We Must Be Brave Page 15

  ‘Ellen.’

  I thought the voice was in my head. But there was a hand pulling at my sodden sleeve. I turned to see Mr Kennet in an oilskin, the rain battering the brim of his hat. ‘Come round the back.’ He sounded gruff and calm. ‘The barn door’s not locked.’

  ‘I can’t move.’ My teeth chattered. ‘I might get struck.’

  ‘You won’t get struck. Come—’ But the rest was lost in a white flash and a bang. The drainpipe at the end of the wall fell away into the yard. Mr Kennet seized my arm and pulled me round the corner and into the barn.

  *

  The rain roared on the tin roof. I sat on a bale of hay. Mr Kennet put his oilskin over my wet shoulders. The barn door was slightly open and through it I could see the walls of rain sweep up the line of Beacon Hill. I was still sobbing but my cries went unheard in the din. Mr Kennet stood with his back to me, doffing his hat and striking it lightly against the edge of the door to shake the raindrops from the brim. His hair was coarse, pale blond, like stubble in a field. The rain began to fall in large drops from the roof. I hugged my knees under the heavy oilskin, then rested my head on my folded arms. Great rhythmic shivers ran through me.

  By and by I noticed that Mr Kennet was gazing upwards at the rafters, mouth half-open, chest rising and falling, slow blinks closing his eyes. Some kind of vagueness or otherworldliness seemed to be overtaking him, a strange, rapt solemnity.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Kennet?’

  ‘Wondering about those drips,’ he said after a moment. ‘I should tell Harvey Corey. It’s his barn.’

  More light was beginning to shine in through the door. The rain had eased and the clouds were breaking up.

  ‘You looked as if you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘Fair few ghosts up here on the chalk, I reckon.’ He gazed out at the hill. ‘Along with the flints and bones from those ancient people. And they all had their troubles too. There’s never anything so bad you can’t be soothed by that, Ellen.’

  I disagreed, thinking that an empty belly put paid to all soothing. But did not say so.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Kennet,’ I said instead. ‘I think I was too frightened to move.’

  ‘Lucky it was my afternoon off. I always come up to take a look at the Coreys’ sheep for them.’ He smiled at me. ‘So who did that close crop?’

  I blushed to the roots of it. ‘Elizabeth.’

  The roof was silent. The rain had stopped. He stood up and pulled the barn door wide. I felt my tears rise again. ‘I’d much rather stay here.’

  He laughed. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

  Desolate, I began to shrug my way out of his oilskin, but he shook his head. ‘Keep it on while we go down the lane. We’ll go to Upton Hall and have a warm by my fire.’

  The cow parsley in the verges was drenched; the road shone in the sun. My head felt dull, my face and eyes sticky. I sniffed, to bring cool, damp air into my lungs. Suddenly Mr Kennet laughed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He smiled. ‘I have a great deal to think about. That’s all.’

  Then he stared ahead at the water shining on the puddles.

  We reached Upton Hall and the potting shed. The crying had exhausted me and I was still chilled to the marrow. Mr Kennet kneeled down to attend to the stove. I sat on the stool thinking I would never be warm again. But it wasn’t long before the coals glowed and he was passing me a cup of hot tea.

  ‘What’s in store for you now, Ellen? Where will you go?’

  ‘I’m at the Dawes’.’ I bound my fingers around the tin mug.

  ‘After that?’

  ‘Well.’ I fixed my eyes on the brick-coloured tea. ‘I’ve been learning to type. I haven’t got a machine, but I’ve got a cardboard …’ It sounded pitiful spoken aloud. He turned round, still on his knees. I struggled on. ‘I’ve got a keyboard made of card. And I practise putting my fingers on it. According to the principles of rhythm and touch.’

  ‘Have you told those Dawes?’

  I shook my head. I imagined their dismay as I showed them my typewriting book. I could see Miss Dawes picking it up by one corner, between finger and thumb. I had got rid of the mildew and the woodworm frass, but could do nothing about the chewed parts. They probably contained vital information about typewriting techniques. There might very well be additional apparatus, dials and levers about which I knew nothing.

  ‘No one’ll believe you can do it. Don’t take on,’ he chuckled, because I was hanging my head, my eyes welling. ‘I meant, you’ll have to have a go on a real one first. An actual typewriter.’

