We Must Be Brave

by Frances Liardet

  ‘It’s the cigars. I can’t bear them. Actually, I think I might go. If Lady Brock’s ready. I brought her with me.’

  I moved across the grass towards Althea, leaving Margaret Dennis standing.

  ‘Well, you’ve made an impression on James Acton,’ Althea said, as I helped her into the Land Rover.

  ‘I’m not surprised. I told him we turn into pieces of moss.’ I climbed in and we set off for the Lodge. ‘Mother certainly has. There’s moss all over her grave. It’s gorgeous, like a coverlet. I’d like to think there was something of her in it.’

  I spoke absently, took the bend faster than I should. We both leaned sideways in our seats.

  ‘That wasn’t the sort of impression I had in mind, Ellen.’

  I was used to Althea’s voice, with its ironic drawls and hollows, the coarse gravel of its lower reaches. But the emphases seemed even heavier than usual. I gave her a quick glance. Her eyes were trained on me, deep and knowing.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Althea. Oh, honestly.’

  ‘Why is it so impossible that a man would find you attractive, Ellen?’

  I swung round another corner. ‘Ha! I’ve put paid to that. I’ve just learned he’s a widower. Not only did I deny the Resurrection, I did it to a man whose one solace must be the hope of meeting his wife in the hereafter—’

  ‘We’re nearly at the turn, Ellen. Slow down. Slow down.’

  At her bidding I slowed, lurched onto the drive, and came to a halt by the Lodge. I applied the handbrake, took my hands from the wheel, and heaved in several deep breaths.

  ‘Ellen, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Bloody Margaret Dennis—’

  The mirror swung, the light flashed, a small pale child looked heavenwards. I clamped my hands over my mouth.

  ‘Margaret? What’s she done, the animal? I won’t have her upsetting my friends.’

  Althea put a hand on my arm but it did not help me. She and I were once more in the sun room at Upton Hall with the cactus tall against the black-rimmed window. And Selwyn was upstairs playing the piano to Sir Michael, and I was feeling that delicious wash of gold over my body as Althea told me that Selwyn was in love with me. And even at that moment she was warning me that he would try, the moment he came downstairs, try his hardest to release me, that this was about to happen …

  ‘Mariage blanc, you told me it was going to be. Do you remember, Althea? Well, it wasn’t a white marriage, it was golden. Un mariage doré—’

  ‘Darling girl—’

  ‘Lucy was right, actually. I didn’t get the full bowl of cherries. What life was meant to be. She just didn’t understand what it was. What I didn’t have—’

  ‘Ellen, dearest friend.’ Althea’s eyes were such a kindly brown. Just now a little aglimmer with party booze. ‘Whatever Lucy might say, a marriage without children – you and I know this – is a matter for nobody, nobody but you and your husband. Now, much as I’m enjoying the comfort of your Land Rover, I’m going to suggest we head indoors. We can sit down over a nice cup of coffee. Just set me free from this deathtrap.’ She began to struggle with the seat-belt buckle.

  ‘Children.’ I laughed. ‘Of course, that’s what you and Lucy think.’

  Her hands went still. ‘Ellen …’

  ‘You think I wanted children.’ I unfastened her seat belt and mine, got out of the vehicle and went round to her side. ‘It’s not about children.’

  She clambered down holding onto my shoulder, her grasp at once unsteady and strong. ‘Ellen, do come in and talk to me—’

  ‘No, I won’t, if you don’t mind.’ I walked with her to her door, a gentle hand on her arm. ‘Have you got your key? Good. There we are.’

  ‘Darling girl, please stay.’

  The door opened; Stuart began his intemperate greeting. ‘I’ll come on Tuesday for your shopping list. But now I must go—’

  ‘Never mind the bloody shopping!’ she burst out. ‘Ellen, for the love of Christ!’

  I turned away towards the Land Rover.

  I drove without thought or destination, found myself travelling back down the main road, into the village and out the other side, sweeping along under Beacon Hill and up again onto the high roads. Just over the brow of the hill I stopped on a verge and sat listening to nothing but the tick of the engine. In the corner of my eye lay the humped shadow of an ancient yew wood, the trunks and boughs stunted and crooked as befitted trees growing all their lives in the face of the south-westerly gales. I got out and leaned on a field gate and gazed at the thin line of the hills beyond, happy for the wind to catch me about the ears and whip away the sheep bleating, whip it away and bring it back again as the light dulled. No lambs crying here in this season and I was glad of that.

