Frederick shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Forget it.’ His tone changed. ‘Forget it, my dear BB. I’m a blithering idiot.’ He smacked my arm, and I smacked him back. We jostled, and then we were rolling over and over in the sand.
He was learning to use only the right words, which were signals to others like him. Often what mattered was what he didn’t say. Mr Dennis hadn’t sent him away to school so much to learn things, it seemed to me, as to distinguish between them.
But for years, Frederick couldn’t get enough of words. I never saw him read for pleasure, but he loved stories. He didn’t want me to read aloud to him, although I was a good reader. Instead, he’d ask me to tell him the story of the book. He’d listen to the end and never let me stop until I had to pull myself away to dig the vegetable patch or help my mother with the mangle. We’d sit close, and sometimes, when we were deep in the story, we’d wrap our arms around each other’s shoulders and huddle even closer, for delight.
‘Why don’t you read it for yourself?’ I asked him once. You had to be private, inside a book, to get the best of it; I was sure of that. If Frederick gave A Tale of Two Cities half a chance, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He’d be Sydney Carton, half-hero and half-villain, caught between the two sides of himself and never knowing which was going to win until that final ride to the scaffold . . .
‘It’s boring. I can’t do the voices the way you can.’
The voices were there in the book all the time, I thought. All you had to do was open the pages and they would talk to you. But Frederick wouldn’t have it.
‘It’s not the same. Go on. You were up to where Sydney Carton finds out that Lucie is in great danger. In the wine shop. The Vengeance was speaking.’
The Vengeance was French. I knew a French person wouldn’t talk the way we did. Frederick knew some French but it sounded like nonsense, and I wasn’t going to copy that. Instead, I made The Vengeance’s voice like Ellen Tehidy’s when she screamed at her children and made them cower. She was the worst woman I knew. Now the story was growing bright inside me, like a fire. ‘Oh, all right then,’ I said, as if I was doing Frederick a favour.
When Frederick was thirteen Mr Dennis sent him upcountry to board, at a school in Dorset. Truro wasn’t far enough. Frederick and I stayed the same with each other when he came home for holidays, except one year when he brought a friend with him and they went about together. I kept seeing them every time I rounded a corner. I dodged away. I didn’t want them to speak to me. The friend only stayed a week, but it changed the summer for me. I thought maybe that was the end. Even after I knew the friend was gone, I kept out of Frederick’s way. After a couple of days of this, he came looking for me. I was up at my mother’s vegetable patch, that I’d taken over since her illness. It wasn’t big enough for potatoes, but I grew everything else beside. I still had my potato patch up at Mulla House. It was a summer evening, long and fine, and I was picking runner beans. Frederick’s shadow fell over me.
‘Why haven’t I seen you?’ he demanded, squatting down opposite me.
‘Been busy. Some of us have holidays, some of us have a job of work to do.’
‘It’s Saturday. You always have a half-day.’
I shrugged. ‘I got to pick these beans.’
‘I can wait.’
I sat back on my heels and brushed the soil off my hands. ‘Your friend gone home, then, has he?’
Frederick reached out, took a bean, nipped off the end and began to crunch it very slowly. I watched it disappear into his mouth, and that was the only time I came close to hating Frederick. I was boiling with anger and jealousy. I could have trampled down the row sooner than see him pick another bean.
Frederick knew it. No one was quicker than him. He was watching me intently and I caught my breath, wondering what he’d do. Below him, where the ground fell away in a slope to the sea, there were gulls tilting sharply through the sky. I thought: This is the end of it. But Frederick’s face changed. He was grave, eyes lowered as if he was in church. Slowly, he shuffled himself into a kneeling position and then bowed forward, and knocked his head against the ground. He came up, clasping his hands together in supplication.
‘I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela,’ he said. He hadn’t got Kim’s voice right, but he’d remembered the words. I’d been reading Kim last Easter. I couldn’t stop talking about it, and Frederick made me tell him the whole story, right through to the end. ‘Crease?’ asked Frederick now, in his own voice. Very slowly, he began to tilt forward once more, until he lost his balance and fell into me.
‘You bleddy addled, you,’ I said, heaving him off.
‘Crease?’
‘Crease, you dummock,’ and that was it. We were back to ourselves. Next holidays, Frederick came home alone.
If I used too many words, then I wanted to know which ones they were that were too many. Frederick couldn’t tell me that. I came to disbelieve him, anyway. I thought that maybe you had to have too many, to have any chance of ever possessing what you needed, just as you sowed lettuce seed and then thinned out the seedlings.
It is the most soothing thing I’ve ever known, to stroke the collie bitch. She no more wants to go back to Venton Awen than she wants to fly to the moon, but I’ll have to take her in case they come knocking on the door and see Mary Pascoe’s empty bed, the scrubbed table with the little charred spot on it from last night’s match, the earth that I’ve disturbed to dig Mary Pascoe’s grave. I murmur, ‘Good girl. Good girl now,’ and I begin to slow my strokes, making them longer, lighter, preparing her for the end.