  I looked up. He was staring into the distance again but this time his eyes were sharp, narrowed, as if scanning a strange new landscape. But he was intrepid. ‘I reckon Lady Brock’s got one,’ he went on. ‘It’s in the farm office. Len Norris, the farm manager – he don’t use it, but his girl does. Evie Norris. She might show you a trick or two.’

  ‘Yes, she might. Oh, Mr Kennet. How will I find the money?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Evie Norris. She won’t do it for free.’

  ‘Cross that bridge later. Let me ask her first.’

  We sat at rest. He lit the gas lamp. I gazed at his hand, the forefinger and thumb braided scar tissue and the truncated palm, in its pincering strength somewhat like a crab, in its silvered puffiness somewhat like a quilt. He followed my line of sight.

  ‘When I was a young man I beat copper for a living,’ he told me. ‘I made the weathercock. The one on the clock tower of Waltham Town Hall.’

  I had seen the weathercock many times, gybing with a flash of red-gold in the wind. I had never considered it as a thing to be fashioned, or that there were people who knew how.

  ‘That beautiful shiny bird? How wonderful!’

  ‘My cousin Mottram is a steeplejack. He brings it down every year, puts a polish on it.’ William grunted. ‘I wish he’d let the sun and rain turn it green, as is natural. So people would forget about it. So I could forget about it. But I can’t tell him to stop.’

  ‘Because he’s doing it for your sake?’

  He nodded. ‘He thinks it’s a kindness.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m glad he does it.’

  William smiled at me. ‘Then I shan’t mind so much.’

  I hugged my knees, feeling the chill leave me. I knew that I ought to go back to the Dawes’ soon. But it was peaceful here.

  ‘Any road,’ William continued, ‘after the war Sir Michael gave me this job. One day I was in here whittling a birch twig, trying to get the knack of pruning, when your mother came by. On her way up to the Hall, she was. We sat and talked a while in the shed. She didn’t mind my hand. In those days, you see, people flinched at it.’

  To think of my mother, young, before our ruin, in this shed where I was now. Perhaps she’d sat on the milking stool, like me. Or would he have given her the armchair? Surely, yes. In all our years at the Absaloms she’d never mentioned it. But then conversation on any topic had been beyond her in the Absaloms.

  I looked out of the window. Venus rippled beyond the pane, as bright as a lamp. I thought of my mother sitting here, being kind.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Kennet. I never invited you back to our house, after all your hospitality here. I’m afraid it wasn’t suitable …’

  He leaned forward to adjust the vent on the stove. ‘Don’t you mind about that.’ His voice was deep. ‘Your mother was a lady. She preferred to entertain in style.’

  13

  EVIE NORRIS’S TYPEWRITING MACHINE sat black and shining under a lamp with a hooked brass neck and a green glass shade. I was right: there were levers and rolls, things foreign to me. Evie bade me sit down and bent over me. She had warm, warty hands and smelled of Parma violets. She placed these hands on mine and I pressed the key of Q. Bang, went the machine. ‘Not so hard.’ Evie gave a violet giggle. ‘But better too hard than too soft.’

  I went to Evie twice a week after school, where I continued as assistant to
Miss Yarnold, handing my wages to Mr and Miss Dawes for room and board. They had agreed, reluctantly at first and then with good grace, to me extending my time with them until I was fifteen, a matter of six months or so. When the school closed for the summer Miss Dawes found me piecework making clothes-peg bags and hemming dishcloths. ‘The fabric’s from the fallen women. You know. The home for unmarried mothers,’ she added in a whisper, when I stared in confusion. ‘But you won’t mind that, dear, will you?’

  I did not mind that.

  One day in September Evie Norris said, ‘You’re about ready for the Misses Spall and Benn in Waltham. You need your shorthand, and I can’t help you with that.’ She gave me a contented smile, looked at the window where the sun made a muck of the glass, and I saw lines at her eyes and on her cheek, lines I hadn’t noticed when we were cooped over the typewriter.

  The shorthand course cost ten shillings. I had nothing to sell but Downland Flora, so when the time came I asked Mr Dawes what I should do with it. ‘I believe Colonel Daventry’s an expert on antiquarian books,’ he said. ‘It is antiquarian, isn’t it?’

