Zennor in Darkness

  Francis Coyne thrashes the newspaper. Pinkish brown streaks of rhubarb fibre cling to the corner of the front page.

  ‘Father,’ says Clare.

  ‘Mmm? What?’

  ‘I’m going up to Zennor today, to get some eggs and butter.’

  ‘Zennor! Why would you go all the way up there for eggs and butter? Haven’t you asked your uncle?’

  ‘I can’t keep asking Uncle John, Father. He can get much more for butter at the market than we pay him.’

  It’s true, but it’s a slander to Uncle John all the same. He takes pride in himself as provider for the Treveals. She knows that if she asked him Albert or Jo would be sent down that same evening with a plump pound of butter wrapped in a damp muslin cloth. ‘The sweetest butter in all Cornwall,’ Uncle John called it, when he was feeling sentimental, and, ‘It’s all due to the hand at the churn,’ looking at Aunt Annie, who bridled at that because she had a girl to help her now, and it was the girl’s hand at the churn.

  ‘But really,’ Clare goes on quickly, ‘I want to take my sketching things. I want to draw the white Himalayan balsam in the churchtown. We haven’t an illustration of it yet.’

  But he frowns and twitches another piece of toast on to his plate.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Clare, it won’t be in flower for a good two months. Sometimes I think I’ve taught you nothing.’

  ‘And I’m going to visit Mr Lawrence and his wife. They have asked me to tea with them.’

  ‘Mr Lawrence? Mr Lawrence? Who is he? I seem to know the name, but I can’t place him. What sort of people are they?’

  ‘He’s a writer, Father. They’ve taken a cottage at Higher Tregerthen.’

  ‘And how did you meet them?’

  ‘At the concert, with my cousins.’

  It sounds all right. She is margarining a slice of bread, rubbing the grease carefully into the crumb. There’s something tricky here which he can’t put his finger on. Something’s been up with the child since – when? Last Friday? Saturday? And then her cousin leaving on Sunday will have upset her, though she’s said nothing. He hopes they aren’t going to have any more upsets like the one they had after the concert. This is where a girl misses her mother. The trouble is that Clare reads the newspapers and she knows what is going on. It would be easier for her if she were stupid. And now these new people – surely he’s heard that name somewhere? Lawrence. Of course. The writer-fellow there’s been all the trouble about. A German wife or something. And they won’t like that round here. It’s quite bad enough to be a Catholic from London; Francis Coyne is well aware that he is a foreigner and will remain a foreigner long after he has been buried in Coyne Chapel. Let her go. It will do her good to see new people, and a different way of life. A writer ought to have something to talk about beyond the price of pork and pilchards. And if his wife is German, perhaps she is a Catholic? He remembers Bavaria, and his walking tour there during the Long. People walked miles over the mountains to Mass, women in their costumes, men in black hats. And that greeting of theirs: ‘Grüss Gott, Grüss Gott.’ God’s greeting. A true Catholic country; it had touched him more than he expected. He could open any church door and find himself at home. All the beautiful churches were still ours. And now we’re fighting them. What a country it was. Those lakes we bathed in – as cold as death in the height of summer, cold like iron bracelets around wrists and ankles when we swam, weighing us down. We must have walked fifteen miles a day through the forests. The smell of resin, and the silence of the birds. White-haired children herding goats who made the sign of the evil eye as we went past. Those children will be old enough to fight now, I daresay.

  ‘How will you get there? Is somebody going up in a trap?’

  ‘I shall walk. It will do me good,’ she says firmly.

  ‘Higher Tregerthen; that’s this side of the churchtown. Still, it must be six miles.’

  ‘Oh, Father, you know six miles is nothing. And look what a perfect day it is! And it’ll be downhill coming home. I’ll take my sketchbook in case I see anything interesting.’

  She will too. You need a salting of truth in the broth of a lie. She wants to sketch Frieda. Frieda will be beautiful, she is sure of it, even though Mr Lawrence is not beautiful at all. But he is a person whose wife would not be like anybody else’s. You would find yourself looking longest at Mr Lawrence in any crowded room. He’d seem insignificant at a first glance, but your eye would be drawn back to him. He looks so alive.

