We Must Be Brave

8

I WAS ELEVEN when things started disappearing.

First it was my rocking horse, a beautiful thing with a blood-red bridle of suede. I was really too big for her now but all the same I loved her. When I asked Connie and Miss Fane, and they both said, ‘She’s gone to be repaired,’ using those exact words, I knew they’d been taught a lie. Three weeks later I saw Miss Fane in the hall, planting her foot on the lid of her trunk and bending to tug the strap tight. Then she too was gone.

I ran outside, found my brother Edward in the orchard, swinging a stick. The orchard was the jewel of our house, which was known as the Stour House after Godfrey Stour who had sold it to my father, and the generations of Stours before him who had planted and grafted and filled the apple press with cider jars. Edward looked up as I came running, crying. He put his arms around me and chose words a little too young for me, perhaps to soften the blow or perhaps just because he too, at fourteen, was confounded.

‘Daddy’s made a mistake with the money.’

My mother and father didn’t shout: instead they went to the study and spoke in a level tone, each word separate as if etched into the air.

‘It’s simply gossip, Susan.’

‘People are gossiping because they haven’t been paid. And they haven’t been paid because you’ve ruined us.’

‘I’m an investor. There are always ups and downs—’

‘You’re a gambler.’

On the word gambler my mother’s voice tightened to a whisper and the acid bit deep.

On the following morning Daddy came to my bedroom resplendent in waistcoat and watch chain, his moustaches groomed, his round blue eyes full of glory. He kissed me on the side of the head roughly, said, ‘Kitten,’ and went downstairs. I heard the front door slam, his footsteps on the gravel, the gorgeous cough and chug of the engine of his car. He changed gear once, twice, as he tore away down the drive. He was awfully skilful at driving.

In the hall I found his goggles, gloves and driving coat, slung across the hall table.

I asked Edward if he shouldn’t be back at school, and he gave a bark of a laugh. ‘What do you think has happened to our father, Ellen?’

We were loitering on the stairs where Mother couldn’t hear us. On a post at the top of the banister sat a small, wide-eyed, oaken owl looking at us, his feathers in neat carved rows.

‘We don’t know exactly,’ I said patiently. ‘Mother said he’s away, trying to salvage what he can.’ The word ‘salvage’ made me form a picture of Daddy, a great figure in oilskins, seawater sluicing off his sou’wester, pulling treasure from a wreck in the pounding surf.

‘He won’t be coming back. He’s absconded. Do you know what that means?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘And it’s utter nonsense. He’s on his own, he hasn’t absconded anyone.’

Edward let loose a groan of fury. ‘That’s abduct, Ellen!’ He clattered away down the stairs. ‘To abscond is to escape on pain of arrest!’ And he left the house, slamming the front door after him.

I started to brush the dust from between the owl’s ranks of feathers.

Connie, our maid, stayed for a while longer, and then I did Mother’s hair on my own, and it was just me, Edward, Cook and Jennie, to look after everything. Edward made the fires and I folded the sheets with Jennie. She wouldn’t look at me as she took the sheet from my fingers, nipping the edges together neatly; she turned her head away. She’d been eating onions, she said, she didn’t trust her breath.

Mother couldn’t stay downstairs for long. ‘I’m finding our circumstances extremely trying,’ she would say. ‘I need my rest.’

She couldn’t salvage her friends. Lady Brock was far too busy with the shoot, Mrs Daventry preparing to travel to India. ‘You have no idea what has to be done, children, when one shuts up a house like The Place,’ Mother told us, glassy-eyed. ‘It was silly of me to expect her to linger chatting in the street.’

My friends, too, were beyond rescue. I no longer went to dance Scottish reels with Esme and Lucinda Drake in their drawing room with its delightful carpet the colour and texture of moss. I didn’t sit cross-legged any more in Clara Mayhew’s bedroom where Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur were kept in cupboards of black oak. Anyway, how would I get to their houses? The car, with its leather seats redolent of luxury and nausea as he swung me around the lanes, was gone, of course, along with Daddy.

