He sounds like one of her uncles. What can have happened? Father never talks like this. Dull red mottles his neck as he struggles with his left boot.
‘Let me.’
‘No, I have it. There.’
‘Father, what happened?’
She is terrified by the bitterness in his voice. The flat ungivingness of it. Everyone is changing – even her father is no longer the same.
‘Tell me.’
‘You must give me your word that what I tell you will never be repeated.’
‘Aren’t you going to tell Aunt Sarah – or Nan?’
‘It must never be repeated.’
‘All right. I promise.’
And he tells her. The day is dark already, so it does not darken. The grey sky stays just as grey, and the swiftly moving clouds do not stop, or turn backward in their course. The noise of the sea goes on and on. The war continues at Passchendaele in the Ypres sector. The noise of guns.
‘Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear it?’
Francis Coyne can hear it now, and the voices singing out, and the cry of wounded men as they hold their entrails together and beg for water which cannot come until dark when a stretcher-party will try to reach them. The faces of the stretcher-bearers are no longer appalled by anything, but their hands are still gentle as they refuse to put in the bullet the wounded man screams for. They are men, not beasts.
John William had a revolver. He put it into his mouth, pointed it upwards, and squeezed the trigger. He was used to shooting. He did not make any stupid mistake like trying to shoot himself through the heart, and he made no error in the angle of the barrel. All the same it was lucky he could not foresee the heart-stopping spray of his brains and bone over the whitewashed walls of the hut, or the way he spoiled the clean laundry for eight men. And someone had to pick it all up, and clean it away. One of the detail said, ‘Yer’d a thought the bugger could’ve done it out in the woods.’ For that was the way they talked, to make it all bearable. And perhaps the bugger could have, or perhaps he’d had enough of men dying in mud and dirt holes where no one had to clear up after them. Maybe he thought he would spoil one white room in Blighty, and make them clean it, and know that a man had died there.
There is Clare with her white, white face, his own daughter shrinking back from him.
‘Did you see him?’ she whispers at last.
He shakes his head.
She raises both her clenched fists and bangs them against the side of her head, at the temples.
‘Why did you tell me!’ she screams. ‘I shall never get it out of my mind.’
And she bangs and batters, as if she will fight her way into her own skull and beat out the knowledge which he has put in there. He seizes her hands, and holds them down. He is just stronger than her.
‘Clare. Clare. Clare, listen to me…’
And she collapses against him, burrowing her head into his chest. It is frightful, he thinks. He would never have thought she’d take it like this. Could there have been something between them – some understanding he didn’t know about? No, it couldn’t be. The rest of the family would have known about it. Nan would have told him. And Clare is half a child still. It is the shock.
‘Clare, Clare,’ he remonstrates, rocking her. But he is fiercely glad. She is his, his own daughter, his own Clare. His little red-haired one. Let Nan and Hannah and Mag and all the rest of them know it. They are outside, and he is inside. He will be the one who comforts her.
‘Nan,’ she hiccups. ‘Nan.’
‘What, my darling?’
‘Don’t tell her.’
‘I won’t tell her. I won’t tell anyone. We shall be the only ones who know.’
‘Don’t light the candle, Clarey! Come on out.’
‘But I’m only in my night-dress. I can’t.’
‘You’ll be warm enough.’
We shall be the only ones who know.
‘Stop that whistling, John William! You’ll whistle up ill-luck for yourself.’
We shall be the only ones who know.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Down to the sea.’
‘Which way are we going?’
‘Down through the cemetery.’
‘Are you a mermaid?’
‘Are you a human boy?’
‘Come here and let me hold you.’
We shall be the only ones who know.
Twenty-two
Little Clarey in her black dress, a smudge on the front steps, in high-walled steep alleys. The houses are white cliffs to Clare, and the women who lean out of their windows to screech across at one another and hang out their washing are seagulls roosting fiercely in the cliff crevices. They are big women with brawny arms and hard hands who will slap Clare if she goes near their washing baskets and meddles. Nan has put her out for the morning. All the others are at school, and Clare isn’t to have her lessons today because Miss Purse’s mother has had one of her turns. (Gagging, reeling Mrs Purse with her face like a white and red crumpled cloth at the door of the poky parlour where Clare is taught.) But Nan and Aunt Mag have got the morning-room curtains to finish for Carrack House, and if they are not delivered on time a shilling must be deducted from the charge.
