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  At eighteen she had not got far with her life, but exactly what she was to do with it was, as yet, a mystery. Three moderate passes at GCSE, as Mrs Horton also pointed out, were not a passport to a briefcase and a company car. Silence lay over the other subjects with which Emmy had wrestled and lost. Since leaving school, she had made do with odd jobs here and there, but they never lasted more than a month or two, and never engaged her interest.

  She halted by the big oak at the bottom of the lane which was flanked by hawthorn scrub. Earlier that morning, a fieldfare had been sitting there, fluffing out its grey and russet plumage. Emmy had enjoyed that.

  Her shoes cracked on the frozen puddles and the sound was magnified in the cold air. In the field ahead, the livery horses were clumped together. A big bay had a New Zealand rug strapped around his girth, thicker than Emmy’s jacket. Round here, livery horses got treated like hotel guests - linen sheets and hot-and-cold running.

  Emmy rounded the corner and Hallet’s Gate came into view. She recognized the Valours’ voices in the drive as she drew nearer and saw them standing, talking.

  ‘Don’t get cold,’ he said, and there was a degree of tenderness in his tone that made Emmy halt temporarily in her tracks. Sometimes the unfairness with which love was dished out, some people getting so much, made her jealous. Emmy had no idea that its presence could create more trouble than its absence. She hovered for a few seconds more, a dark, rather anguished shadow with a perm that imperfectly disguised a spirit that longed to expand but did not know how.

  Then, Mr Valour put his arm around Mrs Valour and she leant briefly against him before they moved towards the front door from which light was streaming.

  Suddenly, Emmy knew. She did want something from life. She wanted her own home. Not a big one, just a couple of rooms, with a kitchen, and a bathroom with a decent bath. A back garden. She wanted white walls, fringed lampshades, coir matting and plants. She wanted order and quiet, not the deadly quiet of Number 5, but her own peace. The yearning solidified in the pit of her stomach, surprising Emmy by its physicality.

  As Emmy let herself into her own home, which smelt chilly and unoccupied, the boiler leapt into life. She switched on the light, which sent down harsh rays through its frosted glass shade on to the patterned carpet.

  In the kitchen, Mrs Horton had left a message on the back of an envelope. ‘Get your own supper. Dad and me out.’

  Emmy sighed.

  Chapter Four

  Emmy proved a godsend and, for someone with no experience of babies, a natural. Edward took to her and so, after the initial week, did Prue. Quick to pick up the basics, she was not too talkative, apparently reliable and, above all, willing. Prue relaxed, and Violet exploited all these advantages.

  ‘I’ll be away a lot more in the future,’ she explained to Emmy, and sipped mint tea while Emmy struggled to change a nappy. ‘I need to be in London to supervise the new house. After all, I’ve done my whack with breast-feeding, whatever Sheila Kitzinger says.’

  Emmy did not hold any opinions on breast-feeding, neither did she know who Sheila Kitzinger was, but what did strike her was that Violet was on the defensive. Guilt at offloading the baby? No, Mrs Beckett did not look the guilty type. Intuitively, Emmy felt it was more complicated. People looked and sounded like Violet when they were not sure how to behave: she had seen it with her mates at school, and particularly with the bullies. Violet, Emmy eventually put her finger on it, to her satisfaction, was only pretending to be a mother.

  Emmy liked the baby, without feeling any passionate attachment to him, but when he was presented with a bottle instead of the warm breast and occasionally cried, his desolation rendered Emmy sweaty and uneasy. She was not, therefore, surprised that Violet made herself scarce.

  ‘She’s a madam,’ she told Anna.

  Anna inspected the expensive pushchair. ‘With loot.’

  ‘With loot.’

  ‘Are you going to stick it, Em?’

  ‘Of course. The more spoilt Madam is, the more’s in it for me.’

  ‘You’ve lost your deck.’

