It isn’t called the Borough Hospital any more, thank God. That name went after the war. It’s Southampton General instead, a competent modern name. Though the injections and modern doctors did not make a difference, in the end.
Selwyn died before the winter dawn. I was almost asleep but felt him leave me. I pressed the bell and a nurse removed the oxygen mask. He had an expression I hadn’t seen before, that of a traveller gladly alighting with no thought for the companions he was leaving behind. That expression didn’t belong this side on earth but should only have been seen in the afterlife.
By now my friends were sleeping in the waiting room, propped upright on benches. Lady Brock was there – she had been reading to him in his last hours. She had long training in this task. Articles from the Hampshire Chronicle, the prices of grain and feed.
The moment I came in they awoke and rose to their feet as one.
William took us all home and I sat in the back with Lucy. Selwyn’s watch and his toothbrush and copy of Edward Thomas’s The South Country were in a plastic bag on my lap. I took the watch out, felt it smooth in my hand, the rubbed pale-gold back and rim, the soft brown leather strap, the biddable buckle. I slipped it on and the narrowest hole in the strap fitted.
I put it to my ear and heard him still, in the ticking of the watch.
23rd October 1971
Dear Pamela,
There are so many things gone, I clutch at what’s left. Often I still touch the things he touched – the paperweight in the study, the clock key – because it’s comforting to know his hand rested where mine is. I wear his watch, of course, the heavy golden penny of it snug beneath the cuff of my blouse.
I’ve been building my own waymarkers now for a long time, building them just as carefully as cairns on moorland. A scone and butter, a nap, three clues of the crossword, to help me beat a path through the day however low the fog rolls. They punctuated mourning in the beginning; now they punctuate work. I run the mill with Suky Fitch now, and pay her accordingly. But when she retires, which is soon, I’ll lease the mill. I couldn’t do it with both Selwyn and Suky gone.
When you left it was different. I didn’t want your things around. After the first agony I buried your small blue dress deep in the layers of a linen chest and extirpated everything else that I could because it hurt too much to see them. It was wartime, you never had a wardrobe full of clothes or a box full of toys, but you had left your mark everywhere. You took the Peg family but all the other clothes-pegs had to go too, because over the years you had put eyes and mouths on all of them. You had a child-sized fork and spoon, your own, and you had bent the tines of the fork trying to pull a nail out of one of the runners of your sledge. I had to put those in the attic. In the bathroom you had drawn a fox in the steam on the mirror, a fox that reappeared with every bath I took for days and which had to be scrubbed away.
I still find things. A pencil stub at the back of a desk drawer, the end chewed by milk teeth.
8th February 1973
Dear Pamela,
I remember you teasing Mr Parr as he read the newspaper. He had the paper spread out in his usual way, as wide as a windbreak, and he was hunched in the chair behind it, eyes narrowed behind spectacles, wanting nothing more than a few moments’ peaceful wandering among the newsprint columns. And you could not give him that, you terrible, gorgeous girl, and you kept tapping and poking at the outer pages until he brought the paper down with a great flap and a howl of only-just-pretend annoyance that made you shriek in delight.
You had a great deal of mischief in you, Pamela. I hope that mischief hasn’t gone.
THREE
Ellen
1974
22
I PLACED MY FEET solidly on the branch, held tight with one hand, and with the other reached for an apple. They were beautiful this year, large enough to fill my palm and spread fingers, excellent for peeling. The warm, rustling breeze swayed me gently to and fro. A mile away, the church tower peeped above the wall and beyond, under strong sunshine, lay the recumbent flank of Beacon Hill. To be aloft in an apple tree, on a hot afternoon in late September: surely this was an instance of heaven on earth.
Lucy was below, filling the barrow with windfalls. From my position I could see the inch of grey at her parting.
‘I wish you’d come up, Lucy. It’s simply glorious.’
‘My climbin days are done,’ she replied equably. ‘As you well know.’ She placed a palm over the top of her head. ‘I can feel you lookin at my roots, Ell.’
I giggled, and picked another beauty. ‘I suppose I could always send the basket down with my eyes shut. If you don’t mind it landing on your head.’
She squinted up at me. ‘Have you thought about hair dye, dear? You don’t want to end up like Miss Peacock. Remember her?’
Xanthe Peacock, who had been born in 1879 and who used to live by the ford before the war. A goat-keeper and cheesemaker, she had been famous for her long, looping, iron-grey locks.
‘My hair is nothing like hers.’ I unwound the rope attached to the basket handle and began to pay it out. ‘It’s simply a rather light blonde after the summer. Particularly at the temples.’
The basket began its dallying descent. I heard Lucy stifle a snort.
We took the kitchen chairs outside to do our peeling. Deckchairs were more comfortable but all you could do in a deckchair was loll. And lolling was a temptation, beneath this deep-blue sky as hot as a brick-kiln.
Lucy heaved a sigh of happiness. ‘We’re owed this.’
She was right: a rainy August had kept us damp and discontented. ‘Didn’t the blackberries recover well, though? Jet black. Prodigious.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Your Selwyn was the blackberryer. I remember him gathering at that big hedgerow behind Beacon Hill. Hooking them down with his stick.’
Selwyn used to wear an old mackintosh which he spread against the brambles so he could lean in and reach the high treasures. Tall and spare, his soft trilby on the ground next to an enamel bowl. I’d be homeward-bound, calling him in a low sun, but on he’d go, returning at dusk with his quarry. It was three years since he’d died – three times I’d entered into the dark tunnel of January and come out the other side, and each time the light came a little sooner, and now I could talk like this about him, smiling.
‘Selwyn was no gatherer of blackberries,’ I told Lucy. ‘He was a hunter.’
We worked on, throwing the apple parings into a bucket placed between us. The quartered apples, sliced of their cores, swirled in a plastic tub of water. A platoon of ants was trying to bear away a scrap of peel the shape of a tiny shield; they circled, unable to find direction.
Lucy grunted. ‘Them ants need a general.’
I picked up another apple, smooth and slightly greasy in my hand. I should start peeling, but instead I closed my eyes in the sunshine.
‘Do you know young Colin Bowyer, Lucy?’
Colin was the son of Barney Bowyer, an affable red-haired chap who had taken over the lease of the mill when Suky retired.
‘Him that charges around in bell-bottom trousers? Strange flappin articles. Not a hornpipe dancer, is he?’
I had never heard Lucy describe a man born after 1945 with anything but censoriousness and denigration.
‘I expect many people admire those trousers. And he charges around because he’s busy and hard-working. Anyway, Colin told me his father Barney is nephew to old Evie Norris who taught me typing, about a century ago.’
The sunshine was warm and rosy on my eyelids.
‘Norris, now,’ Lucy said. ‘Norris. Oh, yes. Her with the warts on her fingers. From the estate office at Barrow End. And it was all down to Bill Kennet.’
I smiled, and opened my eyes to the blue. ‘She was a terrific horticulturalist, it turned out.’