Read Online A Girl Called Rosie by Anne Doughty - Free Book Online Page A

to show her how much her back had improved and to tell her what she and John had decided the previous evening.
    Even when all the arrangements had been made, when Emily had been phoned at work and asked to pack her case, a single room requested from thehotel in Kerry, the hire firm contacted about a larger motor than the Lagonda John had already booked, she still could not believe it. But here was the proof. The green fields of Ulster, its villages and towns, streaming past her eyes, names she knew only from Miss Wilson’s battered atlas. Poyntzpass, an unknown place as exotic as Paris or Prague.
    Down there in that narrow main street people lived and worked and bought their groceries just as she did in Richhill. But these people were separate and as completely unknown as Poyntzpass itself. She wondered if they went for Sunday walks to the strange, broken earthwork called the Black Pig’s Dyke. Looking down from the high embankment, she saw its random shape breaking across the smooth landscape of small fields. She’d read that the dyke was thrown up as a defence against raiders from the south. There were those who declared it was made by a huge, angry monster furiously gouging the earth. But surely that would leave a trench, not a ridge.
    She was still thinking about stories and legends and where they came from when she became aware that the countryside had changed. Now the fields were full of rushes, the cabins scattered and poor. On the horizon mountains rose, peak behind peak in shades of grey, their heads in cloud. The Mournes, Granny’s mountains. The ones you could see on aclear day from the bottom of her garden or from the lane running down the hill from Rathdrum to her old home at Ballydown. Sombre now seen from this distance. Their outline unfamiliar from this different angle.
    She glanced across the carriage. Her grandfather was absorbed in the
Banbridge Chronicle
. Her grandmother had fallen asleep, her head to one side and her mouth slightly open. With a chilling shock, for the first time Rosie realised her grandmother was old. Without her quick smile and the twinkle in her eye, the wrinkles of her seventy odd years spelt out the length of her life rather than the quality of her living.
    She looked from her grandmother’s face to the face she saw above the rim of the newspaper. White-haired now, but still broad-shouldered and fit, her grandfather was a year or two older than her grandmother. He was still absorbed in his newspaper, reading methodically from front to back. He liked to know what was going on in the district and still kept in touch with the mills, though he’d retired from his directorship when he was seventy. She knew how much he enjoyed being called upon when there was a particularly difficult problem with the machinery.
    She wondered what it would be like to be old. It must be strange to have most of your life behind you,seeing your youth from far away, instead of looking forward to having all your real life in front of you. Perhaps it was like seeing the mountains from a completely different angle. They were the same rugged peaks, but you were standing somewhere different.
    As the train slowed down on the outskirts of Newry, a cloud passed over the sun. As if a giant hand had covered the globe of a lamp, the sunlight was shut off. The fields lost their glow. The mountains retreated further from view. With a sudden gasp, as if her heart had stopped, she realised that being old, her grandparents would die. Unless there was some awful accident, they’d not die together, so one of them would be left alone, desolate, after a whole lifetime of loving.
    The thought appalled her and she had to look yet more vigorously out of the window in case either of them should notice how upset she was. She was grateful when the train whistled and slowed to a halt alongside a more crowded platform. The carriage door opened and a man and woman got in, apologising politely for having to step over their feet in the