‘There’s bound to be a good reason for that. Some men aren’t made to be fathers, or husbands—’
‘I would say, listening to him, it’s his heart’s desire to find that little girl.’ She rolled her eyes, gave me a sweet, colluding, woman-to-woman smile. ‘And I’ve listened to a lot of people, Mrs Parr, in my time. It’s surprising what ladies and gentlemen tell the char.’
That had been my last shot, my last shell, and it had exploded in mid-air. I leaned my head back, suddenly drowsy with shock. Nauseated, too: even the milk in the tea was unwelcome, greasy in my mouth.
‘Would you care for a cigarette?’ I heard myself say. ‘My husband keeps some for visitors.’
Selwyn didn’t smoke but he didn’t mind if other people did. He’d just remark on the smell as a way of enquiring about our guest. ‘Oh,’ he might say. ‘Who dropped by, darling?’ But what would I tell him this time? I held the heavy lighter in both hands but the spark jumped in vain.
‘Here, love. Let me.’ She produced a floppy blue flame, buried the tip of the cigarette in it. The plume of smoke she directed courteously at the ceiling, holding the cigarette pinched in the V of her first two fingers. ‘Ah, Turkish.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Takes me back.’
Her hand was dangerously close to her head. I hoped she wouldn’t catch her hair. It would caramelize in an instant.
‘They’re probably rather stale.’
She opened her eyes. ‘I’ve seen him again, you know. He’s taken to walking by the Crown. Up the street, down again, and into the Lyons on the corner. Waiting for those coppers to pull their fingers out, is my guess, and in the meantime he don’t know what to do with himself. I ain’t spoken to him – ducked out the way, in fact.’
‘And you still hold to this, this resemblance?’
She didn’t reply. The sitting-room door was opening with its usual tiny creak. Pamela came in. ‘I’ve dressed them up. Guess what they are!’
In her hands, bunched against her belly, eight or nine wooden clothes-pegs, each swathed in one of Selwyn’s white silk handkerchiefs. As she kneeled, some of them tumbled onto the floor. She laid them out in a line, pushing and patting the folds of silk into position.
‘Roman ladies?’ I forced a smile onto my face. ‘Those dresses look a bit like togas. No – of course not. Roman ladies don’t wear togas.’ But neither Phyl nor Pamela were listening to me. Pamela was picking up the peg dolls one by one and placing them on the generous double hump of Phyl’s knees.
‘They’re ghosts,’ Pamela was telling her. ‘Oooh, oooh. See?’
‘I do see.’
Her eyes met mine over Pamela’s head, just as Pamela turned and said to me, ‘Is Mrs Berrow going to stay the night again? She was telling me all about it earlier.’
‘No, Pamela. We’re going to finish our tea, and then I’m taking Mrs Berrow to the bus stop.’
I walked with her down the lane. The evenings were lengthening now, and she’d be back well before dark. She went surprisingly fast for a heavy woman with avowedly sore feet, rolling from side to side in such a way that her elbow occasionally jogged mine, with no shortness of breath.
‘He was invalided home from Italy,’ she said as we walked. ‘He went to Plymouth to see his wife and it was the Plymouth coppers who told him the story. So up he came to Southampton. Our police will get round to him in the end, and then he’ll be arriving in Upton before you can say knife. I’m just trying to warn you, dear.’
We passed under a tall dank hedge. ‘Thank you, Mrs Berrow. I’ll consider myself warned.’
‘I don’t blame you for a bit of temper. Call me Phyl, by the way.’
‘Likewise, Ellen. I do beg your pardon. I should be reimbursing you for your bus instead of making rude remarks. Especially as you’ve made two journeys on my behalf.’ My words were dull in the still air.
‘I won’t hear of it, Ellen my dear.’
We sat in the bus shelter, safe from the fine drizzle which had begun to fall as we covered the last hundred yards. A loop of river lay beyond the fence in the bottom of the field opposite, and the cows churned the bank as we watched, muddy to the hocks.
