Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Come in – come in and have something, John William. Will you have a glass of Father’s sherry?’

  ‘We’d much better get down along,’ he says easily. ‘Concert starts in ten minutes.’

  And it does, she knows that, for hasn’t she been watching each quivering touch of the long hand on to the minute all day long? But now she looks behind her and dismisses the face of the clock airily. ‘Oh, is it so late? I hadn’t realized.’

  ‘Not that they ever start on time. You got your wrap – or something?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘It’s warm enough. I don’t need anything.’

  ‘You might be needing it later. It gets cool.’ He’s smiling.

  She darts into her father’s room and snatches up the Indian shawl he keeps draped over a chair. It is dark and gorgeous, though it smells of her father and his tobacco and his closed room.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ says John William. ‘Silk.’

  He rubs the fine shawl between his fingers approvingly. He has always liked the things about her which are different from Hannah and the cousins. They stand in the empty, dim hall with evening sunlight filtering on to them through coloured panes of glass. The house is luxurious, suddenly, as she sees it through his senses, with its space and smell of polish. The polish has been rubbed in by Clare herself, but if he liked he could imagine that she has sat in a room playing the piano and asking some Annie or Edith to do the banisters again, because they are smeared. Behind them the clock which came from Coyne ticks, measuring out time. John William glances at it, watches the second hand go round at the top of the dial. It never stops; Francis Coyne says that it has been going since before Clare was born. She watches John William watching it. Time sweeping away, time which will sweep him away from her. She touches his arm, and he turns away from the clock and looks at her. Here is Clare with an Indian shawl gliding over her arms. Her workaday blouse is hidden, and the broad flirtatious stripes of Hannah’s skirt. She moves slightly, reservedly, feeling herself to be desirable. This time John William doesn’t try to touch her. He points at the undulating stained-glass maiden with her heavy knot of red hair and her rapt expression which Clare once loved and now mocks.

  ‘She looks like you, Clarey,’ he says.

  She thinks he is teasing her, but no. He is serious as he traces the outline of hair, cheek-bone, neck on the stained glass. She knows how the glass feels under his finger.

  ‘She looks like you look sometimes. Always in a dream. Maybe that’s a good way to be.’ He turns round to her and smiles.

  Clare stills her lips and looks down. This is important. This is what John William wants, so it can’t be ridiculous.

  They open the door, and he folds her arm through his as they meet the flood of evening light and step out past the little staring row of tiptoe houses.

  But unlike the Pre-Raphaelite beauty on her front door, Clare can’t keep her mouth shut. She starts by making conversation, but soon she’s accelerating through the void of his lack of response. And she can’t be silent, as she has always been able to be with John William. Even though she hears herself gabbling and wants to stop herself, she can’t. Words fall out, and they are all the wrong words.

  ‘How is Sam really? Will you see him at the end of your leave? What will you say to him? Don’t you think someone ought to say something – after all, there’s Hannah…’

  When? Why? What has come over him, how can he, how can he do this to Hannah? I don’t understand.

  John William’s arm stiffens to wood. Clare ceases to be his young woman and becomes a canary clinging desperately to its perch as they reach the steepest part of the hill. She nags on, her voice high and shrill. Sam and Hannah. His own sister. What’s changed Sam so much?

  And then, unforgivably at last, what she really wants to know. She burns at her own words, driven on by a curiosity which feels more shameful than the curiosity which led them to lift skirts and unbutton knickerbockers when they were all young together and knew nothing but this town and one another. She asks about the war. About being out there. What is it like? What it is really like. The war. Your friends around you, dying. Billy. No one tells us anything. But you know. Tell me, John William…

  Tell me. Let me sympathize. Let me be the one.

  You can talk to me.

  You can spill yourself on me.

  She doesn’t even need to say it. He knows it. She is warm and sticky and eager. But he wants none of it. He cannot expose his exhaustion to Clare. It is all right for her to try to draw his soul out of him, but he has got to go back into the world of the war. He cannot look to the left of him or to the right of him.

