Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘He’s tried for Albert, you mean. And Jo, and George. But not for Kitchie, has he? What about Kitchie when his time comes up? What about Harry? What’s he going to do for Harry when they say that Harry’s bad arm doesn’t count any more, that’s fine, he can still fight with it? Because they will say that, you know they will. And what about John William?’ Her breath runs out, and her voice squeaks as she says John William’s name. She stares at her father.

  ‘Clare. Clare. Come now. I’m sure if you asked John William, he would tell you that he understands why we have to fight. And think how well John William’s done. His commission will stand him in good stead after the war.’

  He has to say it, and even six months ago he could just about have believed it. He could have believed in what they were fighting for, and in the evil of what they were fighting against. But now he can’t believe in it any more. He is reminded of the deadly frustration he used to feel when his mother called him into her bedroom because she had not seen him at the altar rails for months. She would talk to him of her own ‘implicit faith’, her God-given freedom from doubt or difficulty in matters of religion, and how she only longed to share this with him. He can see now her blind, ecstatic face as she told him she would pray night and day for God to grant him this same faith.

  To cease to believe in the war feels like that loss of faith; it is something he has kept just as secret. All he can see is confusion, and newspaper columns full of deaths and explanations which mask still more confusion. We’re frantic with fear of what we’ve already done, and what we’re doing now, and what we’re about to do, he thinks. But we have to go on pretending that we know what we are doing. Newspaper justifications. We are like children whose game has gone terribly wrong, all gathered round the one who’s got hurt, begging him to say it’s all right, it doesn’t matter, the blood can be wiped off and we can all go home.

  But we can’t let out the truth, not now that so many have died. It would be like killing them again. We can’t say how bloody and pointless it’s become, and that we don’t know what to do any more. These are our children who are dying, rows of them in uniform like the children they were a few years ago in their school photographs. Our sons, dying for us. It’s the wrong way round. People die for their children, that’s the way it has always been. Now we send them out fresh from school. Everything is confusion.

  ‘Clare,’ he goes on diffidently, ‘has John William been talking to you about the war? Has it distressed you?’

  She laughs, then her eyes fill with tears. Her face quivers and she hides it behind her hands, then sinks down on to the carpet, kneeling, obliterating herself, shaken with sobs.

  Now he knows something must have happened. After the concert perhaps. How he dislikes these patriotic concerts. They send people out into the streets swollen with enjoyable sentimentalities which they confuse with feeling. This whole country is in love with the idea of death, as long as the death happens elsewhere.

  He has a sudden vision of seven-year-old Clare, beside herself with rage, drumming the carpet with her heels. It’s best for her if I let her cry, he tells himself, and the thought makes him easier. After a few moments, hovering, he says, ‘I’ll go and make our Bengers.’

  A hot drink will do her good. He bustles gratefully to the kitchen, feels along the cupboard-top for the matches – isn’t that where she keeps them? – and lights the stove. A soft blue bubble of flame comes up. He watches it, thinking of May. He tries to remember whether May has ever talked about the war. He doesn’t think so – or if she has, it’s only to say the same things everybody says. While he is with her, there is no world outside her cottage, her bed, the white, blue-hazed circle of her thighs.

  He scrapes the bottom of the Bengers tin, stirs the powder into hot milk, fills two striped mugs and carries them back to Clare. Her hand slips out and takes one of the mugs. He sits down on the shabby carpet beside her and puts his arm around her. She is still shaking, but she seems calmer. She’s over the worst of it. How she used to cry! He smiles, remembering. He’d think she would choke herself, or scream herself into a fit. He had nearly forgotten. When her grandmother used to scold her or Hannah wouldn’t play or the others had gone off without her. And now she’s grown up and he doesn’t know what she cries about any more. Who does she talk to now?

  ‘Clare,’ he suggests, ‘perhaps we should have the rosary tonight? With a special intention for John William?’