‘I hates the country,’ Phyl said.
‘It can’t be him.’ The words burst out of me. ‘It’s just too ridiculous, for you to tell me a man looks like a girl child. That’s all you’ve done, talk to a man in a crowd who told you he’d mislaid a daughter. Did he say her name? Did he?’
‘No.’
‘There. And now you’ve formed this ridiculous opinion. I won’t countenance it.’
She leaned forward on the seat, looking back towards the village. ‘If you want to take a look at him, come down to Southampton one afternoon, get a bus to the Crown stops. Come at four o’clock, we can sit in the Lyons together. We’ll have a bit of a chat if he spots me. Write to me care of the nurses’ hostel and tell me when you’re coming.’
‘I’ll do no such thing—’
‘The bus is coming, dear.’
So it was, a motoring burr beyond the trees. I rubbed my knees like a schoolgirl. ‘He can’t have known her. They can’t have been a proper family, ever. Why should he suddenly care now?’
She patted my arm. ‘Why don’t your old man give you a baby,’ she said, almost to herself.
‘He’s given me himself. That’s enough.’
That tickled her: she gave me a sharp, mirthful glance. ‘He must be one hell of a chap. How did you two bump into each other, anyhow?’
‘We did precisely that. Bump into each other. It was an extraordinary piece of luck.’
The bus drew up, came to a stop. In the quiet the door swished open. ‘Thank you,’ I said as she mounted the step. She turned to speak to me once more.
‘I ain’t said nothing to the man. Nothing,’ she repeated, meeting my eyes. ‘Do you understand?’
Pamela and Elizabeth were kneeling on sheets of newspaper by the back door, polishing shoes. Elizabeth turned her face up to me, her expression one of a person who had listened to a solid forty-five minutes of Pamela’s chatter. ‘Oh, it’s times like these I miss the boys,’ she told me. ‘If you slip yours off, Mrs Parr, we’ll do them now.’
‘Buff buff buff buff buff.’ Pamela plied the brush over Selwyn’s toe-caps. ‘Buff buff buff.’
‘Stop that now, young Pam. Did the lady go off all right?’
I stepped out of my shoes. Found a bright tone to reply to Elizabeth. ‘Oh, yes! She caught the bus with plenty of time to spare. We had a nice chat. I think she simply came to say thank you to us. She said she fancied an outing. Oh, lord, Elizabeth, I forgot the bread.’
‘I didn’t. Look, they’ve kissed.’ Elizabeth nodded towards the cooling rack where the two baked loaves sat, fused together down the long side. I’d put them too close together on the tray.
‘So they have. Never mind. I’m sure I’ll find those wretched tins before the next time.’ As I went to the larder I caught sight of Pamela’s face, a secretive moon of guilt and glee.
‘Pamela? Do you know where the tins are?’
She squirmed but it was pleasure rather than apprehension. She was safe in my love and she knew it. ‘I’m very sorry, Ellen. I just borrowed them for a short while. They’re completely perfect for doll beds.’
‘You’re the absolute limit. Please go and get them.’
‘But the mattresses fit in exactly! What’s wrong with the bread kissing, anyway? We can just eat double toasts. It would be fun. Oh – I got you a present.’ She jumped up and left the room, returning a moment later with a newspaper parcel.
I took it from her while she stood, beaming. ‘What on earth?’
‘Open it.’
I pulled aside the newspaper. It was a pair of oven gloves, made of a heavy coarse yarn the colour of porridge. Made all of a piece, two pockets for the hands joined by a wide strip. The most useful, durable, practical kind.
‘Oh, Pamela.’
‘Elizabeth told me you needed some, and Suky fetched them from the market for me.’ She beamed wider. ‘I used up half my pocket-money savings.’ Bathed, now, in munificence and self-congratulation. Her small face glowing.
‘Darling heart, come here.’