The Lie (13 page)

Felicia waits.

‘Your grandmother never spoke to me,’ I say. ‘She didn’t know I was there.’

‘She was the same with all of us,’ says Felicia quickly.

‘She must have talked to you sometimes.’

‘She told me to sit up straight. I can hear her now.
Sit up straight, miss.
I used to wonder if she knew my name.’

I remember the old woman’s rusty black dresses, and yet she’d had ten thousand pounds misered away. If she had taken out her banknotes then and given me a hundred pounds, I would have pelted home. I’d have burst into the house, barely able to speak. That night we’d have had lamb chops, my mother’s favourite. We’d have piled our fire with coal. My mother would have rested at home instead of going out to clean. A hundred pounds might have kept her alive. And now Felicia says I can have five thousand.

‘I don’t want it, Felicia,’ I say. Black anger breaks bubbles in me, like road-menders’ tar. I don’t know what I’ll say if I stay here another minute. I scrape my chair back and stand up. She stands too, and clasps her hands tight in front of her.

‘I’ve offended you,’ she says.

I can’t answer her. I want to pull down the house, brick by brick, as she said. I’m not angry with Felicia. The clear oval of her face is turned to me, her eyes black with trouble. I remember how wild she was, like a poppy or a marigold, some tough, constant little flower that grew by itself on the edge of things. I remember how she would run in spurts along the garden paths, with her dusty handfuls of treasure – stones and shells I think, she would never show them – and then she would lag by the gooseberry bushes, singing to herself hoarsely, a song without words. She was always at the corner of my eye then; I rarely looked at her straight, because my vision was taken up by Frederick.

9

To gain a decisive success the enemy must be driven out of his defences and his armies crushed in the open.

I KNEW HE
would be at the foot of my bed tonight, and here he is. His head is bowed. His back is turned to me, and he’s deep in thought, away by himself in that place where you can never reach even those you know best. That’s how I realised what a soul was, when I was young. I’d sung about it in hymns, along with everyone else. I had a soul, I knew that, just as I knew I had a stomach. But it meant nothing until one day I saw my mother sitting in her chair by the unlit fire, her eyes open as if she was looking at the wall opposite. But she wasn’t. If I’d made a sound she would have turned and become my mother again. I didn’t make a sound. She was away, and I couldn’t come to her. I saw something then: loneliness, like a frost that burns your hand when you touch it. I knew she was away, and I couldn’t come near without breaking whatever it was that held her. When I first read ‘
My soul, there is a country/Far beyond the stars
 . . .’ I knew what it meant. It was about how lonely we all were, trying to come close but something always stopping us, that something inside us that was as far away as the stars. From that time on, when I looked up at the night sky I couldn’t feel that the stars were companions. I saw a forest of lights, going away into nowhere.

‘Frederick,’ I say, but he doesn’t turn. The frost holds him. Tonight I’m less afraid of him than I’ve ever been, but farther from him too. He stands and dreams, lost in himself, and my voice doesn’t touch him.

We are together in the shell-hole. He’s propped against the back of the dugout. I’ve had to push and shove to get him safe, and I’m afraid I’ve hurt him, but this is the best place he can be. He doesn’t cry out, but his breath whistles through his teeth. Even though there’s no water in the dugout, it oozes damp, and stinks of raw earth and gas. I am wet and cold with sweat. The noise of shelling is not so loud now. It smells of blood down here too, like a butcher’s shop. It takes a while before I understand where the smell is coming from. A rat scampers, close by, then goes still before I know where it is. It will have smelled the blood. I kick out, in case it’s by my foot. Nothing happens.

I prop my rifle beside me, then think again, take it and lay it across my knees to examine the firing mechanism. Frederick’s equipment was blown away into the mud. I’ve got his revolver.

