I was starting to know it now, securely in my heart, but it came again with the word ‘daughter’. It came and came, this knowledge, the petals opening and opening again like a blown rose. Daughter. It broke over my head, making my hair stand on end, rinsing the world.
‘All that you did. It was for our sake, all the kindness.’
‘In particular for your sake.’ He smiled. ‘Ellen, take this the right way. You’re a better woman than she. You did not buckle.’
He lifted his good hand and pushed a strand of hair back from my forehead. His fingers were rough but it was like a kiss.
We grew cold. William picked up his turfing spade and resumed his work on the bed. I helped him, piling and barrowing the loose sod away to a heap under the wall. I was to lay it grass side down, so that it would rot down and compost, and neatly too. He was an exacting master.
I roamed over my landscape of long years’ shame. ‘I wish you’d been more forthright,’ I said, as I filled another barrow. ‘I’d have been proud to be known as your daughter.’
‘Would you?’ He unbent, frowning. ‘To grow up here, in those days, born the wrong side of the blanket?’
‘It would have been better than the shame of being his.’
He shook his head. ‘You’d have had both, my dear, and so would your mother. And you loved him, Ellen. The Captain.’
‘Not after he ruined us, I didn’t.’
We worked on until sunset. In the deeper dusk of my memory he turned up his gas lamp with half a hand while I wrote out grammar and arithmetic with a dipping pen, my wooden stool scraping on the brick floor, a bare sixteen years after the Great War. So long ago, and so hard it had been.
‘Oh, William,’ I said. ‘You and I, we’ve earned this happiness. But I would have liked to look after you as a daughter should. You could have lived in my house, with Selwyn and me.’
‘I would not have cared –’ he spoke with genteel consideration ‘– to live under a roof with you and Mr Parr, respect him greatly though I did.’
‘You could live with me now. If you wanted. Shall I call you Father?’
‘No. Not Dad, either. Not from a lady like you.’
‘God forbid.’
Laughter bubbled up.
‘We shall stay as we are, Ellen,’ he said.
I found myself straight away trapped in a rough embrace, held against a thin shoulder. A somewhat bristly chin scraped my forehead. Then I was released, to gasp and breathe out and gasp again.
Pamela
2010
31
‘YOU HAVE A new comment on your blog,’ Joe says. ‘Somebody called …’ He screws up his eyes, he’s not wearing his glasses. ‘Somebody called Sparks, who’s ninety years old.’
Not long ago I had a student called Sparks, a lovely man with rings and studs in his eyebrows, nose, lips, tongue. He had to take them all out before he started work. My glass furnace is heated to near eleven hundred degrees Celsius, and it’s impossible to wear metal next to the skin. It can’t be that Sparks, since he’s twenty-two.
‘Honey, give it here.’
Joe passes me the tablet and I take a look. I don’t normally do technology while breakfasting in my bathrobe. We’re great bathrobe people, Joe and I, fond of cosiness, massages, hot tubs, neck pillows. It’s a geriatric thing. You can’t do physical work in your seventies without creaking in the mornings. This blog’s called Little Ruins: I’m posting my failed works online, all my droopy vessels, the unmentionables with lop-eared handles and rubbery lips. They’re normally destined for the trash bucket but now they’ve got a new life, nicely lit with a title and a text saying what I learned from each disaster. The comments – especially those from other glassworkers – are often hilarious.
Not this one.
I’m just wondering if you’re the Pamela Lovell who knew Ellen Parr during the war in Upton, Hampshire, UK. I’m a friend of hers. You might like to know she’s 90 and still going strong! BTW I love the emerald mug with its shark fins. How did you do that? Penny Lacey Sparks.
‘What’s up, Pamela?’ Joe’s eyes, sharper now, quiz me over the rim of his cup.
I shut the web page. ‘Nothing. Why?’
‘You just said, “Oh, good God.”’
I try to laugh. ‘It’s not Sparks who’s ninety. It’s someone else, who I thought was dead, but she’s not.’
Joe grins. ‘I’m very happy to hear it.’
