Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he says consideringly, turning the sandwich. ‘Good enough. Good enough, eh, Kitchie.’

  Kitchie, scarlet, bolts his sandwich. That was rough of Uncle John. Kitchie can’t help being greedy, not even today. But at least he doesn’t pretend about it. He doesn’t say in a faint voice that he couldn’t eat a morsel, like Aunt Sarah, then gnaw her way through three sandwiches. If John William was here, he’d spot that. And maybe he’d give Clare a smile so quick nobody else would see it, and one of his split-second winks. How she envied him for that when she was little – he could wink, and whistle through his teeth, and imitate a dog barking. He tried to teach her, but she never learned. Once she thought she’d got it, but he made her look in the glass and she saw that all she was doing was to screw up both eyes and look foolish.

  The men are talking about the funeral. Will John William’s body be brought home for burial here? Uncle John is blustering, sounding important but knowing nothing. Her father says quietly, ‘I don’t think that they will release his body for burial here.’

  Clare looks at him, startled. She has hardly ever heard such finality in her father’s voice. She cannot think why he says it, for surely he knows nothing more than any of them? But the family defers to him. He is a gentleman, and he knows the way of the world and the ways of officers.

  ‘They’ll give him a military funeral, with full honours,’ says Father.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ begins Aunt Mag, eyes darting around for support. ‘Surely he did ought to be brought home? It’s only right –’

  Unexpectedly Nan quells her. ‘He’s a soldier, Mag. He got to have what soldiers have.’

  Surely Nan would want John William brought home, so he could rest here in his coffin and the neighbours could come in and pay their respects, and look at him before the coffin was closed. If he’d been killed in France, we would know that couldn’t happen. But he’s here, in England. Why doesn’t Nan want it? Why is she agreeing with Father?

  ‘There will be a letter, from the camp commander, to notify us,’ says Father.

  Nan nods. A look passes between the two of them: Nan in her black, for she always wears black and needs to dye nothing; Father with his fine, thin face turned to her. Something is between the two of them, as if they are alone in the room. Now Nan’s face is slack and heavy with sorrow. She looks old, and afraid. But Nan isn’t afraid of death, Clare knows. Clare cries out silently to the two of them, ‘Don’t let them bring him here. Take it away from me.’

  She sees a day of blazing sun, and the coffin bobbing down the steep path through Barnoon Cemetery, and the people of the town following it with faces like hungry gulls.

  ‘Nan, take it away from me. Make it not happen.’

  Nan sighs. She is very tired, but she will not give way yet. There are things to be taken care of first, and this is something they are taking care of between the two of them, she and Francis Coyne.

  Nineteen

  At first light the next day Clare hears her father creak past on the landing. Thank God, it’s morning, even though the room’s still shadowy because of its heavy curtains. Last night she went to bed thinking that she’d never be able to get to sleep, but she slept heavily, scarcely moving in the bed, plummeting so far into solid waveless sleep that she was beyond dreaming until the last minutes of the night. Then, in her dream, the church of the Sacred Heart and St Ia was being built again, this time with a smooth forest of slender marble columns supporting a roof so fragile that Clare could not tell if it were made of glass or air. The old altar had vanished, and a new altar was being built into the side of the church. It was made of marble, the colour of sweet butter and scrolled with carving.

  In her dream Clare advanced down the quiet church, stepping on sheets spattered with white and gold, past stepladders and chisels and fine brushes for applying gold-leaf. All the tools looked as if they had just been put down a moment before. One drop of gold paint hung on the end of a brush, a globe ready to topple. There was no one to be seen, but she must find the builders and tell them they were making the altar in the wrong place. The altar must be in the front of the church. But just as she reached the altar someone took her right hand. The grip was no more than a band of warmth around her little finger. She did not see the person who touched her, because in the dream she knew she was not allowed to look sideways. She had to look ahead of her. Suddenly she wasn’t worried about anything any more. Let them build the altar where they liked. It was beautiful. She laughed as she touched a coil of marble, not caring about the sound of laughter in the empty church. Then the building was suddenly full of people, talking and laughing and making more noise than she had ever heard in a church before. They were hanging branches of cherry and bunches of grapes around the altar, so that leaves, tendrils and fruit curved over the swell of the marble. Now its marble hollows were flushed with crimson from the colour of the cherry-flesh. Slowly Clare felt the grip on her finger thin away like mist. She was released. She turned and saw that it was John William walking swiftly away towards the door. He did not look at her. She knew when he opened the door that he would walk out into the sunlight.

