‘Yes, and those are getting on, too.’ She jerked her head towards a pair of trees by the hedge. ‘Bill Kennet gave us those. Do you remember Bill, little girl that you were?’
I nod my head. Suddenly I think of Maurice, the stubborn refuser of proffered juicy stems, warm in his nest of dry grass. I was trying to feed him when a man called Aubrey came, and I said, ‘Yes, but who is that?’ A vision comes, so bright I have to shut my eyes. The tortoise, the grass, the sunshine. A father in shadow. I press my hand against my lips, to stop them trembling.
‘There, there,’ I hear Lucy say.
‘Be OK in a minute.’
‘I know you will.’
I recover myself, open my eyes. ‘You’re looking well too, Lucy!’
‘Yup.’ She nods without conceit. ‘I’ve had me inhalers for years now. Never bin better. Ageing better than herself, anyhow. Go on in, dear, you know the way. She’s waiting.’
I enter the house. I go into the small parlour, step up into the kitchen, and there, sitting at the table, is an old lady.
I can’t get her properly into my sight. Not the whole of her. My eyes keep scuttling about. The collar of her blouse, cream with a dark-blue print. A staring, blue-veined collarbone. One blue eye and one slightly milky. Short, white hair, cloudy to go with the eye. Her hands spread out on the kitchen table. Her fingertips, broad and calloused.
I sit down, because standing is beyond me. It’s as much as I can do to keep breathing.
After a moment she reaches across and takes my hand. Her fingers cling to mine.
Then her other hand reaches out for my other hand. Hers are veined and spotted, the knuckles large. Now we are fully held. Her fingers as warm and strong as they used to be. Mine, adult now, still smaller than hers. She still encloses me.
She says, ‘So here you are, child.’
There is a pulse in her voice, as if a giant hand is gently shaking her. Her eyes look heavenward.
The house is so quiet.
‘Where has everyone gone?’ she says.
‘I have no idea.’
I glimpse her good eye, blazing blue. Any more than that, the tears will come and blind me.
‘Potatoes,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘We should be peeling potatoes.’
‘I don’t want to let go of your hands.’
She laughs a little. ‘Sweetheart. Let’s do the potatoes. We can hold hands again afterwards.’
The potatoes are earthy, in a straw basket in the larder. The memory hits me in the nose, because the smell of Lucy’s larder is exactly the same, of cold good food. Peas sit in there, and custard, and a butter dish, along with empty milk bottles, and tins of prunes.
‘How many shall I bring?’
‘The lot. There are three boys.’
‘Those boys,’ I say. ‘How hungry they were.’
‘You were all hungry.’
I wouldn’t mind the hunger, if I could have been back here, staying with her for ever. I scrub the potatoes at the sink, feeling her eyes on me.
‘I’m just looking at you,’ she says. ‘Thinking how strong you must be. Penny showed me a video. It looks so graceful.’
It’s a relief to dwell for a moment on work. ‘They used to liken it to a dance. Glass-blowing.’
I put the wet potatoes on the chopping board. She takes one, pares it expertly with a knife. I start work with the peeler. A quiet falls over us. I let my gaze wander round the walls, linger for a moment on the only picture in the room, one I don’t remember, showing a young man in army uniform with flattened light hair and small trustable eyes. Then I see the railway clock.
‘Ellen! You’ve given Lucy our clock!’
‘I live here, with Lucy now.’ She laughs at my astonishment. ‘I moved out of the mill house a long time ago.’
I listen to its steady, rocking tick, so familiar that I only now hear it. ‘So we won’t be going to the house?’
She shakes her head. ‘Well. We can. But it’s an artisan mill now, grinding organic flour. The mill house is a tea room, with a museum of old tools upstairs. Full of pictures of Selwyn in his overalls, and our lorry, and all the ancient Victorian Parrs.’ She sighs. ‘I got rid of the house about three years after Selwyn died. I went to Singapore with William Kennet. We visited Edward, and when I came back I sold up.’
‘Penny and I were talking about Edward’s birds.’
‘The first one was the most treasured. You broke some of the wing feathers. I only found out a long time later.’
‘Well, I’m ever so sorry. I was probably five years old.’
She chuckles.
We finish the potatoes, set them to boil. I put the peelings in a dish for the hens. I look out of the window at the patch of garden, the hills beyond. It was here, in Lucy’s cottage on its high bank, that I learned how hills become bluer as they recede.
‘You said there’d be hens in Ireland.’
There it is. Said. There was no thought that preceded these words. It was just the blue hills, and then the hens.
‘Did I? When?’
‘The day I left. I wanted to feed the hens one last time but you said there’d be hens enough in Ireland.’ I turn round to face her. ‘Those were your exact words before you pushed me into the car.’
She swings her head as if from a lash.
‘And then there weren’t any hens. Aunt Hester didn’t have any.’
In the silence her fingers poke, push my back, I hear my own screams. It is a hot day and I cannot stop.
I’m dumbstruck now, the tears dripping from my chin.
I stand for a while longer at the window. The lid rattles on the pan. I turn down the electric. She sits, also without moving, staring ahead of her. Her shoulders are all caved in, as if there’s nothing in the middle.
I think of all the times she hugged me in bed; that hard, hot fusion, those whispered endearments in the half-light. When I added my pounds, shillings and pence correctly she would kneel on the floor to embrace me and say, ‘My clever little creature.’ But that family of mine? It was jumping aboard a milk float, easy to do but nothing there to speak of. My cousins just tramped up the stairs saying ‘G’night, Ma’, and that was it. I thought I’d die, sometimes, from lack of kissing.
‘You know,’ I say to her, ‘I tried to tell myself, at least I’ve felt love. At least I had it once. But sometimes I wished I’d never known you.’
She nods her head, sombre. Looks at her hands. When she speaks her voice is rich with grief.
‘You were so heavy to pick up.’ She shakes her head at the memory. ‘Of course you were heavy. You were precious. I remember I dropped the blanket. That was the day you came, the day of the bus. Oh, yes. I know exactly what you’re talking about, Pamela. There have been times since when I wished I’d never found you.’
I sit down again. A pair of oven gloves is lying on the table, two pockets, one at each end of a long strip. I slide my hand into one of the pockets, feel the coarse stuff, woven wool maybe, in a tight criss-cross knotting which has gone brown like burnt porridge, only fit for toting blackened pans and trays and bread tins.
‘I had no idea I was going to say that.’ My fingertips seek out the holes in the glove, the sparse thready patches inside. ‘It isn’t why I came. I must have been possessed …’
‘It’s nothing.’ Her voice is blank, exhausted. ‘Not compared to what I did to you.’
Now we’re in the wilderness. For the first time I can look properly at her face as she stares at the window. A kind wolf, I used to think sometimes. A white defending wolf, strict with boys who put my shoes out in the rain and dribbled tea all over my schoolwork, a picture showing the proper way to eat a herring. Fiercely loving.
I take my hand out of the warm, threadbare little pocket and fold the oven gloves together. ‘I wrapped these up for you. All I could find was newspaper, old yellow newspaper from before the war. I got some twine and Mr Parr put his finger on the knot.’
Her lips tweak. ‘Those mitts are long gone, I’m afraid.’
‘Of course. How silly of me.’ I’m incredibly cast down by this. ‘They’d be, what, over sixty years old.’
‘These are the same lineage, darling. Their descendants.’