The Lie

  ‘Daniel!’

  I know that voice. It gives orders. It shifts lives.

  ‘Daniel!’

  You can be shot for sleeping on duty. I can’t feel my rifle. You can be shot for throwing away your weapons. But it’s Dr Sanders, lifting his stick in greeting as he comes off the path and stands before me. He has his black bag in his other hand. I reach behind me, get hold of the door handle, and pull it to as I step out towards him. There he is, in his tweed suit, and looking older. The same creased, shrewd face as ever. Sweat trickles inside my armpits and my heart is banging. I stand sideways so that he has to face into the sun and squint.

  ‘This is a bad business, Daniel,’ he says, as familiar as if we’re in my mother’s kitchen and I’m going for a gardener’s boy. As if the war never happened. But I fold my arms and lower my head to look at him, bullish. I want to tell him how lucky he is that I didn’t have my weapon. Coming on a man like that, when he’s half asleep. You’ve only yourself to blame if you get shot.

  ‘Which business would that be?’ I ask him.

  ‘Mary Pascoe lying ill all winter, and no one sending for me,’ he says bluntly. ‘I only heard of it yesterday. A bad business. I should have thought you knew me well enough to knock at my door.’

  I have to marvel at the way Dr Sanders doesn’t know things that have simmered through the town for weeks. The Dennises were the same. They hear no more about what goes on than a child does.

  ‘She’s been cared for well enough,’ I tell him.

  ‘I dare say she has, as far as you are able,’ he says, looking as if he doesn’t think that’s very far. ‘She ought to have had a nurse. Never mind. What’s done is done. No use standing here talking. I’ll go in and see her.’ He steps forward, as if to skirt around me to the door of the cottage. I shouldn’t have stepped sideways to dazzle his eyes. I move back, lightly enough, and block him.

  ‘You won’t find her here.’ My heart is still beating so fast I’m afraid he’ll hear it, and yet I’m glad, somehow, that the reckoning has come. It sweeps away everything into a kind of wildness. I have the better of him. He’s never been there, where dawn comes between one breath and the next, and we have the advantage of the light. We see the German lines plain against the ribbon of raw light at the horizon. Or at least the sentries do, with their periscopes. We’re too close to risk it otherwise. I look to the right and left of me. Glimmer of faces all turned the same way, every muscle in them stretched tight, flat, the way you never see a face at home. The clinks and shifts of equipment. The sudden reek of chloride of lime, old gas, rottenness, all pouring into your nose at once as if you’ve never smelled anything in your life before.

  I will outface Dr Sanders. I straighten up, look him dead in the eye, and say, ‘The morning was so fine, she asked me to walk her up to the high road, and she’s gone by cart to Morven.’

  ‘Morven!’ The doctor looks confounded, as well he may.

  ‘She has a sister at Morven. She’ll stay a month there, maybe more, with her sister looking after her.’

  ‘I was told she couldn’t get out of bed.’

  ‘She was in bed most of the winter. But once the spring came, she took a turn for the better.’

  I look at him steadily, daring him not to believe me. My heart has quietened itself now. In my mind I can see the high road, and the cart, and Mary Pascoe clambering aboard. I even see the red flash of her flannel petticoat. Why shouldn’t it have happened?

  ‘Walked to the high road, you say?’

  ‘Well, I say walk. She was leaning on me. I half carried her, if I’m honest. But she was set on going.’

  Call me a liar, I dare him silently. Call me a liar, and I’ll knock you down. All my fear has burned off like mist.

  ‘Are you living in the cottage, Daniel?’ asks the doctor abruptly, catching me off guard. There is smoke coming from the chimney, and he must have seen it.

  ‘Until she comes back. Otherwise I’m staying there,’ and I jerk my head towards the corrugated-iron shack.

  There’s a silence. He looks about him with his quick doctor’s eye, noting the freshly dug earth, the chickens in their run, the goat nuzzling at the stone hedge. From here I can see the rise of the field, where Mary Pascoe lies under her green coat. I almost think that the doctor will hear my thoughts, and see what I see. He considers me.

  ‘What’s the name of this sister in Morven?’

  ‘Pascoe. Ellen Pascoe.’