  ‘Hey, ho, nobody at home …’

  I sang softly into the wind, my voice thirty years older now, husky, hollowed out by the salt water in my throat. ‘Meat nor drink nor money have I none. Yet will I be merry, merry, merry …’

  There had been a dislodgement. A crack somewhere, and a falling. Lucy had said my husband’s name on a hot still day in very late summer. She had spoken about another fate, and she had censured my husband. The barometer started falling at that moment: it had fallen all the way to Penny. William’s weathercock had whipped round on the clock tower in Waltham and I’d travelled to Althea Brock’s house through the gale, and she had brushed past me, a pale child in the wind. And it wasn’t finished. Those years when I was young, they were welling up as in a flooded meadow where the grass became greener under rills of clear water. The waters had long been dammed but now they were moving unchecked across the fields, reflecting the sky. They could not be held back.

  I reached the mill, went out to the hens. They were shawled in feathers and disgruntled: it was fully half an hour since sunset, and they were still waiting to be shut in. Would you like that dog fox to decimate us? Hm? ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t care,’ I told them, and they remonstrated. Well, really. I bolted the door on them. Pamela used to place small scraps of cabbage or sprinkles of grain on the toes of her rubberized boots and let them come and peck. ‘Dink dink dink,’ she used to say. That was when she was very small. By the time she left she was more off-hand with the hens – weary of their stupidity, rolling her eyes. Running out and upturning the bucket, running in again to brush her hair for school. But it was skin-deep. She still knew them all by name. On the last day she screamed for them.

  Nothing warned me, not the straightening curve of her nose, the first wobbling of her milk teeth, the smoothing-out of the creases in her wrists. Beware. Somebody will come for her.

  I went upstairs without turning the light on. I was cold, I needed a hot bath. I ran the water, peeled my woollen tights from my legs. The knee-bone and ankle-bone jutted now, unweathered knobs, the veins a mineral seam, something precious perhaps – cobalt, lapis. ‘Do you know,’ I would have called to Selwyn, ‘there’s something geological about my legs.’ Listened for his answering laugh, a phrase along the lines of ‘absolute rubbish, sweetheart’, or ‘Ellen, you’re quite—’ Words and laughter muffled by steam, steam cut through by his sharp cologne. Every month or so we’d dress up, drive to Southampton and see a play or film, eat a late supper somewhere. Catch sight of a reflected couple in the plate glass of some large emporium long risen from the smoking rubble of the war: he very dapper, she with her hair piled elegantly, tall in a high-collared coat. A couple enjoying their lengthy prime, their troubles behind them.

  The geological feature sank below a rising, steaming inlet. The end of an ice age. I turned off the hot tap.

  I was floating now, I had slipped my anchors. If only Selwyn were here to take me out, to tell me what nonsense I talked. I told him he was a coward, once. He was going to walk away and I called him a coward and he turned back for me, took me on. He took Pamela into his heart.

  I looked at myself naked in the wardrobe mirror, thinner than when twenty-one and my hair in the dim light no longer pale blonde or cream
. Nothing but white would give off that glow at dusk. My face sharper, eyes more hollowed. I appeared to be more myself, truth to be told. More than at any time since the Absaloms. At fourteen, pared to the bone, I had surely been myself.

  In the dusk the effect was of a monochrome photograph.

  I don’t want children—

  You want Pamela.

  Selwyn had said that, at the beginning of the war. So unwittingly prescient and precise. William could offer counsel, consolation even, but he had no idea. Althea, Lucy, they hadn’t a notion. I didn’t want children, I wanted Pamela. She and I were not two separate people. We were two loaves put too close together in the oven. Our loaves kissed, fused together, and when her father tore Pamela from me he created an open rip, soft, spongy, of the inner bread, lying not across my face or belly but across the years.

  I put on pyjamas, a dressing gown. Went downstairs into the hall, lifted the telephone receiver and dialled.

