We Must Be Brave Page 18

  ‘I’m not expecting you to do anything—’

  ‘Good, because we can’t.’ A heat was spreading over my cheeks to my eyes, unconcealable. Silence fell. Outside Pamela shrieked, ‘Oh, Nipper, you naughty, naughty boy!’ and Lady Brock, more indistinctly, echoed the sentiment.

  ‘Ellen. I didn’t mean to offend.’

  It wasn’t often these days that he called me Ellen. More and more, it seemed, I was becoming Mrs Parr. ‘No offence taken.’

  He gave a single soft laugh. We drank up our tea. ‘Well, then, my dear,’ he said, as we rose to our feet. ‘Thank you for the eggs. A duck-egg omelette can’t be surpassed.’

  Outside Pamela and Lady Brock were both speaking to Nipper, who was lying with flattened ears on the path. ‘Bad dog,’ they were saying. ‘Bad, bad dog.’

  William lifted up the pots containing the saplings and I lodged them carefully in my wicker bicycle basket. ‘I’m sorry your rehearsal was interrupted by Pamela,’ I called to Lady Brock. ‘Pamela, it’s time to go.’

  ‘But we haven’t finished telling off Nipper. He was digging.’

  ‘Pamela was a welcome distraction.’ Lady Brock came up the path towards me. ‘I’m sick to death of Lady Macbeth.’

  ‘That rhymes. Sick to death, of Lady Macbeth. Sick to death—’

  ‘I had a dream,’ I found myself saying to Lady Brock. ‘That you and Pamela were eating Christmas cake.’ Remembering the dream as I spoke: their faces, pink with pleasure, the plate containing only dark rich fragments of dried fruit and aromatic crumb. ‘And you hadn’t –’ I felt the indignation now ‘– even asked me to join you!’

  Lady Brock was smiling, her wrasse-like mouth still a lush red. Where on earth did she find such lipsticks now? Nobody knew, and nobody begrudged her. ‘My dear girl, I do apologize. Cake, now. I’ll have to look that one up. I’ve got a dream book, you see. The man who wrote it must have been raving, but one’s quite gripped all the same.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘Now pay attention, you young rascal of a girl. Enough prowling. Obey Mrs Parr all the long day, d’you hear?’

  At the tone of command, both Pamela and Nipper ducked their heads.

  Pamela sang on her way home, a long song of her own invention, psalm-like, each phrase ending with the same fall of notes. ‘And we we-hent to Upton Hall. But we did-not, no we didn’t, see-hee the knight in shining ah-ah-armour …’ There was a light curtain of rain behind us; I felt its damp breath first and then turned my head to see it sweep over the army camp. The tiny trees wouldn’t mind it. They fluttered in the basket in front of the handlebars. I hoped we weren’t ‘rattling’ them.

  ‘Pamela, don’t lean sideways. How many times.’

  ‘I’m peering past the apple twigs. It’s practice for prowling. Tomtits and jays give warnings, you know.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘They’re alarmed by the enemy, you see, coming towards you.’

  The wind blew at our backs all the way home.

  15

  A WEEK PASSED. George Horne planted Lucy’s pair of trees, and Selwyn and I planted ours. Lucy developed a cold and a cough so incapacitating that Harry Parker ordered her off the tractor and into bed. By the time I visited she was on the mend, sitting up peevishly. Old Mrs Horne was taking away a half-finished bowl of soup. ‘I do hope you’ve brought her something to do, Mrs Parr.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lucy gave a sigh. ‘I’m bored to blimmin sobs.’

  I unpacked a blanket from my bag, the middle gnawed away by mice. ‘I’m cutting a waistcoat for Pamela. Perhaps you could help me with the stitching.’

  Her small hands rose and fell in fists. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I thought you needed occupying.’

  ‘I’m dying to get up but Nan won’t let me. You’d think I was seven years old.’ She sighed again. ‘Oh, give me the pattern.’ The ‘pattern’ consisted of rather ragged calico shapes I used for all Pamela’s top-half clothes. Lucy and I pinned them into an economical corner of the blanket. Lucy drove in the pins quicker than me and spread out the rest. ‘What are you going to do with this bit?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘You hadn’t thought.’ She looked up, grinned. ‘Sometimes you sound like your ma.’

