Her Name Is Rose Read online

  Next stop is Belsize. Did she get on the right line? Feck. Her anxiety is such that she gets out at Belsize to check. She jumps back in just as the doors are about to close. Hampstead, Golders Green. How long will it be to the end of the line? Brent Cross, Hendon, Colindale. Places she’s never been, never even heard of, doesn’t want to know. Burnt Oak. That’s what she feels like, she thinks. Burnt Oak. What have I done? What have I done?

  Dadda?

  Finally, Edgware. The tube doors open and Rose is first out. She’s frantic. Takes the stairs two at a time. Her heart is hammering.

  I was stupid. I was stupid. I was stupid.

  At the top step she looks quickly around like a frightened mother looking for a lost child. At the turnstiles other passengers come and go. She is wild with alarm, yet with hope, too, that somehow the violin will be here.

  She flings her Oyster Card onto the Reader. Her eyes sweep across the ticket windows. Will someone recognize the look on her face and know that she’s not running from heartbreak but toward something? Will someone help her? Know this must be the girl looking for the violin that was brought in an hour earlier by some decent passenger? This girl with the flushed face and tossed hair must be her. It’s crazy ridiculous but it flashes through her mind just the same— It’ll be there. It’ll be there. It’ll be there.

  But the ticket windows are shut.

  No porter stands by any turnstile.

  And there is no sign of a violin case as she peers in through the black windows of the office.

  Exiting passengers flow past her. She keeps staring in. It’s not there, but she doesn’t stop looking, she doesn’t stop hoping. Then, at last, like a slow breath exhaling, Rose slides down the cold tiled wall to the dirty floor. People pass but they do not look. She’s just another drunken nightclubbing girl of London at one o’clock in the morning.

  * * *

  It is the second-hardest thing Rose Bowen has had to do, to get herself back to Camden, but somehow she does. It takes a long time. A long time to reconcile what she has done with what she had hoped this day would bring—achievement, recognition, a sense of belonging. Her so-called sterile Bach wasn’t part of her plan or her tender hope to shine as a rising star for whom the academy might sit up and take notice, of whom her father would be proud. Rejection is all she feels. She can’t escape it. Yet, somehow, she finally gathers herself, presses her Oyster Card again on the Reader, and makes her way down, down into the Northern Line.

  She rides back in the spotlight of the nighttime Tube in a trance, not sitting but standing, swaying in a slow oscillation through the dark and light of Colindale, Brent Cross, Hampstead, Belsize, Chalk Farm, Camden … until she makes it back to her flat. There is a note from Isobel.

  Hey Rosie, Hope the master class was brill! Hope you nailed it. Sorry I missed you. Aaron and I are off to Dublin. Back in a week. xxxoo Izzy

  She sits on her small balcony with the bottle of champagne she’d brought the day before and drinks quickly. The bubbles spill down her chin. She has not eaten. Too late to ring her mother and confess all. Below, across the canal under a streetlight, a guy with a guitar sings reggae. The music swells every memory of the day into one tidal wave of emotion. She finally breaks. The guy with the guitar pauses his playing and looks for the sound of a woman crying. When he cannot locate it he plays Bob Marley’s song “No Woman No Cry.”

  Rose will find out if it is the end of the world when she contacts the Underground’s lost property office in the morning. But now, dizzy from drinking too fast, she steps back into her room, closes the curtains, and falls to her bed and sleeps.

  In her early-morning dreams there are people in a crowd. They are waiting for someone. A man comes toward her but she can’t make out whom it is. First it seems like it’s the man she sometimes sees on her way to college. Then it’s the violin maker. Then it’s Roger. Then Bob Marley. There’s guitar music and violins tuning. The man whom everybody is waiting for becomes solid. He approaches through a blue haze and when she recognizes who he is, she runs. She runs straight at him and flings her arms around him. The man hugs her tiny child frame. Her head turns in against his chest and she cries. “Dadda, come back to me. Come back to me. Please. Please.”

