Selwyn spoke. ‘We were thinking about packing, Pamela and I.’
I got up and left the room. On the landing I paused. In front of me was a picture, a Victorian oil of a family of bucolics disporting themselves in a tree-shrouded lane entirely free of mud and animal dung. Young and old alike were rosy-cheeked, clad in clean, white smocks. I felt a blunt stab of pain, as if from a bone needle.
Selwyn followed me out, laid a hand on my shoulder, withdrew it again when I didn’t turn round. ‘Selwyn, did you know I hate this picture beyond measure?’
He gave a small puff of soundless laughter, agonized. ‘I love you so much.’
‘What?’ The word broke out of me in a stunned gasp. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
Pamela opened the door. ‘Why are you whooshing?’ she asked.
‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you make a battlefield? You can show the boys when you’ve finished.’
We went downstairs. The boys were chattering in the kitchen, and Elizabeth was hanging the children’s smalls on a clothes-horse in front of the sitting-room fire. We slipped outside and sat on a bench in the garden. For a minute, sitting straight-backed in the sharp frost and the low morning sun, I felt that we were both young, with everything before us. A great shiver convulsed me.
He began speaking immediately. ‘I can’t have a child in this house. It’s too dangerous.’
I gaped. ‘What are you talking about? The house is full of children. They’re here because it’s safe.’
‘It won’t be, in an invasion.’
‘My God.’ The nerves leaped in my belly. ‘Have you heard something? Has there been a warning?’ I clutched his arm. ‘Selwyn—’
‘No. Nothing like that. I’m simply looking to the future. If they invade, the children will all have to be moved.’ He squinted up at the mill. ‘You know our building’s strategic. I told you, Ellen. William Kennet and his party will be up there tomorrow with their chisels.’
‘He didn’t say anything about that when I saw him.’
‘Discretion is the watchword. He probably didn’t know then.’
Above me the mill rose quiet in the sunlight. Such a fine place it was, well-founded and built for peace, the only damage two centuries of weathering by frost and sun. I could not picture it pierced by gunsights, even less wreathed in smoke. The idea was sickening. I wrapped my arms around my body. If no one would comfort me, I would do it myself. ‘Why just Pamela?’ I spoke mutinously. ‘Why aren’t the boys going?’
‘Their families will take them when the moment comes.’
‘If it comes.’
‘If it comes. But with Pamela it’s different. Her life’s been shattered. We can’t risk her taking root here, and then having to be moved again. It wouldn’t be fair. Constable Flack suggested we find her a family, and that’s what I’ve done. On a farm, far from the roads, as safe as can be, for the duration of the war. That’s no more than our duty, in my view.’
The sun was lifting into the bare branches of the rowan tree. There was a rowan outside my house at the Absaloms, and an owl that used to perch in it. The tree and the sun were tainted now with a dreadful bitterness. If only Selwyn hadn’t driven down to fetch the grain. If only he hadn’t seen the city after the air raid.
‘I should have gone to Southampton,’ I said.
He laughed; it was an unpleasant sound. ‘Yes, you should,’ he said. ‘You’d have seen the children then, with tears running through the soot on their cheeks. It’ll be worse, of course, after the actual invasion.’ He turned to look at me. ‘You really should have seen France in the last war, Ellen. Children standing alone in shelled houses, too stunned to cry, surrounded by the bodies of their families.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, France. You’d know, then, what could happen to Pamela.’
A long moment passed. Selwyn’s eyes were slitted against the early-morning light, his face worn, crumpled.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said in the end. ‘I thought you agreed with Colonel Daventry. He doesn’t think it’s remotely—’
‘Daventry’s making petrol bombs.’
The sun was rising higher into the tree. A branch had split it across.
‘People make a better job of things,’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘if they’re not utterly terrified. That’s what we find. So we encourage a certain superstition, in the Home Guard. That the more thorough our preparations, the less likely it is that they will be needed.’ He stood up slowly, pushing his hands against his knees. ‘Now. Pamela needs to get ready.’
She raised her arms obediently as I pulled the singlet over her head. I could believe that children were born out of the buds of giant flowers, little gods and goddesses, so perfect was her body. Those extraordinary, clear, peat-brook eyes, wide-set in a round face. This hair the colour of the darkest honey. Those neat, plump little toes. I wondered if Mrs Henstrow would look on her and marvel.
‘Can I come and take you for walks?’ The tears bathed my eyes.
Her eyebrows kinked. ‘Just me, will you take? Or all the Henstrows? There’s five, Mr Parr said so. A boy and a boy and a boy and a girl and a girl, and that last girl is ten. The boy at the top is a farmer, he’s so big. So he would be too busy to come, I expect.’
I buttoned her dress. Reached the broken top button. ‘Let me snip off this button and sew on a new one. Hold still.’ I opened my sewing drawer. My scissors lay beside Mrs Pickering’s slips of greaseproof paper and cotton.
‘I might stay with the Henstrows for ever, or Aunt Margie might come and get me after the end of the war. But we don’t know when that’ll be. Why are you sniffling? Do my button.’
If she was in South Africa I’d find her. I would find her on all points of the earth. ‘Say please.’
‘Do my button please. Please may you do my button.’
‘We don’t say please may you.’ I cut the button fragment off and tore out the broken threads.
‘Yes, we do. It’s polite.’
‘No, we only say, please may I.’ I licked the end of the thread and inserted it into the needle, holding my eyes wide so that the tiny, shining, oval hole should not blur. ‘We say please can you, or could you. Put your head forward.’
She bent her neck. I pushed her hair aside. Her nape was covered in fine, golden down. How could anyone refuse this glory? I kneeled behind her and put the needle’s point through the loop of a small pearl button.
As Pamela ate her porridge I took hold of her free hand and rubbed my thumb across her dimples of knuckles. The hand small enough still for the fingers to radiate, like a starfish. A crease at her wrist, the babyish plumpness. Her whole forearm I could take in my spread hand.
‘If Mummy comes here, will you tell her I’m at the Henstrows’ house?’ she said suddenly. ‘I do know she’s gone. But just in case.’
Blessed art thou.
‘Yes. Of course I will. Would you like some more?’
‘Is there any sugar?’
‘No.’
‘Then no more.’
Selwyn stood in the doorway in his hat and coat, his thin jaw cuddled by his scarf. ‘Hurry, Pamela, or the kitchen pig will come and snuffle you away.’
‘What kitchen pig?’
‘This one.’ He made an absurd snort, and she giggled like bubbles coming up through a stream, and for that astonishing glimpse of fatherliness, now that it was too late, I wanted to strike him.
The motor car coughed and struggled into life. ‘How much fuel have we got?’ I asked Selwyn.
‘About a teacupful.’