We Must Be Brave

by Frances Liardet

  ‘And what were the craters like?’ I asked.

  ‘Full of still water, like great big dewponds.’ He blinked. ‘How’s George, Lucy?’

  ‘Frettin. I don’t know what to do with him.’

  The night William left for France, Lucy’s father had broken his leg. He had caught his foot in a root high on the embankment above the disused railway track, falling and fracturing his thigh. He was now installed in the office at the kennels, on a couch, preferring this to isolation in his own bed at the Hornes’ cottage.

  ‘He’ll be glad to see you, Bill,’ Lucy continued. ‘The days are ever so long, and he’s gone off the wireless.’

  ‘I know he’s bored with me,’ I said.

  Lucy brought the teapot to the table. ‘He never is, Ellen; he’s always glad to see your face.’

  ‘And my back, a short interval later.’ I was laughing. George and I could never have offended each other.

  William raised a finger. ‘What about the pupils? Always volunteering about the place, those girls. A couple of them could run up to the kennels and read to him.’

  The apples puffed and sighed on the stove. I got up to stir them again. ‘There’s an idea, Lucy.’

  Lucy cackled. ‘He’ll only want the racin pages, Bill. Upton Hall girls, readin out “Golden Boy, two forty-five at Kempton Park” to my dad. That would be a flabbergastin sight.’

  I laughed. ‘Why shouldn’t they? It can’t be all Wordsworth.’

  After tea my friends climbed into the Land Rover and I took the wheel. We went first to Lucy’s cottage, dropped her off, then to Upton Hall. On the drive I spun the wheel from long habit: the potholes moved, but they moved slowly. We reached the main building: it was still the Hall of my childhood, but these days it nestled greyly between two red-brick wings, faced down by the glittering science block opposite.

  William was watching me with a particular look, one I’d come to know well. A sort of tender glare.

  ‘Thank you, Ellen, for the loan of your vehicle. I’m a lucky man to have such friends.’

  ‘Oh, honestly.’ I put my hand over his scarred one, laughing gently. ‘We’re lucky to have you.’

  I made my way back, faster, less careful of the potholes. The Land Rover pitched and rolled. Althea Brock used to say it was like the mine craters at St Eloi, but of course it wasn’t. I thought suddenly of General Lord Plumer. Not the man who had caused the mines to be set at Messines, but the croquet ball Selwyn’s father had turned into a doorstop. I remembered the little girl who had transformed General Plumer into a doll, or the head of a doll. Hauling it onto her tiny lap and wrapping a tea towel round it.

  What had she been saying? Some little phrase, some game about going shopping. She’d been very small then. At the beginning of the war.

  *

  The scrap of apple, the futile ants, the hot sun: all sucked away by low pressure bringing wind and front upon front of heavy rain. William’s weathercock was flung this way and that before settling in the west; a green, storm-tarnished old bird now, as he’d always wanted it to be, for his cousin Mottram, the steeplejack, had long since lost his head for heights. My sandals were stowed in the cupboard, my heavier coats and skirts released from their trunks and presses. I’d had good clothes for nearly thirty years now, and a fire to dry them. The lovely wholesome smell of hot cotton and dry wool; toasty-dry as Elizabeth used to say: I breathed it in time and again, the smell of safety and content. Elizabeth had long retired to a bungalow on the new estate in Barrow End, still with her scarf wound about her head, these days not quite concealing soft white hair which in turn did not quite conceal a pink scalp blotched with fawn patches reminding me of the belly of a Jack Russell terrier.

  So it was October, and autumn was well under way, when I put on a full-length mackintosh and set out through the rain for Althea Brock’s house with six jars of stewed apple in my bag.

  The door to the Lodge, when I knocked, swung gently open. I went in, and took a few paces down the tiled corridor. I was about to call softly, so as not to alarm her, when I drew level with the sitting-room door. Althea was on the sofa, facing a small girl in a school mackintosh and a beret out of which poked a bush of untidy hair. I stifled an exclamation. The Lodge and its surrounding shrubbery were strictly forbidden to Upton Hall girls. But Althea was speaking.

  ‘Bullies abound, my dear,’ she was saying. ‘Bullies abound. And the only remedy is to go back to them with your head held high. Go on. Show me now.’

