Remembering Rose (Mapleby Memories Book 1) Page 3

  “Feeling better today are you, Rachel? Daniel said you weren’t too good yesterday. He seemed really worried about you but I suppose that’s only to be expected when you’ve had such a rough time of it.”

  Underneath the sympathy I heard what she was really saying although to most people it probably sounded like genuine concern. She was telling me to be careful, that if I worried Daniel once too often he would look somewhere else for solace, and that when he did she would be waiting. It was something I worried about too on the rare occasions I stopped feeling sorry for myself, so it was why my tongue was sharper than usual.

  “I’m fine. One off day isn’t exactly the beginning of a major illness.”

  She came around the counter to look at Leah. Leah stared back at her through those dark eyes that are exactly like Daniel’s. The dimple in her cheek is the same too. Only her hair is like mine, or at least it will be when it grows to more than a few wispy curls on the top of her head

  “She’s the spit of her daddy, isn’t she?” I had to force myself not to jerk the stroller away when she bent close and made those stupid noises that pass for baby talk. Leah, however, was having none of it. Without me lifting a finger she went into total melt down, her screams ratcheting upwards until Millie backed away.

  “Goodness she’s got quite a temper, hasn’t she?” She flushed slightly as she retreated behind the counter while I dangled my keys over the pram in an attempt to distract my angry daughter.

  Although I wanted to award Leah five stars for picking up on my dislike in such a big way, I kept the satisfaction out of my voice when I asked Millie where Daniel was. She didn’t keep the satisfaction out of hers when she told me though.

  “He’s in town all day today. First he’s going to the wholesalers and then he has to see someone about getting some flyers made in time for the holiday season, and he said he has some sort of business meeting too.”

  Although I didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about, I wasn’t going to let her know that, so I just nodded wisely and made some excuse about having forgotten what day it was. I knew she didn’t believe me but as she couldn’t prove a thing I claimed another point on our virtual score board. My satisfaction didn’t last however, not when I made the mistake of asking her how long she was filling in for Patsy, the cheerful middle-aged woman Daniel had taken on to replace me when I went on maternity leave.

  “Patsy left. Didn’t he tell you? Her daughter is ill with something really nasty and she’s gone off to look after the children.”

  Millie’s long hazel eyes held a gleam of triumph as they met mine, and although the rational part of my mind could understand why Daniel hadn’t told me about Patsy’s daughter when I was so ill myself, the other part wanted to strangle him.

  “So you’re helping out until she comes back. That’s nice of you Millie.”

  She shook her head as her mouth quirked into an amused smile. “Not helping out, Rachel. I work here. I’ve been working here for three weeks now…ten ‘til three with half-an-hour for lunch. Daniel was great when I said the job would have to fit in with school hours.”

  I stared at her. So that was why Daniel had started leaving so early every morning. Someone needed to open up for the parents on the school run, the commuters on their way to the station, the ‘up with the lark’ dog walkers. It was all trade we couldn’t afford to lose and when I was working we had always shared the early opening, and that had been the agreement with Patsy as well. She was someone we had both known since the days she had run the now defunct Post Office, so when she agreed to work for us we had been delighted. With Patsy in charge there would be nothing to worry about when Daniel wasn’t there. Yet, without telling me, he had replaced her with someone I didn’t like and who was taking him for a ride over what hours she was prepared to work. Worse, he hadn’t even told me about Patsy’s daughter. For the second time in ten minutes I wanted to kill my husband.

  Taking my stunned silence for exactly what it was, Millie gave me another one of those smiles. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”

  When I shook my head, she tilted hers slightly sideways, finger to cheek. “I expect he didn’t want to worry you, not with you struggling to cope and everything.”

  I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could and hoped she couldn’t hear my teeth grinding together in anger. “It’s not exactly an important decision is it, employing a part-time assistant? He probably just forgot.”

  It was a bit lame as retorts go but the spots of color on her cheeks told me the barb had struck home. I gave her a false smile. “I only called in to pick up some chocolates and a bottle of wine. Ma babysat yesterday while Daniel and I went out for a meal, so it’s the least I can do.”

  Her face soured slightly and it was then that I remembered she was a single mum whose husband had left her three months after her youngest boy was born. She had been the first of all the girls at school to get married, the first to have children, and now she was the first to get divorced. Her parents were both dead too, so she didn’t get to go out much at all what with the cost of babysitters and the fact that going out wasn’t much fun unless you had someone to go out with. It was when I remembered her situation that I knew why Daniel had employed her. It was because he felt sorry for her and because he knew that a job that fitted in with school hours would make her life a whole lot easier.

  I should have felt pleased about it; glad I was married to such a thoughtful man. Instead, all I felt was aggrieved, even if it was tinged with a slight feeling of guilt. As far as I was concerned Millie Carter’s hard life was all of her own making…well not her parents being dead obviously…but the rest of it, and Daniel had no right to let her problems interfere with our life. He had let Millie snatch away his early mornings with Leah and me just so she could take her kids to school. The evenings too. No chance of him ever finishing early while Millie worked for him, not unless she let her children run riot in the shop.

