I hold on tight too. I have to, because as I climb I have the sensation that I’m falling forward.
We reach the top, and the back door opens and Lucy comes out.
‘Hello, Penny. Hello, Danny, William, Josh. Oh, and here’s young Pam.’ As if I’m just another child. ‘Hello, Pam.’
She’s smaller than me. Hair a matt dark brown with half an inch of white at the roots. Beaming with a magnificent set of dentures. Cosy in a bottle-green body-warmer with half the quilting unpicked, a pair of what look like ancient black ski-pants, a yellow scarf high underneath her chin.
‘Look at you, all flabbergasted that I’m still here!’ She searches my face beadily, wags a finger. ‘Oh, no. You can’t kill me off that easily!’ A brisk, stiff little embrace, her head coming up to my chin and bringing a sweet breath of lavender, and then she takes my free hand in hers.
‘You’re looking well, dear.’ She laughs in her creaking way. ‘I’ve heard all about you. You make vases and suchlike. Well, I never.’
I look around. ‘The apple tree’s gone!’ I blurt.
‘Yes, and those are getting on, too.’ She jerked her head towards a pair of trees by the hedge. ‘Bill Kennet gave us those. Do you remember Bill, little girl that you were?’
I nod my head. Suddenly I think of Maurice, the stubborn refuser of proffered juicy stems, warm in his nest of dry grass. I was trying to feed him when a man called Aubrey came, and I said, ‘Yes, but who is that?’ A vision comes, so bright I have to shut my eyes. The tortoise, the grass, the sunshine. A father in shadow. I press my hand against my lips, to stop them trembling.
‘There, there,’ I hear Lucy say.
‘Be OK in a minute.’
‘I know you will.’
I recover myself, open my eyes. ‘You’re looking well too, Lucy!’
‘Yup.’ She nods without conceit. ‘I’ve had me inhalers for years now. Never bin better. Ageing better than herself, anyhow. Go on in, dear, you know the way. She’s waiting.’
I enter the house. I go into the small parlour, step up into the kitchen, and there, sitting at the table, is an old lady.
I can’t get her properly into my sight. Not the whole of her. My eyes keep scuttling about. The collar of her blouse, cream with a dark-blue print. A staring, blue-veined collarbone. One blue eye and one slightly milky. Short, white hair, cloudy to go with the eye. Her hands spread out on the kitchen table. Her fingertips, broad and calloused.
I sit down, because standing is beyond me. It’s as much as I can do to keep breathing.
After a moment she reaches across and takes my hand. Her fingers cling to mine.
Then her other hand reaches out for my other hand. Hers are veined and spotted, the knuckles large. Now we are fully held. Her fingers as warm and strong as they used to be. Mine, adult now, still smaller than hers. She still encloses me.
She says, ‘So here you are, child.’
There is a pulse in her voice, as if a giant hand is gently shaking her. Her eyes look heavenward.
The house is so quiet.
‘Where has everyone gone?’ she says.
‘I have no idea.’
I glimpse her good eye, blazing blue. Any more than that, the tears will come and blind me.
‘Potatoes,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘We should be peeling potatoes.’
‘I don’t want to let go of your hands.’
She laughs a little. ‘Sweetheart. Let’s do the potatoes. We can hold hands again afterwards.’
The potatoes are earthy, in a straw basket in the larder. The memory hits me in the nose, because the smell of Lucy’s larder is exactly the same, of cold good food. Peas sit in there, and custard, and a butter dish, along with empty milk bottles, and tins of prunes.
‘How many shall I bring?’
‘The lot. There are three boys.’
‘Those boys,’ I say. ‘How hungry they were.’
‘You were all hungry.’
I wouldn’t mind the hunger, if I could have been back here, staying with her for ever. I scrub the potatoes at the sink, feeling her eyes on me.
‘I’m just looking at you,’ she says. ‘Thinking how strong you must be. Penny showed me a video. It looks so graceful.’
It’s a relief to dwell for a moment on work. ‘They used to liken it to a dance. Glass-blowing.’
