So had three years and three months passed: we began to mill barley flour along with the wheat, and then we had to mix potato flour with the barley, and Pamela was still with us.
The wind was strong at seven o’clock, rattling the handle of the kitchen door. Last night I’d dropped a dish of steamed cabbage on the stone floor and there were still glass fragments, treacherously small, unfound. Nobody went downstairs in stockinged feet. Elizabeth and I had plucked a great deal of cabbage out of the larger slivers and served it without mentioning the incident to Selwyn or Pamela.
‘This is exactly why we need that soft brush back from Lady Brock, Mrs Parr.’ Elizabeth now spoke reproachfully.
‘I’ll ask her again. I’m sure it’s just slipped her mind.’ I had a strong suspicion Lady Brock had lost the brush.
Elizabeth sliced bread and put it onto the range to toast. ‘And the hole in the bellows has got atrocious. I might just as well blow on the kindling with my own lungs.’
I inspected the bristles of the insufficiently soft brush for glistening particles, gave up. We’d find them all in the end. Perhaps in six months’ time, in the soles of our feet. Then I let the brush drop, and rubbed my face. ‘I’ll look out those chammy leathers we had for the car. Pamela, put your slippers on your feet.’
Because here she was, my heart, my joy, with her slippers on her hands like paws. ‘Are we going to see Lucy after school?’ She sat down to her unadorned porridge, poked it with her spoon. ‘I wish I lived in her house. She’s always got sugar.’
‘What’s this about going “up the battery”?’
I said it artlessly, but she wasn’t gulled into telling me. No longer five years old. ‘What battery?’
‘You said it in your sleep.’
She gave a delicious display of little and big teeth. ‘I expect it was just a dream then.’
‘Pamela, I think you know what I’m talking about.’
Her eyes sparkled with guilt.
‘Don’t rise to it, Mrs Parr,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You’re a cheeky girl, Pamela. I would put you over my knee.’
‘I’d escape by springing into a forward roll. Bobby and Ruby and I, we’ve been practising. We can do it straight off a chair, like this.’
There was no such thing as a single, unchanging child. They altered as fast as clouds across the Downs. A month ago she seemed a placid, moon-faced creature reciting her tables, the month previous elfin and fey. Now she was effervescent, particularly in the morning. The sunrise uncorked her and up she fizzed, this time to pitch towards the stone floor and lithely curl into a rolling ball.
‘Pamela! Careful!’
Elizabeth and I cried out together, mindful of the glass. Pamela got up unharmed, rosy-cheeked from being upside down, and sat on her chair again. I glanced out of the window. ‘We’re going to see Mr Kennet this afternoon, Pamela.’
‘Oh, good, I want to borrow something from him.’
‘What?’
‘Something.’
Out in the hall the letterbox flapped. ‘Will you fetch the post, darling?’
She hurried back, handed me a long white envelope. ‘What lovely stamps. Please may I have them?’
‘I expect so.’ I couldn’t see the stamps properly – they looked black in the gloom of the kitchen. I took the letter over to the window where I made out a grim silhouette of brown tanks mounting a dusty, identically brown escarpment. ‘I’d hardly call these stamps lovely, Pamela …’
Suid-Afrika, they said. South Africa.
So long I’d imagined it, this letter. Deep in a mailbag on an aeroplane droning its way north, fragile as an insect, casting a tiny wavering shadow over the veldt. And now it had come. I opened my mouth, thinking to call Selwyn, but my fingers were already fumbling at the envelope.
Dear Mrs Parr,
Thank you for your letter regarding the child you refer to as my niece.
Please know that I have had no contact with my sister since her divorce. I know nothing of the father of this child, never having met him. My sister led a dissolute life and I have therefore consulted a solicitor, whose note I attach and who confirms that I am not liable in law for the child’s upkeep. My husband will arrange for the sum of ￡10 to be made available to you at Barclays bank. This is purely in recognition of your kindness and in no way constitutes an acknowledgement of future obligation. I now regard the matter as closed and any further communication from parties acting on behalf of the child will be treated by my solicitor as harassment.
Yours very sincerely,
Marjorie Lord (Mrs)
That final viper’s bite, the forked teeth sinking into the ball of my thumb, made me drop the letter. There was another sheet beneath, the solicitor’s attached note, on blue paper. They both dimmed and descended as if into water, and the air around me darkened, teemed with sparkles, became unbreathable.
Pamela and Elizabeth were looking down at me. She’s grown old, I thought of Elizabeth, as I noticed the folds around her mouth, the wiry grey hair springing from under her scarf. When on earth did that happen?
‘Jeepers, creepers, now you’ve opened your peepers,’ Pamela burst out in a tuneless chant. But her mouth was puckered in anxiety.
‘Darling, I simply fainted.’ I felt a stab in my scalp. ‘I’ve found a piece of glass. Quite a big one, I think.’ I gave a watery giggle.
Selwyn appeared in the corner of my vision. ‘Good grief. Darling.’
‘Oh my lord, the toast.’ Elizabeth sprang away.
‘She fainted,’ Pamela told Selwyn. ‘She read a letter and fainted.’
Selwyn bent down and took my hands. I allowed myself to be helped up into a chair. ‘I’m really quite all right.’
He picked up the two pieces of paper, one white and one blue, from the floor. He read with his back to me. Pamela stood beside me, leaning against my side. A long, long while passed, and my head pounded. I felt the back of my scalp, retrieved a shard of glass the size and shape of a fingernail. There didn’t seem to be any blood.
‘Who on earth is it from?’ said Pamela to Selwyn.
His eyes flickered from the letter to Pamela and back again. ‘A thoroughly cross and silly person. Nothing for you to worry about.’ He bent down to Pamela. ‘Don’t lean so hard against Ellen, sweetheart. She’s feeling faint.’
‘Selwyn …’ I said.
‘Sit still, Ellen. Let me – let me take this to my study.’
He made to straighten up again but Pamela grabbed his tie and pulled him down. ‘Please will you give me a kiss on my parting?’ Elizabeth turned from rescuing the toast to see Pamela battened to my side, Selwyn tethered, kissing the top of her head.
‘Mr and Mrs Parr. For goodness’ sake, will you eat your breakfasts.’
Elizabeth left the house soon after, for Judd’s in Waltham where she made shell nose-cones alongside a bombed-out company workforce from Portsmouth who ragged her for her country burr. She preferred Judd’s, she said, for all the teasing and backtalk, to looking after those ‘rapscallions of boys’, Jack and Donald and their cousin Hawley. They had gone home after the worst of the air raids, their mothers no longer able to do without them.
That morning I took the lorry out to collect the orders from the farms, leaving Selwyn kneeling in a boiler suit and goggles, chipping at one of the Derbyshire peak millstones with hammer and chisel. The odd spark flew out unheeded, which always worried me, but, so far, I had never returned to black smoke billowing from the mill roof. I travelled at speed across the high land where the chalk came close to the surface of the soil and the sheep nibbled short tough turf. The mill was lowlying, tree-shrouded: I loved being able to see in every direction, the clouds in fleets all the way to the sea.
I reflected on what to say to Pamela about Marjorie Lord. Pamela had never met her, nor even mentioned her since those first days with us. Good God, but the woman was monstrous. Could she have children of her own? Perhaps they hatched from eggs in her swampy lair, fully formed, with teeth. Pamela, dear, your aunt …