The Denniston Rose Read Online Free

She lifts off the lid. Rose wants to see in.
    ‘Don’t touch!’ says her mother in a sharp voice. ‘They’reprecious.’ The box has eggs in it, each one wrapped in a piece of woollen cloth. One is broken and a sort of chicken is lying mixed up with the egg.
    ‘What is it?’ asks Rose, but Lenie just picks up the thing by one thin leg, opens the door and throws it outside.
    Opposite the bed is a rough fireplace and chimney made from rusty iron. The chimney has a wooden frame and the canvas walls are attached to this. Rose’s mother takes the box over to the fireplace and puts her hand on the stones. Then she puts her hand in the fire itself and stirs the ashes till she’s made a nest. She puts the whole box right in the fire. Rose waits for it to burn up but it doesn’t. Lenie washes her hands in the bucket in the corner. She takes out a towel from the bundle and dips it in water too, and washes the mud off Rose’s legs and off her own legs, then wipes mud from the hem of her good coat hanging on the door.
    ‘Your face is black too,’ says Rose. Lenie wipes her face and cries out at the black on the towel. ‘What I must look like! Some black savage!’ She looks over to Jimmy Cork but all the time he is crying, ‘Ah, Jesus, Angel. Ah, Jesus.’
    ‘That’s enough of Ah Jesus,’ says Rose’s mother, and stands in front of him waiting. Jimmy won’t look up. ‘Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy, I’m too tired for all this,’ says Lenie. ‘Look at you! The arm! The house! So then. The gold was all words, was it, like your entire life? All a dream? So? All in your head?’
    Jimmy frowns. ‘Don’t be so damned sure, woman. There are complications, that’s all, and this is not the moment to go into them.’
    ‘Complications! Complications I have plenty myself without yours.’ Lenie suddenly yawns hugely. The yawn turns into yelping cries, like a wounded animal. ‘Ah! Ah! Ah! What luck I have!’
    Rose thinks her mother might be crying too. She stands on thecold floor and watches while her mother turns away from Jimmy and goes to the bundle again. She takes a blanket from the bundle and another towel. She rolls the towel up and puts it on the platform-bed. ‘Pillow,’ she announces, and Rose understands that she is to sleep next to this man who is her father. Lenie wraps the child twice around with the blanket, lifts her up like a sausage and tells her to sleep at the bottom of her father’s bed. Rose doesn’t want to. She sits up for a while, leaning against the tent at the farthest corner of the bed. Where she leans rain comes through, so she sits up straight again. She can’t get her hands out to balance and she can feel herself falling towards the man. Rose thinks she might be going to cry too, but doesn’t want to make her mother angry. Jimmy stares at her. His eyes are pale and watery, and a drip hangs off his nose.
    ‘What do they call you?’ he says.
    ‘Rose.’
    ‘Ah, Rosie, Rosie,’ says her father. ‘Ah, Jesus,’ and he starts to cry again. Rose pulls her head down into the blanket and shuts her eyes. She sings a song to herself about the ride up in the railway wagon and the nice man who lifted her out. She thinks about hot scones in the frying pan which Mr Thrush back at the beach used to make for her, and another nice lady who often talked to her.
    The bundled-up grey sausage that is Rose slowly keels over and comes to rest on her father’s feet. She is asleep.
    Lenie takes off her jacket and shakes out her hair. Jimmy turns his shaggy head to watch her. Lenie’s hair is thick and wild, like his, only a darker red. Her body is more solid than he remembers, but splendid still, and her wide red mouth a temptation, even in his present state. Over huge black eyes the eyebrows, thick as a man’s and straight as boot-brushes, are fiercely at odds with the tender mouth. Jimmy had forgotten the brooding force of this woman, her power to excite. She makes a move towards the bed and then stops,looks