We Must Be Brave Page 19

  Mrs Berrow set a teacup down in front of me. ‘Are you grasping it, dear? What I’m saying?’

  I shook my head, and she lifted the teapot and poured for both of us. Then silence came. I sat very still, knowing I would have to speak.

  ‘How can you even think it?’ My lips felt swollen. They rubbed together strangely as I moved them. ‘He could be any man, any man. There could be any number of children in that hotel. How can you come here and say it’s, it’s Pamela’s …’

  She poured milk into her cup and then lifted her face to me. Battered, wrinkled, sharp-eyed. ‘He’s still young,’ she said. ‘So you can see it full clear. She’s the spitting image of him.’

  My fingers found the piping on the arm of the sofa and pinched it. In my mind’s eye I saw Pamela’s hot cheek marked by the raised seam of the bus seat. Where she’d slept on her journey out of Southampton, alone in her dirty blanket.

  Mrs Berrow handed me a cup of tea. It rocked on the saucer as I took it, but didn’t spill. I set it down. Her eyes were trained on me. Small, bright blue, almost triangular under the sag of her old eyelids.

  ‘It can’t be.’

  She gave a slow shrug, as if to say: I am but the messenger.

  ‘Do you know that this so-called father disappeared from her life before the war? Pamela doesn’t even know him. Why has he left it till now, to come out of the blue?’

  She took a gulp of tea, sighed. ‘His wife kicked him out after a year. Took the child away and didn’t want any more to do with him.’

  ‘There’s bound to be a good reason for that. Some men aren’t made to be fathers, or husbands—’

  ‘I would say, listening to him, it’s his heart’s desire to find that little girl.’ She rolled her eyes, gave me a sweet, colluding, woman-to-woman smile. ‘And I’ve listened to a lot of people, Mrs Parr, in my time. It’s surprising what ladies and gentlemen tell the char.’

  That had been my last shot, my last shell, and it had exploded in mid-air. I leaned my head back, suddenly drowsy with shock. Nauseated, too: even the milk in the tea was unwelcome, greasy in my mouth.

  ‘Would you care for a cigarette?’ I heard myself say. ‘My husband keeps some for visitors.’

  Selwyn didn’t smoke but he didn’t mind if other people did. He’d just remark on the smell as a way of enquiring about our guest. ‘Oh,’ he might say. ‘Who dropped by, darling?’ But what would I tell him this time? I held the heavy lighter in both hands but the spark jumped in vain.

  ‘Here, love. Let me.’ She produced a floppy blue flame, buried the tip of the cigarette in it. The plume of smoke she directed courteously at the ceiling, holding the cigarette pinched in the V of her first two fingers. ‘Ah, Turkish.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Takes me back.’

  Her hand was dangerously close to her head. I hoped she wouldn’t catch her hair. It would caramelize in an instant.

  ‘They’re probably rather stale.’

  She opened her eyes. ‘I’ve seen him again, you know. He’s taken to walking by the Crown. Up the street, down again, and into the Lyons on the corner. Waiting for those coppers to pull their fingers out, is my guess, and in the meantime he don’t know what to do with himself. I ain’t spoken to him – ducked out the way, in fact.’

  ‘And you still hold to this, this resemblance?’

  She didn’t reply. The sitting-room door was opening with its usual tiny creak. Pamela came in. ‘I’ve dressed them up. Guess what they are!’

  In her hands, bunched against her belly, eight or nine wooden clothes-pegs, each swathed in one of Selwyn’s white silk handkerchiefs. As she kneeled, some of them tumbled onto the floor. She laid them out in a line, pushing and patting the folds of silk into position.

  ‘Roman ladies?’ I forced a smile onto my face. ‘Those dresses look a bit like togas. No – of course not. Roman ladies don’t wear togas.’ But neither Phyl nor Pamela were listening to me. Pamela was picking up the peg dolls one by one and placing them on the generous double hump of Phyl’s knees.

  ‘They’re ghosts,’ Pamela was telling her. ‘Oooh, oooh. See?’

  ‘I do see.’

  Her eyes met mine over Pamela’s head, just as Pamela turned and said to me, ‘Is Mrs Berrow going to stay the night again? She was telling me all about it earlier.’

  ‘No, Pamela. We’re going to finish our tea, and then I’m taking Mrs Berrow to the bus stop.’

