Dear Pamela,
Yesterday I was arranging flowers with Althea Brock, cutting the stems of her dahlias, the stiff red pompoms Sir Michael liked so much in his time: I was standing in the pantry at Upton Hall and pushing the knife down through green stem after green stem when suddenly I couldn’t move. So I was motionless with the knife in my hand until Althea approached with a brimming jug and the words, ‘Ellen, have you turned to stone?’
In this room were cupboards and cupboards of glasses, some Venetian, and porcelain coffee cups, some Chinese. Ranked behind the glass-fronted panes.
I couldn’t move because I saw you in the fluted perfection of that whorled red flower just as I still see you in the green arrowhead on a snowdrop petal, the blue bell of a bluebell, in the freckled gullet of a foxglove. Because they too are perfect, small, untouched; and because the season comes for them to be borne away.
Althea touching my elbow. ‘My dear. Bear up, my dear.’
2nd November 1948
Dear Pamela,
Edward came to Upton. Thin as a rail, brown as a toasted nut. Joyful to see me. His blood is half salt water he says – he learned this in the war. It wasn’t enemy fire that nearly killed him, but trudging through the dust and mud. He stayed with us a fortnight, and he and Selwyn spent a great deal of time in the mill, replacing the bearings in the turbine. He’s back in Singapore now, tentatively – I think – looking for a wife. ‘If any woman in her right mind will have me.’ Despite the old scar he is handsome in a lean, wiry fashion and endearingly doesn’t know it. This is the last bit of boyishness left. In all other respects he’s grown up now.
He told me how sorry he was about Daniel. Then he handed me a page of a letter I had sent to him when he was in Ceylon. You had drawn snails and slugs down the margins, identifying them with arrows and titles. Snail, slug, slug, slug, snail. At the top of each margin was a duck with an open bill. ‘I thought you might like to have this,’ he said, and for a hideous moment it was as if you were dead and this was a relic. But then I took it, and was glad of it. I told him about the war here, how we’d lived. ‘We were mostly preoccupied with bread and potatoes, and coal.’
He put his arm in mine. ‘A bit like the old days, then.’
After he left I remembered what he said, and thought of you. Because you must be thirteen now, and I hope and trust your thoughts do not run as incessantly as mine did at that age on the staples of life. I picture you whirling through the days with your big cousins, the five of you gathering round a table of plenty. Where’s Pamela? Ah, there she is. There she is.
12th May 1951
Dear Pamela,
I’m as indomitable as a spider creeping on a wall. In and out of the crevices of brick. Spinning silently in sunlight. Industry, industry. The mill. Selwyn. The Women’s Institute. The illiterate children I help to read at Upton School, their fingers leaving smears of grime or butter or ink under the difficult words. The mill, the WI, the children, Selwyn: what industrious spinning. My webs hang glittering, drooping under dewdrops.
In the beginning when I looked at those children’s small, soft fingers and saw yours instead, all my weaving was torn away by a dry, heartless, leaf-bowling wind. Nothing to do but start again, and I did start again, and now the children’s fingers remain their own, and I learn their names. Robert and George and Margaret.
If it’s possible to love Selwyn more than I did during the war, I do. I haven’t said anything about how he missed you. We walked a lot that summer, out along the Downs beyond Barrow End. Just the two of us, hand in hand. Almost foolishly bereft. In the evenings we read aloud to each other as we used to before the war. We had begun The Count of Monte Cristo in the summer of 1939 and now we took it up again, and as Selwyn read I felt not the blaze from our log fire but the sunburn on my face from that summer. And if I lay on the sofa, teetering on the edge of a doze, I could almost convince myself the war had not taken place and we, Selwyn and I, had somehow taken a different path through time.
You must be sixteen now. A clever girl, I don’t doubt.
12th February 1959
Dear Pamela,
Lady Brock has sold Upton Hall at last. It will now be Upton Hall School, a boarding school for girls. The new head is one Mrs Margaret Dennis, an army widow who has endeared herself to Upton society by her enthusiasm for drinks parties, bridge, racing, and the odd set of tennis. The ballroom’s a dining room now, the squash court a chapel, the stable block full of pianos. William is now caretaker, a job he’s been performing untitled for years. He can’t count the number of leaks he’s plugged in that infernal old roof, he says: he is so glad there’s money in the place, so he can have done with all this ‘makeshifting and stopgappery’.
And Lady Brock? She hasn’t gone far. Just to the Lodge near the top of the drive. A small square house hidden in laurels – we used to pass it, you and I. Selwyn, William, Lucy, George, John Blunden and I helped Lady Brock move in. We brought the knight in armour, you’ll be glad to hear. He stands guard in her new sitting room, looming beside the window, not entirely steady on his feet. She never tires of telling everyone how blissful it is to be shot of the Hall. ‘I was camping in the sewing room by the end, you know,’ she says, and guffaws.
Now that she has grand-nephews in New Zealand, Lady Brock occasionally regales me with stories of their doings. Recently she told me how after finishing their boiled eggs the boys turned the hollowed shells over in the egg cups to make it look as though the eggs were still untouched, earning a mock rebuke from their mother. But she brought the story to a halt, saying, ‘What silly stuff. Now – about the church flowers …’ Because she saw in my eyes that it was something that you did, my child, when you were here.
11th April 1963
Dear Pamela,
I have walked bareheaded under the Lion Gate at Mycenae, felt the sudden shadow cool on my face. The sky belonged only to Zeus, so blue it was. We’d forgotten our water canteens but we didn’t care. Even our thirst was exciting. Selwyn rubbed a sprig of thyme between his fingers. I was given a great gift, which was to see him again as he must have been in his youth. Because it was a new person I discovered. And I told him so, and he said, ‘It’s you. You’ve made me young again.’
We’ve been to Mycenae, Olympus, Thermopylae. I can’t imagine where you are any more. Still in Ireland? Moved to Dublin? London, perhaps. You might even have been in Greece yourself on one of our trips. Could I have glimpsed you below me on a mountain path, a young woman with a rucksack, exploring?
Extraordinary to think that you’re now older than I was when I first met you. Older than I was when I let you go.
10th January 1971
Dear Pamela,
Selwyn has gone. Mister Parr has gone.
Pneumonia took him. A cough turned to bronchitis; he recovered. Then he got worse again. One cold afternoon he became very agitated, wouldn’t stay in bed, paced around the bedroom, saying, ‘I can’t see them, they’re calling but I can’t find them.’ I suspected that in his delirium he was back at Messines. Looking for the wounded men in the mud.
William came. He was magnificent. He said, ‘Lieutenant Parr, return to your bunk.’
He drove me to the hospital in my Land Rover. We let the ambulance speed ahead of us into the rain.