THE WATERS RECEDED, and Pipehouse Wood turned to blue and gold under a clear windy sky, with torrents of crisp beech leaves tumbling from the trees. Althea and I walked there with Stuart, Stuart mostly travelling underground with a fine disregard for the difference between rabbit warrens and badger setts, an attitude which would one day earn him a calamitous bite on the nose. Althea was equally and even more alarmingly scornful of the holes in the ground.
‘Wouldn’t you prefer a flatter route?’ I pleaded. ‘I can’t carry you if you fall, you know.’
‘Oh,’ she said, pointing at one of the larger badger hollows. ‘Just bury me here. It’s better than those Druids. They’re always burying each other in farmers’ fields, aren’t they? So inconsiderate. Just what you want to dig up when ploughing. A blasted Druid.’
‘I think they prefer groves, Althea. Clearings. Places like Pipehouse Wood, in fact. I’m quite certain they wouldn’t choose a cornfield.’
Time passed, the weather turned again. Iron ragbags of clouds marauded, discharging heavy drops and hail, but they travelled in small convoys separated by wide tracts of rough blue sky. Nothing like the dank low cover of the flood. That was a month ago now and I was so glad it had all gone, the submerged fields and fences, the tugging, knee-high brown waters. The feeling of time out of joint.
‘Are you taking Lady Brock to the vicar’s party, Ell?’
Lucy and I were sitting side by side at a table in the village hall. George Horne had lost his plaster cast and regained his feet, liberating Lucy from the kennels for her time-honoured Thursday morning off to attend the Women’s Institute market. I’d been minding her stall for her in the meantime, presiding on her behalf over the pastel rainbows of knitted baby clothes, the bright primaries of embroidered birds and flowers. I had nothing but my humdrum preserves and eggs. I could never compete with this glory.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I think you might have surpassed your nan, in skill.’
‘No one could surpass my nan.’ But a small smile expressed her inner delight. ‘The vicar’s party, my dear. Are you taking Lady B?’
‘Oh! Yes, I am. I’d forgotten it was so soon.’
Lucy cleared her throat, performed an experimental wheeze. ‘You ain’t got one of them Fisherman sweets, dear?’
‘No, I’m so sorry, Lucy.’
Her wheeze turned into a hectic, rattling cough. I reached over and slapped her gently on the back, which she said she needed and which never, in the decades that I’d been doing it, made the slightest difference. ‘Lucy, there’s a boy with asthma at the village school, you know. He breathes in some kind of spray from a little pump. It works an absolute treat. I wonder if you—’
‘I ain’t got asthma.’
‘Really, I think you might have.’
The cough quietened. She picked up her needlepoint frame and stabbed out a row of brown stitches, the outline of the tail of a wren.
‘It’s the dentures all over again,’ she murmured, after a long pause.
‘Aren’t you glad of your dentures?’
‘Gladder not to be told what to bloomin do all the time.’
Some time after the war I’d asked William if he could persuade George Horne tactfully to apprise Lucy of the fact that the dentist was now free of charge. That was the sum of my involvement. I gave her a saintly, forbearing smile.
She snorted, abandoned her irritation, grinned at me. Even now there was still a kink in her smile, a tweaking-down of her top lip to conceal the long-gone gaps.
‘Oh! I nearly forgot.’ Her hand dived into the front of her jerkin, a padded affair faded to salmon pink except for a shiny brick-red square testifying to a pocket recently ripped away. From the surviving pocket she produced a small white envelope, creased and grimed. ‘I’ve got a letter for you, Ell.’
‘Who from?’
Her eyes glinted. ‘Open it up.’
Mrs Parr, the envelope said. The back, spotted by some nameless brown liquid, was blank. ‘Really, Lucy, look at the state of it.’
‘I ain’t a postman.’
I slid my thumb under the seal. A child’s handwriting, looped and regular, and on the fold of the paper the words kind to me and gave me a warm bed.
‘How did you get this, Lucy?’
‘She came up the kennels round about Sunday teatime.’ Lucy selected a new needle and a yarn of a slightly darker brown. ‘She was on the lam. Couldn’t reach the mill in time, she said, so she popped over to me.’
‘That’s extremely silly of her! I don’t want to be party to any trouble she gets herself into. Why on earth is she writing to me?’
Lucy squinted at the eye of her needle. ‘It might be a thank you, for having her. Better late than never.’
‘What did she say, when you saw her?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘Well, how did she seem?’
‘What d’you mean, how did she seem?’
‘Yes! Did she seem upset, for example? Or anxious? Or cheerful, come to that?’
Lucy pondered, threaded needle poised.
‘She read me my Bunty,’ she said at last.
Was it possible actually to die from exasperation? ‘Lucy!’
‘Ellen, my dear, why don’t you read your letter and find out how she is for yourself?’
‘I will.’ On the other side of the hall the kitchen hatch rattled up, releasing a cloud of steam. ‘I’ll fetch you a hot drink. It might help your chest.’
‘I’ve got rock cakes.’ Deirdre Harper folded her arms. It was a challenge.
‘Two rock cakes, then, Deirdre, please, and a pot of tea for two. I’ll take them over to Lucy, if that’s all right.’
Deirdre narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like her cups to travel, even if only across the hall to the stallholders. Tea was to be taken here, at the tables set out by the kitchen. Her son’s death all that time ago, in the cold sea of Norway, right at the beginning of the war – this death had turned her into a vixen, and a vixen she’d remained for over thirty years, black lips bared over long narrow teeth, at bay in the bracken. I admired her for it.
‘You’d better sit down while I get it ready.’
Meekly I obeyed and, once seated, pulled the letter out of the envelope.
Dear Mrs Parr,
Please may I talk to you? Every day I go down to the humps and bumps at about half-past three. It’s free time and no one speaks to me so they don’t notice I’m gone. Please can you meet me there? If you’re too busy shopping for Lady Brock or feeding the hens I will understand. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you but I’m doing it because you were kind to me and gave me a warm bed.
Yours sincerely, Penny Lacey
The writing was small and smeared in places where her fingers had moved over the paper. Every letter that could be joined was joined. I pondered on the humps and bumps. What, and where, they could be.
I folded the letter over, and over again crossways, so that I couldn’t read the writing.
Deirdre plonked the tea and rock cakes down.
‘Thanks, Deirdre,’ I said automatically. ‘Those look nice.’
‘Made this morning.’
‘You lent me Patricia’s shoes.’ I thought of this every so often, but I’d never mentioned it to Deirdre before. ‘When I went for my job at the town hall, and I had nothing except my old boots.’
Her mouth stayed downturned but the memory kindled in her eyes. ‘Patricia wasn’t best pleased.’
‘Shoes with a heel,’ I said. ‘They changed my life. I’m sure I couldn’t have got that job in my boots.’
She smiled at last. ‘For want of a heel—’
‘The job was lost.’
Her lips tightened, and the moment was gone. ‘Don’t forget those cups, mind. I want them back.’