Page 5 of The Show Woman

4

Rosie

Darkness steals around Rosie like a blanket. Surely it must be midnight? She listens for the chime of the clock on the landing but the house keeps a heavy, watchful silence.

She shifts under the coverlet, careful not to wake her sister, mouth open, breath fluttering, limbs curled up around her knees. This is how it has always been. Jennifer deep inside her padded, cosy dreams, Rosie awake, waiting for the yawning creak of the loose floorboard outside their bedroom door.

He always comes after midnight. When the farm has laid down its tools for the day, when her mother is safe behind her own bedroom door, when there is no one around to hear her muffled protests. It started the day before her twelfth birthday. She was small enough then that he could still lift her, carry her out into the corridor like a ragdoll to the large linen cupboard at the top of the stairs. The first time she was so shocked, so disbelieving that her father, her pa, could have done such a terrible thing to her, his breath soured with alcohol, thick hands pulling at her long plait, that she had not spoken for three days, not even when her mother produced a plump round honey cake from the larder and sang happy birthday in her thin, wavering soprano.

She bled afterwards and her mother gave her napkins, thinking she had started her monthlies. She did not demur. She loved her mother, and, just as importantly, her mother loved her father, despite his sharp fists. To tell seemed unimaginable. The deep, painful fissure that had cracked open inside her body that first night would surely rip through the whole family, break them apart.

She wondered why he had not chosen Jennifer, a year older than her, sensible and forthright. Was she special? Or was it Rosie who was special? That was what he whispered as he clutched her nightgown, did unspeakable things with his calloused, pitted fingers.

It had started two months after his own father died. Grandpa, a hard man with a nose as red as a hawthorn berry, who frightened both sisters and whom her father loathed. He’d ruled the farm with a whip that seemed forged from iron, right until the very end. Something about his death had changed Pa for good. It was as though he had been handed a gift he did not want, a freedom he was not ready for. And Rosie had borne the brunt of it.

She shifts again, the coverlet scratchy at her throat. Perhaps he will not come tonight. He only comes after he has been drinking, at the pub with his farm hands or alone in the front parlour. Sometimes when he comes to her his face is wet, and she hears him sob as he buries his head on her shoulder. Afterwards he is kind, tosses her a sixpence or an extra hunk of bread when nobody is looking, lets her help him with the horses.

Rosie loves the horses, Clydesdales with flanks taller than Rosie herself, whose flared nostrils emit great clouds of steam on frosty mornings. They nuzzle her, let her pat their white noses, soft as sage. She likes to watch their fringed hooves drift across the fields like hems on a lady’s dress, muscles glistening as they pull the ploughs.

And then there is Tommy Pony. Tommy is barely half the size of the Clydesdales that work the land, a joke of a horse really, but he is Rosie’s favourite, because he belongs to her. Her father brought him home for her thirteenth birthday after another of those horrific, interminable nights in the cupboard, his face a repulsive mixture of guilt and pride. Tommy Pony was not so much a gift as a bribe, a reward even, for not talking, for compliance. But one look at that long grey snout, the little tuft of hair between his eyes and those long, lustrous eyelashes, and she was in love. She did not care that her father was buying her silence. Finally, after a lifetime of sharing everything from a hairbrush to a bed with her sister, she had something of her own.

Five years on her father comes less often now, although she is always careful to monitor his drinking nights. Occasionally she props something up against the door, and sometimes he gives up, stumbles back to bed. Other times though he appears in the doorway, edged by moonlight, and she gets meekly out of bed and follows him to the cupboard, burning with shame. He is rougher now, leaves red marks on her back and her inner thighs, and when she washes she has to be careful that Jennifer does not catch sight of her bruises.

No more. It ends tonight.

Rosie is short and lean. Her muscles ripple under her skin like water in a whirlpool. Her right leg is particularly developed, the sinew sticking out as though it has been carved from marble. That’s what happens when you spend so much time standing on a horse.

The first time she tried it, her mother, hawk-eyed at the kitchen window, screamed in fright, came running out into the field, apron flapping, shrieking at her daughter. Rosie leant down, smoothly pulled on Tommy’s reins and brought him to a stop. It was as though she and Tommy Pony were one, a single organism that could move anywhere they wished.

As a little girl she had been taken to the circus just once and watched, spellbound, as the bareback riders performed tricks on their elegant white horses. They stood on one leg, jumped from one horse to the next, tumbled and danced and pirouetted while the horses kept trotting, seemingly oblivious to the chaos on their backs. That’s what I want to do , she thought, and when Tommy Pony became hers she knew she had found a way to turn her dream into something real, something she could grab hold of.

Beside her, Jennifer coos quietly. She looks down at her sister’s plain, sensible face. She is due to be married in three weeks to Richard Wright, a big-eared boy from the village who works in the local mine. Jennifer will be sad that Rosie isn’t there, particularly as they have already found her the material for a bridesmaid’s dress, a floaty peach linen which hangs unhemmed in the front parlour, where her mother, a gifted seamstress, will work on it, giving her fingers a rest from edging the fine lace of Jennifer’s veil.

She will be sad, too, that Rosie will not be there for the move into the village cottage already earmarked for them, the inevitable first baby, and the second, and the third. But Jennifer will be fine. She has a good heart, and she is happy. It strikes Rosie that to be oblivious, particularly to all that is bad in the world, might mean happiness.

But Rosie is not oblivious. She knows evil. She has lived with it, eaten bread and soup beside it, bid it good morning each day. For her, happiness will be different. Slowly, silently, she mouths the words on the poster she’d spied down in the village one last time. Daring performers! Ladies of all ages! Sensational new venture! Then, silent as the night, she creeps out of bed. It is past midnight. Her father is not coming. She will fetch Tommy Pony and she will leave this place, for good.