Lord Plumer was an ancient croquet ball, legendarily unbeatable, named by Selwyn’s uncle after the general who, in turning the course of the Battle of Messines, had, in his estimation, spared the life of his nephew. Old Mr Parr, bereaved of both his sons at the Somme, had been grateful for small mercies. When he gave up croquet he had planed a flat underside onto Lord Plumer, fastened a lead plate thereto, and used it as a doorstop for the pantry. No one else was allowed to win a game with Lord Plumer.
The rumble returned. ‘That’s the way!’ we heard Elizabeth say, in a high, breaking voice. ‘Off it goes.’
‘You’ve told Elizabeth, then.’
‘Yes. She’s taking it badly.’ He spread his hands, clasped them as if washing. ‘Apparently Mrs Pickering called the police and then ran out to look for Pamela, only coming back at nightfall. And then, along with a dozen other unfortunates, she placed too much faith in the cellar. The ceiling came down on them all.’
I pictured her returning tear-stained in the evening to her certain death. For even while she was running in the streets, shrieking Pamela, Pamela, the bomb for the Crown was being loaded into its bay.
‘God damn them.’ I swallowed the stone in my throat. ‘I wish them eternal perdition.’
Selwyn breathed in. ‘That attitude helps no one, darling.’
‘It helps me.’ I swallowed again. ‘The police will come now, won’t they? And take her away?’
‘They will. Eventually.’ He took out his spectacles and started cleaning them. He was going to read the Bible: he always gave the lenses fastidious attention before doing so. ‘They’re looking for her father, obviously, and other relatives. They’ll be in touch soon.’
I pushed away a lock of hair. The bicycle ride had made it messy. ‘You could try the Book of Job,’ I told Selwyn. ‘We need his God now. One who can shut the sea with doors. Unload granaries of hail.’
Pamela was sitting on the kitchen floor, wrapping the croquet ball in a tea towel. Elizabeth was putting onions in a baking dish.
‘Baked onions,’ I said. ‘They take me back. Do you know how lucky we are, to have got all that precious onion seed from Upton Hall? Most people’s mouths are watering for onions. They haven’t seen one in months and months.’ I babbled on, in the same bright tone. ‘Months and months.’ Elizabeth’s eyes were brimming. I made to embrace her, my hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged me away.
‘No, Mrs Parr,’ she murmured. ‘It’ll only start me again.’
‘Dolly needs a headscarf.’ Pamela held up her swaddled ball. ‘Otherwise she might get earache in the wind. Do you know what happens then? Somebody irons your ear.’
‘No!’ I feigned amazement while Elizabeth dashed her tears away. ‘With a hot iron?’
Pamela sucked her teeth. ‘They put a towel over your ear first. And then they put the iron on the towel, and it’s so lovely and warm. Mummy’s being very slow.’
‘Yes, Pamela. She must be very busy.’
Elizabeth put the dish in the oven. ‘Perhaps she’s gone to see your auntie. Have you got any aunties?’
Pamela’s face puckered. ‘Why would she go and see Aunt Margie without me?’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Of course she wouldn’t do that.’
‘Aunt Margie’s a long way away. She’s in Cape Town. They have grapes there and lots of flowers. I haven’t been there but Mummy went before I was born. She says it’s wizard. She wouldn’t go and visit Aunt Margie without me.’ She hummed a little and unwrapped the ball to fold the tea towel into an uneven triangle. ‘Bad headscarf.’
‘Let me.’ I took the tea towel and made a neater job of it, and knotted it as best I could under Lord Plumer’s flat chin.
Pamela cradled the ball experimentally, in each elbow, and then set it on the floor to take bobbing steps. ‘Pamela, we’re going shopping. Oh, do come on, darling. Do hurry up. Honestly, it’s like wading through treacle.’
I set three places at the kitchen table. Selwyn didn’t have lunch. Elizabeth started the last loaf, cutting it fine. We listened to the voice of a dead woman piped through Pamela’s mouth, Mrs Pickering exhorting her small child, and prepared the meal.
In the afternoon I found an old bed-jacket that my mother used to wear when she sat up against the pillows to drink her tea. It was a flouncy woollen affair with a flapping collar and silky straps, and it hung down almost to Pamela’s knees. When I drew it off her shoulders she clutched at the swathes of wool. ‘No. No, it’s too cosy. Let me keep it.’
‘You shall have it back when I’ve taken off these silly straps. We need buttons, nice big ones …’
I had no buttons large enough. After a long search we found, in a wooden box in the dressing room, the toggles from an old duffel coat belonging to my brother Edward. That coat had been so torn and stained that Mother and I had cut it into strips and burned it on the fire. I refused to worry about Edward because he’d told me, the day he left to go to sea, that I should never worry, that worry brought bad luck and he would always need luck. He’d been fourteen, I eleven, and since then we had spent a total of nineteen precious days together. His last letter, dated a month ago and headed Singapore, said I’ll take my chances here, drst Ell. The company is doing terrifically, what with soldiery everywhere. I’ve been in a few jams before now and know my way around. Place like a fortress – indeed, it is a fortress and always has been. I’ve been contemplating calling myself Senhor de Souza and speaking entirely in pidgin. But like as not will end up doing my bit.
At least doing his bit wouldn’t put his life in danger, not in Singapore. I was glad he was far away from all this.
Pamela was delighted with the toggles. They were of such smooth, dark-polished wood. I took her to the mill where she sat on the office floor while I tidied my desk. My eyes lit upon an advisory leaflet on the turnip gall weevil which for some reason had come my way, and which I was going to pass to Lady Brock, with her great root crop. It seemed now that this message, arriving as it did before the bombing, belonged to another world. Pamela sat leaning against the wall, sucking her thumb, putting two fingers over her eyelids to pin them closed. That seemed to comfort her, as did the battering of my typewriter keys when I began my letters. ‘Do more,’ she said, whenever I paused. ‘Keep going bangbang.’ It was a noisy behemoth of a machine. We went back to the house an hour before dusk and saw a policeman ahead of us, wheeling his bicycle up the path.
He turned to face us. The strap of his helmet ran beneath a chin now blue with the bristle that accumulated by the evening.
‘Mrs Parr,’ he said, by way of greeting. ‘I’m Constable Flack. Suky Fitch’s brother.’
‘Suky’s brother!’ Astonishing, how such a bulky individual could spring from the same stock as our diminutive mill forewoman.
The constable’s flinty, fifty-year-old eyes warmed. ‘We had different mams.’
He removed his helmet. For a sickening moment I thought he was about to announce Mrs Pickering’s death. But instead he said gravely to Pamela, ‘Would you be so kind, miss, and take this hat for me? I’ve got a great bag of papers to carry.’
He and Pamela went into the sitting room. Elizabeth was shutting up the hens, so I made tea the colour of washing water and took it through. ‘That’s my number,’ he was saying to Pamela. ‘And that there, GR, what do you think that means?’
‘It means you’re fierce. Grrr. So have you been to see Mummy?’
He lifted his bewildered face to me. I heard Elizabeth open the back door. ‘Pamela, I need to speak to the constable. Elizabeth’s got some milk for you.’