Or I shall blast you with my faerie power. ‘No, Miss Moss.’
‘There are rules on the door, please acquaint yourself with them. Supper’s at six. Your time’s your own until eight o’clock tomorrow morning when I shall expect you outside my office.’ I listened to her patter up the stairs and let herself out of the street door. It slammed behind her surprisingly loudly. Perhaps caught by the wind.
I shrugged myself out of my coat. Where was the heat coming from? There was no radiator. I unlaced my boots, kicked them off, and turned round in the small floor space. Everywhere was warm. The window pole was leaning upright in the corner of the room, so I took it and opened the window. Looking up, I saw the pipe. It was fat, painted white, and ran along the inner edge of the ceiling. I got up onto the bed and put my hand against it. It was hot, dry, smelling slightly of paint.
I opened my door and peered out into the corridor, which was dark, swept clean, and seemingly deserted. Somewhere a bell rang. Shortly afterwards I heard footsteps, and a door at the end banged open to reveal a large woman in a crumpled apron who came hurrying towards me. ‘Are you on tea duty, dear?’
‘I don’t know. I’m new.’
She sniffed hard. ‘What’s the betting it’s Polly and Esme. If they were mine I’d put each one over my knee and spank them. Can you make pastry?’
I shook my head.
‘You girls. When I first came here I was flabbergasted, the amount of girls who didn’t know how to make a good pie-crust.’ She began to hurry off again and I followed her to the kitchen Miss Moss had shown me earlier. ‘It can’t be your brains, can it, since you’re all bright enough. You’d better start on the potatoes. You can peel a potato, I expect?’
‘Yes.’
‘Off you go, then. In the cupboard there. My name’s Miss Careless, if you haven’t already been told.’
‘I’m Ellen Calvert.’ I pulled a large earthy sack of potatoes from the cupboard.
‘Ellen. Good. I shan’t bother with the surname, dear, if you don’t mind. The rate you girls come and go. I’m not meant to be cooking at all, you realize. But you lot wouldn’t even get a pie in the oven unless I pitched in. Nowadays I even bring my own blessed apron, see? About a dozen, dear.’ She was cutting lard into a bowl of flour, and pointed with her greasy knife at the potatoes I was putting in the sink. ‘Never mind. I suppose it must be your home backgrounds. If you had good homes to live in, with mothers who brought you up to make a proper pie-crust, you wouldn’t be here, would you. Which room have you got?’
‘The one with the pipe.’ I ran the tap onto the potatoes. I was swaying, whether from sleepiness or plain dislocation, I couldn’t be sure.
‘Oh, the boiler pipe. The new ones always get that.’ Miss Careless plunged her big pink hands into the bowl and began to smear the lard into the flour. ‘You’ll die in there.’
‘Maybe.’ I turned the tap off. ‘But I’ll die warm.’
Miss Careless began to expel a series of billowing breaths. ‘You’ll die warm. Oh, that’s funny.’ She exhaled some more. ‘Die warm. Bless you. You’ll be all right, I think. Peel away, now, dear.’
When the pie was made Miss Careless put it in the oven. I went back to my room to wait until suppertime. I let my knees go and slumped down onto the bed. My eyes felt swollen and sleepy. My bag and box lay quietly on the floor, patiently. They looked so dirty. We were thrown up at last on the beach, among tangled rigging and spars, with boulders for pillows. But this pillow was soft. It was all that counted.
Ellen
Early March, 1944
14
I WOKE, Selwyn beside me, a long form like a ridge of the Downs. I stroked the back of his head. He didn’t stir. I got up and went through to the dressing room. Pamela was soused in sleep, sucking her thumb.
Eight years old now, and her emerging big teeth pushed out a little by this endless sucking; no good, no good at all. That perfect curve in her nose straightening but her eyes seemingly big as ever. The lashes trembled on her cheek. Freckles like those on a bird’s egg covered her nose and the tops of her cheeks. There was no crease in her wrists any more but her arms, especially when she raised them above her head to shrug off a singlet or blouse, were still babyish-smooth, the forearms rounded, the hands soft and stubby-fingered. I still brushed her hair as it straightened and thickened. The colour of it dry was the same as mine wet – gleaming dark honey.
I pulled her blankets aside and dragged her sleeping legs to the edge of the bed. She obeyed me and walked, eyes tight shut, down the steps from the old dressing room into our bedroom. She followed me into our bed, still sleeping, and lay half on top of me, utterly senseless. I lay squashed, uncaring that I was squashed. Her cheek was hot and damp. Her thick hair at the back of her neck smelled heavenly. Hot, clean, slightly salty, like baking bread with a breath of clean linen. That was it: clean, dry tea towels covering loaves fresh from the oven. Or was it that? Was there more sweetness in it, something like honeysuckle nectar? Whatever it was, I could live off this aroma.
Selwyn rolled over. I couldn’t see if he’d opened his eyes. ‘Unconscionable,’ I heard him say, with a smile in his voice. ‘What was that dream about? Going up the old battery with Bobby and Ruby?’
I laughed. ‘She can’t help talking in her sleep.’
‘Well. She’s given herself away this time.’
‘There aren’t any guns up there any longer. Well, none that work.’
‘It’s still dangerous. Rusty barbed wire is not a plaything.’ Selwyn pushed himself into a sitting position, put on his spectacles. ‘I must go and look at the level. This soft rain is deceptive.’ He reached over me and ruffled Pamela’s hair. ‘Morning, parrot.’
Pamela slurped, her cheek pressed against my neck. Selwyn got out of bed. I rolled her into the warm trough in the mattress left by him.
It was early March, 1944. We were nearing the end of a mild dry winter, roaring blue skies that brought no rain. The previous winter had sent a brief flood, widening onto the water meadows by the church. But the mill still turned, and our house was a weatherly little boat that floated on the highest tide.
This year, fine drizzle, and then clouds whipped away by the wind.
Selwyn had relented at the end of 1940, a month after Pamela came. I’d expected him, after Christmas, to resume his search for a home for her. But he didn’t. ‘I don’t know why,’ he said, fingering his chin. ‘I think I’ve placed her in your charge. Mentally, I mean. I think you’ll know what to do.’ For I had told him all of it, every jot of my young life, a long, dogged account of all those days of cold and dirt and privation during which, at times, he closed his eyes. He did not say if there was a particular thing that had moved him. Edward’s departure, the death of my mother? Something small, like the frozen tap? Perhaps none of these things – I didn’t ask. At least now he knew I was the bucket in the well, the bucket Mr Kennet had mended for me after I’d broken it on the ice. I was made of old staves and tarred felt. Water poured from my seams when I was filled but I held enough, for long enough, to be serviceable. This knowledge made him gentler, which was touching, but unnecessary since my mends were sound. Cautiously he let his mind creak open, like an old sluicegate, to the idea that he need not remain obdurate for my sake, that he too could dare to love Pamela a little. Bad days still came to her, even now, when she lay motionless and speechless, embracing a pillow on our bed. Sometimes she tied my dressing-gown cord around the middle of the pillow to make a waist, and laid her head on the upper part, which had become a bosom. Selwyn, if he found her like this, would take her small cold feet in his hands and rub them, saying, ‘There now. There now.’