At the Break of Day by Margaret Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

– and he smiled at the comfort the memory brought.
    Yes, there had been despair behind Rosie’s love, and he knew it was because she’d left a land and people she’d grown to care for and there was an ache in his chest at her pain. He eased himself back down, pulling the sheet up round his shoulders. He understood that and he would try and take her back to those hills where the scent of the past would ease the present, perhaps for them all, even Maisie and Ollie.

CHAPTER 3
    The night had been long, and as Rosie washed in the sink she longed for her own shower and scented soap back in Lower Falls, but there was only the tin bath which hung on the yard wall. Tonight, she thought, she would drag it in when Grandpa was asleep and Norah in bed. Tonight and every night, not just once a week like before she went away.
    Grandpa was sitting at the table. Rosie had washed through his drenched sheets and his pyjamas and they were hung on the line, along with his rubber square. She had hoisted them high with the pole but not too high, because he had said that he did not like the neighbours to know.
    ‘Even Jack’s mum and dad?’ she had asked gently as he dipped his bread in some warm milk after he had sponged himself down standing on newspaper behind the curtain.
    ‘Even Ollie and Maisie,’ he had said.
    She carried her tea out into the yard, standing by the shed in the spot the sun reached at this hour of the morning. She listened to the sounds of the street, the dogs, the children, the whistling bike-riders, the rag and bone cry. She looked up at Jack’s house. The windows were blank and there was no sound. Before she left there had always been laughter and music and shouting.
    Her grandfather walked out now and sat on the bench, his back against the wall. He had a walking stick which he propped between his knees. When she was young he would bring peas home on a Saturday wrapped in newspaper and on Sunday they would shell them, sitting on the back step, eating some, putting the rest into Grandma’s pan.
    Jack would come in and pinch five, always five, throwing them up and catching them in his mouth. Then Maisie would shout across the wall that there was bread and hot dripping from around the piece of scrag-end. She, Jack, and sometimes Norah would go while Ollie and Grandpa went to the pub on the corner for a pint.
    The pub had gone too, she realised now. She had forgotten that it had existed, down next to Mr Meiner. She fingered the peach rose, The Reverend Ashe, which grew up against the shed. It had taken a fancy to the creosote, Grandpa had laughed in the year before the war. She had made perfume with its petals. The water had gone brown but there had been a weak scent.
    She had given a bottle to Grandma, Norah and Maisie. Maisie had laughed and dabbed some on behind her ears, heavy with earrings, throwing back her head, patting her hair, telling them it made her feel like a ruddy duchess. Ollie roared and slapped her on the backside. Grandma and Norah had thrown theirs down the sink.
    As Norah grew older she had always copied Grandma, though Rosie could remember that when they were small sometimes they had laughed together. But as Grandma grew more bitter, more angry, Norah copied her. They froze Rosie out. They formed a team. A team ‘who knew better’, who were older, wiser. Just more crabby, Jack had always said.
    Rosie drank her tea, which was too cold now, then threw the dregs around the roots.
    ‘You remembered then, Rosie,’ Grandpa called.
    Rosie smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve never forgotten.’ But she had until this moment. She had forgotten that the tea leaves nourished the roots.
    She moved into the shadow, sitting with him, tucking her hand in his arm. It was thin and his armbands sagged above the elbows. His cuffs were drooping on his wrists. ‘I’ll sew a tuck in those sleeves for you, shall I?’
    She smiled as he nodded and patted her hand. His joints were swollen, his skin was dry and thin, stretched