His phone beeps. He gets to his feet and leaves the room, running a hand along my shoulders as he passes.
I’ve been living in the desert light for thirty-five years. There’s nothing on earth like the light of the American Southwest. It shines off the mountains, stands tall in the streets. Blazes into our house through half-open windows and doors left ajar. Into our heads too, I’m convinced, through the chinks of our eyes and ears. It brought me Joe Landry, solar engineer, optimist and gorgeous man, who came down here in the late seventies to the desert villages, small places way off the grid, and helped them to harvest this glut of photo-energy. He soon convinced me that he and I, Landry and Lovell, could rub along nicely, and so it has proved. We’re two unrepentant workaholics: disgustingly elderly now, it’s true; outrageously undomestic, extremely contented.
The other thing I thank the light for? The way it eclipses things. Anything which has no place under this light, anything which isn’t nailed down in the here and now, is lost in the dazzle. If I happen to say, ‘When I was twenty and living in London,’ all I have in my mind’s eye is a puff of smog. When someone asks me where I spent my teenage years, I see a lifting curtain of Irish rain. Plymouth and my distant mother only reappear – I have no idea why – in the talky trill of an English blackbird, a sound I only get to hear very rarely, on Masterpiece Theatre shows.
Upton. I smell Upton, equally seldom, in unburned coal.
And Ellen?
I was wrong to say I thought she’d be dead. I don’t think of her as dead. But I haven’t pictured her alive, either. She’s just been another symbol, a sort of brightness glimpsed when I look up into the blue, a watermark printed in the air.
She hardly hurts at all now.
I get showered and dressed and drive through this elemental light to my studio. I’m having a glorious time making pitchers and tumblers in the actual hues of molten glass – Fanta orange, tangerine crush, incandescent lemon cream. Succulent citrus vessels lolling and stretching and quivering their tips, tongue-like and potent. I gather hot glass, shape it and blow, heat it, shape it and blow. I’m going to call this group Lingual. Joe prefers Cunnilingual but I can’t help his filthy mind. I was nearly forty when I started this – a woman, English, and short: the blowing-iron comes up to my chin. People waited for me to fail. But I couldn’t afford to. I’d been a good pupil in Ireland, eager, but the only thing I liked was art. Tone, heft, bump, shine. My husband got fed up waiting for me to abandon my dabbling, my pots and my pigments, and turn to procreation. My employers, an educational publishing house, decided they would prefer an editor whose mind was actually on the job.
Sacked, divorced and almost middle-aged. It wasn’t pretty. Poor Daddy. Never a more guilty man walked the earth. It was written in his worried weary eyes and eyebags and crow’s feet and wrinkled lids. ‘Can you please keep calm,’ I told him, when everything went wrong. ‘Try and imagine there’s still a chance for me. That one day I might do something great. That you might be proud of me.’
‘Sweetheart, I will always be proud of you,’ he said. ‘It’s just that if … Oh, everything was so difficult. We had to, you see …’
‘No, Daddy, please don’t. You can’t lay my mistakes at your door. If you do, you’re just turning me back into that …’
‘That what?’
‘That wretched little girl. The one you posted over the Irish Sea. I have to be more than that. It’s too cruel, otherwise. Do you understand?’
He did, in the end, and he had years of pride in me, and visited a lot, especially in his old a
ge. But I don’t suppose – no, I know. I know that since I’ve been in America I haven’t spoken Ellen’s name.
Towards noon I go to the office, take a litre of water from the fridge. Then I turn to my blog. Penny Sparks’s comment is still there. How did you do that? she wrote, about the mug with shark fins. All she has to do is look at the explanation under the photo and she’d find out. But people never read anything these days.
I begin to type rapidly.
Penny, that mug with fins was accidentally made by blowing glass into a cup mould. This particular mould is made of two halves which my assistant was supposed to hold together. I failed to remind her to tighten her grip as I blew, so she allowed the pressure of the inflating glass to push the two mould halves apart. The glass expanded through the resulting gaps and made those fins.
Then I sit staring at the screen. I eat a peach. The message winks at me, unsent.