Edward sold the pig. Cook’s brother took it away to be butchered and came back with a warm newspaper parcel. ‘You give that to Irene, my love, it’s some nice hocks and trotters.’ That was how I learned Cook’s Christian name. But soon afterwards Cook and Jennie went, and we were alone. And then Mr Dawes from the parish was at the gate, grimacing under his moustaches, because what expression is suitable when you’re turning the Captain’s family out of their home; and there was a cart outside, and I wore my plaid coat and carried a small case containing my first workbook; Daddy’s hand had cupped mine as I wrote Ellen Beatrice Calvert on the first page. That great thumb I remembered, and the ring with the claws holding a garnet. It was astounding how quickly we’d fallen. The apple trees had been in blossom when my rocking horse disappeared, and now the early desserts were cropping in the orchard. The time of the rocking horse and Miss Fane seemed like the dimmest age of the ancients.

I remembered, as the dirt came, how white everything had been at the Stour House. A tongue of milk spooling into a jug, and the jug itself, white china with a white beaded cloth on top against the flies. And the apple blossom, of course, and my petticoats and drawers, and the tablecloths that Mother embroidered out on the porch in full sun, white silk thread on white linen, and why are we doing this? I would ask.

And Mother’s secret smile. ‘It’s a present for you.’

‘But I don’t want a tablecloth.’

Smiling more secretly. ‘You will.’

I kept my plainest drawers and the cotton underskirts. Miss Dawes, the sister of the parish man, sold the embroidered linens discreetly for us. They fetched a good price. We put our furniture – two beds, an armchair, two chests, three kitchen chairs and a table – on the cart. A firescreen decorated with Arcadian scenes, a fluting shepherd and a lolling goatherd, so that Mother could sit facing the fire and forget that the house was gone: the dining room, the sun room, the sleepy sunlit bedrooms with their wrinkled quilts of eider down. Mr Dawes and Mr Blunden, who mowed the graveyard, lashed everything together with stiff ropes. ‘Heave ho,’ said Mr Blunden, bearing down on the rope and guffawing as if our belongings were a pile of bric-a-brac for the Whitsun Fair.

We left the Stour House, which stood out on its own beyond Beacon Hill, aloof from the hamlet of Barrow End and the village of Upton. We left owing money in Barrow End, Upton and Waltham, and no doubt in Southampton and London too. And if anyone were to come and dun us, whether it be for the price of a buttonhook or a hundred railway shares, we had nothing to give them but the charity shown us by the parish, and if they took that they might as well take our bones for bone meal too, because we’d surely die.

The cottage was on the edge of Upton, the first of five dwellings clustered at the top of a dead-end lane that petered into a wasteland of ruined shacks, nettles and broken fencing. The other cottages were empty, too dilapidated to live in. Mary Absalom, who had given them over to the parish, had been dead a hundred years but people still called the place after her, a fact I learned on my first day at Upton School when a sallow-faced girl said, ‘You’re the one that’s come to the Absaloms, then.’

From this girl I also learned that the last occupant of our house had been one Vic Small who, when drunk, fired a crossbow into the front door, which accounted for the splits.

‘I prefer not to know about Mr Small,’ I told this girl, whose name was Lucy and who cackled, ‘Only being friendly, dear.’

Edward couldn’t come to this school because the pupils left at fourteen. I refused at first to go without him, but it was cold in the cottage and Mother said that I’d be warm there. ‘You don’t have to speak to anyone, darling. I’m sure Miss Yarnold will be kind.’ Her voice wavered: she was sure of no such thing. ‘And don’t bend your head too close to another child’s. Something may leap from their hair.’

I’m sure it won’t be for long, she said. Something will come up.

We stood by our desks and recited the Lord’s Prayer. We would do it every morning thereafter, so that, for me, the words remained saturated with the body odour of those children. Amen, we said, and stank, because when I got home I did too, and we didn’t know it but soon I would on my own account, and our smell was unnoticeable save to people who washed.

Miss Yarnold took the register. My mother had always greeted her when we met in the haberdasher’s in Waltham. ‘How nice you look, Miss Yarnold, so fresh,’ my mother usually said, or something like it, and I’d nod and smile as well, tilting my head the way my mother did. Now I felt the heat envelop me as she reached my name: ‘Ellen Calvert,’ she called, and my ‘Present’ came out as a choking cry that made one boy crow like a cock in imitation. I looked her straight in the eye then, because she’d said my name a shade too loud and sharp, almost trippingly.

‘Daniel Corey,’ she said next, with a guileless gaze and a tweak of a smile.

On that first day she announced the national competition. Each of us was to write two essays, one about a bird, the other about a tree. We would observe our birds and trees over the course of the autumn.

