We Must Be Brave Page 22

  But then he spoke quickly, eyes still shut. ‘I can’t perform the physical act, Ellen, I’m sure you know the one I mean, and I’ve done a stupid, harmful thing in befriending you, because you’re young, you need a family, and the joys of a full married life, and I’m not the man for that.’

  He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. His back was facing me. I pushed myself upright.

  ‘Is it …’ I squeezed my hands together. These, for me, were utterly uncharted waters. ‘I mean, isn’t there some sort of treatment?’

  ‘No. At the end of the war I was hospitalized. They called it neurasthenia. I started passing out at the wheel, you see. Seconds at a time, with no warning at all. My brain was no longer giving me permission to drive. Or eat, or drink, or speak. And then there was this final thing, the one we’re talking about, that I discovered I couldn’t do at all. I’m afraid that ability never came back.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I am,’ said Selwyn. ‘Believe me, I have tried.’

  I fought vainly against a bursting volley of giggles. He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Oh, Ellen,’ he said. ‘Ellen, Ellen.’

  ‘I do understand, you know. You’re describing a mariage blanc. I learned the phrase from Lady Brock.’

  ‘It’s no marriage for you.’

  ‘Kiss me, Selwyn. You can do that, can’t you?’

  ‘No, Ellen. It would be wrong.’

  I kissed him on the cheek. Then he put his lips against the corner of my mouth. My entire left side was electrified.

  ‘Now you’ve made it worse,’ he said.

  We drove to Waltham. Selwyn put his hat and gloves on before he got in the car. Accoutred as he now was, it was impossible to believe that we had ever lain on the white bed. He drove in silence, craning forward to penetrate the shadows in the lane.

  ‘So,’ I said as we crossed Waltham Square. ‘Thank you for a nice afternoon.’

  He laughed in spite of himself, a lovely light sound. He slowed the car to a halt. The hostel door drew level with my window.

  ‘I’ve got no desire to have children, Selwyn.’

  He gave a tired smile. ‘You say that now.’

  ‘I do say it.’

  ‘In a year you’ll change your mind—’

  ‘How do you know!’ It burst out of me. ‘Why do people even think they can know about me!’

  I grabbed at the door handle and got out of the car. He peered up at me, his hat low on his brow. Selwyn Parr of Parr’s Mill. Fine Flours and Animal Feeds. ‘It’s a pity you’re determined to finish this,’ I said. ‘Because you’re ruining your life, and mine too, by turning down the one woman who’d suit you.’

  Ten days, and then a note in my pigeonhole. Copperplate, spare and neat. I read it with what little light penetrated the heavy clouds of early summer, in the lobby of the hostel, propping the door open with my foot. I didn’t want to take his letter into my room, where I’d keep chancing on it among my things. The hurt would take my breath away.

  Please try to understand that the last thing I wanted to do was cause you unhappiness. Someone like you, a young woman of great beauty –

  Hyperbole.

  – will prompt the rashest acts in men. It is one of life’s unfairnesses.

  Balderdash.

  Ever yours, Selwyn.

  Arrant falsehood.

  Crumpling the letter in my pocket, I wandered through the streets of Waltham, watching women hoist babies out of perambulators, plug their mouths with bottles. I might turn into a thousand things – who could tell? But I couldn’t live my life according to what I might be, or might want. I was myself, now. And he was here, now. A man who wouldn’t just hold me and kiss me, but a man I could say anything to and be understood, a man who could open the world to me with his heart and mind. How many women had that? Didn’t he realize what we could be, together?

  I tried in vain to swallow a great hot lump in my throat. Stupid, stupid man.

  The following morning I inserted a fresh sheet of paper into the roller and began to type. My eyes were smarting, the keys of my machine spattering the letters onto the page.

  Dear Mr Parr. Thank you for your note of Wednesday last. It will probably gratify you to know that I am at present walking out with a Mr Robert Coward, a bookkeeper at the town hall. His name does not suit him and might better be adopted by another of my acquaintance. Yours sincerely, Ellen Calvert.

  I then hammered Mr S. Parr, Esq., Parr’s Mill, Upton, Nr Waltham, Hampshire onto an envelope and sealed the letter inside, and thrust it into the typing-pool mail sack with a single loud tearless sob that went unnoticed in the din.