Clare rumples up her petticoat and sits on the thickness of it, because the stone is cold. Her black bonnet drags at the back of her neck by the strings which she has nearly chewed through. Her red hair straggles over her shoulders. A grey day. No Nan and no cousins. Grandad is not there for her to smell his tobacco and play round his feet. Clare has a thick piece of bread with lardy bacon in it for her dinner. She must mind and play and be a good girl and not run off.
She stands up and pats the warm nibbled lump of bread in her pocket. And down the cobbles she goes, stepping from one to another, pretending that she is crossing a river, pretending to herself that she does not notice that she is getting farther and farther from the cottage door. Now she is out of Nan’s hearing. Now she is under the arch, and she skips across the deep launder, hopscotch, back and forth, draggling her skirt in the dirty running water. A big seagull voice cawks at her, and she dodges off, farther again, slipping along by the high steps on one side of the houses. And down, and down, until the sheer white light of the harbour bursts all over her and she blinks and screws up her eyes. She will watch the carts and horses drawing off the pilchards.
Everyone’s working. No one notices Clare except to shout her out of the way once, when she comes close to the hoofs of a straining horse and an arm reaches out and half lifts, half knocks her out of its path. For a second the horse’s huge, hairy hoof is by her temples. It strikes out, struggling for a grip on the fish-slimed cobbles. She tumbles out of its way and makes off up the harbour wall with a curse after her. The sails are the colour of blood setting on a scab, she thinks, and remembers her knee, and picks at it slowly, deliciously, easing the big brown crust off the shiny pink surface of new skin underneath. Half off. She will eat it. Already she can taste its dense chewiness. But the middle of the scab won’t come. She pulls again and there it is, with blood on it, and a new dent of blood where the scab was, slowly filling up. She eats the scab and tastes fresh salty blood on it. The air wheels with screaming seagulls, plummeting and rising high into the air again, maddened by the dense silver mountains of pilchards. She looks down and is giddy with pilchards. Are they alive still? Oh, the man with his hands plunged into them, his hands all scaled and rich with silver pilchards, and then he lets them fall as if he were lifting them like silver money for the pure joy of having and letting go.
Clare shies her way back up the alley, face bland, eyes watchful. How long has she been gone? She is not properly sure if she’s been asleep or not. It was warm by the bollard, and she ate her bread and bacon in mouse-bites, hiding it inside her hand against seagulls and bad boys who hadn’t gone to school. She made herself small and put her apron over her head to dull the horses and carts and men and women and screaming gulls. Beat after beat of voice and noise
s. Dark. Sharp. Dark. Sharp. Clouds going over the sun when Clare’s eyes are shut.
I’m dawdling, she thinks now, tasting the word as she comes up the cobbles, battering her stout little boots the way she’s been told never to do, for it wastes shoe-leather. Nan’s always telling her to run and not dawdle. The bread and bacon is not solid inside her any more. It must be a long, long time since she ate it, and perhaps it’s nearly night now. She looks up at the sky and can’t tell. Night has a way of slamming down on her, pouring out stars when she is playing out wildly, ready to play for ever.
A hand snatches her from behind.
‘You young divil!’
It’s Grandad.
‘Don’t yer know yer Nan ’n’ Aunt Mag’ve had to run all over the town looking for you stead a getting their work done? Where’ve you been to?’
But she stands brazenly looking up at him, straight at him without a tear or a blush. He sees she has the devil in her today. Five years old and fit to lie her head off like a woman of fifty. Satan has got half his work done for him here. Grandad roars out, and Nan and Aunt Mag come to the door. A flock of seagulls from the opposite cottages leans out of the windows and caws to the Treveals.
‘Thank the Lord you’ve found her!’ cries Nan.
‘Found her! She’s found herself! Run off for pure devilment, that’s all it was!’
