I set three places at the kitchen table. Selwyn didn’t have lunch. Elizabeth started the last loaf, cutting it fine. We listened to the voice of a dead woman piped through Pamela’s mouth, Mrs Pickering exhorting her small child, and prepared the meal.
In the afternoon I found an old bed-jacket that my mother used to wear when she sat up against the pillows to drink her tea. It was a flouncy woollen affair with a flapping collar and silky straps, and it hung down almost to Pamela’s knees. When I drew it off her shoulders she clutched at the swathes of wool. ‘No. No, it’s too cosy. Let me keep it.’
‘You shall have it back when I’ve taken off these silly straps. We need buttons, nice big ones …’
I had no buttons large enough. After a long search we found, in a wooden box in the dressing room, the toggles from an old duffel coat belonging to my brother Edward. That coat had been so torn and stained that Mother and I had cut it into strips and burned it on the fire. I refused to worry about Edward because he’d told me, the day he left to go to sea, that I should never worry, that worry brought bad luck and he would always need luck. He’d been fourteen, I eleven, and since then we had spent a total of nineteen precious days together. His last letter, dated a month ago and headed Singapore, said I’ll take my chances here, drst Ell. The company is doing terrifically, what with soldiery everywhere. I’ve been in a few jams before now and know my way around. Place like a fortress – indeed, it is a fortress and always has been. I’ve been contemplating calling myself Senhor de Souza and speaking entirely in pidgin. But like as not will end up doing my bit.
At least doing his bit wouldn’t put his life in danger, not in Singapore. I was glad he was far away from all this.
Pamela was delighted with the toggles. They were of such smooth, dark-polished wood. I took her to the mill where she sat on the office floor while I tidied my desk. My eyes lit upon an advisory leaflet on the turnip gall weevil which for some reason had come my way, and which I was going to pass to Lady Brock, with her great root crop. It seemed now that this message, arriving as it did before the bombing, belonged to another world. Pamela sat leaning against the wall, sucking her thumb, putting two fingers over her eyelids to pin them closed. That seemed to comfort her, as did the battering of my typewriter keys when I began my letters. ‘Do more,’ she said, whenever I paused. ‘Keep going bangbang.’ It was a noisy behemoth of a machine. We went back to the house an hour before dusk and saw a policeman ahead of us, wheeling his bicycle up the path.
He turned to face us. The strap of his helmet ran beneath a chin now blue with the bristle that accumulated by the evening.
‘Mrs Parr,’ he said, by way of greeting. ‘I’m Constable Flack. Suky Fitch’s brother.’
‘Suky’s brother!’ Astonishing, how such a bulky individual could spring from the same stock as our diminutive mill forewoman.
The constable’s flinty, fifty-year-old eyes warmed. ‘We had different mams.’
He removed his helmet. For a sickening moment I thought he was about to announce Mrs Pickering’s death. But instead he said gravely to Pamela, ‘Would you be so kind, miss, and take this hat for me? I’ve got a great bag of papers to carry.’
He and Pamela went into the sitting room. Elizabeth was shutting up the hens, so I made tea the colour of washing water and took it through. ‘That’s my number,’ he was saying to Pamela. ‘And that there, GR, what do you think that means?’
‘It means you’re fierce. Grrr. So have you been to see Mummy?’
He lifted his bewildered face to me. I heard Elizabeth open the back door. ‘Pamela, I need to speak to the constable. Elizabeth’s got some milk for you.’
She burst out with a loud bellow. ‘Why won’t anyone bring me my mummy!’ I embraced her but she growled and with surprising strength pushed me away. ‘Don’t keep hugging me! You’re not my mummy!’ She stamped her foot. ‘Where’s my mummy!’ Her face crimson, she threw herself on the floor, roaring, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Oh, my mummy!’
Elizabeth came in. We gave each other blank, drained stares. The constable shifted in his chair. ‘I’ve got to get back before dark,’ he said through the din.
‘Come into the kitchen, Constable.’
We left Elizabeth kneeling beside the screaming child. As the door closed I saw her place the flat of one gentle hand on Pamela’s stomach. Her face, Elizabeth’s face, was a mask of sorrow.
In the kitchen Constable Flack handed me a child’s ration book. ‘This was found in her mother’s handbag,’ he told me. ‘You must make sure it goes with her.’
I gasped. ‘When will she leave?’
‘Sit down, Mrs Parr.’
I did so. We listened to the screams in the sitting room. If she didn’t stop, I’d have to go back in there. But just then Pamela gave a choking sigh, and Elizabeth’s voice came to us, muffled. ‘There, there,’ she was saying. ‘There, there.’
Constable Flack cleared his throat. ‘We don’t know what’s become of Mr Pickering. He scarpered long before the war, it seems. Nobody in Plymouth has ever seen hide or hair of hubby.’
‘Pamela hasn’t mentioned him …’ My breath fluttered out through my nostrils. ‘What were they doing in Southampton?’
He shrugged. ‘We’ve got no way of knowing. She said nothing to the hotel staff.’
I picked up the ration book, stared at it in a sort of stupor.
‘You’ll get a pint of milk for the little one. And please obtain a child’s respirator. Hers couldn’t be found. Register her at your shops here in Upton. However short her stay.’
A pint of milk for Pamela. ‘She mentioned an aunt in South Africa.’
‘Oh, yes.’ The constable nodded. ‘A Mrs Marjorie Lord of Cape Town. The Plymouth officers found some letters, none more recent than ten year ago. Seems the sisters weren’t corresponding at the time of Mrs Pickering’s death.’
‘She certainly talked about her sister to Pamela.’
The constable rubbed his chin. ‘The Plymouth boys have it in hand, but it’ll be a good while before we hear from Mrs Lord. Any rate, you’re stuck with the little girl until Southampton sorts itself out. Telegraph, electricity, telephones, all properly snarled up. Plus there’s the stragglers from the raid. One lot were out in a field, in a storm drain. A storm drain.’ He stood up. ‘Don’t worry unduly, Mrs Parr. We’ll find her somewhere suitable. A nice family who’d take her on. Pack her in like another little sardine.’
‘We’ll have to tell her soon. It’s worse not to.’
‘I expect so.’
I stared up at him, and then rose to my feet.
‘Constable Flack, we’re not unsuitable ourselves, you know. We’ve got three boys from Southampton already. We’d be happy to pack her in, as you say.’
In the silence which followed I heard the front door open, and then Selwyn’s light voice. ‘Hello?’ I could tell from his expectant tone that he’d seen the constable’s bicycle.
I raised my voice. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’
‘Ah.’ Selwyn came in. ‘Good afternoon, Constable. Have you unearthed any family?’
‘This is Constable Flack, darling. Suky’s half-brother.’ I gripped the back of the chair. ‘I was just telling him we’re perfectly prepared to take Pamela under our wing for a while.’
‘Just until we manage to place her, sir.’ Constable Flack fitted his helmet onto his head.
‘She’s got an aunt in South Africa,’ I told Selwyn. ‘Her father’s long gone. There’s no one else.’
‘I was informing Mrs Parr that we’ll do our best to find her a berth –’ Constable Flack delved in his tunic pocket and produced bicycle clips ‘– while we try to get a hold of the aunt. Or, if we’re lucky, this darned elusive Mr Pickering.’
‘Pickering. Pimpernel. Very good.’ Selwyn grinned, twitching the buttons out of the buttonholes of his coat with a brisk thumb and forefinger. Most people used both hands to unbutton their coats, but he didn’t.