  The day is alive too, and glorious, even the golden slice of it which is all they can see through their window as they breakfast. Francis looks at his daughter affectionately, reaches over and pats her hand. His strong girl.

  ‘Will you be going over to Newlyn?’ she asks, collecting tea-cups. Her face is averted, her voice casual.

  ‘Why, no – you know I only went there last Thursday. I have no business there today. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I only just wondered – I wasn’t sure.’

  A very slight tremor in the hand which holds the cups, then she’s gone, whisking up from the table with a pile of crockery. Could she have been laughing? Could she have been teasing him? Does she know – has she guessed? Could someone have spoken to her? One of her uncles, letting something slip, trusting the words not to mean anything to her. They don’t know his Clare’s intelligence.

  But no. If she is intelligent, she is also innocent. It’s impossible that she should think or suspect any such thing of her own father.

  ‘I shall go to my study now, Clare.’

  ‘I’m going down to Nan’s to help with her ironing. Then we’ll have lunch early, at twelve. Pickled herring,’ she adds, knowing that her father likes to know but hates to appear greedy. ‘And I have some spring onions.’

  ‘Have you!’ he brightens. ‘Do you know, Clare, I think I shan’t work on my classifications today.’

  ‘Shan’t you?’

  ‘No. I have something else in mind.’ He pauses, shyly, importantly.

  ‘What is it, Father?’

  ‘I thought I’d like to attempt a little sketch of my Oxford days. Nothing significant. I don’t pretend to be in the same league as your Mr Lawrence,’ he disclaims, wondering what Mr Lawrence does write. He must try to find out. He could ask the Rector of Zennor when he next meets him in town. The Rector is an educated man, and must know these Lawrences. It would be interesting to have his opinion of them. And the Rector might be interested in Francis’s memories of Oxford too?

  ‘A small volume, Clare. It could be printed privately, for circulation among friends.’ Francis Coyne looks at his daughter expectantly.

  ‘Oh, yes, Father, that does sound interesting.’

  ‘When we were all young together.’ He puts irony into his voice but there’s something else there too, something which she hears far more rarely from him. Eagerness.

  ‘Stacey – Montfort – all of them. They were wonderful fellows. I made sure Montfort would make his name as a poet – we all did.’

  He sees dripping sun; tall glasses of hock and seltzer. Montfort has just finished reading his new poem. They sprawl in a circle and he stands, his back to the chimney-piece. One of his arms lies easily along the stone shelf, but his left hand grips the paper tight, with the words on it which he’s worked at from tipsy midnight through to morning. He stares round at his friends. For all his nervousness he can’t help knowing, knowing, that they must find it good, as he does. Stacey, Coyne, Chatterne. What will they say?

  ‘Well, what do you say?’ He trusts them enough to ask, to risk it. Tender, humorous, mockingly affectionate, their words swarm in the sunlit room.

  ‘You’ve really done it this time, old fellow!’

  ‘Stupendous.’

  ‘That line about the lily.’

  ‘Let’s hear it again – I thought I detected a false quantity in line 47.’

  They all laugh.

  ‘God, I feel – I can’t tell you!’

  ‘Sit on that man, someone.’
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  A cushion is hurled, a wine-glass topples, a bubbling pool of wine and water runs over the carpet.

  His Clare is looking at him. If only he could show her – make her see – but all that comes out is a repeated ‘They were wonderful fellows’.

  Clare smiles, and straightens the table-cloth.

  Stacey. Montfort. Chatterne. And Eliot, and Stillington too, and all of them. Their sons ought to be at Oxford now, drinking wine and feeling as if it were the morning of the world. Getting drunk and writing poetry and travelling to Prague in the Long. Stacey went to Rome and wrote back, ‘It is all just as we imagined it.’ He fell in love there – we talked of it all Michaelmas term.