  She looks up and sees the tight skin around his eyes and the set of his mouth. It is only his heavy tan that makes him look healthy, she realizes. Under it his colour is bad. How they used to swing along together, arm in arm, she and Hannah and John William. They could walk for miles. But it hurts her to walk with him now. They hurt each other.

  And here’s the Drill Hall and so he doesn’t have to say anything. And here’s Pretty Peggy, free for the evening, dancing up to them. Little Georgie’s in bed, and her employers were only too pleased to let her go to a Red Cross concert.

  Peggy’s eyes dart over Clare and John William as they barge forward together, out of step with one another. Clare bangs the back of her hand against the rough wall. She reddens slightly with the effort of suppressing pain. Peggy’s little, off-centre face glows at John William. She is really lovely tonight, dressed in something he doesn’t notice – white, perhaps. Cool. She teases him.

  ‘I wouldn’t have known you in that uniform, John William. He’s grown so handsome, hasn’t he, Clare?’

  Now, appealing to Clare, she becomes the privileged friend, licensed to flirtatious sisterliness with John William.

  Clare says nothing. Somehow she and John William have dropped arms. Her own arm feels numb where he held it, and she’d like to rub it. Instead she pulls the shawl round her more closely, because he’s right, it is getting colder already.

  Peggy puts up a little, light hand to marvel at the shortness of John William’s hair. She caresses the bristle at the back of his neck. And he just stands there like a prize bull, thinks Clare. Her offended body recoils farther from his.

  ‘Such a shame there’s no dancing tonight,’ says Peggy. ‘I love dancing, Clare can tell you. But we haven’t had any for ages, with all you boys gone.’

  ‘You should dance, in that dress,’ says John William. The breeze stirs a wisp of it and the skirts flatten against Peggy’s slender legs.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she says. She looks down, then up again, under lasholened eyelids.

  ‘We ought to get our tickets,’ says Clare. Her voice feels clumsy in her mouth. If only Hannah were here. She always knew how to deal with Peggy. When they were children, it was Clare who snapped at Peggy’s provocations, and raged and pulled hair and got a whipping from Nan for treating poor little Peggy like that. Hannah sized up situations and then deflated them.

  ‘In a minute,’ says John William. The crowd bulges around the entrance, under the bunting, the home-made red, white and blue decorations and the skewed portrait of the King. There are farmers, shop-people, fishermen and swarms of kids without tickets getting their caps knocked off as they dive under people’s elbows to see through the door. Not many in khaki. They’d all make way for John William. The Belgian singer has arrived. She’s in the back, resting her voice. She’s been sucking glycerine lozenges since noon, they say, because this is the last leg of a tour which has taken her from Exeter all down Cornwall. Travelling through all that dust, no wonder she’s hoarse. But she’s good. Oh, yes, there’s no doubt about that. Your Uncle Arthur spoke to someone at Penzance market who heard her up at Plymouth and he did say…

  Uncle Arthur and Aunt Sarah. Even Aunt Mabel who never comes to things and looks as washed out and wobbly as ever, with her fingers tense on Uncle William’s sleeve. Kitchie ducks through the crowd towa
rds Clare, lighting up at the sight of John William. Two gulls swing over the crowd, louder than the milling voices below. They poise on a current of air and then dive-bomb Mrs Cocking’s feathered Sunday hat. There are shrieks of laughter, and she too decides she’d better make light of it in spite of her annoyance at the damned thing and the sight of her mangled, claw-struck best straw. Besides, one of the gulls has shat on it in fright. There’s the black shape of Mrs Hore. The crowd makes space for her, respecting her inky trail of grief.

  ‘Hello, John William,’ says Kitchie. ‘Hello, Peggy.’

  For they stand together. They are a couple, suddenly, her white dress hazing his uniform, her laughter drawing in Kitchie too. Her eyes flit over Clare without looking at her. But tomorrow they’ll be friends again.