  Nobody else could say this to me. ‘Do you want one, Lucy? A waistcoat?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ We cut out another series of shapes, using Pamela’s pattern but clearing it by two or three inches each side. Lucy couldn’t be that small. I glanced from the pattern to the span of Lucy’s shoulders and the narrowness of her chest, and saw that she was, indeed, that small.

  We began on the sewing, whipping the pieces together with a tough yarn. Then we would bind the free edges with a close blanket stitch. The waistcoats were a dusty mid-blue and the stitching would be dark red. ‘I’ve still got Edward’s wooden toggles. You and Pamela can have three sets each.’

  ‘Bill Kennet dropped by.’

  ‘That was nice of him, to come and see you.’

  ‘Hm. Came to inspect the plantin, more like. Dad can’t be trusted to put a couple of trees in, see.’ She coughed. ‘Oh, yes. I know what I was going to tell you. This chest has made me so forgetful. There was a lady looking for you at the WI last week.’

  ‘At the market?’

  ‘Yes. Last week.’

  ‘Oh, blast, it’s Thursday today, isn’t it.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I was going to get some oven gloves.’ The old ones had turned to such rags that I’d burned my hand through a worn-away patch in the palm. ‘What sort of lady?’

  Lucy laughed. ‘The sort that isn’t a lady as such. String bag and slits cut out of her shoes for her poor old bunions. She bought a tea cosy off of me.’

  I bit my thread and knotted it. ‘So what did she want, this non-lady?’

  ‘All she said was that she’d been to the mill but you weren’t at home, so she popped by the village hall. She said, “I’ve come from Southampton to have a word with Mrs Parr.”’

  ‘Southampton?’

  Lucy nodded, took another wheezy breath. ‘I told her you and Mr Parr was in Waltham, and she said, “Oh well, I’ll get home then.” And she took the bus back to the city. I saw her gettin on when I came out with Deirdre Harper to flap the tablecloths.’

  It was true. Selwyn and I had been in Waltham last Thursday. Selwyn needed a stopping in his tooth and I was hunting for herrings and paraffin. Lucy was slumping back on her pillows, tired out by her tale. I slid my needle into the blanket fabric, bewildered. I thought of saying, You could at least have asked her name. Following it with Why on earth didn’t you find out what she wanted? But Lucy ill being even more intransigent and touchy a creature than Lucy well, I let it pass. She was watching me now, her black eyes soft, curious. ‘Don’t you even have one single inklin, Ellen Parr?’

  ‘Lucy, I swear, if I did I’d tell you. I can’t think what any woman, any bunioned woman – you’re sure about the bunions?’

  ‘They was the size of pickled onions.’

  ‘Ha, ha. There’s a rhyme for Pamela … I should go. It’s nearly time to fetch her.’ I folded my blanket pieces into my bag and stood up. ‘Is there any news from John or Dan?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘Marcy’s not heard for a while now. Nor has Ted.’

  Daniel Corey and John Blunden were either in North Africa or Italy. We didn’t know which. I knew Dan and John weren’t together, and I was glad of it. During the Great War a single shell-burst had killed all the boys who had gone together to France from Fair Mead, a hamlet the other side of Waltham. All that was left now of Fair Mead was a handful of dilapidated houses and a vast memorial. And yet somehow, a bare twenty-five years later, we were once again toiling towards the end of another war. It was inconceivable. Toiling, mending, digging, waiting, waiting. The fear and dismay of all these years, the craving for release, gathered and roiled in me like smoke above an oil fire, and I let loose a long sigh.

  ‘All right, dear?’ Lucy was gazing up at me, the blanket fabric
bunched in one hand, a needle gleaming in the other. A Victorian orphan, put to work.

  ‘I do so want this to end. For everyone’s sake.’

  Pamela came out of school with Bobby Rail and Ruby Sutton. ‘We’re going to club together and buy a lardy cake at the market next week,’ she told me.

  ‘Good heavens. How are you going to get there? It’s during school time.’

  ‘We’re going to play truant!’ All three children spoke together, elated by their foolproof plan. I laughed aloud.

  ‘I think you’ll be spotted. Come on, Pamela, it’s time to go home.’

  Pamela, somewhat crushed, said goodbye to her friends. We were on foot today and it was lovely to walk holding her hand. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You club together, and I’ll buy it for you.’

