We Must Be Brave

by Frances Liardet

  Pamela, there’s been a flood. Did it wash you back here, little girl? I thought I saw you in the mirror, my darling

  Once, twice

  But when I looked again it was only Penny

  ‘Stupid.’ I tore the paper out of the machine and crumpled it up. ‘Stupid, stupid fool.’ I threw the ball of paper across the room, and it hit the skirting board and flew under the bed.

  27

  THE WATERS RECEDED, and Pipehouse Wood turned to blue and gold under a clear windy sky, with torrents of crisp beech leaves tumbling from the trees. Althea and I walked there with Stuart, Stuart mostly travelling underground with a fine disregard for the difference between rabbit warrens and badger setts, an attitude which would one day earn him a calamitous bite on the nose. Althea was equally and even more alarmingly scornful of the holes in the ground.

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer a flatter route?’ I pleaded. ‘I can’t carry you if you fall, you know.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, pointing at one of the larger badger hollows. ‘Just bury me here. It’s better than those Druids. They’re always burying each other in farmers’ fields, aren’t they? So inconsiderate. Just what you want to dig up when ploughing. A blasted Druid.’

  ‘I think they prefer groves, Althea. Clearings. Places like Pipehouse Wood, in fact. I’m quite certain they wouldn’t choose a cornfield.’

  Time passed, the weather turned again. Iron ragbags of clouds marauded, discharging heavy drops and hail, but they travelled in small convoys separated by wide tracts of rough blue sky. Nothing like the dank low cover of the flood. That was a month ago now and I was so glad it had all gone, the submerged fields and fences, the tugging, knee-high brown waters. The feeling of time out of joint.

  ‘Are you taking Lady Brock to the vicar’s party, Ell?’

  Lucy and I were sitting side by side at a table in the village hall. George Horne had lost his plaster cast and regained his feet, liberating Lucy from the kennels for her time-honoured Thursday morning off to attend the Women’s Institute market. I’d been minding her stall for her in the meantime, presiding on her behalf over the pastel rainbows of knitted baby clothes, the bright primaries of embroidered birds and flowers. I had nothing but my humdrum preserves and eggs. I could never compete with this glory.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I think you might have surpassed your nan, in skill.’

  ‘No one could surpass my nan.’ But a small smile expressed her inner delight. ‘The vicar’s party, my dear. Are you taking Lady B?’

  ‘Oh! Yes, I am. I’d forgotten it was so soon.’

  Lucy cleared her throat, performed an experimental wheeze. ‘You ain’t got one of them Fisherman sweets, dear?’

  ‘No, I’m so sorry, Lucy.’

  Her wheeze turned into a hectic, rattling cough. I reached over and slapped her gently on the back, which she said she needed and which never, in the decades that I’d been doing it, made the slightest difference. ‘Lucy, there’s a boy with asthma at the village school, you know. He breathes in some kind of spray from a little pump. It works an absolute treat. I wonder if you—’

  ‘I ain’t got asthma.’

  ‘Really, I think you might have.’

  The cough quietened. She picked up her needlepoint frame and stabbed out a row of brown stitches, the outline of the tail of a wren.

  ‘It’s the dentures all over again,’ she murmured, after a long pause.

  ‘Aren’t you glad of your dentures?’

  ‘Gladder not to be told what to bloomin do all the time.’

  Some time after the war I’d asked William if he could persuade George Horne tactfully to apprise Lucy of the fact that the dentist was now free of charge. That was the sum of my involvement. I gave her a saintly, forbearing smile.

  She snorted, abandoned her irritation, grinned at me. Even now there was still a kink in her smile, a tweaking-down of her top lip to conceal the long-gone gaps.

  ‘Oh! I nearly forgot.’ Her hand dived into the front of her jerkin, a padded affair faded to salmon pink except for a shiny brick-red square testifying to a pocket recently ripped away. From the surviving pocket she produced a small white envelope, creased and grimed. ‘I’ve got a letter for you, Ell.’

  ‘Who from?’

  Her eyes glinted. ‘Open it up.’

  Mrs Parr, the envelope said. The back, spotted by some nameless brown liquid, was blank. ‘Really, Lucy, look at the state of it.’