‘You bad girl,’ says Nan, but the relief in her voice is stronger than the anger. Clare smiles, and makes to run and snuggle against her, but this is more than Grandad can bear. He catches her back, switches up her dress and petticoats and pulls down her drawers. Clare struggles to run, but with her drawers round her ankles she cannot. Instead she screeches shrilly, ‘Bog! Bog!’ which is all she dares to say of the word ‘bugger’.
However, it is enough for Grandad, and for the amusement of the watching women. In a second he has hauled her over his knee. In a second she has twisted round and bitten the side of his left hand, which is holding her down across the back and shoulders. She tastes the familiar smell of blood, spits and shrieks again.
‘Bog! Bog! Bog, Grandad!’
‘Tell she’s got red hair without lookin at er,’ remarks one woman to another in the next doorway.
Grandad smacks Clare so hard that Nan darts forward to catch hold of his arm. But before she can do so, he shoves the child off his knee and stamps into the house, leaving Clare upended on the cobbles, still screeching. But she stops at once as Nan picks her up.
‘Pull yer drawers up, Clarey. What a sight! And everyone looking at yer.’
Clare is silent at once. She settles her own clothes as coolly as if she were getting dressed in the morning in her own bedroom. She will not let Nan help her. Then she takes Nan’s hand and tucks her thumb inside Nan’s in their ‘special’ way, and walks into the cottage, her head well up. Mute, and stubborn, she is put to bed until her father should fetch her. Rumblings downstairs. Nan’s voice, then Grandad’s.
Clare sleeps again. When she wakes, her father has come for her, but Nan and Aunt Mag are still working. Nan gets up from her chair, blinking as she looks up from the fine stuff she’s sewing, putting one hand to her tired back. She kisses Clare just as she always does, and says, ‘Go and kiss Grandad.’
But Clare will not. She pretends to be sleepy, and clings to her father’s hand, and stumbles out past Grandad without looking at him. When she has gone, he laughs. He is tickled by her small fierce face, her deliberate aloofness.
‘Did you see that, Alice? Er won’t come to me! Er won’t come to me!’
‘She’ll come,’ murmurs Nan, frowning over the gathers.
‘Just because I tan her backside for her, our Clarey won’t as much as look at me!’ he marvels, almost appreciatively. Nan smiles. Thank the Lord the child’s devilment’s caught his fancy.
Mag’s lips narrow. She’s heard enough from Stan of thrashings handed out to the boys when they were young. Lucky Stan’s not here now. Nothing makes him angrier than Grandad’s softness to Hannah and Clare.
Nan sews. Her thoughts are like stitches, each one tiny and precise and not much in itself, but making up the strong seam. She thinks about Clare, and her responsibility for Clare. She weighs over Francis Coyne in her mind, and what can be expected from him. But she cannot judge the weight of him. Is he going to be able to rear that child as she should be reared? In her mind she feels around the edges of what Francis Coyne lacks. It is hard to put into words, and she does not need to try. These thoughts are for herself alone. Clare’s red hair and her white, wild face. Say what you like, but some things are born, not bred, and you can’t change them. A good child seven days out of the seven, but she’s good because she wants to be, not because it’s in her nature. Nan sighs and smiles, thinking of the turn of Clare’s thumb under her own, the secret sign of love. How she watches us all. Well, we can do nothing but pray to the Lord and watch her. Keep her with her cousins. She’s safe enough along with them. Better than with Miss Purse. Nan’s face wrinkles in distaste for the Purse family’s fits and vapours.
Fifteen years later Nan sews and thinks of Clare. She treadles the Singer in its placid, slightly irregular rhythm, and yards of plain seaming spill down over her sewing-table. Her eyes are not good tonight. It has strained them to make Sarah’s mourning. Sarah would not have her Sunday dress dyed like the rest of them, and Arthur was weak and gave in to her. You would never think how black would grow to dazzle your eyes as you sat sewing it. Still, these sheets are white. Good, seemly white sheets. Nan feels the quality of the cotton twill. Not like the rubbish we get now, since the war.