  He braces himself for the sting of her refusal, but after a minute she nods. He was right not to talk about the war any more. They both need to recollect themselves. He goes and fetches their beads, and they kneel on the hall carpet together, with the cheap cord pressing into their flesh. He makes the sign of the Cross and leads the prayers, feeling his way forward through Clare’s silence, until her voice responds in the third Hail Mary. He sighs in relief and plunges on through the decade of the Resurrection. This is putting things right! Somehow they’ve got out of the way of the evening rosary – he can’t quite remember how it happened. He had always resolved to keep it going for Clare, no matter how he felt himself. Religion is more important to women. They are beautiful within it, he knows, thinking of his shy, plain sisters.

  To Clare, the hall is as cold as the bottom of the sea, as cold as the current that tugs past the Island, taking dead things with it. She’s stood there often in early spring and watched the mackerel luggers buck as they come out of the harbour and set sail south-west. From here you can look down on the men bending over their gear, with their backs to the land and their legs braced against the swing of the decks.

  Prayers slip and drift behind her; her cold little beads trail through her fingers. She shuts her eyes. Now, she’s leaning over the back of Uncle Arthur’s rowing boat. The boys are rowing; Harry at the back because of his arm, John William pulling away strongly. The water is navy-blue and the sun blazes around the white circle of her cotton sun-bonnet. She is ten years old. She kneels in the stern and holds her beads down in the water, into the bubbling stream of the wake, and then slowly, slowly she uncurls her fingers and lets the sea slip the rosary right off her hand. There, it’s gone. She looks over her shoulder at John William.

  ‘An owl,’ says John William. The two men look up and see its white spread wings ghost across the road in the moonlight.

  ‘A little owl, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what we get commonly round here. Sometimes you’ll see a pair of short-eared owls hunting over the moor when we’ve a plague of voles. They’ll raise two broods in a season then, and take hundreds of voles.’

  They walk on in silence, as they have walked most of the last three miles, brushed by moths and night breezes. The moon is up, sheeted by a thin layer of cloud. Its light is grey and wan, like dawn. It has none of the glamour of unclouded moonlight and the two men’s moon-shadows are vague splotches in front of them. Far off on their right the long Atlantic swell rolls in against the cliffs.

  Their feet crunch loose stones. They are both wearing evening shoes, more suitable for the concert than for miles of country road. Lawrence had a lift into St Ives in the Hockings’ trap earlier, and would have ridden home in it but for meeting Clare and John William. But it is good to walk. It feels like walking out of the world entirely, into a moonscape of sky and moorlands which were here long before the first people came to live in the hollows and valleys. Lawrence and John William walk on past streams rushing off the moor, through the smell of dung spread on fields, through knotty, complicated shadows of thorn-trees. Granite boulders loom, balancing on top of one another as they have done for more than two thousand years. They seem to pivot over the little fields like blind men. Surely they are moving? But when you stop, and blink, it is the effect of the moonlight. You walk on, and just out of the corner of your eye you see the loggans stir…

  ‘Zennor witches,’ says John William.

  ‘This is a country for witches, isn’t it? I’ve heard stories from the Hockings.’

  ‘Oh, you
’ll hear stories from everyone here.’

  Lawrence hears the other man’s soft laugh. There is no humour in it. He glances at John William’s face and sees that it is set hard. The moon draws out odd resemblances. John William’s bulky shoulders and blunt, cropped head make him seem like a cousin of those standing stones. But how ill he looks, suddenly. The wash of moonlight shows a sheen of sweat on his face.

  ‘So, you are going to study medicine after the war?’ Lawrence prompts him, wanting to resume the conversation they’d started as they left behind the last few houses of St Ives.

  John William lowers his head, draws in a deep breath of exhaustion. ‘Yes,’ he says vaguely.

  ‘You are tired. I should not have brought you so far,’ says Lawrence with quick, warm sympathy. ‘Should you like to stay at the cottage with us? We have only two rooms, but we can make up a comfortable bed for you. It is very quiet – only Frieda and myself. You could walk back to St Ives in the morning.’

  John William shakes his head slowly, as if to clear it. His footsteps drag. His shoe scuffs against gravel, then he stands stock-still.

  ‘Listen,’ he whispers.

  The soughing of the wind, the sea’s slow suck and heave, the thousand sounds of the countryside stirring at night. A small agonized squeak, cut off as soon as it forms. Around the moon the clouds thin and race north.