  She brightened. ‘I’ll get their ha’pennies tomorrow.’

  ‘Is that all they’re contributing?’

  ‘Bobby and Ruby are poor. They don’t get pocket money.’ She used her patient voice. There were a great many things she’d been obliged to explain to me, viz. how to make a loop out of a plantain stem and snap it tight so that the black head of the plantain shot off, preferably at someone; or trap a grass blade between your upright thumbs and blow on it to produce a shocking squawk; or shove hairy rosehip seeds down an unsuspecting neck, where they would provoke violent itching. I’d never discovered these tricks. At Pamela’s age I was still governessed and starched and ironed. I didn’t run the lanes until I was eleven and too old, or at least too sad, to learn them. ‘Bobby only had the money in the first place because he got it off some Yanks.’

  We reached the head of our lane and crossed the road. As I glanced to the left I saw a woman walking behind us with a shopping bag. Trudging for the bus, no doubt. I tightened my clasp on Pamela’s soft warm palm. ‘I wish you wouldn’t say Yanks.’

  ‘Well, Bobby told the Ya— the Americans that the beer at the Stour Hotel was watered and they’d be better off going to the Buck’s Head in Waltham, and they gave him two ha’pennies. But I didn’t ask for the whole penny even though Bobby offered it. Just half.’

  My old home had been an hotel since I left Upton for Waltham. In keeping with its tainted past it had become a funk hole at the beginning of the war – a refuge for rich individuals too frightened to stay in London. Now most of these fearful types had gone, and the bar was open very late to the visiting soldiery – though it was apparent that the servicemen hadn’t inspired honesty, let alone generosity, in the staff.

  ‘In point of fact, the soldiers around here are Canadian, Pamela. It’s an important distinction. It was nice of you not to take all the money …’

  We got home. I put my sewing bag away, washed my hands and knocked back some risen bread dough I’d started after lunch. I baked only two loaves at a time now that we were four small eaters instead of the seven that we’d been at the beginning of the war. But the bread tins were nowhere to be found. Searching every shelf and drawer in the kitchen resulted only in irritation and dust. How on earth could I have lost the tins? I shaped the dough by hand into two long loaves and left them to rise on a baking sheet. Regular heavy thumps crossed the ceiling from the bedroom above: Pamela, somersaulting. The doorbell rang. I covered the loaves with a cloth and hurried to the door.

  A woman was standing on the step.

  ‘I was walking behind you,’ she said, as if nothing else were required. ‘I’m so glad to find you in, this time.’

  Her face was jowly, patient, her teeth few when she smiled. She folded her large, ringed hands, and then I remembered. Those fingers, feeling along the waistband of Pamela’s knickers. When we were all in the sitting room, the morning after the bombing. Her face, of course, was less puffy, the bruise vanished from her eye.

  ‘Mrs Berrow.’

  She smiled wider. ‘Phyllis. Phyl to my friends.’

  She’d done her hair smartly too, in a sort of domed style with an obedient row of curls across her brow. Set with sugar water, no doubt. Conscious of my own slatternly locks I rammed the pins in across my crown. She watched me do it, and when I had finished she continued to stand on the step, waiting. Her feet cumbersome in her slippery-soled shoes, the bunions noticed by Lucy. But not by me, the first time, back in 1940. I hadn’t seen them then. I hadn’t looked at her feet.

  At last I said, ‘Do come in.’

  ‘I will indeed. Thank you.’

  I gave her the armchair she’d sat in that morning when Pamela had told us about the candles for her cake. Her carapace of hair caught the light from the window and briefly sparkled.

  ‘Where’s that little girl of yours, then?’

  I was transported to the horror and the cold of that night, the glare beyond the battened blackout curtain. ‘Oh, Mrs Berrow, how brave you all were.’

  She permitted herself a delicate snort. ‘We was petrified.’

  As if to answer her, there was a thump on the ceiling. I said, ‘We couldn’t let her go. Not at Christmas time,’ and she smiled, a slow, kind smile with lips closed, acknowledging the three years and more that had passed since that Christmas.

  ‘I’ll make you some tea.’ I started towards the door, but then turned. ‘Her mother’s dead. She died on the second night of that raid, in the cellar of the Crown.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Berrow.

  Elizabeth came back from Waltham, nipping in by the back door.

