‘Your hair will dry full of salt,’ she observes.
He flicks his head and showers of drops fly off, to spatter against Clare’s skirt. They make dark blotches on fading navy cloth. Then he bounds back up the rock to sit by Clare, so close she smells not only beer and smoke and salt but the smell of John William himself, unaltered underneath it all, a dry, almondy smell which is him and will always be him, a smell which even the war can’t change, though it’s changed everything else. He’s still there. Her body gives and warms on the side where he almost touches her.
He stares out at the horizon. ‘You don’t get anything like this in the trenches,’ he remarks.
She shifts in irritation. Why is he talking like this, with a crudity and banality which would suit Sam or one of the other lads, but is quite foreign to John William? It’s as if he wants to pretend he’s only got the same thoughts everyone else has. And John William’s never had those, nor wanted them. He is different from the others, and she can’t bear him acting the same.
‘You surprise me,’ she says tartly. ‘I should have thought the trenches would be just like Porthmeor Beach. Not that I know anything about it, of course.’
‘Good old Blighty,’ he says, looking at her mockingly, appreciatively. ‘I’m glad I saw you this morning, Clarey. I need your opinion.’
Her heart quickens. Something’s wrong. He’s going to tell her –
‘Is it true what the Bishop of London’s saying?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
His eyes yellow and glitter. ‘The curse of lust and sin has fallen on London, according to him. Girls abandoning the decent ways they were brought up to. Is there much of that going on in St Ives?’
She slaps down her skirts and stands up. ‘You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better go home,’ she says.
But he gets hold of her hem. ‘Don’t go, Clarey, don’t rush off like that. I was only asking.’
Now he looks like himself, sharp and funny and a bit pleading. Well, he’s been through a bad time. She mustn’t take him up like that. He was only joking. And those articles in the paper Grandad reads are always about war-babies and sin and shame in cinemas. She sits down again. And isn’t it the way he always talks, saying things other people wouldn’t say?
‘It’s just the same here. Hellfire from Grandad if Hannah shows more than a couple of inches of leg.’
‘Oh, Hannah…’ He looks thoughtful.
‘Have you seen Sam?’
He hesitates, picks up her hand which is lying in her lap, runs her fingers lightly against his palm. She’s glad she filed her nails to smooth moony ovals.
‘Yes. Sam’s in London.’
So Hannah was right; the letter did come from London.
‘But how did he get there?’
‘Sick-leave.’
‘But Sam’s not sick. We’d have heard.’
‘No,’ he agrees. ‘But Sam’s not stupid either. Our Sam saw which way the wind was blowing. He had dysentery – well, that’s nothing. Half the men have got it. But then he got blood in his stools, trust Sam for that, so they had to take him back to base camp for treatment. Course they’d a spotted he was faking it in five minutes. They’re sharp enough, those army medical officers, and they know what their job is. So the next thing we know Sam is rolling around and shrieking out because he’s suffering from shell-shock.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘He told me himself. He’s not ashamed, don’t think it. He’s set on living, that’s all, and who am I to say he shouldn’t be? He hadn’t got one chance in ten, the section he was in, not with an advance due. So he gets sent back to hospital in London and the first chance he has he deserts. He made a fool of one of the VADs, I daresay.’
‘But where is he now? Does Hannah know?’
‘He’s stopping in London. He met a girl there.’
She stares into his inscrutable face, tight on itself. He’s lidded his eyes, the way he does when he doesn’t want to look at someone.
‘But he can’t just stay there! I mean – what about Hannah? She’s worried to death over him. Can’t you do something?’
‘No.’
‘But – but he loves her. He loves Hannah. You know he does.’
John William moves his shoulders slightly. It’s not a shrug, nothing as crude as that, but it’s a gesture which repudiates everything she’s said, and everything on which her words are founded.
‘You won’t say anything to Hannah,’ he says quietly.