  I walked with her down the lane. The evenings were lengthening now, and she’d be back well before dark. She went surprisingly fast for a heavy woman with avowedly sore feet, rolling from side to side in such a way that her elbow occasionally jogged mine, with no shortness of breath.

  ‘He was invalided home from Italy,’ she said as we walked. ‘He went to Plymouth to see his wife and it was the Plymouth coppers who told him the story. So up he came to Southampton. Our police will get round to him in the end, and then he’ll be arriving in Upton before you can say knife. I’m just trying to warn you, dear.’

  We passed under a tall dank hedge. ‘Thank you, Mrs Berrow. I’ll consider myself warned.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for a bit of temper. Call me Phyl, by the way.’

  ‘Likewise, Ellen. I do beg your pardon. I should be reimbursing you for your bus instead of making rude remarks. Especially as you’ve made two journeys on my behalf.’ My words were dull in the still air.

  ‘I won’t hear of it, Ellen my dear.’

  We sat in the bus shelter, safe from the fine drizzle which had begun to fall as we covered the last hundred yards. A loop of river lay beyond the fence in the bottom of the field opposite, and the cows churned the bank as we watched, muddy to the hocks.

  ‘I hates the country,’ Phyl said.

  ‘It can’t be him.’ The words burst out of me. ‘It’s just too ridiculous, for you to tell me a man looks like a girl child. That’s all you’ve done, talk to a man in a crowd who told you he’d mislaid a daughter. Did he say her name? Did he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There. And now you’ve formed this ridiculous opinion. I won’t countenance it.’

  She leaned forward on the seat, looking back towards the village. ‘If you want to take a look at him, come down to Southampton one afternoon, get a bus to the Crown stops. Come at four o’clock, we can sit in the Lyons together. We’ll have a bit of a chat if he spots me. Write to me care of the nurses’ hostel and tell me when you’re coming.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing—’

  ‘The bus is coming, dear.’

  So it was, a motoring burr beyond the trees. I rubbed my knees like a schoolgirl. ‘He can’t have known her. They can’t have been a proper family, ever. Why should he suddenly care now?’

  She patted my arm. ‘Why don’t your old man give you a baby,’ she said, almost to herself.

  ‘He’s given me himself. That’s enough.’

  That tickled her: she gave me a sharp, mirthful glance. ‘He must be one hell of a chap. How did you two bump into each other, anyhow?’

  ‘We did precisely that. Bump into each other. It was an extraordinary piece of luck.’

  The bus drew up, came to a stop. In the quiet the door swished open. ‘Thank you,’ I said as she mounted the step. She turned to speak to me once more.

  ‘I ain’t said nothing to the man. Nothing,’ she repeated, meeting my eyes. ‘Do you understand?’

  Pamela and Elizabeth were kneeling on sheets of newspaper by the back door, polishing shoes. Elizabeth turned her face up to me, her expression one of a person who had listened to a solid forty-five minutes of Pamela’s chatter. ‘Oh, it’s times like these I miss the boys,’ she told me. ‘If you slip yours off, Mrs Parr, we’ll do them now.’

  ‘Buff buff buff buff buff.’ Pamela plied the brush over Selwyn’s toe-caps. ‘Buff buff buff.’

  ‘Stop that now, young Pam. Did the lady go off all right?’

  I stepped out of my shoes. Found a bright tone to reply to Elizabeth. ‘Oh, yes! She caught the bus with pl
enty of time to spare. We had a nice chat. I think she simply came to say thank you to us. She said she fancied an outing. Oh, lord, Elizabeth, I forgot the bread.’

  ‘I didn’t. Look, they’ve kissed.’ Elizabeth nodded towards the cooling rack where the two baked loaves sat, fused together down the long side. I’d put them too close together on the tray.

  ‘So they have. Never mind. I’m sure I’ll find those wretched tins before the next time.’ As I went to the larder I caught sight of Pamela’s face, a secretive moon of guilt and glee.

  ‘Pamela? Do you know where the tins are?’

  She squirmed but it was pleasure rather than apprehension. She was safe in my love and she knew it. ‘I’m very sorry, Ellen. I just borrowed them for a short while. They’re completely perfect for doll beds.’