  ‘Listen,’ whispers John William, ‘listen. Can’t you hear them?’

  ‘No, I hear nothing,’ says Lawrence.

  John William sinks with a slow staggering motion to his knees. His fists clench, his face turns up to the moon, he scans the thorn-bushes. There it is. He freezes, staring, then, ‘Get down, Hawker! Get down! Get your fucking head down!’

  A pause. The breeze lifts Lawrence’s hair as John William slowly lowers his own head and knuckles his fists against his eyes, hiding what they have seen. In the quiet Lawrence hears his short, harsh breathing. He waits, not daring to touch or speak to the kneeling man. Slowly the shoulders relax and sag. Lawrence reaches out and puts his hand on John William’s arm. He shudders, but does not strike out at the other man.

  ‘Come on,’ says Lawrence. ‘Best come to the cottage. You can rest there.’

  John William takes his hands from his face, shivers slightly, and looks up. His face is blank for a moment or two, then it relaxes. He says in the same easy tones in which he discussed his career in medicine, ‘I ought to get back now.’

  ‘Ought you?’ asks Lawrence carefully.

  ‘There’s not much time,’ explains John William.

  ‘No, you are going back to camp tomorrow, of course. You will want to be with your family tonight.’

  ‘You know Clarey’s my cousin?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did know.’

  ‘Cousin Clarey,’ repeats John William thoughtfully. His smile is real now, and he gets up lithely, sweeping the dirt off his knees as if it’s an immense joke to find himself kneeling in the road.

  ‘But you should not go back so soon. You aren’t well.’

  ‘Me?’ asks John William. He sounds astonished. ‘Why, I’m well enough. Fit for an officer.’ He laughs again, looks around, says, ‘We used to walk up here, you know. All the way to Zennor we’d walk, Clare and Hannah and me. The whole day up on the moor with our dinner basket Nan gave us. When we were tired, Hannah made house for us under a thorn-tree. Clare always wanted to go and see the little mermaid.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We got as far as the church one time. Then we had milk at one of the farms, warm out of the cow. The farm-people knew Nan. They wanted Clare to drink buttermilk because she was so pale, but she pressed her mouth shut. She didn’t like it.’

  His smile is pure reminiscent affection. Lawrence sees that he remembers nothing of Hawker now. John William has gone back to where Clare is a stubborn child in a grass-stained petticoat, lips pinched to a thin line, and Hawker is an unknown boy of seven somewhere in England, wandering out with his pail to pick blackberries or blubbing in a corner because he has had the strap.

  ‘So you’ll turn here?’

  ‘I shall,’ says John William. The two men are very close. Far off, a chained dog barks, but they feel themselves to be the only living creatures in the landscape. The cloud is dissolving now, blowing into flakes over the moon, and the light is strong. They shake hands, feeling the living flesh behind the transfer of warmth. They move apart.

  ‘Come and visit us when you are next on leave,’ says Lawrence.

  ‘I shall,’ says John William. He smiles, turns and walks swiftly back along the road to St Ives while Lawrence watches. John William doesn’t hesitate or look back; he looks neither to the right of him nor to the left of him.

  Thirteen

  He comes whistling into her dreams. The sea tosses; she stirs uneasily. Don’t go so close in to the rocks, she begs him, in small desperate whispers. But he pulls harder, hauling at the sweat-worn oars. They are toiling out into the bay – she can see Clodgy Point with white foam smothering the rocks, then the waves roll back and the rock streams black and clear. The sea heaves as it roughens, but there is no sound of wind or water, only thin whistling, on and on.

  And she wakes. The whistling goes on like bad luck. What had Nan told her? ‘It’s ill-luck to whistle, for you never know what you’re calling to come to you. Don’t let the men hear you.’ The boys knew they must never whistle at night. The seven whistlers mean death when you hear them. But the night is still and there’s someone out in it, whistling for Clare.

  She slithers out of her bed. Her night-gown sticks to her, damp with nightmare. She lifts aside an inch of the curtain, and looks down. Dark shadows and a skim of moonlight show on the sea, and she still hears that thin whistling, insistent, on one note, then fluking up, then down to its home note again. Ah, but she knows that whistle, the one he was whipped for. And there’s his dark shape too, and she’s looking down on a strange new map of him in the moonlight, all face and dwindling legs. He is staring whitely up at her window. Cautiously, she pushes up the sash, and the whistling stops. They look at one another, neither knowing how much the other can see. Clare scrapes the window up a little farther and leans out and whispers, pointing down the road.

