‘We don’t know exactly,’ I said patiently. ‘Mother said he’s away, trying to salvage what he can.’ The word ‘salvage’ made me form a picture of Daddy, a great figure in oilskins, seawater sluicing off his sou’wester, pulling treasure from a wreck in the pounding surf.
‘He won’t be coming back. He’s absconded. Do you know what that means?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘And it’s utter nonsense. He’s on his own, he hasn’t absconded anyone.’
Edward let loose a groan of fury. ‘That’s abduct, Ellen!’ He clattered away down the stairs. ‘To abscond is to escape on pain of arrest!’ And he left the house, slamming the front door after him.
I started to brush the dust from between the owl’s ranks of feathers.
Connie, our maid, stayed for a while longer, and then I did Mother’s hair on my own, and it was just me, Edward, Cook and Jennie, to look after everything. Edward made the fires and I folded the sheets with Jennie. She wouldn’t look at me as she took the sheet from my fingers, nipping the edges together neatly; she turned her head away. She’d been eating onions, she said, she didn’t trust her breath.
Mother couldn’t stay downstairs for long. ‘I’m finding our circumstances extremely trying,’ she would say. ‘I need my rest.’
She couldn’t salvage her friends. Lady Brock was far too busy with the shoot, Mrs Daventry preparing to travel to India. ‘You have no idea what has to be done, children, when one shuts up a house like The Place,’ Mother told us, glassy-eyed. ‘It was silly of me to expect her to linger chatting in the street.’
My friends, too, were beyond rescue. I no longer went to dance Scottish reels with Esme and Lucinda Drake in their drawing room with its delightful carpet the colour and texture of moss. I didn’t sit cross-legged any more in Clara Mayhew’s bedroom where Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur were kept in cupboards of black oak. Anyway, how would I get to their houses? The car, with its leather seats redolent of luxury and nausea as he swung me around the lanes, was gone, of course, along with Daddy.
Edward sold the pig. Cook’s brother took it away to be butchered and came back with a warm newspaper parcel. ‘You give that to Irene, my love, it’s some nice hocks and trotters.’ That was how I learned Cook’s Christian name. But soon afterwards Cook and Jennie went, and we were alone. And then Mr Dawes from the parish was at the gate, grimacing under his moustaches, because what expression is suitable when you’re turning the Captain’s family out of their home; and there was a cart outside, and I wore my plaid coat and carried a small case containing my first workbook; Daddy’s hand had cupped mine as I wrote Ellen Beatrice Calvert on the first page. That great thumb I remembered, and the ring with the claws holding a garnet. It was astounding how quickly we’d fallen. The apple trees had been in blossom when my rocking horse disappeared, and now the early desserts were cropping in the orchard. The time of the rocking horse and Miss Fane seemed like the dimmest age of the ancients.
I remembered, as the dirt came, how white everything had been at the Stour House. A tongue of milk spooling into a jug, and the jug itself, white china with a white beaded cloth on top against the flies. And the apple blossom, of course, and my petticoats and drawers, and the tablecloths that Mother embroidered out on the porch in full sun, white silk thread on white linen, and why are we doing this? I would ask.
And Mother’s secret smile. ‘It’s a present for you.’
‘But I don’t want a tablecloth.’
Smiling more secretly. ‘You will.’
I kept my plainest drawers and the cotton underskirts. Miss Dawes, the sister of the parish man, sold the embroidered linens discreetly for us. They fetched a good price. We put our furniture – two beds, an armchair, two chests, three kitchen chairs and a table – on the cart. A firescreen decorated with Arcadian scenes, a fluting shepherd and a lolling goatherd, so that Mother could sit facing the fire and forget that the house was gone: the dining room, the sun room, the sleepy sunlit bedrooms with their wrinkled quilts of eider down. Mr Dawes and Mr Blunden, who mowed the graveyard, lashed everything together with stiff ropes. ‘Heave ho,’ said Mr Blunden, bearing down on the rope and guffawing as if our belongings were a pile of bric-a-brac for the Whitsun Fair.
We left the Stour House, which stood out on its own beyond Beacon Hill, aloof from the hamlet of Barrow End and the village of Upton. We left owing money in Barrow End, Upton and Waltham, and no doubt in Southampton and London too. And if anyone were to come and dun us, whether it be for the price of a buttonhook or a hundred railway shares, we had nothing to give them but the charity shown us by the parish, and if they took that they might as well take our bones for bone meal too, because we’d surely die.
The cottage was on the edge of Upton, the first of five dwellings clustered at the top of a dead-end lane that petered into a wasteland of ruined shacks, nettles and broken fencing. The other cottages were empty, too dilapidated to live in. Mary Absalom, who had given them over to the parish, had been dead a hundred years but people still called the place after her, a fact I learned on my first day at Upton School when a sallow-faced girl said, ‘You’re the one that’s come to the Absaloms, then.’
From this girl I also learned that the last occupant of our house had been one Vic Small who, when drunk, fired a crossbow into the front door, which accounted for the splits.
‘I prefer not to know about Mr Small,’ I told this girl, whose name was Lucy and who cackled, ‘Only being friendly, dear.’
Edward couldn’t come to this school because the pupils left at fourteen. I refused at first to go without him, but it was cold in the cottage and Mother said that I’d be warm there. ‘You don’t have to speak to anyone, darling. I’m sure Miss Yarnold will be kind.’ Her voice wavered: she was sure of no such thing. ‘And don’t bend your head too close to another child’s. Something may leap from their hair.’
I’m sure it won’t be for long, she said. Something will come up.
We stood by our desks and recited the Lord’s Prayer. We would do it every morning thereafter, so that, for me, the words remained saturated with the body odour of those children. Amen, we said, and stank, because when I got home I did too, and we didn’t know it but soon I would on my own account, and our smell was unnoticeable save to people who washed.
Miss Yarnold took the register. My mother had always greeted her when we met in the haberdasher’s in Waltham. ‘How nice you look, Miss Yarnold, so fresh,’ my mother usually said, or something like it, and I’d nod and smile as well, tilting my head the way my mother did. Now I felt the heat envelop me as she reached my name: ‘Ellen Calvert,’ she called, and my ‘Present’ came out as a choking cry that made one boy crow like a cock in imitation. I looked her straight in the eye then, because she’d said my name a shade too loud and sharp, almost trippingly.
‘Daniel Corey,’ she said next, with a guileless gaze and a tweak of a smile.
On that first day she announced the national competition. Each of us was to write two essays, one about a bird, the other about a tree. We would observe our birds and trees over the course of the autumn.
We set to work. I sat at a double desk with the girl Lucy. I chose the waxwing and the rowan, being that there was a rowan tree outside our house at the Absaloms. I hoped to save myself labour since the waxwing was a migrant and fed off the rowan. I might whip it all into one text and have done, since surely by winter I wouldn’t be in this school. Daddy would have come back and rescued us by then. He’d come bounding into the schoolroom, tall and moustached, and gather me out of my seat. Come, my kitten, not a minute more. My fingers squeezed my pen.
‘I’m so sorry, Ellen.’ Miss Yarnold smiled over our desk. ‘But the rules are specific. It must be a native bird. And do choose an unrelated tree, since otherwise there would be too much repetition. And now, Lucy. There’s nothing on your page. What is it to be?’
‘The linnet, Miss.’
‘And why?’
Lucy shrugged.
‘And your tree?’