  I had not lied. One of my fellows, Polly, had asked me to make a four with her and two young clerks, Tom Dallimore and Bob Coward, at Bishop’s on Saturday afternoon. I’d willingly have paid a high price to go to another tea room but Polly refused the notion. ‘It’s so clean in Bishop’s. All those virginal lace doilies. It gives a tremendously good impression. And Mrs B is quite the chaperone, should a boy lean too close. The moment you feel his breath on your neck she appears soundlessly at your table. Perhaps she runs on castors.’

  She was a witty girl, if not wholly likeable.

  We had tea. I answered Bob’s compendious list of questions and watched Polly eat Tom alive. We could rob a bank this afternoon, I thought, as long as Polly was in charge. She’d just make Tom do it, and he’d go to jail with the same enraptured smile on his face. Bob was a stringy boy with too much of the looks of Selwyn and none of his mind. As the afternoon wound to an end I excused myself, saying that I had to pop into Priddy’s for a tart for Sunday. I’d go to Lucy and Mrs Horne as usual, for my Sunday dinner, though I might excuse myself from church.

  The air was fresh, rinsed with recently fallen rain, and there were rough, uncertain patches of blue in the sky. Water lapped the cobbles in the lowest corner of the square. It was on a day like this, one after rain, that I had hurried towards the town hall in Patricia Harper’s shoes, late, full of hope.

  Selwyn was coming towards me across the cobbles. His glasses were misted. Had he even seen me? But then he gave a shaken smile. ‘Ellen. I was making my way to find you.’

  I put out my hands and he took them tightly.

  ‘Robert Coward shall not have you. I can’t bear it.’

  I stepped back, my hands still in his, my arms extended. ‘Don’t I have a say?’

  ‘Beautiful Ellen. I love you.’ He was laughing, and so was I.

  In the street we embraced. My head lay comfortably against his shoulder. I was a tall girl. His hand was deliciously heavy on the back of my head, my shoulders, my back. I shut my eyes and the cobbles pressed through the thin soles of my shoes.

  Lucy scraped a spoon round the pie dish and stuck it in her mouth. A moment’s noisy sucking followed. ‘I just wanted to get the most out of it,’ she said. ‘We shan’t see another one of these for many a long year.’

  ‘How rude,’ said Mrs Horne.

  ‘Lucy, honestly. I don’t have to work in Waltham to bring you pies.’ I laughed. I had to laugh every so often, to release the sparkling happiness that brimmed inside me.

  Lucy’s father George rose to his feet. ‘Miss Calvert. Let me offer you my congratulations.’ He held out his hand and I got up too, and shook it.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Horne.’

  He turned and left the room. I saw his back bend outside the window. He was putting on his boots to go up to the kennels.

  ‘Go on, Nan,’ said Lucy. ‘Into the parlour with you.’

  Lucy and I cleared the table. I put on the apron that Mrs Horne called ‘Ellen’s pinny’, a long, starched affair rejected by her and Lucy because the hem brushed their toes. I began washing the cutlery. Lucy leaned against the drainer and tugged the knives and spoons from my hands to dry them. Something about the way she placed them carefully, one by one, into their slots in the drawer, glancing up at me all the while, caught my attention.

  ‘What
is it, Lucy?’

  ‘I don’t know if I should say this, Ell.’

  ‘You’re not usually so hesitant.’ I smiled at her. ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘All right. You know Ivy Sutton, who cleans for Dr Bell? She told me something about your Mr Parr. She didn’t mean to overhear but she was polishing the brass plate on the surgery door.’

  ‘And the keyhole too, I expect. So what did she overhear?’

  ‘She said …’ Lucy cleared her throat. ‘She said Mr Parr can’t do it. Because of the war. The war affected his, you know. His private parts.’ Her eyes shone black with embarrassment. ‘I’m only thinking of you, dear. That’s the only reason I’m repeatin this.’

  I slid our dinner plates into the sink and let my hands rest on them, pleasantly gloved by the hot water. ‘I already know, Lucy.’

  ‘So it’s true?’ She gaped. ‘So it’ll be just … just room and board?’

  I laughed aloud, that the riches which had poured into my lap could be termed so. ‘Oh, Lucy. Would you like to be my bridesmaid?’

