We Must Be Brave. Frances Liardet

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