Mr Parr had a little clock, one I wasn’t allowed to play with. A folding leather travel clock that clicked shut with a clasp. Maybe that was how he died, clicking neatly closed. Such a tall, dry, mild, bending person, swabbing at my tears with his handkerchief. Sometimes, when the boys were at their worst, the only person I could bear. I’d sit in his study and try the crossword with him. I’d go to the mill early on Saturday mornings and he’d let me swing down on the pulley, all the way from the top storey to the ground. Kind, he was, always, right up to the last day. And then he put his hat on and drove me away, me and my father, and he didn’t even turn his head when I screamed.
The breeze picks up, chills me. I have a hole in my tights. Ellen used to call this a potato, the way the white roundel of flesh bulged out. In Ireland when it happened Aunt Hester told me, ‘You’ve got a spud,’ and I remembered Ellen and my smaller stockinged leg. And I told Hester, ‘It’s called a potato, not a spud,’ and I was small and very angry still, so Hester said I was quite right.
The moon hangs white, low in the powder-blue sky, just shy of the graveyard wall. The damp air slides into the damp air of Ireland where the moon was torn across with cloud and I gazed at it, that tattered moon, imagining it riding also over England in the same dark night, over Upton, and wondering if Ellen was outside shutting up the hens. If she was looking up and seeing it too. Suddenly I’m young again and my heart is bursting. The Irish Sea, the one Ellen can’t cross, lies between us, and my tears are saltier than the whole of it.
Penny’s coming back. Her kids lollop ahead of her up the path towards me. They look me shyly in the eye, say ‘Hello, Pamela’ in voices at various degrees of breaking, shake hands. I’m so glad they’re here. They’ve pulled me back from the brink. I let them bear me along, and we all troop out of the graveyard and back up the walled lane. There are rock daisies between the stones, pink and white. I hear a creaking laugh in my inner ear.
‘I forgot Lucy!’ I say in sudden panic. ‘How could I? Where’s Lucy’s grave?’
‘Don’t worry!’ Penny’s laughing. ‘Lucy’s not in the graveyard. She’s up at the cottage. We’re going there for lunch. That’s where you’ll see Ellen, Pamela. It’s all arranged.’
We begin to walk up the long road from the graveyard into the village. The children have pulled ahead, skylarking, vanishing into the shadow of the trees.
The questions I have so far refused to ponder lie in front of me now, along the straight road ahead. I can’t go on without raising them.
‘What was it like, Penny? For you, I mean. Being with Ellen.’
She walks beside me, hands in her hoodie pockets, half on and half off the narrow pavement. She has a jaunty way of walking, as if at any moment she might break into a frolic.
‘Heaven.’ She gives a sigh. ‘She was so kind to me. The other girls called me Pigpen because I wouldn’t brush my hair, so she cut out all the tangles and made it look nice. She listened to David Bowie with me. At least, tolerated me listening to David Bowie. And on the long weekends we used to watch Dad’s Army on Mr Horne’s TV with Lucy and Mr Kennet. She laid in a stock of Curly Wurlys for those TV nights.’
‘Of whats?’
‘It’s a sweet.’ She’s giggling. ‘Bendy toffee … I don’t know what I’d have done without her.’
I picture her sitting on the floor with my knight dismembered around her. Sitting there grinning, with my Lady Brock, and my Ellen.
‘Did you play with the hawk?’ I can’t help asking. ‘The one Edward made out of wood?’
‘Oh. Yes. There were lots of those birds. He made all different kinds. A new one every time he visited, apparently. He had a very adventurous war, you know. He—’
‘Yes. We used to push pins into a map, Ellen and me.’ I come to a halt. ‘I was there, you see. In the war.’
A small flock of starlings wheels above the trees. I watch them settle in the upper branches.
‘Of course you were.’ Her voice is so soft. ‘Pamela, I know I had everything you – that you couldn’t ever—’
I brush the air with my hand, a pleading motion, and she falls silent.
When I was still a young child I used to imagine what it would be like if they’d let me visit her. We’d cling to each other but all the time the hours would be passing, and all the time we’d be thinking that I had to go. Looking at the clock: just time for a walk. Just time to have a slice of lardy cake. The tears coming even as I ate. I knew, as I saw us saying goodbye again and again, as I saw myself leave again and again for Ireland – I knew it would have killed us. And if I’d come later, as an adult? It would have been worse. What would we have done then, except sit together and stare at the ruins of all we’d lost, and hold each other’s hands, and cry?
This was going to happen now. This was why I should never have come.
‘You made a snowball,’ Penny suddenly says. ‘You went round and round the garden, and it got bigger and bigger. Ellen brought you inside because you were cold, but you found your way outside again and carried on rolling, and she saw you out of the window, crying because you couldn’t get it up the bank. It had got too big for you to push, it kept rolling back …’
‘What made you think of that?’
She looks bewildered. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t remember any snowball.’
Slowly I pick up my feet. I know I have no choice. A few moments longer, step by step, and here we are, rounding the corner at last, well into the shadow of the trees now, and this turn in the road has an angle which mimics exactly the curve of some internal chamber of my heart, because I know it so well. Ellen and I went back and forth, back and forth like a shuttle through a loom, in and out from the mill to the village and back again, and here I come now, on the last pass, and this time there’s no stopping.
‘Oh, my goodness.’ I clutch Penny’s arm. ‘What on earth have they done?’
‘I know.’
The main street of Upton is clogged with sleek cars. Skirts of creamy gravel lap the spotless tarmac. Every window gleams, every stone is repointed. Cleansed also of people, it seems – there’s no one on the road, in the front gardens, at the windows. Penny pats my hand, gently persuading me to loosen my grip. ‘The houses go for a fortune. Lucy and Ellen are about the only originals left …’
‘This is where they picked up the milk churns.’ I point as we pass a low wall. ‘There was a big wooden platform. The milk lorry stopped and loaded them up.’ I glimpse a gleaming cottage called the old bakery, literally, in lower-case wrought iron. ‘Do you remember a bakery, Penny?’
‘No, just the village shop.’
‘There was a butcher as well. And a saddler …’
My heart is too full for more talking. And although I can’t see it I can smell it, somehow, the street of my childhood, dark and dirty with long ruts of mud from tractors, dung from droves of cattle that ambled by, udders jostling their back legs. The smell of that long-past street keener now as the grassy bank on the left starts to rise, and we approach Lucy’s house. The boys are already bounding up the steps. Which are scrubbed russet-red, I see, and equipped with an iron rail on each side, to help aged knees.
I hold on tight too. I have to, because as I climb I have the sensation that I’m falling forward.
We reach the top, and the back door opens and Lucy comes out.
‘Hello, Penny. Hello, Danny, William, Josh. Oh, and here’s young Pam.’ As if I’m just another child. ‘Hello, Pam.’
She’s smaller than me. Hair a matt dark brown with half an inch of white at the roots. Beaming with a magnificent set of dentures. Cosy in a bottle-green body-warmer with half the quilting unpicked, a pair of what look like ancient black ski-pants, a yellow scarf high underneath her chin.
‘Look at you, all flabbergasted that I’m still here!’ She searches my face beadily, wags a finger. ‘Oh, no. You can’t kill me off that easily!’ A brisk, stiff little embrace, her head coming up to my chin and bringing a sweet breath of lavender, and then she takes my free hand in hers.
‘You’re looking well, dear.’ She laughs in her creaking way. ‘I’ve heard all about you. You make vases and suchlike. Well, I never.’
I look around. ‘The apple tree’s gone!’ I blurt.