My mother had two books: the Bible and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. They have her name written inside the front cover, in her fine handwriting. She was given the Bible as a Sunday School prize, and A Christmas Carol was a present from my father, on their wedding day. She wrote this on the flyleaf:
A Present from my Husband on the Occasion of our Marriage, 5th June 1897.
My father had no books, and never read any. He had only his wonderful memory for songs. He must have known hundreds, or, at least, my mother said that she never came to the end of his store. He had no family, only me and my mother. The magistrates in Bristol sent him to an Industrial School when he was seven years old, for begging on the streets. He never talked about it, my mother said; only told her once that he used to watch the ships going out of the docks, and think that one day he’d go with them. Maybe he did stow away, and ended up here, thinking he was in Australia already.
Each Christmas Eve my mother read aloud to me the story of the Cratchit family’s goose, and the pudding coming in from the wash-house. I knew it so well that I would say the lines along with her, under my breath. I had my father’s memory but I was a book-reader too.
My mother’s Bible was in the bundle of her possessions that was left for me. It’s in the deep windowsill at the back of the cottage now. I pick it up and take it out into the sunlight. She was given the Bible at Sunday School, when she was ten, as a prize for recitation. She did not need to open it in order to quote from it.
It’s a long time since I opened it. There’s a bookmark that has always been there, but right at the back, towards Revelation, there is another piece of thin card. The edge of it just shows above the edge of the pages. I take it out and turn it over. It’s my school photograph, the only one ever taken.
I remember the day that the photographer came in, with his stand and the black cloth under which he vanished like a conjuror’s rabbit. There had never been a school photograph before. Our teacher told the girls to wear clean pinafores and tie their hair with ribbons. If they had no ribbon, she would give them a length of white cotton tape. We boys must be clean and tidy, wear our Sunday clothes if we had them, and comb our hair down with water if it was unruly.
My mother polished my boots and scrubbed my face, neck and hands. We were to sit very still while the photograph was taken. If we moved, there would be a blur in the photograph instead of a face.
‘It will look as if
you were never in the class at all,’ said our teacher. ‘As if you were rubbed out with an India rubber.’ She bared her teeth, smiling.
I was determined not to be rubbed out. I hadn’t been photographed since I was a baby. It was expensive to have a copy of the photograph, but my mother said we would order one. I had already taken the money into school in a brown envelope, and Miss Carlyon had put a tick against my name. I was proud of that tick, and glad that I wasn’t Charlie Bozer or Susannah Caddy, with no tick and no photograph to come.
In the photograph, my lips are pressed tightly together. Like all the children, I’m sitting cross-legged, with my arms folded on my chest and my shoulders braced to take the weight of being photographed. I stare straight ahead, frowning with concentration. I don’t remember anyone telling us to smile. It was a tense moment. We’d been drilled that when Miss Carlyon said, ‘Now, children!’ we were to keep still as statues. We could move again when she said the word. When I say the word, and not before. She stood beside us, wearing her Sunday blouse, which we had never seen in school before. ‘Now, children!’
We froze. We didn’t move or breathe or smile. There we are, rows of unsmiling children, looking straight ahead as instructed, the girls’ hair plaited and be-ribboned, their pinafores as white as bleach and sunlight could make them. We boys are wearing our Sunday jackets and collars, if we possess them, and our hair is darkly plastered to our skulls.
When the photograph envelopes were given out we bore them home as if they were breakable as eggs. There was no larking about that day. Those who didn’t have an envelope pretended not to care. I gave mine into my mother’s hand, and stood beside her while she opened it. She looked at the photograph for a long moment, but said nothing, until I wondered if I had done something wrong. But I hadn’t moved a muscle. There was no India rubber blur where my face ought to have been. It was clear as clear. I pointed to it, to show her.
‘Look, that’s me,’ I said.
‘It’s very like,’ said my mother. She was far away. I feared her in this mood, because I couldn’t reach her, even if I was standing beside her. The photograph slipped into her lap, as if her hands were too tired to hold it.
The photograph was never framed. I thought my mother had lost it, when I thought of it at all, but soon I forgot that it had ever been taken. We had only one framed photograph, kept on a shelf of the kitchen dresser. It showed my mother, my father and me as a baby, with a waterfall thundering behind us and a rustic bridge to one side. For a long time I believed that I remembered the rush of that water, and the creaky sound of the bridge as the three of us walked across it, and then my mother explained that the photograph had been taken in a studio in Simonstown. My father looked proudly ahead. He was very handsome, I thought, and both my parents wore wonderful clothes. My baby self was swaddled in a shawl that fell like a second waterfall, halfway down my mother’s dress.
But she had kept the school photograph all the time, and must have put it inside her Bible before she died. I know it wasn’t there before, because the pages of that Bible were turned each Sunday. Its rhythms were as familiar to me as my own voice.
Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
The children in the photograph are not changed. I look at us, and all at once, for the first time, I realise why she never put it on display. I was not one of the boys in a Sunday jacket and collar. I was one of half a dozen who wore mended jerseys, and showed no collars below their scrubbed and shining faces. It must have cut her to the quick. Not because we were poor; we were most of us poor. We had been less poor once, when my father was alive, and we would do better again once I was older and able to work. Meanwhile my mother cleaned and mended, made broth with butcher’s bones, worked all day in other people’s houses and on spring and summer evenings dug and weeded in her vegetable plot at the top of the town until the light went. It was how we were and it said nothing about us, beyond that we had little. That photograph said too much. It said that this was how I was, a child who had no jacket or Sunday collar, and would never have one, as far as the photograph was concerned. It fixed what we believed was temporary, and made it the fact of our existence. But she hadn’t destroyed it. I could not imagine my mother tearing up any photograph which contained my face.
We shall all be changed.
How those words used to run through me like fire. Whether or not I believed them didn’t matter. They promised that the world was greater than I knew.
How many books had Mr Dennis in his library? Hundreds. Thousands, even. Frederick had textbooks, too. Kennedy’s Latin Primer, Durell’s Elementary Problem Papers, Panting’s English Grammar, Laboulaye’s Contes Bleus . . .
The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. That was the most important of all. Later I found out that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was a Cornishman, born not forty miles away, up in Bodmin.
Frederick would toss the books to me when he was finished with them, as if they meant nothing. I could open The Oxford Book of English Verse at any page, and he would know nothing of what was on it. And yet he must have studied it. I was mystified, and then I would flatter myself with a touch of scorn for his laziness. It took me years to realise that Frederick was not lazy. I couldn’t believe that he could fail to learn, if he wanted to, with everything he needed set in front of him. I never knew how to describe what it was that Frederick had. He made it seem as if the way he did things was the only possible way that they could be done. When I realised that he couldn’t read a poem once over and know it, as I could, it made me think that there was something freakish in the gift. He laboured to learn the long lists of declensions that his school gave him. Mr Dennis read Frederick’s school report and hired a tutor for the summer holidays.
I took The Oxford Book of English Verse from him one day when we were lying in a hollow above the cliffs. I read aloud the poem he was learning:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
It was the kind of stuff that I liked then. I had just time to finish declaiming it before Frederick snatched the book from me.
‘You haven’t got to learn it.’
‘I know it already,’ I said.
‘You infernal blowviator.’
‘It’s true.’
Frederick held the book against his chest, pages inward. He’d known for years that I could tell him any story through, if I’d read it once, but this was different. ‘All right then. Cough it up.’
‘Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance . . .’
I went on to the end.
‘Do that again,’ said Frederick, staring at me as if there was a trick he hadn’t been quick enough to spot. He flipped the book open at another page and held it towards me. It was Lord Byron:
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this . . .
Twice more Frederick opened the book at a random page, and tested me. Twice more I recalled the words perfectly. Something changed then. I couldn’t read his Greek but I could read Latin. I didn’t understand it and I mispronounced it, but I could learn it as easy as breathing. Then I wished I’d never done it, because Fre
derick said that he would tell his father. For a moment my mind was flooded with impossibilities. Mr Dennis would clap me on the shoulder and say, ‘My boy, this is quite remarkable.’ He would send me to school with Frederick. I would leave Mulla House. I would become—
What would I become? Besides, Mr Dennis had no interest in poetry, or Greek or Latin. He hadn’t read a single one of his own books. Frederick had to learn what a gentleman should learn. The things he learned had no importance in themselves. Mr Dennis would be embarrassed if I showed off my tricks to him, as if Frederick had brought in a performing monkey.
‘Don’t tell him,’ I said.
‘You fatuous ape, why not?’
‘You’re the fatuous ape if you don’t know,’ I said, using his words, feeling them go wrong in my mouth. I got up and left him. I didn’t speak to him again for the rest of his holiday.
I have all those poems in my head. They swarm, crowding me like bees. I don’t think that I even want them any more. I want the dead to be raised incorruptible, but I know that won’t happen.
She’s wide awake now, the collie bitch. She hasn’t stirred but her eyes are on me. My hands keep on stroking her, as if they have a life of their own. She lies sideways, showing me her soft belly.
I might have gone through my whole life without knowing how good I’d be with a bayonet. Our bayonet instructor was a fat, overage sergeant who’d never been in France. He told us to go for the groin or the breastbone. But if you get a bayonet in a man’s groin, he won’t care what he does to get it out. He’ll grab the blade and hold on even though his hands are cut to ribbons. And if you go for the breastbone, the blade will stick, or skid, and go nowhere. You need the knack, to see which way a man will go, and be there first.
Sergeant Flint’s arse looked like a woman’s. We called him Fanny Flinto. We heard that Fritz had bayonet blades that were saw-toothed, not like ours. I feinted, parried, struck. He had us charging uphill, bayonets fixed, yelling like lunatics.
I was good at it, that’s all. But a live man doesn’t work like a straw dummy. Your blade comes out of the dummy, clean as it went in. It’s not just the blood and slime that comes out of a man, but the fact that he won’t let go. Or his body won’t. And in training there’s Fanny Flinto screaming, ‘Stick un, stick the bugger! Get un in the guts!’ but you don’t think about what guts contain, because you don’t know. You stick your bayonet in the right place inside a living man and it will come out with shit on it. It sticks to the blade, and you smell it when you clean your weapon.