Zennor in Darkness

‘Come on, Clare,’ says Lawrence, touching her elbow.

  Seventeen

  He says very little as they walk up the lane side by side. The silence is cool spring water after so much talk. And such talk! – she can’t absorb it all at once. She’ll have to take it in slowly, while she wipes the plates and sets the table for tomorrow’s breakfast and talks to her father of spring onions and Sheba. Lawrence points to a clump of white foxgloves, like the ones she drew. They are flowering early this year, forced on by the heat of May. The bracken has unfurled to fresh silvery points. She catches one between her fingers, and it breaks off with a dull, tender snap. Puffs of dust kick up under their boots. Clare is tired: the day’s been so long, and she’s swung far out of the orbit of home and Nan. Yet she’s excited too. Suddenly it seems much too tame just to turn left and walk down the quiet high road home, towards her father and the smells of polish and pickled herring. They are nearly at the top of the lane, and the sweet evening wind is blowing from the sea. The light’s golden here, glowing, almost incandescent. If she were to paint someone in this light… Lawrence, say… to paint him out of pure light and show the way his solid form makes the light jump and dance… And yet she’s got to go home, just when she feels so alive. She could stay up all night, walk all night, paint as she’s never painted in her life.

  ‘Why do we live in houses?’ she demands and stands still, reaching up into the warm sky, bathing her hands in the breeze, laughing at the feel of it, laughing back at Lawrence.

  ‘What do you want to do – pull down the sky?’ asks Lawrence, but she looks at his face and knows that the same restless energy is licking through him, filling his limbs, his hands, his voice. She stares out at the big sun as it drops quickly westward.

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ she says.

  ‘No. Why should you?’ he responds. But he’s waiting for her to take the lead. She’s in charge.

  ‘Let’s go the other way,’ she says.

  ‘What, towards the churchtown? Do you still want to go there?’

  ‘How do you mean – still?’

  ‘Something your cousin said. That you always wanted to go to the church, to see the mermaid.’

  ‘Did he say that? Why, I’d forgotten. I haven’t thought of that for years. How strange…’

  It’s certainly strange. She doesn’t forget much to do with John William. She fumbles for the memory but it won’t come; there’s a blur of sensation, nothing more. Never mind, it’ll come back if she doesn’t force it. Everything to do with John William comes back in the end.

  ‘We’ll go there now,’ she announces. Lawrence will come. He’s bound to do what she wants. Just at this moment she knows that everything is with her; the warm expectant evening, the long hush of the sea, the constant secret presence of John William. ‘Are you coming?’ she challenges.

  ‘Look, there’s the moon,’ he answers. There it hangs, pale and insignificant. Daylight takes a long time to die here.

  ‘Frieda will be all right, won’t she?’ asks Clare.

  ‘Oh, she’s used to it. I often go out in the evenings. I can’t stay cooped in one place, thinking. She knows that, really.’

  ‘You go down to the farm, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, or I go walking with William Henry. Like us, now. It’s the best time. You feel you can do anything: run over the fields to the sea, turn round and find the farm gone and nothing there but little dark Cornish farmers from a thousand years ago, looking at you… have you ever noticed the way the Cornish look at you? No, of course you haven’t. This is your place, isn’t it, Clare Coyne? But you haven’t got those Cornish eyes – soft and dark and a bit inscrutable. Your cousin Hannah has those eyes. Do you know William Henry?’

  ‘Yes, he comes into market, doesn’t he – and my uncle knows him. My Uncle John, who has the farm.’

  ‘Everyone knows everyone here. I’m a fool to forget it. But William Henry – he’s not like a common farmer. Those eyes of his – they draw all your thoughts out of you. Yet there’s something else there – something a bit sceptical – even jeering – as if he’d like to do you down for getting close to him.’

  Where’s she heard that tone before? Wistful, puzzling, eager? Why, in herself. That’s what she hears when she turns over and over the secret of John William, like turning a coin in her pocket at full moon, and the secret quickens into life, flames up, dies down. When you love someone, you just want to say his name. That’s what Nan told her years ago, when Clare asked how it was that she always knew when a girl liked a boy long before anything was ever said. No courtship, no marriage, no pregnancy had ever surprised Nan.

