New-baked bread, sharp, slightly salty, warm. Bread – what else? Nectar, almost. Heated cotton, nearly. All of these facets of a single thing. Her body on that hot spring day. Part of her, those atoms of her that lay between the threads of this fabric, was here and had never gone. She’d been small, and here in this room she still was. I had breathed in on that day and it was my life’s breath. I’d lived off it, fed from it, ever since.
She had loomed into my life like a lightening sky, illuminating what went before as well as what came after. Selwyn, my wedding day, the first year of the war: I moved through them as through astronomical, nautical and civil twilight to the stinking bus, the grimy white blanket woven with holes the size of a small child’s finger. The gossamer hair stuck to her forehead. The tick of her tongue against her palate as she sucked on nothing. Because her thumb had fallen from her mouth. Just fallen: it was still wet. There came a change in the room, an increasing solidity to the walls, a dulling of the interior glow as another, greater, colder light swelled outside, grew and grew in brightness until it filled the room. The birds shrieked, the light passed from air-force blue to yellow through a split second of blinding white, and there she was. Pamela dawned.
29
ONE MORNING after a heavy fall of snow I looked out of the kitchen window to see my child pushing a huge creaking snowball around the garden. Crumbs of packed snow clinging to the soaked wool of her gloves, and her little fingers inside surely burning with cold, but she would not stop. And a green track behind the ball, winding under the apple trees, and the snow reducing to white polygons clipped smaller and more irregular with each passage. Until she couldn’t roll the snowball up the bank – it rolled back each time she tried – and I took her in for some hot rosehip syrup. But she escaped again into the garden so that I saw her through the now driving snow, pushing again at the snowball, her face red, her mouth square with effort and rage, and I let out a mother’s bellow of joy and love.
I remembered the days after she left, how they tripped past one after the other. Now there was a similar skipping quality to the sunrise and sunset. Time had turned on its heel, it was running back to me, and the years were reeled in.
Skip, slip, a handful of days. Then I was standing once more at my kitchen window in expectation, at a minute to midday on Friday.
The clock drew breath and struck. Ten, eleven, twelve. Outside an engine stopped. Doors slammed. Footsteps sounded on the path. I opened the front door to admit the light.
‘Why, child. Here you are!’
She stood holding her suitcase, the autumn sun shining in her hair. A glorious, wicked, white smile. ‘Yes. Here I am again! Isn’t it terrific?’
The words bubbled out. I closed my eyes and felt her arms come round me.
In the midst of the joy I found some words for her guardian, ‘Thank you, Margaret. Thank you so much,’ as she departed with a wave. I closed the door. My child was still speaking. ‘Oh, Mrs Parr, it’s lovely to see you. Look at this old chair. Is it extremely ancient? It must have been made for someone with tiny legs and a huge tall back.’
She ensconced herself on the low seat, legs crossed tailor-fashion. She was so neat and small.
I laughed. ‘It is ancient. But it’s for kneeling on and praying.’
She wriggled round and kneeled upright, palms together. ‘Please God, let me stay here with Mrs Parr. Thank you, God. Amen.’
‘You can call me Ellen, dear.’ I was smiling. ‘You wouldn’t want to stay for ever. You’d be bored and spreading your wings in the end. Take your suitcase upstairs. We’ve got work to do.’
My pans clattered in the cupboard as I searched for the bread tins. Here they were, blackened and dented. What a sorry sight. I poured warm water onto yeast, made a well in my bowl of flour. When I looked up she was there in the doorway, my heart’s delight, with patches on the knees of her trousers. She looked down at them. ‘I did these patches in my sewing lesson.’
I nodded. ‘I’m glad you’re good with your needle and thread.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘What am I doing, indeed.’ I chuckled. ‘Can’t you see? Do you want to help?’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
Her eyes met mine, suddenly rounded and wondering. I took her hands, so soft and warm, knuckles snuggling into my palms. I stroked my thumbs across the backs of her hands.
‘I’ll show you.’
The bread rose, I knocked it back, it rose again and we baked it. We peeled apples and stewed them with lemon rind. She was full of news. She had to play a fearsome game these days, she told me, called lacrosse, with a hideous tackling stick like a torture instrument and a foul rubber ball that whacked her on the kneecap. ‘I vow – look, Ellen. I’m making the vow right now. With this special sign.’ She held up her palm, thumb outstretched, fingers quiveringly fanning out. ‘Oh, that’s not quite it.’
‘What is that sign?’
‘The Vulcan salute.’
‘I didn’t realize he had a salute. Only a blacksmith’s hammer.’
‘Vulcans don’t have hammers. Oh, naughty fingers. They’re meant to make a sort of V.’ She tried once again to prise apart her middle and ring finger but they were too soft and pliant to hold the pose. ‘I vow – don’t laugh please, Ellen – today, in this kitchen at the mill house, that I will never ever play lacrosse again …’
I drank in the chirruping of her chatter. I could close my eyes and listen. Just as high as before, that clear peeled piping.
We ate fresh bread and cheese. In the afternoon we walked along the mill channel, out into the fields, and into Pipehouse Wood. How the trees had grown since we were here last. A knight’s hall of handsome, limber beech columns. Elderly trunks, silvery, dewlapped. Something elephantine about them, their age and their burdens. And the summits roaring in the wind. She darted ahead, away down into a deep valley, up the other side, distant in the hollows. Edward and I had walked here too, before Mother died, and he’d had that bright sea-light in his eyes, and he’d seemed so young.
She came scrambling back. ‘Don’t let’s go home yet, Ellen. We’re always indoors, at school.’
‘Except when you’re playing lacrosse.’
She twisted her mouth. ‘It’s not playing. It’s fighting with sticks.’
We walked the lanes. The winter day was short. In the distance Beacon Hill was lying in shadow, massive and especially still this afternoon, the sun going down behind it. The hedge thinned into single blackthorns, straggling along the edge of a field of yearling ponies who clustered whickering at the gate as we approached. She held out her hand to a round-bellied chestnut who mumbled in her palm and gazed at her with moody liquid eyes. Then he gave a deep sigh, and danced away with dainty hooves over the turf. How innocent he and his fellows were.
There was a moon in the sky, a ghostly white sliver against the dulling blue.
‘I’m so lonely,’ she said. ‘No one at school thinks like me. They’re a pack of sneering wolves. Instead of howling at the moon they sneer at me. And Daddy’s so far away. And Mummy doesn’t love me at all.’
‘I’m quite sure she does.’
‘She’s bored with me and doesn’t care any more. She said so.’
‘Listen,’ I told her. ‘Your mother isn’t well. Her words come out wrong. She loves you, but she simply can’t show her love.’
‘I don’t see what love is, then.’ She sniffed. ‘If you can’t show it. I wish Daddy was here.’ She began to cry. ‘And then you told me I had to stay at school. I thought I wouldn’t see you again.’
I kneeled in the wet grass and folded my arms around her. ‘My darling. I thought it was for the best, but I was wrong. I will look after you. I promise you.’
She sat by the fire while I heated a casserole for supper. On the floor with her knees up, her arms folded on top of them, her chin on her arms. Her socks were half-pulled off her feet, the toes empty. As I watched she put out a hand to trace the dimples in the coal scuttle with her fingertip. ‘It’s a bullfrog,’ she said. ‘A red-gold gaping bullfrog.’ The flames crackled and spat in the grate. ‘Look at those gleams, Ellen. Isn’t he beautiful?’
‘Would you like peas or cabbage with your stew, darling?’
‘Neither, please.’
The impudence of the child. I shook my head in exasperated love.
‘What about pudding? Stewed apple, or egg custard?’