  ‘You’re the absolute limit. Please go and get them.’

  ‘But the mattresses fit in exactly! What’s wrong with the bread kissing, anyway? We can just eat double toasts. It would be fun. Oh – I got you a present.’ She jumped up and left the room, returning a moment later with a newspaper parcel.

  I took it from her while she stood, beaming. ‘What on earth?’

  ‘Open it.’

  I pulled aside the newspaper. It was a pair of oven gloves, made of a heavy coarse yarn the colour of porridge. Made all of a piece, two pockets for the hands joined by a wide strip. The most useful, durable, practical kind.

  ‘Oh, Pamela.’

  ‘Elizabeth told me you needed some, and Suky fetched them from the market for me.’ She beamed wider. ‘I used up half my pocket-money savings.’ Bathed, now, in munificence and self-congratulation. Her small face glowing.

  ‘Darling heart, come here.’

  She smelled of fresh air, boot polish and sugar, and I clung to her.

  Selwyn was lying on the bed, fully clothed. Everyone in the house was asleep except us. When he felt me watching him he turned his head, held my gaze: surprised, perhaps, at the way I stood without speaking.

  ‘We had to repair the block on the beam today. I had to bicycle over to the forge at Barrow End and get Edwin Lusty to beat a new pin. It took the best part of the day.’ He sighed. ‘It’s exactly like living in medieval times.’

  ‘Except for the bicycle, I suppose.’

  He smiled. A small coal fire hissed in the bedroom grate.

  ‘I got very cold, up there on the beam.’

  ‘I don’t begrudge you a fire, my darling.’

  The letter from Marjorie Lord was lying on the bedside table along with the solicitor’s note.

  ‘Pamela will have to know, eventually, I suppose,’ Selwyn said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That her aunt disowned her … Oh, yes. Look.’ He reached for the second sheet and held it out to me. ‘This is what I noticed. The solicitor identifies Marjorie Lord as née Pickering.’

  I peered. There was the phrase exactly, in brownish-black ink on pressed blue paper. On behalf of Mrs Marjorie Lord (née Pickering) …

  My understanding was slow. I thought suddenly of the young trees William had given me a few days ago. I should go and tend them tomorrow. Watering was vital at these early stages. The wind had dried out the soil a great deal.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Selwyn’s eyes were wide and earnest behind his glasses. ‘Pamela’s mother, Amelia’s, maiden name was Pickering.’

  ‘No. No.’ I gave a slow shake of the head. ‘Don’t you remember, she was Mrs …’

  Selwyn tutted. ‘She would merely have called herself that. She mightn’t have been married at all.’ He sighed. ‘We’ve been barking up the wrong tree, haven’t we. Looking for Mr Pickering all this while. He could be called anything.’

  ‘Mr Anything.’ My voice was tight and dull. ‘Yes, he could.’

  ‘Well, whatever his name is, he’s still the same renegade. I doubt any authority will bring him to heel after all this time.’ When I didn’t reply, Selwyn looked at me once more. ‘Ellen, darling, are you all right?’

  ‘Tired.’

  The house was quiet. We both listened to the soft roar of the water outside as it coursed into the spillway. Unending, unending, except in flood. He propped himself up on one elbow and tossed the solicitor’s letter back onto the bedside table. ‘What were you thinking of just now? When you were gazing at me.’

  ‘Do you remember that girl you bumped into? The bright-eyed thing with her long stride and her Trollope from the library?’

  He sat up and held out his arms. ‘You still are that girl,’ he said. ‘You always will be, to me.’

  I moved onto the bed and accepted his embrace. ‘I can’t even remember her.’

  ‘Because you have so many cares. My sweetheart, you’ll find her again after the war.’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’ I closed my eyes. ‘After the war.’

  I remembered the first time we lay down together on this bed. We were fully clothed then, and I had just put the new sheet on, tucked it tight.

  ‘Selwyn,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ He stirred beside me.

  ‘I’ll always love you.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘No, I mean it,’ I said. ‘Come what may. I’ll never regret loving you. Saying yes.’

  He propped himself up on one elbow, searching my face. The white sheet sailed out and hovered in the air, four-square, and it would settle in a second. In a second, it would alight on the bed.