‘Of course I won’t,’ says Clare, thinking of the letter Hannah couldn’t understand, of Hannah’s suspended nightmare of waiting last autumn, of the kisses she has seen and the love-making she can’t imagine.
‘He’s going to see a new show called Zig-Zag tonight. Good old Sam,’ remarks John William surprisingly.
‘Good old Sam! I don’t see what’s good about it. Don’t you care about Hannah at all?’ snaps Clare.
‘He’ll come back. As much as anyone’s likely to come back. You don’t know what it’s like out there.’
‘Is it so awful?’ she asks.
‘You can get through it as long as you don’t think about it too much. I wish I could draw like you, though, Clarey. I’ve seen some queer sights. Flowers in the middle of everything. You’d like the flowers: you know I thought of you a couple of weeks ago. We were in an apple orchard, not far from Arras. Where Fritz moved back a couple of months ago. All the farm people had gone, but they hadn’t been able to take anything with them except what they could get on a handcart, so our officers billeted themselves in the farmhouse and we slept in the orchard. Oh, the smell of it in the night, Clarey. All those trees flowering. You’ve no idea. We killed a hen for breakfast.’ He gives a crack of laughter. ‘One of the officers wanted to shoot it. I wish you’d seen him. He got down on his belly and went stalking the hen through the long grass, as high as your waist and wet. And the old hen didn’t take a blind bit of notice of him. She kept on pecking away the grain we’d thrown for her. We thought we’d fatten her up a bit first. She was a stringy dud of a creature.’
‘Did he shoot her?’
‘No, his batman came up and wrung her neck. She’d have been blown to shreds if the silly bugger’d shot her. No good to us like that.’
‘And you all had some?’
He laughs in real amusement. ‘Luckily, as it happened, she turned out too tough for the officers. So I kindly took her off their hands and made soup for the men. They quite thought it had been their own idea.’
‘Officers’ training camp,’ she says. ‘You must have been pleased.’
The same movement of the shoulders again. Another rebuff. The weakness and silliness of what she has just said echoes in her own ears.
‘You could say pleased,’ he says. ‘It’s like being born. You can feel your blood pouring through you like it’s for the first time in your life. When they told me, we’d been three days in the reserve trench, waiting for orders. There’s big manoeuvres on, but you never know the whole picture, only your own bit of it. I suppose I’ll have to know more now. But we knew it would be bad. Everyone was on edge. Then I was sent for by our colonel. I walked up the farm lane, out of range of the guns, noticing every flower in the ditch as I walked past it. It was warm. There was a sparrow having a dustbath. Things seem to burn into your mind sometimes. I went in and saluted him, thinking what now, was there something I’d done wrong. And he looked up from his paperwork and asked me if I’d like to go in for a commission. Just like that. I was to go to headquarters to be interviewed a week later. It poured through me so I could hardly stand, and all the time I was looking at the yellow in the white of his eyes, thinking he had something wrong with his liver, or else he drank too much.
‘That was the worst week. I thought I was sure to be killed, just when I’d seen my way out of it. I knew I’d be sent back to Blighty for training, and I’d been told it would be three months. The war could be over by th
en. All the boys were round me, telling me what a lucky bugger I was. You’d a thought they’d grudge me my luck, but they didn’t. I was going right away to Blighty, and they knew there was going to be another big push coming up soon. And they knew their chances.’
He is lost to her. He is a thousand miles away, hearing the guns, seeing the ring of faces round him and knowing their chances.
‘I must get back, I haven’t lit the stove yet,’ she says quickly. Perhaps he wants to be on his own.
‘Stay a bit. It’s nice here. Listen, Clarey, you mustn’t worry over Hannah and Sam. Sam’s all right.’
Easy, glib words again. Anybody’s words. But she wants to believe them. Hannah’s all right, and Sam’s all right, and John William’s all right. Sam’s letters stink of death and he’d rather hide with a prostitute in London than trust them here at home. But it will be all right, once the war’s over.
