to a gurgling wraith in a bath chair before killing him in September 1939, ten days into the present war. Lady Brock as usual had a gorgeous rich red on her wide, rather fish-like mouth. The lipstick, plus a feathered hat and a shy, rarely seen beast of a fur coat, constituted all she had of glamour. On the day of Sir Michael’s death, which had been by internal drowning, she had donned them all, to serve as her breastplate, sword and buckler.
Pamela gave her a guarded look. Lady Brock laughed.
‘We’ve come to speak to two of the women who were on the bus,’ I said.
‘Ah. I know the ones you mean. I’m afraid they’ve all gone. They departed en masse at first light, desperate to get home. Like a shoal of salmon. There was nothing I could do to stop them.’ She saw my shoulders sag. ‘Buck up, dear. All is not lost.’ She crouched down in front of Pamela. ‘So you came by bicycle!’
Pamela nodded.
‘Was it your first time?’
Pamela nodded again.
‘That deserves an egg, at the very least,’ said Lady Brock, ‘if not some mashed potato.’
She cooked without removing her mackintosh, flinging cold mashed potato into the sputtering frying pan along with the egg, stabbing unhandily at the mixture with the tip of a long iron spoon. ‘I shan’t disturb Mrs Hicks. She went to see her sister in Cosham and got stuck on a train all night. Caught her absolute death.’ When Pamela was served she picked up a pan containing the remains of a burnt breakfast of porridge. ‘The girls scorched this specially. Come with me, Ellen, while I feed Nipper.’
We stepped outside into the flagstoned yard. Lady Brock scraped the porridge pan into a tin bowl and the dog, a rangy collie with one blue eye, loped out from the empty stables. Upton Hall currently housed Nipper, Mrs Hicks, William Kennet, six land girls and Lady Brock herself. The herds were dispatched, the fields turned to wheat and turnips. ‘I had two hunters in those stables, and now that dog’s the only resident,’ she remarked now, quite cheerfully. ‘I don’t know. What a bloody comedown.’
She knew what had happened to Pamela. The two women on the bus had told her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Pamela doesn’t know which hotel it was. My guests thought it might have been the Crown. The family’s from Plymouth, so they’d have stayed in an hotel.’
Lady Brock banged the spoon in the pan to release the last scraps of porridge and the dog snapped at them as they fell. ‘It was the Crown Hotel. The ladies told me.’
‘Ah. Well.’ I ran my toe along the gap between two flagstones. There was something comforting about the worn edges. ‘I’ll telephone the Crown, then, and the police if need be. And Mrs Pickering, who couldn’t be bothered to mind her own child, will come with tears of joy to us.’
Lady Brock surveyed me, a gentle pike.
‘That was uncharitable of me.’ I felt the blush heat my cheeks. ‘My people were noisy last night.’
‘I didn’t hear mine. I put them in the drawing room and took a spoon of Michael’s mixture.’ Lady Brock’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t breathe a word to Dr Bell but I’ve got some left over. It’s absolutely topping. One doesn’t move a muscle all night. Now, let’s go. Pamela’s scraping the pattern off that plate.’
Pamela and I followed Lady Brock past the ballroom. The chandeliers hung sheeted in canvas from the dim ceiling; the alabaster lions were corralled in some hidden basement, the carpets rolled up and gone. Instead there were a half-dozen rows of trestles bearing camouflage netting for the anti-aircraft batteries. Many of us in Upton came here to weave strips of drab fabric in and out through the mesh of tarred ropes. Our first efforts were returned as ‘insufficiently garnished’ or, as William put it when he saw them, ‘like a pack of dogs with mange. Jerry will see right through ’em and let fly.’ So now we worked until the sides of our hands were rough and sore. Today the room was empty, the half-finished nets hanging forlorn.
‘Aren’t those holey tents,’ Pamela said.
‘Yes. They need mending.’
We mounted the stairs. The suit of armour glimmered in the darkness of the upper corridor next to the door of Sir Michael Brock’s bedroom, the gloom now permanent with the blackout. In former days it stood in the hall, lit around with candles so that its reflection hung, an inverted ghost in the depths of the polished oak floorboards. Candles but no candle man, no candle men here. Lady Brock had been faithful. What kind of a woman comported herself in that way, shouting at a man all night with her child in the room? Too busy to notice when her curious little girl crept off outside? The floorboards were dried out and dusty now, the armour tarnished. ‘Mrs Hicks wants to get up here and apply elbow grease,’ said Lady Brock. ‘But I’m not having it. We both need to conserve our strength. Who knows how long this is going to last?’
I helped Pamela onto a stool. She lifted the visor and replaced it, transfixed by the grille, the blackness behind, the small creak as it settled into position. ‘Peep-bo,’ she said softly. ‘Peep-bo.’
‘I’ve always felt guilty about you, Ellen.’ Lady Brock’s voice, unused to speaking low, was husky. ‘I felt we didn’t do enough.’
Creak. Peep-bo. I remembered the grate at the Absaloms, black with past coal but no coal in it to burn, the cold looming from the walls.
‘It was very difficult to do anything for my mother,’ I managed to say at last. ‘She wouldn’t be helped.’
We left Lady Brock at her front door and went down the steps. ‘Perhaps my boys could buff up these floorboards for you,’ I said, as I helped Pamela onto the bicycle. ‘They’re always on the lookout for a job.’ I was exaggerating the case somewhat, but they were helpful boys on the whole, not overly given to skulking.
She stared out over my head, at the turned earth of the potato beds and the mud of her drive. ‘I’ll be down there with William, you know,’ she said. ‘In the old dairy. With my rabbit gun.’
‘And I hope that William would send you straight back again, Lady Brock. We need you.’
‘Not before I pot one for Michael.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘I promised him, you see.’
We went home, pushing the bicycle through the kitchen garden and out through the back gate. The sky was the same light blue. I let Pamela chatter on, about the bicycle spokes, the brick wall, the crows in their high nests.
Selwyn opened the front door as we came up the path. ‘Give Pamela to Elizabeth,’ he murmured. ‘Let her go in.’
‘What news? Selwyn? Have you found Mrs Pickering?’
Pamela slipped past him into the house. Perhaps Mrs Pickering had come to the village hall. Perhaps she was even now indoors. Yes. Selwyn had let her in for Pamela to find, as a surprise. My heart battered my chest.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ He ran his hand over his eyes. ‘The Crown was bombed last night.’
‘WE CAN’T BE EXPECTED to behave as if we’re made of Derbyshire peakstone.’ Selwyn wielded his handkerchief. ‘That poor little child.’
The woman’s face was untouched, he told me. Her ration book was in her handbag, in the name of one Amelia Pickering, residing at the same Plymouth address she had sewn into her child’s clothes. ‘I called Waltham police station after you left,’ he went on. ‘Sit down, darling.’
I did so, and so did he. We faced each other in our sitting room’s comfortable armchairs. The lower part of my face, my cheeks, felt strange; the skin numb, tingling.
‘They managed to get through to Southampton. Then Southampton called them back about an hour ago.’ He blew his nose.