The Lie

‘What would I do in London?’

  ‘You’d be safe there.’

  ‘I’m safe enough here. Nothing’s going to hurt me.’

  ‘Dr Sanders will go up to Morven, or he’ll send someone.’

  ‘I know that. I’ll say I was mistaken. It must have been some other place where her sister lived.’

  ‘They won’t believe you. Even if they do, it won’t be for long. Look at the colour of the grass over the grave. It’s different from the rest. They’ll come up here and they’ll see it.’ She looks around her at the wide sweep of the land: so bare, it seems. But we both know that it isn’t. ‘People might be watching—’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Frederick would have wanted you to take the money. You could stay as long as you wanted in London. You’d have enough to rent a place. You could even go abroad.’

  ‘To France, do you think? I’ll stay here, Felicia. Let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘All right. You tell me what else we’re going to talk about.’

  ‘Don’t be angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry with you. I’m angry because of what you’ve done to yourself. No one will believe you now. Look at me, Daniel. I’m a widow. I’m not twenty and I’m a widow, and Jeannie’s got no father. It’s like something out of a book, isn’t it? But with a book, you can read it and close it up and go back to your own life. I can’t remember Harry’s face. I have to try to get it back by looking at Jeannie.’

  I’ve been allowing myself to believe that Felicia only married him because of the war. I’ve never once considered that she might have loved him. He wanted her: I understood that. But the thought that Felicia might have wanted him is hard to bear. I have to think of her differently, and in a way that troubles me.

  ‘He hoped we’d have a baby.’

  I can’t answer. There’s Jeannie, curled in the grass like a hare in its form, cuddling her mother’s boots.

  ‘He wanted that because he knew it might be all he’d get. And then he never even saw her. Frederick was gone too and you were away. There was no one for me to show her to. They’ll take you away, Daniel.’ She bends down, picks up the child and rocks her on her hip, to and fro, to and fro, comforting Jeannie, comforting herself. She looks so age-old and desolate that I don’t know what to do. In spite of the rocking, Jeannie wails and wails.

  They sit at my table, Felicia with Jeannie on her lap, and I give them mashed potatoes with a poached egg each on the top, and chopped-up dandelion leaves. Felicia asks me what the greenstuff is, and I tell her that dandelions clean the blood. Jeannie eats everything, but Felicia only swallows a couple of mouthfuls. She’s tired, she says. She sits sunk in on herself, attending to Jeannie automatically. I make her tea, and put in the last of my sugar to give her strength for the walk back. I’ll buy more tea and sugar before they come again. I’ll buy biscuits for Jeannie, and a bar of chocolate. I don’t even want to sit down with them. It’s enough to have them here.

  ‘You will go, won’t you, Daniel?’ says Felicia. ‘To please me?’

  It doesn’t suit her to wheedle. I say straight out that she’ll find me here the next time she comes. I tell Jeannie that I’ll have something nice for her to eat then, but she only stares at me. I wish the dog was here for her to play with. I’m so tired that I could put my head down on the table and sleep.

  ‘Is that the bed?’ asks Felicia, looking behind her. Where she died, she means.

  ‘You know it is.’

  ‘Were her things in the chest? Did you open it?’

  ‘I didn’t open it,’ I say, not expecting to be believed, although it’s true.

  ‘I wonder what she kept in there. Do you remember all the stories there were about her, when we were little? That she was a witch. Do you think I could open it?’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  Is Frederick in the chest, or is the chest in Frederick? I know he won’t come while Felicia’s here. I hate the thought of him coming here again and again, all clagged with mud, as if for him the war hasn’t ended. And yet I want him to come, because it’s the only way I can see him.

  ‘Do you remember the wigwam?’ asks Felicia.

  ‘The one we made?’

  ‘You and Frederick wouldn’t let me in. I tried to make my own wigwam but it was no good, just a heap of sticks with the rain coming in. And you said to Frederick, Let her in.’

  ‘Did I?’ I speak as if I’ve clean forgotten.

  ‘Yes. I think you must have been sorry for me.’

  ‘I was never sorry for you.’