  The child lifted her chin. A small soldierly form, eyes burning.

  ‘Higher.’

  The child obeyed. There was a long, singing silence, and then Althea spoke.

  ‘That’s the girl. Now off you go.’

  The girl made a bobbing bow to Althea. ‘Thank you very much for the lime cordial, Lady Brock.’ Her voice was almost a whisper. As she turned to go she saw me, gasped and ducked past me through the doorway and back down the corridor. By the time I reached the front door she was darting away over the mud of the drive, her white-socked legs flashing up behind her.

  ‘Good lord, Althea.’ I was laughing – laughing, and rather moved. ‘Who was that?’

  Althea hitched herself up on the sofa, one bony hand stabbing at her cushion. ‘A new girl. She arrived late, and the others are ragging her, the vixens.’

  On the coffee table were two cloudy glasses half-filled with greenish liquid. I longed to bear them away to the kitchen and plunge them into hot suds but Althea’s tiny boiler was grudging. The dishes piled up beside the sink rimed in dried-on food, waiting for the rare flood. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked. ‘What kind of ragging?’ I dug in my bag for paper and pencil. All my ladies had a list prepared when I dropped by, but Althea was emphatically not one of my ladies.

  Althea snorted in disgust. ‘They told her to come and walk down here in the shrubbery, that a sweet old lady would invite her in for tea. I found her cornered by Stuart. I’d like some cod,’ she added, seeing me lick my pencil.

  As if he had heard his name, Stuart sent us a long growl from his tartan bed. He was a terrier of uncertain temper bequeathed by Colonel Daventry, who was now too old to take his dog for walks. I wondered privately how long this arrangement could last. Althea had recently gone from one walking stick to two. But without slackening her pace, or hardly.

  ‘With parsley sauce, Althea, or just plain cod?’

  She stared. ‘Parsley sauce? The Mac Fisheries isn’t a restaurant.’

  ‘You can buy it frozen. The sauce is frozen with it.’

  ‘Good God above. My mother preserved it, you know. Laid it down in layers of salt.’

  Her mother had done no such thing. It was understood that her mother’s cook and under-cook had performed the task. She struggled to her feet, and we made our way down the hall to the kitchen to stare together into her dark cupboards where tins gleamed.

  She grunted. ‘I hate cod.’

  ‘Then why on earth buy it?’

  ‘It’s good for one. And Stuart likes the skin.’

  ‘I’ll get you some trimmings for Stuart. And you might try a box of the new parsley-sauced cod. You must eat it this evening. I don’t trust your icebox.’ I opened her fridge to see the tongue of a glacier, studded with peas, poking out of the plastic hatch. ‘Shall I ask Mrs Ware to pop round?’

  June Ware, June Broad that was, my old schoolmate whose bust rose like dough over the cups of her brassiere, and who had gone for the typing-pool job at the town hall with me. Her bust was still good, and she had the strong, bulging calves of a woman who had never owned a car. She didn’t hold it against me that I had got that job instead of her, and she certainly didn’t need my charity. She had four grown children, all married, and they took turns to roast her a Sunday dinner.

  Althea flapped her hand at the icebox. ‘Oh, if you see fit. While I think of it, Ellen …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lucy’s wondering whether she should collect her stewed apples, or if you’ll
deliver them to the cottage.’

  Slowly I started lifting the jars out of my sturdy bags. Almost a fortnight had passed since that blue September day, the last of that vanished, hot, pre-equinoctial world. I should have taken Lucy’s apples to her cottage, but I hadn’t, and I was at a loss to find the reason. Perhaps there was no reason, and I simply forgot. Althea, however, had spoken carefully, and with meaning, and she was waiting for my reply. Which meant that Lucy had made her feelings known to Althea.

  ‘My God, who would live in a village?’ I plonked a jar on the table. ‘One can’t make the tiniest slip … All she’s going to do is buy that blessed Angel Delight.’

  Because Lucy didn’t eat her apples. She sold the lot at the Women’s Institute market and used the money to buy packets of this dessert.

  Althea picked up the jar, holding it by the neck in a slightly unsteady grip, appraising the contents as one would a vintage liquor. She chuckled at my rage. ‘What’s that? It sounds literally heavenly.’

