It Was Only Ever You (8 page)

Patrick did not question the ease and speed with which she had replied.

‘I’ll come down and talk to your father,’ he said brightly, ‘so we can put a stop to all this secretive nonsense and start courting properly.’

He hadn’t noticed the way that Rose’s hand halted on the page when she heard him say ‘I love you’, or how she had begun drawing again as she said, ‘I love you too’. Neither did he sense that her kiss was not as passionate as he might have imagined it should be after the first declaration of love. When the kiss was over she prodded him playfully in the chest and said in a firm, gentle voice, ‘Sit back how you were – I’m not finished drawing you yet.’

She smiled at him, dazzlingly, which he took to mean utter happiness. In fact it masked the fact that Rose did not know quite what to say. The very fact that he had told her that he loved her was, for an older lad like Patrick, tantamount to a marriage proposal. Patrick was not some stupid boy of eighteen, mooning over her. At twenty-five it was time enough for him to get married and if you told a girl you loved them, especially a girl like Rose Hopkins, the doctor’s daughter, that was what you meant.

Until now she had assumed that Patrick understood that the secrecy was because her parents would not approve of him, not because her parents would not approve of the fact that they were courting without serious intention of marriage.

She could not hurt his feelings by telling him that her parents would not think that he was good enough for her. Of course he was good enough, he was too good. Rose knew that she would never find anyone who understood her as he did. Never find anyone who would complete her the way that Patrick did. She had not realized that she had been incomplete without him until that day at the lake when he had swooped her up out of the water and kissed her. Now, she could not go back to being without him. She would only be half of who she was. Rose didn’t know why that would be but in the hours she was not with him a terrible ennui descended on her. When she was with Patrick she felt powerful, fulfilled, whole. Just being with him rescued her from herself. They were soulmates, she knew that. Much as her parents loved her and wanted her to be happy, they did not understand her as Patrick did: the life and death nature of her drawing, the passion she felt for nature, but mostly, the all-encompassing love she felt for this man. There was no way that her pragmatic father and anxious, snobbish mother could begin to understand Patrick and Rose’s love for each other. Her parents would find a way of putting a stop to the romance if it became public.

‘Let’s run away,’ she said.

As she said it Rose had no idea what she was suggesting. All she knew was that she could not have Patrick going to her parents’ house and talking to her father. She could not bear the thought of seeing the disappointment in her father’s face or the fear in her mother’s eyes when she found out her precious daughter had been ‘running about’ with ‘that Murphy boy’.

‘We could go to Dublin: I finish school in a year.’ An idea began to take shape. ‘You could go ahead of me and get digs and a job. I could go to art college and you could sing. You know you’ll never get work singing around here.’

The more she spoke, the more Rose started to believe that it could be true. They could go away and start a life together in the city. It was where they both belonged anyway – the artist and the singer, there was nothing for them around here. They would have to get married, of course. But once it was a fait accompli and her parents saw how happy she was, and that Patrick was a good man, they would come round to the idea. They had already agreed to let her go to college, more or less, so this would be the perfect solution. If she and Patrick started dating here, now, in the small town of Foxford, her parents would disapprove. That would not stop them, of course. Their love was too strong. Nothing would stop them. But nonetheless it would taint the beauty of what they had. If they ran away and got married her parents would have no choice. They would have to continue as normal and, in time, they would come around to loving Patrick too. Rose knew it would all work out. It had to all work out, it was just a delicate situation and she knew she had to be clever about how she would make it all happen.

‘It sounds a lot simpler to me to just tell our families that we are doing a serious line...’ he said. ‘Besides, I hate all this creeping around, putting charcoal stains on your dress so your mother thinks you are drawing flowers – we’re not doing anything wrong.’

Rose began to panic.

‘My father would be really upset,’ she blurted out, ‘because you are so much older than me. I am still his little girl and—’

‘—he’s afraid I’m not going to be a gentleman and that I’ll defile you.’

Then he leant across and grabbed her by the waist. ‘Maybe he’s right about that too, aghrá!’ And he tickled her so hard that she dropped her pad, clutching at her skirt with her charcoal-covered hands and squealing with delight.

