this bright September afternoon, the sun reflecting off the grey stone of the tower, the gates stand open, a small, battered car parked close by, as two women make their way up to the church door, their arms full of flowers and foliage.
‘You divide them up, Ma, and I’ll get out the vases,’ said the girl, as she lowered her burden gently on to the pedestal of the font. ‘Aren’t they lovely? Where did Clare get them?’
‘Sure, they’re from Drumsollen,’ June Wiley replied, watching her eldest daughter finger the bright blooms. ‘Hasn’t Andrew and your Da replanted one of the big beds at the front?’ she went on, as she began to strip green leaves briskly from the lower stems. ‘They’ve half of it back the way it was in the old days when the Richardsons had three or four gardeners,’ she added, with a little laugh. ‘You’ll see great improvements at Drumsollen. Mind you, that’s only the start. They’ve great plans, the pair of them. They’ll maybe take away some of your trade from the Charlemont.’
‘That’ll not worry me after next week,’ Helen replied cheerfully. ‘I’ll have my work cut out keeping up with all these Belfast students cleverer than I am.’
‘Now don’t be sayin’ that,’ June replied sharply, as Helen lined up a collection of tall vases. ‘Sure didn’t Clare go up to Queens just like you’re doin’ and look where she’s got to. Just because you come up from the country, ye needn’t think those ones from Belfast are any better than you are. Didn’t you get a County Scholarship? How many gets that?’
‘Clare was the first one from round here, wasn’t she?’
‘She was indeed, an’ I’ll never forget the day she got the news. Her grandfather was that pleased he could hardly tell me when I called at the forge to ask. I thought he was going to cry.’
‘Wish he was here for tomorrow, Ma. He’d be so proud,’ Helen replied, looking away, suddenly finding her own eyes full of tears, so sharp the memory of the old man in his soot-streaked clothes.
‘Aye, he would. But the other granda’s coming from over Richhill way with her Uncle Jack. So I hear. But she hasn’t mentioned her brother who lives with them. She talks about the uncle often enough, but the brother I’ve never met. They say he’s kind of funny. Very abrupt. Unsettled. Apparently the only one can manage him is Granda Hamilton. The granny pays no attention to him at all.’
‘Is she not coming to the wedding?’
‘Oh no. Not the same lady,’ the older woman replied, her tone darkening. ‘Apparently she won’t go to weddings or funerals. Says they’re a lot of fuss about nothing. But I hear she’s bad with her legs, so maybe it’s an excuse,’ she added, a frown creasing her pleasant face as she laid roses side by side and studied the length of their stems.
They worked quietly together as the afternoon sun dropped lower and the light faded in the north aisle. June Wiley had always loved flowers and had learnt long ago how to make the best of whatever the gardener’s boy had brought into the big kitchen at Drumsollen. She’d started work there as a kitchen maid, progressed to the parlour and had been instructed in the art of flower arranging by Mrs Richardson herself, a formidable lady known to all the staff as The Missus. It was later that young Mrs Richardson had chosen June as nurse for her son. She was a very different woman from her mother-in-law, warm-hearted and kindly, devoted to her little boy. June herself had gone in fear of The Missus for most of her working life, but she ended up by caring for her right up until her death in the house only eighteen months earlier.
‘Have you seen her dress, Ma?’ Helen asked, as she knelt down and swept up small fragments of foliage and discarded thorns from the step of the font.
‘No, not yet. She said she’d bring it when she came to help me with the food this morning, but she had to leave it behind at Rowentrees. She said she hung it up for the creases to drop out for she didn’t want to risk the iron. I think it has wee beads sewn into it here and there.’
‘I wonder what she’s thinking about today,’ Helen said, half to herself. ‘She used to work at Drumsollen with you, didn’t she, washing dishes and making beds like me at the Charlemont, and now she’s the lady of the house.’
June gave her daughter a thoughtful look. A clever girl she was by all accounts, but she’d always made up stories in her head. That was not something June had much time for, her own life having been hard. She had tried to bring up her three girls so they wouldn’t get ideas that would let them down.
‘Oh, something sensible, I wouldn’t wonder,’ she replied crisply. ‘Oh, she loves him all right, she always has from ever they met, but she’ll not think of him and her till she’s seen to what has to be done. Them visitors ye have at the Charlemont, Mr Lafarge and the French lady and her daughter. She’ll make sure they’re all right before she thinks about her and Andrew. Can’t remember their name.’
‘The girl is Michelle.’
June shook her head. ‘No, I meant the mother, Madame Saint-something. Clare said she was awful good to her when she first went over to France, bought her a suit for her first interview and taught her how to dress like the French do.’
She stopped suddenly, straightened up and laughed, so unexpectedly that Helen nearly dropped her dustpan.
‘What’s the joke?’ she demanded.
‘You should’ve seen her this mornin’,’ her mother said, shaking her head. ‘A pair of jeans I wouldn’t let any of you girls be seen dead in and an old shirt. It must have been Andrew’s before it shrank in the wash. I wonder what the French lady would have thought of that.’
‘It’s Madame St Clair, Ma, and she’s very nice. Speaks beautiful English. And Mr Lafarge is very polite. But I though he was American. He has an American accent.’
‘Oh aye. That’s another story too,’ June replied, lifting the first of the arrangements into place. ‘Clare says he learnt English from the Americans at the end of the war and he has some awful accent. Not the right thing at all in his job. I suppose the French are just as fussy about that sort of thing as they are here. Sure old Mrs Richardson, God rest her, was furious when young Andrew came back from a visit to Brittany with some country accent he’d picked up. Clare told me once that when he wants to make her laugh he asks her would she like ‘fish and chips’.
‘Poisson et pommes frites’
‘Aye, maybe that’s the right way of it, but that’s not how Andrew says it. The Missus always used to talk French to him when he came visitin’ and when he landed back with this accent she was fit to be tied. A Richardson talkin’ like a servant.’
‘But it was only in French, Ma. What did that matter? It was how he spoke English that would matter here, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well, I suppose you’re right, but these gentry families are full of things you wouldn’t believe. They’re always lookin’ to see whose watchin’ them. An’ the less money they have, the more they look,’ she added, nodding wisely. ‘Now the Senator was always the same to everyone, high or low, but The Missus, she was a different story. She was always on her high horse about somethin’ and yet she once told our Clare that Andrew wasn’t good enough for her, that she could do better for herself. An’ Clare a wee orphan with her granda a blacksmith.’
‘Even though Andrew was a Richardson and might some day have a title?’ Helen asked, her dark eyes wide and full of curiosity.
‘Yes. She hadn’t a good word for Andrew an’ I’ll never understand it, for you’d travel a long way to meet a nicer young man. She always said he had no go in him. He was clever enough, but he never made the best of himself, even with the posh boarding school in England and the uncle behind him sending him to Cambridge to do Law.’
‘Was Law what he wanted to do?’
June removed a dead leaf from the spread of colour which would grace the font itself and looked at her daughter thoughtfully.
‘Maybe