  “I’ll take those,” I pointed to a box of chocolates on the shelf behind her, my voice as neutral as I could make it. “And this looks okay.” I plucked a bottle of white wine from the cooler.

  She handed me the chocolates and told me the total cost, and then asked how she should put it through the till. I told her to talk to Daniel. As far as I was concerned he had employed her without saying a word to me, so he could explain the system when we took stuff from the shelves for our own use.

  She nodded and then came around the counter to open the door for me. I maneuvered the pram out with a now sleeping Leah inside, all the while wishing she hadn’t done that. I wanted to carry on feeling angry with her. I wanted to be able to tell Daniel he had made a mistake employing someone like her, someone who would need to take days off when one of her children was sick. I wanted ammunition to pick a fight with him. Instead, Millie made me feel a bit ashamed when she helped me maneuver the stroller down the step, which was why I smiled at her I guess. The warmth of her response startled me.

  “Hang in there Rachel,” she said. “It’s tough at the beginning but it will get better, especially when you’ve got someone like Daniel to share it with.”

  * * *

  I pondered her words as I pushed Leah through the village and then down the dusty track that led to the farm. Well farm is a bit of an exaggeration, it’s a smallholding really, with a few chickens and ducks, two goats, and an ancient horse who spends most of his time nodding sleepily under the apple tree and is no good for anything at all these days.

  Long before I’d come to any conclusion about what Millie had said, I reached the farmhouse. The kitchen door was wide open and a hen was pecking at some groundsel that was growing in a crack in the doorstep. Buffy, the border collie, whose main aim in life is to herd any child she sees into the barn, came running to meet me, her tail wagging. I pulled her ears, apologized for not having a biscuit in my pocket and parked the stroller in the shade. Leah was safe enough here because the farm was at least half a mile from the road, and anyway Buffy
would bark if a stranger came into the yard. Anywhere else and I’d have her in her baby carrier and strapped to me, asleep or not.

  I could hear the laughter echoing around the kitchen before I stepped inside. Well, cackling really because Catherine, my second sister, is known for her ridiculous laugh. She makes the sort of screeching sound that would be funny if she wasn’t related but as she is, it’s just embarrassing. It’s infectious though and she had obviously set Ma off and Rebecca, my youngest sister, who was there as well. I expected them to stop when they saw me, instead of which they all exploded into even more laughter.

  “What…what?” I looked from them to the two boxes on the table and back again.

  “Sorry love…it’s just…you…it’s…” Ma couldn’t go on.

  Catherine snorted as she rummaged in one of the boxes, found a photo and held it out to me. I stared at it. It was me at two years old wearing nothing but wellington boots and a ferocious scowl.

  “Here’s another one…and another one,” She picked two more photos from the box and dropped them onto the table. I peered at them. They were more of the same. Me, the wellingtons and the scowl.

  I could see I was cute. I could also see that the wellingtons added something, but I had no idea why Ma and my sisters found the photos quite so funny, and I said so.

  “That’s because you don’t remember,” Ma told me when she finally managed to compose herself. “You refused to wear clothes for most of that summer. As fast as I put them on you, you stripped them off, except for the wellies. You would have even worn those in bed if you could have gotten away with it.”

  “Do you remember when Auntie Jane came to visit?” Rebecca asked Ma and they all dissolved into splutters of laughter again. I could guess why without being told because Auntie Jane, who was actually Ma’s cousin, was single, childless, and notoriously straight-laced. None of us could ever fathom why she bothered to visit the chaotic Pavalak household when all she did was tut and complain. Pa said it was because it made her feel superior. Ma said it was because she lived in the vain hope that one day we would listen to her and mend our ways. Only Daniel, on the two occasions he had met her since we got married, had wondered if it was because she was lonely. We had all scoffed him big time of course, and told him he wouldn’t be so charitable if he had to put up with her visits every year. He nodded as if he took the point but when she visited last Christmas I noticed he spent quite a long time talking to her. They even took Buffy for a walk together.

  I shrugged off the memory and began to rummage in the box of photos as the others continued to reminisce. Because I was so much younger there was a lot I didn’t know about the family history, so I found the pictures of my sisters as babies almost as fascinating as the early ones of Ma and Pa.

  As the youngest of the family I’d grown up thinking I was the centre of the Pavalak universe. Until I was about five I’d found it inconceivable that the rest of the family had even had a life before I came along. Growing up had put paid to that of course and then, through my teenage years, I had been far too self-centered to pay much attention when they talked about the things that had happened before I was born. Now I had Leah it was different. I wanted to know everything so I could tell her about her family and answer her questions when she was old enough to start asking them.

  I had managed to unearth baby pictures of two of my other sisters, one of Hannah in a fluffy all-in-one Babygro, and one of Ruth lying on a rug under the old apple tree at the top of the orchard, and was listening to Ma trying to remember when they were taken, when my heart almost stopped. I waited until I was sure I could control the expression on my face, and be sure that my voice wouldn’t be wobbly, then I held out the photo I had just picked up.

  “Who is this?” I asked ever so casually.

  Instead of answering, Ma almost snatched it out of my hand. “That’s what I’ve been looking for. That and ones like it. Which box did it come from Rachel?”

