The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  There’s the engine-house, half ruined now. Crows fly up as we approach. The walls are thick with ivy.

  ‘Could we go inside?’ asks Felicia.

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  There are shafts, lipped with soft grass that quakes when the wind blows, so that you think you could walk on it. Frederick and I crawled on our stomachs, and dropped down stones to hear how they echoed.

  The path skirts the cliff. We are above the cove, with its quay where the boats came to take off the ore from the mine. The cobbled slipway is as good as ever. How they got the loads down there, I don’t know. They had winches, I suppose, I say to Felicia. All kinds of machinery that was taken away for use in other mines when this one closed.

  No boats now. Only the tide, sighing its way in under the cliff. The white sand is all hidden. There are caves you can walk into at low tide, but they’re covered too. I point out the way down across the rocks. It’s a rough way, and not easily discovered until you’ve been shown. You have the cove to yourself then. If we didn’t go down, we’d lie in the sun on the clifftops, while the seabirds wheeled above us, screaming out as the crows cawed in answer. All those cries, going up and up above us.

  There’s a broad, grassy shelf in the side of the cliff, above the cove. You can walk along it. The path must have gone right round once, but the rock has broken away. The shelf is wide enough for us to sit comfortably, with our backs against rock. Protected by the overhang, the grass is soft and dry, but I lay the blanket down all the same. The sunlight is hazy, but still has some warmth in it. Felicia unpacks the canvas bag, taking out bread, cheese, apples, chocolate and a bottle of cold tea stoppered with a cork. As we eat, a gull floats lazily, just below us, tipping its wings for balance and turning its yellow eye to watch us. A boat noses its way around the headland and we keep as still as still, but it’s only a crabber. The sea is so flat we see the wrinkles on it spreading out long after the boat has passed.

  ‘We could have made a fire. Are you cold?’

  Felicia shakes her head. ‘Someone might see the smoke.’

  ‘What if they did?’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to know we’re here. Did you come down here with Frederick, Dan?’

  ‘You know I did.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. Did you sit just here?’

  ‘Not just here.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because sometimes it seems as if whatever you do with me, it’s because of Frederick. We don’t do anything for its own sake. And because this is the last time, I wanted it not to be like that.’

  ‘It’s not the last time.’

  ‘It has to be. You’ll go to London, and I’ll be here with Jeannie.’

  ‘You’ll marry Geoff Paddick, won’t you?’

  She sits back on her heels and laughs. ‘You can’t really think that.’

  ‘It’s obvious. His sisters are dead nuts about Jeannie.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘And they’re looking out for a Shetland pony, so she can learn to ride.’

  Felicia is no longer laughing. ‘They mean well,’ she says. ‘He’s a good man. I like him.’

  I let this pass. ‘But marriage, Dan – it’s got nothing to do with liking someone. I suppose you know that.’

  I have a faint but certain feeling that Felicia is daring to tell me about her own marriage. Harry Fearne wanted her. Jeannie was born out of that wanting. She must think that I don’t know as much as she does; not really. Only in the way that boys and men think they know everything.

  ‘Judith and Anne share a bed. They can’t sleep apart,’ says Felicia. ‘And then there’s old Mrs Paddick in her room. As Dolly Quick says, it’d be a braver woman than her who walked into that.’ She lifts the tea-bottle, takes a swig, wipes her mouth on her sleeve and smiles at me. ‘You don’t like Dolly, I know that. But she was good to me, when Jeannie was born. I don’t know what I’d have done without her. Harry was gone, and the doctor was away up in Truro. You know Jeannie was born three weeks before she was expected? And I was so frightened. You’ve no idea, Dan. I was sitting on the stairs, crying, and Dolly came back because she’d forgotten something – I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it wasn’t anything. She was so kind. She knew just what to do, and she got me upstairs and told me it didn’t matter if the doctor came or not, we’d be all right. The thing I remember most is that she never took her hat off. I kept seeing that little jet bead on her hatpin. She was so good to me, but when the doctor came he ordered her about as if she knew nothing. His hands were cold when he touched me. When Jeannie was born he picked her up by her feet and shook her like a rabbit, and I couldn’t stop him.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what they always do.’

