We Must Be Brave

by Frances Liardet

  32

  I’M SITTING BY A coal fire in the living room of a B&B in Hampshire, a safe five miles from Upton.

  The coals are fake, glittering and glowing from ruby to cherry and back again. You aren’t meant to like these fires but I adore them. I’m eating a bowl of leek and potato soup, made by my landlady, and it’s delicious. I’ve got a rug over my knees, and the TV is tuned to a programme about a couple who are deciding whether to stay in England, where it pours with rain, or relocate to a country where it doesn’t. An entirely non-existent dilemma, in my view. Would I like a home-made cheese scone and a cuppa, asks my landlady? I should think I would.

  She’s asked me why I’m here, and I’ve found that my reply, ‘Looking up an old friend,’ works very well. It’s easy to say and it doesn’t cause adrenalin to pour into my bloodstream. That’s because it’s not true, of course. Whatever Ellen was, it was not a friend.

  Penny and I have had several conversations by now. Each one longer, each one building on what went before. We’ve pieced together a bridge, or maybe a series of stepping stones, so that I can edge out into the torrent. Agreeing to consider, tentatively suggesting, firmly committing: stone by stone. Somewhere along the way Penny asked Ellen if she would like me to visit. Ellen, apparently, kneeled down on the floor. And then refused point-blank to entertain the notion.

  ‘I know how she feels,’ I remember saying, on the phone.

  ‘She’ll get there,’ Penny told me.

  I’ve learned a bit about Penny, as well. Found the answer to a question that bobbed benignly to the surface of my mind as we conversed: why, or rather how, a woman forty years her junior – not a neighbour, mind, and not even distantly related – came to befriend Ellen in the first place. She was rescued, too – from a flood, as it happened, and an alcoholic mother, and a pack of bullying schoolgirls, denizens of Upton Hall under its new dispensation. Penny did not fit in. So Ellen took pity on her.

  Other questions will arise from this, I know. But I can’t ponder them now. The main thing is, it’s safe to cross the river.

  The landlady brings me the scone and cuppa, and in comes a muddy terrier and suddenly the room is rank with strong tea and wet dog and rain. Ellen never had a dog but Lady Brock did. He was called Nipper. Nipper had one blue eye, he enjoyed porridge, he dug holes where he shouldn’t. I was naughty too – I failed to take my shoes off and covered the sitting-room carpet with mud. Elizabeth was furious, so to make up for it I picked her some pretty flaming flowers I found on the runner-bean poles in the vegetable plot. That was the only time I made Elizabeth cry. I cried louder, to outdo her and to demonstrate my essential innocence, and Ellen came into the kitchen. What is this hullabaloo? She saw the bean flowers on the floor, where Elizabeth had thrown them. And she bent down and held me tight and tight, and I buried my face in the crook of her arm. How old would she have been? Twenty-three, four? She never had any other children, Penny told me on the phone. Any other children. Penny actually said that. Suddenly the room’s too hot. Ellen’s woollen arm presses against my cheek, warm and prickly and quite hard too, because she was thin as well as young. She was thin and young and mine.

  ‘Oh dear,’ says the landlady. ‘Look at your face. Is it the dog? I shall shoo him out.’

  ‘The dog’s fine,’ I say. ‘I’m just tired.’

  The dog’s fine. I’m just falling to pieces.

  Later that evening Penny rings. ‘I’m driving down tomorrow,’ she tells me. ‘I’ll be in Upton about midday. Would you like to meet me at the churchyard? I said I’d plant some bulbs for her, you see. Might be a chance for you to … I don’t know. Gear up to it.’

  I’m lying on the bed with a valerian tea. Never so wakeful in my life.

  ‘That’s a great idea,’ I say, with as much vigour as I can muster.

  ‘Courage, Pamela.’ She chuckles. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  *

  The cab has just driven away. I’m on the verge of the lane outside the church. A bulky berry-spattering yew tree throws the gate – the lychgate, was it called? – into shadow. I’m a little early, and Penny’s nowhere to be seen.

  I don’t want to go in without her, so I walk down the lane and look up at the church tower.

