‘We’ve had a little chat!’ I said, in the tone of a Mrs White.
‘I can’t stop long, dear,’ Phyl said to me. ‘If you knew the errands and suchlike I had to take care of. You wouldn’t believe what a job it is to keep everything clean and respectable and make ends meet at the same time.’
The same tame. She polished up her accent for him. I noticed even through the heartbeats pounding in my ears.
I watched him rummage in his jacket pocket. ‘Here.’ He put three packets of cigarettes on the table. ‘I’m only sorry I couldn’t snaffle more. It was awfully nice talking to you that day. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything on the grapevine? In the locality?’
A vigorous shake of the head released a thick curl of hair from her set. She cupped it back into position. ‘Oh no, dear, no.’
‘We met in a fearful crush outside the police station.’ He turned to me. ‘Poor Mrs Berrow had had her purse stolen. Such venal cowardice, in a war. And I’m on the hunt for a small missing person.’
I could neither speak, blink nor swallow. He smiled at me and then addressed us both. ‘Well, I’m on my way, but may I get you ladies a pot of tea?’
We, or rather Mrs Berrow, declined. He picked his coat up from the chair back, hitching it clumsily over one arm. As he put on his hat he bowed his head to me, locked eyes with me for a second, and then made his way to the door. I felt a pain in my palm, looked down to see my hand in a fist. I released my fingers to see four dark-pink dents along my lifeline.
Phyllis stuffed two of the cigarette packets into her shopping bag and took out a box of Cook’s Matches. ‘Bloody hell.’ She lit her cigarette. ‘That was close to the wind.’
I stared out into the street, at some young women whose thin skirts were being pulled out behind them by the sea breeze. They all turned round, clutching at the sides of their heads, to save their hats. Their screams of laughter were transformed into thin whines by the plate glass. My heart was sinking into the depths of my body.
‘What a mistake.’ I swallowed again. ‘An awful blunder. I was like a rabbit paralysed by a shotgun barrel. He knew it was me.’
Mrs Berrow’s small blue eyes roved over the possibility. ‘Any road, I didn’t help him, I promise you.’
The door of the café swung open, bringing a gust of wind. Bills fluttered from tables, chairs scraped. It was the laughing girls, in their skirts, patting their hair. Suddenly the room was unbearably full. I stood up.
‘Don’t you want to have tea, dear?’
‘I can’t stay. Goodbye, Mrs Berrow.’
She grasped at my arm, a hard, sudden grip, as if she were in a heavy sea and I in a lifeboat. ‘Give that little child a kiss from me.’
The blasting wind whipped at my eyes, made them leak. Like the girls, I put my hands to my hat. At the bus stops there was a milling crowd of children under the care of a single elderly schoolmaster. He funnelled them in through the doorway of the bus with a shepherd’s long practice, and smiled at me. ‘I don’t suppose you want a couple, do you?’
It was astonishing how often people said things like that to me. You’re welcome to her, my dear. Have one of mine, I wouldn’t miss him. ‘Yes. I’ll take –’ I glanced over the flock ‘– those two boys there, the ones hitting each other with their caps.’
He laughed in good humour. I imagined Pamela’s father saying to me, I don’t suppose you want her, do you? Keep her. She’s yours. I followed the schoolmaster into the bus. The children were sitting in their seats, if bouncing and jostling could be called sitting. The noise, rather like that in an aviary, abated as he held up one flat hand. ‘Lower Fourth,’ he intoned, ‘tacete, be silent,’ and they were. He stood aside to let the rest of the passengers on and I filed down the crowded bus. The driver was in a hurry: he lurched away from the stop while we were still on our feet. I staggered against the person behind me who gasped in pain. ‘I do beg your pardon.’
I sat down and so did he, next to me.
He took a moment to reposition his arm in its sling, and then smiled into my face. His candid light-brown eyes ran over me. ‘They bombed us in the Bay, you know. A hospital ship, and they bombed us. At one point we were fighting four simultaneous fires. That’s how I came a cropper. The surgeon in Naples dealt very well with my fingers.’ He gave me a steady look. ‘I’m not an idiot, Mrs … White?’
A shade of contempt in his query. I blushed to my hairline.
‘Parr. Ellen Parr.’
‘I wasn’t lying in wait for you today. I had no idea that you’d come. But I knew Mrs Berrow would let drop some sort of clue in the end. She’s a slightly better liar than you, but still not very good. A little girl? Oh no, dear, I don’t know nothing about that.’ It was a fair imitation, gravelly, lower than his natural tone. ‘I told her I’d pay fifty pounds for the information but she held firm. I thought you might like to know that.’
He was regarding me with a clear, benign, interested gaze. ‘I should introduce myself. Aubrey Lovell, naval surgeon.’
So it was Lovell. Why not? A nice name, elegant. Competent.
‘Pamela thinks she’s called Pamela Pickering.’ My voice was husky. ‘That’s what she’s been taught.’
His eyebrows shot up.
‘Yes.’ I swallowed. ‘Her mother called herself Mrs Pickering, you see. It was only a few days ago that we discovered this wasn’t right. So naturally we’ve been looking for a Mr Pickering all this time. Not a Lovell.’
‘You have been looking, then?’ He smiled.
‘Oh, yes. The police, the Forces, Wounded and Missing … why do you ask?’
‘Your face, madam. The sheer horror when you looked at me.’
The way his lips thinned, even now almost mischievous. It was Pamela, and yet the down-curve of the mouth translated effortlessly into masculinity. I saw all this and struggled in vain for words.
‘I’d have found her myself, in the end. It’s simply a fact. If not now, then after we’ve finished with all this.’ He gestured clumsily at the battered frontages beyond the window. ‘Sooner or later the constabulary would have got round to me. How long must it be, now?’
‘Must what be?’ I was stupid, my lips numb, the margins of my vision dim. I wondered if I was going to faint again. I did hope not. That would be so embarrassing.
‘Since you found Pamela.’
‘Let me see. Three – three years and three months.’
‘Are you all right, Mrs Parr?’
The sunshine glanced along all the windows of the bus as we turned north. ‘I’m quite well, thank you.’
The city streets seemed to stretch and hold us in their grasp. There were so many ponderous military vehicles; they swung out onto the highway and we gave way every time.
‘How did you know to go to Plymouth? You said you were estranged. You didn’t know where she was, did you?’
Even to my ears I sounded odd, needlessly interrogatory. As if I were still testing him, as if he might still turn out to be the wrong man. He seemed not to notice.
‘She wrote from that address, asking for money. I sent her some. This was at the beginning of the war, and we’d been apart for four years or so. Then I left England. When I didn’t hear from her I simply assumed she was in funds, or had found someone to keep her in funds.’ He glanced out of the window at a row of shops, half intact, the other half a smashed and blackened mound of brick. ‘God, what a mess they’ve made of us, the bastards. Excuse my language, Mrs Parr. I’m afraid we do an awful lot of cursing in the Navy.’
‘I don’t mind it.’ We were crossing the river now, winding our way through the battered city. ‘That was the entrance to the gasworks.’ I pointed at a blasted weed-run expanse in which a hulk of deformed ironwork had collapsed to its knees, rivets crying rust. ‘They hit Cold Storage. Did you hear about the butter fire? It burned for nine days. And the ice rink. The ice rink,’ I repeated, at the absurdity of it.