He laughed, the torchlight playing over his jowls, his eyes hidden. ‘Or what? Your little ferret of a dad’ll come and see to me?’ He gave a buzzing snort. ‘He wouldn’t find the guts, not if he had till kingdom come.’ He pushed us ahead of him. ‘Now light our way or you’ll dash your brains out on them steps.’
We climbed the stairs to the upper door, Sam Pearce pushing in the small of my back and hooking Lucy’s coat in his fist so that her collar fairly choked her. My knees were shaking too much to go at any speed. He shoved us ahead of him through the door and shut it. A kettle dripped and wheezed on the hob, and on the table by the window, next to the telephone, gnawed sandwich crusts were scattered over his deck of greasy cards. Every square inch of air in that room stank of him.
He stood there dwarfing the doorway. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ he said, and sniggered.
I looked sideways at Lucy. She was licking her thin lips like a fox. I’d never seen her scared before, and the fear leaped higher in me too.
Just then the telephone rang. For an instant he took his eyes off us. Straight away Lucy sent her foot shooting out to land between his legs. He screamed, buckling and burying both hands in his groin. Lucy danced in front of him. ‘That’s what you get for being a filthy fucker!’ She grabbed the coal bag as Sam, roaring, lunged at her. She fell with one of his huge hands clamped over her leg. I picked up the boiling kettle and swung it down on his head. Bellowing, he let go of Lucy. She scrambled to her feet and we hurtled down the steps and into the dark.
We took a shortcut through the woods, lugging the full sack between us, stumbling over the hollows. Our breath sawed in our throats and we looked back and stumbled again, fearing a lamp beam swinging through the trees behind us, but all was dark. In the end Lucy came to a halt, her hands on her knees, coughing.
A weird, high keening came out of my throat.
She put her hand on my shoulder and rubbed rhythmically, sucking her teeth. ‘Sorry, old pal. We should have gone when you said. I just wanted to get you more than half a bloomin bag. God damn Sam Pearce. Good work with the kettle. If only he’d got his privates scalded. That would put paid to him.’
The white shape of an owl flitted along the treeline at the edge of my vision. It brought no comfort. ‘Oh, how … how revolting! We should report him!’
‘Report him?’ She creaked like a door. ‘Oh, lor, oh lor. And who would believe us, you chicken? We were the ones thievin on the track. Sam Pearce would most likely say we were flatterin ourselves. “As if I’d look twice,” he’d say.’
We reached the Absaloms and in the dim light from our window I saw my stockings were utterly torn.
‘They were done for anyway, those stockings. Sell a bit of this coal to Bill Kennet, get yourself a new pair.’ Her own legs were scratched and bare.
I shook my head. ‘I couldn’t sell the coal. I didn’t come by it honestly. And I’m certain that Mr Kennet isn’t short of coal.’
She was sardonic again, sucking her teeth, shoving her hands in her pockets. She bent to pick up her lamp and took a couple of backward strides down the path. ‘Try and wash your face before mornin. And don’t you worry about men, dear. They ain’t worth it.’
10
ONE DAY IN FEBRUARY I woke to a liquid cheeping and chirruping and wondered why a warbler would come from the riverbank to our garden. But it wasn’t a bird; it was water issuing from the pipe that served our outside tap, the pipe the ice had split during the freeze. And now came the thaw, its silence rent by the illusion of birdsong.
We moved carefully through the weakening cold, Mother and I. Meticulous with our coal, scrupulous with our firewood and kindling. Because at times we were sorely tempted to burn it all up at once, in one great fire festival, on a pitch-black night. Then, on a quiet March morning, the sunrise shifted at last from behind the rowan tree out on the lane and my room was filled with new yellow light.
Mother and I lay, our hair frowsted on the pillow, our limbs trapped beneath the mouse-saturated carpet. Mother was blinking in the sunlight. The face she had now was a sunken version of her former face, with skin the colour of unbleached flour falling into deep grooves either side of her mouth, and oddly huge nostrils. I watched her eyes wander over the ceiling and around the room as if she’d never seen it before.
‘I think she’s become a little unhinged,’ I confided to Lucy and Daniel. ‘The way she stares about.’
Lucy looked sombre. ‘She wouldn’t be the first to go that way. That lived in the Absaloms, I mean.’
Unexpectedly I found myself laughing. ‘Thank you, Lucy. How heartening.’
‘I’m just sayin,’ she said, already shame-faced, quailing under Dan’s beetling glare. When he’d finished silently admonishing her he turned to me.
‘She’ll perk up come the spring, Ellen,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it. Now, Saturday afternoon you’re to come along with us. You need a change of scene.’
On Saturday I followed them down a lane that ran along by the river in the lee of a high wall. We came to a halt beneath a line of elms, their branches still leafless against the clear sky, their tops untidy with the bundled nests of rooks. Lucy drew a key from her pocket.
‘Where are we?’ I said, but she took no notice, struggling as she was with the lock of a wooden door set into the wall. After a shove from Daniel the door creaked open and we filed into a kitchen garden where the newly turned beds lay black in the sunshine. On the other side of a hedge at the top of the kitchen garden rose the upper storey and peaked roof of a great brown house.
I clutched Lucy’s arm. ‘This is the back of Upton Hall. How on earth do you come to have a key?’
‘Lady Brock gave it me. She got sick of us climbin over.’ Lucy pointed. ‘There she is now.’
And indeed there she was, a tall woman in a mackintosh pushing a man in a wheelchair along a stone path between the beds. She glanced in our direction, raised a long arm in a salute. The man in the wheelchair, a wraith tucked into coverlets and rugs, also lifted his hand.
‘That’s Sir Michael,’ Daniel said. ‘Gas got him in the war.’
‘Oh! Sir Michael!’
I gasped the name. I knew about the gas – everybody did. But he’d been upright the last time I’d seen him, greeting his guests in the ballroom of Upton Hall on Boxing Day. Beside him had stood a suit of armour polished to a brilliant silver, one gauntlet thrust out for the guests to shake. And I had done so, pink-cheeked and nicely plump in my tartan Christmas dress, well-nourished on my father’s rapaciousness – on Sir Michael’s money, truth to be told, since my father had died owing him upward of three hundred guineas.
I sidled behind Daniel. I could have been carrying my father on my shoulders, his dead body in a pedlar’s pack, so enormous was my shame. I wished it would press me into the earth. ‘They mustn’t see me,’ I whispered.
Lucy tutted. ‘They won’t take any account of us. Look, they’re goin now and all.’
I watched Lady Brock turn the chair. The two figures receded and then disappeared through the gate at the top of the kitchen garden. ‘I don’t care. I still want to go home.’
‘No, Ellen.’ Daniel was firm. ‘Not till you’ve had a look at our bolthole.’
The shed stood among the greenhouses at the top of the kitchen garden. The light came from one small window. A polished charcoal stove, bearing an equally gleaming kettle, squatted in the middle of the room. There was a scuffed leather armchair and sundry folding camp stools and milking stools as well as a wide, flat tree stump. A low shelf bore a panoply of objects – lanterns and gas lamps, boxes and chests of wood and tin, enamel mugs. And there was a clean, wholesome odour of compost.
Daniel picked up a tall, cylindrical container bearing a scratched colour picture of a girl in a white dress alighting from a horse-drawn carriage. He shook it by his ear, seemingly satisfied by the rattle.
‘What’s in there?’
‘Lickrish.’ He went and crouched by the stove to light it. Lucy took the kettle and ducked outside, and I heard her filling it at a garden tap. ‘Whose shed is this?’ I asked her, when she came back.
‘Mr Kennet’s, of course.’