  Clare could not be sad to see him go. He had to leave. She could tell that from the set of his back as he turned, and the way he looked as if he were hurrying towards something she could not see. At that same moment she saw that someone had planted a naked baby in one of the hollows of marble. It lay there cupped, on its back, looking up through leaves and fruit. Then, as Clare watched, a big man with a battered face knelt on the step of the altar and reached up to the child in its stone cradle. Clare knew his face: he was a herring fisherman. He held out his finger, calloused from handling the nets, and the child grasped it. There they remained. Now there was no one else in the church, and Clare woke.

  ‘Clare. Clare.’

  ‘Yes, I’m awake.’

  He pushes open her door. His voice is tired. Has he slept? He never gets up this early. Clare hoists herself up on her elbows and says, ‘Draw the curtains, Father, I can’t see you.’

  But he stays in the doorway.

  ‘Clare, I’m taking the half past seven train. I am going to make arrangements at the officers’ training camp. I have been thinking about it, and I must go. I won’t be home tonight, so you must get Hannah to come up and sleep with you, if your Aunt Sarah can spare her.’

  ‘But why are you going, Father? What about Uncle Arthur?’

  ‘Arthur is in no fit state. It’s better that I go. And Arthur would get nothing out of the people in charge. They would know they could get away with telling him anything, and he would take it gratefully, no matter what the truth of it.’

  The truth? Why is he talking like this? There’s no truth except that John William is dead. Or does he think – can he possibly think –

  ‘Father! Could it have been a mistake? Do you think it’s possible? Is that why you’re going?’

  ‘No, no, Clare, not that. There can be no mistake, not here in England. If it had happened in France, perhaps: though the communications are excellent, I believe. But we ought to know what kind of accident it was.’

  ‘I see,’ she says. She had not really thought it could be a mistake. She could not wake up and believe John William was alive. She could not be like Mrs Hore who still said that she would hark as she sat by her fire in the evening and think she heard her William’s footstep. There was not a trace of John William left in the world. Only his body; an unthinkable thing, slumped, never moving any more. Even in her dream he was walking away; but he had touched her before he left her, and that dream-touch was still as real as anything that had happened between her and John William.

  ‘Wait, Father, I’ll get up and make your breakfast. You mustn’t go without eating anything. You know what the trains are like: it will take hours.’

  ‘Go back to sleep. You need to sleep. I only put my head round the door to tell you I was going.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I shan’t sleep now.’
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  She throws on her dressing-gown and stumbles downstairs to boil an egg and cut bread and butter for her father. At least there is butter today. For once her father wants to talk to her. He wants to share this with her – his fears, whatever they are. Is she going to let him? Or will she cook for him and tidy up after him and let him go without asking questions?

  The way I always do.

  Francis Coyne sits there, grey and old with a shaving cut on his right cheek and a rusty bubble of blood oozing over the lint he has put on it. He chips off the top of his egg and the kitchen fills with the murky smell of it. Yet he lifts his spoon absently. He’s going to eat it. She sweeps the plate away from him.

  ‘That egg is bad. Can’t you smell it, Father? Eat your bread and wait five minutes while I cook you another. You have twenty minutes yet.’ Reckless of their bare larder, she takes another egg off the shelf and boils it. Fresh tea for them both. Her head is thick and aching. She has just these few minutes before it boils. Heart thumping, she sits down opposite him, elbows on the table, and asks, ‘Tell me why are you going. Truly.’

  He sighs. ‘It would be wrong to say anything before I am sure.’

