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.