He winked. ‘Bassett’s,’ he whispered. ‘Bought it in Waltham.’
From that day on, I completed homework for Lucy and Dan. We would meet in Mr Kennet’s shed, and sometimes he would join us for a cup of tea. At other times we’d see only his back bent, digging, or the shadow of his hatted head in one of the greenhouses. We could come and go as we pleased, eating everything as we travelled the lanes. Our diet changed with the seasons: we nibbled the stalks of fresh long grass, pulled honeysuckle flowers, then blackberries. We fell upon the hazel trees, eating the nuts unripe, the green shells bending between our molars, our tongues and teeth seeking out the sour white flesh. Even the squirrels had more continence. One day I went with Daniel and Lucy back to the Stour House. My old house, that I hadn’t seen since we left: I agreed on impulse. Dan’s friend John Blunden, who used to mow the orchard with his father, came too. John told us that a family who made marmalade lived there now: nobody liked them, and I was glad of that. So I joined them, and we took apples from the orchard that used to be mine, climbing the wall and bagging the windfall cookers. We did our thieving down at the far end where the brambles grew and I tried not to raise my eyes towards the house. But all the same I caught a flash of red brick through the trees: the back of the laundry, it was, and it hit me in the heart. And afterwards I couldn’t smile, not even when we baked the apples in Mr Kennet’s stove and Dan tried to make John eat a piece of cooked worm. As they scuffled on the brick floor, bringing Mr Kennet from his planting in high dudgeon, I wondered what I had been thinking of, to visit that house again. As if it could ever be all right.
When we went back to school I continued to sit with Amy and Airey at dinner-time, but now Miss Yarnold took to supplying us with dry rolls, one for each of us. But not every day, and not on regular days either, though we tried to work out a pattern. Then I overheard her with Miss Dawes in our playground at break-time. ‘I don’t have a great deal of surplus, in my personal economy,’ Miss Yarnold was saying, ‘but sometimes I confess I overbuy on dinner rolls, and they do end up here in school for the fatherless girls.’
And Miss Dawes replied, ‘That’s very warm-hearted and commendable. Just make sure –’ and she leaned closer to Miss Yarnold ‘– that they don’t come to rely on them.’
‘My dear, what do you mean?’
‘Simply that the families in question, assuming the girls are fed at dinner-time, give them even shorter commons at night.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Yarnold.
I was in the corner by the fence but my loitering stance caught her eye, and I blushed for shame at eavesdropping. She cleared her throat and bustled inside, and the next day summoned me. ‘Here is threepence from my purse,’ she said, holding out the coins. ‘In return you shall assist me in the classroom. Start by taking a little lesson with …’ Her eyes travelled over the classroom as she listed the names. That afternoon I took charge of the twins Amy and Airey, and the Rail boys. Ernest and Stanley Rail were the children who’d lost everything in the fire that had consumed the back of their house when the rick caught alight – the boys for whom my mother and I, to my shame, hadn’t provided a stitch of clothing. They’d been thrown from the top window into waiting arms like a pair of puppies. Ernest Rail was the older and smaller of the two, with knobbed shoulders and a tiny triangular mouth.
We huddled in a circle near the fire and I returned to the problem of 2a. ‘Consider twin lambs in their caul,’ I suggested. ‘Together they weigh ten pounds. So how heavy is one of the lambs?’ Silence. They fastened their eyes on their boots. I put out my hands to Airey. ‘Ten fingers, look. Ten pounds. Two hands. Two lambs.’ But Airey clenched her own hands in her lap.
‘Are they dead or alive?’ asked Stanley Rail.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does. If they was dead I wouldn’t bother weighing ’em.’
Amy sucked her teeth. ‘I bet they was dead. Mr Corey had a lamb that weighed ten pound on its own. So two lambs that didn’t weigh more’n ten pound wouldn’t be worth bothering about. Stan’s right.’
Airey put up her hand.
‘Yes, Airey?’
‘Ellen, what will you buy with your threepence? Will you get a lardy cake from Mundays? I could go a slice of that.’
There was another silence. I was about to let my spread hands fall when Ernest Rail reached over and tapped my right palm. ‘Five, Miss. One lamb weighs five pound.’
Thanks to Miss Yarnold I managed to set our grocer’s bill on a downward slope. Mrs Legg, the grocer’s wife, was pleased. ‘Because of your worry, Miss Calvert, as much as the money. Because of it being on your shoulders. I’m not allowed to write it off, you do know that, dear?’ Although my coal was husbanded in a couple of barrels out by the fence where Mother couldn’t find it, there still wasn’t enough, and as it grew colder once more, Mother started to go to bed during the day. Mr Kennet roasted chestnuts for us and I came home in the dark with sooty fingers, already hungry again by the time I reached the Absaloms. My birthday came, my fourteenth, and this year Mother gave me her Bible. It was a true lady’s Bible, the white leather cover embossed with silver. Her confirmation cards were tucked inside.
‘Mother, really, you shouldn’t. At least keep these. They’re from your old friends.’ The cards mostly bore pictures of lilies, and the girls, who were called Ianthe, Vera, Gretel, wished her almost identical sorts of good luck for her confirmation, which they were sure would go swimmingly.
Mother took the cards from me. ‘Those girls …’ Her eyes wandered around the room. ‘I can’t remember who they are now.’
After Christmas I took to walking to keep warm, and while I roamed the lanes I pondered my future. Lucy was going to the kennels when she turned fourteen – she was three months younger than me – but I was staying at school, filling inkwells and tutoring the likes of Amy and Airey and the Rail boys, until something else happened to me. Perhaps nothing would, and I would remain there at Miss Yarnold’s side for ever. I couldn’t allow that to happen.
One day in February I climbed up into the attic, thinking that there might be some unfound books or papers there to distract me from my empty belly. In the gloom I first laid hands on a sheaf of magazine pages featuring women displaying underwear and had a sharp memory of Edward, young, mocking, red-lipped. How long, now, had he been gone? Over two years, and the money orders he sent were scant and rare as April snowfalls and as quickly melting. I wondered sometimes, had I been the high-seas adventurer, if Mother and Edward would have loved me as she and I loved him.
Underneath the magazines there was a dark board book disfigured by the droppings of insects and mice. I brought it downstairs, in a shower of muck, cobwebs and dust.
Typewriting: A Practical Manual Based Upon the Principles of Rhythm and Touch. By W. R. Sedley. I turned it over. The back had been eaten off but there was an odd-smelling oiled-paper sleeve which the mice had not liked. I drew out a folded keyboard made of thick card, and laid it flat on the table. The first eight pages of the book had been fused together by damp, so I began at Lesson Three. The top row of letter keys. 1. The letters E, R, U and I. Place your forefingers on the starter keys and engage them in reaching up from F to R and J to U.
‘Look, Ellen.’ Mother was coming into the room, her hands held out flat and wide apart in front of her. Across her spread palms a yard of Nottingham lace.