Well, Sarah and Harry are back in their own place now. Nan doesn’t like the look of Harry’s arm. It wasn’t more than a week before she knew it was going to take bad ways. And she’d been right. Dr Kernack had gone quiet the last time he looked at it, then he had spoken to her privately in the kitchen and told her that Harry would lose the use of it entirely. The nerve had been severed. But there was no use troubling Sarah. Let her come to that when she must. She was a poor thing at the best of times and what sense she had was driven out of her by John William’s death. It was as well she had a daughter like Hannah.
Clare. Paler than ever, and she never had but a pinch of colour at the best of times. Now she’s like whey. No one’d look at her.
Nan treadles, and pushes the cloth smoothly under the machine-foot. Thoughts of Susannah. Push them away, don’t let them form. They do nothing but harm. Besides, Susannah had a good colour right up to the day the doctor told them there was no hope for her. Clare is a Coyne through and through to look at her. There’s not a red hair among all the Treveals, nor one face the colour of Clare’s.
Nan treadles on. The things they think they hide from us, these girls. Take Hannah now. Hannah tearing out her heart over Sam and saying nothing. But I could tell her, he’ll be back, you can be sure of it. Because he needs you, Hannah, because your Sam is a poor thing for all he’s so handsome and six foot in his stockings. But there’s no telling you that. There’s trouble between you now, I know, but your trouble will pass. Or you will think it’s passed, though to my mind it will be only just beginning.
But Clare. My Clarey. Hovering in the doorway, with her shawl wrapped around her like a smudge on a ghost.
‘I think I won’t stop, Nan. I ought to get Father’s supper. And I’m colouring a drawing for him.’
Your father’s supper has never been started at four o’clock since this world began. I want to tell you to come on in, girl, and get your things off and sit down with your Nan, but I don’t say anything. For fear of scaring you. You don’t want to be with us, do you, my lovey? You don’t want us to share your grieving. You don’t want your Nan.
Oh, if I could just look up now and see the pair of you laughing over your nonsense. But Hannah’s taken up entirely with Harry, because that’s the way she wants to be. To stop her thinking. And what’s my Clarey taken up with?
Nan treadles on. A quiet house for once, with Sarah ba
ck in her own kitchen, and Hannah hanging over her brother, and Mag visiting John and Annie purely for the sake of coming back snappish and discontented. There’s nothing worse in God’s creation than a discontented woman. But there’s no Clarey coming in through the doorway on a swirl of wind, and John bellowing out to the girls to keep the door shut. Or maybe I should go up there and see her? But it’ll seem strange to her. Better let her think she’s able to hide her troubles.
Clare crouches on the middle of the kitchen-table in her stocking-feet. She shifts her weight cautiously to the edge of the table. It creaks, but does not tip. A bit farther. Then she braces her calf and thigh muscles, and springs out towards the hard stone floor. Her heels strike with a sickening jar which goes right up through her spine, making her gag. Again. If only the kitchen ceiling was higher and she could stand up and jump properly. That would be sure to work better. She crouches again, shuts her eyes and springs. But this time she misjudges it so badly that she falls backwards, striking the knob of her spine against the table-leg and biting her tongue. Once more. I must do it once more, then I’ll let myself go and lie down. Her next jump is soft and useless. She despises herself, but she can’t bring herself to scramble back on to that table. She limps upstairs and lies down on her bed.
It’s not easy to say why suspicion and fear and curiosity and excitement and disbelief should suddenly vanish, leaving nothing but hard certainty. But it’s very easy to say when it happened. It was at quarter to five last Friday evening, between peeling the potatoes and dropping them into a panful of cold salted water. Before, when she fetched the potatoes out of the cellar, she was not pregnant. Her visitor was late: but then it had been late before. Eight days; well, perhaps not quite as late before. Fourteen days. It is the shock of John William. I’m quite well and not any fatter. Peer in the mirror: my face is thinner, if anything. Look at my eyes. Seventeen days. A hot, insistent beat of panic behind everything, all day long. Twenty-one days. A surge of confidence. I am stupid to worry. It’s perfectly all right. It is simply that I’m going to miss out one month, and then everything will go on as usual.