  He makes a slight movement of the head, and shifts the bag in his hand. Suddenly he says, ‘Daniel?’ in quite a different voice, softer but as if he’s a bit afraid of me too. As if I might have some illness that he doesn’t want to diagnose. I don’t answer. ‘Daniel, I ought to have come to see you before now. Your mother—’

  I cannot hear it. I turn aside, chopping the air with my hand. He falters, but only for a moment, then he shakes out a white handkerchief, takes off his glasses and wipes them slowly and carefully. He wants time. He wants to think what to do next.

  ‘I’m sorry you had your walk for nothing,’ I say, and I mean it too. Dr Sanders got me out of school a year early and found me work as a gardener’s boy. I have a lot to be grateful for, as my mother often said. But in my head I hear Frederick laugh and say, ‘It’ll do the old walrus good to walk. Get his fat down.’

  ‘You should come into the town more,’ says the doctor. ‘It’s not good to be alone out here.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of all that. I’m better here.’ The morning sun searches out every crack and crevice in his face. He’s getting old. And soft too. He’d rather believe me, because it’s easier.

  ‘You’ll be wanting work,’ he says. ‘I can put in a word for you.’

  It’s boiling up in me now: the hate. The morning hate and the evening hate. ‘I’ve got all the work I need.’

  He nods slowly. ‘You know Georgie Sennen lost his right leg.’

  ‘I heard,’ I say, although I haven’t.

  ‘He has wonderful spirit.’

  ‘I dessay.’

  That’s what they like: wonderful spirit. Men with no legs selling matches outside theatres. Men with their hands shaking so that the tea towels they sell door to door dance in their hands. And grateful with it. I should have said I didn’t know where the sister lived. Morven’s too small. It’s easy enough to find out who lives there, and who doesn’t. I can always say I was mistaken.

  She told me she wanted to lie here, and not in the graveyard under a stone. I did what she asked. She was light to carry, but since then I’ve been heavy. It lies inside me like the stone that might have lain on Mary Pascoe. I stare at the doctor and think the same as I thought when Felicia came here: What if I told him? What if I took him up the field to where Mary Pascoe lies, and told him how it happened? But I know I won’t. I could tell him how there isn’t anything between life and death, not when you come to it. You wake dead beat, wipe yourself as best you can with a mug of water. Billy Ransom crouches at the back of the dugout, coaxing up a clear flame from splinters of wood, to boil up the dixie. You all want your tea. It’s been raining, and it looks as if it’s going to rain again later, but for now the sky holds clear. You think of sugar, and a fag. It’s been a quiet night. Billy says, ‘Bugger this, I need more wood,’ and wriggles out of the dugout. He doesn’t put on his tin hat. Off he goes, crouching, because this is a shallow trench. Head down, just as it ought to be. He disappears round the angle of the trench. You scratch your armpit, and once you start you can’t stop because it itches like fire. You want to tear your own skin off. A few minutes later, back comes Billy, grinning, with a bundle of sticks scrounged from God knows where. For some reason no one will ever know, when he’s a couple of yards away he lifts his head. Maybe he’s smelling the rain. At that exact moment a rattle of machine-gun fire crosses the spot where Billy Ransom’s forehead rises above the rim of the earth. Earth and stuff out of Billy flies around like a blizzard. He folds up backwards without a sound. There he is: dead, his face,
thank Christ, turned the other way. In an instant, in the blinking of an eye, he’s not Billy Ransom any more. His little fire is still going. And what I feel isn’t shock or anger or even pity for him: it’s annoyance. It sounds a simple enough thing: a wet grey morning and Billy Ransom here one minute and gone the next, but I can’t get past it, and no one who wasn’t out there can get anywhere near it. What were the odds? Ten to one, a hundred to one, a thousand to one? It made no odds.

  Here I am, upright in the sunshine, and they’re gone. I’ve walked past them. I’ve watched the rain dropping on their faces as if they were split pigs hung up outside the butcher’s. I’ve seen them put in their graves and then blown out again. They dung the fields.

