The Lie

  I say that as if we were using our bayonets all the time, but we weren’t. We didn’t ever charge uphill, yelling, into a row of men like straw dummies. We used our bayonets at night, on patrol, because they were quiet. We used our knives, and Mr Tremough had his revolver.

  That night with Frederick, in the dark of the shell-hole, it was a bayonet I was afraid of, more than a grenade even. We’d failed. The raid was a disaster and those who could get away had gone. The rest were dead, or too injured to move, like Frederick. We were cornered if the Germans came and shone a light down. I had no idea where we were, although I could tell the direction of the line from the firing. We were in no-man’s-land, and no-man’s-land was as big as Africa once you were in it at night. There was water in the bottom of the shell-hole. Old rotten water, full of stinking things. There was a dugout in the side, where we were hidden. Wire ran from it up to the surface. They must have run a telephone wire out here, into no-man’s-land, so they could crouch in the dugout, listening, and send back messages. On the earthen shelf, someone had left a tin mug. I hoped there might be water in the mug, but it was empty. It made my skin crawl, to think of that German coming back for his mug. This was his hole, and we were in it.

  The lower part of Frederick’s leg was bad. I lit a match from the box I carried in my tunic pocket, and cupped the flame to hide it. The calf of his boot was ripped open. Dirt had blown into the wound. There was shrapnel in it, and the flesh around was mushy. I saw a splinter big enough to grasp, but I didn’t dare draw it out. The match singed my hand, and I dropped it in the water below us. I knew enough. I unfixed the blade of my bayonet, and gripped the leather of his boot in my right hand so I could cut it with my left. The blade was too clumsy. I had my knife, and I tried with that, but he groaned and shook all over until I had to stop. I lit another match, shielding it carefully with my hands, even though we were right into the back of the dugout. I couldn’t get his boot off, because there was nothing above it I could safely get a hold of. There was a lot of bleeding, not pumping blood, just heavy, pulpy bleeding. I unwound the cotton tape from the top of my puttees, tied the pieces together and wrapped it around his thigh, tight enough to slow the blood. Frederick didn’t seem to know what had happened to him. He’d been hit on the head too, which might have been the reason. I felt his forehead and there was a bloody ridge. He wasn’t unconscious though. I could just about see his eyes, and his pupils shrank from the light of the match. I was afraid that any moment he would start to feel his leg and make a noise so that they’d be bound to hear us. I wound off more of my puttees and made a gag ready.

  The Germans must have been in this shell-hole all the time, listening to us, while we thought that they knew nothing of the raid. Once the shelling stopped, that would be the time for them to retake their dugout. I had my rifle. I fixed my bayonet again. But it was more than likely they’d lob grenades down before retaking it. That’s what I’d have done. Our one chance was that they wouldn’t know we were here. They’d think they were retaking an empty shell-hole, and that could wait, now that the raid was over. Besides, they wouldn’t want to blow up a listening post that had already proved so useful.

  The collie whines. She’s had enough of this. I lift my hand off her, and she gets up, shakes herself all over as if she’s been in the water, and whines again. She wants to go home.

  ‘All right, my girl,’ I say, stooping over her, but she doesn’t like me as much as she did. Sometimes I think a dog can see right through you, into the thoughts you hide even from yourself.

  8

  As regards dress and arrangements generally, no part of the training should be perfunctory, that is to say, nothing should be left to the imagination.

  THIS TIME THERE is a smell of food in the hall of Albert House. Felicia comes to the door with the child in her arms. The two of them look at me out of eyes that are shaped the same, then Felicia smiles as if she’s glad to see me.

  ‘This is Jeannie,’ she says, and the baby turns her head into her mother’s shoulder. Her hair is as fine as thistledown, and pale. There was never hair like that in the Dennis family. It must come from Harry Fearne.

  ‘It’s all right, Jeannie. Daniel’s our friend,’ says Felicia, but Jeannie won’t look up. ‘She’s tired. I was just going to put her to bed.’

