascus House thinking they’d get me right, to take up my life again. But there’s no life to take up. Everything’s changed except me.’

Joan got up and started pacing, hands dug into her jeans pockets.

Ali watched her walk to the water’s edge. ‘Was it the baby … Was it that that put you in the hospital?’

Joan stooped to pick up a stone and flung it into the water. ‘It’s not a hospital, you know. It’s a residential facility.’

‘Sorry. You do seem pretty normal to me.’

‘I’m not well.’ Joan turned to look at her directly. ‘After the baby and losing the job, things were hard. I fell out with my family. I lived wild.’

She dropped down to settle on the other side of the picnic cloth, hugging her knees tightly to