  ‘Do you think so? It seems a funny way of going about it to me. Jeannie screamed and screamed. She was all stretched out, flailing in the air. The doctor even slapped her, and she was only about this big – look!’ Felicia holds her hands apart. ‘As if he were punishing her for being born. When he’d gone, Dolly said, ‘You pop her in alongside you,’ and so I had her in with me all night. Poor little thing, she was cold, but after a while she grew warm. Every so often she’d give a shudder, as if she was remembering. I told her nothing like that was ever going to happen to her again. But maybe it was too late, and that’s why she’s like she is.’

  I pick up a tiny, glistening pebble and spin it into the air. It goes down and down, catching the light, and vanishes almost without a sound. ‘Did you tell Harry about how it was?’ I ask her. I’m jealous of all those things that have happened to Felicia while I wasn’t there.

  ‘I didn’t want to write about it in a letter.’

  She’d have told him, I suppose, when he came home. But he never came home, or knew what happened when his child was born.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I am. My jealousy falls away. Harry Fearne, one of the unlucky buggers who thought they’d begun something, when it was all finishing for them. But that doesn’t alter the fact that if he were here, I’d want to push him off the cliff.

  The time glides on, and I let it, even though the sun is slipping down the sky, hazier than ever as the cloud gains on it. We ought to go back. The mare will be wanting her stable. The light in the cove is over-clear now, and the wind’s rising. Below us, the swell heaves.

  ‘Tide’s on the turn.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Look at the rocks.’

  We swam here many times, me and Frederick, when the tide was down. There was only ourselves in the whole bowl of the bay. We shrieked and splashed and then we grew quiet, floating on our backs, letting the cross-current drag us from one side of the bay to the other. When we turned over and floated on our bellies we saw our own shadows on the sand below, quivering so that we looked like strange, forked fish. The sand was rippled up, like corrugated iron.

  ‘Daniel, it’s starting to rain.’

  Sure enough, the sky shakes a few drops out of itself, warning of downpours to come. We get up hastily, pack the bag and roll up the blanket.

  ‘It’ll hold off long enough for us to get to the farm. We can shelter there until it passes.’

  The sky darkens as we hurry up the footpath and then the track. The cows are coming in, jostling into all the space there is. We can’t pass them, and have to stand while the herdsman gets them through the gate that leads to the dairy. It’s raining hard now. I hold the blanket over Felicia’s head, until the cows are through, leaving behind their churn of muck and mud.

  When we knock at the kitchen door, a thin middle-aged woman with her hair scragged back opens it. She looks from one of us to the other, as Felicia explains and apologises and asks, all in one smooth breath and a voice no one could refuse. Even so I think the woman will be churlish, but no. She starts to excuse the mess, push things aside, sweep cats off chairs and get us to the table. You wouldn’t believe that her raw face could lighten so. I’ve only ever seen her in the distance before, when Fr
ederick and I dodged round the farm gates, avoiding her. In a minute the big blackened kettle is on the range. All Mrs Thomas’s gestures are quick and nervous, as if she’s half afraid of herself. But I remember her as a big, solid woman, with sons who put the fear of God into us the day they caught us trying to get milk out of one of their cows.

  She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t even seem to know Felicia, which surprises me. The Fearnes and the Dennises are known all over. I keep quiet and drink my tea, while Felicia talks to her. She lost her son, the younger one. She will just fetch his photograph from the parlour. Here he is, look, in his uniform. The likeness was taken the day before he went off, at Harbin’s. It’s very like, only a bit solemn, and he was never solemn. His brother was the quiet one, and more so now. They can go a whole evening without a word spoken, him and his father. There are bright spots of colour on Mrs Thomas’s cheeks now.

