Page 46 of The Show Woman

45

Jennifer

Jennifer stoats into the caravan, heavily pregnant, belly blooming like a hot air balloon.

‘Dear God,’ says Rosie, as Jennifer flings her arms round her sister. They are both wet, hair clinging to their scalps like damp leaves. Jennifer. Her lovely, kind, innocent sister. And a mother now, almost.

‘Come in, come in,’ she says, making room on the bed for Jennifer to sit down.

‘This is where you’ve been living? Oh, Rosie.’

‘It’s not so bad. You get used to it. And in the summer it can be fun when you’re on the road all the time. Well...it was fun.’ She smiles weakly. ‘It’s a very long story. But how did you find me?’

‘I heard about your friend Violet,’ says Jennifer, smoothing her palm over her belly. ‘After we came to see you. It was the next night, wasn’t it? Everyone in the town was talking about it, how this beautiful girl had gone flying off the trapeze and broken her back and that someone had greased her bar and done it deliberately. People were shocked. I realised it had to be Violet.

‘Ma and I wanted to come and find you but by then Pa was wise to us and he wouldn’t let Ma go, and told her that if I went he’d give her a beating, and me too. So I decided I couldn’t. Not with the babby inside me.’

She cradles her stomach and Rosie, unable to help herself, leans forward, touches the soft, rounded bump.

‘Can you feel a wee kick?’ asks Jennifer, and Rosie nods, marvelling at the sensation, at the tiny new life growing in her sister’s belly. A daughter or a son. Her niece or her nephew. How different things might have been had she stayed home, instead of running away. Perhaps she could have moved in with Jennifer and her man, helped them keep house, seen them raise the bairn. Perhaps she could still.

‘But I asked around, wondered where you’d have gone, if the show wasn’t on the road any more, and someone said you’d likely have come back here. To Vinegarhill. You’re a long way from home here, lass, you really are.’ She pulls her sodden shawl tighter round her shoulders, casts an eye at the dark, grubby caravan, untouched almost, since Violet’s death.

‘But that was months ago,’ says Rosie. ‘Why come now?’

‘Don’t start,’ says Jennifer, and an unfamiliar fire flares in her eyes. ‘Have you any idea the trouble I had getting here? I had to walk to the town, take a train, then a tram, packed in like a sardine. It’s no journey for a woman in my condition. And you’re the one who ran away, remember? Left me on my own, a bride with no bridesmaid, Ma weeping, Pa drinking more than ever. You just walked away and left us.’

Rosie hangs her head. Over these past sunlit months, and the grey, bare winter ones, she has done her best to block out thoughts of her family. She is used to trying to forget about her father, about his great ham-like hands, his sour breath. But until she left them, Rosie’s entire world had revolved around Jennifer and their ma. Thoughts of them have snuck in, entirely uninvited. The first time she kissed Violet there was a part of her still hovering in the corner of the milking parlour, waiting for her ma to bring in the pails. Performing on Tommy Pony, soaking up the applause, she was still cantering round the empty fields of the farm, Jennifer watching on from the stables. And, holding Violet’s thin hands in those days after she came home from the hospital, the memory of her father’s fat fingers had risen, unbidden.

‘Do you want to know why?’

‘I know why,’ says Jennifer. ‘I always knew more than you think. But I wanted you to be the one to say it. I never knew how to talk to you about what he was doing.’

From nowhere, a great, thundering sob begins inside Rosie. It billows and swells and bursts forth until she is shrieking with pain and sadness, for all she has lost, all she has left behind. Jennifer holds her, soft and safe, lets her weep.

Finally she brings out a hanky, gives it to Rosie to dab at her eyes. Rosie feels a bleak release, as though something she has been holding in for too long has finally been let go, returned to the air.

‘There is another reason I came,’ she says. ‘It’s about Pa.’

Rosie tenses, every hair on her skin prickling. ‘He doesn’t know where I am, does he? Is he coming here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘That’s why I need to tell you.’

And so she does. About how one day last week Jennifer had visited their ma and found a tin of petroleum jelly hidden away behind some of this year’s crop of freshly made jam, great handfuls scooped out of it. She had never seen such a thing in the house before. Asked her mother about it, but she said she’d never seen it before either, barely knew what it was. Then her father had exploded in a rage. Told her she was nosy and a good-for-nothing, that she should stop asking questions.

‘And that’s when I realised,’ says Jennifer. ‘It was him. He was the one who’d greased the bar and hurt your friend. I confronted him, asked him why, and he said he knew about you both.’ She pauses, swallows, looks away. ‘Said that you were doing unnatural things . And that no daughter of his would be allowed to do that, and the other lassie didn’t deserve to live.’

Rosie clasps her hands to her mouth in horror.

‘No, no, no,’ she says. Her heart feels as though it has shattered into tiny fragments, scattered across the floor. How could her own pa have done this to Violet? To her?

But she knows, deep down, that he could. He had always carried a thick jealousy about him when it came to Rosie. He’d treated her as though she were a possession, a trinket, a toy he could do what he pleased with. He would not have been able to bear the thought of another’s hands touching her. Particularly those of a delicate, beautiful woman.

‘We think he had been following you,’ says Jennifer. She is holding Rosie’s hand now, stroking her palm in soothing, circular motions. ‘He went away in June, said he had to go and see about some grain, but we had a sense it was something else. I always said to Ma that he’d go and find you if he could.’

Rosie shivers, feels trickles of ice slip down her back. The idea that her father was stalking her, his own daughter, like prey, spying on her, plotting against her, makes her feel sick.