  ‘Frederick wanted me to go away, but you moved up and made room for me. I sat as still as still. I don’t think we did anything, we just all sat there, the three of us, and we could hear the rain falling on the gunnera. You had a liquorice bootlace and we took bites at it in turn, until it was gone.’

  I don’t remember the liquorice.

  ‘They were calling for us,’ says Felicia, ‘but Frederick said, Let ’em call. They’ll never find us here. And they didn’t.’

  ‘They winkled us out in the end, though.’

  That whole long train of us, boys and men, off the farms and out of the fishing boats and up from the mines. I can see us as clear as clear. Orange-peel teeth and talk about tarts. We’d never been out of Cornwall before. It’s like a photograph. I can see it but I can’t feel it. Maybe that’s why there are so many things I can’t remember. We didn’t volunteer: they came to get us. Winkled us out of our shells, raw as we were.

  ‘I wish Jeannie had a brother,’ says Felicia. ‘She needs company. She likes Dolly, though. They’re always laughing – I hear them in the kitchen. You wouldn’t think it, would you?’

  I shake my head. She’s a viper, Dolly Quick, if you want my opinion. Frederick told me once that the Ancient Greeks kept a house snake. Maybe Dolly Quick is Felicia’s house snake.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Something Frederick said once.’

  Felicia looks down at Jeannie. ‘She’s dropping off.’

  ‘We could lay her on the bed.’

  ‘She’s not heavy. What was it he said?’

  ‘It was about the Ancient Greeks.’

  ‘Oh them.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Girls can’t learn Greek. They haven’t the brains for it, and girls who try to be like boys only succeed in becoming unwomanly.’ Her eyes sparkle with temper. I hear the voice of Mr Dennis, round and pompous. She’s a good mimic, Felicia.

  ‘Sing, O goddess,’ I say, ‘the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures.’

  ‘What’s that, Dan?’

  ‘The beginning of the Iliad. Homer.’

  ‘You don’t know Greek, do you?’

  ‘It’s Samuel Butler’s translation, from your father’s library. You’ll like this, Felicia: Samuel Butler thought that a woman wrote the Odyssey.’

  ‘Did he?’

  Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades . . . I haven’t thought of those lines for years. They used to thrill me through, but now I’m not so sure. Hurrying down to Hades, as if they were running to catch a London omnibus.

  ‘Did your father think mathematics weren’t for girls as well?’

  ‘I never asked him. You remember the tutor they got for Frederick, in the summer holidays?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’ve never seen a vulture, outside the pictures in the Dennises’ National Geographic. Only crows and buzzards, drifting lazily across the sky, with a wing-tilt here and there as they look down. And rats. ‘What about the tutor?’

  ‘I saw him crying in the schoolroom one day, with his head on the desk. Just crying and crying.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I crept away. I don’t think he heard me. I was frightened.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’

  ‘Only Frederick. He laughed, then he
said it was probably because of something that had happened in the schoolroom.’

  ‘What?’

  Felicia hesitates, looks down. ‘The tutor put his hand . . .’

  I can see it. ‘And what did Frederick do?’

  ‘Nothing. He said it happened all the time at school.’

  ‘I suppose the tutor was afraid he’d tell your father.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Frederick would have forgotten about it by the next day. It happened all the time at school.

  ‘The tutor was meant to be teaching Frederick Greek,’ says Felicia. ‘But we went out as much as we liked, after that.’

  I gave up staring at the pages of Frederick’s Greek. I would never make it out. Instead, I read the Iliad through in English, and then the Odyssey. I was fifteen and didn’t know how to pronounce the Greek names; I still don’t. But inside your head, it doesn’t matter. The words used to strike inside my head. I felt them go into my memory, like footsteps.

  I watch the way Jeannie curls against Felicia, and let the lines unroll.

  ‘The first ghost I saw was that of my comrade Elpenor, for he had not yet been laid beneath the earth. We had left his body unwaked and unburied in Circe’s house, for we had had too much else to do. I was very sorry for him, and cried when I saw him: “Elpenor,” said I, “how did you come down here into this gloom and darkness? You have come here on foot quicker than I have with my ship.”’