  Six

  Iris had never been across the Atlantic. When she arrived into Boston’s Logan Airport at four on Thursday afternoon after an eight-hour flight from Shannon, she was travel weary, in a bit of a daze. So she followed the crowd through to the arrivals area where people in summer clothes looked like they knew where they were going. They seemed happy to be there. Happy to be on holiday. Happy to be home. Happy to have arrived safely. With a little trip of her heart, Iris believed that happiness belonged only to these people. Not to her. She slumped and let go of her suitcase. Gone was the confidence she’d felt walking away from the Adoption Board—a woman with a mission, doing nothing but charging forward until she would arrive in Boston and find Hilary Barrett. No distractions in between. She’d let no one know. Not Tess. Not the postman. Not the Breast Clinic. Not Rose. Especially not Rose. She expected to be back in four or five days. (She’d left enough food for Cicero in one of those plastic funnel self-feeders but, she was suddenly remembering, had neglected to reschedule her appointment with the Breast Clinic.)

  In the center of the concourse the crowd she’d been following dispersed in a dozen directions. Iris stood by her suitcase and looked around. She hadn’t thought this through. Now what? Now what the hell? What the bloody hell! There, under the bold bright information kiosk, stood a young redhead. As Iris approached the counter she saw the girl was wearing a green HI! I’M KERRY nametag. She had the kind of face you see on old postcards of Ireland, the ones with donkeys in Technicolor and freckled, curly-haired children. Iris angled her suitcase against the kiosk.

  The girl looked up from her work.

  “Can you find me some place to stay?” Iris blurted. “I mean, please, can you help me?” She was hot and gathered up her hair to let the air-conditioned air cool the back of her neck. “I’m afraid I haven’t booked a place. It was last-minute.”

  “First time to Boston?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be happy to help.” Kerry smiled. Iris noticed her teeth were straight and perfect and white. Her red hair was more auburn than Iris’s. “In the city?”

  “I’d like to stay near St. Botolph Street. Is that in the city?” Iris didn’t know what size city Boston was or, foolishly, she was now realizing, how expensive. She’d already spent a fortune on the last-minute flight.

  “Sure thing. St. Botolph Street? Ummm.” Kerry’s eyes squinted into the distance. After a moment she said, “Oh, right! I know where that is. I pass it all the time.” She said it with such obvious satisfaction that it made Iris smile. “I can look for a hotel around Copley Square. The Copley Plaza maybe?” Kerry leaned slightly forward and asked, “Single?”

  “Single,” Iris said quietly and made her best silly middle-aged-lady face. “I don’t know what I was thinking, not booking accommodation. It really was a last-minute decision.”

  The girl smiled and looked down. Her fingers padded a keyboard behind the counter while she scanned the PC’s screen. “Um … sorry. Copley’s booked. It’s the weekend.” She paused. “Like, how nice a place do you want? There are lots of great places. But, some of them are—”

  “A small hotel, I think.” Iris placed her hands on the counter.

  “No problem.”

  “Like a B-and-B, maybe? But near St. Botolph Street,” Iris quickly added.

  “A B-and-B? We don’t really have B…” Kerry thought a moment, looked at her watch, then back to Iris. “Just a sec.” She picked up the phone.

  Iris’s eyes rose from her hands to Kerry’s young face. She wanted to say more. She wanted to confide in her the way one does sometimes with strangers. In fact, right then she wanted to confide to anybody who might listen. And for a few seconds she imagined walking right out into the middle of the concou
rse, walking into the flux of the arriving and departing, the helloing and good-byeing, and saying: “Hey. Listen. I need your help. I have to find my daughter’s mother.” But of course she didn’t, and the flow of people continued, each face carrying its own story, like worlds within worlds.

  She’d kept to herself the whole flight from Shannon, flicking through her gardening magazines, and back and forth between films she didn’t really care to watch, eating and not eating, drinking a gin and tonic after takeoff and then two small bottles of pinot grigio somewhere over the mid-Atlantic when she realized she wasn’t going to be able to nap. She’d been eight hours in a silent cocoon with the name “Hilary Barrett” and the words “architectural distortion” flying around in her head. Everything was up in the air, literally—her appointment at the Breast Clinic; her promise to Luke; and just what she was going to say to Hilary Barrett when she found her. It had all been colliding silently in seat 16D for eight hours. And now, now she was desperate to talk to someone. Just that. Talk. She turned from the counter to watch the crowds negotiating the concourse, a nonstop rush of families, friends, and other strangers moving purposefully across the polished floor, and then she looked through its wide windows beyond where cottonball clouds floated above the city on the horizon.