She doesn’t even try to believe it. She listens to the sea and the screaming of the gulls. They’re gutting the catch round by the harbour. The gulls dive with slimy trails hanging from their beaks.
John William shifts position, frees his arm and puts it around her waist. It circles her there, warm and definite. She breathes in quickly, unevenly. He must feel her breathing. And her heart, beating so fast. She is sitting with John William’s arm around her. She looks down and there is the back of his hand, curled over the light mound of her stomach, the black fine hairs on it lying flat now, the hand blunt and strong, the colour of the skin like that of another kind of creature from herself and her own paleness. The underside of her left breast just skims the top of his wrist as she breathes out. She sits as still as still. If she says nothing and doesn’t move, they will stay together like this. Excitement trembles in her, and peace too. He is here, with her. No one else can touch him. For now he does not belong to the war. No matter how close he may be to the boys, they are not here. She is.
His hand begins to stroke her lightly, as he would stroke the belly of a cat. The tips of her breasts burn under warm cotton.
‘There’s a Red Cross concert on tonight, at the Drill Hall,’ he says. ‘Had you thought of going? I’d like to hear a woman singing.’
‘I don’t know – I hadn’t considered it…’
No, but she’s seen the poster. A Belgian woman singing in aid of the Red Cross. Opera-trained, with her piano accompanist, it said. What was her name exactly? Not Elaine, but something like it. Eliane, that was it. A preposterous bosom and a background of gunfire over a distant shore. But people are getting tired of Belgians.
‘How are your Belgian atrocities?’ they joke.
She can picture the concert, and the singer, her eyes wide with unshed tears against the crossed flags of Britain and Belgium. A faulty, shuddering soprano… But it is no use criticizing. Clare had flared in passionate pity with the rest of them, three years back at the invasion of Belgium. Now it is all different. People cope by making jokes and going on blindly, heads down, without flourishes. Her father would raise his eyebrows if she said she was going to the Saturday night concert.
‘A predictable type of evening, I’d have thought, Clare.’
A woman’s voice. John William must hear nothing but men’s voices out there, except for the VADs. Only men, day after day, living together and dying together. No wonder they talk about each other the way they do, as if the other men in the trenches are more real than all of us here. The way even Sam talked about Billy when he came back on leave after Billy was killed. Tender. You’d never imagine Sam could talk like that.
‘The singing I heard last night,’ goes on John William. ‘That was a woman. Or a seal maybe.’
‘Or a mermaid.’
‘That’s right. Will you come?’
‘With you?’
‘Yes. We could go for a walk after. Like I did last night. Tell Uncle Francis you’re going with me and Hannah and he won’t trouble himself.’
‘Yes.’ Her voice is muffled. Surely now he can hear her heart thudding through it.
Yes, we could go for a walk. Like Hannah and Sam. Just John William and me and no one else in the world. He’ll talk to me…
His hand on her waist tightens.
‘You’d better sleep this afternoon, or you won’t enjoy the concert,’ she says.
His face shutters against her. ‘I shan’t sleep.’
There is a long pause, with the sand sucking as the tide drains out through it. A bee flies past them, out of its element and dangerously low over the water. The pouncing tip of a wave nearly gets it. How long would it struggle to fly again, weighed down by its wet fur and salt-sodden wings? His arm feels less warm and she is stiff with sitting still on the rock. She must go and cook breakfast for her father. She twists to free herself and he lets her go with disconcerting promptness.
‘Goodbye, then,’ she says.
‘I’ll call for you, Clarey. Seven o’clock.’
She nods, and turns to go. He hunches forward, clasping his knees. She’s going, so he’ll hold on to himself, smelling his own khaki, watching his boots glitter. The others are up already, working. Essential workers they are, Jo and Albert and George, and they are there to be seen working essentially by anyone prowling or nosing up at the farm. Coast-watchers, military police, tribunal members, let em all come. The boys will be blinding their way across the yard to swill down the pig-sheds now, hung-over and breakfastless.