  ‘You looked lovely in that skirt of Hannah’s last night, Clarey,’ she’ll say tomorrow, widening her eyes. Because Peggy will never let herself know anything. What is there to know? If you said anything, she’d answer, ‘But what’s the matter with you? We were only having a bit of fun.’ All she’s doing is having a bit of fun and a lovely time. Everybody’s having a lovely time. The sky’s clear blue, striped with mackerel, the gulls are raving over fish-heads, Peggy’s got the evening off and everybody loves her. Even little Georgie wouldn’t go to sleep tonight without a kiss from his Peggy.

  Peggy’s flittering eyes have spotted the skirt Clare’s wearing and identified it instantly, but she won’t say anything about it now, because she’s not that sort of a girl.

  ‘He’s so brown, isn’t he, Clare?’ she coos. ‘Even the back of his neck!’ And she just touches it.

  ‘It goes down farther’n that,’ says John William, with his straight, unreadable look, and Peggy flushes deliciously and shrinks towards him.

  ‘I expect you’d like to take a look, wouldn’t you, Peg?’ a voice remarks. ‘I’m sure we could arrange it for you, couldn’t we, Clare?’ It’s Hannah, slipping in suddenly beside Kitchie, wearing just her plain navy skirt and white blouse. Peggy frowns. Her native prudishness peeks out as she says, ‘Really, Hannah, what a thing to suggest.’

  But everyone is looking at Hannah now, not at Peggy. You can’t keep a good story hidden. Everyone knows Sam’s got leave but he hasn’t come home. How will Hannah take it? Shame on him. You’ve got to feel sorry for the girl.

  But you don’t and you can’t feel sorry for her, not when Hannah is there before you. Her eyes are steady, and after a few moments the furtive glances die down like a breeze-eddy on the bay.

  She smiles warmly at Clare. ‘You look lovely, Clare,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t she, Johnnie?’ Only Hannah calls him that, and hardly ever. But she does so now, asserting that she’s John William’s sister as she moves in close to him, leaving no space for Peggy’s insinuating sisterliness. As Hannah moves forward, she seems to draw Clare closer too.

  ‘You and Clarey better be going on in,’ she tells her brother. ‘You don’t want to be stuck in those nasty seats at the back, not with our Clarey, do you?’

  She winks at the couple. They have all heard Grandad fulminating against ‘those nasty seats at the back of the cinema’, and the evils they hold for the young girls of Penzance when the boys are on leave. There’s a ripple of laughter. Kitchie guffaws, then glances quickly at John William. Only Peggy does not see the joke.

  Clare’s breathing steadies. She is their Clarey.

  ‘All right, let’s get our tickets, shall we?’ says John William. ‘Three, is it, Hannah?’

  ‘I’ve got mine. I’m over there with Nan. Come on, Peggy, Nan was wanting to have a word with you. Come and sit with us.’ And she tows off the reluctant Peggy, who is by now rather chilly in her white dress, and glad enough to be in with the press of warm, breathing people.

  Some instinct keeps Clare very still. She draws her shawl close, and looks down.

  ‘There’s such a crowd,’ she demurs. Hannah would be proud of her. John William takes her arm, and thrusts forward with the other shoulder. As she’s expected, the people around them make way. All the farmers struggling for exemptions for their sons want to be seen here tonight at the Red Cross concert. They make way for John William and murmur approving nothings to him as he goes by. Clare and John William are drawn through the narrow central doorway and into the hall.

  It is true enough about the glycerine lozenges. In the small side room Eliane leans into a mirror which has been propped ready for her. Her practised fingers twist up the last scraps of her reddish hair over her false hairpiece and jab in the pins. She hennas her hair and she had better do it again soon, because a narrow strip of grey is worming its way to the surface at her parting. However, no one will see it on stage. She damps her index finger with spit and combs the hair a little looser, clouding, hiding. Once she’s back in London she’ll go to Emile to have her hair cleaned, then she’ll henna it again. But her costume is perfect. Dove-grey, demure but piquant, trimmed with black velvet. Eliane despises singers who trail about in flowing white with patriotic sashes, particularly those who continue to do so once they are over thirty. Who do they imagine they are deceiving? Besides, they have no elegance. Do they wish to pretend they are still at their First Communion? Then they should put a veil over their heads and have done with it.