  ‘A powdered sweet you make up with milk. Tastes of butterscotch.’ I shook my head in bewilderment. ‘I know I should have gone to see Lucy by now. The change in the weather seems to have swept me off my feet, somehow. Time passing. And this rain …’ Curtains of it were falling outside as we spoke.

  ‘It’s like that, on and off.’ Althea touched my arm. ‘For the first few years. You bash around your house looking for your specs, no one to ask where they are, and then things seem to settle around you …’

  ‘Lucy thinks I should have married Bob Coward.’

  The words leaped out like frogs from a pail of water. Well might Althea stare – they surprised me, too.

  ‘You should have married – whom did you say?’

  ‘Bob Coward. He worked at the town hall. When Selwyn tried to turn me down –’ we both smiled at the memory ‘– I went out to tea with Bob Coward and another couple. Anyway, Lucy thinks that if I’d married him I’d have got the full bowl of cherries.’

  Althea frowned. ‘Surely, life is not a bowl of cherries.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I told her. She got the saying wrong. She meant, a full life.’

  Althea’s grin was not an altogether pleasant sight. A great deal of bridgework was on display. ‘My dear girl, are you sure? Lucy’s no great handler of words.’

  ‘But she said it, she said, “what life …”’

  What life is meant to be. Five quick words flashed out on the blade of a paring knife, then covered by the dark roar of the Land Rover engine as William turned into the yard. But I had heard them.

  ‘Good lord, Ellen. Don’t tell me you’re hankering after a life with this Mr Coward. Ten to one he’s a frightful bore.’

  I managed a smile. ‘I don’t suppose it matters.’

  We finished her list and walked together to the front door. Suddenly she chuckled. ‘Did you know there’s a discotheque this Saturday at the Stour Hotel?’

  ‘A discotheque!’

  ‘Mm. I was thinking of going.’

  ‘Who would partner you?’

  ‘That’s the beauty of discotheque dancing. You do it on your own.’ The wires on her teeth shone in the unlit hallway. ‘It’s made for us widows, really. You should come with me.’

  We both started hooting gently, at the idea. Tears were leaking into my eyes, perhaps hers. I opened the door and the gale forced its way in, blew in our faces.

  ‘Ellen, do go and see George. Lucy’s worried about him. An injury like that is cruelty to a man who only ever sits down in church.’

  A long mental sigh swept through me. ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘Oh, and get me some of Lucy’s angel pudding, if you please. It sounds wizard.’

  23

  GEORGE WAS IRRITABLE, shifting his plastered leg over the waxed cloth of the couch. Though he said the sound leg bothered him more. ‘This one –’ indicating the poor limb ‘– he’s content to lay. But this one –’ slapping the undamaged leg ‘– he wants to be up and doing. He’s getting cramped, stuck here on this settee.’

  ‘That’s why you need to exercise it.’ I picked up the crumpled leaflet supplied by the hospital. It featured line drawings of an impossibly muscled man lifting his brawny thigh at varying degrees from his torso. ‘Gosh. He’s a fit fellow. Not very encouraging, somehow.’

  George sighed. ‘I know it.’

  I glanced at his injured leg. Someone, to my mild amazement, had sketched a sailing boat on his knee in biro. The boat was sandwiched between pinched little wavelets and bulbous clouds, all slightly bumpy from the plaster. Underneath was a signature, PL, and the exhortation Get well soon Mr Horne. ‘Who did this, George?’

  ‘Girl from the school. They been up to read.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad.’

  ‘It made a nice change. I might try those exercises.’

  ‘I’ll help you.’ I stood above him, holding out my hand. He lifted his good leg about forty-five degrees until his heel touched my fingers. The heel was warm, dry and small. The sock was clean. I could probably pick this man up.

  The rain had not stopped at all in the three days since I’d gone over to see Lady Brock. People in Upton were openly talking about the possibility of a flood, which was sensible, of course, but sat ill with me. I never liked to tempt the river gods.

  Outside, a barrow clattered to a halt. Lucy, heavily hooded, looked in through the window, gave me a grin of welcome. Then the outer door banged open and there was a stamp of boots, and in she breezed, bringing a gust of damp autumn air. ‘This bloomin rain puts me so behind. I’ve only just finished strawin the hot bitches.’ She coughed. ‘I’ll put the kettle on in a sec, Ellen dear.’

