‘You may not. You can read it while you’re here. A young child like you with a good memory, you can get it by heart if you try.’
Pamela suddenly gasped. ‘Oh! Guess what happened this morning! Ell got a letter from a cross, silly person, and then she fainted! She did! And after she’d finished fainting there was a piece of glass in her head!’ Pamela spread her arms, triumphant, at the splendour of her story.
‘I dropped a dish, the night before.’ I was laughing.
He broke into a broad smile. ‘That tale deserves a cuppa, and a toffee.’
The toffees were the colour of polished walnut; fat discs, all of different sizes, with smooth, rounded tops and flat, glassy bottoms. Lady Brock stored up her sugar and her land girls made them, dropping them from a spoon onto a marble slab.
Pamela took William’s pamphlet The Art of Prowling from a battered wooden box, flipping up the lid with an insolent familiarity.
‘Those are Mr Kennet’s things, Pamela.’
‘Don’t mind her, Mrs Parr. It’s just some bits of old rubbish, anyway.’
‘Liquorice isn’t rubbish.’ Pamela shook the tin. The fine lady was still there on the side, alighting from her carriage in a blizzard of dents and scratches. ‘Oh, Mr Kennet, you’ve restocked!’
‘You leave that be.’ William was stern. ‘You’ve got toffees today.’ He gazed past me, out through the open door where Lady Brock was walking on the path, followed by Nipper. ‘Out, damned spot! Out!’ she was saying.
‘They’re doing Macbeth at the Hall,’ William told me. ‘For the Canadians.’
‘I know.’ I thought of Macbeth’s ineluctable, prophesied defeat. ‘It’s hardly the most apposite story.’
‘No, my dear. The idea is, Macbeth is Adolf. Doomed.’ He smiled his square smile. ‘So you had a letter, then.’
Pamela was creeping on hands and knees, or more accurately elbows and knees, out of the door and onto the path, glancing every few moments at William’s pamphlet which she was holding in one hand. ‘I did indeed, William.’ In a soft voice, one that merged with the hiss of the kettle on the stove, I told William about Marjorie Lord. ‘It really seems Pamela’s got no one,’ I concluded. ‘Not a soul.’
The hills of the morning rose in my mind’s eye, speckled with chalk, and the bare line cut the brightening sky, and peace broke out, and Pamela, aged ten, twelve, eighteen, strode up ahead of me with her skirts flapping in the wind.
So you might get to keep her.
I laughed. ‘Who knows?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Didn’t you speak?’
‘No.’
I was sure I’d heard his voice.
Beyond him the doorway grew bright: the sun had come out. Lady Brock was still striding up and down the path, rubbing her hands together. Pamela, unnoticed by her and by Nipper, crept along the flagstones in the lee of the greenhouse. William offered me a mug of tea. The thin enamel handle dug into my fingers. I raised the mug to my mouth and the rim burned my bottom lip.
‘Hold hard,’ William said. ‘It’s way too hot.’ Surprised that I should even try to drink yet.
I blew on my tea. William blew on his, his eyes almost shut, eyebrows raised, mouth in an O. This gave him a somewhat angelic air. A rather careworn, older angel, just now a little fatigued, I learned, from a long night patrolling bridges and culverts along the railway line. ‘No chance of a brew-up, and brambles this high. All we saw was some Canadians coming back from banging their heads on the beams at the King’s Arms. We properly apprehended them. Why do they grow them so tall over there? It can’t be good for their brains. I’d get down to Southampton while you can, if there’s anything you need. They’re going to shut the whole coast off soon.’
I felt a strong inward sucking at my sternum. ‘Oh, lord, lord—’
‘Bear up, Ellen.’
‘I suppose we can pray.’
‘We can. For the Canadians, and ours, and all of them.’
I lifted my mug back up to my lips.
‘She still has got a father, though,’ William said after a moment.
‘What?’
‘Pamela. She’s got a father.’
