14. A Set of House Keys

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

THE POETESS Part 14

Several weeks later Rosie went for a walk down Strong Lane to look at the cottage. The money she’d won from the poetry competition had left her bank account and was in the hands of Mr Babbage, who was dealing with the sale of Miller’s Cottage personally for her. She had a spring in her step as she walked along, hardly daring to believe that she’d sold her family home and was back in Aunt Mildred’s caravan while she tried to get work started on her cottage.

When she got to the old place she could tell that it was still in a state of disrepair, worse possibly than the last time she’d seen it. But there was a sign on a rickety post there that said all it needed to say. Yet that wasn’t what attracted her attention or went some way to warming her heart.

Sitting on a heap of bricks that looked as if might deposit him onto the dusty ground at any moment was the once familiar figure of Roy, and from a distance he looked far from happy. He was wearing jeans that looked as though they might have needed to be washed a fortnight yesterday ago, together with an equally unkempt bomber jacket, and taken altogether he looked a sight.

I might have asked him what on Earth he was doing, looking like that and wearing clothes that would be best in the dustbin, but I didn’t. Instead I felt my heart give a tiny lurch as if I’d been waiting all my life for this moment and took no notice of his rather tatty attire. He was clearly deep in thought with some weighty matter bowing his head. He hadn’t noticed me. In fact, I doubt he noticed anything more than a small striped fly that was walking purposefully up his jeans leg, and it’s possible that he didn’t even notice that.

“Why so woebegone?” asked Rosie when she was close enough for her quiet voice to be heard quite clearly.

He almost leapt into the air and definitely dislodged some of the bricks he was almost sitting on so that he slid awkwardly sideways, twisting his ankle.

“Rosie!” he gasped, “it is you, isn’t it?”

“I asked the first question!” she said in a spritely voice.

“Oh, I’m okay,” he replied, a tad sheepishly, “I was just looking at that sign.”

He pointed the sign she had noticed but not quite registered. It was the notice that announced that the old cottage was SOLD.

“I was hoping,” he said, “you know, years ago when we were kids…”

“I wasn’t a kid!” she protested.

“Well, you were still at school. You said.”

“And you thought I was ripe for snogging?” she teased.

“You were nice,” he muttered awkwardly, “Remember that little kilt you wore? It was … so pretty.”

“I know perfectly well how beautiful I was!”

“I was silly not to stay as close to you as I could. Remember what you said about this place?” He jerked his head indicating the derelict building.

“I always loved it,” she told him, “even in this state with only half a roof!”

“It was a lovely dream for a little while,” she said, “this place with a family in it, kids and a man and his wife. The sounds of life and love. But now it’s been sold and before long the new owners will come along, put a fence around it or bulldoze it or something, and we’ll have to go away and never come back.”

“No we won’t,” she said with a teasing smile, “anyway, where’s your Violet?”

“Oh her. I did think, ages ago, that we could make a go of it. Archie’s a smashing kid, but his real dad’s on and off the scene all the time. Mr bloody Hardcastle and his school holidays.”

“Fathers do have some rights?” murmured Rosie.

“But what about me and my rights? Answer me that, then! I’ve sacrificed stuff, my freedom, my right to find a different girlfriend, everything, to try and give little Archie someone to call daddy and Mr bloody Hardcastle, who as good a raped a schoolgirl, comes in and sits between us, and Archie’s going to call him daddy, I know that much,”

Rosie took a couple of steps towards the cottage, and stared at him, frowning.

“Is that what your life was all going to be about?” she asked, “being a dad to another man’s son? What does Violet make of it?”

“She welcomes him, and when Mr Bloody Hardcastle takes Archie out in his push chair she gets him ready and waves goodbye, and is never nice to me.”

“If the baby’s off your hands for an hour you could spend the time in bed with her…” suggested Rosie.

“Fat chance there! She’s got me sleeping in a different room from her, for goodness’ sake. In case Archie wakes me up in the night, she says. I work at Jones’s the builders, as an odd-job man on sites. I plan to go to college and get a qualification when I can. I know I’m a year or two older than most, but then so are quite a lot of other lads.”

“You’ll feel a whole lot better about things when you’ve got coins jangling in your pocket.”

“Violet takes most of my wages. For Archie, she says, though I know for a cert that Hardcastle gives her more than enough.”

“Kids can be expensive,” murmured Rosie, quoting just about every parent she’d discussed their children with.

He sighed, a picture of utmost misery, and Rosie had all on to stop herself putting a comforting arm round him.

“And now my dream’s gone,” he mumbled, and Rosie was sure there were tears forming in his eyes.

“What dream?” she asked.

He wearily indicated the SOLD sign. “This place. Some sod’s gone and bought it and if he came along right here and now I’d give him a piece of my mind, for stealing so many hopes and dreams from me.”

“You would?”

“I darned well would! You probably don’t realise, and why should you, but that first time you and I were here, admiring it even though it was falling to pieces, set something going in my head. I’ve somehow got a connection with this daft old place and I’ll curse anyone, and I mean anyone, who smashed my dreams to pieces!”

I wasn’t expecting what happened next, but it happened anyway and it was a mighty fine thing. We heard a car coming down Strong Lane, slowly because it was hardly suitable for wheeled vehicles, especially a large one like the car struggling until it pulled up a few yards from where we were.

“This’ll be the swine now!” almost cursed Roy.

“Probably,” said Rosie when she noticed the familiar shape of the solicitor Mr Babbage’s rather expensive saloon car, and his corpulent shape as he walked out.