  Emmy considered Prue’s kitchen and larder, the scent bottles on Violet’s dressing-table, the stack of sweaters and shirts with classy labels, and shot a look at Anna. At the back of her mind, she harboured an idea that if she stuck out the job some of the luxury and exclusiveness would rub off on her — like glitter flaking from a Christmas card. Whether that was sensible or not, and what she would get out of it in the end, Emmy was unsure. Neither Violet nor Prue wore T-shirts and there was not a leather jacket to be cast off between either woman. Packets of pasta? An insider’s knowledge of Sainsbury’s layout? Instant recall of Radio 4’s timetable, Monday to Friday?

  It was not the savoir-faire that would get Emmy by in the disco or the factory, or the supermarket packing division - if it came to the latter, the thought of which made Emmy screw up her face.

  ‘Bear up, Em,’ said Anna, flicking her hair. ‘We’ll go drinking tonight.’

  From the first - and always - Violet had inhabited an uneasy terrain in Max and Prue’s life together. ‘I can’t cope with her, I can’t cope,’ Prue had been driven to shouting at Max from her mess of hormones and leaking body just after Jane was born. She hates me. She hates the baby.

  Max’s large, heavy hand on her shoulder and his silence, which she interpreted as condemnatory, hurt badly, and drove Prue to say something she regretted: ‘She’s like a bad fairy in our marriage.’

  Instantly, Max had removed his hand and left the room. Later, Prue discovered him in the study polishing (forever polishing) the two guns from the gun-safe. Max always used his uncle’s Purdey for shooting but the other, which had belonged to William, his father, received equal attention. She had endeavoured an apology and ended up weeping hysterically in the armchair. Max dealt with Prue’s tears and moved into action. He had put her to bed, summoned her mother, who was still going strong at that point, and Mrs Blake from the village was recruited to take charge of Violet until the worst was over. All wonderfully practical solutions that he effected without drama, fuss or recrimination, and Prue was grateful.

  ‘We all need breathing space,’ he said when she tried to thank him. ‘Otherwise we crowd the spirit too much.’

  And Prue was left in peace with her new baby, and her mind was allowed to drift in and out of dreams, to go over and over the birth until it was settled in her memory, to struggle with the sense that she should be giving thanks to a God, but that she could not find him. At least, she had been given the silence in which to try.

  Max had never commented on Prue’s outburst. Yet she felt that its memory, and its import, remained, submerged but there.

  ‘Violet looks exhausted,’ said Max, sitting down and peeling off a sock. It had been a full week and everyone had opted for early bed. Violet had arrived back in Dainton after a two-day trip to London full of talk of the new house and the job she had been offered.

  ‘I’m worried it’s going to be too much for her.’ Max took off the second sock. He held up a hand to forestall Prue. ‘I know, I know, it’s what women want.’

  The echo from the conversation in which she had been the one to query Violet’s decision pricked and bothered Prue. Instead of confessing that she had been thinking along the same lines, she said, ‘You sound like something out of the ark.’

  ‘Maybe. But I watch these working mothers struggling to keep the show going and I wonder. Delphine Watson, for instance. I told you about her before. She used to be pretty but these days looks dreadful. I took her out to lunch to find out why. Apparently her two-year-old hasn’t slept through the night yet and her husband’s no help.’

  ‘Being at home makes no difference if you have no sleep.’ Prue got into bed beside Max and leant over and dropped a kiss on his hair. ‘It was nice of you to bother.’

  That girl has a good job and she looks awful. How can she do her job properly in her state?’

  Prue withdrew to her side of the bed.
r />   ‘What I’m saying is this. I don’t want Violet ending up half dead with fatigue and heading for a nervous breakdown.’ Max punched his pillow and settled down.

  He interpreted Prue’s silence correctly and flung a sop. ‘Actually, the working mother is nothing new, only the dames who ran the manors and demesnes in history had family back-up. Nowadays, you use girls like Emmy.’

  ‘Emmy is very reliable.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Max swivelled on the pillow to look at Prue. Underneath the blankets his hand felt for his wife’s. ‘But she has no brains.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Anyone who wears only a T-shirt in February is brainless.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  Prue turned off the bedside light and composed her body into the position she preferred for sleep. After they had first married, Max had forbidden Prue to work. Well, not forbidden exactly, he had just kept up a powerful lobby. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve lost one wife, and Violet and I need you at home.’