  There was an old man called Michael Finnegan

  He grew whiskers on his chinegan

  The wind came out and blew them inigan

  Poor old Michael Finnegan begin agin

  Why shouldn’t I be punished? Billy Ransom did nothing but go for a bundle of sticks. I watched as the stuff flew out of him and then I turned away. I touched my own head after. His fire still burned and I drank the tea. If I tell the doctor now, I will be punished. They’ll take me to Bodmin gaol. They could hang me there.

  ‘Do you sleep well, Daniel?’ he asks me quietly. The question catches me, but I don’t show it.

  ‘Well enough,’ I say, ‘and now if you’ll excuse me, doctor, I’ve work to do.’

  I watch him down the path, his hat bobbing where the furze hides his figure. As I’m about to turn away, his hat stops moving. His voice hails me again: ‘Daniel!’ I don’t answer. Even when he’s as still as still, the hat stands out. A perfect target.

  16

  Labourers working in the fields between the armies have been detected giving information.

  I HAVEN’T HAD time to take up my spade again before I see Felicia coming, with Jeannie in her arms. I go forward to lift the child’s weight from her, but Felicia holds on. She won’t meet my eye, and at once I know that she’s met the doctor on the way, and that he’s told her my lie about Mary Pascoe.

  ‘You shouldn’t lug Jeannie all this way.’

  ‘She’s not heavy. Daniel—’

  ‘No, Felicia.’

  ‘What do you mean, “no”? How can I not? Dr Sanders tells me Mary Pascoe’s gone to Morven, to her sister’s, when you told me she was lying in bed too ill to move or see me. What are you saying, Daniel? What are you doing?’

  Jeannie squalls, and clings to her mother’s neck like a monkey.

  ‘You’re frightening her,’ I say. ‘Come inside and I’ll get her a drink of water.’

  ‘So I can come inside now, can I? She’s not too ill to see me?’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘I know she’s not here. Dr Sanders told me that. I’m just wondering what other lies you’ve told me.’

  ‘I haven’t told you lies. Not meant as lies, Felicia.’ I am up too close to her, and a spark of fear lights in her eyes. She steps backwards, clutching Jeannie. I let my hands drop to my sides and step backwards too, away from her.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I say.

  We turn, and walk up to the top of the field. First you can’t see it, and then you can. The brighter green oblong in the after-winter dullness of last year’s grass. I go ahead and they walk in my footsteps. The long grass brushes wet on to my boots, from the night’s dew. I halt by the grave. I think Felicia will understand at once, but she doesn’t.

  ‘Here,’ I say, pointing down. ‘She’s here.’

  All the colour goes out of her face. She is so white that I’m afraid she’ll fall, or drop the child. She sways back, but recovers herself. I daren’t touch her.

  ‘Who put her here?’ she says at last.

  ‘I did. She asked me to, when she was dying. She said she didn’t want to lie in the graveyard, under a stone. She wanted to be here.’

  There is a long silence, or you could call it silence although it’s full of noises. I hear the gulls as they wheel out over the sea. The close drowsy burring of a bee. Farther off, a buzzard’s cat-like cry. All the while the stirring of wind and water.

  ‘Did she tell you that?’ asks Felicia.

  ‘Yes.’

  I don’t know that she’ll believe me. I think she won’t.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘She’d been failing. It was her chest, like I said. She knew she was dying. She didn’t want the doctor. I asked her and she shook her head. She said she wanted to lie here. She asked me to stay with her.’

  ‘And then did she die?’

  ‘Not straight away.’

  ‘Were you with her?’

  ‘Yes.’ I think of Mary Pascoe’s skull, so visible, with its frail wisps of hair flattened by the sweat of dying. Her nose poked out like a bird’s beak. Her tongue was thick in her mouth and I dipped a cloth in water and held it to her lips. I’d seen plenty of men die, but never an old woman dying in her bed, day by day. It was quite different. It looked like hard work that she was engaged in, and had to finish.

  ‘I think she had pneumonia,’ I say. ‘She was dark all around here,’ and I touch my own lips.

  ‘And you buried her.’ Felicia can’t help herself: she gives a shudder and it runs all through her, head to foot, at the thought of what that burial means. She is seeing me lift Mary Pascoe, and carry her, and dig out a grave deep enough for her, then lay her into it. I can see how terrible it might appear to a girl like Felicia.

