Читать книгу We Must Be Brave - Frances Liardet - Страница 12

‘WE CAN’T BE EXPECTED to behave as if we’re made of Derbyshire peakstone.’ Selwyn wielded his handkerchief. ‘That poor little child.’

The woman’s face was untouched, he told me. Her ration book was in her handbag, in the name of one Amelia Pickering, residing at the same Plymouth address she had sewn into her child’s clothes. ‘I called Waltham police station after you left,’ he went on. ‘Sit down, darling.’

I did so, and so did he. We faced each other in our sitting room’s comfortable armchairs. The lower part of my face, my cheeks, felt strange; the skin numb, tingling.

‘They managed to get through to Southampton. Then Southampton called them back about an hour ago.’ He blew his nose. ‘Mrs Pickering contacted them when Pamela disappeared, but they couldn’t get to the hotel until this morning. By which time it had been hit.’ A hollow, wooden rumble came from the kitchen, followed by a scream of pleasure. ‘What on earth is that?’

I cocked my head. ‘I think it’s Lord Plumer.’

Lord Plumer was an ancient croquet ball, legendarily unbeatable, named by Selwyn’s uncle after the general who, in turning the course of the Battle of Messines, had, in his estimation, spared the life of his nephew. Old Mr Parr, bereaved of both his sons at the Somme, had been grateful for small mercies. When he gave up croquet he had planed a flat underside onto Lord Plumer, fastened a lead plate thereto, and used it as a doorstop for the pantry. No one else was allowed to win a game with Lord Plumer.

The rumble returned. ‘That’s the way!’ we heard Elizabeth say, in a high, breaking voice. ‘Off it goes.’

‘You’ve told Elizabeth, then.’

‘Yes. She’s taking it badly.’ He spread his hands, clasped them as if washing. ‘Apparently Mrs Pickering called the police and then ran out to look for Pamela, only coming back at nightfall. And then, along with a dozen other unfortunates, she placed too much faith in the cellar. The ceiling came down on them all.’

I pictured her returning tear-stained in the evening to her certain death. For even while she was running in the streets, shrieking Pamela, Pamela, the bomb for the Crown was being loaded into its bay.

‘God damn them.’ I swallowed the stone in my throat. ‘I wish them eternal perdition.’

Selwyn breathed in. ‘That attitude helps no one, darling.’

‘It helps me.’ I swallowed again. ‘The police will come now, won’t they? And take her away?’

‘They will. Eventually.’ He took out his spectacles and started cleaning them. He was going to read the Bible: he always gave the lenses fastidious attention before doing so. ‘They’re looking for her father, obviously, and other relatives. They’ll be in touch soon.’

I pushed away a lock of hair. The bicycle ride had made it messy. ‘You could try the Book of Job,’ I told Selwyn. ‘We need his God now. One who can shut the sea with doors. Unload granaries of hail.’

Pamela was sitting on the kitchen floor, wrapping the croquet ball in a tea towel. Elizabeth was putting onions in a baking dish.

‘Baked onions,’ I said. ‘They take me back. Do you know how lucky we are, to have got all that precious onion seed from Upton Hall? Most people’s mouths are watering for onions. They haven’t seen one in months and months.’ I babbled on, in the same bright tone. ‘Months and months.’ Elizabeth’s eyes were brimming. I made to embrace her, my hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged me away.

‘No, Mrs Parr,’ she murmured. ‘It’ll only start me again.’

‘Dolly needs a headscarf.’ Pamela held up her swaddled ball. ‘Otherwise she might get earache in the wind. Do you know what happens then? Somebody irons your ear.’

‘No!’ I feigned amazement while Elizabeth dashed her tears away. ‘With a hot iron?’

Pamela sucked her teeth. ‘They put a towel over your ear first. And then they put the iron on the towel, and it’s so lovely and warm. Mummy’s being very slow.’

‘Yes, Pamela. She must be very busy.’

Elizabeth put the dish in the oven. ‘Perhaps she’s gone to see your auntie. Have you got any aunties?’

Pamela’s face puckered. ‘Why would she go and see Aunt Margie without me?’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Of course she wouldn’t do that.’

‘Aunt Margie’s a long way away. She’s in Cape Town. They have grapes there and lots of flowers. I haven’t been there but Mummy went before I was born. She says it’s wizard. She wouldn’t go and visit Aunt Margie without me.’ She hummed a little and unwrapped the ball to fold the tea towel into an uneven triangle. ‘Bad headscarf.’

‘Let me.’ I took the tea towel and made a neater job of it, and knotted it as best I could under Lord Plumer’s flat chin.

Pamela cradled the ball experimentally, in each elbow, and then set it on the floor to take bobbing steps. ‘Pamela, we’re going shopping. Oh, do come on, darling. Do hurry up. Honestly, it’s like wading through treacle.’

I set three places at the kitchen table. Selwyn didn’t have lunch. Elizabeth started the last loaf, cutting it fine. We listened to the voice of a dead woman piped through Pamela’s mouth, Mrs Pickering exhorting her small child, and prepared the meal.