My students are arriving. One of them pokes his head round the door. ‘Pamela, we can’t find the copper cane. Sorry.’
I get up off my chair, go to the door. I pause there for a second, dart back to the computer and press Send. Then I scuttle after my student into the hot shop.
*
That night I dream about an early summer morning.
The low sun’s already blazing, the sky a heated blue pearl over the fields. The trees and hedgerows gorgeously pelted in racing green. A thousand tiny birds shout, and I know instantly that I’m in England.
The dream makes a jump-cut to a house, the wall of a house and some windows, black paint blistering on the frames, bricks baked by the sun. I go from window to window, peering inside. The house seems to be empty. I try the kitchen window which is in the deep shade of a pear tree. Someone’s in there, standing by a stove, a big bull of a coal range. Her hair is a golden pile of strawy coils. She jerks her head towards me.
I wake up, my heart going like a kettledrum. It’s not yet dawn.
Ellen had a button on the pocket of her dress, and a thread trailed from the buttonhole. Soon it would unravel, zag-zig, zag-zig, all the way round, unless she sewed it up. Sewn or unravelled, I wouldn’t get to see it because I was leaving.
We were standing in the doorway of my home. The car was ready outside.
So I fixed my eyes on this last piece of her, the buttonhole and the dress, which was light grey with an ink-stain on the pocket that had leached with many washings into a pale-blue tide with a bright-indigo margin.
Then I clung to her. My father embraced her.
She said, ‘You must both let go of me.’
Then I remembered the hens. But it was too late and she pushed me into the car. So our last touch was her great strong hands grabbing me. Grabbing me by the legs and pushing.
Hester came and sat on my bed. She told me why Ellen would never visit, why she wouldn’t be writing any more. She said it was because Ellen loved me. I didn’t understand that, so Hester gave me bread and milk, which I did understand. And other things you might give to a very young child – paper windmills, a knitted lamb to hold. As if they were starting again with me. Painting over the years.
Hester said, It’s nice to have a hazel girl here. My own brood, they take after their father. Gangly redheads, the lot of them.
She said, It’s nice to have a girl the same as me.
The light leaches into the bedroom. Stealthily, so as not to wake Joe, I reach for my phone. No reply on the blog page, but that, I soon discover, is because Penny Lacey Sparks has used the studio email this time.
Oh, that is fascinating about the mug, Pamela! I’d like to buy it if it’s for sale. I’d love to tell Ellen about you. But only if you want me to?
That little fish-hook of a question mark. My fingers hover over the keys.
Penny, I write. May I ask who you are?
A pause. I close my eyes and try to doze off again.
I’m in the hall of my home, in the grey light and the sudden hush as the front door closes behind me. I run up the stairs and onto the landing where there are pictures of Mr Parr and his cousins. A row of very young men, the uniforms making their faces even more tender, grave, expectant. Photographs taken nearly a hundred years ago now, and I glimpsed them as a child in that grey light. I didn’t think I’d ever looked properly, but I must have. Only one of those men survived, and I pulled his tie and teased him, that man who’d waded through the mud. And he had a young wife, and she found me on a bus.
To think of it.
And this woman, this Penny, wants to tell Ellen about me? Tell Ellen, about me? What does she imagine she has the right to say?
I surface again. The sun is beginning to glow against the bottom of the shutters, making stripes over the opposite wall. I sit up in bed and open my email.
Dear Pamela, I apologize. I’ve been rather rude. I’m a friend of Ellen’s – I’ve known her since 1974. I wondered if you were the Pamela she told me about, who was also called Lovell.
Joe rolls over beside me. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Sorry,’ I whisper. ‘It’s nearly getting-up time anyway.’
‘Getting-up time.’ He chuckles and rolls back again.
So … I try to think how to put this. So Ellen doesn’t even know you’ve contacted me?
No, she doesn’t. I didn’t want to upset her.
I stare at the wall and breathe in.
As if she senses the impact, she writes again.
Pamela,
I’m so sorry. I’ve upset you instead, haven’t I. I’m an idiot.