  Ellen

  1939

  16

  MAKING MY WAY along Castle Road in the shadow of the printing press, I looked up to see a gull flying down the street above me, lower than the rooftops. I realized that it was spring – sensing it in the warm breeze, since there was nothing to guide me in the way of trees or flowers.

  I was returning from the library where I’d exchanged The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Redux for The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children. When I got back to my room I would stand the books, spine outward, on my table, using my boxes of cotton reels and elastics as bookends, and pretend they were mine. At the age of six I’d been the owner of two entire shelves of books. I could still see the sunlight striking the titles, some bright gold; others, belonging originally to my mother and father, a deeper bronze.

  But I was eighteen now, and perhaps it was simply adulthood, or perhaps it was also the insulating effect of three meals a day, but I was now able to remember my old books, to wander freely through the Stour House of my memory without feeling that jolt of shrivelling pain. Even more so now that it was an hotel, its outbuildings prettied up and its gravelled drive rutted by motor cars. Lucy and I had peered in through the gateway one Sunday. The Stour Hotel, Lucy opined, looked ‘a bit racy’. I had searched the brick façade for signs of raciness but could see none, wondering later if it was the sleek shining line of parked motor cars that had given her that impression.

  The Absaloms, however, was another matter. My thoughts refused to dwell there.

  I also had a volume called Heroic Feats of Animals. This was for Lucy. ‘I’m fed up to the back teeth with stories,’ she told me. ‘I want something about real life. Real life, and with dogs in.’ She railed about her life, the dirt, the cold, but over the past few years she’d come to love the hounds. I still spent most Sundays in Upton, and occasionally she took me up to the kennels to see them. They pressed their noses against the wire and yodelled at her, their bellies pale, like the inside of tree bark. She put her hand out and bade them ‘clam up’. She was no longer even trying to read, so after Sunday dinner I read to her. If she especially loved the book we’d go together to the bus stop and sit on the bench and continue until my bus came. Whenever anyone passed by I was to fall silent. She didn’t want them to hear me speaking the words aloud to her.

  It was nice to be out. My working life was spent in cacophony, a noise like hundreds of thousands of small nails falling onto a tin roof, the typing pool at full stretch. I unbuttoned the collar of my coat in the fine warm breeze. Reaching the corner, I turned into Waltham
Square, glancing up at the gull which was now winging ahead of me.

  And stepped straight into the arms of a man.

  We buffeted each other, sprang back, gasping. My books flew from my hands.

  ‘Oh!’ We bent simultaneously to the pavement. I felt a sharp clout to my temple as his head hit mine, and I fell to my knees in agony. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I do beg your pardon. I was looking the other way.’ His voice was fine and light. I didn’t know what he looked like. My eyes were squeezed shut. ‘My skull,’ I heard him say next. ‘My skull is thicker than yours. The male brow ridge. I’m so sorry.’

  I clasped my hand to my temple. ‘I’m lucky you aren’t a Neanderthal person,’ I managed to say. ‘You would have laid me out.’

  I opened my eyes. He had spectacles, fixing them carefully to his face as I watched. Making him recognizable. ‘You’re from Upton,’ I blurted.

  He was smiling broadly. Sandy hair tufted on the top of his head. A gentleman somewhere in his thirties. ‘I am indeed. Of Upton, and not, as you say, of Neanderthal stock. Yes, they did have the most colossal brow ridges. Although I feel we malign them. Brains aren’t everything.’

  ‘Oh, they had extremely large brains.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Did they indeed? Clearly it’s how one uses one’s brain that counts, then, rather than its absolute volume. It seems you give yours a great deal of exercise.’

  ‘I spend most evenings reading. In the library. And in my room.’

  We were both still kneeling on the pavement. I looked up to see people skirting us, smirking. He rose to his feet and held out his hands. They were warm, dry, thin, strong.

  In Bishop’s Tea Rooms they gave me a compress and a little bowl of iced water. I sat holding the folded damp linen to my brow.

  ‘My name’s Selwyn Parr. And you?’

  My name, trailing after me like a soiled slip. But there was nothing for it.

  ‘I’m Ellen Calvert.’

  The tea came. He took over the task of pouring from the fluted metal pot. ‘Was there a, was there a Captain Calvert? In that splendid house the other side of Beacon Hill, beyond Barrow End …’ I watched him make his way towards realization, embarrassment.