She smelled of fresh air, boot polish and sugar, and I clung to her.
Selwyn was lying on the bed, fully clothed. Everyone in the house was asleep except us. When he felt me watching him he turned his head, held my gaze: surprised, perhaps, at the way I stood without speaking.
‘We had to repair the block on the beam today. I had to bicycle over to the forge at Barrow End and get Edwin Lusty to beat a new pin. It took the best part of the day.’ He sighed. ‘It’s exactly like living in medieval times.’
‘Except for the bicycle, I suppose.’
He smiled. A small coal fire hissed in the bedroom grate.
‘I got very cold, up there on the beam.’
‘I don’t begrudge you a fire, my darling.’
The letter from Marjorie Lord was lying on the bedside table along with the solicitor’s note.
‘Pamela will have to know, eventually, I suppose,’ Selwyn said.
‘What?’
‘That her aunt disowned her … Oh, yes. Look.’ He reached for the second sheet and held it out to me. ‘This is what I noticed. The solicitor identifies Marjorie Lord as née Pickering.’
I peered. There was the phrase exactly, in brownish-black ink on pressed blue paper. On behalf of Mrs Marjorie Lord (née Pickering) …
My understanding was slow. I thought suddenly of the young trees William had given me a few days ago. I should go and tend them tomorrow. Watering was vital at these early stages. The wind had dried out the soil a great deal.
‘Don’t you see?’ Selwyn’s eyes were wide and earnest behind his glasses. ‘Pamela’s mother, Amelia’s, maiden name was Pickering.’
‘No. No.’ I gave a slow shake of the head. ‘Don’t you remember, she was Mrs …’
Selwyn tutted. ‘She would merely have called herself that. She mightn’t have been married at all.’ He sighed. ‘We’ve been barking up the wrong tree, haven’t we. Looking for Mr Pickering all this while. He could be called anything.’
‘Mr Anything.’ My voice was tight and dull. ‘Yes, he could.’
‘Well, whatever his name is, he’s still the same renegade. I doubt any authority will bring him to heel after all this time.’ When I didn’t reply, Selwyn looked at me once more. ‘Ellen, darling, are you all right?’
‘Tired.’
The house was quiet. We both listened to the soft roar of the water outside as it coursed into the spillway. Unending, unending, except in flood. He propped himself up on one elbow and tossed the solicitor’s letter back onto the bedside table. ‘What were you thinking of just now? When you were gazing at me.’
‘Do you remember that girl you bumped into? The bright-eyed thing with her long stride and her Trollope from the library?’
He sat up and held out his arms. ‘You still are that girl,’ he said. ‘You always will be, to me.’
I moved onto the bed and accepted his embrace. ‘I can’t even remember her.’
‘Because you have so many cares. My sweetheart, you’ll find her again after the war.’
‘Yes, maybe.’ I closed my eyes. ‘After the war.’
I remembered the first time we lay down together on this bed. We were fully clothed then, and I had just put the new sheet on, tucked it tight.
‘Selwyn,’ I said.
‘What?’ He stirred beside me.
‘I’ll always love you.’
‘Excellent.’
‘No, I mean it,’ I said. ‘Come what may. I’ll never regret loving you. Saying yes.’
He propped himself up on one elbow, searching my face. The white sheet sailed out and hovered in the air, four-square, and it would settle in a second. In a second, it would alight on the bed.
Ellen
1939
16
MAKING MY WAY along Castle Road in the shadow of the printing press, I looked up to see a gull flying down the street above me, lower than the rooftops. I realized that it was spring – sensing it in the warm breeze, since there was nothing to guide me in the way of trees or flowers.
I was returning from the library where I’d exchanged The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Redux for The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children. When I got back to my room I would stand the books, spine outward, on my table, using my boxes of cotton reels and elastics as bookends, and pretend they were mine. At the age of six I’d been the owner of two entire shelves of books. I could still see the sunlight striking the titles, some bright gold; others, belonging originally to my mother and father, a deeper bronze.
But I was eighteen now, and perhaps it was simply adulthood, or perhaps it was also the insulating effect of three meals a day, but I was now able to remember my old books, to wander freely through the Stour House of my memory without feeling that jolt of shrivelling pain. Even more so now that it was an hotel, its outbuildings prettied up and its gravelled drive rutted by motor cars. Lucy and I had peered in through the gateway one Sunday. The Stour Hotel, Lucy opined, looked ‘a bit racy’. I had searched the brick fa?ade for signs of raciness but could see none, wondering later if it was the sleek shining line of parked motor cars that had given her that impression.
The Absaloms, however, was another matter. My thoughts refused to dwell there.
I also had a volume called Heroic Feats of Animals. This was for Lucy. ‘I’m fed up to the back teeth with stories,’ she told me. ‘I want something about real life. Real life, and with dogs in.’ She railed about her life, the dirt, the cold, but over the past few years she’d come to love the hounds. I still spent most Sundays in Upton, and occasionally she took me up to the kennels to see them. They pressed their noses against the wire and yodelled at her, their bellies pale, like the inside of tree bark. She put her hand out and bade them ‘clam up’. She was no longer even trying to read, so after Sunday dinner I read to her. If she especially loved the book we’d go together to the bus stop and sit on the bench and continue until my bus came. Whenever anyone passed by I was to fall silent. She didn’t want them to hear me speaking the words aloud to her.
It was nice to be out. My working life was spent in cacophony, a noise like hundreds of thousands of small nails falling onto a tin roof, the typing pool at full stretch. I unbuttoned the collar of my coat in the fine warm breeze. Reaching the corner, I turned into Waltham Square, glancing up at the gull which was now winging ahead of me.
And stepped straight into the arms of a man.
We buffeted each other, sprang back, gasping. My books flew from my hands.
‘Oh!’ We bent simultaneously to the pavement. I felt a sharp clout to my temple as his head hit mine, and I fell to my knees in agony. ‘Ouch!’
‘I’m so sorry. I do beg your pardon. I was looking the other way.’ His voice was fine and light. I didn’t know what he looked like. My eyes were squeezed shut. ‘My skull,’ I heard him say next. ‘My skull is thicker than yours. The male brow ridge. I’m so sorry.’
I clasped my hand to my temple. ‘I’m lucky you aren’t a Neanderthal person,’ I managed to say. ‘You would have laid me out.’
I opened my eyes. He had spectacles, fixing them carefully to his face as I watched. Making him recognizable. ‘You’re from Upton,’ I blurted.
He was smiling broadly. Sandy hair tufted on the top of his head. A gentleman somewhere in his thirties. ‘I am indeed. Of Upton, and not, as you say, of Neanderthal stock. Yes, they did have the most colossal brow ridges. Although I feel we malign them. Brains aren’t everything.’
‘Oh, they had extremely large brains.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Did they indeed? Clearly it’s how one uses one’s brain that counts, then, rather than its absolute volume. It seems you give yours a great deal of exercise.’
‘I spend most evenings reading. In the library. And in my room.’
We were both still kneeling on the pavement. I looked up to see people skirting us, smirking. He rose to his feet and held out his hands. They were warm, dry, thin, strong.
In Bishop’s Tea Rooms they gave me a compress and a little bowl of iced water. I sat holding the folded damp linen to my brow.
‘My name’s Selwyn Parr. And you?’