In the afternoon I found an old bed-jacket that my mother used to wear when she sat up against the pillows to drink her tea. It was a flouncy woollen affair with a flapping collar and silky straps, and it hung down almost to Pamela’s knees. When I drew it off her shoulders she clutched at the swathes of wool. ‘No. No, it’s too cosy. Let me keep it.’

‘You shall have it back when I’ve taken off these silly straps. We need buttons, nice big ones …’

I had no buttons large enough. After a long search we found, in a wooden box in the dressing room, the toggles from an old duffel coat belonging to my brother Edward. That coat had been so torn and stained that Mother and I had cut it into strips and burned it on the fire. I refused to worry about Edward because he’d told me, the day he left to go to sea, that I should never worry, that worry brought bad luck and he would always need luck. He’d been fourteen, I eleven, and since then we had spent a total of nineteen precious days together. His last letter, dated a month ago and headed Singapore, said I’ll take my chances here, drst Ell. The company is doing terrifically, what with soldiery everywhere. I’ve been in a few jams before now and know my way around. Place like a fortress – indeed, it is a fortress and always has been. I’ve been contemplating calling myself Senhor de Souza and speaking entirely in pidgin. But like as not will end up doing my bit.

At least doing his bit wouldn’t put his life in danger, not in Singapore. I was glad he was far away from all this.

Pamela was delighted with the toggles. They were of such smooth, dark-polished wood. I took her to the mill where she sat on the office floor while I tidied my desk. My eyes lit upon an advisory leaflet on the turnip gall weevil which for some reason had come my way, and which I was going to pass to Lady Brock, with her great root crop. It seemed now that this message, arriving as it did before the bombing, belonged to another world. Pamela sat leaning against the wall, sucking her thumb, putting two fingers over her eyelids to pin them closed. That seemed to comfort her, as did the battering of my typewriter keys when I began my letters. ‘Do more,’ she said, whenever I paused. ‘Keep going bangbang.’ It was a noisy behemoth of a machine. We went back to the house an hour before dusk and saw a policeman ahead of us, wheeling his bicycle up the path.

He turned to face us. The strap of his helmet ran beneath a chin now blue with the bristle that accumulated by the evening.

‘Mrs Parr,’ he said, by way of greeting. ‘I’m Constable Flack. Suky Fitch’s brother.’

‘Suky’s brother!’ Astonishing, how such a bulky individual could spring from the same stock as our diminutive mill forewoman.

The constable’s flinty, fifty-year-old eyes warmed. ‘We had different mams.’

He removed his helmet. For a sickening moment I thought he was about to announce Mrs Pickering’s death. But instead he said gravely to Pamela, ‘Would you be so kind, miss, and take this hat for me? I’ve got a great bag of papers to carry.’

He and Pamela went into the sitting room. Elizabeth was shutting up the hens, so I made tea the colour of washing water and took it through. ‘That’s my number,’ he was saying to Pamela. ‘And that there, GR, what do you think that means?’

‘It means you’re fierce. Grrr. So have you been to see Mummy?’

He lifted his bewildered face to me. I heard Elizabeth open the back door. ‘Pamela, I need to speak to the constable. Elizabeth’s got some milk for you.’

She burst out with a loud bellow. ‘Why won’t anyone bring me my mummy!’ I embraced her but she growled and with surprising strength pushed me away. ‘Don’t keep hugging me! You’re not my mummy!’ She stamped her foot. ‘Where’s my mummy!’ Her face crimson, she threw herself on the floor, roaring, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Oh, my mummy!’

Elizabeth came in. We gave each other blank, drained stares. The constable shifted in his chair. ‘I’ve got to get back before dark,’ he said through the din.

‘Come into the kitchen, Constable.’

We left Elizabeth kneeling beside the screaming child. As the door closed I saw her place the flat of one gentle hand on Pamela’s stomach. Her face, Elizabeth’s face, was a mask of sorrow.

In the kitchen Constable Flack handed me a child’s ration book. ‘This was found in her mother’s handbag,’ he told me. ‘You must make sure it goes with her.’

I gasped. ‘When will she leave?’

‘Sit down, Mrs Parr.’

I did so. We listened to the screams in the sitting room. If she didn’t stop, I’d have to go back in there. But just then Pamela gave a choking sigh, and Elizabeth’s voice came to us, muffled. ‘There, there,’ she was saying. ‘There, there.’

Constable Flack cleared his throat. ‘We don’t know what’s become of Mr Pickering. He scarpered long before the war, it seems. Nobody in Plymouth has ever seen hide or hair of hubby.’

‘Pamela hasn’t mentioned him …’ My breath fluttered out through my nostrils. ‘What were they doing in Southampton?’

He shrugged. ‘We’ve got no way of knowing. She said nothing to the hotel staff.’

I picked up the ration book, stared at it in a sort of stupor.

‘You’ll get a pint of milk for the little one. And please obtain a child’s respirator. Hers couldn’t be found. Register her at your shops here in Upton. However short her stay.’

A pint of milk for Pamela. ‘She mentioned an aunt in South Africa.’

‘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.