If they haven’t come by dark we have a chance. If Frederick rests he’ll be strong enough to move. I can get him out of the shell-hole. Once we’re out, the flashes from the guns will show me where the line is. Men have come back long after everyone’s given them up. Spike Rowe did. He crawled from shell-hole to shell-hole. He fell asleep in one, he said, didn’t know how long he slept, maybe a day and a night and day, then he came on. The worst danger he was in was when our sentries shot at him before he started singing out in English. His eyes were white all round and his body black with earth that had blown into him from the shell-blast that ripped his tunic and trousers off. All he had on him was rags. Every grain of his skin was full of dirt.

‘Where’s that fucking Sunlight Soap to,’ said Dickie Fadge, as he knelt beside Spike and unwrapped, very gently, the last rags of his puttees. Spike didn’t flinch. He looked down at himself as if he didn’t know what was there.

‘Cleanest fighter in the world, that’s the British Tommy, did you know that, Spikey,’ said Jack Peach, and he held his can of cold tea to Spike’s mouth. It gaped open and the tea ran down his chin.

My head pounds and I begin to believe that I’m wounded too, even though I know I’m not. They’ll come back. They will retake the shell-hole. There’s nothing to stop them. Maybe they already know we’re down here and they are muttering, out of hearing, deciding what’s best. Chuck in a couple of grenades first, to flush us out. They’re safe in their trenches, which are like palaces compared to ours. Twelve foot deep at least. Their sandbags are darker than ours. They dig good drainage channels under their duckboards so they’re not slopping in muddy water. I’ve never been in a German trench but Blanco says they’re like blooming Buckingham Palace. For a moment I let myself think of us coming back like Spike. Cold tea on our chins. The blessed slop of mud at the bottom of the trench.

‘Frederick,’ I whisper, and shake his shoulder gently. Nothing happens. His head lolls. For a moment I think he’s dead and my animal self leaps up in relief: Now I won’t have to crawl. I can run. Now I can get away.

But a bit of breath smoors out of him, on to my hand. I light another match, cup it, look around in case a rat is watching us. They won’t attack a man that they know is living.

Five thousand pounds, Felicia says. If I want, she will give me five thousand pounds. I wanted to laugh in her face. Felicia said:
I’ve offended you
. The old woman in her rusty black had that money all the time, but she never spoke a word to me. The fees for the grammar school over in Simonstown were six pounds a year. I don’t know what the fees were for the schools that Frederick attended. That doesn’t matter. I never wanted what he had. I never begrudged him any of it.

We caught a pony in the fields above Senara and rode it on the high road, turn by turn, all the way out to Bass Head, getting a hold of its mane and sticking on to its hot, burry sides with our knees. Frederick had chocolate and I had three Woodbines. The sky was high blue but there were mares’ tails streaking in from the west. We tied the pony to a post and took the footpath down to the old mine. Frederick said you could hear men’s feet tramping there, morning and evening, but we heard nothing. We cast ourselves down at the cliff edge and smoked the last Woodbine. Frederick stared out to sea, his eyes narrowed against the glare. I looked westward where sometimes the Scillies show themselves, looking like damsons on the water, but there was more cloud coming in, twenty miles off. By evening, there’d be rain.

Frederick looked as if he was smiling, but I knew it was a trick of his face, the way the bones were set in it. He was dark-skinned. At school they called him a Red Indian, and he rose to it, showing them how to track through the school woods and how to make fire from a handful of damp wood. Maybe he had Spanish blood in him somewhere, from the Armada vessels that were wrecked against the coast. Felicia had the same black hair, but her skin was pale.

‘Tell me one of your poems,’ he said, but I didn’t want to. It was enough to be there with Frederick. He passed me the Woodbine and I dragged deep on it until I was dizzy. It would be a long way back. We’d be lucky if the farmer hadn’t missed his pony. He’d thrash us if he caught us. We might get home before the rain fell, but there’d be no moon or starlight, with all the cloud cover. We’d have to follow the whiteness of the high road rather than take the field paths.

‘Let’s sleep out here on the cliffs,’ said Frederick.

‘It’s going to rain.’

‘We can make a shelter.’