‘So what happened?’ she asks. ‘After you confronted him?’

‘I thought he was going to kick me, right in the stomach. I’ve never seen him so furious. He looked as though he was going to thump me, or Ma. But then he got ahold of himself. He went to the stable, saddled Scout, and rode out on to the road. That was a week ago. He hasn’t been back. I came to warn you, Rosie. He might come after you still. He’ll have the devil in him now.’

He has always had the devil in him, thinks Rosie. It’s just that I saw more of him than you.

‘Will you stay the night, at least?’

‘Aye,’ says Jennifer. ‘It’s been a long journey. My feet are squealing in these boots.’

But just as she starts to unbutton them, there is another knock on the door and Lena and Harry walk in, clothes sodden. Misery clings to them like wet hair.

‘Lena,’ says Rosie brightly, flicking a glance to Jennifer, who has risen, unsteadily, to her feet.

‘You’re Jennifer,’ says Lena. ‘I remember you from Ayr. Please, sit down for goodness’ sake. When are you due?’

‘Soon, I hope,’ says Jennifer. ‘Can’t take much more of this back pain. I’m so sorry to hear about Violet.’

‘Thank you,’ says Harry, who is standing by the door, cap in hand. ‘She was my sister. We all miss her.’

Rosie looks at her sister again. Jennifer gives her a slight nod.

‘Jennifer’s come with news. Bad news. The worst, the most terrible . . .’ She breaks into heaving sobs again, and Lena’s face collapses.

‘Oh, no, Rosie, is it your mother?’

‘It’s our father,’ says Jennifer. Her voice is calm and even. ‘He greased the bar. He killed your . . .’ She breaks off, looks around the wagon at the three horrified faces staring at her. ‘He killed your Violet.’

The silence is punctured only by Rosie’s heaving sobs. Jennifer continues, looking at Lena.

‘He found out about Violet and Rosie and he was furious. He’s an evil man, and, now he knows that my mother and I understand the truth, he’s gone, left the farm. We haven’t seen him in a week.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Harry softly. ‘The bastard. The complete and utter bastard.’

Lena looks at him. ‘So it really wasn’t Serena,’ she says. She looks pale, tired. Defeated. ‘Now do you believe me?’

Harry nods. ‘I do. I just – I despair. It’s so cruel. To Violet – to you, Rosie; to all of us. And I don’t even know the bloody man’s name. Jennifer, do you think your father would come here? Will he come after Rosie?’

‘He might,’ says Jennifer. ‘There’s no telling what he’ll do in a rage. And this was about the worst rage I’ve ever seen him in. His name is James Carluke, by the way.’

Rosie recalls a night when she was around ten years old. It was before her father started interfering with her, before she could even begin to conceive of such horrors. And yet she had never truly felt comfortable around her pa, had always shrunk at his touch, and his temper. She and Jennifer were in bed when she heard her father crashing about down below, swearing at her mother, calling her a stupid old cow because she’d let one of the sheepdogs into the parlour to have her puppies instead of leaving them in the barn. They had been born earlier that cold, rain-lashed night, four tiny, squiggling balls, pink and blind, the littlest one, the runt, struggling to find his mammy’s teat in order to feed.

Rosie, pitying him, had wanted to bring him to bed with her. But her ma said she should stay with the mother, it was cruel to rip them away so young, and anyway, she wanted him to grow big and strong, didn’t she? Rosie had reluctantly agreed, giving the tiny puppy a soft stroke with the nail of her pinkie finger. And now there was her father, raging at the puppies’ mere existence.

The next morning she was relieved when she went down to the parlour to see the collie, Meg, still there, her puppies asleep beside her by the dying embers of the fire. But then she looked closer, and saw that the runt – whom she had already christened Patch on account of the little black splodge on his left eye – was missing.

She had run around the parlour, shouting his name, searching frantically, but there was no sign. Then she opened the back door and found the little puppy lying lifeless on the doorstep. He had been strangled. His tiny eyes had never opened. Rosie had been inconsolable.

‘When my father gets a thirst for revenge he’s terrifying,’ she says now. ‘There’s no saying what he might do.’

She feels a hideous powerlessness. When she had left the farm that night last spring, cantered away on Tommy Pony and into a new life, it was the first time she had ever felt any real control. She was holding the reins of her own destiny and it made her feel giddy and free. She might have known that that evil man would find a way to ruin it for her. She had been foolish to think it could ever have been otherwise.

‘So you saw Serena Linden?’ Rosie asks Lena finally, wiping her eyes. ‘What did she tell you?’

Lena shakes her head and looks away. ‘Not much. Except that she had been messing with us. It was her who sent those men round the wagon, and poisoned Tommy Pony, and cut the tent.’

Rosie winces.

‘It’s a fine set-up she has there with the circus, but she’s not a woman you want to stay chatting to for very long. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

Lena and Harry turn to leave, Harry promising to speak to some of the other showmen in the ground, ask them to keep an eye out for any strange men.

‘Or we could move you to another showground if you like?’ he says. ‘There’s Garngad, a bit further out. You might be safer there.’

But Rosie shakes her head. She cannot face leaving Vinegarhill, its memories of Violet, just yet. And she can’t afford the tram fare from Garngad that would be the only way to get her to the factory each morning.

After they’ve gone, she makes up the bunk for her and Jennifer and they both pile in, Rosie pulling Violet’s pillow with its woody scent, fainter each night, over to her side.

‘This is like old times, isn’t it?’ says Jennifer, and gives her hand a small squeeze.

‘It is,’ says Rosie into the dark. And squeezes back.