I’ve known about you for a long time, that’s all. And she’s been talking about you lately. And I know she’d never ask you to come. Because of what happened.
She says you began a new life when you were small, and that she would only hurt you more by bringing it all back again.
Look, I’d better just bog off. Sorry. Penny.
P.S. I really do love your glass.
The alarm emits a soft silvery ping.
‘Bog off,’ I say to it.
The sun comes up a shocking dirty bubblegum, a colour that would normally excite me. But today I’m underslept, shaken. So I give the sunrise a dull stare, and gulp coffee. Joe’s watching me patiently.
‘I can’t talk about it now,’ I say to him.
‘OK.’ He returns to his slice of Small Planet six-grain toast. He never presses me, just waits. I’m the same with him. It’s easy for us. We can always simply go back to thinking about our work.
‘Joe, you know I told you my mother died in the war?’
‘Mm-hm?’
I wrap my hands around my mug. The gesture’s strange, belonging to my childhood, to the cold of Upton.
‘Sorry.’ My laugh is unsteady. ‘I really can’t talk about it now.’
‘OK.’
The sun hauls itself higher. Now a respectable grandmotherly rose. ‘I love you, Joe.’
‘I know.’
I drop Joe off at work, get to the studio. Every five minutes I think of Penny’s message. I try to hold it in my head. Get the import of it. Even seeing Ellen’s name, reading that she talked about me: I can’t compute that. I shake my head to clear it, but the words flood back in.
I’ve hardly been working an hour when I burn my hand. I let a blowing-iron overheat in the mouth of the furnace, and I grab it without thinking. I have a huge sign above the door saying TREAT ALL METAL AS HOT and I never, ever do anything this stupid. I run ice water over the cushions of my palm and lower fingers, put a light dressing on, and leave the studio to my assistant.
My hand is agony but I must do something useful. So I go food shopping. I push the cart down the fruit aisle and try and fail to jumble a watermelon out of a deep plastic crate with one hand. Each time I get the melon to the top of the crate, it falls back in again. People glance at me as they go by but no one does a damn thing.
I start to cry.
In the end I’m rescued by an African-American lady in a red hairnet, a woman as old as me. She lifts out the melon and p
uts it in my cart.
‘Oh, ma’am, that’s very kind.’
I don’t hide my tears, I don’t care.
She starts singing to me. ‘The tide is high but I’m holding on,’ she sings. Then she looks me in the eye.
‘Yes, my sister!’ she says. ‘We got to hold on!’ And she goes on her way.
I check out my groceries and go to the car. I sit in the parking bay, blubbering. Then I open up my phone and write a message. It’s short, but I can’t get any further, not right now.
Penny. Please don’t bog off.
That afternoon I teach a beginners’ blowing class. I let everyone have a salutary look at my burn, and we run over our first-aid techniques. By the end of the class I’m disintegrating again, but nobody notices. As my beginners leave, the studio phone rings.
‘Pamela?’ A young voice, chirpy. ‘It’s Penny.’
It’s impossible for me to speak. But it seems she knows that.
‘I’m sorry,’ she goes on. ‘This is probably too much. But I had to say hello. So you know me, a bit, anyway.’
Some moments pass, and I find my voice.
‘Penny, are you in Upton?’
‘Yes.’
I squeeze my eyes shut and lean against the wall.
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘There’s no rush. You can both take your time.’
At the end of the day I collect Joe from his office. His mouth falls open when he sees the bandage. I explain about the burn and he looks at my face.
‘Honey,’ he says, and takes the wheel.
I watch him adjusting the seat and the mirror. ‘It’s not just the burn,’ I tell him.
‘Oh. Right.’ He backs out, joins the traffic.
‘It’s to do with England, and the war.’
‘Let me drive, sweet girl.’ He rubs my knee. ‘Let me drive, and tell me at home.’
The road unrolls in the light, shining blacktop under a dome of blue. In the distance a violet frieze of mountains hangs in the air. I could blow it away with one breath.
We Must Be Brave Page 39