We Must Be Brave Page 5

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The constable nodded. ‘A Mrs Marjorie Lord of Cape Town. The Plymouth officers found some letters, none more recent than ten year ago. Seems the sisters weren’t corresponding at the time of Mrs Pickering’s death.’

  ‘She certainly talked about her sister to Pamela.’

  The constable rubbed his chin. ‘The Plymouth boys have it in hand, but it’ll be a good while before we hear from Mrs Lord. Any rate, you’re stuck with the little girl until Southampton sorts itself out. Telegraph, electricity, telephones, all properly snarled up. Plus there’s the stragglers from the raid. One lot were out in a field, in a storm drain. A storm drain.’ He stood up. ‘Don’t worry unduly, Mrs Parr. We’ll find her somewhere suitable. A nice family who’d take her on. Pack her in like another little sardine.’

  ‘We’ll have to tell her soon. It’s worse not to.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  I stared up at him, and then rose to my feet.

  ‘Constable Flack, we’re not unsuitable ourselves, you know. We’ve got three boys from Southampton already. We’d be happy to pack her in, as you say.’

  In the silence which followed I heard the front door open, and then Selwyn’s light voice. ‘Hello?’ I could tell from his expectant tone that he’d seen the constable’s bicycle.

  I raised my voice. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’

  ‘Ah.’ Selwyn came in. ‘Good afternoon, Constable. Have you unearthed any family?’

  ‘This is Constable Flack, darling. Suky’s half-brother.’ I gripped the back of the chair. ‘I was just telling him we’re perfectly prepared to take Pamela under our wing for a while.’

  ‘Just until we manage to place her, sir.’ Constable Flack fitted his helmet onto his head.

  ‘She’s got an aunt in South Africa,’ I told Selwyn. ‘Her father’s long gone. There’s no one else.’

  ‘I was informing Mrs Parr that we’ll do our best to find her a berth –’ Constable Flack delved in his tunic pocket and produced bicycle clips ‘– while we try to get a hold of the aunt. Or, if we’re lucky, this darned elusive Mr Pickering.’

  ‘Pickering. Pimpernel. Very good.’ Selwyn grinned, twitching the buttons out of the buttonholes of his coat with a brisk thumb and forefinger. Most people used both hands to unbutton their coats, but he didn’t.

  ‘Quite a job it’ll be, with half the men overseas.’ Constable Flack was sombre. ‘And these blokes who scarper, they’re generally a bad lot. No responsibility or fatherly feeling.’ He dwelled for a second or two on these feckless men. ‘If they had an ounce of decency,’ he concluded, ‘they wouldn’t have gone in the first place.’

  ‘Some sort of fostering arrangement, then. That would be a capital solution.’ Selwyn sighed. ‘Poor little mite.’ He and the constable left the room, and I heard the front door open once more. Selwyn murmured something, and there was a scrape of boots on the path. Then a loud ticking as Constable Flack freewheeled down to the gate. Only then did I make for the door. I brushed past Selwyn in the hall.

  ‘What the dickens—’

  ‘Just something about the ration book,’ I stammered. ‘I forgot to ask him.’

  I dashed down the path to see the constable’s bicycle gathering speed. ‘Constable.’ I started running. ‘Constable Flack!’ He slowed, and I caught up with him.

  ‘Everything all right, Mrs Parr?’

  ‘Do remember that we could have Pamela. That’s what I was saying. We’re suitable.’

  ‘It’s not for me to decide. Mr Parr seemed very agreeable to the idea of a family taking her.’ He squinted at me. I was standing against the declining sun.

  ‘Mr Parr hasn’t had two seconds to consider the matter.’

  The constable gave a couple of slow nods. ‘Telephone Waltham police in the morning. Ask for Sergeant Moore. He deals with these matters.’ He ran his finger under his chinstrap. ‘I must get on.’

  ‘Thank you, Constable.’

  ‘Sergeant Moore,’ he repeated, and pedalled away down the lane.

  The boys came home late. They’d been playing football on the green. I told them that soon I would take them to Upton Hall, and if they gave the oaken floorboards the most brilliant shine, they would then be allowed to polish the suit of armour. They nodded solemnly, awed not by the task but by the sight of Pamela. ‘She’s still here, then.’ Donald folded his arms against the newcomer.

  Jack smirked. ‘Her clothes are funny.’

