I sipped the strong tea. ‘I only have my memory, you see. Not a single photograph or drawing of her.’
‘The war came and stole away all my youth and talent, all my gusto. I thought I’d never see her again. But she found me at Upton Hall. She sat there by my charcoal stove and took hold of my hand. I lied to you, Ellen; it wasn’t the work that stopped me mourning my hand. It was love for her.’
‘How did it end, then, William?’
He gave a long sigh, cleared his throat.
‘You were born. I came through the snow with a sheepskin for your cradle. I knew I’d done wrong when your Connie admitted me to the nursery and there they were, your mother and the Captain, and Edward, and you tucked in your mother’s arm. And she’d cut her hair, all that beautiful hair had gone. I bellowed out in surprise. What have you done to your hair? It was beautiful! It was as good as a confession. The next night the Captain came to my aunt and uncle’s house where I lived, and he knocked me clean across the parlour floor. And she wrote to me in such terms. I tell you, Ellen, it hurt me worse than the wound to my hand. I was not to address her or look at her anywhere in Upton on pain of losing my job. I learnt it very hard, that lesson. That her reputation trumped my love without a second’s thought. I never suspected about you, back then. She told me she took pains to prevent a baby and I believed her. I think she did indeed take such pains, but nature foiled us.’
I thought about that sheepskin. It had warmed my feet at the Absaloms, shoved into the bottom drawer of the chest. At the town-hall hostel it had remained folded in my suitcase – too warm, there, to need it. And at the mill it lay on the floor by my dressing table. Selwyn had put it there, not me. Thinking it would be a soft carpet for my bare feet.
‘My God,’ I said aloud. ‘Do you think she knew?’
He thrust his chin into his collar, pursed his lips. ‘I’ve got no way of knowing.’
I thought of her that day when William mended the bucket. Her eyes hollowed, wandering over the damp-patched wall and the empty range. Oh, William Kennet, she’d said, in a voice equally hollow and wandering. Yes. We used to know him. And there was nothing, not a flicker of warmth, or conscience, or memory, or anything.
‘All I know …’ I spoke slowly. ‘All I know is that she kept that sheepskin.’
‘Yes.’
I sighed. ‘I’m sorry for hitting you, William.’
‘You did it right softly.’
‘And for railing at you. You won’t have to save me again, I promise.’
His mouth stretched in a grin of silent laughter. ‘You’ve been an errant daughter, that’s for sure,’ he said at last. ‘Not that it matters, since I’ll love you for ever, whatever you do.’
I was starting to know it now, securely in my heart, but it came again with the word ‘daughter’. It came and came, this knowledge, the petals opening and opening again like a blown rose. Daughter. It broke over my head, making my hair stand on end, rinsing the world.
‘All that you did. It was for our sake, all the kindness.’
‘In particular for your sake.’ He smiled. ‘Ellen, take this the right way. You’re a better woman than she. You did not buckle.’
He lifted his good hand and pushed a strand of hair back from my forehead. His fingers were rough but it was like a kiss.
We grew cold. William picked up his turfing spade and resumed his work on the bed. I helped him, piling and barrowing the loose sod away to a heap under the wall. I was to lay it grass side down, so that it would rot down and compost, and neatly too. He was an exacting master.
I roamed over my landscape of long years’ shame. ‘I wish you’d been more forthright,’ I said, as I filled another barrow. ‘I’d have been proud to be known as your daughter.’
‘Would you?’ He unbent, frowning. ‘To grow up here, in those days, born the wrong side of the blanket?’
‘It would have been better than the shame of being his.’
He shook his head. ‘You’d have had both, my dear, and so would your mother. And you loved him, Ellen. The Captain.’
‘Not after he ruined us, I didn’t.’
We worked on until sunset. In the deeper dusk of my memory he turned up his gas lamp with half a hand while I wrote out grammar and arithmetic with a dipping pen, my wooden stool scraping on the brick floor, a bare sixteen years after the Great War. So long ago, and so hard it had been.
‘Oh, William,’ I said. ‘You and I, we’ve earned this happiness. But I would have liked to look after you as a daughter should. You could have lived in my house, with Selwyn and me.’
‘I would not have cared –’ he spoke with genteel consideration ‘– to live under a roof with you and Mr Parr, respect him greatly though I did.’
‘You could live with me now. If you wanted. Shall I call you Father?’
‘No. Not Dad, either. Not from a lady like you.’
‘God forbid.’
Laughter bubbled up.
‘We shall stay as we are, Ellen,’ he said.
I found myself straight away trapped in a rough embrace, held against a thin shoulder. A somewhat bristly chin scraped my forehead. Then I was released, to gasp and breathe out and gasp again.
Pamela
2010
31
‘YOU HAVE A new comment on your blog,’ Joe says. ‘Somebody called …’ He screws up his eyes, he’s not wearing his glasses. ‘Somebody called Sparks, who’s ninety years old.’
Not long ago I had a student called Sparks, a lovely man with rings and studs in his eyebrows, nose, lips, tongue. He had to take them all out before he started work. My glass furnace is heated to near eleven hundred degrees Celsius, and it’s impossible to wear metal next to the skin. It can’t be that Sparks, since he’s twenty-two.
‘Honey, give it here.’
Joe passes me the tablet and I take a look. I don’t normally do technology while breakfasting in my bathrobe. We’re great bathrobe people, Joe and I, fond of cosiness, massages, hot tubs, neck pillows. It’s a geriatric thing. You can’t do physical work in your seventies without creaking in the mornings. This blog’s called Little Ruins: I’m posting my failed works online, all my droopy vessels, the unmentionables with lop-eared handles and rubbery lips. They’re normally destined for the trash bucket but now they’ve got a new life, nicely lit with a title and a text saying what I learned from each disaster. The comments – especially those from other glassworkers – are often hilarious.
Not this one.
I’m just wondering if you’re the Pamela Lovell who knew Ellen Parr during the war in Upton, Hampshire, UK. I’m a friend of hers. You might like to know she’s 90 and still going strong! BTW I love the emerald mug with its shark fins. How did you do that? Penny Lacey Sparks.
‘What’s up, Pamela?’ Joe’s eyes, sharper now, quiz me over the rim of his cup.
I shut the web page. ‘Nothing. Why?’
‘You just said, “Oh, good God.”’
I try to laugh. ‘It’s not Sparks who’s ninety. It’s someone else, who I thought was dead, but she’s not.’
Joe grins. ‘I’m very happy to hear it.’
His phone beeps. He gets to his feet and leaves the room, running a hand along my shoulders as he passes.