  I turned it over. The cover had always been battered but it had survived the Absaloms remarkably well, collecting only a few spots on the flyleaf. The pages were so often turned, of course. The damp hadn’t got to them, to glue them shut. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could be.’

  Colonel Daventry and I hadn’t acknowledged each other since the Boxing Day meets of my early childhood, and it was with a stiff embarrassed little bow that he took the book from me. I didn’t like to see his fingers briskly flicking the thin paper from the colour plates.

  ‘Those papers are fragile, Colonel Daventry. They might tear.’

  His eyes met mine, a pained light blue. ‘Quite right, Miss Calvert. This isn’t the railway timetable, after all. I stand corrected.’ He turned a few more pages, for form’s sake, and then he closed the book and placed it in a leather satchel. ‘I’ll take it to Bradwell’s in Southampton. But I’m so certain of a good price that I’ll advance you fifteen shillings, my dear.’

  ‘I only need ten.’

  In unison, the Dawes broke into a ripple of discomfited laughter – at their charge’s rude tone, at the comedy of an indigent young person rejecting an offer of money. But Colonel Daventry gave a genuine wide grin, and stepped back, rummaging for his billfold. Then he took my hand, and I felt the crisp pressure of a note folded into my palm.

  ‘Ten it is, then. Be certain, you’ll get the balance, if there is any.’

  ‘What if it goes for less than ten shillings?’ Panic rose inside me. ‘How will I pay you back?’

  Colonel Daventry laughed. ‘Out of your wages, Miss Calvert. Your wages to come.’

  Miss Spall of the Misses Spall and Benn called me her Halley’s Comet. ‘Here you come blazing out of nowhere, Miss Calvert. From your farm office.’ She said the words with the scent of slurry flaring her nostrils. ‘But there we are.’ She handed me a stiff cream card. ‘Necessity, in this case, has evidently bred resolution.’

  I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t even claim the security of a farm office. Simply looked at the card, which stated in copperplate, under the stamp and seal of Spall and Benn’s Secretarial College, that Ellen Calvert had obtained a Preliminary Certificate in Typing and Shorthand, Grade One, on 29th November 1935. ‘There’s a post opening up at the town hall,’ she went on. ‘In the typing pool. Don’t get your hopes up. June Broad is also applying.’

  Smug June Broad of the blooming bustline. I had no idea she was even training. I’d never seen her here. But then I’d been coming to the evening class, full of yawns and wet umbrellas and work-worn faces, older people by and large.

  ‘Do I have to pay to apply for the job?’

  Miss Spall’s lips disappeared entirely as she smiled. ‘You do not. And I’ll put in the application for you.’ Her grey, small-pupilled eyes flicked to my feet. ‘You’ll go to the town hall for a test along with all the others. You’ll have to lay your hands on some decent shoes, however.’

  Elizabeth went to see Deirdre Harper at the village post office. Mrs Harper’s daughter Patricia had a pair of black shoes with a low heel. ‘They’re still in their tissue,’ Patricia told me. ‘Don’t bend your toes. I don’t want a crease in them.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  Patricia sniffed, and handed the box over.

  I walked together with Lucy down the lane. ‘Would you like to come and have tea with me at the Dawes’?’

  I pranced over the puddles. I was full of life today. All that ran in my mind were the words, Dear God in Heaven, please let me get this job. ‘I’ve got to get across Waltham Square without bending my toes!’ I burst out joyously. ‘Patricia’s shoes have to be kept pristine!’ I crossed my fingers behind my back in hope, and let the giggles stream out.

  ‘I shan’t be able to, I don’t suppose.’

  I turned. Lucy was dragging some way behind me, swishing a stick in the hedge.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To come to your Mr and Miss Dawes. You just invited me, remember? Anyway, I can’t. I’ll be taken up with my job, you see. It’s not just you that’s busy,’ she added.

  The string broke. My exhilaration was whipped away, a kite in the wind.

  ‘Well.’ My throat was tight. ‘Be like that, then. After all your kindness, your family’s kindness …’ For there had been a fair few teas and suppers at the Hornes’ over the years. ‘I wanted to repay you, that’s all. But have it your own way.’