  ‘Did Elpenor die in battle?’

  ‘No. He got drunk, fell off the roof of a house and broke his neck.’ Felicia snorts with laughter. ‘And then Odysseus meets the ghost of his mother and tries to embrace her, but he can’t, because the dead aren’t made of the same stuff as us. Every time he tries to catch hold of her, she turns to nothing. They put out bowls of blood to draw the dead.’

  ‘How do you know so much, Dan?’

  ‘It’s only bits and pieces. You have to have an education, to make it fit together.’

  ‘You could have an education.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  I want us to sit at this table for ever. Mary Pascoe is under the grass, where she wanted to be. It’s as if the sun has come out on a small field, although there are such heavy clouds spreading over the rest of the sky that the wider landscape is blighted. Even here in the kitchen, the light shines. If I don’t move, and Felicia doesn’t move, and Jeannie stays in her mother’s arms, then we’re safe.

  ‘I’ll go to London,’ I say to her.

  ‘Will you really?’ Her thin face glows. ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘But we’ll have a day together first. Will you leave Jeannie with Dolly Quick tomorrow, and come up here? We’ll go to Bass Head together.’

  ‘That’s too far to walk.’

  ‘I’ll borrow a pony for you, from Venton Awen. Don’t tell Dolly you’re coming with me.’

  ‘We’ll be back before dark, won’t we?’

  I remember the bruise of rainclouds on the horizon, above the sea. We had to get home, I said. It was a long way back from Bass Head. We had to get ahead of the rain. Frederick didn’t want to leave, but I made him. I remember glancing behind at the weather which seemed to be gaining on us, but held off and held off until Frederick said in disappointment: We could have stayed.

  ‘We’ll be back well before dark,’ I say to Felicia.

  17

  Officers and men selected to take part in the operation should, when possible, be volunteers. The men should be quartered together in a comfortable billet for the week preceding the operation. They should be taught the use of German phrases such as ‘hands up’, ‘come out’.

  THAT NIGHT, I don’t sleep. I lie down twice, but each time I have to get up again, because of the way my heart is beating. It makes no difference if I turn on my left side or on my right, if I count to a hundred or breathe deeply. It beats too hard, as if I’ve been running. I should get up, I tell myself, I’ve got so much to do, but once I’m out of bed there is nothing to do except wait for morning. I get my money out from the tobacco tin where I keep it, and count it. I move the tin from its usual place on the shelf over the fire, and then back again. I know I’m using up candles for nothing, but I can’t sit in darkness. I ought to have bought more lamp oil.

  I’m not afraid, though you might think so. My heart beating hasn’t anything to do with fear. It’s a new thing, that I don’t know. Excitement, maybe. Exhilaration. Maybe I’ll never sleep again. I seem to be going into a new life, which has nothing to do with the old one.

  I want the day. I want Felicia to come. Already, I see her approaching. Her eyes will be wide and dark in her pale face. She’s not very like Frederick, and yet she’s entirely like him. At first light I’ll go up to Venton Awen to get the pony. They won’t deny me. I’ve got money and I’ll make it worth their while. I’ll walk, and she’ll ride. A single day, that’s all I want.

  I might be afraid. Fear is a taste and smell more than a feeling, at least I’ve found it so. It doesn’t have much to do with your thoughts. Some smells draw it up. The first time up the line, you don’t even know what the smells are. They catch in your throat and you gag, but it’s dark and what you have to do is follow the man ahead of you so that the man behind you can follow in his turn. Sometimes it’s so dark that you’ll feel a hand from behind coming on to your shoulder, like the hand of a blind man. And so you go on through the darkness, with mud sucking at your boots and clogging them so each foot weighs more than seven pounds. You get used to everything step by step, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to bear it. Later on, you know what it is you’re smelling. Chloride of lime, cordite, raw mud, latrines, petrol-tainted water, rotting flesh. You learn to put a face on it when fear swells up in you like a balloon. You sweat in your animal self, but being a man you hide it.