  She remembered he had stood over her as she sat on the sofa, his large features creased and urgent. Then he took hold of Prue’s hand and held it against his cheek. ‘Please, Prue. I want a family and a home.’

  There had been no glittering career for Prue to fight for - the role of secretary then research assistant did not warrant a lot of drum banging, and insisting on her right to work promised to be a Pyrrhic victory.

  ‘I would prefer you at home,’ insisted Max.

  Practicalities were a consideration, too. The prospect of daily outwitting British Rail made Prue wilt - the cattle truck of the rush-hours, the furtive Mars Bars at the end of a long day and falling asleep over the Evening Standard did not seem to be positive affirmations of life. Who would look after the children, the many she envisaged sitting around the kitchen table? An Adam and an Edmund. An Eleanor and a Freya.

  Prue turned over, aware that her distaste for the commuting life would cut no ice with those who had no option but to do it. Her hand sought and found the corner of the pillowcase and she rubbed it between her fingers. She liked the feel of the texture on her skin, and to run an edge under her fingernail.

  Max was asleep. This was Prue’s time, and her mind flowed up and over the rocks and hills of her life, trying to make sense of problems or the restlessness that occasionally tormented her. Sometimes, in the moment suspended between waking and sleeping, she sloughed off the sense of herself and floated free. Just for a few moments. Then she would feel extraordinarily peaceful and receptive but, paradoxically, charged with energy. I have been lucky.

  Yes, so far, Prue had been lucky: in her marriage, in her circumstances, in her daughter.

  Men are good icon-makers, and Max had shaped Prue into a familiar and infinitely comforting one, and she had not objected. A French peasant girl wearing a man’s armour and a man’s haircut had also been turned into an icon through the medium of the masculine eye and pen. (Although women’s tongues must have had quite a bit to do in shaping Joan’s story and sending news of it far and wide.) As far as Prue knew, there was only one documented instance of a woman describing Joan, which affirmed only that from what she could observe Joan was a virgin. Stranger still, as often in the business of forging icons, men like to ascribe weird purities to the female version. Extreme, tortured virginity. Suffering. Untouch-ableness. Immaculate conception.

  A virgin then, the pucelle. A woman on the brink of change.

  Before she fell asleep, Prue relived the moment in the kitchen with Jamie and Edward: the sensation of the baby against her breast, and Jamie’s tired, tenderly composed face. He was a stranger, and different, one whose possibilities were foreign. Of one thing only she was sure: the sum of Jamie was hidden below the surface. Her mind drifted on . . . Jamie holding his baby and telling her to mind her own business. His touch on her arm, as violent in the sensation it provoked in her as must have been the swords of Joan’s men running through English flesh.

  After Prue had fallen asleep, Max turned and looked at the dark shape, tipped by a luminous lick of white linen. He stared at his wife for some time. Then, very carefully, he turned back to his side of the bed.

  Jamie leant over to kiss Violet goodnight. Burrowed into the bedclothes, she was already half asleep and the waterfall of hair on the pillow was motionless. He turned off the light.

  Blue was the Virgin’s colour, the Madonna’s colour, and it suited Prue as it did not suit the unMadonna-like Violet who favoured reds and greens. He stared at the ceiling while his eyes adjusted to night vision. Blue was a colour into which to sink, rested and calmed by its serenity.

  Prue was secret, or rather private, and Jamie suddenly perceived that walls and thorn hedges offered temptation as, let it be said, they did in matters of work. How high could you, would you, climb? Did you dare to cut and slash your way through to the princess wrapped in blue who lay sleeping within?

  To reassure himself, Jamie slid a hand across the sheets and placed it on Violet’s slender haunch. It was cool and firm to the touch.

  Goodnight, wife.

  ‘My mum’s always worked,’ Emmy informed Prue over the sterilizer, which took up too much space on the sideboard and made the kitchen stink of Milton.

  ‘Who looked after you when you came home from school?’