  Kerry returned and scribbled something down on a little “Welcome to Boston” pad. Her short nails were painted purple. She produced a map from below the counter and as she leaned forward, she tossed her hair back over her shoulder. “Here. Here’s a nice place,” she said quietly, looking around her and ringing the location with a pen. “She has a vacancy. A Mrs. Hale.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I have to tell you…” She lowered her voice even more. “She’s not registered, exactly. Not like, officially. But I know her. She’s a bit, um … she’s really nice. I think you’ll like her.” She looked at Iris, quizzically, as if to see that she understood.

  But Iris’s eyes were scrambling over the map to see how close this was to St. Botolph Street.

  “Okay. That sounds okay.”

  “Good.” Kerry smiled. “See here? This is the T stop, just a few blocks away.” She outlined with her pen. “You can walk from the T to here, and then, here.”

  “The T?” Iris flagged her hair against the back of her neck and wondered for a second if jet lag made you hotter.

  “Public transport. It’s called the T.” She laughed. “You can take it straight there. I’ve done it many times. Or you can take a taxi. But it’s Friday. Rush hour, you know.”

  “Is it far?”

  “On the T? No. And it’s a lot cheaper. Don’t worry. I know Mrs. Hale. She’s my mother’s friend. They play tennis together over near Berklee.”

  “What’s Berklee?”

  “Berklee College. It’s near the South End. Near St. Botolph Street. Where you’re going. Look. You take the Silver Line”—Kerry indicated with a wave of her arm across the concourse in the direction of the T—“to Newton Street Station. Then walk here. Where St. Botolph Street is.” She circled it, too. “Very close.” She handed over the map but Iris didn’t want to move away from the information booth.

  “Thank you. Kerry.”

  As if sensing the lady in front of her wanted something more, Kerry said, “Are you Irish?”

  “Yes.” Iris’s face brightened.

  “Me, too! My grandmother’s from County Kerry.” She pointed to the name tag. “That’s how I got my name.” Her Boston accent was now, Iris noted, heavily pronounced with its missing Rs. “One day I hope to get over there.”

  This brief recognition was just what Iris needed, one tiny connection to inch her along. She nodded. “I hope you do. And thank you so much for your help.” She smiled as genuinely as she could and grabbed the handle of her bag and headed toward the Silver Line, leaving the girl at the counter dreaming, probably, about the day she would return to the birthplace of her grandmother in the Kingdom of Kerry. Midway across the concourse, Iris turned to wave back but the crowd was already whirring between them.

  * * *

  Mrs. Hale’s was only a few blocks from the station stop but with each step—pulling a resistant brown suitcase whose wheels seemed to have swollen in the heat—Iris withered. She stopped on a corner and looked up. Tremont and West Newton. My God, it was hot. Heat rose from the sidewalk and channeled through her feet up to the top of her head.

  It was commuter time. People passed around her. Well-dressed women in running shoes and men with suit jackets off, their ties loose around their necks. She fanned herself with the map and walked toward the shade under what looked like maple trees. She rested a few moments. Through the canopy of green she looked up at the blue sky. In the middle of a puzzle, the pieces will fit somewhere. Trust. White in, gray out. Water up, fire down. She steadied, went another block, and arrived at the steps of a redbrick building with a fancy wooden sign: HALE 116.

  She rang the bell, and after a few moments a middle-aged woman with a shock of cropped golden-white hair and the reddest-painted lips opened the door. She was a good few years older than Iris.

  “Oh, hello!” the woman beamed. “Come in. Come in. Hot out there, huh? Yes. The heat is just gruesome today. We’re having a heat wave. Right?” It was like she was giddy with it. Iris stepped in. Air like a cool breeze rushed toward her.