  ‘Go round the back! Go round the entry. I’ll come down.’

  He nods, and disappears.

  No time for anything. She throws on her dressing-gown and shakes her hair back, and runs on her bare feet down the stairs, through kitchen and scullery, to fumble with the bolts. The top one’s rusty – everything rusts if you don’t keep oiling it. And there he is already, close and sudden, making her catch her breath and shrink back. Even now, knowing who it is, she’s afraid of him. It is blind dark in the kitchen, and she feels for the matches, but: ‘Don’t light the candle, Clarey! Come on out.’

  ‘But I’m only in my night-dress. I can’t.’

  ‘You’ll be warm enough. It’s still as still out here. The sea’s flat as a plate but for the swell. Come on, Clarey, come down and see it with me. There’s no one about to look at you. All the tabbies have been in their beds for hours.’

  He sounds as young and eager as Kitchie. She thrusts out a bare white foot and says, ‘Wait a moment.’

  Her old boots are in the cupboard under the stairs. She knows them well enough to lace them in the dark. There. She draws her dressing-gown sash tight and runs back to him. They listen, but the house is quite silent.

  ‘Father never wakes,’ says Clare. But he sleeps at the back of the house, and they are right under him.

  They slip through the door and the little moonlit garden with white shells glowing at the path edge. Clare knocks her foot at the gate, then they are down the alley, over the ash and clinker, past the grumble of sleepy Kaiser at the Lees’ (‘I call him Kaiser so I can say “Down, Kaiser”, see’), and then out on to the flat whitish top road.

  ‘We’ll go down through the cemetery,’ says John William.

  ‘Where are we going?’


  ‘To the sea,’ he says, as if there’s no other answer.

  They take the diagonal path across the steepness of the cemetery where she’s so often played and hidden. For a moment she can feel all the sleepers moan and turn over beneath her. All their poor bones, some of them scarcely laid down, she thinks, and now here we are disturbing them. Our footprints are too light. We ought to be sad and heavy, carrying water and flowers. They’ll know we’re not thinking of them. But John William catches her waist and she laughs aloud. If anyone hears it, they’ll only stop their ears and pray to God to deliver them from seeing a ghost that night. Her dressing-gown sash is loose and her white night-dress billows and glimmers as they flit down the slopes between the stones. And down they go out of the cemetery, past St Ia’s holy well and along the top of the beach, towards the rocks. He is heading for the coast-path, and she’ll come with him, no matter where. Tonight her feet are light and sure and she cannot lose her footing. The grass is tussocky and cold around the tops of her boots and dew wipes against her calves. They used to go out like this just as it got light, mushrooming. Hannah, John William, little Kitchie, Clare. Albert would meet them up at the leys. The air smells sweetly of salt and gorse, and though it is so still they begin to feel the thud and shock of the swell coming against the rocks, coming in under the rocks to its secret caverns.

  Now they must climb. John William goes first, takes her hand, and swings her. She makes a long sure step and she’s beside him. They are up on the rocks, with black sea in front and to their sides, and the land behind. There, on the left, the swell comes in under a jumble of rocks. They hear the surface noise of the water, and under it something deeper and darker, like a kept caged lion waiting for food which comes too late and never enough.

  Here they are. There is always wind here, enough to flap her white skirts and strew her hair over her face. He is fully dressed and they have cut his hair so close that the wind can do nothing but comb through it. They stand side by side on the rock, facing out to sea. They are hidden from land here. Even spies would see nothing of them. Clare’s heard how people used to spy on lovers on the Island, in their private places where they thought they were alone. Some of the watchers even took a telescope and claimed they were watching the boats go out. Then there would be scandal, hot and delicious, licking up narrow streets until it reached the watched girl’s home in a thunderous explosion. The wind blows John William and Clare. It feels strong and warm, even though she knows it cannot be warm, for this is only May and long past midnight.