Patrick settled his body in behind hers, putting his arms around her neck so that they hung, temptingly, in front of her breasts. ‘So that’s why I should go and talk to him,’ he said, kissing her neck and adding, ‘I can reassure him, tell him we’re serious. Tell him that we’re to be...’

Patrick frightened himself, coming so close to saying the word ‘married’ out loud.

Rose was happy that he had left the word hanging in the air. She turned around and sat, with crossed legs, facing him, patting down her skirt between her legs so that her pants weren’t visible, the light cotton tucked into the curve of her thighs.

She said, ‘Let’s just keep it the way it is for now. I’ll be nineteen in a few months and, if they don’t push me into the convent in the meantime, we can talk about it then.’

Patrick smiled and nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said.

In truth, Patrick wasn’t ready to get married. To Rose or anyone. He was still waiting to see if his father could get him a job in the Foxford Woollen Mills so that he would have a steady enough income to help him pursue his singing career. Not that he had any idea how he might go about that. All he knew was that he could sing as well as John McCormack and everyone said he was as much of a fine thing as Elvis Presley. He had his regular gig in Ballina town hall playing the Saturday-night dances, which made him a big deal locally. But although his skiffle-playing friends were happy with that, Patrick dreamed of bigger things. The world was changing – Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis had seen to that. In the past year, rock and roll had started to creep into the dance halls around Ireland. Even the priests had been powerless to stop the jiving, jitterbugging revolution. Everyone Patrick met told him that he was so good it was only a matter of time before he was ‘discovered’ and became a famous singer. Patrick always laughed off the accolades but, deep in his heart, it was what he wanted. At twenty-five he had finally come to realize that it wasn’t going to happen for him in Mayo. He had to get himself somewhere – London, Manchester, America, anywhere that he might be discovered. In reality, he had never travelled any further than Galway. His father said he didn’t have it in him and Patrick was starting to wonder if perhaps his father was right.

Maybe it was the time just to bite the bullet and move away. Perhaps Rose was right and the move to Dublin wasn’t such a bad idea. He could pick up some casual building work, he was a decent enough carpenter when he wanted to be. Although where would they live? How would they live? A lot of lads went to London but he had never managed to scrabble together the fare. The Hopkins family had money. Perhaps her father could loan them the passage over. Although, they’d have to be engaged before he could even ask for anything like that – and if they went to London, or even Dublin, they would have to marry for sure.

Patrick looked at her sideways for a moment and a small feeling of doubt crept into Rose’s heart. Perhaps he was changing his mind about the whole thing. Perhaps her reticence about telling her parents had upset him. Had he guessed at the truth? Should she go ahead and tell them, and to hell with the consequences? Then they could run away together. It would be crazy but they loved each other so much, she knew they’d manage somehow. That would be the right thing to do: honour their love. Be brave. Be fearless as lovers should be.

But before she had time to put words to her thoughts, Patrick said, ‘We’d best be getting back.’

He helped gather her things as she shook down her skirt, then as he leaned in to kiss her goodbye, Patrick stopped and picked out a daisy head from a tangle of curls on her shoulder. As he looked at her face he felt overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of how beautiful she was. He desperately wanted to pick her up in his arms then lay her down on the grass, give in to his most base desires and take her, right there in the open country. He knew from her pleading eyes that she would not stop him. In fact, he believed she wanted it too. But she was too young, and they had already taken things far enough. Even if he didn’t feel like it, even if it went against every natural desire in his body, Patrick knew he had to be a gentleman.

So he simply smiled, then they kissed and parted under the tree, as they had done a dozen times before.

As she walked back over the hill towards home, Rose felt a sheet of melancholy fall down over her heart, although she could not say why. Their kiss was tender, and sweet but nonetheless it had felt, to Rose, like an ordinary goodbye.

E
LEANOR
HOPKINS
was preparing dinner when she looked out the window and saw Rose coming towards the house from the small hill across the road. Her appearance was messy, as usual. Her cotton dress was crumpled, her slim athletic legs, on which she refused to wear stockings, were doubtless spattered with muck where she had trudged through a puddle in her flimsy plimsolls. And, Eleanor noted, her hair was not tied back in a neat bun like her own, but instead it tumbled around her shoulders, probably full of tangles that she would have to try and brush out that evening.