  I watch Felicia move about the kitchen with the child on her hip.

  ‘She still has her bottle at night,’ she says, and heats milk in a little pan before pouring it into a newfangled-looking feeding bottle. I watch everything she does. Her hands move surely. Of course they do, she must have done this hundreds of times. Felicia being a mother is new to me, but not to her.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she says, and goes off with the child and the bottle. I look around the kitchen. The range is lit, and a pot is simmering on one of the plates. A dense, savoury smell rises with the steam. My mouth floods with saliva. It seems a long time before Felicia comes back.

  ‘She’s hard to settle. I sit and sit, and as soon as I move, she rears up.’

  I know nothing about little children. I thought they lay down and slept when it was time for bed.

  ‘Will you have some chicken soup?’ asks Felicia.

  ‘Did you make it?’

  ‘I’m learning. I ask Dolly what to do, and I write down what she says. She brought up a boiling fowl this morning, and cut it into joints. I did the rest.’

  ‘It smells good.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Felicia picks up a pot-holder, opens the lid and steps back as a gout of steam blows at her. She approaches the pot again, cautiously. ‘I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like,’ she says.

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘All right,’ she says doubtfully, and passes the pot-holder to me. I look into the pot, where four quarters of chicken swim in yellow globules of fat. There are carrots and onions, and a bunch of thyme and bay, tied together.

  ‘What my mother used to do was take off the fat from the surface with a piece of bread,’ I remember.

  ‘Could you do that, Dan?’

  ‘Cut me off the heel of the loaf.’

  I take a large fork, lower the bread and skim the surface of the soup with it. Sure enough, the yellow globules of fat are sucked into the dough. I lift the bread before it can dissolve, and lay the soggy slice on a plate.

  ‘What did you use to do with the bread?’

  ‘Eat it.’

  The soup is too liquid, but the chicken is already cooked through. ‘The stock needs to be boiled down,’ I tell her, ‘but you don’t want to cook the chicken to rags.’ I lift the chicken pieces one by one, with the fork, and put them on a board. ‘How does the range work, Felicia? Is there a plate that’s hotter than the others?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Families like the Dennises live in their own houses like children, not knowing how things work. And now that all the people who used to run the house for them have gone, Felicia is next door to helpless. I pass my hand over the iron plates and judge that the front left one is the hottest. I move the pot across. Sure enough, after a few minutes bubbles start to swarm beneath the surface. My mother put barley into soup, to thicken it, but Felicia doesn’t know if there is any.

  ‘It’ll taste as good without,’ I say.

  Felicia cuts more slices of bread, and when the soup has boiled thick enough, I drop the chicken pieces back into it to heat through.

  ‘There’s so much of it,’ says Felicia, as I fill our plates and put them on the kitchen table. She’s right; there seems to be almost as much soup left in the pot as there was before.

  ‘You can eat it tomorrow,’ I say.

  ‘Will it keep?’

  ‘Soup keeps for ever, as long as you boil it up every day.’ That was what my mother used to do. Every day, she would feed our soup pot with carrots and onion, sliced potato, some barley, maybe a piece of fat bacon if she had it. This soup could have done with the bacon: it tastes bland. ‘Did you salt it, Felicia?’

  A
faint colour comes up into her face. She rises, fetches the salt, and passes it to me. Some spills on the table and so I reach out, take a pinch and throw it over my left shoulder. Felicia tucks in her lips, the way she used to when she was trying not to laugh.

  ‘That’s sent him off with his tail between his legs,’ I say.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Old Nick, of course.’

  Felicia doesn’t add salt. She’d sooner swallow tasteless soup than admit that it needed seasoning. Here we are, eating together at the same table again. I watch the movements of her hands and the dip of her head as she brings the spoon to her mouth.

  ‘Do you still grow flowers?’ I ask her.

  ‘I clear leaves and cut things back when they grow over the paths. Josh comes up once a week to mow, in season.’

