Free It Was Only Ever You by Kate Kerrigan

the ease and speed with which she had replied.
    ‘I’ll come down and talk to your father,’ he said brightly, ‘so we can put a stop to all this secretive nonsense and start courting properly.’
    He hadn’t noticed the way that Rose’s hand halted on the page when she heard him say ‘I love you’, or how she had begun drawing again as she said, ‘I love you too’. Neither did he sense that her kiss was not as passionate as he might have imagined it should be after the first declaration of love. When the kiss was over she prodded him playfully in the chest and said in a firm, gentle voice, ‘Sit back how you were – I’m not finished drawing you yet.’
    She smiled at him, dazzlingly, which he took to mean utter happiness. In fact it masked the fact that Rose did not know quite what to say. The very fact that he had told her that he loved her was, for an older lad like Patrick, tantamount to a marriage proposal. Patrick was not some stupid boy of eighteen, mooning over her. At twenty-five it was time enough for him to get married and if you told a girl you loved them, especially a girl like Rose Hopkins, the doctor’s daughter, that was what you meant.
    Until now she had assumed that Patrick understood that the secrecy was because her parents would not approve of him, not because her parents would not approve of the fact that they were courting without serious intention of marriage.
    She could not hurt his feelings by telling him that her parents would not think that he was good enough for her. Of course he was good enough, he was too good. Rose knew that she would never find anyone who understood her as he did. Never find anyone who would complete her the way that Patrick did. She had not realized that she had been incomplete without him until that day at the lake when he had swooped her up out of the water and kissed her. Now, she could not go back to being without him. She would only be half of who she was. Rose didn’t know why that would be but in the hours she was not with him a terrible ennui descended on her. When she was with Patrick she felt powerful, fulfilled, whole. Just being with him rescued her from herself. They were soulmates, she knew that. Much as her parents loved her and wanted her to be happy, they did not understand her as Patrick did: the life and death nature of her drawing, the passion she felt for nature, but mostly, the all-encompassing love she felt for this man. There was no way that her pragmatic father and anxious, snobbish mother could begin to understand Patrick and Rose’s love for each other. Her parents would find a way of putting a stop to the romance if it became public.
    ‘Let’s run away,’ she said.
    As she said it Rose had no idea what she was suggesting. All she knew was that she could not have Patrick going to her parents’ house and talking to her father. She could not bear the thought of seeing the disappointment in her father’s face or the fear in her mother’s eyes when she found out her precious daughter had been ‘running about’ with ‘that Murphy boy’.
    ‘We could go to Dublin: I finish school in a year.’ An idea began to take shape. ‘You could go ahead of me and get digs and a job. I could go to art college and you could sing. You know you’ll never get work singing around here.’
    The more she spoke, the more Rose started to believe that it could be true. They could go away and start a life together in the city. It was where they both belonged anyway – the artist and the singer, there was nothing for them around here. They would have to get married, of course. But once it was a fait accompli and her parents saw how happy she was, and that Patrick was a good man, they would come round to the idea. They had already agreed to let her go to college, more or less, so this would be the perfect solution. If she and Patrick started dating here, now, in the small town of Foxford, her parents would disapprove. That would not stop them, of