Penny was still curled up in the small armchair near the fire, knees by her chin. She didn’t move as I came in. I didn’t want to look her in the eye, because then I would be openly seeing her shame, and I needed to spare her that. I put her suitcase down and stretched out my hands to the warmth. My fingers were trembling. I wondered what to say, but only came up with tritenesses, not to be uttered. In the end it was Penny who spoke.
‘Some people hate home, and some people hate school.’ She dug her chin down between her shoulders. ‘But I hate home and school.’
I listened to the crackle of the fire, the occasional phutt as a pocket of water in the wood turned to steam. I rubbed my hands together, just to make friction, to get a purchase on this absolute despond. ‘I’ll go and see if your trousers are dry.’
They were. I took them off the top of the range and remembered the shepherd’s pie for this evening. William was coming to supper. The pie was ready in the larder. I put it in the oven to heat through. When I brought the child’s trousers into the sitting room, she wedged herself deeper in the chair, binding her arms around her knees. ‘You need to get changed, Penny,’ I told her. ‘Not into these muddy things, but into some of your clean clothes. I’m going to tell Mrs Dennis you’re here, and then take you to join your school-friends.’
She pressed her lips together, said nothing.
‘You can change here by the fire.’ I went towards the door. ‘After I drop you off I’m collecting a friend for supper.’
‘What are you having?’
I paused. ‘What?’
‘For supper. What are you having?’
‘Shepherd’s pie.’
She unfurled the polo neck of her sweater and pulled it all the way up over her nose. Above the woollen ribbing her lower eyelids were a flat line, the upper lids semicircles. It was the perfect shape of sadness.
The number for The Place, when I dialled, was engaged. I tried twice more, at intervals of about half a minute, but the line remained busy. I went back into the sitting room to find Penny still lodged in the armchair as tight as a whelk, her suitcase unopened on the floor beside her.
‘Dear,’ I said. ‘Come, now.’
‘Have you spoken to Mrs Dennis?’
‘Not yet.’
She lifted up her chin, as Lady Brock had taught her. I opened my mouth, shut it again. The implication was clear. When summoned, she would get ready to leave. But in the meantime she would sit by the fire.
I retreated to the window and looked out into a featureless, settling dusk overlaid by the reflection of the room behind me. Running my finger down the side of the window frame, I felt a little dimple in the wood. Two, three – a whole line of them, about three inches apart. They were the holes made by the hooks we had screwed into the frame, the hooks that held our blackout curtains taut to the window. We’d never filled them in properly, those little holes. Just added a coat of gloss paint, then another as the years went by. I had no idea that they could still be felt, after all this time.
The firelight silhouetted the child’s snubbed little profile, the fuzz of hair beneath the beret. She’d pulled her polo neck down so I could see individual tears reflected in the glass as they tracked down the side of her nose. What had I said to her mother? How we looked after people in floods? Well, then. Let there be a moment’s truce in the world, a natural contract between two human beings, one the owner of a warm house, the other clinging to a gate in a flooded field. I thought of the lilos, the draughty barracks of bedrooms at The Place.
‘Come, dear,’ I said. ‘You shan’t stay in that chair.’
She looked up, startled, with the same fearful light in her eyes as before. I made a sound, something between a sigh and a laugh.
‘No, Penny,’ I told her. ‘I’ll give you a bed.’
25
IN THE BATHROOM I turned on the hot tap and left her sitting on a towel on the lip of the bath, her suitcase on the floor at her feet.
‘Don’t let the bath run over. I’m going to fetch my friend William.’
‘OK.’ Her voice, small and high, came through steam.
I telephoned The Place again. Margaret Dennis answered this time, and I explained the situation. ‘I met Mrs Lacey coming into the village. She didn’t get the message.’
I didn’t mention the woman’s shunning of her daughter; her precipitate, outrageous departure.
‘Thank you, Mrs Parr. That is helpful. We’re filled to the gunwales here. James Acton’s been singing your praises, by the way. I gather you saved Church Walk. He says we need more practical people like you!’
I laughed. ‘Lucy Horne helped too. But that’s very kind of him.’
‘Look after young Lacey. She’s a miserable little thing.’
‘I think there’s a reason for that.’
‘Yes.’ Mrs Dennis grunted. ‘Mum’s on the sauce.’
‘I’m glad you know.’
‘Major Lacey’s stationed in Ulster, you see.’ She sighed. ‘These modern army wives. Half of them aren’t remotely cut out for it. Look, I’d better ring off. We’ve got games to plan for tomorrow. Beanbag relays, that sort of thing. I’m staying the night here so Marcy can look after the Colonel. I’ve brought my own camp bed, of course, and a hot-water bottle.’
I fought back the urge to giggle. Althea had appointed the right kind of headmistress.
I plunged down the wet lanes towards Upton Hall and William. Selwyn had taught me to drive in the days when men wore gloves at the wheel. He’d bought me a pair the first time I successfully double-declutched. I’d driven this road with headlamps slitted for the blackout, knew it better than the back of my hand.
Practical. Ellen has such strong fingers. She’s so practical. Who had said that?
Mrs Daventry and Miss Legg, of course, in the village hall. They couldn’t deal with the knot on a bale of blankets. Southampton was engulfed in fire, and they hadn’t been able to untie a simple reef knot between them. Mrs Daventry had none of her husband’s courtesy, Miss Legg none of her mother’s kindness – her mother being the grocer’s wife who had steadied my nerve, in the face of our mounting bills for potatoes and cheese, during the time of the Absaloms. That was why, on that day in the village hall, I had said, I simply know where to pull, coldly, as the rope loosened in my grasp. Uncaring, in the face of their complete ignorance of life, of how rude I seemed. I had released that knot one-handed, of course, because my other arm was bearing the sack-like weight of a small girl.
William was among the firemen outside the school building. A wide hose snaked across the flagstones, its origin in the basements where a banging, hectoring engine was driving the pump. A chute of stinking brown water erupted from the mouth of the hose into a tank.
‘The boiler rooms are nearly empty,’ William said to me. ‘They won’t get much more out with this great sucker.’ He kicked the hose gently. ‘The rest will be done with shovels.’
The cloud bank was at last passing over, it seemed. The horizon was a clear, dimming blue in the eastern quarter beyond the elms, their enlacement of branches bare against the sky. We negotiated the drive and the first part of the journey in silence. I hoped that Penny had turned off the bath tap.
‘I’ve got an Upton Hall girl at home, William.’ I described my encounter in the flooded lane, the ensuing debacle. ‘She’s such a wretched little thing, I simply couldn’t say no.’
He was nodding. ‘That’ll be young Lacey. Her mother’s already famous.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Mrs Dennis will appreciate it, any road.’ He shook his head. ‘Nobody understands how unbudgeable water is, not till they grapple with a flood. Barring you millers, of course. Water being your stock-in-trade. I always thought Mr Parr took to the job exceptionally well, being that he never expected to inherit the mill.’
‘Selwyn would have been gratified by your compliment.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘Do you think he gave me what life is meant to be?’
I didn’t take my eyes off the lane ahead of us, the headlights probing the mist that was gathering over the tea-brown water.
‘I’ve always had the impression,’ he said at last, ‘that Mr Parr gave you everything you wanted. But it’s hardly a matter for another person to judge. Friends may not understand that, of course, and speak out of turn.’