Page 20 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“I hope so, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

And so it became our secret, the three of us. We learned to swim, and grew strong and brown in the sun. My father growled that I was going native, but my mother shushed him. “Let her be a child.”

It only lasted one summer. By the next, Gurdaya had developed breasts and a figure and was under the hawkish eye of her ayah, for she would be a fine prize on the bridal market. All of us would grow up far too quickly, our freedom curtailed.

But the taste of it could not be erased.

Bread, Vinegar, and Runner Beans

1940

London

—11—

After my phone call with Tanveer, I washed and dressed, pulling my hair under a scarf. My growling stomach insisted on breakfast. Betty had not returned, which gave me a twinge of worry, but considering how long the bombing had gone on, who knew what things might get in her way—broken streets, debris, things I didn’t even know to consider. If she didn’t appear midday, I’d telephone the drugstore near her sister’s flat.

Meantime, I put the kettle on, then went around opening the curtains and shades to allow the day in. It was odd to see the ordinary September light, gloomy but oblivious to the events of the night before. Across the way, purple-and-yellow asters bloomed in profusion in Mrs. Ball’s garden, as always.

There was no sign of Peter yet, but I worried even less about him. He had nine lives and a canny ability to get through anything.

The quest for breakfast was a bit thin—the dregs of our tea ration, which I’d save for mother, a half a loaf of bread, some jam. No meat and, of course, no eggs, though Nina had brought some hens to town from her country house, and there soon would be.

Betty managed the shopping and the ration coupons, and Mondays were her shopping day, so I’d have to make do with what I could find until tomorrow. The potato from last night would offer a substantial base. I picked some peas and new lettuces, then inside, I shredded carrots and potatoes and mixed them with the lettuces, sprinkling thewhole with vinegar we’d made the week before from a starter Betty had thought to maintain. With a cup of very hot water to drink, it was plenty, and filled the hole in my stomach.

My mother would need more nutrition than this, however. She was much too thin as it was. Looking through the drawers, I found the ration books and tucked them into my handbag. I wouldn’t be gone long, but in case Peter returned before I did, I hid the tea and the last of the sugar so I could serve it to Mother when she awakened.

Outdoors, the neighborhood looked as it always did, which was strangely unsettling. I saw no rubble, but the sky was covered in a yellow haze, the evidence of fires still burning. As I rounded the corner toward the fish market, I saw the queue was half the block, and my hope of getting something decent plummeted. “Have you heard what he has?” I asked the woman in front of me.

She shook her head. “As long as it isn’t that awful dogfish from last week.”

I nodded in sympathy, but I would have taken it.

As I reached the counter nearly a half hour later, Mr. Foley asked, “Where’s Betty today?” His thick wiry brows ruffled together, like two caterpillars. “She didn’t—?”

“No, no,” I said. “She went to check on her family between sirens and hasn’t returned yet.”

“Hope she’s all right.” He passed me a white wrapped package. “I saved her this bit for dinner.”

Relief flooded through me. I didn’t care what it was—fish could give my mother some genuine sustenance. “I’m grateful. I’ll have her check in with you as soon as I hear from her.”

On the way home, I stopped in the pub to ask after Peter, but although he’d been there last night as I expected, he’d left at midnight and not returned.

“He left in the middle of the bombing?” I asked.

George shrugged, a gesture I could interpret easily enough—he’d left drunk and likely belligerent, and no one would have bothered tostop him. I couldn’t see how the noise of the bombing would have helped his shell shock, and imagined a terrified dog running mindlessly through a thunderstorm.

There was no help for it. Outside on the pavement, I stood still for a moment, struck by a shaft of sunlight on my face. It seemed so strange it should shine at all.

But weather didn’t care. It continued on in its usual way, just as the stars would shine tonight. Through everything.

At home, I settled the meager shopping, and went upstairs to my studio. I opened the windows to create some cross drafts and set to work cataloging the paintings that remained. The ones I’d had shipped up to Helen’s were more recent, explorations of portraiture and color that I thought were my best pieces. She only had space for so many, and now I had to sort the rest.

I’d been painting for nearly thirty years, more if I counted the youthful work before I started art school. The sketchbooks were stacked on shelves by the wall, not valuable but as meaningful to me as the diary of another woman. Those pages, year after year, had captured my world a day, a drawing, a watercolor at a time. It would grieve me to lose them. Perhaps they, too, should be boxed up and taken somewhere safe, along with the rest of the paintings.

But where? The family estate no longer belonged to us; after my brother’s untimely death, it had passed to a distant cousin, a loss I grieved still to this day, especially when I had been living at Herewich at the time and could easily have cared for it myself.