I gulped the burning tea. ‘Whoever he is, he’s not interested in fathering. He scarpered long before the war, remember? I’m sure I told you.’ I pictured Constable Flack in our kitchen back in 1940, running his finger under his chinstrap. ‘Anyway, we’ve hardly been dilatory – goodness, we’ve gone through the Forces, the police, Wounded and Missing, and no one’s come up with the right Pickering. Quite honestly, I don’t know what else you expect us to do.’
‘I’m not expecting you to do anything—’
‘Good, because we can’t.’ A heat was spreading over my cheeks to my eyes, unconcealable. Silence fell. Outside Pamela shrieked, ‘Oh, Nipper, you naughty, naughty boy!’ and Lady Brock, more indistinctly, echoed the sentiment.
‘Ellen. I didn’t mean to offend.’
It wasn’t often these days that he called me Ellen. More and more, it seemed, I was becoming Mrs Parr. ‘No offence taken.’
He gave a single soft laugh. We drank up our tea. ‘Well, then, my dear,’ he said, as we rose to our feet. ‘Thank you for the eggs. A duck-egg omelette can’t be surpassed.’
Outside Pamela and Lady Brock were both speaking to Nipper, who was lying with flattened ears on the path. ‘Bad dog,’ they were saying. ‘Bad, bad dog.’
William lifted up the pots containing the saplings and I lodged them carefully in my wicker bicycle basket. ‘I’m sorry your rehearsal was interrupted by Pamela,’ I called to Lady Brock. ‘Pamela, it’s time to go.’
‘But we haven’t finished telling off Nipper. He was digging.’
‘Pamela was a welcome distraction.’ Lady Brock came up the path towards me. ‘I’m sick to death of Lady Macbeth.’
‘That rhymes. Sick to death, of Lady Macbeth. Sick to death—’
‘I had a dream,’ I found myself saying to Lady Brock. ‘That you and Pamela were eating Christmas cake.’ Remembering the dream as I spoke: their faces, pink with pleasure, the plate containing only dark rich fragments of dried fruit and aromatic crumb. ‘And you hadn’t –’ I felt the indignation now ‘– even asked me to join you!’
Lady Brock was smiling, her wrasse-like mouth still a lush red. Where on earth did she find such lipsticks now? Nobody knew, and nobody begrudged her. ‘My dear girl, I do apologize. Cake, now. I’ll have to look that one up. I’ve got a dream book, you see. The man who wrote it must have been raving, but one’s quite gripped all the same.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘Now pay attention, you young rascal of a girl. Enough prowling. Obey Mrs Parr all the long day, d’you hear?’
At the tone of command, both Pamela and Nipper ducked their heads.
Pamela sang on her way home, a long song of her own invention, psalm-like, each phrase ending with the same fall of notes. ‘And we we-hent to Upton Hall. But we did-not, no we didn’t, see-hee the knight in shining ah-ah-armour …’ There was a light curtain of rain behind us; I felt its damp breath first and then turned my head to see it sweep over the army camp. The tiny trees wouldn’t mind it. They fluttered in the basket in front of the handlebars. I hoped we weren’t ‘rattling’ them.
‘Pamela, don’t lean sideways. How many times.’
‘I’m peering past the apple twigs. It’s practice for prowling. Tomtits and jays give warnings, you know.’
‘Do they?’
‘They’re alarmed by the enemy, you see, coming towards you.’
The wind blew at our backs all the way home.
15
A WEEK PASSED. George Horne planted Lucy’s pair of trees, and Selwyn and I planted ours. Lucy developed a cold and a cough so incapacitating that Harry Parker ordered her off the tractor and into bed. By the time I visited she was on the mend, sitting up peevishly. Old Mrs Horne was taking away a half-finished bowl of soup. ‘I do hope you’ve brought her something to do, Mrs Parr.’
‘Yes.’ Lucy gave a sigh. ‘I’m bored to blimmin sobs.’
I unpacked a blanket from my bag, the middle gnawed away by mice. ‘I’m cutting a waistcoat for Pamela. Perhaps you could help me with the stitching.’
Her small hands rose and fell in fists. ‘I dunno.’