  “Mrs. Bowen, yes? Have I got it right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Grace Hale.” She offered her hand. “Not up for this heat, are we? Not even we Bostonians are. And golly, look what you’re wearing. You must be ready for a tall glass of lemonade. Or something.”

  Iris took Grace’s hand, which was cold, and said, “That would be lovely. Thank you.”

  “Here, let me take that,” the woman said, beginning to reach for Iris’s bag, then shouting, “Billy?” She seemed as if she was either just coming in or just going out. Pink seahorses rode in the white of her knee-length shorts and the pink socks she wore peeked above her white tennis shoes. Mrs. Hale called down the cool hallway, “Billy? Billy!?” and turned back to Iris, who was still holding her bag. “Oh, leave your bag. Billy, my helper, will bring it up. Eventually.” She led farther along the hallway, past framed prints of landscapes and city scenes that hung on green-painted walls.

  Mrs. Hale explained that she’d had a phone call from Kerry and was happy to let out the room. “It’s a little arrangement Kerry and I have.” Iris followed her up two flights of old wooden stairs and into a small room with wallpaper patterned with bird boxes. “Kerry only sends me special people.” The bed was tidily made up with linen pillowcases and a dresser held a small pile of books and brochures. “I’m not exactly registered with the tourist board, you know.” Everything in the room was wooden except for a soft leather armchair. “Maybe next year I’ll apply for my license.”

  “I’m very grateful,” Iris said, feeling she should say something, but now wondering if she should have declined Kerry’s booking and found a Best Western or something.

  At the window Grace Hale moved the voile curtain aside and said, “It’s not much to look at, but you’ll be glad because this corner is nice and quiet in the morning.”

  “I’m not here for the view.”

  Grace Hale didn’t follow up; she just smiled. “You’ll find everything you want.” Grace’s round eyes opened wider and she scanned the room, nodding to herself as if ticking off a mental checklist: fresh towels, a bar of soap, bottled water, and a drinking glass. It was all there. “And now, what about a bite to eat? You must be starved. Right? I mean, what time is it? I can bring you up a light supper and something to drink.”

  “Really? If it isn’t too much trouble,” Iris said, thinking how she’d love a glass of that lemonade she’d been offered at the door. “Thank you.”

  “Gosh. Not at all. I couldn’t send you out into this heat.” Grace Hale leaned slightly out the door. “Billy?” she called down the stairs, then turned back to Iris. “Lemonade? Or … something stronger
?”

  Iris paused. She was unable to match this woman’s energy and before she could reply, Grace laughed. “I’m famous for my chicken sandwiches. Wouldn’t that be nice? Yes? Toasted?” She spoke quickly, as if used to one-sided dialogues. “I’ll get that and I’ll leave you now, unless there’s something else—”

  Of course there was something else. “No. That would be wonderful. Thank you, Mrs. Hale.”

  Grace stood a moment longer. “It used to be Mrs. Hale,” she said “but my husband, Bob, died a while ago.” There was a tiny puckering around the corners of her eyes then, a little resigned upturn on her lips, as if it was a story she was finally able to tell without crying. “Please, call me Grace.”

  * * *

  A young man with black hair and a black T-shirt and khakis finally appeared with Iris’s suitcase. “Hi, I’m Billy. Welcome to Boston. If you need anything I’m usually downstairs. I’m helping Grace out—” He was about to say more when they both heard Grace calling “Billy!” from below, and he shrugged and said “That’s me,” and headed off down to her at a saunter. “Coming, Mrs. Hale.”

  Iris closed the wooden door, stood a few moments feeling at a loss, then unpacked. And as if she needed evidence that she had made her decision to come too rashly, here it was: no nightgown and too many cardigans. Three. “Well done, Iris. If they get a sudden freeze, you’ll be fine.” She pulled aside the curtain and looked down into an alleyway, listening to the sounds, inside and out, of the early evening. A soft whir of traffic hummed. Someone walked by her door outside. The floors creaked. A vent above the door to the bathroom made a hissing noise, but Iris didn’t mind. She was glad of the cool air. She checked the bathroom and was grateful to see a tub. A white cotton bathrobe hung on a hanger on the back door. It was belted at the empty waist. She could sleep in that.