I watched her depart. She’d slipped a pair of stockings into the shoebox as well, Deirdre, knowing that I’d have had none of my own.
For want of a heel. For want of a nail. When did I write that? I could see my typewriter in my mind’s eye. It was during the war and I was in the mill office, and I’d been pleading with a Mr … Mr Gresham, of course, for some piece of equipment that could not be had anywhere. Threatening him with the defeat of the nation over a – yes, that was it – a new protective screen, to stop river debris in the head-race getting into the turbine. The darkness had been crowding in on me, darkness of the war, and of the winter. I had the desk lamp poised over the black-topped keys so that the ranks of gold letters shone. Bang bang bang, and then Suky Fitch had come in and told me that Selwyn had arranged for my child to be taken away. The serried gold-gleaming black keys, and Suky’s enquiring face, and the knock in my heart.
Their name was Henstrow. The woman had bandaged legs. I had stood up to Selwyn: No. My girl shall not stay there. She will come home with me.
There was a rattle on the roof of the village hall. Rain had come again. People were raising their voices in soft coos of dismay. A huddled throng clustered by the door, unwilling to depart; they were nudged gently backwards by a wetter crowd coming in, flapping umbrellas. What a morning, they said. Wellingtons if I’d thought. Dark figures passed in front of me, shoulders shining wet. Dr Bell had been wearing an overcoat, that day when the busloads came, fleeing Southampton. He was the only one of us properly dressed. Deirdre had been smoking outside in an overall, her red elbows bared, and Selwyn and I had been wearing light jackets. We hadn’t waited to put on top clothes. How joyous the morning had seemed, festive. The weather had been dull, in reality, but in my memory we hurried through sparkling frost to meet our girl.
The folded letter lay in front of me, a small smudged square. I picked it up and put it in my handbag.
The crowd swelled, murmured, parted. Lucy was on her feet, gesturing, one hand flat for a saucer, the other tipping an imaginary cup to her lips. I got up from the table, poured her a cup of tea, carried it to her along with a rock cake on a plate. When I set the things down she was speaking to me, saying ‘parched’ and some other words.
I sat down slowly, and Lucy’s voice became clearer. ‘This rock cake is properly delicious. Most people don’t realize, they’re only meant to look like rocks. Where’s yours? Ellen, you’ve gone and left your cake on the table over there. Ellen, dear?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Your rock cake.’
‘I don’t want any cake … I think I’ll go and see William when we finish here.’
‘Give it to him, then,’ Lucy said. ‘He deserves it. After all, he set me right. You know, on that little matter.’
I stirred myself, tried to concentrate on what she was saying. ‘What little matter?’
‘You know. About you not marrying Bob Coward, and the bowl of cherries, and all that. He reckons –’ her eyelids fluttered ‘– that as neither him nor me have ever got within spittin distance of wedlock, we shouldn’t cast aspersions on other people’s marriages. It’s not within our purview.’
She copied his measured delivery exactly, which would normally amuse me.
‘Cast aspersions.’ My voice was dull. ‘Yes, I suppose you did.’
Lucy was looking down at her lap. There was a faint heat in her sallow face. Then she lifted her head.
‘I beg your pardon, Ellen.’
That was all she said. Gracefully, and with her grandmother’s natural courtesy which in Lucy was as rare as the blue flash of a kingfisher.
‘And I beg yours, Lucy.’ I gave her a bleak smile. ‘It doesn’t matter what you said. Not now.’
I pedalled up the drive of Upton Hall. The rain had left shining ruts, small pools: the skirts of my coat were soon spattered, because that was what happened, if one dared to cycle here. One got bumped, one slid, one became muddy. But I was resolute. Penny Lacey was not my concern. I’d telephone Margaret Dennis – she was in loco parentis, after all – and suggest a good dollop of pastoral care, perhaps from a kindly sixth-former. For some reason a clear picture of the imaginary sixth-former came unbidden to my mind, a girl with unruly walnut-coloured hair and small, friendly blue eyes, complete with steaming kettle and buttered toast. Or perhaps it was all Penguin chocolate bars and Coca-Cola now. No, not for Penny. She’d liked my tea and toast.
I’d see the girl, that was all. Speak briefly and kindly to her, and then consign her to the care of her redoubtable headmistress. I couldn’t afford to be waylaid again by those mirrored glimmerings. Those half-caught glimpses that, coming warningless in the gloom of the evening and again in the bright morning light, had sliced open my heart.
Reaching the gravel sweep in front of Upton Hall, or ‘the main building’ as it was known now, I dismounted and began to push my bicycle down a path which had once passed under an avenue of pergolas fragrant with climbing roses, but which now led between two rows of tennis courts. At the bottom of the tennis courts, a gate pierced a high brick wall. I wheeled the bike through the gate and, once on the other side, leaned it against the wall.
I had realised, soon after leaving the Women’s Institute market, what Penny had meant by the humps and bumps.
Today the low winter light threw the desecration into relief. The traces of the paths, the greenhouse footings, the ancient vegetable beds were picked out sharp and clear, the hollowed-out pattern of the great kitchen garden of Upton Hall which, in the autumn of 1959, had been destroyed in a matter of days. It was Mrs Dennis, in her first year as headmistress, who had committed this act of vandalism. William’s gentle contractions and decommissionings over previous years – closing an asparagus bed here, felling an ancient fig tree there – had nothing in common with this extirpation, this ingress of a boiler-suited ground-clearance team who in the space of a week had grubbed up fruit bushes, dismantled the remaining greenhouse – apparently because of the danger it posed – and turfed over everything else. ‘It was my great blunder,’ Mrs Dennis said these days, and nobody disagreed. The wall at least remained, deeply shadowed on the western side but diagonally bisected by the sun along the southern boundary. In the sunlit part, preserved in lighter brick, the shape of a door long since removed. Above it, on the other side of the wall, the elms rose high. They remained, too, in the face of the blight which had recently taken so many. Apparently the Reverend Acton led prayers in church for these trees, that they should be spared. Some villagers disapproved, but it seemed to me to be a good use for prayer.
A movement in the shadow. She was coming down the path under the wall towards me, hopscotching over the flagstones. A child in a school mackintosh and beret. She hadn’t seen me yet.
I hailed her softly. ‘Penny.’
She hurried towards me. ‘Oh, Mrs Parr! I knew you’d come. Well, I hoped you would. Actually I was afraid you wouldn’t. But here you are!’
She was actually lifting off her heels, her clear little voice a burbling fountain.
‘I hope you don’t mind me writing,’ she rushed on. ‘I’m glad Miss Horne passed my letter to you. We had Battenberg cake at her house and I read her a comic. She can’t read at all, can she? It must be such a pain. I must say,’ she burst out, ‘it’s so nice to see you again!’
Her short hair stuck out in wisps, her teeth were joyfully white. I remembered her parting embrace, as hard as the butting of a young lamb. It would be so easy to grin back, to surrender to this delight. But I forced myself to speak levelly, to keep my smile firm and reasonable.
‘It was a bit naughty of you to go to Miss Horne’s house. You could have got her into trouble as well as yourself. Let’s walk, shall we? I’m so cold, and I bet you are too. Now, what did you want to tell me?’