  ‘Althea, could you give me Margaret Dennis’s number? I need to talk to her.’

  ‘No need. She’s right here.’ I heard a surge of Brahms, the chink of a glass. Althea and Margaret appeared to be sharing a nightcap. ‘Are you all right, Ellen? I’m rather concerned.’ Like many of her generation, her telephone voice was loud and declamatory, as if radioing from the bridge of a warship in heavy seas.

  ‘No need to be.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll hand you over to Margaret.’

  A fumbling, clinking murmur.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Parr. I can’t apologize enough. Althea’s given me a proper ticking-off—’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll have Penny.’

  ‘Oh! Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could only do this with the utmost terseness. Small talk and blandishments were beyond me.

  ‘Well! That’s super. She’ll be thrilled to be shot of us for a while—’

  ‘When shall I collect her?’

  ‘Midday Friday? I’ll tell you what – I’ll bring her to you. Save you the trouble.’

  I got ready for bed but could not sleep. Hours passed. Orion rose; he hung in the south with his feet in Southampton Water, his body dimmed by the city’s glow. I crept out of bed and went downstairs in my dressing gown and sat a while in the study, lighting the stub of a candle to keep me company. Selwyn used to read like this until the peering and squinting got too ridiculous, but I wasn’t reading. I was just staring.

  Under the window was a chest full of old curtains, tablecloths, things we hardly used but never wanted to throw away. I had buried the thing I craved inside, allowing it to get caught up, as if I no longer cared about it, in a pile of cushion covers and napkins, and crammed down deep. I’d never moved it, drawn attention to it. Just let it lie. I went to the window and lifted the lid of the chest, delved with strong fingers between heavy strata. I remembered how far down to go. Among so many other fabrics my fingers easily lit upon the thin, slightly polished cotton.

  It was the dress she wore before she changed for the journey to London. Pressed into creases thirty years old. White check on sky blue, the blue reduced to a dusty iron by the candlelight, the trim of daisies on the hem similarly greyed. I held it up and it was quite shockingly small. If it smelled of nothing, so be it. I bunched the fabric in my hands and put it to my face and breathed in.

  New-baked bread, sharp, slightly salty, warm. Bread – what else? Nectar, almost. Heated cotton, nearly. All of these facets of a single thing. Her body on that hot spring day. Part of her, those atoms of her that lay between the threads of this fabric, was here and had never gone. She’d been small, and here in this room she still was. I had breathed in on that day and it was my life’s breath. I’d lived off it, fed from it, ever since.

  She had loomed into my life like a lightening sky, illuminating what went before as well as what came after. Selwyn, my wedding day, the first year of the war: I moved through them as through astronomical, nautical and civil twilight to the stinking bus, the grimy white blanket woven with holes the size of a small child’s finger. The gossamer hair stuck to her forehead. The tick of her tongue against her palate as she sucked on nothing. Because her thumb had fallen from her mouth. Just fallen: it was still wet. There came a change in the room, an increasing solidity to the walls, a dulling of the interior glow as another, greater, colder light swelled outside, grew and grew in brightness until it filled the room. The birds shrieked, the light passed from air-force blue to yellow through a split second of blinding white, and there she was. Pamela dawned.

  29

  ONE MORNING after a heavy fall of snow I looked out of the kitchen window to see my child pushing a huge creaking snowball around the garden. Crumbs of packed snow clinging to the soaked wool of her gloves, and her little fingers inside surely burning with cold, but she would not stop. And a green track behind the ball, winding under the apple trees, and the snow reducing to white polygons clipped smaller and more irregular with each passage. Until she couldn’t roll the snowball up the bank – it rolled back each time she tried – and I took her in for some hot rosehip syrup. But she escaped again into the garden so that I saw her through the now driving snow, pushing again at the snowball, her face red, her mouth square with effort and rage, and I let out a mother’s bellow of joy and love.

  I remembered the days after she left, how they tripped past one after the other. Now there was a similar skipping quality to the sunrise and sunset. Time had turned on its heel, it was running back to me, and the years were reeled in.

  Skip, slip, a handful of days. Then I was standing once more at my kitchen window in expectation, at a minute to midday on Friday.