  ‘It’s from watching, Clarey. Most folk walk around with their eyes shut. And there’s other sure signs: say, if a girl always brings a man’s name into her conversation where it doesn’t belong, then you know she’s saying it for the pure pleasure of having his name in her mouth. Names are magical things, Clarey, never forget that.’

  But how can Lawrence feel anything like that about another man? She must have misunderstood, that’s all.

  He’s walking with her and the last bees swing past them, heavily laden, down to the farm stocks. They fly close to the earth now, late in the evening, going home. Frieda will be waiting. No she won’t, thinks Clare quickly. She’s not like the women of the town, pulling the potatoes off the fire before they boil to rags, keeping her man’s plate covered and warm at the bottom of the range for fear of feeling the back of his hand when he comes home late and truculent to a spoiled dinner. Frieda does not cook or sweep or spin. Frieda sits in her chair like a queen. Clare smiles, making it up, but her powers of invention falter as the road opens to the right and reveals the long, changeful, violet-shadowed slope to the sea.

  The graveyard is full of people Clare has known. She kneels, examining names, tracing family trees, stories, allegiances, old hates and likings, while Lawrence sits back on his heels and urges her on. She matches each name to its own patch of earth: to the one it tilled before it came here, or to the restless acres of the sea. There are Celtic crosses, trefoils and rough, potent granite stones too hard for a name to be worn into them. They rise like a wave towards the sweep of the moor. She stops, exhausted and looks up at him.

  ‘That’s a funny way of sitting,’ she says.

  ‘It’s very comfortable. You ought to try it. It’s the way all the miners sit at home, squatting against the walls after the shift. I used to pass them on my way home from school. My father’ud be there too, making them all laugh.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He was famous through the whole pit. He could mimic anyone: the men loved him.’

  The bitterness in his voice is so much at odds with his words that she searches his face, puzzled.

  ‘Didn’t you like that?’

  There’s a pause. Carefully Lawrence selects a blade of grass from a long tangled clump, breaks it off, raises it to his lips and blows. There’s a feeble fluttering squeak, then he blows again and a keen whistle parts the air. She smiles: it’s ages since she thought of doing that. He grins back at her.

  ‘My father taught me,’ he says. ‘He taught me lots of things like that. Trouble was, I never thought they were worth anything. Not compared to real learning, the kind of thing they taught us at school. And my mother agreed with me.’

  ‘That was sad.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘It was, though at the time I though it was just what I wanted. Once I went back home, and an old man who’d known my father stopped me in the street. I can see him now, in his clean Sunday clothes, a bit bent and having to walk carefully. He’d danced with my father when they were young… but now he was old and tired and angry. He said that I’d shamed a finer man than I’d ever be, writing of him in my books. He stood there telling me this, and I couldn’t even remember his name. My father knew every man in the pit, and they all knew him. But my father’s friends never came to our house. He would meet them in the pub. When I was little I’d think what a place it
must be, that all the men wanted to go there so badly. But my mother said it was a nasty place where men went to drink away the money that might have made decent-looking women of their wives and chances for their children. He used to run a dancing-class…’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘The best dancer for miles around, they said he was, before he married. But he’d long stopped dancing by the time I knew him. And my mother never danced with him once she was married. He was the best dancer, and the handsomest – so quick and always the kind of man you warmed to – you couldn’t help yourself. Unless you’d grown to hate him…’

  There he goes, brooding over his father just like he brooded over William Henry, with the same helpless regret and longing. Why can’t he stop thinking of them both and sit in the last bit of sun and whistle with the grass? He ought to have seen Francis Coyne and Susannah Treveal together. That would have given him something to think about.

  ‘They were as different as cream from herring,’ said Nan, when Clare asked for stories of her parents. But Nan would never say that cream was better than herring; each was good in its kind. And you would sicken of the one in time, and want the other.