  ‘I ain’t a postman.’

  I slid my thumb under the seal. A child’s handwriting, looped and regular, and on the fold of the paper the words kind to me and gave me a warm bed.

  ‘How did you get this, Lucy?’

  ‘She came up the kennels round about Sunday teatime.’ Lucy selected a new needle and a yarn of a slightly darker brown. ‘She was on the lam. Couldn’t reach the mill in time, she said, so she popped over to me.’

  ‘That’s extremely silly of her! I don’t want to be party to any trouble she gets herself into. Why on earth is she writing to me?’

  Lucy squinted at the eye of her needle. ‘It might be a thank you, for having her. Better late than never.’

  ‘What did she say, when you saw her?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘Well, how did she seem?’

  ‘What d’you mean, how did she seem?’

  ‘Yes! Did she seem upset, for example? Or anxious? Or cheerful, come to that?’

  Lucy pondered, threaded needle poised.

  ‘She read me my Bunty,’ she said at last.

  Was it possible actually to die from exasperation? ‘Lucy!’

  ‘Ellen, my dear, why don’t you read your letter and find out how she is for yourself?’

  ‘I will.’ On the other side of the hall the kitchen hatch rattled up, releasing a cloud of steam. ‘I’ll fetch you a hot drink. It might help your chest.’

  ‘I’ve got rock cakes.’ Deirdre Harper folded her arms. It was a challenge.

  ‘Two rock cakes, then, Deirdre, please, and a pot of tea for two. I’ll take them over to Lucy, if that’s all right.’

  Deirdre narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like her cups to travel, even if only across the hall to the stallholders. Tea was to be taken here, at the tables set out by the kitchen. Her son’s death all that time ago, in the cold sea of Norway, right at the beginning of the war – this death had turned her into a vixen, and a vixen she’d remained for over thirty years, black lips bared over long narrow teeth, at bay in the bracken. I admired her for it.

  ‘You’d better sit down while I get it ready.’

  Meekly I obeyed and, once seated, pulled the letter out of the envelope.

  Dear Mrs Parr,

  Please may I talk to you? Every day I go down to the humps and bumps at about half-past three. It’s free time and no one speaks to me so they don’t notice I’m gone. Please can you meet me there? If you’re too busy shopping for Lady Brock or feeding the hens I will understand. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you but I’m doing it because you were kind to me and gave me a warm bed.

  Yours sincerely, Penny Lacey

  The writing was small and smeared in places where her fingers had moved over the paper. Every letter that could be joined was joined. I pondered on the humps and bumps. What, and where, they could be.

  I folded the letter over, and over again crossways, so that I couldn’t read the writing.

  Deirdre plonked the tea and rock cakes down.

  ‘Thanks, Deirdre,’ I said automatically. ‘Those look nice.’

  ‘Made this morning.’

  ‘You lent me Patricia’s shoes.’ I thought of this every so often, but I’d never mentioned it to Deirdre before. ‘When I went for my job at the town hall, and I had nothing except my old boots.’

  Her mouth stayed downturned but the memory kindled in her eyes. ‘Patricia wasn’t best pleased.’

  ‘Shoes with a heel,’ I said. ‘They changed my life. I’m sure I couldn’t have got that job in my boots.’

>   She smiled at last. ‘For want of a heel—’

  ‘The job was lost.’

  Her lips tightened, and the moment was gone. ‘Don’t forget those cups, mind. I want them back.’

  I watched her depart. She’d slipped a pair of stockings into the shoebox as well, Deirdre, knowing that I’d have had none of my own.

  For want of a heel. For want of a nail. When did I write that? I could see my typewriter in my mind’s eye. It was during the war and I was in the mill office, and I’d been pleading with a Mr … Mr Gresham, of course, for some piece of equipment that could not be had anywhere. Threatening him with the defeat of the nation over a – yes, that was it – a new protective screen, to stop river debris in the head-race getting into the turbine. The darkness had been crowding in on me, darkness of the war, and of the winter. I had the desk lamp poised over the black-topped keys so that the ranks of gold letters shone. Bang bang bang, and then Suky Fitch had come in and told me that Selwyn had arranged for my child to be taken away. The serried gold-gleaming black keys, and Suky’s enquiring face, and the knock in my heart.

