‘Doesn’t mean you won’t find someone else,’ I said. ‘A more kindly farmer’s wife. I know. You’ve already made yourself clear.’
He shook his head. We stood in the dim light of the hall. He touched my face with his fingertips. Something I usually adored, but today my skin felt numb. I had to find something of him, grab some scrap of the man I loved, out of this wasteland.
‘Please play the piano, Selwyn.’
‘I haven’t the heart.’
‘For Pamela, then, if not for me. Please.’
Pamela wanted ‘Jingle Bells’. It was only a few days to Christmas. Selwyn played it for her roughly three dozen times. It was getting dark, but not yet time for supper. Pamela and I cut out some newspaper dolls, some with skirts, some with trousers, and the boys joined us to sit cross-legged and snipping, and Pamela spread them out on the floor.
Elizabeth came in and sat on the arm of the sofa. Selwyn asked her what song she would like to hear.
‘I’ve always been fond of “Sally Gardens”. I’m making a macaroni cheese.’ She and I sang together and Pamela dragged the lopsided dolls across the carpet. Selwyn’s fingers pranced over the keys, his eyes hidden behind his glasses. Pamela went into the kitchen and Elizabeth followed her. His fingers stilled immediately.
We ate the macaroni cheese. It was delicious: all that baked hot milk and flour and those shavings of cheese. I had taught Elizabeth to make the body of the dish with milk only, and as much salt as was tasty, and to reserve the cheese slivers for the top. Selwyn quarantined the mixture in his mouth before manfully swallowing but the rest of us ate it up with gusto. We put the house in order, and went to bed, all of us, at eight o’clock in the evening.
I put Pamela on the small bed in the dressing room and admitted Selwyn back into our double. Selwyn lay on his back, hair tufted against the pillow. Our first night together we’d read poetry, Edward Thomas, lounging on the pillows. We still did this from time to time but I sensed it wouldn’t happen again for a long while. So little time it took, for a small girl to bring me to this. The least likely thing to happen, as astonishing as an imago in a chrysalis. I let my gaze become absorbed into the gloom of the curtains, their heavy, somewhat threadbare blue velvet a powdery grey in the lamplight.
‘You would never have let her stay,’ I said. ‘Even if there had been no war.’
‘If there had been no war, she would never have been here.’
That was unanswerable.
‘Somebody will come for her, Ellen.’
‘No. She’s got no one. Her aunt hasn’t been in touch for ten years. Her father’s probably forgotten she existed.’
He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. ‘If this child is taken away from you, and you suffer, I don’t know how I’ll forgive myself. You say you don’t want children, but—’
‘I don’t want children.’
‘You want Pamela.’
I stroked my hand over the linen sheet. The sheets didn’t smell of lavender now, since Elizabeth and I hadn’t found the time or the spirit, last summer, to make up new lavender bags. I was eighteen the first time I saw this bed. It was so beautiful. The headboard of polished wood the colour of toffee, and the sheets heavy, crisp and scented. They had reminded me of my earliest childhood, before our ruin. I pulled myself away from his reaching arms and got off the bed. I started tearing my clothes off, tossing my woollens onto the floor, stripping my legs of their stockings. I trampled my way out of my skirt and stood barefoot in my slip, tugging pins out of my hair.
‘Darling, do put on your dressing gown. You’ll catch cold.’
‘You think this room is chilly?’ I laughed without pleasure. ‘When I was a girl I woke with frost on the carpet. The carpet that we put on our bed, Mother and I. It stank of mice, even in the frost, but we couldn’t get to sleep without it.’
He got out of bed and came to me. His pyjama-clad body was warm against mine and this time I let him put his arms around me. ‘I’d be the last person to make light of your hard years.’ He pressed his cheek against the top of my head. ‘But – forgive me, I can’t see what bearing they have.’
I released myself from his embrace, stood so that he could see my face. ‘What bearing?’ I shook my head in wonderment. ‘Seriously, you can’t see it?’
He gave me a baffled, unhappy stare. ‘You told me how you and your mother suffered. How you had to scrimp and save—’
‘Scrimp and save.’ I laughed again. ‘Do you know why I’m not frightened of the cold? Because I know about it. How you can let it sink right into your bones, and it won’t damage you at all. I know how to suck on a pebble to keep hunger pangs away. You have to do that, you know, if you’ve just given a child your own food. The pain’s excruciating otherwise. And I can carry her, further than anyone. I can walk twenty miles with nothing inside me but the skin of a baked potato. You say I’ve got no idea about war, and shelling. Well, you’ve got no idea what I can endure for her sake.’
He stood in front of me, a mild man, a clever man. Pyjama’d, bespectacled. So beloved. Pushed beyond his bounds. He’d tried to push me, too. But he’d simply forced me down onto my bedrock.
‘I don’t care what happens after the war,’ I told him. ‘That’s not the point. You can put her where you want, but I’ll go with her. She needs me now. Me. Do you see? We’re the same, Pamela and I. I was a child like her. A child who lost everything in the world.’
Ellen
1932–1935
8
I WAS ELEVEN when things started disappearing.
First it was my rocking horse, a beautiful thing with a blood-red bridle of suede. I was really too big for her now but all the same I loved her. When I asked Connie and Miss Fane, and they both said, ‘She’s gone to be repaired,’ using those exact words, I knew they’d been taught a lie. Three weeks later I saw Miss Fane in the hall, planting her foot on the lid of her trunk and bending to tug the strap tight. Then she too was gone.
I ran outside, found my brother Edward in the orchard, swinging a stick. The orchard was the jewel of our house, which was known as the Stour House after Godfrey Stour who had sold it to my father, and the generations of Stours before him who had planted and grafted and filled the apple press with cider jars. Edward looked up as I came running, crying. He put his arms around me and chose words a little too young for me, perhaps to soften the blow or perhaps just because he too, at fourteen, was confounded.
‘Daddy’s made a mistake with the money.’
My mother and father didn’t shout: instead they went to the study and spoke in a level tone, each word separate as if etched into the air.
‘It’s simply gossip, Susan.’
‘People are gossiping because they haven’t been paid. And they haven’t been paid because you’ve ruined us.’
‘I’m an investor. There are always ups and downs—’
‘You’re a gambler.’
On the word gambler my mother’s voice tightened to a whisper and the acid bit deep.
On the following morning Daddy came to my bedroom resplendent in waistcoat and watch chain, his moustaches groomed, his round blue eyes full of glory. He kissed me on the side of the head roughly, said, ‘Kitten,’ and went downstairs. I heard the front door slam, his footsteps on the gravel, the gorgeous cough and chug of the engine of his car. He changed gear once, twice, as he tore away down the drive. He was awfully skilful at driving.
In the hall I found his goggles, gloves and driving coat, slung across the hall table.
I asked Edward if he shouldn’t be back at school, and he gave a bark of a laugh. ‘What do you think has happened to our father, Ellen?’
We were loitering on the stairs where Mother couldn’t hear us. On a post at the top of the banister sat a small, wide-eyed, oaken owl looking at us, his feathers in neat carved rows.