  But Oxford’s empty now. All the young men are in France, buried or still breathing, turning up their faces to the sun to feel its warmth. Ranks of schoolboys come up behind to replace them. We have not been able to give our sons anything. Not even one golden year. Gashed and splattered…

  He fumbles The Times in his hands. But he has his Clare, and here she is beside him, solid and warm.

  ‘It was just a thought,’ he apologizes. ‘I don’t suppose I shall do it.’

  She is not interested, he thinks, shutting the study door. He does not guess that she will think of him all the way up the long steep pull of hill out of St Ives, and keep on thinking of him as the road bends and rises and she walks at a good easy pace the six miles to Higher Tregerthen. She thinks of his loneliness. She has always known about it, all her life, because it is half hers. If it weren’t for Nan, and Grandad, and Hannah and Aunt Mag and all of them, and John William and Kitchie and the boys, she would live in the same globe of loneliness as he does. Her mother’s family have a family liking for her father and they respect him, but she knows that they cannot really include him in their lives. None of them can be themselves while he is there. When he comes stooping through Nan’s low doorway the atmosphere changes. Clare and Hannah are chivvied up from the table where they have been sprawling over the trimming of Hannah’s new petticoat, threading ribbons at bodice and hem. Nan talks differently. Grandad leaves off bellowing hymns. Nobody can be himself or herself, even though Francis Coyne must have spent hundreds of hours with them over the years.

  He spends less time now. Now she comes to think of it, she realizes that he hardly ever goes down to Nan’s. He seems to think that now Clare is grown up, and there is no obvious reason for him to call to fetch her or to ask Nan’s advice over a cough or a bad tooth, he has no place there. He has done his duty. That particular tangle of family doesn’t require his presence any more. Nan likes him, but either he doesn’t know it or it wouldn’t mean anything to him. Nan says to Clare: ‘Your father has beautiful teeth.’ That’s so like Nan. She fancies the idea of a son-in-law with beautiful teeth, instead of her broad, lummocking sons. Oh, yes, she likes his teeth and his way of eating and his fineness, but what good’s that if you can’t be happy in the same room together?

  And he’s not at ease with new people. It’s just the same in the Church. He hates meetings, shrinks from comfortable intimacy with ‘Father’. He couldn’t do a good work to save his life, thinks Clare, though he gives enough to charity to stop mouths against him.

  Yes, he’s lonely. Better not think about it. It’s like a bruise, and the day is magnificent. You could sing aloud, glorying in it. You could understand that the Magnificat was once a wild and unstoppable song of triumph, not a delicate lacework of church voices. Little complicated fields glitter. The sun is high and hot, but a breeze keeps the temperature perfect. She’s walking up into wildness, up the little road with rising land on her left. The bracken’s uncurling, white and hooked over at the top of each frond. Rough boulders glitter and the larks’ song melts into the flare of gorse. On her right the sea shines like a shield. She shades her eyes and picks out farms, set in where a hollow will protect them from sea-gales, reached by thick-tunnelled lanes full of hart’s tongue ferns, foxgloves, yarrow. She has been walking for two hours, and soon she should come to the lane for Higher Tregerthen and the farm.

  And there it is, sandy and open at first, and then it turns and is coolly shaded by the high bank on the left.

  ‘Just a little way down,’ he’d said, and soon she sees it. But not one cottage – there are two or three, with the long front of the second one facing the track, just before another turn in the lane. This must be the place. Her boots and stockings and her skirt hem are thick with dust. She stops, and bangs some of it off.

  The door’s open. A snatch of voice – a woman’s voice, quite deep and rich. Then a burst of song without recognizable words. Is it German? No, surely not. It sounds wilder than German. Someone begins to play the piano, not very well. About as well as Clare plays herself.

  Clare walks quietly to the deep-set open door, which is slightly below the level of the lane. She’s looking straight into the one room – and straight through it, for there’s the window through on the other side, looking out over fields and down to the sea. It’s like looking straight through the train John William left on. The room is dark. There she is, a big yellow-haired woman in a white blouse at a cottage piano.

  ‘Hello,’ says Clare.