  Their name was Henstrow. The woman had bandaged legs. I had stood up to Selwyn: No. My girl shall not stay there. She will come home with me.

  There was a rattle on the roof of the village hall. Rain had come again. People were raising their voices in soft coos of dismay. A huddled throng clustered by the door, unwilling to depart; they were nudged gently backwards by a wetter crowd coming in, flapping umbrellas. What a morning, they said. Wellingtons if I’d thought. Dark figures passed in front of me, shoulders shining wet. Dr Bell had been wearing an overcoat, that day when the busloads came, fleeing Southampton. He was the only one of us properly dressed. Deirdre had been smoking outside in an overall, her red elbows bared, and Selwyn and I had been wearing light jackets. We hadn’t waited to put on top clothes. How joyous the morning had seemed, festive. The weather had been dull, in reality, but in my memory we hurried through sparkling frost to meet our girl.

  The folded letter lay in front of me, a small smudged square. I picked it up and put it in my handbag.

  The crowd swelled, murmured, parted. Lucy was on her feet, gesturing, one hand flat for a saucer, the other tipping an imaginary cup to her lips. I got up from the table, poured her a cup of tea, carried it to her along with a rock cake on a plate. When I set the things down she was speaking to me, saying ‘parched’ and some other words.

  I sat down slowly, and Lucy’s voice became clearer. ‘This rock cake is properly delicious. Most people don’t realize, they’re only meant to look like rocks. Where’s yours? Ellen, you’ve gone and left your cake on the table over there. Ellen, dear?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Your rock cake.’

  ‘I don’t want any cake … I think I’ll go and see William when we finish here.’

  ‘Give it to him, then,’ Lucy said. ‘He deserves it. After all, he set me right. You know, on that little matter.’

  I stirred myself, tried to concentrate on what she was saying. ‘What little matter?’

  ‘You know. About you not marrying Bob Coward, and the bowl of cherries, and all that. He reckons –’ her eyelids fluttered ‘– that as neither him nor me have ever got within spittin distance of wedlock, we shouldn’t cast aspersions on other people’s marriages. It’s not within our purview.’

  She copied his measured delivery exactly, which would normally amuse me.

  ‘Cast aspersions.’ My voice was dull. ‘Yes, I suppose you did.’

  Lucy was looking down at her lap. There was a faint heat in her sallow face. Then she lifted her head.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Ellen.’

  That was all she said. Gracefully, and with her grandmother’s natural courtesy which in Lucy was as rare as the blue flash of a kingfisher.

  ‘And I beg yours, Lucy.’ I gave her a bleak smile. ‘It doesn’t matter what you said. Not now.’

  I pedalled up the drive of Upton Hall. The rain had left shining ruts, small pools: the skirts of my coat were soon spattered, because that was what happened, if one dared to cycle here. One got bumped, one slid, one became muddy. But I was resolute. Penny Lacey was not my concern. I’d telephone Margaret Dennis – she was in loco parentis, after all – and suggest a good dollop of pastoral care, perhaps from a kindly sixth-former. For some reason a clear picture of the imaginary sixth-former came unbidden to my mind, a girl with unruly walnut-coloured hair and small, friendly blue eyes, complete with steaming kettle and buttered toast. Or perhaps it was all Penguin chocolate bars and Coca-Cola now. No, not for Penny. She’d liked my tea and toast.

  I’d see the girl, that was all. Speak briefly and kindly to her, and then consign her to the care of her redoubtable headmistress. I couldn’t afford to be waylaid again by those mirrored glimmerings. Those half-caught glimpses that, coming warningless in the gloom of the evening and again in the bright morning light, had sliced open my heart.

  Reaching the gravel sweep in front of Upton Hall, or ‘the main building’ as it was known now, I dismounted and began to push my bicycle down a path which had once passed under an avenue of pergolas fragrant with climbing roses, but which now led between two rows of tennis courts. At the bottom of the tennis courts, a gate pierced a high brick wall. I wheeled the bike through the gate and, once on the other side, leaned it against the wall.

  I had realised, soon after leaving the Women’s Institute market, what Penny had meant by the humps and bumps.