  We came here on the last day. No, the day before. Of course we did. A spring day it was, so warm, and I still thought Ellen was coming to Ireland too. I had no idea what she’d do there. Would she stay with me and the cousins and my aunt and uncle? Or would she have a separate house? Or maybe she and I would live together in one house, with the cousins next door, and Daddy would come and visit me. But what would Mr Parr do? I didn’t have time to work that out because church ended. And then after lunch they told me, Daddy and Ellen, that Ellen wasn’t coming.

  I gaze up at the tower. Six hundred years of prayer in these stones, and somewhere in the cracks and crevices, my own innocent wonderings of those last hours before the blow fell.

  A small woman in jeans and a hoodie is hurrying down the lane towards me.

  ‘Oh, Pamela.’ She tries to catch her breath. ‘I’m so sorry. I was early, you see, so I took the boys up to the cottage, and then I decided to walk …’

  She’s slight, a bit pixie-like, with short hair and twinkly light-brown eyes. I hesitate for a moment, taking in the first sight of her. ‘So you’re Penny!’ I blurt.

  She laughs, and we hold our arms out to each other and embrace.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘For everything you’ve done, and are doing. I know she …’

  I can’t claim to know anything about Ellen, I realize. About how she feels.

  Penny releases me, smiling. ‘Don’t worry about that now.’

  Feeling infinitely stronger, I hand her a bubble-wrapped package. ‘The shark-fin mug.’

  ‘That is so kind!’ She nestles the mug into a pocket of her little rucksack. ‘I’m honoured! A work by Pam Lovell!’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s unique.’ I smile. ‘Mistakes often are.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. The skill is getting things to turn out the same, time after time.’

  ‘Like happy families,’ she muses. ‘They’re all meant to be the same, aren’t they. But unhappy ones, they’re each miserable in their own special way.’

  ‘Now there’s an interesting connection!’

  I take her arm and we go through the lychgate – it is the lychgate, I’m sure now – into the churchyard.

  Yew, leaf mould, and damp stone. I breathe it in deep, this scented air as cold as the dawn. The low sun is disorientating: at this high latitude in winter, early morning seems to fade straight into late afternoon. Penny’s kneeling down by a grave almost covered in moss, taking a trowel and a paper bag from her rucksack. ‘Ellen thought her mum might like some crocuses.’

  SUSAN CALVERT

  1890–1934

  A LOVING MOTHER

  ‘This is Ellen’s mother?’ I’m gaping. ‘I had no idea.’

  Penny looks up. ‘Yes,’ she says after a moment. ‘She died when Ellen was fourteen.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘I know. Awful.’

  ‘And she’s been here all this time. Ellen never mentioned her, not once. It never crossed my mind that Ellen even had a mother.’

  Penny’s digging little holes, gently pushing a bulb into each one. ‘It wasn’t a story for a young child. Especially not you, back then …’

  My eyes wander over the grave. It’s pretty, with its moss, and the headstone is scrubbed clean. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘Cancer.’

  ‘And Ellen’s father? Where is he?’

  She kneels upright and smiles at me. ‘Let Ellen tell you about it all. I think she’d want to, now.’ She points with her trowel. ‘Would you like to see Lady Brock? She and Sir Michael are just over there.’

  MICHAEL HUGH BROCK, Bart. DSO

  1885–1939

  Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant

  HIS DEVOTED WIFE ALTHEA MARY

 
1892–1979

  Enter Thou into the Joy of Thy Lord

  A silvery glimmer enters my mind’s eye, a helmet against oak panelling. ‘Lady Brock had a suit of armour,’ I call to Penny. ‘I used to lift up the visor and go “peep-bo”. I expect he’d gone, the knight, by the time you got to Upton Hall.’

  ‘He went to the Lodge with Lady Brock.’ Penny laughs as she works. ‘We used to polish him. Me and Ellen, with Mr Kennet. Mr Kennet’s at the end of the row.’

  WILLIAM ERNEST KENNET

  1898–1980

  And he was filled with wisdom and understanding

  and cunning to work all works in brass

  I can see the shed right now, the brick floor where I used to sit filling little flowerpots with compost that went into beautiful dark loamy crumbs. Our mouths watered for chocolate cake just looking at it, and there wasn’t a hope of getting any. The light came in through the cloudy window and the door that was always ajar for the air, and it was never cold. There was a stove with charcoal embers that always glowed, bright in the dull weather and dim in the sunshine, a stove fed by Mr Kennet’s nimble capable pincer of a hand.

