The women had pulled the blackout curtain away from the side of the window. They were all crowded around the slit they had made, crying out and clinging together as if they were in a lifeboat on a high sea. ‘How can they, how can they, the devils.’ ‘Bloody fucking bastards.’ ‘It’s vicious. It ain’t human.’
They’d left the lamp on. The light was shining out through the naked glass.
‘Replace that curtain.’ I spoke in a voice of steel.
One of them sobbed at me, ‘You should see it, dear, before we do.’
Darting to the table, I turned out the lamp. ‘You’ve broken the blackout. And you may also have broken the fastenings.’ I shouldered my way in among them and started lashing the blackout tapes back onto the hooks in the window frame. There it was again, the same rumbling, fleshy stain on the undersides of the clouds, punctuated by white flashes, that I’d seen last night rising over Beacon Hill. I tried to avert my face but with each flash I felt sicker.
‘Those are the flares,’ said one of the girls behind me. ‘They make it like daylight. So you can see the bomb doors, you see, you can see them opening up.’
The other girl burst out into noisy weeping, and several others joined her.
‘Please don’t wake our evacuees.’ My voice and fingers were shaking as I worked. ‘I can’t have them seeing this raid. Their families are in the city.’ The curtain secured, I fumbled for the lamp and lit it again, and saw Mrs Berrow in the doorway.
‘Mrs Parr’s right,’ she said. ‘And that light would have carried twenty mile in the blackout. You want their leftovers dumped on us?’ She folded her strong arms. ‘Now pipe down, and no more of that language, thank you very much.’
Chastened, the women began to settle themselves down, sighing and murmuring. Mrs Berrow and I left the room. Just as we reached the stairs Mrs Berrow spoke again. ‘Any whisper of that little girl’s mam?’
Her face was benign, expectant, in the shaft of dull light from the sitting room.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’
At three o’clock I was startled by a sturdy punch in the back and a long, grinding grizzle.
‘Mummy. Mummeee.’
She sat up, eyes half open, arms outstretched. She wasn’t awake. I pulled her to me and her arms went tight round my neck, her hot cheek pressed against mine. Very small breaths she took, just puffs of air. Then I laid her down onto her small pillow.
*
I rose at six. Selwyn’s bed was empty. He had already gone up to the sluicegate. Our mill workers would be in at seven.
In the hall I met Elizabeth carrying a bucket of water to the lavatory, her face tight. ‘I know they’ve been bombed out, but a cistern still has to fill up before you can flush again, Mrs Parr, no matter who’s pulling the chain.’
The women were stirring in the sitting room. I knocked on the door and when I was admitted found them pulling off blankets, shrugging on cardigans in the lamplight. ‘We’re so grateful, madam,’ somebody said. ‘But we’ll get off home as soon as we can.’
As if they’d been banished by a burst pipe, or an overly bold family of rats. ‘Well, if you’re sure …’
‘Of course we are. You can’t feed us, dear.’
At least they realized.
I brought two full teapots, each with one spoonful of tea in it. They would simply have to make do with that. They took the teacups with both hands and passed them in a ritual silence. I untied the blackout curtains and drew them. One of the young women said, ‘We’re very sorry about last night, Mrs Parr.’ She had fresh lipstick on, defiantly at odds with the graze that slanted across her high, pasty forehead.
‘It’s all right. You were frightened, and with good reason.’
There was a silence, broken eventually by Mrs Berrow. She was sitting in the largest armchair. ‘There wasn’t any thinking,’ she told me. ‘We just covered our heads, and as soon as we could find a bus we cleared off without a backward look. We lost our nerve, dear, is all.’ She gulped the tea. ‘This is pure nectar. Where’s that little girl of yours?’
‘Upstairs … What happened to your friend, the lady who could only say Daphne?’
‘Oh, yes. Somebody did a whopper of a sneeze right by her head and she snapped right out of it. Never saw the like. If you brought the little girl down we could have a chat. Now that we’re in our right minds, or nearly.’
‘I expect she’s still sleeping, Mrs Berrow.’
I hesitated. There were thumps on the stairs.
‘That’ll be your lads.’ Mrs Berrow chuckled. ‘Not very likely, is it?’
They slept through the Second Coming, little children. That was what she’d told me. I almost pointed it out to her.
‘I’ll fetch Pamela.’
‘So we went into the hotel because Mummy said we had to get some candles for my cake. And then we were going to bed there. Gosh, your eye is like a thunderstorm, isn’t it.’
Pamela, in blanket, knickers and knee-length singlet, was standing in front of Mrs Berrow who, seated as she was, had acquired a faintly inquisitorial air.
‘Some candles,’ I repeated. ‘For your cake.’
‘Because I’m going to be six.’ She gave me a passing glance. I was much less important than Mrs Berrow. ‘My cake’s going to be pink.’
‘Could it have been the Crown?’ somebody said. ‘The buses stop right outside.’
‘It was mayhem there.’ Mrs Berrow nodded, remembering. ‘That’s where I live, see, opposite the Crown. So when you and Mummy came out, what happened next?’
A blended howl of outrage and mirth rose from the kitchen next door, along with a crash of cutlery and a thin cry of exasperation from Elizabeth. Pamela peered through the gap in the door. ‘What naughty boys you’ve got,’ she said to me.
Mrs Berrow sighed. ‘So when you and Mummy came out—’
‘Mummy was coming.’ Pamela sat down on the floor. ‘But she was so slow. She was talking to the cake-candle man. So I went out first.’ She crossed her legs and encircled her big toe with thumb and fingers. ‘This is how you comfort your toes, especially when they’re cold. And then I banged my head on the bus-stop pole, and after that I looked for Mummy. But all I could see was the top of her head in a bus window. Then the bald lady asked me if that was my mummy, and I said it was, but that bus was going. Then the other lady, the fat one, came, and they took me on their bus. And the bald lady laid me down under a blanket with a lot of tiny holes in because I was screaming.’
‘The bald lady?’
‘Yes, the one with the special hat. She wouldn’t wear that unless she was bald.’
Her face contorted and she let loose a single, keening, tearless sob. I kneeled down and grasped her. She leaned against my chest and sucked her thumb industriously.
‘There were two women,’ I murmured to Mrs Berrow. ‘Between them they got the idea that Pamela’s mother was already aboard one of the buses. They didn’t stop to wonder how she could have got on without Pamela. They just took Pamela with them on the next bus. I was stupid, I didn’t ask them which hotel they were outside.’
Mrs Berrow patted my hand. ‘Nobody was very clever yesterday, dear.’
Pamela stopped sobbing as suddenly as she’d begun. She broke away from me and clasped her feet again. ‘Your toes you can hold all at once in one hand, look.’ Involuntarily she rolled onto her back, where she rocked like