  ‘I covered her,’ I say, ‘I wrapped her in a sheet of canvas so that the earth wouldn’t touch her.’

  Felicia is silent, looking down at the green, dinted ground. Jeannie, too, looks down as if she understands what is being said. She puts out her hand, and points, then throws her head back and crows with laughter.

  ‘Did you say a prayer for her?’

  ‘No. I said goodbye to her, and then I covered her face.’

  ‘Don’t you think she should have had the choice?’ asks Felicia angrily.

  ‘I did what she asked.’

  Jeannie wriggles in her mother’s arms. She’s had enough of us talking. ‘Set her down,’ I say to Felicia. ‘Let her run about a bit.’

  Felicia puts Jeannie on the ground, but she doesn’t run about. She stands there, holding fast to her mother’s legs, looking at me warily out of eyes that are the shape of Frederick’s, though not the colour.

  ‘Dr Sanders didn’t believe you,’ says Felicia.

  ‘I didn’t tell him what had happened.’

  ‘I mean, he didn’t believe that she had gone to Morven.’

  ‘Did he say so?’

  ‘No, but I could tell. Daniel, is it a crime?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To keep her from being buried in the churchyard.’

  I almost smile. My blessed Felicia. It has not even occurred to her that I might be suspected of a worse crime than that.

  ‘She ought to have had a doctor,’ I say. ‘Her death ought to have been certified. You know all that.’

  Felicia nods, then looks down at Jeannie, who’s whining now and dragging off her mother’s hand. ‘Stand up straight, Jeannie,’ she says sharply, and to me, ‘I ought not to have brought her.’

  ‘I’ll get her a cup of milk. Does she like goat’s milk?’

  It seems not. Jeannie screws up her face when she tastes the milk, and tries to dash the cup down. ‘That’s not the way,’ I say to her. ‘This is good milk, Jeannie. Look at the goat over there that’s given it to you. She wants you to drink it, not waste it.’ Jeannie does look. She is sharp for her age, I can see that. She sees the goat’s roving yellow eyes and maybe she thinks that the goat will be angry with her and bite her. She sups the milk noisily until it’s all gone, leaving her with a milk moustache that Felicia wipes away.

  ‘I don’t understand how you could do it, Daniel,’ she says to me over the child’s head.

  ‘You mean burying her? It wasn’t hard. It’s heavy work but it’s not hard. I??
?ve done it a few times.’

  ‘In France, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Think how she liked to be alone. They lie cheek by jowl in the graveyard.’

  The wind stirs again, ruffling Jeannie’s pinafore where she sits on the grass, tugging at stalks. Felicia kneels down and kisses the nape of the baby’s neck, so that her own face is hidden. She says, ‘Did you bury Frederick?’

  I can’t think what to say. I try to remember what I wrote in the letter I sent to the Dennises. What story I told. ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘I didn’t bury him. There was a burial party that day.’

  ‘And did they have a proper graveyard?’

  ‘It was like this. Part of a field. They put up wooden crosses with the men’s numbers on them.’

  I want her to see green and quiet. A grave with the air washing over it, like this one.

  ‘One day, I’ll go and see it,’ says Felicia.

  I say nothing. There’s no need. Time enough for whatever discoveries she may make in the years to come. I don’t believe she’ll go anywhere, not to Cambridge, not to France. Jeannie will grow up here, as we did.

  ‘I think that you were right to do what Mary wanted,’ says Felicia, frowning.

  ‘Wrong or right, it’s done now.’

  ‘Look, Jeannie, a rabbit!’

  I want to shy a stone at it, but not in front of them. Rabbits’d strip the world bare if they were let. It sits up, quivering. Jeannie throws out her fist with a shout, and the rabbit disappears.

  ‘You used to catch rabbits, you and Frederick.’

  Yes, and we’d pull the skin over their heads, like pulling off a jersey, while they were still warm. It was a knack. I’d take the rabbit home and my mother would joint it for the pot.

  ‘Daniel, I think you need to go away from here.’

  I was wrong: she understands everything.

  ‘Where would I go?’

  ‘To London?’