LITMIR.BIZ

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Amy came down the area steps and saw that there was a light in the window. She tapped on the door and it was opened a crack by a small, wiry woman who stared defensively out at her.

      ‘I’m Helen’s friend, Amy Lovell. I couldn’t come to the church this afternoon.’

      The crack widened a little, but not enough to let her in.

      ‘Are you Aunt Mag? I came to see if I could do anything. Are Freda and Jim there?’

      At last Mag opened the door and Amy followed her into the room. Freda and Jim were sitting side by side on the truckle-bed. The blankets had been removed and were folded in a neat, threadbare pile. Glancing into the cupboard room beyond, Amy saw that the big bed Helen and Freda had shared was similarly stripped. The mantelpiece was bare of its plush cover and the precious photographs. Even the glass shade had been removed from the single light.

      ‘What’s going to happen?’ Amy asked.

      Mag stuck her hands in the pockets of her print apron. ‘I won’t let them go on the parish,’ she said. ‘Not in that orphanage. They’ll come ‘ome with me for as long as I can manage. Freda’ll be old enough to bring in a bit herself, soon.’ Mag saw Amy’s troubled glance at their dismantled home. ‘They can’t stay ‘ere, can they?’

      Amy tried to look at the children. They shrank closer together, not wanting to meet her eyes. Jim’s face was grimy and reddened where he had rubbed at the tears with his knuckles.

      Amy had been Helen’s friend, not theirs. To them, in spite of the presents, the glass beads and the clockwork car and the red cap and skirt, she belonged to the other side. She represented power and authority just because of the way she looked and spoke, and all three of them were wary of her. It was hard, Amy thought, with sudden bitterness. She remembered Mary Morrow and then with vivid clarity she saw Nick Penry, with his black hair and blue-scarred hands, in the nursery at Bruton Street.

      ‘I’d like to help,’ she said abruptly. None of them looked at her. ‘If money would help…’ The clumsiness of it stirred her anger again.

      ‘Nah,’ Mag said quickly. ‘We’ll manage, won’t we? Freda? Jim?’

      It was exactly the same rapid rejection that Helen herself had dealt her. People like you make me laugh, Helen had said. And: If all you’ve got is your pride …

      Amy opened her handbag and took out a piece of paper. She wrote on it her name and the hostel address, and the address of the Bruton Street house as well, and then she folded it up and gave it to Mag. Mag put the paper in her apron pocket.

      ‘If you change your mind,’ Amy said into the silence.

      She turned to go, looking around the room for the last time. The screen that Helen had used to hide the sink was folded up, exposing the buckets and a little zinc bath. On the floor in the middle of the room was a cardboard suitcase, open, with Helen’s few clothes folded in it. On the top was the green cashmere jacket.

      ‘You gave her that, didn’t you?’ Mag said. ‘Do you want to take it?’

      Amy stood stock-still. The anger that she had carried with her since Helen’s death was suddenly gone. It was futile to be angry, with the hospital or the world outside it or with Helen herself for leaving so abruptly. And in place of the anger came grief, swooping and choking.

      She shook her head blindly. ‘No. You wear it. Helen would want that.’ Somehow she crossed the room, passing the truckle-bed. She wanted to hug Freda and Jim but their hunched shoulders and averted faces rejected her still. Instead she reached and just touched Freda’s tangled hair with her fingertips. ‘Goodbye Jim, Freda. If you need me …’

      Amy knew that she wouldn’t see them again. She reached the door, opened it and closed it again, and climbed the steps into the streaming street.

      In the darkness she cried. The wind whipped the tears and stung her face as the grief took hold of her and she cried for the pity of everything. It seemed to Amy then that the quicksands were engulfing Helen and swallowing her up as if her years had never been. In a single day the home and everything she had fought and scrubbed for had been folded into a suitcase and carried away.

      Nor was it just Helen that Amy cried for. It was for Isabel and the baby Peter, for Richard and Tony, her mother and father, and for Nick Penry and his wife and child.

      And then she heard Helen’s voice, as clearly as if she was walking beside her huddled against the wind.

      ‘Tough, isn’t it? At least you’re on the right side of it.’

      That’s what she would have said. They were still there, Freda and Jim and Mag and Amy herself, and so they were on the right side of it. Nor had the quicksands swallowed Helen. They would remember her. Amy could only grope at the idea through her sorrow, but she already understood that for the rest of her life at times that truly mattered she would act or think in a particular way because that was what Helen Pearce would have done.

      Amy reached the hostel door. The porter peered at her and then reached for his book for her to initial. Amy was not allowed to be out after eight o’clock without the matron’s specific permission. Tonight she signed herself in without having to swallow her usual anger at such pettiness. She was still shackled by the fact that Helen was dead.

      In her pigeonhole a batch of envelopes was waiting for her from the afternoon’s post. They were thick, cream or white envelopes addressed to the Hon’ble Amy Lovell in confident black handwriting and mostly forwarded from Bruton Street. She knew that they all contained invitations, engraved and gilt-edged, for dances and dinners. Usually Amy wrote her well-schooled formal refusal. Tonight she picked up the sheaf of them and dropped them into the waste-bin unopened. Then she went on up the dingy stairs to her room.

Part Three

       Eleven

       Nantlas 1933

      Mari climbed the steep stairs, lifting each foot as if it hurt her, and ducked under the low lintel into Dickon’s tiny room. He hadn’t moved since she had left him to go down and warm his food. Mari sat down in her place beside the bed and stirred the contents of the bowl, then held a spoonful out to him.

      ‘Come on now, Dickon bach,’ she coaxed. ‘Eat this for your mam, will you?’

      The little boy’s head seemed too heavy on his thin neck for him to lift it off the pillow, but when the smell of the potatoes reached him he pushed the spoon away. Mari stared at him, dry-eyed with desperation.

      ‘You must eat something, lovely. You won’t get better if you don’t eat.’

      Dickon made no response, but he kept his eyes fixed on his mother. Even before his illness he had been small for his eight years, and now his body was shrivelled and brittle. His eyes seemed to have shrunk into a bony helmet.

      ‘Dickon?’ She held the spoon again, invitingly.

      Mari knew from the long years of caring for him that Dickon understood what she was saying. His way of answering had always been by look and touch, even though he had proudly mastered a dozen or so important words as well as ‘Mam’ and ‘Daa-ad’ and ‘More’.

      In the last years, under her patient, repetitive tuition, Dickon had learned to feed himself and even to keep himself clean and dry. Mari had begun to hope that against all the odds he might go on improving, might even one day be capable of living a sheltered life of his own. But with the illness he had slipped back into helpless infancy. Mari had to boil the old copper every day for the heavy washing, and she fed him in slow spoonfuls like a baby.

      Dickon was looking at her now, and telling her explicitly that he couldn’t eat the food. She glanced down at the waxy chunks of potato in the thin, greyish liquid and felt a surge of exhausted anger. She didn’t want to eat it herself, and she was fit and well. She

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