  All night Frederick is close to me. I don’t see him or hear him, and there isn’t a moment when my hair crisps on my neck. He leaves me in peace, but he keeps alongside. He said to me once: ‘You know those cards people leave, when they go visiting? Hopeless system. I’ve a wider acquaintance among the dead than the living. I’d rather see them than anyone. Except you, my dear BB.’ He said it so casually I didn’t grasp it. Besides, how should I know about those cards? I didn’t like to hear him say that. His company was cut to bits, and he was beyond finding new company in us. He had a way of staring into the darkness, very intently, which might have been only the sharpness of a good officer, but to me it seemed as if he was looking where he ought not to look, where the dead were.

  We were billeted together before the trench raid, as Frederick said we would be. Forty-eight of us, Sergeant Morris and one officer in command: Frederick. Our purpose was to obtain maps, cut telephone wires and secure at least one prisoner for interrogation. The raiding party would be supported by three forty-five-second bursts of artillery fire at intervals, with the final burst being the signal for us to attack the enemy trench. Or so they said. We looked at each other. A ripple that you couldn’t see or hear went round us.

  We were told off for two days’ training. It was a cushy billet, just as I’d hoped: a clean barn with clean farm rats that ran away into corners instead of looking at you bold as brass while they chirruped over bits of bodies that were blown out of the side of the trench. Frederick had a room in the farmhouse. We put on balaclavas, blacked our faces with cork and wriggled over a mocked-up no-man’s-land. The ground was taped out to mark our route to the trench we were going to attack. They said the wire would be cut for us by the preliminary barrage, but no one trusted that. We had our wire-cutters. The way the German wire was staked in our sector, there was no chance of getting under it.

  I was surprised how much care went into the preparation. Most trench raids, all you’d get was a tap on the shoulder the same day. This one was going to be a proper job, it seemed. Frederick was never still. He seemed fired up by it. We were issued with knobkerries, and we weren’t to fire a shot until we’d gone through the first bay of the German
trench, so as to keep ‘the element of surprise’. Knobkerries, entrenching tools, knives and bayonets would do it, until the ‘strategic aims of the raid had been accomplished’, and then it’d be time for the Mills bombs. That way we wouldn’t draw fire until we had to. We’d be safe back in our trenches before Fritz had got our range.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Blanco, too quiet for anyone else to hear, or so he thought, ‘by the time they’ve finished putting down that box barrage, every bastard from here to Balloo’s going to know we’re on our way.’

  Sergeant Morris heard that, though all he did was raise his eyebrows. He never said much. He had one of those long, doleful faces, and the cuttingest tongue. He didn’t set much store by the plan of attack, you could see that. As for the knobkerries, his expression as he weighed one in his left hand, then swung it, was a thing of wonder. But he didn’t say anything beyond ‘Very much favoured in Ireland as a weapon, I believe,’ and gave us extra bayonet drill. What he thought of Frederick, I had no idea. He rested his long, speculative gaze on him as he did on everyone.

  The farm had a battered bit of an orchard, which might have been pretty in summer. But now, with the rain on it and the yellow-grey sky above, it was nothing much. The rain never stopped. Send it down, David, Blanco had yelled up at the sky that morning. Frederick was in the orchard, smoking.

  ‘Why do the men say, Send it down, David?’ he asked. I had no idea, even though I shouted it out myself when the rain fell in stair rods and we marched and marched under our waterproof capes, if we had them.

  ‘It’s for luck,’ I answered.

  He offered me a cigarette from his case. They were Players. We smoked them silently, sheltering the cigarettes in our fists while rain dripped off the branches. The guns were sounding up the line.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t let you in for this,’ said Frederick.

  I didn’t answer. I’d volunteered, he knew that. I would have explained my idea about how you couldn’t get out of your death by trying, but I was too tired. I felt flat, too, in spite of the tension. Nothing was going right, and Frederick hadn’t got the knack of making us feel that it would. We weren’t quick enough. We’d crawled over our makeshift ‘no-man’s-land’, following the tapes laid out for us. We’d captured the ‘German’ trench over and over, but the rate we were going, Sergeant Morris said, Fritz’d have time to paint our portraits as we came over.