LITMIR.BIZ

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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,

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