  ‘They don’t as much as notice the food that’s put in front of them,’ she says. ‘These apricots.’ She points to a box of dried apricots on the table, half covered by a sheet of newspaper. ‘They were giving these away. Do you like apricot jam?’

  ‘Very much,’ says Felicia.

  ‘And your husband, I’m sure, if you made it, would be glad of it.’ She glances at me for confirmation, and I wait for Felicia to explain, but she says nothing beyond ‘You’re always hungry, aren’t you, Daniel?’

  ‘That’s the way a man ought to be!’ exclaims the woman. ‘But I may as well tip these apricots on to the midden, for all the pleasure they’ll give to anyone.’

  ‘It is very annoying,’ sympathises Felicia.

  A squall spatters against the windows, and the woman laughs a high, nervy laugh and says, ‘I should think you’d better stay here tonight.’

  ‘Oh no, we couldn’t do that. Your husband and your other son will be coming in shortly.’

  ‘They’ve gone to market. They’ll stay out as late as they like, on market night. Maybe they won’t come home at all,’ she says astonishingly, her eyes bright and wild. I wonder if she’s all there.

  ‘We’ll go on, as soon as the rain stops,’ says Felicia. ‘Our mare is in one of your fields, you know.’

  ‘A horse won’t die of a drop of rain. She can be brought in and stabled presently. I’ll send Sammy down. You’d do much better to stop here.’

  She wants us here, I see that. She’s on fire with the idea of it. Now I see that all the sewing on the table is for baby clothes. Maybe her son is married, and has a child coming. Felicia picks up a little vest, and admires the stitching on it.

  ‘Is it for your grandchild?’

  ‘Oh no! Oh no! Nothing like that.’ The woman folds and smooths the cloth with anxious fingers. Felicia’s right, it is beautiful work. She must sit here stitching and stitching.

  ‘I’m worried about Jeannie,’ says Felicia quietly, when the woman gets up to attend to a pot that’s simmering on the range.

  ‘She’ll be all right. You said Dolly Quick often has her overnight.’

  ‘She does, but – they won’t know where I am. They’ll think something’s happened to me.’

  ‘They won’t think that. Listen to that rain: she’ll know you had to take shelter.’

  She wants to believe me. My head is throbbing. The woman believes that we are man and wife. If we stay here, she’ll put us into a room together. And Felicia’s said nothing to contradict her.

  19

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I.

  ‘DO YOU THINK that this was her son’s room?’ Felicia puts the candle down on the washstand.

  I look around. It’s a narrow bedroom, very clean. The walls are freshly distempered. ‘I shouldn’t think so. She’d leave his room as it was.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Felicia moves nervously around the room. There’s an iron bed, a rag rug, a washstand with jug and ewer. A chamber pot under the bed. On the wall there’s an embroidered text:

  And God saw every thing that He had made

  And behold, it was very good.

  ‘He wasn’t looking very hard,’ I say.

  Felicia is at the window, staring out at the darkness and driving rain.

  ‘We can’t go back in this,’ I say.

  ‘I know we can’t.’

  ‘She wanted us to stay.’

  ‘Poor woman, she’s half mad with loneliness.’

  ‘Maybe she’ll keep us here.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘We can leave as soon as it’s light. She’s all right; at any rate, she’s harmless enough. She was glad of the money.’

  The floor creaks as we move. We’re up two flights of stairs, under the eaves, tucked away. That chamber pot. I push it a little farther under the bed with my foot. We shan’t need it, I hope. We went out to the privy in turn, in spite of the rain, shielding the candle. The flame gulped and sizzled when a spot of rain fell on it, but didn’t go out.

  ‘Well,’ says Felicia briskly, ‘we’d better get ready.’ She pours water from the jug, splashes her face and hands, dries herself and then sits on the bed to unlace her boots. She arranges them tidily, clambers into bed in Anne Paddick’s breeches and pulls the covers up to her chin. She even shuts her eyes tight, like a child pretending to be asleep. I nearly laugh out loud. Well, if that’s the game . . . And then I think of what she said about Jeannie’s birth. Felicia knows everything that a woman has to know.