We set to work. I sat at a double desk with the girl Lucy. I chose the waxwing and the rowan, being that there was a rowan tree outside our house at the Absaloms. I hoped to save myself labour since the waxwing was a migrant and fed off the rowan. I might whip it all into one text and have done, since surely by winter I wouldn’t be in this school. Daddy would have come back and rescued us by then. He’d come bounding into the schoolroom, tall and moustached, and gather me out of my seat. Come, my kitten, not a minute more. My fingers squeezed my pen.

‘I’m so sorry, Ellen.’ Miss Yarnold smiled over our desk. ‘But the rules are specific. It must be a native bird. And do choose an unrelated tree, since otherwise there would be too much repetition. And now, Lucy. There’s nothing on your page. What is it to be?’

‘The linnet, Miss.’

‘And why?’

Lucy shrugged.

‘And your tree?’

Another shrug.

Miss Yarnold smiled more brightly. ‘Dear Lucy. Always so slow.’

By mid-morning Lucy had written ‘linnet’, which I had spelled for her, and ‘prity’, which I hadn’t. There followed a break during which I stood at the edge of the yard and watched the boy Daniel Corey, whose name came after mine in the register, try and fail to push another boy over a log. This second, stronger boy was called John Blunden. It was his father who had helped us lash down our cart of shame. As they broke from their wrestling John stepped back and glanced at me, and frowned a hot, embarrassed frown.

At midday the classroom emptied at the first strike of Miss Yarnold’s little handbell – emptied, that is, apart from me and two small twin girls. ‘We stop at school,’ one said, and the other added, ‘Our dinner-time’s not till night. Is your dinner at night too?’

‘Yes.’

There was a silence. They were pale and long-haired, the hair dark and lankly curling.

‘What are your names?’

‘I’m Amy and she’s Airey.’

‘I’m Airey and she’s Amy.’

They’d spoken in unison. I smiled and pointed at the left-hand twin. ‘Amy?’ When she smiled back I saw the distinguishing mark, the tiniest chip on her front tooth. Then they placed their folded hands on their desks and laid their heads down. I sat still as their breathing fell into a single rhythm.

‘I must say, Ellen, you’re bearing up awfully well.’

A month of this life had passed. Edward and I were returning to the cottage from the copse on the other side of the lane, pulling behind us a bundle of dry dead branches lashed together with Edward’s belt.

‘It’s not so bad.’ I copied his tone: stout, cheerful and schoolboyish. I knew it was worse for him. He’d been to petition Mr Dawes over and over again for work – anything, clearing field drains, beating for the shoot. But all jobs were taken, it seemed.

‘We shall keep warm, I’m sure,’ I went on, ‘if we throw ourselves into our tasks.’

We stacked the branches and set to cleaning the windows. There was vinegar in the cupboard, and newspaper in the kitchen drawers, left, we assumed, by Vic Small. The windows were so crusted that we used all the newspaper on four panes, creating four clear, bright holes ringed by a fuzz of grime. Edward went inside and I tried scrubbing with a hard brush, but it had been left outside in the weather and only made the glass dirtier.

‘More paper, look.’ Edward reappeared with a bold, red-lipped smile and handed me a sheaf of illustrated pages. I glimpsed a corseted female torso, a suspendered leg cocked upon a stool, and dropped the pages in the mud. Edward broke into a baying laugh. ‘You can’t afford to be so nice. Not any more!’

I heard tapping and looked up to see Mother’s fingers against the glass. ‘She wants tea.’ My eyes were stinging. ‘I’ll go.’

The police came one afternoon late in October, all the way from Southampton in a black car whose headlights illuminated billowing tents of rain as it drew up outside the cottage. The car disgorged two men, a constable in a cape with skirts shining in the wet, and a detective sergeant doffing a trilby whose brim shed a short stream of water onto the floor. And then Miss Dawes, a surprising, straggling third.

The detective introduced himself and his junior. ‘I’m here to inform you, Mrs Calvert,’ he continued, ‘that we’ve found your husband.’

‘What do you mean, you’ve found him?’ Mother stared. ‘He’s not lost. He’s simply absent for the moment, retrieving our finances. He’s a capable, resourceful man. A very good provider.’ She waved an airy hand. ‘I expect he was fairly cross when you found him. Busy as he must be. He does get so involved in his enterprises.’