She doesn’t want to leave John William like this, worn out and half sober. After all this is her cousin. He’s neither slept nor eaten. He isn’t like himself. All the intelligence which scares the others like a fire which might singe them is sleeping somewhere way down in the middle of him. Like the red core of an overnight fire, piled up with slack. Almost sleeping. And when he put his arm around her, was that really him, or was it just part of his being a soldier, part of the strangeness? Is it something which has woken up in him because of war and death, which needs to be coaxed back into cousinly sleep? Or is it just that she was there? He doesn’t really need her, not Clare Coyne herself. What he needs is a girl in London, and the music-hall, and a few drinks inside him so the lights grow muzzy while an old man plays Goodby-eee on his violin and the audience roars its approval and John William’s girl smiles at him the way she smiles at all the boys. A noble sense of renunciation swells inside Clare. She is family. Cousin Clarey. She ought to look after him.
‘Nan’ll make you a bacon sandwich if you come on up,’ she calls to him across the sand.
But her words come to nothing. He remains sitting on the rock, looking out to sea, not wanting her.
Nine
Twenty-five to six. The confessional curtain opens behind her, and Francis Coyne walks past her, calm and everyday. He walks the length of the church, dips into the pew in front of the altar, crosses himself, bows his head.
Good, thinks Clare. He won’t take long now. She feels uneasy and inhibited as long as her father is here in the church. The fruits of a bad conscience. She’s deep enough in the sticky web of family as it is. The confessional queue shuffles up by one, and now she joins it. She wanted to be sure that her father would be well out of the Church by the time she made her own confession. She kneels again, sighs, pulls off her gloves. The thumb seam is splitting and she’s not going to be able to mend it again. The left palm is worn too. She will have to buy new gloves. She twists her fingers together, then covers her face with her hands to blot out the milky sea-light filtering through stained glass, and the row of patient backs, bowed over in the pews. The familiar church smell comforts her as she takes a deep breath, calms herself, spins out a prayer which she can follow without panic: ‘Oh Guardian Angel, sent to watch over me during my life, be with me now in sorrow for my sins. May my holy patron, Saint Clare, whose name I bear…’
Father’s still kneeling there. He’s taking a long time over his penance. I wish he’d go. What if he’s decided to wait for me?
No, it’s all right. She sees her father’s back stirring, his he
ad lifting. Francis Coyne crosses himself again, unfolds his long legs awkwardly, genuflects as he leaves his pew and walks out into the sunshine, putting on his hat. An obscure sense of propriety stops him from acknowledging Clare as he passes her.
That’s that. The spice of May Foage has been cleansed from his flesh and his spirit. The child looks miserable today. I wonder what’s wrong? Better not ask her. It’ll be some quarrel that’s blown up between her and Hannah. And now she’s exaggerated it into sin in her own mind, no doubt. He smiles fondly at the thought of his daughter’s innocent conscience. But he’d felt sorry for her, kneeling there, looking small and young and extinguished. She isn’t pretty at all at the moment. Slate shadows round slate eyes, her face narrow and pinched, with spots of colour on the cheek-bones. It takes him back to the sight of her when she was ten or eleven, with all that fierce hair strained back into tight plaits. She used to kneel beside him during Mass and hold up her fingers in front of her eyes to make patterns of light through them. She didn’t have her mother to make the church a proper home to her, that was the root of it. Even if she’d lived, Susannah wouldn’t have known how to do it. She was stiff and not a quick learner. She would never have called in easily with Clare on her way back from the shops, to light a candle, pray for an anniversary or remember a small local saint. Besides, this church wasn’t built then, and Susannah would have been even more uneasy in the over-intimate atmosphere of the Mission. And he too had failed. Perhaps it was because he was a man. Somehow he did not have the gift of making her faith both immediate and mysterious to her, in the way it had been to his sisters. He had spent too long explaining her faith to her. Clare fidgeted, he became impatient. If she wanted familiarity, she went down to Nan’s.