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‘Scrag is cheap,' shouted Patricia. ‘So just you shut up.'

And she thought, I sound like Mum. The back straps of Mum's apron moving as she kneaded the bread dough, shouting to get up them stairs. The girls reluctant to leave the crackle of the coal fire, Queenie feeding in kindling sticks. Mum coming out, incandescent, a slap across Pat's face. Queenie already running. Dad just a letter now. Nothing to help Mum now.

She'd thought, When the time comes, Mum and me, we'll make up. There'd be an understanding. Something completed.

And then it was too late.

She'd spent far too much of her scholarship money on the yellow satin dress. Yards and yards of material. She was waiting, sitting out on the balcony over the water, too shy to go in the room, sure she'd dressed too posh for someone like her. He asked her if she liked to dance. There'd been a moment, one arm round her waist, one arm leading her through the music, an odd feeling, as if she recognised him. His hair was not washed under the brilliantine; and she knew him already, the effortful self care of growing up lonely in the war, the missing fathers, the missing mothers.

He walked her back to her lodgings, past the bombsites. He found a patch of anemones growing among the rubble mounds.

‘This was a garden once,' he said. He picked her a bunch of
the deep red and purple flowers, the pollen shedding from their centres.

Then she was on the train home. She and Queenie cycling up the hill to the hospital as fast as they could, feeling her calves would burst. They still got to the hospital too late.

Supper was finished. Her feet were sticking to the lino round the cooker again. Tack, tack, tack as she carried the pans to the sink, Queenie rolling a pen across the table, her head on her arm. The condolence cards waiting to be answered.

‘We should get and clean this bloody house,' said Patricia.

It was starting to go dark, but she got out the mops and the rags, swilling water over the floor, clashing the bucket round the kitchen. Loud knocks ricocheted down the stairs as she went at them with the hand brush. Hammering the broom along the hallway, hitting all the walls. She made Queenie strip their beds and fill the copper. They threw the rugs over the washing line to beat at them, and she noticed how it had gone dark. They had to set the whites to boil in clouds of wet steam, washing until past midnight. And still she would not let them go to bed. Vim and the sting of bleach as they scrubbed down the bath, the lavatory. Scouring the cooker with sugar soap, their hands bright red and sore now, moving every pot in the cupboards. Hanging out the white sheets to flap in the dark. Polishing the black windows with balls of newspaper. When it was starting to get light she said they could go to bed.

The warmth of the autumn sun shining in woke her. She was still in her clothes on the top of the eiderdown. Queenie came in, her blonde hair pushed up on one side, a funny grey look to her skin.

‘We'll go for a swim,' Patricia told her, suddenly sorry. ‘Like we used to.'

They took the bikes down to Saunton sands, late in the afternoon now. Miles along the lanes, past the cottages with the woodsmoke caught in the apple trees. Everything far away, feeling remote as they wheeled past. Through the acres of dunes, the green peaks like waves of hills at first then resolving into sand. They came to the wide beach, stretching away for miles, the immense flat sea, the silver light mercurial over the grey surface. There was no one else in sight.

They put on their costumes under towels, ran down to the sea. She tipped up in the water and let the cold salt sea go in and out of her mouth. The water was too cold for swimming really, but she couldn't register the cold; she knew it, but couldn't feel it.

As they towelled their cold limbs dry Queenie said, ‘I could, Pat, I could go and live with Mrs Wells. And you could go back.'

‘But you'd be by yourself then.' If she wasn't looking after Queenie, who was she now?

They rode home without speaking. Patricia floating away from herself, watching how she pedalled through the tiredness, her body numb and exhausted. Queenie whimpering to keep up.

They ate bread with a heel of stale cheddar that had broken out into a sweat. Chewing in silence. The day almost gone now, Queenie's face fading into the darkness. No one bothered to put the light on. This was how it would be now. This was how it would always be.

Someone was knocking hard on the front door, like a sudden burst of gunfire. Then it stopped. They sat and waited. Jumped when it started up again. They crept out into the hallway, standing back in the shadows. The top of a man's head was moving away and then coming back close in the glass. But he was knocking again, urgent, insistent, the glass in the door rattling. On and on. He'd have all the neighbours out. Her heart beating fast and sickly, Patricia unlocked the door.

A familiar outline against the streetlight. Smelling of evening air. A sudden shock, like a punch, seeing him there.

‘Patricia?' he said. ‘I'm sorry, I don't know why, I panicked and I had to make you open the door. I didn't know if something had . . . You remember me, don't you?'

She stared at him. Her face white, she took a step back, and then she was sitting on the bottom step holding onto the banisters, looking up at him, sobbing. ‘It's you,' she said. ‘Peter.'

He was standing with the door open, the streetlight behind outlining his shape in pale light. And that was what she remembered, that was what she always said to Queenie later, how all the future had come flooding in with him, with Peter Donoghue, through the open door.

CHAPTER 25

Birmingham, 1966

Sarah was walking close to the side of the pram and wondering who had knocked all the buildings down. The last time she and Mum had walked this way there had been narrow rows of terraces; but now, for miles and miles, all you could see was a frozen sea of bricks, wooden beams sticking up here and there like shipwrecks. The tarmac roads had been left in place like a map running through the rubble so that you had to turn left, turn right, but the houses were gone; demolished – which Mum said was a good thing. She said the old slums had to come down.