For a moment nobody moved or spoke. Then Miss Dawes turned to me and Edward. ‘Let us put the kettle on.’

‘We’ve got no fuel in the range,’ I told her. The wood we did have was wet, and I wasn’t burning our coal for Miss Dawes.

‘We’ll pop into the kitchen, dears, all the same.’

Edward folded his arms. ‘I’m staying with Mother.’

I stood with Miss Dawes in the yellow shaft thrown from the open kitchen door into the dim room. The detective began to speak but his words were soon drowned.

Edward went with the policemen to identify Daddy. It was a formality. A formality, I learned, was a senseless cruelty whose sole purpose was to inflict a lasting wound on a boy most innocent and undeserving. I would have gone too, but Miss Dawes told me to stay with Mother.

I learned the truth the following day, in the course of a halting catechism given by Mr Dawes. Daddy had died by his own hand, three days previous, in Southampton. Daddy had felt terrible shame at ruining us. Although he’d made a dreadful blunder in suicide Daddy couldn’t be blamed because the balance of his mind was disturbed. Daddy was now at peace, we should know; he loved us, and we should remember that his heart was in the right place.

Edward told me later that Daddy had put a gun to his own chest. His blue eyes looked black as he spoke. ‘Ha. Ha. Daddy’s heart certainly isn’t in the right place now.’

I screamed in his arms as he begged forgiveness for saying such a thing.

In school Miss Yarnold sat me nearest the fire with Amy and Airey for company. It transpired that they had also lost their father. ‘Dad fell from a roof and broke up his leg,’ Amy said.

‘His leg and his back,’ added Airey.

‘And they wouldn’t mend so he expired,’ said Amy. ‘We do pity you, Ellen dear, but you’ll get over it. We got over it, didn’t we, Airs?’

As if the loss were a high fence on a bleak upland field.

No one else spoke to me – no one, that is, except the girl Lucy, who instructed me to accept her condolences and take them to my mother and brother. ‘On my behalf and on behalf of my dad and nan. That’s Lucy Horne, George Horne and old Mrs Horne. There ain’t no young Mrs Horne because my ma passed on.’

I cast around for words, and then put out my hand. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, Lucy.’

We shook hands. Her palm was warm and the hand itself small and dainty. She said, ‘Long time ago now.’

Mother developed a routine. She would rise early and light a small fire and get herself ready for the day. She toasted bread for us, and made tea. She didn’t eat until evening, apart from the crusts of our toast, and then, when she saw that we wanted the crusts, she left them on our plates. ‘Much too chewy for me, my dears.’ She washed our plates and cups and walked once around the garden. Then she took up her seat by the fire, with the screen shielding her gaze from the room. After the fire went out she stared at the ashes in the grate. At dusk, when no one could see her, she walked a while in the lane, and then she’d come in and light a second fire. We sat round it eating our supper, which became earlier as we grew hungrier with the increasing cold. Edward would stare at the flames like Mother and gently chew his knuckles. When the second fire went out we went to bed.

‘Edward?’

‘Hm?’ He was rolled in a coat on the far side of our bed, dozing. Lit by a bright half-moon in the window.

‘Do you think it was raining when Daddy died?’

He turned his head. Such a handsome boy he was. I was proud of him. He and I had blue eyes like Daddy but he had Daddy’s chestnut-brown hair. Mine was blonde as a stook of corn and much the same in behaviour, bunching and sticking out however tightly I plaited it.

‘Why do you ask?’ He had a new, distant way of talking, now that his voice was breaking. I didn’t mind. If anything it made him more admirable and manly.

‘I’m just trying to imagine it.’

The rain, and then a bang, and then more rain.

‘The balance of his mind was disturbed,’ Edward said at last. ‘It overwhelmed him, alone as he was. The shame and dread.’

‘Is that the same as being mad?’

‘Temporarily. Temporarily mad.’

He started to sob without weeping tears, and even that was manly, in his new breaking voice. I sat up and put my hand on his crisp hair. In the morning he and I found an old potato bed and two rows of turnips among the weeds.

The tenth of December, and my twelfth birthday came. Mother gave me a book which she’d secreted among her things. For the first time since our fall her cheeks and eyes glowed with pleasure. ‘This belonged to my mother, and now you shall have it.’ The book was leather-bound, old and very battered, entitled Downland Flora. All the plants of the chalk downs were in there, the colour plates shielded by paper so translucent that the images beneath were visible as if through soft rain.

