4

“Why does Philpot have to stay with us?” they asked.

“She’s been turned out of her flat.”

“But why does she have to stay with us? We’ve got enough people.”

“She’s looking for another one.”

“I’ve never seen her looking. She just stays in bed all the time if you ask me.”

“In my bed, too. Why can’t she bring her own bed? I’m not going to sleep in that awful cot again.”

“It’s a perfectly good cot.”

“It’s not, and I’m not going to sleep in it.”

“Look, there’s a squirrel.”

“I’m not going to sleep in that cot.”

“Where’s Poppy?”

“Poppy’s staying with her aunt.”

“Then why can’t Philpot stay with her aunt?”

“Because Philpot’s aunt lives in Gloucestershire and Philpot can’t look for a flat, I mean couldn’t look for a flat if she was in Gloucestershire.”

“She could come in a helicopter.”

“I’m not going to sleep in that cot.”

“I’m glad Poppy’s in Australia.”

“Must you wade in the puddles? You don’t have to wade in them.”

“Well, I wish she’d go home, that’s all.”

“She can’t. She hasn’t got a home.”

“She smells of fish.”

“No, she doesn’t. She smells like roses rather.”

“She smells like roses and fish, but fish most.”

“I’m not going to sleep in that awful cot.”

“She had a spot on her chin yesterday, but this morning she’d squeezed it. Don’t tell Dad, he’d say change the conversation.”

“He had to grab her yesterday, when she fainted. It must have been awful for him, the smell.”

“Fainted?”

“She fainted when you were out for your walk.”

“Do you faint like this? Is this how you faint?”

“Oh, for heavens sake, get up! You’re smothered in mud, it’ll take me hours to brush it off, hours!”

“I was only asking.”

“I’m not going to sleep in that …”

We were spread out over quarter of a mile of Heath; converging, in a brown, sodden afternoon, on Dinah playing netball. Why should anxiety touch me? I looked across to one of London’s unexpected hills, topped with a broken steeple. Fly away home, your house is on fire. The older children, in shrunken blue duffel coats, ran pell-mell down the slope and leapt on my back. Jake’s children stamped and fell down in the wet leaves.

“I can see them,” I said, and we stumbled down into a desolate slum patch of ground scattered with a few corrugated iron sheds. Various children in short sleeved cotton jumpers and long skirts and gumboots were festooned about a great bare tree, while others made vague motions with a football in the wet grass that someone had tried to mark out with chalk. “Where’s Dinah?”

We found her shivering in the corner of the field, holding her stomach and saying she had a terrible pain. She looked at us with envy; even, it seemed to me, with affection. The mistress, a young, quite pleasant looking woman sensibly dressed in a leather coat, called “Dinah!” with the rising inflection, tinged with strain, that women use towards children at the end of a hard day. Dinah shuffled off, and the mistress pushed them all into a ragged circle and attempted to show them something. The damp, darkening afternoon was quiet except for their incessant coughing. They began to lollop about, throwing the ball with feeble gestures, from hip-level. “Keep moving!” the mistress exhorted them. “I’m going to stir you up like a pudding!” She ran amongst them, darting heavily to and fro while the children fell in the mud and held their stomachs and gazed into the foggy distance.

“Can we go now?”

“I’m cold, I’m freezing.”

“I’m not going to sleep in that cot.”

“Then run about. Run about and get warm.”

“Why should I? I’m tired.”

“Why do we have to come and see Dinah play football?”

“I’m tired …”

A girl in baggy tartan trousers, a windcheater and a fur hat came slowly over the brow of the hill. For a moment I thought she was Philpot. She dragged a pram after her and stopped, kicking the wheels viciously because they were stuck up with mud. Then, after looking down on us for a few moments, she went back the way she had come. As she was submerged, first pram and finally hat, I was irrationally convinced that she had come to give me some message from the outside world; but that like a rescue craft she had looked, seen nothing, and gone home.