‘What's a slum?' Sarah asked.

‘Like Mrs Fancott's house,' Mum said.

Sarah thought of Mrs Fancott's old house, the ancient lady smiling and shrunken in her armchair with her wobbly head and the blanket of crochet wool squares. In her old house three pots of geraniums sat in a row on the windowsill; you passed them on the way to the outdoor privy. There were rings of green round the terracotta pots, and the leaves matched the flowery patterns on her yellowing net curtains. Sarah thought about how she'd never known that Mrs Fancott's house was a slum. She wondered if Mrs Fancott had minded.

So that was why Mrs Fancott had to live high up in the giant tower now, with a clonking rubbish chute next to her door. Burnt breath came out of the grey metal flap if you lifted it. The windows
in Mrs Fancott's new flat had no patterned nets; they were full of sky and clouds. Up on the fourteenth floor it was just the wind blowing round the windows to keep Mrs Fancott company.

But Mrs Fancott had agreed with Mum; it was good she was living up there, because she didn't have to go outside to the privy. It was much better in the flat. Mum and Dad said it a lot, how things were getting better. Not like before, when there was a war. Although, looking around now, Sarah wondered for a moment if they might have had another war, while she was off at school with a fistful of hot plastic crayons. The acres of rubble looked like one of the black and white war films they showed on the telly, men in helmets hiding in shattered houses, shooting each other to the music of an orchestra.

They didn't usually walk in this direction; it was because of the new baby, Charlie, who was sleeping inside the big black pram with wheels as big as a bicycle. He was small and snuffly, but he had the power to make everything around him alter. With him came boxes of powdered milk and glucose, and measuring spoons and bottles, and buckets with lids on and piles of white towel nappies, and bunches of giant safety pins, and Johnson's baby powder, and a different kind of mummy, who only half listened and didn't answer you very well. Sarah still hadn't got a satisfactory answer about school.

‘So can I walk to school by myself next week?'

‘I don't think so, Sarah.'

‘I'm the only one in my class who doesn't.'

‘Yes, but they've lived here longer than you.'

‘We've been here months and months. I know the way.'

‘Perhaps,' said Mum, blind to how silly Sarah felt, being treated like a baby when she was almost eight years old. The tarmac was hot through the thin rubber of Sarah's plimsolls. She hadn't wanted to come, but Mum said she wasn't old enough to stay in the house
by herself yet. She pushed at the bow on the side of her head; the ribbon was already slipping down so the hair was flopping over her eye again.

The clinic came into sight, a new building on the edge of the rubble. It occurred to Sarah that clinics sometimes involved injections. But Mum said no, no injections today. They had to go to the clinic so they could weigh the baby. Besides, Mum told her, like it was a lovely surprise, they were going to give Sarah free orange juice at the clinic. Which was something they never used to do. Before. In the old days. When Mum was little and they had turnips for apples and no bananas.

‘Did you go to the clinic with your mum?'

‘It was different. You had to find a shilling to see the doctor then, so people put off going.'

Sarah waited, but Mum's lips were pressed together in a line. ‘Before' was one of those grown-up things you weren't supposed to ask about. Bits of interesting information came through, about bombs and old coats for blankets and missing parents; you were handed a few fragments of jigsaw, and that was it.

At the new clinic it was blue and shiny and the nurse knew exactly what everyone should do. Mum and Sarah had to wait on a row of chairs and when the nurse called out, ‘Mrs Donoghue,' Mum had to undress the baby so he could be weighed. Then they gave Sarah a brown bottle to take home, thick, heavy-feeling. The clinic orange juice. With vitamins.

And all the way back Sarah was thirsty and looking forward to tasting the clinic orange juice, which was better than ordinary oranges, more special and delicious. They stopped at the corner shop at the end of the last few rows of houses. Sarah pushed open the shop's door, setting off its jangly bell, and breathed in the smell of damp cardboard. There were paper sacks folded back at the top like shirtsleeves to show the white potatoes. And when they came out Mum was saying, isn't
it a shame, and how she'd miss old Mr Stoke's shop when his street got demolished.

Back home Mum bumped the pram up the front steps of the vicarage and parked it in the cool hallway. She motioned to Sarah to come in the house quietly. The baby was still sleeping, enclosed in its own smell of powder and of the plastic lining of the pram, a faint whiff of wool and something sickly. Sarah could hear voices behind the study door. Daddy was home, but they weren't allowed to go in because he would be having a meeting with someone from the parish.

The study door opened and Daddy came into the hall, in his familiar blue jumper and the black shirt with its funny white dog collar. Mrs Stewart followed behind, a small and wide Jamaican lady in a navy suit and a white hat made of glazed straw folded into a ball of neat origami points.

‘How is that baby?' she cried, going towards the pram.

‘He's still sleeping,' said Mum, but Mrs Stewart ignored her and went over and peered into Charlie's pram. She stroked the baby's face and made an interesting noise like a happy hen. Then she turned and patted the white handbag hung over her arm, as if she had something good in there.

‘And don't forget now, vicar. I'll make sure you get a good rate, every time. Leave it to me. And we will see you there tonight. You all invited. You'll see how well I'm running things for you.'