I put the wet potatoes on the chopping board. She takes one, pares it expertly with a knife. I start work with the peeler. A quiet falls over us. I let my gaze wander round the walls, linger for a moment on the only picture in the room, one I don’t remember, showing a young man in army uniform with flattened light hair and small trustable eyes. Then I see the railway clock.
‘Ellen! You’ve given Lucy our clock!’
‘I live here, with Lucy now.’ She laughs at my astonishment. ‘I moved out of the mill house a long time ago.’
I listen to its steady, rocking tick, so familiar that I only now hear it. ‘So we won’t be going to the house?’
She shakes her head. ‘Well. We can. But it’s an artisan mill now, grinding organic flour. The mill house is a tea room, with a museum of old tools upstairs. Full of pictures of Selwyn in his overalls, and our lorry, and all the ancient Victorian Parrs.’ She sighs. ‘I got rid of the house about three years after Selwyn died. I went to Singapore with William Kennet. We visited Edward, and when I came back I sold up.’
‘Penny and I were talking about Edward’s birds.’
‘The first one was the most treasured. You broke some of the wing feathers. I only found out a long time later.’
‘Well, I’m ever so sorry. I was probably five years old.’
She chuckles.
We finish the potatoes, set them to boil. I put the peelings in a dish for the hens. I look out of the window at the patch of garden, the hills beyond. It was here, in Lucy’s cottage on its high bank, that I learned how hills become bluer as they recede.
‘You said there’d be hens in Ireland.’
There it is. Said. There was no thought that preceded these words. It was just the blue hills, and then the hens.
‘Did I? When?’
‘The day I left. I wanted to feed the hens one last time but you said there’d be hens enough in Ireland.’ I turn round to face her. ‘Those were your exact words before you pushed me into the car.’
She swings her head as if from a lash.
‘And then there weren’t any hens. Aunt Hester didn’t have any.’
In the silence her fingers poke, push my back, I hear my own screams. It is a hot day and I cannot stop.
I’m dumbstruck now, the tears dripping from my chin.
I stand for a while longer at the window. The lid rattles on the pan. I turn down the electric. She sits, also without moving, staring ahead of her. Her shoulders are all caved in, as if there’s nothing in the middle.
I think of all the times she hugged me in bed; that hard, hot fusion, those whispered endearments in the half-light. When I added my pounds, shillings and pence correctly she would kneel on the floor to embrace me and say, ‘My clever little creature.’ But that family of mine? It was jumping aboard a milk float, easy to do but nothing there to speak of. My cousins just tramped up the stairs saying ‘G’night, Ma’, and that was it. I thought I’d die, sometimes, from lack of kissing.
‘You know,’ I say to her, ‘I tried to tell myself, at least I’ve felt love. At least I had it once. But sometimes I wished I’d never known you.’
She nods her head, sombre. Looks at her hands. When she speaks her voice is rich with grief.
‘You were so heavy to pick up.’ She shakes her head at the memory. ‘Of course you were heavy. You were precious. I remember I dropped the blanket. That was the day you came, the day of the bus. Oh, yes. I know exactly what you’re talking about, Pamela. There have been times since when I wished I’d never found you.’
I sit down again. A pair of oven gloves is lying on the table, two pockets,
one at each end of a long strip. I slide my hand into one of the pockets, feel the coarse stuff, woven wool maybe, in a tight criss-cross knotting which has gone brown like burnt porridge, only fit for toting blackened pans and trays and bread tins.
‘I had no idea I was going to say that.’ My fingertips seek out the holes in the glove, the sparse thready patches inside. ‘It isn’t why I came. I must have been possessed …’
‘It’s nothing.’ Her voice is blank, exhausted. ‘Not compared to what I did to you.’
Now we’re in the wilderness. For the first time I can look properly at her face as she stares at the window. A kind wolf, I used to think sometimes. A white defending wolf, strict with boys who put my shoes out in the rain and dribbled tea all over my schoolwork, a picture showing the proper way to eat a herring. Fiercely loving.
