Roisin was miles away in her head as she walked the short distance up to her front door. Her attitude towards her fellow beings was to 'live and let live', especially in relation to her still censorious ex-husband and ex-mother-in-law. However much of a tentative accommodation she had made with them it would be as much to expect that they would finally warm to her and Cassie as it would to expect Ian Paisley to become bosom buddies with the Pope. Regarding her fellow musicians, all she wanted to do was to humbly fit in, play her music and be on friendly terms with them. After all, she, Babs and in his way Grayling were relative outsiders. As she mulled things over in her mind, she had a gut feeling that such detachment may be as difficult to assume as part of the orchestra as it was at Larkhall.
In this frame of mind, she fumbled with her front door key to open the door for a few minutes until the keyhole swung back gently out of reach and the Cassie's welcoming smile was revealed in the crack in the door which opened up in front of her.
"You look tired, babe. Take the weight off your feet," Cassie urged as Michael and Niamh welcomed her into her other world of cosy domesticity.
Michael proudly took Roisin's violin from her while she collapsed unthinking into a chair.
"Be careful with my violin, Michael. It's precious," She called out anxiously, scared in case the child might accidentally damaged an instrument that was priceless as the conveyor of music and of past long association. Despite her tiredness from the hard day's work spent in exacting rehearsals, that faculty was still alive within her.
"I'll look after it, mum. Don't worry," He stopped himself from saying that, as a twelve-year-old, he wasn't a child any more. He was three years older than Niamh and he could tell the difference at that age even if mum and Cassie sometimes couldn't.
"He'll be all right," Cassie added quietly. "He just wants to help."
Roisin smiled nervously but let him place the violin in pride of place on the sideboard with more sense of delicacy than the increasingly larger and more boisterous boy was capable of. Niamh, instead, plonked herself on Mum's lap to welcome her home. From the moment both of them first heard mum practice in the kitchen, they were proud of her.
Cassie passed her a lovely hot cup of tea, which Roisin placed, carefully on a side table to sip from when she felt like it.
"So, come on, what's the latest gossip?" Cassie called out jokingly, standing in front of her.
"I've only been part of Barristers Behaving Badly, nothing much," Roisin answered, grasping at the first snapshot memory image that came to her mind.
"Hey, and I thought you were mixing with high society who knew how to behave themselves. After all, they judge people or prosecute or defend people for a living."
"I stayed out of it. I don't want any trouble," Came Roisin's virtuous reply.
Cassie rolled her eyes heavenwards at Roisin's elliptical way of telling a story. She did not want to hear how much of a goody goody her beloved was as she knew that already. She wanted to hear the scandal. And her frustrated curiosity was at screaming point.
"Now Roash, like the kids English teacher say for writing essays, start at the beginning and finish at the end," she commanded.
"For a start, there was some terrible woman in the chorus line who was screeching away and putting me off my music. Finally George lost her temper and shouted out for someone to take that caterwauling alto out of the hall."
"Whew, that was telling her," Cassie said, deeply impressed. In the first trial ages ago, she had seen George in action as a hard faced woman who had a ferocious line of verbal attack. More recently in the very same court, she had seen a much softer, almost diffident woman who was all the more attractive for it and who wanted so much to be part of their company. It touched her that she wished to belong to them when she clearly came from the sort of background that might not have wanted to pass the time of day with them. There was a fair amount of class to all the women in all their different ways but this woman was different league altogether. Cassie noticed that George hit it off with Nikki, the woman who once would have been condemned to the longest stretch in prison as a lifer.
"If she was so bad, why was that woman allowed to be in the orchestra in the first place. After all, you and Karen auditioned to get into the orchestra," Cassie said reflectively.
This stopped Roisin short. In her innocence, she had not thought to ask herself the question, as she was preoccupied in making an honest effort to keep up to standard.
"I'm not sure."
"Well," grinned Cassie wickedly. "There's the one obvious answer. She's either married to someone important or……."
"Her name is Vera Everard," recalled Roisin from her memory and her husband is the tenor who sings with George and Neil." There was a melee when everyone was taking their places and George smiled kindly at me and made a cryptic aside about her. Reflecting now how stressed George had looked, Roisin had concluded that George had wanted the chorus to buttress and support her solo, and not produce an atonal sound that grated and threatened to put her off her stroke more than she was already.
"George would talk to you as you're restful company for anyone who's stressed out. That's no reason for Vera Whatshername that to be there," Cassie reflected soberly. "So what happened next?"
"One of those men who were at the back of the visitor's gallery in court made a horrible crack about George as she couldn't hit her top notes this time, but just stopped short. The last time she could hit that very high top C note with no trouble."
"Hmmn," Cassie said reflectively. It sounded like she was digging in her heels for some reason which was well within Cassie's own range of sympathies."
"So she picked up a score and hurled it through the air at him and hit him right in the face."
Cassie and the children burst out in laughter at that piece of news. The children had watched too many Tom and Jerry cartoons so that it appealed on a basic level and they had gleaned third hand through George via mum and Cassie just how bad they were.
"It couldn't happen to a better person, except someone like Bodybag," Cassie exclaimed slowly with a satisfaction which was savoured as she spoke before a thought crossed her mind. "Hey, you don't suppose that hanging out with us and the rest of the gang has lured her off the straight and narrow? She would have been right at home on G Wing."
The reality of their present life was that if either of them were torn away either from each other or from the children and ended up in Larkhall, would be the worst nightmare imaginable. When they were in Larkhall, the many horrible periods included Roisin's terrifying slide into drug addiction and how far away she was from her children who she had seen rarely in Aiden's hateful company. It was curious that for all that, they could think themselves back nostalgically to the better times when there was that intense feeling of closeness that they had between themselves, Babs and Yvonne and others like the Julies and Denny and now Lauren who were shut inside that foreign world where everything is done differently, there.