  Lady Brock, the dog Nipper, Mr Kennet. The past seeps out over the gravestones and grass and trees like water over a magic colouring book, making everything vivid.

  Penny comes near, her planting done, and stands beside me.

  ‘It says “works in brass”,’ I say to her after a while. ‘The headstone.’

  ‘If you want the King James version, it has to be brass. It was most likely bronze, in fact.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. He was a gardener.’

  ‘That was after he was wounded. Before the First World War he was a copper-beater, an apprentice, very young and talented. Ellen didn’t want anyone to forget that. He made the weathercock in Waltham, you know. The one on top of the town hall …’

  A fiery glint as we got off the bus, far up in the sky. Ellen pointing, saying, ‘Mr Kennet made that,’ and we watched the bird turn in the changing wind.

  ‘I knew that, of course! How did I think he made it? Maybe with his fork and trowel.’

  We both laugh but the tears are seeding in my eyes.

  Penny puts a hand on my arm. ‘I’ll leave you for a moment. My kids have come down after all. I thought you might like to see Selwyn on your own.’ She indicates the grave carefully. ‘Fourth from the end, up by the hedge.’

  I never in my life called him Selwyn.

  She goes off down towards the bottom of the graveyard where three stripling boys have appeared in an avenue of poplars. They canter about, whooping: she gives a soft remonstrating call and they cluster round her. Even the youngest tops her by a couple of inches. I turn away from the path and pace through the damp grass along the aisles of graves to the place she pointed out, and there he is, a neat granite slab.

  SELWYN EDGAR PARR

  1899–1971

  And that’s all. A silence underneath his name and dates: space for a spouse, as yet unfilled.

  Mr Parr had a little clock, one I wasn’t allowed to play with. A folding leather travel clock that clicked shut with a clasp. Maybe that was how he died, clicking neatly closed. Such a tall, dry, mild, bending person, swabbing at my tears with his handkerchief. Sometimes, when the boys were at their worst, the only person I could bear. I’d sit in his study and try the crossword with him. I’d go to the mill early on Saturday mornings and he’d let me swing down on the pulley, all the way from the top storey to the ground. Kind, he was, always, right up to the last day. And then he put his hat on and drove me away, me and my father, and he didn’t even turn his head when I screamed.

  The breeze picks up, chills me. I have a hole in my tights. Ellen used to call this a potato, the way the white roundel of flesh bulged out. In Ireland when it happened Aunt Hester told me, ‘You’ve got a spud,’ and I remembered Ellen and my smaller stockinged leg. And I told Hester, ‘It’s called a potato, not a spud,’ and I was small and very angry still, so Hester said I was quite right.

  The moon hangs white, low in the powder-blue sky, just shy of the graveyard wall. The damp air slides into the damp air of Ireland where the moon was torn across with cloud and I gazed at it, that tattered moon, imagining it riding also over England in the same dark night, over Upton, and wondering if Ellen was outside shutting up the hens. If she was looking up and seeing it too. Suddenly I’m young again and my heart is bursting. The Irish Sea, the one Ellen can’t cross, lies between us, and my tears are saltier than the whole of it.

  Penny’s coming back. Her kids lollop ahead of her up the path towards me. They look me shyly in the eye, say ‘Hello, Pamela’ in voices at various degrees of breaking, shake hands. I’m so glad they’re here. They’ve pulled me back from the brink. I let them bear me along, and we all troop out of the graveyard and back up the walled lane. There are rock daisies between the stones, pink and white. I hear a creaking laugh in my inner ear.

  ‘I forgot Lucy!’ I say in sudden panic. ‘How could I? Where’s Lucy’s grave?’

  ‘Don’t worry!’ Penny’s laughing. ‘Lucy’s not in the graveyard. She’s up at the cottage. We’re going there for lunch. That’s where you’ll see Ellen, Pamela. It’s all arranged.’

  We begin to walk up the long road from the graveyard into the village. The children have pulled ahead, skylarking, vanishing into the shadow of the trees.

  The questions I have so far refused to ponder lie in front of me now, along the straight road ahead. I can’t go on without raising them.

