Page 55 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘It’s no bother, I’ve been tidying up work contracts all week, not that there were many. Between us, it’s not the most lucrative of locations for an environmental engineer, which is why I needed to apply for something with an actual weekly wage, but anyway… I’ve pretty much closed everything up and I thought, I definitely deserve a little downtime and where better to spend it?’

‘Ahh?’ So, Ros couldn’t help but think, notwhobetter to spend it with? ‘Well, the frying pan is under the sink, if you want to get started…’

‘Do you fancy a glass of wine first of all and maybe we could sit outside, enjoy the view…’ He reached out, pulled her to him and started to kiss her. Oh, God, but he was a great kisser. So much so that when she became aware of the sound of an engine roaring into the back yard, she pulled back from him and only then realised he’d begun to unbutton her shirt.

‘Hey. Ros, are you about…?’ Jonah’s familiar deep growl filled up the porch.

‘Yeah, I’m here, in the kitchen,’ she said hastily, putting herself back together again. She turned to see Jonah standing in the doorway, filling up the frame, his expression inscrutable.

‘Oh, I see you’re…’ He stood there for a moment and went to turn, but she spotted a bottle of wine in his hand. Had he been about to pay her a social call, too? And for a moment, they all stood there in an uncomfortable silence.

‘Come in, come in, Jonah, I think you’ve met Shane before.’ She nodded towards Shane, who was suddenly standing too close for comfort, although he’d been a whole lot closer thirty seconds earlier.

‘No, no, I can see it’s a bad time, I…’ Jonah edged backwards, turned, stood for a moment. ‘I thought…’ Then he turned to face her, his eyes searching hers for a moment, as if trying to convey something that his voice would never manage. ‘Anyway.’ He walked to the table, placed a bottle of white wine on it. ‘I just called in to give you this. Mai Boland was in touch with me this morning. I told her I’d be on board with that other project you were thinking you might get off the ground, of course… I can see it’s not the time, but…’

‘This is so nice of you.’ Ros moved forward, placing her hand on the bottle, brushing against his as she did so, but he pulled back, as if shocked by her very touch.

‘It’s only a token, I had it in the fridge and I’m not much of a wine person,’ he said gruffly, and she imagined him, maybe with a great big pint of Guinness in his hand, but the idea of him holding a long-stemmed glass just seemed all wrong. ‘Well, I must be off, I’ve left a…’ he nodded towards the porch, ‘something to mark where George is a…’ And then he turned and in two long strides he was out of the kitchen and stalking across the yard to his jeep.

‘Well, he’s a bit of a Farmer Fred, isn’t he?’ Shane picked up the bottle of white from the table. ‘Although, he’s certainly able to produce a decent bottle of wine for an occasion.’ He held up the bottle. ‘This thing must have cost the guts of forty quid, he’s got expensive taste for a man who doesn’t much like wine.’

With that, Shane’s phone rang. He’d left it in the porch and Ros had not meant to look at the image of the person calling him. But she did.Izzy, her name appeared at the top of the screen. She was a blonde beach babe wearing little more than a flimsybikini and Shane’s arms wrapped around her. Ros didn’t have to be a genius to work out that Izzy wasn’t his sister from the way his hands were hovering across those huge boobs.

‘Don’t worry about that, I’ll ring them back later,’ Shane said lazily from the kitchen, obviously not realising that Ros had seen the image. She couldn’t un-see it. She stood for a moment, looking out at the yard at the back of Jonah’s retreating jeep. In the kitchen, Shane was going about taking down glasses and mansplaining the fact that more expensive wine did not actually mean a better bottle.

Ros was only half listening to him. She walked to the corner of the porch. Jonah had left a black refuse bag there. She bent down and peered inside. It was a small rose bush, lavender in colour, absolutely exquisite. The scent was grapefruity and she wondered for a moment at where he could have picked it up. Blue Moon. She was pretty sure that was what it was called, not something he’d cut from a wild climber on his farm, that was for sure. It was so thoughtful, just for George, and suddenly, she felt a little overcome with the kindness of the gesture.