  The hands drop from the keys and snatch up a Paisley shawl. The woman looks round at her. A broad face, tense and watchful. She does not want anybody here.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  ‘I’m Clare Coyne. I’ve come for tea – have I got the day right? It was Tuesday, wasn’t it?’

  The face changes completely. The woman jumps up and comes to the doorway and holds out her hands, both hands. Direct, warm, impulsive. This is her real face, thinks Clare, the other one was what she has learned to put on. Why?

  Frieda takes Clare’s hand and holds it between hers.

  ‘Of course, I know now. You will think I am so stupid but I am playing the piano and dreaming and did not know the time. And Lorenzo is not here to tell me.’

  ‘Oh. Isn’t he at home?’

  ‘He is only in his garden. His everlasting garden I call it, but I should not complain for he grows us many good things to eat. Radishes and lettuce and carrots and so. You will see. I will call him.’

  She goes to the back and sings out in a full-throated way which reminds Clare more of the women downalong than any lady: ‘Lor-enzo-o! Come!’ Then she turns to Clare and announces confidently, ‘He will come. And he will make tea for us and we have some little cakes too, I think.’

  Gracious, how peculiar, thinks Clare. Isn’t she going to make the tea herself?

  ‘I am lazy, I know,’ confides Frieda. ‘But I have been ill – very ill. Neuritis so bad I could not walk.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Is it better now?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing now,’ shrugs Frieda, losing interest in the topic. ‘Illness is boring, eh? Especially the illnesses of other people. It was so cold, so long a winter here. So much wind and rain – did you not think so?’

  ‘I like the wind – or perhaps I’m used to it. And I think it is wilder up here than in St Ives. You are more exposed.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s wild. Why, at night, when Lorenzo was out’ – she breaks off, glances out the back to see if he is coming, then continues – ‘when he was out, I would be sitting here and the door would bang open – so – just of itself – and all the wind would fly around our house and the curtains would flap and these cups would shake so I think they would fall off. It would be like a wild animal in the house. A wolf perhaps.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a wolf?’ asks Clare eagerly. Germany, after all…

  ‘No – oo, no wolves! When I was a girl we would hear of wolves coming down off the mountains, in the winter, when it had frozen hard for weeks. But I never saw it. We did not live in those parts. But such frosts! – you cannot imagine them. My sister and I would wrap ourselves up in furs, right to our noses.’

  Clare looks around the room. The walls are washed pink – it is not so very dark, after all. The little boxed staircase goes straight up o
n the right-hand side, opposite the deep black fireplace. And the floor-stones are reddish too, scrubbed very clean. It is a queer, definite little room, quite unlike any she has seen before. No farm-worker’s wife would think of making her cottage like this.

  ‘I like your furniture,’ she says, looking at the round rosewood table. ‘Did it come with the cottage?’

  She has said the right thing. Frieda glows, and reaches out to stroke the lovely, responsive wood.

  ‘No, no, we bought it in St Ives for sixpence!’ cries Frieda. ‘They are so stupid there that nobody wants it. They must have new things. Everything must be new and ugly. What fools! So we buy all this, and bring it up on a cart and make our home. Even the piano.’

  ‘You didn’t get that for sixpence!’ says Clare, laughing.

  ‘No, that is quite true, it was very extravagant, it cost us five pounds. We only bought it this spring, but now we play it all the time, and sing.’

  ‘And your china too – it’s so pretty.’ For Frieda has arranged it, none of it matching, bright, curious, delicate. One vase is stuffed with bluebells. They keel over lightly, beautifully, dipping their heads, bringing their smoky hyacinthine scent into the room.

  ‘Ah! Now he comes!’

  He is at the back, taking off his soil-clodded boots. He nods at Clare as he comes in and goes straight to the stone sink to wash his hands, which he does carefully, turning one hand over the other to examine his nails. All his movements are neat and exact. Unlike Frieda, he looks as if he belongs in a place like this. And yet he’s a gentleman, isn’t he? A writer? Or perhaps he’s a half-and-half, like her.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he says. ‘She’s given you nothing to eat or drink, I’ll be bound.’