  Today the low winter light threw the desecration into relief. The traces of the paths, the greenhouse footings, the ancient vegetable beds were picked out sharp and clear, the hollowed-out pattern of the great kitchen garden of Upton Hall which, in the autumn of 1959, had been destroyed in a matter of days. It was Mrs Dennis, in her first year as headmistress, who had committed this act of vandalism. William’s gentle contractions and decommissionings over previous years – closing an asparagus bed here, felling an ancient fig tree there – had nothing in common with this extirpation, this ingress of a boiler-suited ground-clearance team who in the space of a week had grubbed up fruit bushes, dismantled the remaining greenhouse – apparently because of the danger it posed – and turfed over everything else. ‘It was my great blunder,’ Mrs Dennis said these days, and nobody disagreed. The wall at least remained, deeply shadowed on the western side but diagonally bisected by the sun along the southern boundary. In the sunlit part, preserved in lighter brick, the shape of a door long since removed. Above it, on the other side of the wall, the elms rose high. They remained, too, in the face of the blight which had recently taken so many. Apparently the Reverend Acton led prayers in church for these trees, that they should be spared. Some villagers disapproved, but it seemed to me to be a good use for prayer.

  A movement in the shadow. She was coming down the path under the wall towards me, hopscotching over the flagstones. A child in a school mackintosh and beret. She hadn’t seen me yet.

  I hailed her softly. ‘Penny.’

  She hurried towards me. ‘Oh, Mrs Parr! I knew you’d come. Well, I hoped you would. Actually I was afraid you wouldn’t. But here you are!’

  She was actually lifting off her heels, her clear little voice a burbling fountain.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me writing,’ she rushed on. ‘I’m glad Miss Horne passed my letter to you. We had Battenberg cake at her house and I read her a comic. She can’t read at all, can she? It must be such a pain. I must say,’ she burst out, ‘it’s so nice to see you again!’

  Her short hair stuck out in wisps, her teeth were joyfully white. I remembered her parting embrace, as hard as the butting of a young lamb. It would be so easy to grin back, to surrender to this delight. But I forced myself to speak levelly, to keep my smile firm and reasonable.

  ‘It was a bit naughty of you to go to Miss Horne’s house. You could have got her into trouble as well as yourself. Let’s walk, shall we? I’m so cold, and I bet you are too. Now, what did you want to tell me?’

>   We made our way up the sunlit side of the ruin. She bobbed along by my shoulder. ‘What it is, it’s the Exeat coming up, you see, Mrs Parr.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Exeat. That he she, it may go out. It’s Latin. We get two a term and they’re long weekends. One in October, one in November.’

  Of course. They’d been returning to school when one such flood came.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on. ‘Mummy’s in the Laurels. I never know when she’s going in, or when she’s coming out. Daddy says I’m not to worry, and so does Mrs Dennis. I’m not worried because it always does her good. Anyway, Mummy’s in the Laurels and Dad’s in Ulster, you see.’

  We came to a stop. She was looking up at me, waiting, her hand shielding her eyes from the weak yellow sunlight. I searched for a way to go on.

  ‘I’m sure that’s right, Penny. There’s absolutely no cause to worry.’ We turned around and began to walk back up towards the gate. ‘Can’t you go away with a friend?’

  ‘I haven’t got any friends. Do you know what the girls do at the weekends? When everyone gets bored? They take turns imitating me coming into the house sitting room. They open the door really slowly, and then they put their nose round, then their eyes, then their whole head, and shoulders and so on, and by that time everyone’s screaming with laughter. I know I’m a bit shy, but I do not come into the sitting room like that.’

  How shamelessly vile they were. How valiant she was, with her mackintosh belt so correctly fastened. Some girls loosened their belts, let them fall behind in nonchalant dangling. But hers was buckled neatly and tightly round her waist. They probably teased her for that, too. I stepped forward so that I didn’t have to look at her, and found myself on the verge of stepping into a shallow rectilinear trough, now filled with rainwater that reflected the sky. It was the floor of William’s shed. I stood motionless as the brick walls rose again, along with the stacks of clay flowerpots, greened and lichened and teetering. Pain flared in my lower back, as brief as summer lightning.