  ‘It’s all right for you.’ Her stick slashed at the verge. ‘You, with your full set of teeth and your fair hair and blue eyes, and all the rest. You’re tall. You’re clever. And off you go now, and never mind that Lucy Horne is shovelling—’

  ‘Oh, Lucy,’ I cried, ‘it’s not my fault! What else should I have done? Tell me!’

  But she turned away, raising one hand daintily, palm outward, as if to shield her face from my outburst. I saw Mr Babcock approaching, wheeled in his wicker chair by Marcy Berry. ‘Some people have no manners,’ Lucy said to Marcy, who then tutted at me as she passed. She was a tall girl with many moles. Mr Babcock, stone deaf and dozing, was undisturbed.

  The morning of the test was fresh and we felt the breath of winter as we boarded the bus. It arrived late, and the clock hand sprang to the top of the dial as I started across Waltham Square. The sky was bright blue but the cobbles in the square still shone from the rain, and in the lower corner by the chemist’s each cobble was ringed by cold blue water. The sharp new heel of Patricia Harper’s right shoe clipped my left ankle as I stepped forward; a tiny sting. I tried not to bend my toes.

  I took a breath as Lucy’s voice grated again on my inner ear. All right for you. Off you go now. I shook my head. I didn’t blame her for her resentment and fury but I couldn’t afford, today of all days, to be upset by it.

  ‘Ellen Calvert to see Mr Renfrew,’ I announced to a secretary.

  She gave me an owlish look and put a tick next to my name. ‘Please take a seat.’

  I turned to see, appearing out of the dimness, several girls on a polished bench at the back of the lobby, handbags on knees and feet together. I perched on the end of the bench. We were jammed like roosting hens but my neighbour surged back and forth in her seat for a few seconds, as if she were making room, to show willing. ‘Have you got your piece?’ she asked, and I was hit by a blast of halitosis. ‘They’ll make us do another,’ the girl added, and I swooped forward to duck the second wave of odour, as if to brush something from my shoe. When I saw the blood on my ankle I remembered the sting as I crossed the square.

  ‘Of course. Otherwise we might have cheated.’ My voice on the word ‘cheated’ rang out. The other girls breathed, and fastened their stares on their handbags.

  ‘None of us would cheat,’ said someone and, straightening up, I saw June Broad. Her large, puffy face was impassive. ‘Your hair’s sticking out something shocking.’

  It had grown
well since Elizabeth’s shearing, back in the early summer, but still it could barely be called a bob. I raked my fingers through it, to little avail. Just then the secretary beckoned for us to follow her to a bright, high-ceilinged room set out with six tin tables. Six tin tables and six typewriters: we were going to wake the dead. I sat down, June in front of me and the girl with the monstrous breath behind. As soon as we were seated, the secretary began. ‘Travelling in South America … requires a strength of constitution …’ A battering cacophony as I had predicted, gone in an instant. One girl sobbed as her sheet was ripped from the roll by the secretary; another gasped, ‘I put the wrong there, all the way through …’ We sat, wondering, until it became clear that the secretary, as she went through the texts, was separating the wheat from the chaff.

  ‘June Broad. Elspeth Dixon.’ A pause. ‘Ellen Calvert.’

  We followed the secretary up the stone steps and into an unlit corridor. The door of Mr Renfrew loomed at the end. I sat as June, and then the unknown Elspeth – a pole-thin pigeon-toed girl with a great tuck in the back of a vast sky-blue frock, her mother’s without a doubt – went in by turn. June whistled and simpered behind the oak door; Elspeth was inaudible. June did not pause as she left, passing me without lowering her eyes, which I was astonished to see were glassy in the half-light, as if welling with tears. Elspeth said ‘Good luck’ cheerily, as if she had the job already, and sailed off with her dress bagging out behind her.

  The door opened once more, four inches. Light lay behind. A male voice said, ‘Miss Calvert.’

  Remembering afterwards my own typing test thrust into my hand, remembering the dizzying white light in the room, full sunlight streaming in through two immense windows, and glimpsing the square below, the expanse shrunken from this height, the drenched cobbles no longer intimidating, the shopfronts on the far side neat and domestic in scale. Just a glimpse; one second for each thing: light, typing test, windows, square—