Eleanor tutted to herself disapprovingly but, at the same time, felt a flash of fear. Although Rose was a good girl, with her quiet demeanour and her love of art and her good manners, she had a savage beauty that worried her mother. She looked untethered – wanton. Eleanor had always tried to keep Rose tidy as a child, tying back her hair and containing her growing curves in smart clothes. Now that Rose was eighteen, Eleanor did not have any jurisdiction over her daughter’s wild beauty.

She often felt powerless over her adopted child and worried about her growing older in a way she believed she might not have done if she had been her own. Rose did not have Hopkins blood so how she turned out was God’s department. Eleanor could only hope He knew what He was doing. Sometimes, anxious Eleanor wished she was more like the ardent rural Catholics. They seemed to get great comfort from their faith, with their whispering confessionals, endless chanting novenas and statue-turning, candle-lighting, medal-kissing rituals. Eleanor was reluctant to leave her daughter’s welfare to God alone. She loved her too much. She could barely express her fears for her daughter, even to her husband. He would have said she was being irrational, but he only half knew the truth about his wife’s experiences before they met. He would not have wanted to know more, even if she could have told him.

As her daughter neared the house Eleanor thought Rose looked more pensive than usual. These days, she came back from her walks fresh-faced and happier than usual, as if refreshed and invigorated by the combination of open air and creativity. At first, Eleanor had been worried that Rose was sneaking off to see a boy. But, on reflection, she didn’t believe her daughter would be that duplicitous, or that she would be afraid to confide in her mother about such things. Eleanor kept her own fears away from Rose. She always kept her voice breezy when she talked about young men, encouraging Rose to get to know that nice Anthony Warren, who had just got a place studying law at Trinity, or Bishop Richard’s son, who would be home from Harvard this summer. Middle- class Catholic men from educated homes were thin on the ground, but then, no girl in Mayo was as beautiful and as cultured as Rose Hopkins. Eleanor knew that her daughter would not be stupid enough to throw herself away at some local boy.

In any case, Rose never stayed out later than an hour and always came back with charcoal stains on her fingers and dress. She generally left her sketch pad on the kitchen table and, while she washed her hands in the scullery sink, Eleanor made a point of having a quick flick through. It was always filled with exquisite pictures of flowers and trees. Eleanor fretted about her daughter’s ambitions to be an artist and how it would affect her chance of securing a nice boy. The uncertainty brought a tightness to her chest.

‘You worry too much about her,’ John would say when Eleanor voiced her concerns. ‘She’s a good girl and it would be a terrible shame to waste that talent. Let her go off to Dublin and see what happens. She has to learn to make her own way in the world.’

When John talked like that, Eleanor knew he did not have the first idea about Rose. She could not say why she felt that her daughter was heading for trouble. Only that her maternal instincts told her Rose, her beautiful Rose, was more sensitive than most. ‘Artistic’ was how her husband described the raw spirit that seemed to inhabit their daughter: driving her to spend hours alone, drawing. Only Eleanor could see how vulnerable she was. She had none of the practical grounded ways of her friend Sinead. She was winsome, imaginative – not of this world. The idea of her going up to Dublin terrified her mother.

When she came in from her walk today, Rose seemed different, somehow. Her eyebrows were set in a small frown and her lips were tight, as if she was worried about something. She was quieter than usual, and barely greeted her mother as she came in the kitchen door. She was holding her sketch pad and there was charcoal on her skirt.

‘Go and wash your hands, darling,’ Eleanor said. ‘Would you like a sandwich for lunch?’

Rose felt vaguely irritated with her mother. Everyone else in the town had their main meal or ‘dinner’ at one o’clock, then ‘tea’ in the evening was bread and jam or a boiled egg. The Hopkins were the only people who had ‘lunch’ and their dinner in the evening. Her mother said it was because of the hours her father worked, but Rose knew that this ‘European’ routine was just another way of Eleanor establishing herself as a cut above everyone else. How Rose hated her mother for standing in the way of her love for Patrick. For being such a snob.