I take my hand out of the warm, threadbare little pocket and fold the oven gloves together. ‘I wrapped these up for you. All I could find was newspaper, old yellow newspaper from before the war. I got some twine and Mr Parr put his finger on the knot.’
Her lips tweak. ‘Those mitts are long gone, I’m afraid.’
‘Of course. How silly of me.’ I’m incredibly cast down by this. ‘They’d be, what, over sixty years old.’
‘These are the same lineage, darling. Their descendants.’
I laugh unsteadily, even as my eyes fill.
‘I remember yours.’ She starts to smile. ‘You saved up your pocket money and bought them at the Women’s Institute. It was a lovely present. Pamela, Pamela. You must know. You were my joy, my treasure, my heart’s life.’
Her hands are spread on the table and I see again her old knuckles, her spread fingertips. My joy, my treasure, my heart’s life. I cannot absorb these words. I leave them far away, shining, a fleet of freighted ships standing off in the sea roads, waiting to come in.
‘Would you like to feed them now?’
‘What?’
‘The hens.’
I shake my head and the tears fall again.
‘Well. Maybe later. Sit, then. Talk to me. Tell me about your father.’
I wipe my face. ‘I saw your mother in the churchyard. I’d rather hear about you.’
‘That’s for later.’ Ellen straightens up, and the caved-in look is gone. She is wise again, strong, her smiling eyes roving over a rich past, acquainted with the world. ‘Tell me about Aubrey. His life.’
*
The hens make short work of the grain and the peelings. They dot their beaks on the toes of my shoes, a sensation printed into my body when I was five years old. I’ve told Ellen about my father, how he married late in life, and happily. She remembers every detail of their meeting. ‘We got out Selwyn’s best Venetian glasses. Your father showed us photographs of your mother, and then of your Aunt Hester. And the dog called Winnie, a Labrador.’
‘It must have been a dreadful day.’
‘Not as bad as the ones that followed.’
She’s keeping a firm grip on the doorpost of the hen run. She’s stooped now, and places her feet very carefully when she walks.
‘I’m ashamed to say we put a smock on Winnie and dragged her round in a trolley that used to contain wooden bricks.’
She smiles. ‘I’m glad that you were happy sometimes.’
Maybe I was. Maybe happiness is no more than that, a smocked, long-suffering dog on a wheeled cart. It begins to prick with rain from a small cloud mass above, surprising us, since there’s enough clear sky for hazy sun. ‘Oh, the sheets,’ says Ellen, and I go to pull them down into my arms. Lucy still grows blackcurrants, I see; a little row of three bushes. I ate a blackcurrant once, raw, and Lucy patted my head as I cried from the sourness, which, although I had been warned and warned again, I had to taste to understand. She was taking down the sheets herself at the time, and the whiteness and sourness together were blinding.
‘My darling,’ Ellen’s saying. ‘If I could have done anything. Anything.’
My eyes close in the imagined brightness.
I bundle the sheets in my arms and we walk towards the house. ‘You were so young, Ellen. Only, what, twenty?’
‘I was grown up. I’d been grown up for years.’ Her voice is mild. ‘Do you know, I felt younger the second time I married. Almost skittish—’
‘You married again?’
‘Yes. The vicar, would you believe.’ She’s smiling broadly. ‘James Acton. He’s dead now, of course. Lucy and I have outlived everyone. But James and I had twenty years together. It was absolutely super. In some ways I was rather … uneducated. He saw to that. Pamela, your jaw is hanging in a most unattractive way.’
I laugh as the blush rises.
‘You have to seize love,’ she says. ‘I did that with you. I seized you. I loved you so much, and I never stopped. So it’s all piled up, I’m afraid.’
Her hand lies heavy on my shoulder. The light rain continues to fall.
‘I can’t take it all at once,’ I find myself saying. ‘It’s too much. It’ll kill me.’
‘I was like that when I was hungry.’ She smiles. ‘I knew I needed the food but I couldn’t fit it in. I had to take it away in a paper bag.’
‘Maybe I can do that,’ I say. ‘Put your love into a paper bag.’