  Emmy looked at Prue as if she was sizing up a visitor from Mars. ‘No one. Mum left a meal out for me to warm up. Sometimes my brothers were home. Sometimes my nan came over. The neighbours were there if I wanted something.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Prue. ‘Of course.’

  Emmy flicked through her file of mental images. One of its documents was the picture of a warm house, a bright fire and a mother in the kitchen, baking. It was a picture to which she only referred after careful consideration, or after one too many at the pub, because it hurt her to think about it.

  ‘How do you find dealing with a baby?’ Prue sat down at the table to count out the housekeeping money.

  ‘I was dead frightened.’

  Prue looked amused. ‘And now?’

  ‘I like it. He’s a nice baby and it’s sort of planning, really. Working out a routine. Understanding his language. I should be quite good at it.’

  ‘Oh?’ Prue slid a heap of coins back into the tin, which had ‘Fortnum and Mason. English Breakfast Tea’ written on it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Emmy. ‘I’m good at crosswords.’

  Prue was not and the conversation lapsed. Anyway, she was not quite sure of the logic of Emmy’s argument.

  She was quite clear on one point, however: her longing to have the house back to herself. A baby provoked such big upheavals and such big emotions - panic, inadequacy, crippling tenderness. When it was yours myopia was added to the list, for it was hard to see anything beyond its milk-blistered mouth and your own exhaustion. With Jane, Prue had looked up from time to time to the world outside and found it alarmingly narrowed but, battle-happy and at that time more or less on an even keel with Violet, thanks to Mrs Drake, had longed for a bigger family. When a second one did not arrive, distance set in and, after a few years, so did relief at no longer being on the front line.

  Unlike Joan, who had placed herself fairly and squarely on the front line.

  Joan had possessed an advantage. God. From the beginning, Joan had been in touch with him. She had been an exceptionally pious child, even in an age of piety, if you believe the depositions of Jean Waterin and Mengette Yoyart as they appear in the Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc. In his deposition, her godfather Jean Morel also states that often when Jeanne (sic) was supposed to be watching the cattle, she played truant to worship at the shrine of Our Lady of Bermont. God must have made life easier even in war-ravaged France, particularly if he sent instructions down via St Michael and St Catherine, and less frequently St Margaret.

  Instead of battling on to the 7.33 to Waterloo, or with the school run, Joan had abandoned her patched red frieze dress, the traditional costume for women in the area,
borrowed a tunic and hose and taken herself off to a bigwig in Vaucouleurs, Robert de Baudricourt, and badgered him into listening to her crazy idea of rescuing and crowning their moribund Valois dauphin. This being the age that allowed, encouraged, a dialogue with God and miracles, she succeeded, and set off for Chinon with six companions wearing a new set of clothes and a horse bought by the good people of Vaucouleurs. Note: The saddle was of a design that supported the small of the back and the thighs. Otherwise, how else would a peasant girl unused to riding have mastered such a mount?

  The wool stuff of her newly acquired leggings would have rubbed unfamiliarly between thighs that had known only a skirt. She would have been aware of the different freedoms permitted by a shirt and doublet, the constriction of leather boots, the smell of harnesses and male sweat. Noise, too, would have afflicted Joan, accustomed as she was to the rural peace of the village. She complained later that her voices sometimes had trouble coming through because of it. Prue empathized with this as she read of Joan searching for a little peace among the clamour of conflict and communal medieval life. Today, she would have stood no chance at all against aircraft, breakfast television and the new, improved A303.

  ‘Did you get the organic oats?’ Violet enquired, as Prue was packing away yet another gigantic Saturday shop. It was the first week in March, and everyone was waiting for spring.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘Camomile tea?’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’

  Violet pushed the sterilizer under the window and stacked tins of infant soya milk powder in the place where Prue usually kept the bread crock. Prue bided her time until Violet was occupied with the kettle, pushed the milk tins to one side and replaced the bread crock. She felt thoroughly childish.

  Violet looked up. ‘Were they in the way?’

  ‘No,’ said Prue coolly. ‘But I keep the bread there.’ Violet’s expression prompted her to add, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, it doesn’t matter where the bread goes.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Violet, ‘that’s what I thought.’