  ‘Never mind them,’ Hawley told her. ‘Do you like rissoles? They’re fried-up veg rolls with gravy.’

  Pamela shook her head, her chin trembling.

  I took her hand. ‘Boys, why don’t you play cards in your bedroom? In a little while you can help Elizabeth with the vegetables.’ The two younger ones tramped up the stairs, Hawley lagging on the bottom step.

  ‘Hawley, try not to worry—’ I began, because I knew that no one had telephoned from Southampton.

  ‘Mr Parr told us the lines are still down.’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s all right.’ He turned to climb the stairs.

  I gave Pamela some bread and milk. She ate slowly, pausing to say, ‘I like this food,’ and then, ‘But I don’t like you.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. It must seem strange being in our house. I must seem strange.’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes glowed with anger. ‘You seem nasty. Why are you making me a coat? I’ve got one already. It’s in the hotel.’ Then the anguish rose again, too large for her body, needing to be expelled in gusts of crying. ‘I don’t think Mummy’s coming. I think she won’t ever come to get me.’

  No, she won’t. Pamela darling, you must be very brave. I was about to say those words because this seemed the greater cruelty, to let so small a child venture unaccompanied into the truth. But then Pamela spoke. ‘She said she’d do it. “One more naughty thing, Pamela, and I’ll go off with the candle man.” And now she has.’ She began to growl with grief. ‘Horrid Mummee.’

  I embraced her. This time she allowed it, her arms hanging by her sides.

  I heated two pans of water and poured them into a tin tub in the kitchen to spare her the glacial bathroom upstairs. I kneeled down and unlaced her shoes. Looking up, I found her face in front of mine, watchful, dreaming. A world in those large, light-brown eyes, clear as a peat brook, flecked with the same dark grey as pebbles in a stream. She lifted her arms for me to pull her top clothes off, obediently stepped from foot to foot so I could remove the knickers and long socks. Everything I did must remind her of her mother, and yet she said nothing. She was so small.

  She sat gingerly down in the water. ‘Is it too hot?’ I asked, anxious. She shook her head. I should wash her hair, probably. But not tonight. Instead I washed her grubby hands, her grubby knees and neck with my own bath soap, and scooped water over her shoulders and back. Her skin was uniformly pale, dense, creamy. Perhaps I was wrong, and this bathtime was so new and peculiar that nothing about it recalled her mother.

  She knew about the candle man long before she’d seen him. She used to hear him come whistling up the path, just after she’d been put to bed with her library books. He had a whistle like a blackbird. He always came on library day. Then one night she went downstairs for a drink of water. And her mother had said: This is Eric. He’s going to get some candles for your cake. ‘And he did this with his eye at me.’ Pamela gurned, trying and failing to close one eye without the other following suit. ‘And the next day we all went to Southampton. We put everything into a special kind of suitcase called a vast suitcase,’ she said. ‘When you go away for a long time, that’s what you need. A vast one.’

  ‘Vast means extremely big, Pamela.’

  The bathwater lapped around her knees. She floated the face flannel on the water’s surface, poking it with a finger until it sank down. She wasn’t a fat child but she still had her baby’s chubbiness around the wrists. ‘Vast,’ she said again.

  She didn’t know why they had to go to Southampton, why Eric couldn’t bring the candles to their
house. But Mummy said they needed an adventure. They took a train, then a bus. Then they walked. Mummy was frightened of bombs, but the candle man said the bombers had already got everything they wanted from Southampton. ‘So we went to the hotel and took off our coats and cardigans. Mummy put me on a chair outside our room while she shouted at the candle man inside. We all went to bed in the cellar. And then in the morning I had to sit on the chair again. That’s why I went outside to watch the people rushing around. I was bored.’

  I dipped my hand in the warm water and scooped it over her pale, round shoulders. ‘Promise me that if you’re bored here, you will stay where you’re put. Pamela …’ I tried to sound careless, conversational. ‘This candle man. Eric. I suppose he wasn’t a bit like your daddy, was he?’

  She gave me a blank gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t have a daddy.’

  ‘Really? I thought everyone did …’

  ‘No. You can be excused from it, you know. Mummy told me. He decided not to be a daddy, and so he isn’t. He went off just after I came out. Do you know that babies come out of people, out of a wincy little hole that stretches?’

