Elizabeth and I carried the plates to the kitchen. When I returned alone he was sitting with his head in one hand. I sat down beside him without speaking. After a moment he lifted his head and stared at the curtained window.
‘I passed a house today,’ he said. ‘With its face torn away, only the gable remaining.’ His eyes wandered towards mine. ‘It reminded me of someone I met in the hospital gardens. Nothing left below the browline, yet somehow the man was alive. Bandaged, of course. With a tube for breathing.’
Where had Selwyn been treated after the Great War? Somewhere in the North, I thought, a stately house of grey stone, viridian lawns, a cedar casting black shadow. He’d told me about it when we met, but the details had since escaped me. We were in peacetime back then. Why should I remember?
‘I didn’t realize there were any … I thought your hospital was only for nerve patients.’
‘It was.’
The horror reigned inside me for a long moment. Then I opened my palm and put my hand over his and formed my lips for speaking. ‘Next time,’ I said, ‘I will go to Southampton. You know how much I like driving the lorry.’
His own lips moved. ‘It’s no picnic. Slag heaps of rubble. And smoke.’
‘You’d better give me some tips, then.’
‘Practical girl.’
Elizabeth came in from the kitchen bearing toast cut into fingers and sprinkled with a few grains of sugar. ‘Pudding,’ she announced.
I put Pamela to bed without opposition. I said that it was her turn to tell me a story, and so she did, one about her imaginary donkeys.
‘Did you know, Mummy was killed in the bombs?’ she suddenly said, on the edge of sleep. ‘That’s what Donald said when we were doing snap with the cards.’
I sat back down on the bed and clasped her shoulders. ‘I was going to tell you, darling, but I thought I would wait until you asked. You must forgive Donald. He doesn’t think before he speaks—’
‘All the boys said it.’ Her eyes were limpid, tearless. ‘They also said you can’t come back from Heaven. You can look down, though. Hawley’s grandpa’s looking down, he says. He went up there from drinking drinks, though, not from the bombs.’ She rolled away and put her thumb in her mouth.
7
PAMELA DIDN’T BREAK my night this time. And when I woke early she was still asleep, motionless on her stomach, issuing soft snores, her arm flung over a pillow. I’d do better today. Get her some proper warm clothes – a coat, a nightdress, stockings. We’d have plenty of time if I went to the office early. Got the most important letters done before breakfast.
As I watched she rolled without waking onto her side and drew up her knees, giving the pillow a hearty kick.
‘Silly nonsense,’ she declared, and I almost laughed. Somewhere in her sleeping mind she’d found a place without grief and knowledge, huddled into it like a mouse into the bole of a tree. I encircled her with my arms for five minutes or so, and she smelled of warm, dry, brushed cotton, and something else, that somewhat salty aroma of newly baked bread I had noticed when I lifted her off the seat of the bus. What was it? Her heated skin, her hair at the nape of her neck? I didn’t know.
Stealthily I got up and dressed, and went to the mill before dawn broke. I climbed the stairs to the office, my feet finding their way in the gloom. The stairs were wooden, with two worn dips in each tread. We were to install a fine iron stair, fit for a century to come, but the war began and there was no metal for such vanities.
I lit the gas lamp and typed in my coat. I no longer had my book from the loft at the Absaloms, coated with dust and mildew and the frass of woodworm. Typewriting: A Practical Manual Based Upon the Principles of Rhythm and Touch. By W. R. Sedley. The back had been eaten half off but there had been a keyboard, a cardboard keyboard which folded out, and I used to batter this keyboard with my fingers according to the principles of rhythm and touch. I had no idea, half the time, whether I was right or wrong.
‘Darling, what are you doooing?’ came the worn cooing from the bedroom, and I would reply, ‘Homework, Mother. Just thinking out my arithmetic.’
I found my shorthand pad and wrote now to the Ministry, Selwyn’s voice in my ears and in the rhythms of my fingers. If the screen is regularly put out of action our stoppages will mount until we are unable to fulfil our orders. There is a certain truth, Mr Gresham, in the saying ‘spoiling the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar’. I considered this saying, and substituted another, more apt in my opinion. For want of a nail the shoe was lost. And I added: I am sure, sir, you are familiar with the final lines of this rhyme. Perhaps this was going too far. But the prevarications of Mr Gresham were wasting our paper, ink, typewriter ribbon, postage, not to mention the time and attention of our women. Perhaps I should add something about morale. Our own manager, a capable woman, reports that the constant repairs to broken machinery sap her morale—
As if by telepathy, Suky Fitch stuck her head around the door. ‘I’m closing the sluicegate, Mrs Parr.’
‘Suky. How do you feel, when the screen needs mending?’
She stared.
‘I’m writing to the Ministry. Would you say it sapped your morale?’
‘Oh. Yes.’ She grinned. The most unsappable woman one could hope to meet. ‘And that of my workforce.’
… and that of her workforce. ‘Thanks. Why isn’t Mr Parr doing the sluice?’
Suky raised her shoulders. In someone less delicate it would be a shrug. ‘I don’t know. He asked me. Oh – I saw you with the little girl. Yesterday on my day off. You were running for the bus. I was on it, but I couldn’t make that old sourpuss of a driver stop. Oh, I felt for you.’ She was smiling down at me, warmth in her bright blue eyes.
‘Oh, yes. We missed it by a mile. Children.’ I shook my head as if knowingly. Where was Selwyn?
‘I expect you’ll be glad to get her settled,’ Suky said. ‘The Henstrows are respectable people, very clean. Mrs Henstrow I’ve always found very … practical.’
I let my fingers drop onto the keyboard. A handful of keys rose into the air, the limbs of a struggling metal insect.
‘The Henstrows?’
‘That farm up at Speeds Hill, yes. You sound like you’re getting a throat, Mrs Parr. Be sure and tie your scarf high. Peter told me last night. Peter Flack, Constable Flack, you know he’s my half-brother. Oh, Mrs Parr, are you off, then?’
I fled out, coat unbuttoned. The cold air in my throat like pewter. I reached the house, skating on the damp flagstones of the path. I went into the hall. ‘Selwyn!’
His voice came, muffled, from our bedroom. I ran upstairs.
He was sitting on the floor with Pamela. Between them was a wavering rank of toy soldiers and a cushion.
‘The Henstrows,’ I said. ‘Suky told me.’
‘Yes.’ He levered himself to his feet, tugging the bags out of the knees of his trousers. ‘I arranged it yesterday. We got them in the nick of time. They were about to take a boy from Portsmouth. I’ve just been explaining it all to Pamela. I thought it was important that we had a proper talk about it as soon as she woke up.’
Pamela toured a toy soldier over the plumped cushion. ‘I’m going to be with a family, you know, Ellen.’ She spoke without turning her head, her face a small, pale, full moon in the wardrobe mirror.
‘You telephoned.’ I looked at Selwyn. ‘Yesterday afternoon, while we were out.’
I sank down onto the bed. He came to sit beside me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His wrists were thin, the veins stark, his cuffs frayed. His large, spare hands were beautiful. ‘Darling—’
‘Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?’
‘I should have. I know.’
In the mirror I saw Pamela’s face close. It was almost nothing, a barely perceptible tightening of the corners of her mouth. Many people wouldn’t have noticed, but I knew her face already.