‘I thought you needed occupying.’
‘I’m dying to get up but Nan won’t let me. You’d think I was seven years old.’ She sighed again. ‘Oh, give me the pattern.’ The ‘pattern’ consisted of rather ragged calico shapes I used for all Pamela’s top-half clothes. Lucy and I pinned them into an economical corner of the blanket. Lucy drove in the pins quicker than me and spread out the rest. ‘What are you going to do with this bit?’
‘I hadn’t thought.’
‘You hadn’t thought.’ She looked up, grinned. ‘Sometimes you sound like your ma.’
Nobody else could say this to me. ‘Do you want one, Lucy? A waistcoat?’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’ We cut out another series of shapes, using Pamela’s pattern but clearing it by two or three inches each side. Lucy couldn’t be that small. I glanced from the pattern to the span of Lucy’s shoulders and the narrowness of her chest, and saw that she was, indeed, that small.
We began on the sewing, whipping the pieces together with a tough yarn. Then we would bind the free edges with a close blanket stitch. The waistcoats were a dusty mid-blue and the stitching would be dark red. ‘I’ve still got Edward’s wooden toggles. You and Pamela can have three sets each.’
‘Bill Kennet dropped by.’
‘That was nice of him, to come and see you.’
‘Hm. Came to inspect the plantin, more like. Dad can’t be trusted to put a couple of trees in, see.’ She coughed. ‘Oh, yes. I know what I was going to tell you. This chest has made me so forgetful. There was a lady looking for you at the WI last week.’
‘At the market?’
‘Yes. Last week.’
‘Oh, blast, it’s Thursday today, isn’t it.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I was going to get some oven gloves.’ The old ones had turned to such rags that I’d burned my hand through a worn-away patch in the palm. ‘What sort of lady?’
Lucy laughed. ‘The sort that isn’t a lady as such. String bag and slits cut out of her shoes for her poor old bunions. She bought a tea cosy off of me.’
I bit my thread and knotted it. ‘So what did she want, this non-lady?’
‘All she said was that she’d been to the mill but you weren’t at home, so she popped by the village hall. She said, “I’ve come from Southampton to have a word with Mrs Parr.”’
‘Southampton?’
Lucy nodded, took another wheezy breath. ‘I told her you and Mr Parr was in Waltham, and she said, “Oh well, I’ll get home then.” And she took the bus back to the city. I saw her gettin on when I came out with Deirdre Harper to flap the tablecloths.’
It was true. Selwyn and I had been in Waltham last Thursday. Selwyn needed a stopping in his tooth and I was hunting for herrings and paraffin. Lucy was slumping back on her pillows, tired out by her tale. I slid my needle into the blanket fabric, bewildered. I thought of saying, You could at least have asked her name. Following it with Why on earth didn’t you find out what she wanted? But Lucy ill being even more intransigent and touchy a creature than Lucy well, I let it pass. She was watching me now, her black eyes soft, curious. ‘Don’t you even have one single inklin, Ellen Parr?’
‘Lucy, I swear, if I did I’d tell you. I can’t think what any woman, any bunioned woman – you’re sure about the bunions?’
‘They was the size of pickled onions.’
‘Ha, ha. There’s a rhyme for Pamela … I should go. It’s nearly time to fetch her.’ I folded my blanket pieces into my bag and stood up. ‘Is there any news from John or Dan?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘Marcy’s not heard for a while now. Nor has Ted.’
Daniel Corey and John Blunden were either in North Africa or Italy. We didn’t know which. I knew Dan and John weren’t together, and I was glad of it. During the Great War a single shell-burst had killed all the boys who had gone together to France from Fair Mead, a hamlet the other side of Waltham. All that was left now of Fair Mead was a handful of dilapidated houses and a vast memorial. And yet somehow, a bare twenty-five years later, we were once again toiling towards the end of another war. It was inconceivable. Toiling, mending, digging, waiting, waiting. The fear and dismay of all these years, the craving for release, gathered and roiled in me like smoke above an oil fire, and I let loose a long sigh.
‘All right, dear?’ Lucy was gazing up at me, the blanket fabric bunched in one hand, a needle gleaming in the other. A Victorian orphan, put to work.
‘I do so want this to end. For everyone’s sake.’
Pamela came out of school with Bobby Rail and Ruby Sutton. ‘We’re going to club together and buy a lardy cake at the market next week,’ she told me.
‘Good heavens. How are you going to get there? It’s during school time.’
‘We’re going to play truant!’ All three children spoke together, elated by their foolproof plan. I laughed aloud.
‘I think you’ll be spotted. Come on, Pamela, it’s time to go home.’
Pamela, somewhat crushed, said goodbye to her friends. We were on foot today and it was lovely to walk holding her hand. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You club together, and I’ll buy it for you.’
She brightened. ‘I’ll get their ha’pennies tomorrow.’
‘Is that all they’re contributing?’
‘Bobby and Ruby are poor. They don’t get pocket money.’ She used her patient voice. There were a great many things she’d been obliged to explain to me, viz. how to make a loop out of a plantain stem and snap it tight so that the black head of the plantain shot off, preferably at someone; or trap a grass blade between your upright thumbs and blow on it to produce a shocking squawk; or shove hairy rosehip seeds down an unsuspecting neck, where they would provoke violent itching. I’d never discovered these tricks. At Pamela’s age I was still governessed and starched and ironed. I didn’t run the lanes until I was eleven and too old, or at least too sad, to learn them. ‘Bobby only had the money in the first place because he got it off some Yanks.’
We reached the head of our lane and crossed the road. As I glanced to the left I saw a woman walking behind us with a shopping bag. Trudging for the bus, no doubt. I tightened my clasp on Pamela’s soft warm palm. ‘I wish you wouldn’t say Yanks.’
‘Well, Bobby told the Ya— the Americans that the beer at the Stour Hotel was watered and they’d be better off going to the Buck’s Head in Waltham, and they gave him two ha’pennies. But I didn’t ask for the whole penny even though Bobby offered it. Just half.’
My old home had been an hotel since I left Upton for Waltham. In keeping with its tainted past it had become a funk hole at the beginning of the war – a refuge for rich individuals too frightened to stay in London. Now most of these fearful types had gone, and the bar was open very late to the visiting soldiery – though it was apparent that the servicemen hadn’t inspired honesty, let alone generosity, in the staff.
‘In point of fact, the soldiers around here are Canadian, Pamela. It’s an important distinction. It was nice of you not to take all the money …’
We got home. I put my sewing bag away, washed my hands and knocked back some risen bread dough I’d started after lunch. I baked only two loaves at a time now that we were four small eaters instead of the seven that we’d been at the beginning of the war. But the bread tins were nowhere to be found. Searching every shelf and drawer in the kitchen resulted only in irritation and dust. How on earth could I have lost the tins? I shaped the dough by hand into two long loaves and left them to rise on a baking sheet. Regular heavy thumps crossed the ceiling from the bedroom above: Pamela, somersaulting. The doorbell rang. I covered the loaves with a cloth and hurried to the door.
A woman was standing on the step.