So … I try to think how to put this. So Ellen doesn’t even know you’ve contacted me?
No, she doesn’t. I didn’t want to upset her.
I stare at the wall and breathe in.
As if she senses the impact, she writes again.
Pamela,
I’m so sorry. I’ve upset you instead, haven’t I. I’m an idiot.
I’ve known about you for a long time, that’s all. And she’s been talking about you lately. And I know she’d never ask you to come. Because of what happened.
She says you began a new life when you were small, and that she would only hurt you more by bringing it all back again.
Look, I’d better just bog off. Sorry. Penny.
P.S. I really do love your glass.
The alarm emits a soft silvery ping.
‘Bog off,’ I say to it.
The sun comes up a shocking dirty bubblegum, a colour that would normally excite me. But today I’m underslept, shaken. So I give the sunrise a dull stare, and gulp coffee. Joe’s watching me patiently.
‘I can’t talk about it now,’ I say to him.
‘OK.’ He returns to his slice of Small Planet six-grain toast. He never presses me, just waits. I’m the same with him. It’s easy for us. We can always simply go back to thinking about our work.
‘Joe, you know I told you my mother died in the war?’
‘Mm-hm?’
I wrap my hands around my mug. The gesture’s strange, belonging to my childhood, to the cold of Upton.
‘Sorry.’ My laugh is unsteady. ‘I really can’t talk about it now.’
‘OK.’
The sun hauls itself higher. Now a respectable grandmotherly rose. ‘I love you, Joe.’
‘I know.’
I drop Joe off at work, get to the studio. Every five minutes I think of Penny’s message. I try to hold it in my head. Get the import of it. Even seeing Ellen’s name, reading that she talked about me: I can’t compute that. I shake my head to clear it, but the words flood back in.
I’ve hardly been working an hour when I burn my hand. I let a blowing-iron overheat in the mouth of the furnace, and I grab it without thinking. I have a huge sign above the door saying TREAT ALL METAL AS HOT and I never, ever do anything this stupid. I run ice water over the cushions of my palm and lower fingers, put a light dressing on, and leave the studio to my assistant.
My hand is agony but I must do something useful. So I go food shopping. I push the cart down the fruit aisle and try and fail to jumble a watermelon out of a deep plastic crate with one hand. Each time I get the melon to the top of the crate, it falls back in again. People glance at me as they go by but no one does a damn thing.
I start to cry.
In the end I’m rescued by an African-American lady in a red hairnet, a woman as old as me. She lifts out the melon and puts it in my cart.
‘Oh, ma’am, that’s very kind.’
I don’t hide my tears, I don’t care.
She starts singing to me. ‘The tide is high but I’m holding on,’ she sings. Then she looks me in the eye.
‘Yes, my sister!’ she says. ‘We got to hold on!’ And she goes on her way.
I check out my groceries and go to the car. I sit in the parking bay, blubbering. Then I open up my phone and write a message. It’s short, but I can’t get any further, not right now.
Penny. Please don’t bog off.
That afternoon I teach a beginners’ blowing class. I let everyone have a salutary look at my burn, and we run over our first-aid techniques. By the end of the class I’m disintegrating again, but nobody notices. As my beginners leave, the studio phone rings.
‘Pamela?’ A young voice, chirpy. ‘It’s Penny.’
It’s impossible for me to speak. But it seems she knows that.
‘I’m sorry,’ she goes on. ‘This is probably too much. But I had to say hello. So you know me, a bit, anyway.’
Some moments pass, and I find my voice.
‘Penny, are you in Upton?’
‘Yes.’
I squeeze my eyes shut and lean against the wall.
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘There’s no rush. You can both take your time.’
At the end of the day I collect Joe from his office. His mouth falls open when he sees the bandage. I explain about the burn and he looks at my face.
‘Honey,’ he says, and takes the wheel.
I watch him adjusting the seat and the mirror. ‘It’s not just the burn,’ I tell him.
‘Oh. Right.’ He backs out, joins the traffic.
‘It’s to do with England, and the war.’
‘Let me drive, sweet girl.’ He rubs my knee. ‘Let me drive, and tell me at home.’
The road unrolls in the light, shining blacktop under a dome of blue. In the distance a violet frieze of mountains hangs in the air. I could blow it away with one breath.
32
I’M SITTING BY A coal fire in the living room of a B&B in Hampshire, a safe five miles from Upton.
The coals are fake, glittering and glowing from ruby to cherry and back again. You aren’t meant to like these fires but I adore them. I’m eating a bowl of leek and potato soup, made by my landlady, and it’s delicious. I’ve got a rug over my knees, and the TV is tuned to a programme about a couple who are deciding whether to stay in England, where it pours with rain, or relocate to a country where it doesn’t. An entirely non-existent dilemma, in my view. Would I like a home-made cheese scone and a cuppa, asks my landlady? I should think I would.
She’s asked me why I’m here, and I’ve found that my reply, ‘Looking up an old friend,’ works very well. It’s easy to say and it doesn’t cause adrenalin to pour into my bloodstream. That’s because it’s not true, of course. Whatever Ellen was, it was not a friend.
Penny and I have had several conversations by now. Each one longer, each one building on what went before. We’ve pieced together a bridge, or maybe a series of stepping stones, so that I can edge out into the torrent. Agreeing to consider, tentatively suggesting, firmly committing: stone by stone. Somewhere along the way Penny asked Ellen if she would like me to visit. Ellen, apparently, kneeled down on the floor. And then refused point-blank to entertain the notion.
‘I know how she feels,’ I remember saying, on the phone.
‘She’ll get there,’ Penny told me.
I’ve learned a bit about Penny, as well. Found the answer to a question that bobbed benignly to the surface of my mind as we conversed: why, or rather how, a woman forty years her junior – not a neighbour, mind, and not even distantly related – came to befriend Ellen in the first place. She was rescued, too – from a flood, as it happened, and an alcoholic mother, and a pack of bullying schoolgirls, denizens of Upton Hall under its new dispensation. Penny did not fit in. So Ellen took pity on her.
Other questions will arise from this, I know. But I can’t ponder them now. The main thing is, it’s safe to cross the river.
The landlady brings me the scone and cuppa, and in comes a muddy terrier and suddenly the room is rank with strong tea and wet dog and rain. Ellen never had a dog but Lady Brock did. He was called Nipper. Nipper had one blue eye, he enjoyed porridge, he dug holes where he shouldn’t. I was naughty too – I failed to take my shoes off and covered the sitting-room carpet with mud. Elizabeth was furious, so to make up for it I picked her some pretty flaming flowers I found on the runner-bean poles in the vegetable plot. That was the only time I made Elizabeth cry. I cried louder, to outdo her and to demonstrate my essential innocence, and Ellen came into the kitchen. What is this hullabaloo? She saw the bean flowers on the floor, where Elizabeth had thrown them. And she bent down and held me tight and tight, and I buried my face in the crook of her arm. How old would she have been? Twenty-three, four? She never had any other children, Penny told me on the phone. Any other children. Penny actually said that. Suddenly the room’s too hot. Ellen’s woollen arm presses against my cheek, warm and prickly and quite hard too, because she was thin as well as young. She was thin and young and mine.
‘Oh dear,’ says the landlady. ‘Look at your face. Is it the dog? I shall shoo him out.’
‘The dog’s fine,’ I say. ‘I’m just tired.’