She holds out her arms. Along with the sheets I am folded into her embrace. Her arms bind me fast around my shoulders. My head used to rest against her belly, just beneath her bust. Now I fit neatly under her chin, my cheek against the collar of her blouse, squashed against a brooch pinned to her lapel.
‘You pair! The spuds are boiling themselves dry. We could see the steam out the kitchen window …’
Lucy’s making her way towards us from the steps. ‘Oh, thank you, Pam dear. Hang those sheets in the lavvy, we’ll pop ’em out again later … Ho, ho, you was thinking about that heart toilet, wasn’t you. I can see by your face. There it used to be, and good riddance. What do you think of Upton now we’re all spick and span? Int it lovely. All that cow muck and nuisance gone, and everyone so clean and respectable. I don’t mind saying it now. Them Suttons and Rails, sometimes their kitchen floors weren’t much better than a stall …’
Penny and her children fill the kitchen. Ellen, resolutely unaided, removes a heavy cast-iron casserole dish from the oven. A smell of great riches seeps from under the lid. ‘Where did you all go?’ she asks Penny as she unbends.
‘Down to see Mrs Corey in the Absaloms.’
The Absaloms. The name comes first, and then four damp walls that were open to the sky. ‘Aren’t they all tumbled down?’
Lucy laughs. ‘It’s a care home now. Tickles Ellen. How after all this, she’ll end up back in the Absaloms. So will I, too.’
Penny puts a hand on Lucy’s arm. ‘You don’t know that.’
Lucy shrugs. ‘I don’t mind. It’s comfy enough.’
We serve the boys first. They eat their main course at the little table and then stand up to wash and dry their plates. We take them and lay the table again. The adults sit. I lift my fork to my mouth eagerly. Crying brings appetite, I find. It’s a lamb stew from heaven, scraggy, knotty and reeking with flavour. Bright lumps of root veg, carrot and swede and sweet melting onion. And then a pie, one with black edges and an egg cup to keep the pastry up. Inside it, chunks of Bramley apple that I can’t taste at first because my mouth is full of steam, and then taste the sharpness that stays through sugar.
‘Now that’s a real apple pie, if I say so myself,’ says Ellen.
‘Made with proper tart cookers.’ Lucy guffaws. ‘Look at them kids pushing it around their plates.’
The children are eating their pudding standing up, leaning against the kitchen cupboards.
‘It’s a bit sour,’ ventures the middle boy, William.
‘They don’t know they’re born, these kids.’
Penny laughs. ‘Lucy, you spoke the truth.’
‘Pass him the custard,’ I say. ‘There’s no need to suffer.’
In the quiet,
the freighted ships put in to port. Flags snap in the bright breeze. Gulls peal silently overhead. My joy, my treasure, my heart’s life. The sea sparkles with a million tiny lights. We eat without talking. The only sound is our spoons tinkling on our plates.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK:
My agents. In the US, heartfelt thanks to Deborah Schneider. In the UK, Jo Unwin, who uttered those thrilling words, ‘Send me more!’ and whose hard work and wise counsel led to so many good things.
My editors, Helen Garnons-Williams of 4th Estate and Tara Singh Carlson of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Perceptive, ingenious, patient guides on this exhilarating journey.
Sarah-Jane Forder, for copyediting. You and I know what you did. Thank you.
My friends Alison Clink, Nikki Lloyd, Crysse Morrison and Rosie Jackson. Talented writers all, sensitive critics, and generous companions in craft.
Robert, my husband. Attentive reader, tolerant of deadlines, caring parent. Love and gratitude.
Juliet, my daughter, four years old when I began this book, nine when I finished it. Beloved.
Juliet’s godmother, Kate Teale, for our forty years of friendship. An inspiration to me as a woman and as an artist.
My grandparents, Betty and Brendan O’Hagan, and Bill and Joan Liardet. For being brave.
About the Author
Frances Liardet has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and studied Arabic at Oxford before traveling to Cairo to work as a translator. She currently lives in Somerset, England, with her husband and daughter, and runs a summer writing session called Bootcamp. We Must Be Brave is her second novel.
Also by Frances Liardet
The Game
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
We Must Be Brave Page 41