‘He’s…’ Ros suddenly felt as if her appetite had deserted her. ‘Actually, do you know, I completely forgot, I was meant to go visit my friend Constance this evening, sorry…’ she said, grabbing her coat and stumbling out the door. ‘Make yourself at home, help yourself to anything you want,’ she called back but already she had decided, whatever else happened, the last thing she needed now was to find herself falling for someone she couldn’t trust. She had far too many other things to sort out in her life.

36

1974

Dotty

A baby, what on earth did Dotty know of babies? More to the point, she’d never wanted a baby, never even liked children. And at the worst possible time too.

‘There will be other parts,’ Bobby said to her and he made it sound like a promise.

‘It’s taken me years to get offered this part and it’s…’ She felt it, her first big break, slipping away from her. How pregnant was she anyway? She wasn’t sure. Too pregnant to do much about it but go through with it, that’s what the doctor said when she turned up looking to see if there was any way out of it.

‘Look, we’ll get married, I’ll get a proper job, it’ll be fine, really,’ Bobby said and he tried to pull her close, but at this moment, Dotty hated herself for ending up like this. She was far too upset to even try to pick apart her feelings for Bobby. ‘We can live with my aunt, once we’re married, she’s…’

‘In Fulham? Bobby, I might as well move to the other side of the world, it’s miles from the West End…’ But she didn’t have much of a choice, because without work she couldn’t pay her own rent and she knew she should be grateful that at least she hadn’t been knocked up by some fella who didn’t want to stick around. Everyone knew that a respectable marriage was amillion times better than a mother and baby home – she would have to keep reminding herself of that.

Their wedding was small, a half-hour affair in the registry office with one of her friends from the chorus line of her last job and Bobby’s brother for witnesses. Constance would have liked to be there, but the baby was already showing by the time they’d gotten that over with. In her letters, Constance was so excited about Dotty’s baby. Life wasn’t fair at all. Constance would have given anything to have a husband and a baby and a future that revolved around them. It still felt unreal to Dotty that her friend’s husband had drowned the previous year. Oisin and Constance hardly had time to settle into married life, much less set about having a baby.

It seemed that before she knew it, Dotty was lying in the maternity ward with the main event happening to her, rather than feeling she was in any way in charge of things. She tried to switch off the sounds of other women in labour, the constant wails of newborn babies and nurses’ shoes clacking on the polished tiles. The contractions were nowhere near as bad as everyone said and for the briefest of moments, in the flurry of it all, maybe Dotty convinced herself that she could do this, in spite of all that had happened in the past. Maybe she would be able to make something more of her life than just pretending she was living a life that meant something.

And then she heard the sound of her own newborn baby and it felt as if something tipped over deep inside of her, like a glass filled to overflowing, its contents warm and potent, escaping and contaminating everything that had until now been arid.

‘She’s beautiful.’ Bobby’s eyes were moist when he held their child.

‘I never realised you were such a sop,’ Dotty said. She couldn’t bear to look at the kid for fear she’d be overcome with such emotion she might just drown beneath it all.

‘I have to get back to work now.’ He seemed reluctant to hand the little bundle of cream blankets over to her, but he’d managed to get a job in a small factory. It had dawned on her a few weeks earlier that she’d fallen for the next Richard Burton and ended up with Richard Baker. He was trying to do the right thing, Dotty could see it, but somehow the more he tried, the more it diminished him in her eyes. If she wasn’t sure she loved him to start with, now she resented him more with every passing day.

‘She’s so perfect,’ he said again and this time Dotty looked at him and, suddenly, something unexpected rose within her. A memory, or maybe a foreshadowing, she couldn’t tell which, but it felt like a shadow, cold and tightening in her stomach.

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