We Must Be Brave. Frances Liardet

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      Pamela shook her head, her chin trembling.

      I took her hand. ‘Boys, why don’t you play cards in your bedroom? In a little while you can help Elizabeth with the vegetables.’ The two younger ones tramped up the stairs, Hawley lagging on the bottom step.

      ‘Hawley, try not to worry—’ I began, because I knew that no one had telephoned from Southampton.

      ‘Mr Parr told us the lines are still down.’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s all right.’ He turned to climb the stairs.

      I gave Pamela some bread and milk. She ate slowly, pausing to say, ‘I like this food,’ and then, ‘But I don’t like you.’

      ‘I’m not surprised. It must seem strange being in our house. I must seem strange.’

      ‘No.’ Her eyes glowed with anger. ‘You seem nasty. Why are you making me a coat? I’ve got one already. It’s in the hotel.’ Then the anguish rose again, too large for her body, needing to be expelled in gusts of crying. ‘I don’t think Mummy’s coming. I think she won’t ever come to get me.’

      No, she won’t. Pamela darling, you must be very brave. I was about to say those words because this seemed the greater cruelty, to let so small a child venture unaccompanied into the truth. But then Pamela spoke. ‘She said she’d do it. “One more naughty thing, Pamela, and I’ll go off with the candle man.” And now she has.’ She began to growl with grief. ‘Horrid Mummee.’

      I embraced her. This time she allowed it, her arms hanging by her sides.

      I heated two pans of water and poured them into a tin tub in the kitchen to spare her the glacial bathroom upstairs. I kneeled down and unlaced her shoes. Looking up, I found her face in front of mine, watchful, dreaming. A world in those large, light-brown eyes, clear as a peat brook, flecked with the same dark grey as pebbles in a stream. She lifted her arms for me to pull her top clothes off, obediently stepped from foot to foot so I could remove the knickers and long socks. Everything I did must remind her of her mother, and yet she said nothing. She was so small.

      She sat gingerly down in the water. ‘Is it too hot?’ I asked, anxious. She shook her head. I should wash her hair, probably. But not tonight. Instead I washed her grubby hands, her grubby knees and neck with my own bath soap, and scooped water over her shoulders and back. Her skin was uniformly pale, dense, creamy. Perhaps I was wrong, and this bathtime was so new and peculiar that nothing about it recalled her mother.

      She knew about the candle man long before she’d seen him. She used to hear him come whistling up the path, just after she’d been put to bed with her library books. He had a whistle like a blackbird. He always came on library day. Then one night she went downstairs for a drink of water. And her mother had said: This is Eric. He’s going to get some candles for your cake. ‘And he did this with his eye at me.’ Pamela gurned, trying and failing to close one eye without the other following suit. ‘And the next day we all went to Southampton. We put everything into a special kind of suitcase called a vast suitcase,’ she said. ‘When you go away for a long time, that’s what you need. A vast one.’

      ‘Vast means extremely big, Pamela.’

      The bathwater lapped around her knees. She floated the face flannel on the water’s surface, poking it with a finger until it sank down. She wasn’t a fat child but she still had her baby’s chubbiness around the wrists. ‘Vast,’ she said again.

      She didn’t know why they had to go to Southampton, why Eric couldn’t bring the candles to their house. But Mummy said they needed an adventure. They took a train, then a bus. Then they walked. Mummy was frightened of bombs, but the candle man said the bombers had already got everything they wanted from Southampton. ‘So we went to the hotel and took off our coats and cardigans. Mummy put me on a chair outside our room while she shouted at the candle man inside. We all went to bed in the cellar. And then in the morning I had to sit on the chair again. That’s why I went outside to watch the people rushing around. I was bored.’

      I dipped my hand in the warm water and scooped it over her pale, round shoulders. ‘Promise me that if you’re bored here, you will stay where you’re put. Pamela …’ I tried to sound careless, conversational. ‘This candle man. Eric. I suppose he wasn’t a bit like your daddy, was he?’

      She gave me a blank gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t have a daddy.’

      ‘Really? I thought everyone did …’

      ‘No. You can be excused from it, you know. Mummy told me. He decided not to be a daddy, and so he isn’t. He went off just after I came out. Do you know that babies come out of people, out of a wincy little hole that stretches?’

      ‘Goodness, Pamela!’ I had a sudden sharp image of a woman perched at a dressing table, throwing out the facts of life to her little child while lipsticking her mouth. ‘Yes, I do know that.’

      ‘Are you having a baby, Ellen?’

      I gave a wavering laugh as the heat flooded my face. ‘I certainly am not. And it’s not a question you ask grown-ups, dear.’

      ‘You might be.’ She was unabashed, round-eyed. ‘They’re teeny when they start growing, like a little nut. So you could have one inside you and not know about it till you start being sick as a dog.’

      ‘That’s not a nice expression.’ I smoothed my hands over the pinafore I’d put on to bathe her. ‘I haven’t got time for babies, Pamela. Not with all you children to look after. Now let’s forget about all this silliness.’

      I ran through phrases in my mind. Pamela, darling, your mother … Mummy … Pamela, sweetheart … I couldn’t get any further. It would have to be done tomorrow. Tomorrow or the next day.

      Quite suddenly she started to grizzle, baring small, square milk teeth. Her tears fell into the cooling bath. Elizabeth came in with the vegetables for supper, filled the sink with cold water, cast a sombre eye on Pamela, and left the room again, saying, ‘Hens.’

      I told Pamela she’d see the hens tomorrow, that she could feed them with Elizabeth if she wanted, but she shook her head, because hens were no good to her. I dried her and took her upstairs to dress, and met Hawley coming down to peel parsnips. The others were too darn comfortable to move, he said. ‘They’re the lazy branch of the family. No, truly they are. My dad says so.’

      After supper I put Pamela back in my bed and told her a tale about a swan, one who kept her babies in the soft, white feathers on her back between her wings as she glided along a shining, dark-green summer river. They went for long, long adventures until Pamela grew drowsy.

       5

      PAMELA KEPT ME AWAKE for a large part of the night, a sleeper in almost perpetual motion. At six o’clock I was in the kitchen starting some bread when the telephone rang in the hall, the bell immediately drowned by thundering feet on the landing and Elizabeth’s hopeless cry, ‘Donald, you’re a plain old-fashioned disgrace!’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘Children, stop this bawling,’ but they took no notice and crowded noisily into the kitchen, Elizabeth following.

      ‘Donald refuses to have his hair cut,’ she announced.

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