felt scared of them because of the eyes being hollow, like a skeleton’s. My mother must have been back in her seat by then, because I remember putting my hand on her arm for reassurance and it was then I noticed that she was crying. She wasn’t sobbing or anything, but she had tears on her face. She hardly ever cried. She rubbed her cheek with her fist, roughly. I guessed she was crying about the poor baby elephant, as I had. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” I whispered, “it’s only a film, it’s not real.” Pathetic, really, to have thought she was crying about the cartoon. And she smiled a little smile.’
The baby elephant became a tremendous success in the circus and was allowed to be with his mother again, in a special railway carriage all of their own. That was the end, and everyone got up to go, buttoning up their coats, the women pulling on their gloves, but Iris stayed in her seat. ‘They’re going to show the newsreel again now,’ she told Ruth. ‘I must just have another look, you see.’ She lit a cigarette and sat back, while a new audience in different coats shuffled into their seats. Before long the same newsreel started. Landing craft, troops waving, tanks, the Prime Minister, the desert, the same men standing in the same queue outside the same tent, smiling, with the same men behind them around the truck. Suddenly Iris leant forward and tensed, as if she were a cat about to pounce on some buzzing thing.
At once Ruth guessed why. It must have been because her mother had seen Ruth’s father, Edward, on the newsreel. Ruth herself had not spotted him on the screen, and over the months that followed she wondered why not; why Iris had been able to see him and she had not. She was sure she loved him quite as much as her mother did; wanted to see him just as much. She thought she must have looked away, at the precise moment, to have missed him. Perhaps she had been looking down into her dwindling sweets, licking her finger to catch the grains of sugar sprinkled in the bottom of the bag, concentrating on not spilling any onto the knobbly wool of her coat.
After that they did not stay until the end of the newsreel. They went out into the foyer and Iris spoke to the cinema manager. On their way home she told Ruth that she’d already talked to this man, when she first went out, before the cartoon had started. She’d wanted him to show the newsreel again, then, straight away. He had told her that this often happened to people: they thought they recognised a husband or a brother or a sweetheart. He always asked them to stay on and watch the newsreel again, at the end of the feature, to make sure. Sometimes – usually, he was sorry to say – it turned out not to be who they thought it was after all. But if, after a second viewing, they were quite sure, then the manager would try and obtain a still photograph from the newsreel company. So after she’d seen it for a second time, Iris was able to describe the scene in the newsreel exactly, to make sure he’d get the right picture. She gave the manager her name and address. He said he would do his best.
Ruth was used to her mother getting what she wanted; it was just another thing about Iris. Ruth supposed it was because her mother was pretty. She had long arms and legs, with the thinnest ankles and wrists, like a whippet; and wide pale-hazel eyes with gold flecks in them. Once a friend of her father’s – his name was Bunny Turner – had come to lunch and stayed on for most of the afternoon. Iris had gone upstairs to the drawing room to get a second bottle from the drinks tray. As he was leaving he’d taken Ruth’s shoulders in his hands and looked her intently in the face. ‘You must take good care of your mother,’ he’d said; ‘she’s a captivating woman.’ Ruth didn’t like that word: it sounded like captive-taking, like the poor boys Captain Hook had taken prisoner in Peter Pan. But she was used to people thinking that her mother was wonderful.
Before the incident in the cinema, it had never occurred to Ruth that her mother might have been worrying that Edward was dead. She had certainly never said so. Anyway, people protected children from such fears. Ruth knew from talking to her friends that grown-ups didn’t tell children very much, certainly not bad things. During the worst of the bombing raids, when Ruth was six and seven, Iris had bought a pale-green silk moiré box full of rose and violet creams from Fortnum’s, to take into the coal hole in front of the kitchen, where they waited out the raids. They never ate the chocolates otherwise: they were a treat reserved for the shelter. Iris had taken an eiderdown into the coal hole – it had been ruined, covered in black smudges – and a blanket for them to huddle under, and they’d eaten the chocolates together, waiting in the cramped blackness for the all-clear to be sounded. Iris had made a game of it: which was more delicious, the soapy rose or the chalky, fragrant violet? Ruth had had to concentrate, taking tiny nibbles out of first one then the other. They could never decide. Iris never said anything about being frightened in all those times, even when bombs landed nearby, which had happened more than once. She never seemed afraid of anything.
Courage came easily to Iris, but happiness was more difficult. This was something that Ruth sometimes glimpsed in her mother: a sudden plunge, as if the temperature had dropped, when Iris would sit smoking in her chair, without a book or sewing, hardly speaking. Ruth’s father, Edward, had an aptitude for happiness – a gift, Iris called it – like being musical, or having a good head for numbers. For Iris happiness was something delicious but hard to keep hold of, like the almost-pins-and-needles sherberty feeling when summer air dries seawater on your skin. Ruth thought this was why Iris made decisions so abruptly, in the same way as she snapped shut her powder compact. It was as if she were trying to catch happiness in a trap.
Ruth didn’t know if the cinema manager ever sent the photograph. She never saw it if he did. But she believed that Iris had made her mind up that afternoon at the cinema, when they were both, for their different reasons, crying in the flickering dark. Because three days later, Iris took her daughter to Paddington station and put her on the train. And then, even before the guard had walked the length of the platform to close all the doors, before the flag was waved or the whistle went, she was gone.
Ruth liked her grandparents’ house in Malvern, except that she missed her mother and she did not like the cold, or the henhouse. She loved her grandparents, both of them; their soft voices and their routine and quiet kindness. In the evenings, before supper, her grandfather sometimes read to her, adventures by Rider Haggard and Erskine Childers, or stories by Kipling. Ruth was mousier, less emphatic, than her mother, with a sturdier frame; she felt at home with her grandparents. Even so, there were occasions when the cold was so cold as to be indistinguishable from misery: sometimes, when she cried at night, even she could not have said whether it was from missing her mother or because she could not get warm. London had been cold too, but the rooms were smaller and her mother had taken to lighting a coal fire downstairs in the kitchen grate and staying in there, where it could be made warm, even if it was not so comfortable as the first-floor sitting room.
The house at Malvern had high-ceilinged rooms with big Victorian sash windows, to make the most of the view. Before the war there had been log fires in every grate, but now there was only a one-bar electric fire in the drawing room, which would be unplugged and brought to stand in the grate of the breakfast room before they ate. But it was only ever switched on just before they came in to sit down, more a formality than an actual heating appliance. And there was never enough hot water to get really warm in the bath. Ruth developed chilblains, which made her toes tickle, then throb and burn. Until Mrs Jenkins, who came in to clean every morning, took the potty Ruth used at night and – horrifyingly – dipped a linen hand towel into the urine and dabbed Ruth’s toes with it, bringing an exquisite but temporary relief, like a dock leaf on a nettle sting.
The house, like the town of which it formed a part, stood in the lee of a western slope. Even as a child Ruth was aware of the way that the whole place fell into shadow, as the sun slipped behind the hulk of the hills. But she liked the way you could still see a wide band of sunlight, sliding perceptibly across the lawn like the train of a wedding dress, away from her grandparents’ house towards the distant abbey towns, with their wide rivers and gentle slopes of ancient orchards. She imagined the sun was still shining in London, long after Malvern had fallen into shade.
Her grandparents were her father’s parents, although it was her mother who had sent her to stay with them. Iris’s mother was alive, but she lived outside Sidmouth, a long way away, and her house was thought to be unsuitable for children; no one ever explained why. Ruth hardly ever saw this grandmother, who had been a widow for years and smelled of tobacco and face powder – dry smells, musty, like the bottom