  *

  Selwyn and I would wait half a year or so. He needed to let me be sure. He would never hold it against me if I reconsidered. I grew more certain every day that we spent together, walking in the beech hangers and the high tops of the Downs, or motoring to the sea, or reading in his sitting room, me with my hair down around my shoulders and my bare feet propped on the low table, and he looking up from his book and smiling at me. And all the while the small diamond burned its quiet determined fire on my finger.

  But it was 1939, and we couldn’t live isolated in our warm little nook. In the summer of that year people were still professing their great faith in Mr Chamberlain. He would save us from these growling warmongers. ‘You’re trusting the wrong person,’ Selwyn told them. ‘Your fate doesn’t lie with Mr Chamberlain but with Herr Hitler.’

  And so it proved. We married shortly after the war broke out, in December, amid the turmoil of those early months. Our wedding took place at Waltham Town Hall, a stark building now in wartime, denuded of its railings, the tall windows criss-crossed with blast tape. Lucy attended as bridesmaid and her father and grandmother accompanied her. Daniel Corey came, in uniform: he had a two-day pass from Aldershot and he’d brought his new wife Marcy, Marcy Berry that was, whom I’d seen pushing Mr Babcock in his wheeled wicker chair. John Blunden came, and his father who had taken my things to the Absaloms and taken them away again. Polly and my other pals from the town hall. Mr and Miss Dawes. Some very distant female relatives of Selwyn’s, cousins of his late father, who looked sideways at Lady Brock’s lipstick. Lady Brock came with William Kennet who was astonishingly dapper in a suit once the property of Sir Michael, whose God had finally shown him mercy back in September, right at the beginning of the war.

  I wore a white satin dress that fell to my ankles. I had made it myself on Lady Brock’s machine. For a veil I had my mother’s yard of Nottingham lace.

  Selwyn, allowed to kiss the bride, took me in his arms. Something extraordinary happened to the room then. It seemed to be flooded with a sudden buzzing light, very fierce, as if a piece of Heaven had been torn down to earth to land all around us.

  We had cake and champagne afterwards in Bishop’s Tea Rooms. Lady Brock had supplied the champagne. Daniel read out a telegram from Edward in Singapore. ‘DARLING SISTER STOP OVERJOYED STOP HUSBAND CLEARLY MAN OF GREAT DISCERNMENT STOP HOPE MEET SOON STOP MUCH LOVE EDWARD.’

  Daniel read aloud in capitals, and included all the stops.

  We came out into the square. Those holding champagne glasses toasted us. I shook hands with Selwyn’s bevy of very-much-removed cousins, who then fitted themselves decorously back into a long black automobile and departed.

  ‘Dear girl,’ said Lady Brock at my side, and gave me a carmine kiss on the cheek before going towards Selwyn.

  Lucy loitered nearby, and I went to her. ‘You look so nice, Lucy.’

  She did, in a cream linen jacket and skirt, and a cream cloche hat with a small lilac rose. We had chosen the fabric together, my gift to her as bridesmaid. She chewed her lip. ‘Don’t forget us, Ellen.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m moving back to Upton, silly!’

  Suddenly she put her arm in mine. We drifted away from our companions. ‘I do love Waltham Square,’ she said. ‘It feels like freedom to me.’

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘Oh yes. Coming out on the bus, those Saturdays, to visit you. I never go anywhere, you see.’

  I smiled. ‘Neither of us are great travellers, Lucy.’

  ‘You will be now. He’s got the wanderlust, your Mr Parr.’

  Selwyn wanted to take me to Italy, Greece, the Holy Land. ‘We’ll have to wait until this is all over.’

  ‘One day, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Selwyn approached us, took our hands, mine and Lucy’s. The breeze bowled the few clouds along. Mr Kennet’s weathercock swung overhead and caught fire.

  Ellen

  Late March, 1944

  18

  ‘I REALLY CAN’T get it at Waltham. They don’t stock it.’

  As I lied, I slid the pin of my pearl brooch into the placket of my high-necked blouse. Put my cotton handkerchief in my skirt pocket, and fastened my watch around my wrist. Arrayed in these gifts, all from my husband, I stood up. The dressing-table mirror tilted on its spindles, swinging out of the vertical, so that I looked disconcertingly up my own nose. My lying nose.