I never begrudged Frederick anything. I didn’t want what he had, and so I could think about it all quite easily: Albert House, his school, the darkroom he and Felicia had for their photography, the smell of food in the hall. But the grammar school was different. It was close at hand, and boys I knew went there. It opened the year that I was eleven, in January. I had been at work for seven months then. Already it seemed a long time since I was a scholar, but although the work at Mulla House was hard, it never crowded my mind, and I had the long walk there and back, morning and evening. I went through
Sketches By Boz
, which I’d read from Mr Dennis’s library. Boys like me streamed to work along crowded pavements, going from Camden Town or Somers Town to Chancery. I had a London in my head then made up of carts and wagons coming to Covent Garden, which I thought must be pretty much like Simonstown market, only bigger. Boys darted through thick fog, drunks jostled with policemen, yards were packed with ostlers, hackney coachmen, and boys my age, who worked like me, but in hats that were too big for them, and dirty white trousers. I had many of the scenes off by heart. All the poems I had learned were in my mind too, as whole as eggs. I chanted them aloud to the tramp of my boots, as I walked to Mulla House:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

I looked behind me as I chanted. I was up on the top of the hill, and could see the crease in the land where the town lay, with the winter sea beyond it, bluer by far I thought than any Galilee. There was the lighthouse, floating in the bowl of the bay, and the hump of land northward. I was the Assyrian.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

There were no forests where I lived. Instead of leaves, I saw the host flying like the scuds of foam that were blown off the tops of waves in a storm. Next day it was calm again and you’d barely believe how wild the sea had risen. I thought it would be like that after a battle.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

The Angel of Death must be like a buzzard looping the sky above the valley, searching for food. But I knew that the rabbits a buzzard took didn’t heave once and then grow still. They screamed, and a mess of fur and claws was left after the bird had sated itself.

I knew more than a hundred poems by heart, not to speak of the hymns I’d taken in like breathing. I went up and down my tables like a ladder. I made the names of the Kings and Queens of England blaze across my mind like banners:
Edward Edward Edward Richard Henry Henry Henry Edward Edward Richard Henry Henry Edward Mary Elizabeth James . . .

One morning early, I reached the turn of the lane that led up to Mulla House, but did not stop. Instead, I kept going along the road that led to Simonstown. It was a long walk but I reached the grammar school by the time the boys were arriving. I hung about by the gate and watched them go in. They didn’t notice me. It seemed to me that there were hundreds of them streaming in from all directions, and I thought of the Sermon on the Mount and how it must have been a morning like this, with the February sun sharp and making everything new. Even in our town there’d been talk about the new grammar school and of boys who were going there. But you had to have two pounds a term for the fees, they said. You would have to have money for the uniform.

I could have gone. There were scholarships which paid the fees, if you were clever enough, and I was always the cleverest in the class. I could have made up the months of school I’d missed since I left for Mulla House, and taken the scholarship examination. But they didn’t pay wages at the grammar school.

Andrew Sennen was getting a scholarship. He hadn’t read any of the books I had read. He never knew all the answers in class as I did.

I stayed near the gates until they’d all gone in. The first bell rang and then a second for warning. They barged and jostled through the gate, and I was pushed aside. A minute later they had all vanished, and the street was empty. Whatever was beginning in there had swallowed them up. I listened, but all I could hear through the open window was a murmur like a beehive, mysterious as the noise bees make when they go to their work. I thought that when next September came, Andrew Sennen would be one of them. I took hold of the iron railings with both hands, and clung to them.

It was the only time I ever failed to go to work, and lied about the reason. I walked back the way I’d come but instead of turning up the lane to Mulla House, I went and lay down in a hollow of the furze where the sun was trapped, and shouted all the bad words I knew up into the empty sky, and then cried, and then fell asleep. The next day I said to Mr Roscorla that my mother had been taken ill again and needed me to stay with her. I thought she’d never know, but I hadn’t reckoned that the day’s pay would be docked from my wages. When my mother asked me about it, I turned sullen and said I’d wanted a day’s holiday for once. She looked at my face and didn’t question me further, but became busy about something.