  Catherine peered over her shoulder. “Is that a photo of Grandma when she was young?”

  Ma shook her head. “No, it’s a picture of her grandmother. You can tell by the clothes she’s wearing that it’s from a much earlier period.”

  Catherine nodded as she looked more closely. “I remember seeing a picture of her in Grandma’s house when I was small. It was on the mantle and there was one of her grandfather too, although I can’t remember what he looked like.”

  Ma’s eyes softened. “Apparently he was quite a looker when he was young. Somewhere there’s a photo of him wearing a straw boater and sporting a very dashing moustache.”

  “But what is her name?” I tried not to sound impatient. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself in case my agitation triggered some sort of maternal warning in Ma, but I had to know.

  She handed the photo back to me. “Rose, her name is Rose.”

  Rebecca looked pensive. “She’s the one Grandma always refers to as Granny Rose isn’t she?”

  Ma nodded. “Yes. When she was small she used to spend a lot of time with her even though Rose was quite poorly by then. I think she had some sort of thyroid problem that would probably be easy to treat nowadays.”

  The conversation became another reminiscence as Catherine and Rebecca recalled their own childhood and Ma talked about the early days of her marriage to Pa when she’d only had a couple of children to care for, but I had stopped listening. All I could do was stare at the photo of Rose…my Rose…the woman who had been standing beside Leah’s crib just a few hours earlier.

  Chapter Four

  It took me about ten minutes to ask the question I should have asked in the first place. “Why do you want pictures of Rose?”

  “Because the nurses at Grandma’s nursing home say photos of her own childhood, and of her parents and grandparents, will help her hold onto some of her memories for a bit longer.”

  I stared at her. Grandma was Ma’s mother and she had begun to show signs of dementia a few years ago, soon after Grandpa died. At first she had just been a bit forgetful but when she started doing things like leaving the kettle boiling on the stove while she went shopping, and forgetting to eat, then we all knew she needed to be looked after.

  There are enough of us that it should have been possible for her to move in with someone in the family but sadly it wasn’t as simple as that. Ma tried at first but Grandma couldn’t cope with the continuous stream of visitors. Nor could she cope with the volume of noise that a conversation between even two members of the Pavalak family entailed, so in the end she went into the nursing home. For the first week we thought she’d be heartbroken and we all felt guilty, but she took to it like a duck to water.

  Within days she seemed to have forgotten she had ever lived anywhere else, and Hester, who has always been the bossy one, set up a family visiting rota, so that rarely a day goes by without one or other of us calling in to see her. She likes that, mainly because we take her chocolate biscuits and wine. Even at ninety-four years old she is still partial to a glass of chardonnay at six o’clock.

  Ma went back to rummaging through the photos. “If I can find enough pictures of her and her family when she was young I can stick them all into an album and then we’ll have something to talk about when we visit.”

  I started picking through the photos as well and when I saw the sepia print I felt my breath hitch in my chest. It was Rose again, only younger, and this time she was laughing. Actually she was more than laughing, she was the centre of attention, and whatever she was saying was making the other people in the photo laugh too. There were seven or eight of them, all sitting or kneeling on the ground as if it was some sort of picnic even though I couldn’t see any food. Only Rose was standing, Rose and a tiny golden-haired girl of about four years’ old who was wearing a ruffled dress. Rose was wearing a high-necked white blouse and a skirt with a dark ribbon around the bottom. I knew it was grey and that the ribbon was black because it was what she had been wearing when she stood beside Leah’s crib earlier that mor
ning.

  Eventually I found my voice. “This is Rose again, isn’t it?”

  Ma leaned across the table and peered at the photo. “Yes, that’s the photo I was talking about earlier, and that’s your great-great-grandfather.” She pointed to a young man wearing light colored trousers and a striped blazer. He had a straw boater tilted forwards on his head and his eyes were fixed on Rose. Below his very dashing moustache his mouth was full of laughter.

  Rebecca grabbed the photo. “Wow, he was really handsome.”

  Suddenly I had a brainwave. “Let me sort out the photos and put them all in an album for you, Ma. I’d like to do that, and I’d like to talk to Grandma about them, too.”

  From the silence that followed my suggestion you’d have thought I’d grown two heads. In the end Ma spoke while my two sisters just stared at me.

  “Are you sure, Rachel? Do you…will you be able to find the time, what with Leah and everything?”

  “I’m quite sure,” I said as firmly as I could. Then, because I thought I’d better give them a reason for my uncharacteristically generous offer before they began to wonder if I was beginning to take leave of my senses again, I added, “It will take me out of myself and give me something to do in the evening when Leah is asleep.”

  “In that case be my guest,” Ma began to pile the photos back into the boxes. “I’ll ask Pa to bring these over when he gets home, and when you’ve finished sorting through them we’ll go to the nursing home together and show them to Grandma.”

  I smiled at her. “I’d like that.” Then Leah started to cry and I didn’t have to say anything else at all.

  * * *

  When Daniel arrived home I was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by photos. Leah was already fast asleep in her crib. He bent and kissed my cheek.