  The clock drew breath and struck. Ten, eleven, twelve. Outside an engine stopped. Doors slammed. Footsteps sounded on the path. I opened the front door to admit the light.

  ‘Why, child. Here you are!’

  She stood holding her suitcase, the autumn sun shining in her hair. A glorious, wicked, white smile. ‘Yes. Here I am again! Isn’t it terrific?’

  The words bubbled out. I closed my eyes and felt her arms come round me.

  In the midst of the joy I found some words for her guardian, ‘Thank you, Margaret. Thank you so much,’ as she departed with a wave. I closed the door. My child was still speaking. ‘Oh, Mrs Parr, it’s lovely to see you. Look at this old chair. Is it extremely ancient? It must have been made for someone with tiny legs and a huge tall back.’

  She ensconced herself on the low seat, legs crossed tailor-fashion. She was so neat and small.

  I laughed. ‘It is ancient. But it’s for kneeling on and praying.’

  She wriggled round and kneeled upright, palms together. ‘Please God, let me stay here with Mrs Parr. Thank you, God. Amen.’

  ‘You can call me Ellen, dear.’ I was smiling. ‘You wouldn’t want to stay for ever. You’d be bored and spreading your wings in the end. Take your suitcase upstairs. We’ve got work to do.’

  My pans clattered in the cupboard as I searched for the bread tins. Here they were, blackened and dented. What a sorry sight. I poured warm water onto yeast, made a well in my bowl of flour. When I looked up she was there in the doorway, my heart’s delight, with patches on the knees of her trousers. She looked down at them. ‘I did these patches in my sewing lesson.’

  I nodded. ‘I’m glad you’re good with your needle and thread.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What am I doing, indeed.’ I chuckled. ‘Can’t you see? Do you want to help?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Her eyes met mine, suddenly rounded and wondering. I took her hands, so soft and warm, knuckles snuggling into my palms. I stroked my thumbs across the backs of her hands.

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  The bread rose, I knocked it back, it rose again and we baked it. We peeled apples and stewed them with lemon rind. She was full of news. She had to play a fearsome game these days, she told me, called lacrosse, with a hideous tackling stick like a torture instrumen
t and a foul rubber ball that whacked her on the kneecap. ‘I vow – look, Ellen. I’m making the vow right now. With this special sign.’ She held up her palm, thumb outstretched, fingers quiveringly fanning out. ‘Oh, that’s not quite it.’

  ‘What is that sign?’

  ‘The Vulcan salute.’

  ‘I didn’t realize he had a salute. Only a blacksmith’s hammer.’

  ‘Vulcans don’t have hammers. Oh, naughty fingers. They’re meant to make a sort of V.’ She tried once again to prise apart her middle and ring finger but they were too soft and pliant to hold the pose. ‘I vow – don’t laugh please, Ellen – today, in this kitchen at the mill house, that I will never ever play lacrosse again …’

  I drank in the chirruping of her chatter. I could close my eyes and listen. Just as high as before, that clear peeled piping.

  We ate fresh bread and cheese. In the afternoon we walked along the mill channel, out into the fields, and into Pipehouse Wood. How the trees had grown since we were here last. A knight’s hall of handsome, limber beech columns. Elderly trunks, silvery, dewlapped. Something elephantine about them, their age and their burdens. And the summits roaring in the wind. She darted ahead, away down into a deep valley, up the other side, distant in the hollows. Edward and I had walked here too, before Mother died, and he’d had that bright sea-light in his eyes, and he’d seemed so young.

  She came scrambling back. ‘Don’t let’s go home yet, Ellen. We’re always indoors, at school.’

  ‘Except when you’re playing lacrosse.’

  She twisted her mouth. ‘It’s not playing. It’s fighting with sticks.’

  We walked the lanes. The winter day was short. In the distance Beacon Hill was lying in shadow, massive and especially still this afternoon, the sun going down behind it. The hedge thinned into single blackthorns, straggling along the edge of a field of yearling ponies who clustered whickering at the gate as we approached. She held out her hand to a round-bellied chestnut who mumbled in her palm and gazed at her with moody liquid eyes. Then he gave a deep sigh, and danced away with dainty hooves over the turf. How innocent he and his fellows were.