  ‘Elizabeth. I’m making tea.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky, Mrs Parr.’ She shrugged off her skimpy coat. ‘I let the fire go right down.’

  The range was cool. In my haste I hadn’t noticed. ‘I’ve got Mrs Berrow in the sitting room. One of the ladies from Southampton, on the night of the bombing, do you remember? She had a black eye.’

  She frowned. ‘Was she the one that found Pamela’s address? What’s she doing here?’

  I listened to Mrs Berrow’s voice in the sitting room. Pamela had come down. ‘Hello dearie,’ Mrs Berrow was saying. ‘Remember me?’

  Elizabeth reached for the coal scuttle. ‘I’ll mend that fire. We’ll need it hot, for the bread. Though with these bellows …’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find those chammy leathers,’ I promised her. ‘I expect we’ll need an awl, to make holes in the bellows for sewing. Perhaps we should ask George Horne. He’s an expert home leatherworker …’ I was babbling, the blood starting in my veins.

  ‘Go next door, Mrs Parr,’ Elizabeth said softly. ‘See that Pamela doesn’t annoy the lady.’ The chief effect of Pamela on her elders, in Elizabeth’s eyes, being annoyance.

  Mrs Berrow was sitting leaning forward, hands spread out. Pamela was pressing down on each of the gnarled old fingers. ‘This one has a ruby ring, this one has a gold ring. They’re the queen and the king, I think. This one’s crying, he’s a prince but he doesn’t have any rings at all. Boo hoo, I’m a sad prince. Why don’t you give him a ring, Mrs Berrow?’

  So she’d introduced herself.

  ‘He’s too little for a ring, dearie. Look at him, he ain’t hardly grown up at all.’

  ‘Tea will be some time, I’m afraid, Mrs Berrow.’

  ‘Please don’t go to any trouble. Your good woman doesn’t want to put her range up and I don’t blame her.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘I suspect you’ve got some dollies somewhere upstairs. You go and dress them all up properly for me, and when they’re ready I’ll have a look at them.’

  ‘I’ve got my old peg dolls, that I had when I was that small.’ Pamela flattened her hand in the air, somewhere near her knee. ‘I never finished inking their faces and now there’s no ink. I can fetch—’

  ‘Go and play, my love. Go on upstairs and play.’

  How did they do it? Mrs Berrow, Lady Brock. Two voices less similar one couldn’t imagine, and yet both had this kindly, blunted edge of iron that brooked no opposition. Pamela left without anguish, at speed.

  ‘Now what I came to tell you, Mrs Parr,’ Mrs Berrow went on, ‘was that I’ve been in Southampton
all this while, and I’ve been cleaning the nurses’ hostel since last year. I’m a char, dear, I always have been. I don’t mind anyone knowing. This hostel is just down the road from the Crown, as it happens, and I live round the corner, and it’s the best job I ever had. Those nurses keep everything clean as a new pin, it’s in their nature. Sit down, dear.’

  I obeyed, taking one corner of the sofa. And I was so glad to sit, because I suddenly felt very weary.

  ‘This was about ten days ago. I’m out shopping, just opening my bag wondering if my old feet can stand to queue for a loaf, when I see my purse has gone. There was ten and six in there along with a photo of my late husband, and I was bloody furious. So, sore feet or not, I head off to the police station. But—’

  She stopped. Elizabeth was coming in with a tray. ‘Ah, my dear.’ Phyllis Berrow viewed the tea things and the plate of thin toast with a scrape of butter, and sniffed in the smell of strong tea. ‘That is splendid.’ She waited through Elizabeth’s silent retreat before continuing. ‘So I go up the cop shop and report it. And afterwards I’m standing in the lobby with tears in my eyes, I don’t mind saying, because I know full well I won’t see my money or my photograph again, and it was just the principle of it – I’m standing there, and this nice young man asks me what’s up. So I tell him, and blow me, he gets out his wallet and hands me ten and six. “I can’t let you be robbed,” he says. “There’s enough wrong with the world already.” And then he asks me if I know where the Crown Hotel is. “I should say I do, dear,” I tell him. “I live and work in spitting distance, but I hope you don’t want to stay there, because it’s bombed to ruins.” “I know,” he says to me. “My wife died in that raid. But my little daughter survived, as far as I know, and I’ve come to look for her.”’