Mr Dawes called on us. He carried a box containing a pudding and three Christmas crackers. ‘My sister will come on Christmas Eve with a duck, Mrs Calvert. A few vegetables and you’ll do handsomely.’ Miss Dawes duly came and we gave her fulsome salivating thanks. Later that same evening, there was a knock at the door. I opened it but there was only darkness outside. Then I saw a paper bag, and in it a bottle of beer. As I picked up the bag the gate clicked, and I looked up to see Lucy Horne vanish behind the hedge.

That first Christmas Day we polished our shoes, brushed our coats and went to church. We weren’t going to sit in our hole like mice. We slid to the end of one of the back pews and stared straight ahead. Behind me Daddy’s strong voice rang out in the bass variation to ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. O come, Daddy, O come. Edward sang the hymn loudly in Latin as he’d been taught at school. Adeste fideles, laete triumphantes. We left the church without looking back or stopping, even though Miss Dawes blurted, ‘Mrs Calvert, Merry—’ as we passed. We walked on down the lane, and when it came to the turn for the Absaloms we halted, all three of us. At the Stour House there’d have been dinner waiting for us, guests gathering in the hall. Cries of delight at our tree with its glass balls as big as a man’s hand and red as a man’s blood, its tiny brass bells, its lights glimmering through angel hair like stars through cirrus cloud.

Mother clasped her hands together. ‘I can’t go back to the cottage yet. Not today.’

‘No. A Christmas walk is in order.’ Edward was using his stout voice. ‘We can always have dinner later.’ And we strode on as if we were normal people, not creatures so clemmed that our stomachs were wringing inside us.

We went all the way out of the village to where the land spread out and up towards Beacon Hill. It was dry underfoot and Edward and I ran to and fro along the track, again and again, for the pleasure of being in the open, of being back on the hillside we’d known since we were able to walk. Edward inhaled lungfuls of downland air. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t come out here before, instead of staying cooped up in the cottage!’ But I knew. It was because so much had become forbidden to us. Even as we ran and panted and laughed, there was a sense of truancy.

We helped Mother over the stile. Her legs had got so thin that her stockings were wrinkled at the ankles. We held her hands and pulled her to the top. Edward sang, ‘Fal-de-ree, fal-de-ra, my knapsack on my back.’

At the top it was silent. We sat on a hillock that Edward said was made in the Iron Age. Then one by one we lay down on the soft springy turf among the dry rabbit droppings. We were warm from the climb, and the weather was mild. I tried to identify some of the downland flora but only managed buck’s-horn plantain, a humble rosette of pointed leaves. It was edible, according to my new book, so Edward and I nibbled like rabbits. Like bitter parsley, we decided. Then I rolled onto my back and stared up at the bands of still winter cloud that blurred into the blue. A long time of peace elapsed.

Edward touched my cheek. ‘Ellen. You were nearly asleep.’

In January I grew out of my boots. Edward put newspaper in his so that I could wear them to school. He found a pair of wooden clogs in the outhouse. When I came home we changed shoes. But soon it became clear from Edward’s pigeon-toed walk that his feet had grown too. He went to look in the cash box under Mother’s bed.

I went out into the garden. My feet slid over the ruts at the edge of the vegetable bed. I stamped and blew out a plume of white breath like a fire-eater. I tried to sing, but it turned into a sob. Edward came outside again. ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘Oh, Edward.’ I knew something was going to happen.

‘There’s not enough, Ell, not for three of us to go on like this—’

‘Don’t leave us. We’ll die without you—’

‘Nonsense. You’ll do very well on the parish money, and then—’

‘Where will you go?’ I was crying.

‘Southampton.’

‘Oh, God—’

‘There’s a fortune to be made on the steamers, everyone knows that. And adventure. Who knows what I’ll send back? Come on, Ellen. You’ll live like kings.’

‘Edward. Oh, Edward.’

He turned away. ‘I must tell Mother.’

I wiped my face on my sleeve. My cheeks and eyes felt raw. I heard Mother give a broken sort of moan, a sound like a roosting hen.

In the morning I felt the first stubble on his chin graze my temple, his bony jaw and ear as he bent lower to whisper, ‘Keep Mother safe and study hard.’

‘Good luck, Edward. Don’t forget us.’

‘It’s for you I’m going, my dearest Ellen. So that’s hardly likely.’