  ‘But you can say it to me. You can tell me what it is you are afraid of.’

  ‘I want to find out more about the accident. How it happened. Clare, John William has been two years in France. How many came safe through that? But he did. I know they used to say he was wild, but I always thought he was a careful enough boy, when it mattered. He knew his job, or they would never have thought of making him an officer. He was used to taking charge of men. He had his platoon. They will not tell your Uncle Arthur. Probably they will not tell me the truth either, but I shall be able to piece it out from what they don’t tell me.’

  Yes, her father is right. He knew John William better than she thought. Her father goes on, ‘They said it was a miracle he came through two years in France, but John William knew it wasn’t. You weren’t there when he was talking down at your grandmother’s. We were all in the parlour – the men. Your Aunt Sarah had gone to bed, so I suppose he felt freer to talk.

  ‘No, it wasn’t a miracle. There was luck in it, perhaps nine tenths of it was luck, but without the tenth part all the luck in the world wouldn’t have got him through it. And I am sure that the tenth part was his carefulness, Clare. He never let up on himself. He said he always had to think ahead, even when the noise of shells made them all stupid, and the starlights bursting over their heads knocked their senses out of them. What were those other things he spoke of? Whizz-bangs. We can’t imagine it. Now I see that I have never let myself imagine it. Barbed-wire entanglements, and shell-craters everywhere, and smoke so thick that you can’t see the man next to you. And always the fear that it would be gas next time, not smoke. You can tell gas by its colour, but by the time it is near enough for you to tell, it is too late. The men cough until they cough their own lungs up. He told us in some sections of the Front there wasn’t a blade of grass left, though it had all been farmland and woodland. There were only a few trees left sticking up out of the mud with all their branches splintered, and rags hanging down from them where a man’s clothes had been blown off him in a shell explosion. Or his flesh. Everywhere there were pieces of equipment the men had abandoned in retreat, or when they’d been killed. You didn’t always know if the stuff was British or German, for the line swayed back and forth over the same land like a tug-of-war. Tin hats. Bully-beef tins. They had to walk on duck-boards over the shell-holes. The holes filled up with water, you see. Men drowned in them – can you imagine it, Clare? Wounded men, unable to get their mouths out of the mud, drowning. But even in the middle of all this your cousin was careful of himself. And he was careful of his men once they gave him men to look after. He would have made a good officer, Clare. I’m sure he was a damned fine sergeant.’

  Her cool father swallows.

  ‘He was just as careful over the men. He knew which ones had given up already long before they knew that they had. They had a look on them, he said. He forced all his men to take care of their feet. Even when they were too tired to stand, he’d have them take off their boots and dry their feet when they could. They’d curse him for it, but they didn’t get trench-foot. On hot days when they were behind the lines he’d tell them to strip off their shirts and hang them over their rifle butts – bayonets fixed and the whole thing stuck into the ground – and then the sun would draw out the lice from the seams of their shirts. Clever notion, whoever thought of it. You could kill the lice with a lighted match once they came out. Lice weaken a man, you see, Clare, quite apart from the disease they might bring. And a lice-ridden man takes less care of himself than a clean one.’

  He talks of lice as he might talk of stamens, or pollination. He says, ‘It made me feel ashamed, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. He had to explain it all.’

  But you asked, thinks Clare, and he answered. Mr Lawrence was right. He did need to talk. He could have talked to me too, but perhaps I did not ask the right questions. But Father is right about his carefulness. John William was always careful when it mattered. If we were fishing with maggots, he would hook them on just right, through the loose skin at the top, so that none of their inner juices would spurt out. And he could bring in a rowing-boat through thickets of masts and hulls when the herring-fleet was in, and never once graze another boat. But the thing she sees most vividly is his hands pouring an exact pound of pearl barley into a blue paper bag, then sealing the top. Not a grain spilt.

  ‘You will lose your train,’ she says. ‘And you haven’t had your egg.’