  I never went with the French tarts. I said I didn’t want to catch a dose. I wasn’t the only one. I thought of it more than I ought to have done. They used to light up the red lamp and there’d be so many shoving to get in that it was easy to slip aside. That red lamp. It was all organised for you. I knew I ought to want it, but I didn’t. There were others who didn’t as well, strong Bible Christians or married men with scruples. Some of them, like me, didn’t give their reasons. Every night there were the tales afterwards, going on and on, but you could let them wash over you without listening.

  I take off my own boots, and swill my face and hands as Felicia has done, before creaking round to the other side of the bed. The springs groan even more loudly than the floorboards. There we are, side by side, on our backs like effigies. I can hear Felicia breathing. That woman thought we were man and wife.

  The rain spatters. It could have been like that, in another world. How Mr Dennis would have hated it. I don’t know what Frederick would have thought. There’s Felicia, breathing. No, it could never have happened.

  This is a cushy billet all right. Out of the wind and rain and mud. Nothing to think of until morning, except sleep. But I can’t stop my heart banging away as if morning’s here already. Now I listen, I can hear the sound of the waves thudding in under the cliffs. It never stops. Like gunfire. Even in England you could hear it, they said. If you were in the southern parts, looking out towards France, you could hear the guns.

  All at once I know he’s going to come. The dead aren’t tied to one place. He’s as fearful as I am, more maybe. He knows what’s coming to him, and he can’t get away from it. Something’s gone wrong. Things ought to stop, once they’re finished, but this won’t stop. They say the war’s over, but they’re wrong. It went too deep for that. It opened up a crack in time, a crater maybe. Once you fall into it, you can’t get out again. The mud is too deep and it holds you. I’ve left him there. He thought I was coming back, and I never did.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I didn’t mean it.’ I’m shaking all over and the bed is creaking too, banging off its springs. Felicia’s hands are on me, touching my face, trying to wake me up, but I’m already wide awake and it still goes on. ‘I’m sorry, Frederick. I’m so sorry.’ I keep on saying it but he can’t hear me, because there’s nothing of him left. Now I want him to come. I must speak to him. I want him here, all clagged with mud, even if we both have to die for it.

  ‘Frederick!’ I say, and I�
�m bolt upright with my arms out, feeling for him. ‘Frederick!’

  She has hold of me. She grips me and clings to me, saying my name. ‘It’s all right, Daniel. I’m here. It’s all right. It was a bad dream. I’m here.’

  She gets me down on the bed again and lies alongside me, holding me. I burrow my face into her neck and hair, hiding myself. Her hands are on the back of my neck, holding me in.

  After a long time, I raise my head from her hair. She eases me into the softness of her. I can feel her bubble of laughter as she says, ‘You were making a terrible noise. We’ll have Mrs Thomas up here if we’re not careful.’ I am so light and empty that I could float away. ‘He isn’t here, you know,’ she continues. ‘You think he is, but he isn’t. He’s gone. He’s quite safe.’ Her words sink into me. I can feel her breath, coming and going. ‘We’re alive, and he’s not. We can’t get away from that.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘It wasn’t like I said in the letter.’

  I feel the deep, caught breath in her.

  ‘I know. It’s what they tell people, isn’t it, to make them feel better? Everyone had a letter like that one we had. You can tell me the truth if you want.’

  ‘I was trying to get help for him.’

  Her hands grip into me. I don’t think she knows how hard. ‘I know you were.’

  ‘But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I only told myself that was what I was doing. I ought to have stayed with him.’

  There, it’s said. The words don’t explode, they fall into silence like any other words. I should have stayed with you. You know that, just as much as I do. That’s why you keep coming back. You can’t find peace, any more than I can. We ought to have been together. I’d have been gone, like you, inside a second. With you. I’ve thought about it so much: how can a man be there, entire, one second, and the next there is nothing of him? It ought not to be possible. Even if you’ve seen it you can’t believe it. It’s the filthiest conjuring trick you can think of.