weeks there together, towards the end of 1940, during the worst of the Blitz. In the winter the mottled colours of rock, dead bracken and gorse made the hills look like giant slabs of Christmas cake. Iris had played cards with her father-in-law after dinner each evening, while his wife added pieces to the jigsaw which was accumulating slowly on the writing table in the window.
Ruth had shared a room with her mother during that visit. Before bed, Iris always pinned her hair into tight coils with kirby grips, so that it would curl the next day. While she sat doing her hair she would talk to her daughter in a loud whisper; so loud, it seemed to Ruth, that it would have been better – quieter – if she had spoken in her normal voice.
‘Why does your grandmother have to do those enormous puzzles?’ she asked one evening. Ruth could tell it wasn’t really a question.
‘I don’t know. Why shouldn’t she?’
‘Well, darling, because they take so long. I mean, an eternity.’
‘She likes it, I s’pose. She likes it that they take ages.’
‘Well, obviously. But if one’s going to do jigsaws at all, at least do them of places further away. Why spend weeks at a time doing a yard-long picture of Bourton-on-the-Water, or the swans on the river at Stratford? Why not just go and see the real thing?’
‘It’s not to do with the places. It’s to do with finding the pieces,’ said Ruth.
‘Exactly,’ said Iris, dragging out the second syllable as if it were a cigarette she was drawing on. ‘It’s just that one might think they’d have had enough of the wretched damp countryside, looking at it from practically every window. One would think she’d want to do a puzzle of somewhere a bit more dashing. Monte Carlo. Or the Alps even.’
Ruth thought for a moment. ‘I don’t believe Granny wants to be dashing,’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Iris, ‘yes.’
Ruth’s uncle Christopher had come back to live with her grandparents for the duration. He was teaching science at the Malvern Boys College. Or at least he said he was, and it was true that he was a teacher. It was only years later that Ruth learned that he’d actually been involved in developing signals and radar, based at the evacuated school. He hadn’t been able to enlist because of his poor eyesight, although he was better at seeing things than anyone his niece knew: he could spot a buzzard from miles away, and tell it from a hawk. He knew the names of all the birds and wild flowers. Ruth liked birds, except for chickens. Soon after she arrived, Christopher began to take her for long walks on the hills at weekends. With her stumpy legs and her thick springy hair, she reminded him of a valiant little pony. He knew the secret places where you could drink the icy spring water straight from the rock, so clear that it tasted more like air – exhilarating, like sea air – than water. Christopher was an expert whistler, could whistle any tune, however elaborate. For some reason which Ruth did not understand this annoyed his mother.
It was not yet spring when Ruth arrived at Malvern. That first night she pulled her bed away from the wall and wrote ‘mummy and daddy’ in her neatest writing on the wallpaper, below the line of the mattress, where no one would be able to see it. It was intended as a sort of spell, to make them come back.
Gradually, over the weeks, the cold began to give way to thin sunlight. The early wallflowers in her grandparents’ garden smelled of watery marzipan then, as if the summer to come was hidden inside them. There was a tall monkey puzzle tree outside her bedroom window, and Ruth used to wish that she could find a real-life monkey and open her window and put it out on a branch, to see how puzzled it would be, or whether it would be able to climb down. When she ran her hands along one of the branches, little barbs at the end of each leaf stabbed at her fingers.
Neither of her grandparents asked questions about her mother. They didn’t really ask questions about anything much: they didn’t interfere. They weren’t strict, except about manners, table manners in particular. The table was always laid properly. Everyone had their own big white napkin, rolled up inside a silver ring; and there were special little spoons made of mother-of-pearl for the salt; and spoons made of horn, with long handles, for boiled eggs. There were fruit knives with coloured glass handles, like polished beads, and in summer there were crescent-shaped salad plates. There were two pheasants made of silver as a centrepiece; or, as the weather improved, stiff flowers in a cut-glass bowl which had a mesh made of wire, like a stiffened hairnet, to keep them in place. In London, when it was just her and Ruth, Iris had got into the habit of doing without side plates, or napkins, or butter knives: she couldn’t see much point, since there wasn’t enough butter in the first place. She even put the jam on the table in the jar it came from the shop in, though not if there were visitors.
Iris never wore a wristwatch, didn’t even keep a clock beside the bed, as if she could outwit time by refusing to keep an eye on it. There was only one clock in their house in London, a wind-up one, in the kitchen. But in the house in Malvern there were two long-case clocks, so that if you listened hard you could always hear ticking wherever you were, except in the bathroom with the taps running. Both clocks chimed the quarter-hours, and the smaller walnut clock in the breakfast room appeared to pause momentarily, as if drawing in its breath, before chiming always very slightly ahead of the bigger mahogany clock in the hall. In this house time was ordered, it announced itself politely and was made quietly welcome. Nothing was hasty.
Ruth found the not knowing how long her mother would be away far worse than her absence itself. It was like not knowing whether you’d be staying somewhere long enough to unpack your suitcases properly and unfold all your things and put them in drawers: it made it difficult to settle. After the first two weeks her uncle Christopher made arrangements for her to attend a school further up the hill in the town. Most of the children who had come to Malvern to get away from London had gone home by then, but three evacuees were still there. Ruth was glad to hear their familiar London voices, but they were a tight-knit group, not looking to make extra friends. Out on walks, Ruth had seen the little African princesses who went to school on the other side of the hill. It was said that their father was the King of Abyssinia and that they were descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. She wondered if they were lonely, so far from home. In her class she liked a girl called Veronica, who had long plaits the colour of dust caught in sunlight. Veronica owned a pair of real tap-dancing shoes, which she sometimes allowed Ruth to try on.
Every afternoon her uncle collected Ruth from the school gate and they walked home together, looking at trees and birds along the way. Christopher liked things that other people didn’t care for, as well as noticing things that other people didn’t even see. He told her about crows, how clever they were, how long-lived. People generally feared them, because they were ominous and ate carrion and cawed so loudly, but he enjoyed looking at their tip-tilting jaunty way of walking. He pointed out the flash of blue under a magpie’s wing and told her it was a useful lesson to remember: that even when things looked black and white, they could still surprise you. Magpies looked showy but they were thieves, they took songbirds’ eggs and they made a horrid noise that sounded like mockery. Plumage wasn’t everything.
At half past four tea would be waiting for them: paste sandwiches, bread and butter spread with red jam; or sometimes, as a treat, extra thinly sliced and sprinkled with demerara sugar. Then there would be a piece of the sponge cake which was baked once a fortnight; only a small piece, because it used up such a lot of fat and sugar. It was a matter of pride to Ruth’s grandmother that there should be cake despite the shortages, as if she was not bowing to the Enemy by allowing standards to fall.
A few chickens were kept in an outhouse behind the shrubbery, and once the warmer weather came there was never a shortage of eggs. This was meant to be tremendously lucky, but Ruth had secretly gone off eggs, since being given the task of collecting them, most mornings. She hated the sweetly rotting smell in the henhouse, and covered her nose with her elbow when she went in. She thought she detected something almost snakelike in the furtive sideways glances of the chickens. Once, she found a hen with a dead mouse in its beak, shaking the little corpse as if to loosen its skin, like someone impatient to take a damp overcoat from a guest. After that she found it hard to swallow the runny boiled eggs she was given for breakfast once