  ‘Leave it now. You eat it later,’ says Francis Coyne. ‘All those young men, learning all those things we never knew. And then he’s thrown away in an accident after two years of the war.’

  They will tell Father, Clare thinks, because he is one of them. A gentleman – like John William would have been. And because he is angry. They won’t know why, but there’s a force in him she has scarcely ever sensed before.

  Francis Coyne picks up hat and overcoat and his polished London walking-stick and kisses her. He has sixteen minutes before his train, and he will do it easily. There’ll be nobody about, he says.

  ‘What shall I tell Hannah?’

  ‘Just that I’ve gone to make the funeral arrangements.’

  She smells the sharp, new morning as she lets him out, and he raises his stick and walks swiftly away. He looks purposeful: not like Father at all.

  Inside, she sets the kettle on again. The kitchen looks cluttered and dismal. She shovels her father’s crusts into the compost bin, and, as she does so, she sees the sheets still in the bucket and on the grass. The smell of the bad egg is sickening, and her father smelled old this morning. She had had to turn her face aside when he kissed her. Then he said, ‘Make sure you pray for your cousin.’

  Now I’m alone, with the washing, and some dried cod to soak for tomorrow, and a message to send down to Hat to tell her not to come today, for I can’t bear to have her clattering around the house, sympathizing with those big greedy eyes. I shall scrub the floor myself. I shall wash those sheets again, and water my vegetables, for we’re going to need them. What will Father’s train fare be? I ought to have asked him. But he will find it from somewhere, I suppose. Perhaps he will sell more books, although last time he told me it was not worth the journey to Truro to sell them. He ought to have sold them in London, but we cannot go there.

  Kitchie will come up. Another day of everyone crowding together. And I cannot bear any of it. I would like the day to be over already, and the night here. And then tomorrow to be over, and another night.

  Hannah sleeps, worn out after a day with her mother and Harry. Harry’s arm had kept them awake the whole of the previous night, fetching drinks and wiping sweat from him and easing pillows under his shoulder to keep pressure off his arm. It is a bad break, and now he is feverish. And Harry is a terrible patient. He will not keep still. He tosses to rid himself of pain, and
then the tossing jars his arm, and he cries out. He was confused after the chloroform Dr Kernack gave him when he set the bone.

  ‘I don’t know where I am! I don’t know where I am!’ he cried, clinging on to Hannah, his eyes wide and black and horror-struck.

  ‘And who’s to pay the doctor’s bill, I don’t know,’ said Hannah, as she drank the cocoa Clare made for her. ‘Nan had to fetch him out again today, Harry was so bad.’

  ‘What about your mother? Can’t she nurse him?’

  Hannah made a quick, dismissive motion of her hand. She was tired, and she didn’t want to talk.

  ‘Mother can’t. But I have to be back at work tomorrow. Father can’t manage the shop on his own. But Nan’ll be there, and Aunt Mag. You have to mind him. If he sets up an inflammation…’

  ‘You should let your mother nurse him. You should make her do it, Hannah. You’re too soft on her.’

  ‘It’s not in her nature, Clare, and that’s all there is to it. Besides, she’s thinking of Johnnie –’

  Or you want to believe she is, thought Clare. No. Aunt Sarah’s shallow whirlpool of feeling was something Clare refused to enter.

  The house makes settling night noises around the two girls, one sleeping, one wide awake. Hannah has the best half of Clare’s bed and her warmth fills it. She lies round and peaceful and still, drinking up sleep, snuffling against the pillow, her dark night-plait coiled against her spine. But Clare lies on the cold edge of the bed, so that her body will not touch Hannah’s. She does not want to touch anybody. She lies on her back, her arms behind her head like a declaration of wakefulness, and she stares into the dark. It is not so very late: it is somewhere between quarter to twelve and midnight. Soon the clock in the hall will strike, because her father is not here to muffle it for the night. It will go on striking each quarter until morning. But Clare prefers not to tamper with it. That clock is one of the few things in the house which her father takes care of, and Clare was told too often as a child that its delicate coilings could be wrecked for ever by one interfering finger.