  Exeter, Plymouth, Bodmin, Liskeard, Truro, Redruth. St Ives tonight, Penzance tomorrow, and there’s an end of it, for this tour at least. Back to London on what passes for a fast train these days, crowded with soldiers who will give up two seats if she asks them, so that she can keep her hatboxes beside her. Then she can draw her veil over her face and turn to the window and sleep. There is a place for veils, certainly: Eliane knows that no woman is at her most charming when she is sleeping. No woman over thirty, that is sure, when her unguarded jaw sags a little and a bubble of spittle comes out at the corner of her mouth. It’s necessary to give thought to such things.

  She finishes putting kohl around her eyes. The art lies in wiping nearly all of it away again, so that there is only a suggestion of shadowiness around the pure violet which is her best feature – really, she knows, her only feature. Her nose is little but poorly shaped; her mouth elegant, nothing more. And another week of these train-smuts will ruin her complexion for good. But her eyes are unassailable. She turns, opening them slowly to their most direct, most shadowy regard. Her face vanishes and there is a garden at dusk, a bowl of hyacinths, the sea at Naxos. Everything has been said already and sometimes she wonders if she will ever hear it again, when she wakes up in the train and for the hundredth time adjusts the tired, crumpled flesh of her face into a vase for her eyes.

  They are terrible, these little towns. Smells of sweat and dust, great red faces lolling on the other side of the stage, greedy for her but always holding themselves back, never really enthralled. She knows quite well that even as her husky, hesitant voice casts out its spell and trawls among them a good third are still thinking of their dinner, or whether the position of their seat adequately reflects their social position, or how much money they need to put into the collection. If they are women, they are wondering about Eliane. Is she married or not married, is she – you know – people on the stage… They sit there preening themselves a little beside the bulwark of their Sunday-best husbands, who are bolt upright, hands on thighs, straining the cloth of their good Sunday suits. What they are thinking glides under the surface of their eyes as they devour her body and her clothes, and are satisfied that after all, there’s nothing so special about her. But they can never quite satisfy themselves. Afterwards, if there is a reception and she must talk to the mayor or the freemen of the town or the local vicar, she will feel the prickle of eyes upon her still. What is it about her? Her dress is quite ordinary. The eyes cost it. Plain fine grey wool. Velvet trimmings, one and six-three the yard. No jewels. You would think she would be more – well, dressed up.

  And yet the mayor and the curate kindle in spite of themselves. Warmth rises; one, more daring or simply more human than the others, presses
her hand as he assures her again that it was magnificent, deeply moving. It’s there again, that curious ethereal element which is called her success. It glows around her as she smiles faintly at the joke of one, or acknowledges the bow of another. And the more it grows, the more the faces smile and the crowd thickens around her, the more she longs to be in the next dirty train, with the window open and the cold night air coming in, on her way to her next engagement.

  She isn’t sleeping here tonight; she will go on to Penzance after the concert and spend the next morning resting her face and her voice in her hotel. There have been too many concerts and that faint, attractive huskiness is becoming too pronounced.

  She has rubbed off most of the rouge too. Time to go on. She puts down her handkerchief.

  Clare and John William are in the middle of their row and near the front. They both sit stiffly upright, conscious of their position among Chellews and Stephens and isn’t that the Canon there, on the right? But then John William turns and gives Clare a lightning wink and suddenly this is their own concert, their night out together, and no one has more right here than they have. Clare glows and relaxes for the first time since morning.

  Eliane steps out on to the stage, and stands there in front of them, ‘quite simply’, in a way which is so accomplished that it looks perfectly natural, her hands clasped at her waist. Her hands are extraordinarily white and fine, but that may be the light on them, thinks Clare. Eliane gives a little smile and lets her blue gaze cross the audience.

  ‘I am going to sing for you first – a little song of my country – where some of you may have been,’ and she gives a small, acknowledging nod towards the nearest man in khaki, who happens to be John William.

  Clare’s French is just about up to the song.