  He came every day, before. I wonder how he lives without his wages? He wasn’t called up because of his foot. They grew grapes in the glasshouse before the war, and melons. It was nothing like the scale of Mulla House, but the Dennis house was always full of their own flowers. Now everything is pared, as if a knife has gone round and round an apple without knowing where to stop, so that it isn’t only the peel that has been taken away, but the whole fruit. I wonder if they’re short of money; or rather, if Felicia is, now that Mr Dennis and his wife and coming child have left her to make their own separate household. But he will have done well out of the war. A man like him, an engineer who employed more than three hundred men before the war – he trained up women to replace them, and the work went on. Mr Dennis would have had to throw money over his shoulder, like salt, if he didn’t want to get rich in the war years. Perhaps he forgets Felicia, because his attention is elsewhere. And then I think: all this house, for one girl and a baby. The remarkable thing is that any of them should think it’s right for her to be here alone.

  The narrow spaces of the cellars are directly underneath me now. I’ll go down there, because I promised Felicia, but if she doesn’t mention the furnace then nor will I. I’d rather be up here. Her hands move delicately, lifting her spoon, bringing it to her mouth.

  When I finish, Felicia ladles more into my plate, with another piece of chicken. The white and brown flesh has melted from the bone, and long fibres of it drift in the liquid. Felicia has finished eating. The noises of my jaw and teeth and tongue are loud, but I’m still so hungry that I have to hold back from leaning over my bowl and supping like a dog.

  Felicia’s left hand cups the stem of her glass, her right plucks at the crumb of her bread, which she hasn’t tasted. She sits so still that you’d think her calm, but I know her better than that. I remember her on her knees beside the little patch the gardener gave her. She would make spells with sticks and stones and shells, incanting to herself. Frederick used to say that she was a witch.

  Felicia didn’t know enough to realise that the gardener had given her a poor patch of soil, where marigolds and nasturtiums would flourish, but little else. She had her fork and trowel and she was so absorbed in digging that she didn’t hear us creep up behind her. Frederick shouted ‘Boo!’ and she jumped, but then she flushed with pleasure, because we had sought her out.

  We ran away from her too often. I don’t know why, now.

  Felicia clears the table, while I go to the lavatory. I know that word because of the Dennises. My mother would say ‘out the back’. My father had another word for it, which I do remember. I think it was a Bristol word from his childhood. He would say, ‘I’m off to the jollyhouse.’ That word I thought was apt for the Dennises’ lavatories and their glorious bathrooms, one on each of the upper floors. This big downstairs lavatory has green tiles with dolphins leaping on the narrow border. There are black and white chequered tiles on the floor, and a high cistern with a long brass chain. The door fittings are brass too, with a soft, deep sheen on them. The hook on the back of the door still has a bag of lavender hanging from it. I crush it, but the smell is old and dusty. I used to love the rattle of the chain and the roar of the water refilling the tank, and then I would wash my hands in a deep basin of hot water, soaping them all over. Today, the water in the hot tap is cold and runs thinly. These taps used to spout like whales. I ought to ask Felicia where the tools are kept.

  ‘Do you know what a Ouija board is?’ Felicia asks. She has poured me another glass of wine, the same elderberry that we drank last time.

  ‘I’ve heard of them.’

  ‘I hate the thought of it.’

  ‘It does no harm. It’s a lot of nonsense.’

  ‘Of course it does harm,’ says Felicia. She is silent for a long while, then she takes a sip of her wine, which so far she’s barely touched. ‘But I know why they do it.’

  I wait.

  ‘It’s because they haven’t a grave to go to. Because there wasn’t a body to wash and bury. All they have is a telegram, like we had about Frederick. And then a letter. We had a letter from a Major Puttington-Bott – can that have been his real name?’

  ‘I should think it was.’