"For all the bad times, there were good times, weren't there. And George would have fitted right in there………." Cassie started to say hesitantly.
"Oh children, don't worry. Everything's fine," Roisin urged with that pure maternal love that had held in the children through the fraught times leading up to their trial and that horrible period when she was gone except in their minds. Many times they had had that repeated nightmare of them crying out to mum and hearing her voice from afar that "Mum's coming" and seeing her outstretched arms and face blown back in the wind only to wake up to hear the iron voices of Aiden and his mother. They did wish that mum and Cassie didn't talk about Larkhall so much as it only had evil memories for them of scowling huge grownups, ugly uniforms and locks, bolts and bars.
"Hey, we're really sorry, kids," Cassie's incredibly tender voice and big blue open eyes said as much as her words did. They both started to calm down as Roisin and Cassie hugged them.
"George is more likely to end up inside than we are, kids. She'll have the best to defend her like Jo Mills who defended Lauren."
"When's Auntie Lauren getting out?" Niamh and Michael asked in chorus. At that moment, they both loved Cassie as being totally cool and for her very endearingly humourous way of putting things that took away both their fears of losing what had become dear to them. In turn, Cassie and Roisin were instantly overjoyed that that inadvertent reference to Lauren had steered the conversation away from a sticky moment.
"Let's see," reflected Cassie. "The trial took place in late January and Lauren got a year. If she gets time off for good behaviour, she could be out in August or September."
"That's ages away," They wailed but there was nothing like the upset tones in their voices as there was in their thoughts a minute ago.
"Well, why don't you both write to her so long as you get your homework done as well," Cassie gently persuaded them.
"We'll do the card first, then homework."
Roisin exchanged doubtful glances with Cassie as this wasn't their favoured order of events but they conceded the point.
"We'll get the dinner while you're working," Roisin called out with a sidelong look at Cassie.
Instantly, a purposeful positive feeling came over the house and Roisin reached for a potato peeler as she started to talk.
"I hadn't finished my story of what happened today."
"You're a sly one, Roisin Connor. You're going to tell me the stuff that is not in front of the children," Grinned Cassie before turning to the fridge to select some beefsteaks which had been taken out of the freezer to defrost. At moments like this, they had this curious way of carrying on conversations in the same way as of every busy mother perpetually on the move.
"After George left the hall, we carried on with some orchestral pieces which were hard work but enjoyable. It was only out of the corner of my eye that I saw the judge make a very quiet exit out of the rehearsal. I can't remember how long that time passed, as I was busy enough with keeping up with the rest of the musicians…… Anyway, I noticed when John came back after a long time," Roisin explained as she started to slice up the first of the potatoes into the saucepan,
"How sort of came back, Roashe. Don't be coy," Cassie probed in her inevitable way. "Well, he sort of swaggered in as if ……."
"He'd been screwing George," Finished Cassie before she went to turn the beefsteaks over.
"How are you getting on with your cards. I hope you're starting your homework," Yelled Cassie the virtuous mother who was only too concerned that the children didn't expend all their efforts on the cards and then skimp the homework.
"It's OK," Michael called back. "We're starting our homework now."
"But in the open air near the church? I'm not a prude but won't there be the risk of anyone passing."
"It's easy, Roash," Replied Cassie, that very sexual woman. "I've done it myself in my single days. You've just got to watch out for any thistles. We ought to try it some day."
Cassie's smug smile and nonchalant manner could not have help but make Roisin laugh and the idea of it sounded intriguing if the umbilical chords could be safely detached and put on hold. Cassie was one for suggesting interesting possibilities. It was that look in her eye and the smile at the corner of her mouth that had led her to Cassie when she was a so-called respectably married woman. Well, she still was but in a different way.
"So what's with, the judge, George, Jo and Karen? It all sounds very decadent."
Roisin grinned when she heard Cassie put it this way.
"I get the feeling that there's a tie between George Jo and John but then again, I thought Karen and George were an item. It gets very confusing."
"It's not my scene being bi but many women are. Doing the round of the clubs taught me exactly what is possible and what isn't."
"But what about Jo?"
"Was she particularly thrown or did she go into a strop when they made their very obvious entrance."
"Well, no," Roisin confessed.
"Sweetheart, every woman is gay. It's just that not all of them know it yet. You never know even Jo might be or one day she will be."
"What makes you say that. There are some straight women around. I meet them every day…………." Roisin started to say before Cassie's big grin gave her enough answer not to presume conventional respectability on surface impression.
"You were once," Cassie added, quite unnecessarily.
Roisin shook her head incredulously before breaking off to boil the potatoes and grab for a bagful of frozen broccoli, knowing that Cassie would attend to the gravy.
"When's dinner ready?" came the inevitable call.
"Give us twenty minutes or so," yelled out Cassie with that voice that could carry through brick walls. "You'd better have done your homework by then."
"The only slightly unpleasant note was when that oily man came sidling up to me at breaktime and started making all sorts of personal remarks. I told him that their personal lives were nothing to do with me and that everyone has the right to be exempt from malicious evil gossip. The judge had been so very kind to a dear friend of mine, Lauren Atkins and I am proud to name Jo Mills and George Channing as friends of mine."
Roisin quoted her fierce impassioned reaction with some heat and much pride. She always had fierce loyalties and strong views on petty gossip from when she was a little girl, either despite or because of her conservative Catholic upbringing. However much she had changed in recent years, her God, like Babss', was still very real to her before whom she felt she could hold her head up high with pride. Cassie was not religious but it was that highly moral quality in Roisin which she loved so much.