‘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.’