  ‘Lovely. Now,’ I said to George, ‘it says to repeat ten times. Can you manage that today, or shall you just do five?’ Because his face was shining with the effort, and had become the colour of standing cream.

  Lucy took off her working anorak and shook it out, tutting. ‘He’s neglected them. Because he says the man on the bit of paper looks like a circus performer. Ain’t that right, Dad?’ She put a special emphasis on the words ‘circus performer’, by which we were meant to understand that George thought the man in the diagram was homosexual.

  ‘Oh, really, George,’ I cried, as he raised his leg again.

  I followed Lucy into their new kitchenette, their pride, a galley with a shining fridge and Baby Belling stove. ‘I put your jars of apple under your porch, Lucy, on my way up. Lady Brock said you were waiting for them.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She looked sheepish.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry I forgot. I can’t think how. But you could have reminded me, dear.’

  She filled the kettle and set it on the large ring of the Baby Belling. ‘Oh, I kept forgettin too. It’s this weather. The river’s bank high, you know.’

  ‘I do know.’

  ‘Course you do. With the mill channel and all.’

  There was a pause. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to remember that lovely warm day when William came back. When was it? Two, nearly three weeks ago. Seems like a different world now.’

  She was tearing open a packet of small rectangular chocolate-flavoured biscuits, the kind she and her father relished. To me the chocolate-cream filling was cloying, chalky. ‘Do you want a Bourbon, Ell?’

  ‘Perhaps later. You were talking about how my life could have been different if I hadn’t married Selwyn. If I’d married Bob Coward instead.’

  Her graceful little hands moved over a pink plate, arranging the biscuits. ‘When was this, again?’

  ‘The day we were peeling the apples.’

  The kettle came to a boil. Lucy spooned tea into the pot. ‘Oh. When Bill came back …’ She turned to stare at me. ‘You marry Bob Coward? Did I say that?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea. It was you that suggested it.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t the foggiest.’ She shook her h
ead. ‘You know what I’m like, Ell. The things I come out with. Will you take those biscuits, dear?’

  I picked up the plate. The biscuits were laid in a pretty pattern, pointing inward like the dark rays of a pink central sun.

  George pushed himself upright on the couch and I passed him a cup of tea. There was a book lying open, spine uppermost, on the windowsill. I made out the faded gilt words, A History of the Waterford Hounds. ‘Is this what the schoolgirl read to you? May I?’ I turned it over. The yellowing pages were spotted by flies. ‘He showed tremendous sport,’ I read, adopting a squeaky, cut-glass tone, ‘but I must say that when I took over the hounds …’

  George grinned, his teeth reminding me of Lucy’s before she had her dentures fitted. He’d never been shy of them, so the black gap in his broad grin was familiar to all. ‘Don’t make fun,’ he said. ‘The child don’t sound like that. She’s got a nice clear little voice.’

  ‘She does,’ Lucy agreed. ‘Scruffy little bint, though.’

  There. Why should I take any notice of what Lucy said? Words blew off her like a dustbin lid in a gale – you got struck, or not, at random. I was only bothered because her remark to me had been about Selwyn. And that was ridiculous, because like most of the hundred and one flippancies Lucy uttered in the course of a week, it meant so little to her that she’d forgotten it altogether. Absent-mindedly I took a Bourbon, washing it down with a cup of brick-red tea. The biscuit was as horrible as ever but the combination was bracing.

  A sudden muffled cry startled me from my thoughts. I looked up to see William Kennet at the window, his face stretched in a rictus of panic. A moment later he reappeared in the doorway and Lucy leaped to her feet as the cause of his distress became clear. Clasped in his stringy arms and covered over with a piece of sacking, a television. ‘Gordon Bennett! Why didn’t you come and fetch me out, Bill? I could have got the trolley!’

  William panted a reply. ‘She’s a deceptive creature. The weight settles after you pick her up. And a damned awkward shape.’ His bad hand was flattened against one side, his good hand clamped like a bracket around a bottom corner between two of its pig-like legs.