  ‘Goodness, Pamela!’ I had a sudden sharp image of a woman perched at a dressing table, throwing out the facts of life to her little child while lipsticking her mouth. ‘Yes, I do know that.’

  ‘Are you having a baby, Ellen?’

  I gave a wavering laugh as the heat flooded my face. ‘I certainly am not. And it’s not a question you ask grown-ups, dear.’

  ‘You might be.’ She was unabashed, round-eyed. ‘They’re teeny when they start growing, like a little nut. So you could have one inside you and not know about it till you start being sick as a dog.’

  ‘That’s not a nice expression.’ I smoothed my hands over the pinafore I’d put on to bathe her. ‘I haven’t got time for babies, Pamela. Not with all you children to look after. Now let’s forget about all this silliness.’

  I ran through phrases in my mind. Pamela, darling, your mother … Mummy … Pamela, sweetheart … I couldn’t get any further. It would have to be done tomorrow. Tomorrow or the next day.

  Quite suddenly she started to grizzle, baring small, square milk teeth. Her tears fell into the cooling bath. Elizabeth came in with the vegetables for supper, filled the sink with cold water, cast a sombre eye on Pamela, and left the room again, saying, ‘Hens.’

  I told Pamela she’d see the hens tomorrow, that she could feed them with Elizabeth if she wanted, but she shook her head, because hens were no good to her. I dried her and took her upstairs to dress, and met Hawley coming down to peel parsnips. The others were too darn comfortable to move, he said. ‘They’re the lazy branch of the family. No, truly they are. My dad says so.’

  After supper I put Pamela back in my bed and told her a tale about a swan, one who kept her babies in the soft, white feathers on her back between her wings as she glided along a shining, dark-green summer river. They went for long, long adventures until Pamela grew drowsy.

  5

  PAMELA KEPT ME AWAKE for a large part of the night, a sleeper in almost perpetual motion. At six o’clock I was in the kitchen starting some bread when the telephone rang in the hall, the bell immediately drowned by thundering feet on the landing and Elizabeth’s hopeless cry, ‘Donald, you’re a plain old-fashioned disgrace!’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘Children, stop this bawling,’ but they took no notice and crowded noisily into the kitchen, Elizabeth following.

  ‘Donald refuses to have his hair cut,’ she announced.

  I was pouring warm water into my flour. I looked up to see the older two were freshly shorn, the black-haired Hawley monk-like under his pudding-basin crop. For the first time I noticed the faintest dark down on his upper lip. ‘Hawley, you look very dapper,’ I said. ‘Donald, don’t you want to be as smart as your cousin?’

  Jack, the elder of the two brothers and a russet boy, spoke for Donald. ‘He says we look like girls.’

  Donald scuffed his feet by the range, his fringe in his eyes. Shorter, stockier and redder than Jack, he was a wayward Highland calf.

  ‘Really, Donald, dear. What sort of girl would have such a plain style?’

  ‘Mrs Parr, save your strength.’ Elizabeth scooped oats into a pan, her face creased with exasperation. ‘Donald won’t be told.’

  The older boys sat down, their necks wet, the snipped hems of their hair still bearing the furrows of the comb. When I was fourteen, Elizabeth had cut my hair. She’d worked for Mr and Miss Dawes then, who looked after the children of the parish poor. I was older than these boys but I was nonetheless a parish child. So Elizabeth had clipped me and deloused me with gentle kindness.

  I looked up, met her eyes.

  ‘I’ve never told Mr Parr, you know,’ I said quietly. ‘About my short crop.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She began to smile. ‘He doesn’t have to know everything.’

  My corn goddess, Selwyn had said, when he unpinned my hair for the first time. So easy to worship you. He knew that Mother and I had fetched up in the Absaloms, but I had painted this era in broad brushstrokes, very broad strokes indeed. What corn goddess in her right mind would regale a suitor with stories of long-ago lice?

  Just then Selwyn came into the kitchen. ‘Good morning, boys. I’ve been speaking to Cousin Hawley’s father. They’re all fit and well, although there’s no water and an awful lot of smoke.’

  They were too proud to shed tears of relief but Hawley’s shoulders settled and Jack blinked rapidly. Donald gave a series of blowing breaths, a small bullock on a misty morning.

  ‘Donald won’t have his hair cut,’ I told Selwyn.