  A week had passed since Mrs Berrow’s visit. I had endured two days of anguish; then, when I began to jump every time the telephone rang, I’d written back to her. Dear Mrs Berrow, I have come to think it would be best if I came down to Southampton as you suggested. A hasty scrawl, the stamp pasted on askew, shoved into the letterbox furtively, trying to hide the deed even from myself. I had no idea what would come of this. I simply couldn’t remain in limbo, waiting for the blow to fall. Not even certain if there were a blow to fall.

  The man might not be there, of course. What would that do to me? I had no idea.

  ‘Surely they can send it,’ Selwyn said now. ‘What sort of item is it, anyway?’

  I was ready with my fabricated excuse. ‘The sort ladies buy in person. From the chemist’s shop.’

  In the corner of my eye I watched him pull the white shirt over his head. When his face emerged it was still flushed. ‘Ah. Well. You must do what you must, my love. Indeed.’

  I dragged the brush through my hair, out to the side and let it fall. ‘I could cut half this hair off and still make a bun.’ Even to my own ears I sounded brittle. ‘Some poor woman might need a wig. Perhaps I’ll ask in Southampton.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  I turned from the mirror and pulled my jacket on. ‘If I’m not back, send Pamela to Lucy’s after school. To spare Elizabeth.’

  The wind had dropped and masses of cool air hung motionless under the trees. I was glad of my heavier canvas skirt. In my handbag was Mrs Berrow’s reply to my letter. I was to meet her, as she had suggested, at the Lyons tea house near the ruined Crown, and our appointment was at four o’clock. I had not been able to tell Selwyn about what Mrs Berrow had said. I couldn’t even broach the subject to Lucy. Every word uttered would bring the unthinkable closer to reality.

  And here I was, pushing the unthinkable closer. But I couldn’t do otherwise.

  The driver pulled up at the stop, shaking me out of my daze. I climbed aboard. ‘Goodness, I didn’t hear you coming! A return to Southampton, if you please.’

  ‘I was coasting.’ It was Rick Staveley from Upton, the man lame since birth who had driven this route since before the war. He put two warm coppers into my hand. ‘Twopence change. Do you want the bus station, Mrs Parr?’

  ‘No. The Crown stops.’

  ‘Right you are.’ He put the bus into gear. ‘Funny the way we still call them that, even though the Crown’s been smashed to smithereens. You know we shan’t be allowed down there in a few days? The company tol
d us. They’re shutting the whole coast off, all the way along.’ He swept his arm from west to east.

  ‘Mr Kennet said.’

  ‘I’m to turn round at Fair Mead and come back. That’s what the company says.’

  The bus swung through the lanes under the budding branches that were on the point of releasing their freshest green, and I remembered sitting with Mother – Rick had been driving us then, too – and reading her a letter from Edward. The one about the ship’s cats, the superfluity thereof. When we reached the coast the water flared in sudden sunshine. Will we see the sea soon? my mother had said, like a child on holiday. Now we were passing along the mauled high street, the piles of masonry still strewn about like a carnivore’s leavings. I used to imagine the enemy rebuilding the high street after our conquest but now people were clearing rubble, sweeping it down to the shoreline for hard-standings and new quays. Caissons, jetties, fuel channels to feed the gathering boats and trucks and tanks, and surely every yard of it photographed by the Luftwaffe. I imagined them cruising with glinting wings over our skies, the maps silvered as if by moonlight, our little streets outlined. The mixture of hope and alarm curdled in me, nauseating.

  I went into the Lyons and found a table by the window with a clear view of the hostel and the ruin of the Crown. The entire top storey, the roof and the upper set of windows, had slid down and sideways, as if the building were sinking like a doomed ocean liner.

  ‘There’s nothing behind,’ said a man. ‘Just this façade. The rest is a heap of rubble.’

  I turned my head and saw instantly that it was him. A chubby, childish face with a rounded chin and Pamela’s light, peat-brook eyes, wide-set and clear. Light eyes and dark-honey hair, his a little wavy where hers was straight, glossy. That was the only difference. A pulse pounded in my throat, made me afraid to speak.

  He continued to stand by my table, looking out at the Crown. Some time went by. Finally I managed to say, ‘It’s horrible.’

  He blinked, slowly like his daughter, as my words took him from his reverie. ‘Yes.’ He seated himself at the next table. ‘It is.’