  Lawrence smiles suddenly, unfolds himself and stands over her. He reaches out his hand.

  ‘Come on. We’ll go and look inside the church.’

  She takes his hand, smiling back, and yields to let him pull her up.

  Neither of them sees that they are seen. At that moment the Rector goes down the path from the church door, head down. He catches a movement to his right and turns and there they are: two figures balanced like figures in a dance, one lifting, one lifted, both smiling, the warm evening sun catching and lighting them. Unmistakably they flame in consecrated ground: the daughter of his friend with her rare flag of red hair, and his outlandish red-bearded enemy. There they are. They have not seen him. He steps forward as if to speak, then moves back. He will watch. He will let them betray themselves. Even from here he can see that the girl is flushed, and her hair has come loose around her face. There she is lolling on a gravestone, on the bones of Christ’s chosen. He moves back further, into the shadows, and watches. They stand, and after a long interval their parted hands separate. The girl brushes herself down, then turns as if to display herself. The man leans forward and brushes grass from her back, her skirt. They pick their way through the gravestones, faces animated and bent together, noticing nothing. They turn towards the church porch, and the Rector wants to cry out against sacrilege, but he holds back the cry. Let them eat and drink to their own damnation. They melt into the porch and he hears the click and groan of the church door, then they are gone. Out of their own mouths they have condemned themselves. What I have seen I have seen, he mutters quoting wildly from his own scriptures as he backs out and confronts the Tinner’s Arms, glaring.

  ‘Is it this way?’

  They blunder down the aisle. The church is dark and cool, a vessel of stone-chilled air. It feels so cold that Clare shivers. She begins to remember something – some dim recollection of stumbling out of the blaze of a summer day, the church air washing over a prickle of sunburn, the sudden silence.

  ‘It’s down here.’

  Lawrence’s voice sounds frighteningly loud, but he is only talking as he usually does.

  ‘Do you always whisper in churches?’ he mocks. ‘Who do you think is listening?’

  No one at all. There’s no steady red glow and dip of the sanctuary lamp, no candles flickering with the prayers of those who have already walked out into the sunlight, no murmur of voices from the confessionals. Only this ancient, untenanted silence. You couldn’t say a prayer here. It would be soaked up at once by these granite walls, and blotted out.

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ she whispers.

  But he’s not listening. ‘Here she is,’ he says, and kneels. The little mermaid, carved into dark wood. And Clare knows her. Her fingers reach out for the familiar curves of that body which drew her again and again in her childhood. How could she have forgotten.

  ‘Little mermaid,’ Clare greets her.

  She has got no more wounds since Clare last touched her. Those gashes are polished with age now, and if she is lucky no one will add to them. Will they throw her out of the church again, as they have done before? She smiles and raises her arms, and will not answer. Does she even know what she can stir in those who crouch beside her to pray or to draw out a knife? ‘Virgin most pure, star of the sea,’ Clare mutters. That was it. That was what she used to sing, blurring this beautiful thing in her heart with the Virgin she was taught to love. And Hannah laughed once and they fought blindly and silently, scuffling on the cold floor for fear of waking the echoes. And John William traced the mermaid’s scales and her round breasts and said nothing.

  ‘She doesn’t belong here,’ says Lawrence.

  ‘Why, of course she does!’ says Clare, far more loudly than she intended, surprised by the force of her own anger. ‘It’s only bigots who say she doesn’t, and try to drive her out.’

  ‘No,’ says Lawrence slowly. ‘She doesn’t belong. She’s half and half. They laugh at her on land, and hate her. And when she’s in the sea, she can’t breathe. So what’s left for her? She can only sit on her rock, neither on land nor in the sea, and wait, and drive men mad. So they hate her all the more, all the time they’re pretending to love her and want her –’

  ‘But why? Why do they have to hate her? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Because she makes people think that there’s something more – something they haven’t been told about. And they’ll never have it. Look at her face.’

  ‘It’s worn to nothing,’ says Clare.

  ‘Only because so many people have touched it. It makes her more beautiful.’