  ‘I know. The fearful row you made quite impinged on my telephone conversation. Donald,’ Selwyn commanded, ‘submit to a trim this evening and at Christmas I’ll take all you boys to Suggs’s in Waltham for a proper chap’s back-and-sides.’ He wagged a finger. ‘This is a gentleman’s offer, conditional upon meticulous obedience to Elizabeth. Is that understood?’

  If the vocabulary was a little high, the gist was clear. ‘Yes, Mr Parr,’ Donald said, and the boys seated themselves with an awful scraping of wooden chair-legs on earthenware tiles and Selwyn sat down too. Elizabeth served the porridge while I kneaded my dough, rolling it and slapping it on the board. ‘My spoon’s jumping up and down on the table,’ said Jack. ‘Look. Bang the dough again, Mrs Parr. There!’

  ‘Pick your spoon up and start eating,’ Elizabeth directed him through set teeth.

  The telephone rang again. Selwyn said, ‘Damn,’ and left the room.

  ‘Hawley’s only eight years younger than you, Mrs Parr.’ Jack started to inhale his porridge, speaking between and during mouthfuls. ‘Don’t you find that strordinary? That he’s already thirteen and you’re only twenty-one, but you’re completely grown up?’

  ‘She isn’t. She scrapes her porridge bowl like we do. Mr Parr, now he’s properly grown up. He’s forty.’

  ‘Donald, I shall tell Mr Parr how rude you’ve been about Mrs Parr.’

  ‘Really, Elizabeth.’ I rolled up my dough and put it back in the bowl. ‘It’s no more than the truth. I’m always starving. And Mr Parr is forty-one, to be exact.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Parr. But Donald’s manner.’

  Selwyn returned, unsmiling. The boys, seeing it, were quiet.

  ‘Who rang, dear?’

  ‘Sharp’s.’ He sat down again at the table. ‘The fire hoses did for the grain, nearly all of it, but there’s some dry wheat left. They’re sending for people to fetch it away and grind it.’

  ‘Oh lord,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They got Sharp’s.’

  I rubbed dough from my fingers, awed at the knowledge that, in hitting the Southampton docks, the bombers had laid waste to the largest flour mill in the South.

  I followed Selwyn out to the yard where the lorry was garaged. I tried to match my stride to his; we were both tall, but he was eager to be on his way. ‘Darling, when I dashed after the constable yesterday, I did mention that we’d be happy to hang on to Pa
mela for a while.’

  ‘We haven’t got much choice, have we, in the short term.’ He spoke absently, fumbling for his keys. We were approaching the garage.

  ‘What I mean is, she wouldn’t necessarily have to be with a family. People are so hard-pressed now. She might do better with us and the boys …’

  Selwyn unlocked the door and snapped the padlock shut. ‘Sweetheart, these past few days we’ve all been through a great deal. You’ve been absolutely marvellous—’

  ‘I really haven’t. I simply did what had to be done—’

  ‘—but I think the experience has left us, perhaps, not quite in our right minds.’

  The doors gave a rusty scream as Selwyn pulled them open. I followed him into the garage. ‘What do you mean, in our right minds? Selwyn?’

  ‘Darling, can we talk about this later?’ He was opening the cab door, swinging himself up into the driving seat. ‘It’s hardly the most apposite moment.’

  ‘Well, I’m taking her to Barker’s in Waltham this morning. For clothes. So I won’t get to the office till after lunch.’ My voice was rising. ‘But she needs some things. I can get her things, can’t I? While she’s here?’

  ‘Of course you can. Ellen, what’s the matter?’ He leaned down towards me.

  ‘Nothing. I’m perfectly all right.’ I shut my eyes. ‘And I’m certainly in my right mind.’

  ‘I do beg your pardon. That was a stupid thing to say.’ He smiled deliberately down into my hot eyes. ‘Take Pamela shopping and don’t worry about the office. Suky and I can dash off a couple of bills between us. I must go.’

  ‘Of course you must.’

  He drove off, to Southampton, and Sharp’s, and the undamaged grain.

  I went back inside. Stared at the slowly rising bread dough. Ate my helping of porridge, half-cold, from the pan. Then I went out to the hall and lifted the telephone receiver.

  ‘Waltham police station, please,’ I told the operator.

  Pamela appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Miss Ell, Missis Ell!’

  ‘Quiet, sweetheart. I’m telephoning.’