  ‘Father liked the letter, but when I read it again, I thought it might have been written about anybody. I don’t believe he even knew who Frederick was. That’s why when I got your letter—’

  I have nothing to say to that. ‘What made you think of Ouija boards?’

  ‘My old French teacher asked if I’d like to go to a session with her. Her nephew was killed. She goes every week, but he hasn’t come through yet.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘I know.’ Felicia looks suddenly weary. She gives a little shiver, and rubs her arms.

  ‘I ought to see to that furnace. It’s what I came for.’

  ‘It’s getting late. It doesn’t matter, I’m not cold. The range is lit in here now, and I’ve got a fire laid in the morning room.’ The morning room. Of course. I’d forgotten that was what they called it. They had so many words for things, the Dennis family, but I suppose that, in their lives, such words were necessary and had been devised for a purpose. That is, they described what was real to the Dennises.

  ‘Is she better?’ Felicia is asking, and I stare at her for a blank second. ‘Mary Pascoe. Is her chest better?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, before I’ve thought about where the sentence might take me, ‘at least, she’s not as bad as she was.’

  ‘Is she out of bed? Can she go outside?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I ought to visit her, Dan. She needs a woman to see to her.’

  ‘I can see to her as much as she wants.’

  ‘But there are things—’

  I push back my chair. Something must show on my face, for Felicia says quickly, ‘I’m sure you look after her very well.’

  She thinks I’m annoyed with her. What if I’d told her the truth at the outset? I almost wish that I had. Felicia might have believed me. I think she would understand how an old woman might die like a bird at the bottom of a hedge, and that it was right for Mary Pascoe to be buried in her own land, instead of under a stone among strangers. It wasn’t a terrible thing, compared to how men lie rotting. But it’s too late now. Felicia will want to believe me, but I’ll see her wondering how it can have been, and why I didn’t tell her the truth from the beginning.

  I could ask Felicia to come with me now. We could stand together by Mary Pascoe’s grave. But what if she was afraid? What if she stumbled away from me with her arms outstretched in panic, and her skirts catching on the bushes? I don’t want Felicia to be frightened.

  ‘Do you still play the piano?’ I ask her, but she shakes her head.

  ‘Not for a long time.’

  She learned the piano, and French. She had singing lessons. It was what girls like Felicia did. She wanted a telescope. She read Frederick’s Euclid, although he snatched it away from her and told her to stop pretending she understood it.

  ‘You could go to night school, Daniel,’ she says now, following some swerve of her own thoughts. ‘With all you’ve read, and the way you talk—’

  ‘There’s nothing
I want to learn,’ I say.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaims, as if I’ve hurt myself. ‘There must be something.’

  ‘Only how to live quiet, and make the hens lay better,’ I say.

  ‘You’re not very ambitious.’

  ‘Trouble with me, Felicia, I’ve fulfilled my ambition, and now I don’t like the look of it.’

  ‘What was your ambition?’

  ‘To stay alive.’ I say it meaning to hurt her, meaning to hurt her doubly, maybe. I’ve stayed alive, and Frederick and Harry Fearne will stay dead. I’m eating at their table, as she must long for them to do, but I don’t care a fig for it.

  ‘So you’ll stay at Mary Pascoe’s for the rest of your life, if she’ll have you,’ says Felicia sharply. She gets up and clashes our soup bowls together as she takes them to the sink. She runs cold water into a pan and hoists it on to the range to heat.

  ‘And you won’t ever go to Cambridge,’ I say to her back.

  We are enemies. I look at her and see the warm quick shape of Frederick moving inside her like a ghost.

  ‘We could come to an agreement,’ she says, turning. ‘You go, and I’ll go too. I went to night school, you know. I didn’t tell you that. I was the only girl there.’

  ‘You said you didn’t want to leave here—’

  ‘I know. I say all kinds of things. But he’s not here, is he? I could pull the house down brick by brick and I wouldn’t find him.’

  ‘Could you do so, Felicia?’ I say, looking at her tender, narrow hands.