  ‘What was it like, Penny? For you, I mean. Being with Ellen.’

  She walks beside me, hands in her hoodie pockets, half on and half off the narrow pavement. She has a jaunty way of walking, as if at any moment she might break into a frolic.

  ‘Heaven.’ She gives a sigh. ‘She was so kind to me. The other girls called me Pigpen because I wouldn’t brush my hair, so she cut out all the tangles and made it look nice. She listened to David Bowie with me. At least, tolerated me listening to David Bowie. And on the long weekends we used to watch Dad’s Army on Mr Horne’s TV with Lucy and Mr Kennet. She laid in a stock of Curly Wurlys for those TV nights.’

  ‘Of whats?’

  ‘It’s a sweet.’ She’s giggling. ‘Bendy toffee … I don’t know what I’d have done without her.’

  I picture her sitting on the floor with my knight dismembered around her. Sitting there grinning, with my Lady Brock, and my Ellen.

  ‘Did you play with the hawk?’ I can’t help asking. ‘The one Edward made out of wood?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. There were lots of those birds. He made all different kinds. A new one every time he visited, apparently. He had a very adventurous war, you know. He—’

  ‘Yes. We used to push pins into a map, Ellen and me.’ I come to a halt. ‘I was there, you see. In the war.’

  A small flock of starlings wheels above the trees. I watch them settle in the upper branches.

  ‘Of course you were.’ Her voice is so soft. ‘Pamela, I know I had everything you – that you couldn’t ever—’

  I brush the air with my hand, a pleading motion, and she falls silent.

  When I was still a young child I used to imagine what it would be like if they’d let me visit her. We’d cling to each other but all the time the hours would be passing, and all the time we’d be thinking that I had to go. Looking at the clock: just time for a walk. Just time to have a slice of lardy cake. The tears coming even as I ate. I knew, as I saw us saying goodbye again and again, as I saw myself leave again and again for Ireland – I knew it would have killed us. And if I’d come later, as an adult? It would have been worse. What would we have done then, except sit together and stare at the ruins of all we’d lost, and hold each other’s hands, and cry?

  This was going to happen now. This was why I should never have come.

  ‘You made a snowball,’ Penny suddenly says. ‘You went round and round the garden, and it got bigger and bigger. Ellen brought you inside because y
ou were cold, but you found your way outside again and carried on rolling, and she saw you out of the window, crying because you couldn’t get it up the bank. It had got too big for you to push, it kept rolling back …’

  ‘What made you think of that?’

  She looks bewildered. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t remember any snowball.’

  Slowly I pick up my feet. I know I have no choice. A few moments longer, step by step, and here we are, rounding the corner at last, well into the shadow of the trees now, and this turn in the road has an angle which mimics exactly the curve of some internal chamber of my heart, because I know it so well. Ellen and I went back and forth, back and forth like a shuttle through a loom, in and out from the mill to the village and back again, and here I come now, on the last pass, and this time there’s no stopping.

  ‘Oh, my goodness.’ I clutch Penny’s arm. ‘What on earth have they done?’

  ‘I know.’

  The main street of Upton is clogged with sleek cars. Skirts of creamy gravel lap the spotless tarmac. Every window gleams, every stone is repointed. Cleansed also of people, it seems – there’s no one on the road, in the front gardens, at the windows. Penny pats my hand, gently persuading me to loosen my grip. ‘The houses go for a fortune. Lucy and Ellen are about the only originals left …’

  ‘This is where they picked up the milk churns.’ I point as we pass a low wall. ‘There was a big wooden platform. The milk lorry stopped and loaded them up.’ I glimpse a gleaming cottage called the old bakery, literally, in lower-case wrought iron. ‘Do you remember a bakery, Penny?’

  ‘No, just the village shop.’

  ‘There was a butcher as well. And a saddler …’

  My heart is too full for more talking. And although I can’t see it I can smell it, somehow, the street of my childhood, dark and dirty with long ruts of mud from tractors, dung from droves of cattle that ambled by, udders jostling their back legs. The smell of that long-past street keener now as the grassy bank on the left starts to rise, and we approach Lucy’s house. The boys are already bounding up the steps. Which are scrubbed russet-red, I see, and equipped with an iron rail on each side, to help aged knees.