‘I was walking behind you,’ she said, as if nothing else were required. ‘I’m so glad to find you in, this time.’
Her face was jowly, patient, her teeth few when she smiled. She folded her large, ringed hands, and then I remembered. Those fingers, feeling along the waistband of Pamela’s knickers. When we were all in the sitting room, the morning after the bombing. Her face, of course, was less puffy, the bruise vanished from her eye.
‘Mrs Berrow.’
She smiled wider. ‘Phyllis. Phyl to my friends.’
She’d done her hair smartly too, in a sort of domed style with an obedient row of curls across her brow. Set with sugar water, no doubt. Conscious of my own slatternly locks I rammed the pins in across my crown. She watched me do it, and when I had finished she continued to stand on the step, waiting. Her feet cumbersome in her slippery-soled shoes, the bunions noticed by Lucy. But not by me, the first time, back in 1940. I hadn’t seen them then. I hadn’t looked at her feet.
At last I said, ‘Do come in.’
‘I will indeed. Thank you.’
I gave her the armchair she’d sat in that morning when Pamela had told us about the candles for her cake. Her carapace of hair caught the light from the window and briefly sparkled.
‘Where’s that little girl of yours, then?’
I was transported to the horror and the cold of that night, the glare beyond the battened blackout curtain. ‘Oh, Mrs Berrow, how brave you all were.’
She permitted herself a delicate snort. ‘We was petrified.’
As if to answer her, there was a thump on the ceiling. I said, ‘We couldn’t let her go. Not at Christmas time,’ and she smiled, a slow, kind smile with lips closed, acknowledging the three years and more that had passed since that Christmas.
‘I’ll make you some tea.’ I started towards the door, but then turned. ‘Her mother’s dead. She died on the second night of that raid, in the cellar of the Crown.’
‘I know,’ said Mrs Berrow.
Elizabeth came back from Waltham, nipping in by the back door.
‘Elizabeth. I’m making tea.’
‘You’ll be lucky, Mrs Parr.’ She shrugged off her skimpy coat. ‘I let the fire go right down.’
The range was cool. In my haste I hadn’t noticed. ‘I’ve got Mrs Berrow in the sitting room. One of the ladies from Southampton, on the night of the bombing, do you remember? She had a black eye.’
She frowned. ‘Was she the one that found Pamela’s address? What’s she doing here?’
I listened to Mrs Berrow’s voice in the sitting room. Pamela had come down. ‘Hello dearie,’ Mrs Berrow was saying. ‘Remember me?’
Elizabeth reached for the coal scuttle. ‘I’ll mend that fire. We’ll need it hot, for the bread. Though with these bellows …’
‘I’ll see if I can find those chammy leathers,’ I promised her. ‘I expect we’ll need an awl, to make holes in the bellows for sewing. Perhaps we should ask George Horne. He’s an expert home leatherworker …’ I was babbling, the blood starting in my veins.
‘Go next door, Mrs Parr,’ Elizabeth said softly. ‘See that Pamela doesn’t annoy the lady.’ The chief effect of Pamela on her elders, in Elizabeth’s eyes, being annoyance.
Mrs Berrow was sitting leaning forward, hands spread out. Pamela was pressing down on each of the gnarled old fingers. ‘This one has a ruby ring, this one has a gold ring. They’re the queen and the king, I think. This one’s crying, he’s a prince but he doesn’t have any rings at all. Boo hoo, I’m a sad prince. Why don’t you give him a ring, Mrs Berrow?’
So she’d introduced herself.
‘He’s too little for a ring, dearie. Look at him, he ain’t hardly grown up at all.’
‘Tea will be some time, I’m afraid, Mrs Berrow.’
‘Please don’t go to any trouble. Your good woman doesn’t want to put her range up and I don’t blame her.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘I suspect you’ve got some dollies somewhere upstairs. You go and dress them all up properly for me, and when they’re ready I’ll have a look at them.’
‘I’ve got my old peg dolls, that I had when I was that small.’ Pamela flattened her hand in the air, somewhere near her knee. ‘I never finished inking their faces and now there’s no ink. I can fetch—’
‘Go and play, my love. Go on upstairs and play.’
How did they do it? Mrs Berrow, Lady Brock. Two voices less similar one couldn’t imagine, and yet both had this kindly, blunted edge of iron that brooked no opposition. Pamela left without anguish, at speed.
‘Now what I came to tell you, Mrs Parr,’ Mrs Berrow went on, ‘was that I’ve been in Southampton all this while, and I’ve been cleaning the nurses’ hostel since last year. I’m a char, dear, I always have been. I don’t mind anyone knowing. This hostel is just down the road from the Crown, as it happens, and I live round the corner, and it’s the best job I ever had. Those nurses keep everything clean as a new pin, it’s in their nature. Sit down, dear.’
I obeyed, taking one corner of the sofa. And I was so glad to sit, because I suddenly felt very weary.
‘This was about ten days ago. I’m out shopping, just opening my bag wondering if my old feet can stand to queue for a loaf, when I see my purse has gone. There was ten and six in there along with a photo of my late husband, and I was bloody furious. So, sore feet or not, I head off to the police station. But—’
She stopped. Elizabeth was coming in with a tray. ‘Ah, my dear.’ Phyllis Berrow viewed the tea things and the plate of thin toast with a scrape of butter, and sniffed in the smell of strong tea. ‘That is splendid.’ She waited through Elizabeth’s silent retreat before continuing. ‘So I go up the cop shop and report it. And afterwards I’m standing in the lobby with tears in my eyes, I don’t mind saying, because I know full well I won’t see my money or my photograph again, and it was just the principle of it – I’m standing there, and this nice young man asks me what’s up. So I tell him, and blow me, he gets out his wallet and hands me ten and six. “I can’t let you be robbed,” he says. “There’s enough wrong with the world already.” And then he asks me if I know where the Crown Hotel is. “I should say I do, dear,” I tell him. “I live and work in spitting distance, but I hope you don’t want to stay there, because it’s bombed to ruins.” “I know,” he says to me. “My wife died in that raid. But my little daughter survived, as far as I know, and I’ve come to look for her.”’
Mrs Berrow set a teacup down in front of me. ‘Are you grasping it, dear? What I’m saying?’
I shook my head, and she lifted the teapot and poured for both of us. Then silence came. I sat very still, knowing I would have to speak.
‘How can you even think it?’ My lips felt swollen. They rubbed together strangely as I moved them. ‘He could be any man, any man. There could be any number of children in that hotel. How can you come here and say it’s, it’s Pamela’s …’
She poured milk into her cup and then lifted her face to me. Battered, wrinkled, sharp-eyed. ‘He’s still young,’ she said. ‘So you can see it full clear. She’s the spitting image of him.’
My fingers found the piping on the arm of the sofa and pinched it. In my mind’s eye I saw Pamela’s hot cheek marked by the raised seam of the bus seat. Where she’d slept on her journey out of Southampton, alone in her dirty blanket.
Mrs Berrow handed me a cup of tea. It rocked on the saucer as I took it, but didn’t spill. I set it down. Her eyes were trained on me. Small, bright blue, almost triangular under the sag of her old eyelids.
‘It can’t be.’
She gave a slow shrug, as if to say: I am but the messenger.
‘Do you know that this so-called father disappeared from her life before the war? Pamela doesn’t even know him. Why has he left it till now, to come out of the blue?’
She took a gulp of tea, sighed. ‘His wife kicked him out after a year. Took the child away and didn’t want any more to do with him.’