  Clare does not want to hear any more. His words are taking the little mermaid away from her.

  ‘There’s another way of looking at it,’ she says. ‘She can swim and she can breathe – and she loves both. She has both. Why should there be anything sad about it?’

  He turns to her and smiles. It’s a smile fully for herself, acknowledging, appreciative.

  ‘Long may you believe that, Clare Coyne,’ he answers.

  Eighteen

  Two weeks later, out in her backyard in the morning sun, Clare thinks she would like to go and see Frieda again. Lugging the heavy wash-basket of wet clothes into the garden has made her think of Frieda. What does she do on washing-day? No doubt she laughs and says Lorenzo must do it, he does it so beautifully. Once in her life, Frieda scrubbed a floor, or so Lawrence said. But it was only once. She wasn’t brought up to do such work – not like us.

  Not like us, indeed, thinks Clare grimly, as she hauls out the first twisted sheet from her pile, ready to put it through the mangle. Prices are going up all the time, but their income has dipped again. She’s decided that they’ll have to stop sending the sheets to the laundry. She has always done the clothes-washing at home, but it was her luxury not to wash the sheets and to get them back from the laundry in a brown-paper parcel, starched so stiff so that they creaked when she unfolded them. It is heavy work to fold over the wet sheets and feed them little by little through the mangle, and into the zinc bucket on the other side. The mangle-rollers ride roughly over four thicknesses of sheet. Her hands are red and raw from washing-soda, and her hair sticks to her forehead in tight curls from the steam. She’s sweating so much that her overall sticks to her. She wriggles inside it. The sun beats on the back of the house, and bounces against the whitewashed garden wall. They have even mentioned this unusual spell of fine weather in the newspaper. But other news is crowding for space. There was a bad air-raid in London yesterday, one of the worst of the war. Here the sky stays empty and blue. What must it be like to live in London and see bombs falling out of the skies? But here the talk is of U-boats, not aeroplanes. Everyone is asking what Jellicoe’s going to do about the latest sinkings. It can’t go on like this, with the Germans stealing in under our very noses. Those U-boats do ju
st as they like. They pick off our supply-ships one by one.

  Oh, there’s good news too. There’s always good news. The country has been on the point of a decisive victory for three years now. Now the papers are full of General Plumer’s triumph at the Messines Ridge. It’s better to write about the million tons of TNT it took to blow up the ridge than of the 600,000 tons of shipping lost to the U-boats every month.

  ‘Haig’s chance has come,’ said her father that morning. ‘Now they’ll have to give him a free hand.’

  He sounds eager, as if the news has refreshed him. He has started to order the Morning Post, as well as The Times, to find out what Gwynne’s got to say.

  ‘He’s after Lloyd George to “take charge” in France. Thinks the French would move aside for our Welsh Wizard. Mark you, Clare, Gwynne’s got no more time for Lloyd George than he has for any other politician. What he wants is for the generals to get a free hand.’

  Clare thinks that the cost of two newspapers a day would go a long way to paying her laundry bills.

  How they long for a final onslaught, no matter what it costs. If only it could all be over, no matter what. Last night, slicing a pair of raw kidneys, she was dizzy, seeing how the newly sharpened knife parted the caul and exposed a delicate tracery of ducts. All so exquisitely made, and so easy to spoil. Those kidneys would begin to stink within the hour in this hot weather if she left the meat-dish out in the sun. Then the blowflies would come. She shuddered, covered the kidneys with a plate and put them in the meat-safe until supper-time. The third sheet. Only this one, and one more. Then the table-cloths, and her boiled glass-cloths and dish-rags. She’d rest for a minute before pegging up the sheets. She dreads doing it today; the line is so heavy once all the clothes are on it and it has to be hoisted up into the sunshine by the pulley. She shivers. She must have got over-heated. Just this one sheet now.

  And there’s Hannah, a blur of light at the back-entry gate. Good. That means I’ll have to stop for a bit. Hannah wavers on, indistinct in the blinding light, fumbling with the gate-latch. It always sticks, but Hannah knows the way of it – why is she taking so long?