The Lie (7 page)

‘The Dennises have gone too,’ he says. ‘Except for Mrs Fearne.’ For a moment I don’t know who he’s talking about, then I realise it’s Felicia. ‘And the baby.’

‘Harry Fearne’s daughter,’ I say slowly, deliberately.

‘That’s right. You’d a known all of it, I dessay, before any of us.’

I say nothing. Frederick did write to me, not long after my mother had given me the news. A letter full of jokes and scribble, with caricatures in the margin, and a PS. ‘Our Felicia has become a Fearne. What do you think of that, my dear BB?’

Our Felicia.
What’s mine is thine and what’s thine is mine.
That was another thing we swore. Frederick said it was from the Bible. It worked very well with chocolate and Woodbines.

Geoff was looking at the rise that hid the cottage. ‘Haven’t seen the old woman for months,’ he says.

‘She has a chest complaint. Keeps herself indoors most of the time, or else she starts coughing.’ I hear myself explaining too much, in the way of guilty men. Geoff nods, as if satisfied.

‘You better get those cuts seen to, boy,’ he says, in the old tone of friendship.

I put up my hand slowly, to the side of my head, where for a while there’s been the sensation of insects crawling down my scalp. There’s stickiness. I say nothing, as if he hasn’t surprised me.

‘I thought the sea was going to have you there,’ he says.

But he stayed on the path, with the collie bitch. Either he didn’t truly think I was in trouble, or he hadn’t wanted to bestir himself. I don’t blame him. I know how far away such things can seem. You don’t think of all that’s happening to the left or the right of you. You think of whether you’ll get your fag to light with a wet match, and the bit of bad news in Blanco’s letter, about his baby that’s got croup. We thought of ourselves. Our company. Our platoon. Holding a candle flame to the seams of our shirts to get the lice. The time we spent, getting lice. Chatting, we called it. They’d be all over you like fire until you wanted to tear your skin off. Lice go black when they’re full of blood. No matter how many you get, there’s always more. Our boots, our letters. Our Mr Tremough, until the sniper got him. Fags and rumours. Cake out of parcels. The state of our feet. I see Blanco kneel at little Ollie Curnow’s feet, rubbing whale oil into them and then bandaging them, tender as any woman. If you had a parcel you shared it out until it was all gone.

The fact is we had nothing left. Not to spare, not to go beyond us.

I look down at my hands. They are scraped and raw, as if from clinging to the rocks to save myself. I’m beginning to feel cuts and bruises all over my body. I’m cold, and very tired.

‘I must get back,’ I say. I can think of nothing else now. I’ll let myself down on to the bed, sink into it, go away on a tide of darkness where no one follows me. I’ll sleep the rest of the day and maybe all night too.

The sun breaks out for a moment and there is too much glitter everywhere. A cold, jostling glitter, without a trace of warmth in it. Geoff says again, ‘You want to tend those cuts,’ and looks at me, and I’m startled, because for a moment I don’t see hostility, or even indifference. He’s uncertain. He wants a word from me. Company on the path, even though he’s heading his way and I’m going the other. He’s on his own, as I am, and a hand on the head of a collie bitch is no sort of comfort. But as I part my lips to speak I hear the slabby masses of the sea rushing together, green and pewter, as cold as icebergs, and I’m in the middle of them, climbing, struggling for a life I don’t even want. They could crush me as your boot crushes an ant. They’d know nor care no more than the boot.

He’s gone. He whistles to the bitch who hangs back behind him, mopping and mowing for my attention, because I’ve made no gesture to her, not a look, a touch or a word. ‘Get on with you then,’ I say, to release her, and she nearly dances as she runs to heel.

When I get back, I don’t go to bed as I intended. I go to the foot of Mary Pascoe’s grave and tell her what I’ve done that day. I start off standing but by the time I’ve finished I’m on my knees in the new, wet green that covers her. I tell her about the rocks and the sea; things she knows already. I wonder if she ever walked into the sea, in some confusion of her heart, before she became the old woman who had lived up here for ever, keeping her hens and her goat, hardened by the wind and not talkative, but the vegetables she grew were second to none. I don’t ask her. Instead, I tell her about Ollie Curnow’s feet.

6

Good strong wire entanglements, of the pattern in fig 14, fixed to well-driven posts, should be constructed wherever it is possible. With proper training, infantry should be able to make entanglements of this nature as close as 100 yards from the enemy on a dark night. The iron posts now issued, which screw into the ground, can be placed in position without noise and strengthen the entanglement.

The maintenance of the wire obstacle calls for constant care. It must be inspected every night, and a few men should be told off in each company as a permanent wiring party for the repair and improvement of the obstacle.

I PACK THE
last of two dozen eggs into the straw. When Mary Pascoe grew too old to walk into town with her eggs and vegetables, she came to an arrangement with a smallholder a couple of miles away. He took her produce to Simonstown market along with his own, and she got a better price there than selling through a shop in the town. He walked down to the cottage with his hand-cart to fetch her produce. She packed the eggs so well that never once did a single one crack, let alone break, or so she told me.

I didn’t want him coming to the cottage, but knew that he’d think it strange if she stopped selling her eggs. Besides, I needed the money. I told him that I would bring the eggs up to him, and vegetables too when they were ready. I could pack the eggs, layered with straw, and they would come to no harm.

He seems to see nothing unusual in it. Maybe he thinks there’s some family connection between me and Mary Pascoe, and that is why I’ve come to take care of her. He doesn’t ask after her. He nodded when I told him that she was ill and keeping indoors, and that was all. He’s fifty at least, with a long straggle of beard and matted hair. He has a couple of half-savage dogs, and I take a stick when I visit the smallholding. They snarl from a distance, and he cuffs them back as he opens the gate. He barely speaks and never looks at me directly. I give him the eggs and he counts out the money from the previous week. His hands are hard and his nails broken. Before accepting the eggs, he turns each of them over to examine it for cracks or weaknesses in the shell. Sometimes he’ll hold one up to the light and squint at it mistrustfully. When he’s satisfied, he fumbles inside his clothes and brings out his pouch purse. There are never many coins in it, and I wonder where he keeps the rest of his money, given that he has the eggs from more than fifty hens to sell. He has never told me his name, but Mary Pascoe called him Enoch. The smell of him catches my throat as he leans towards me to hand over the money. His glance slips sideways, waiting for me to be gone.

This week there is one egg as dark as a chestnut. I pick it up and weigh it in my hand, then curve my fingers around it. I increase the pressure on it. The egg doesn’t crack. I press a little harder, and then harder again until the shell crushes in on itself and slime oozes through my fingers. My skin crawls. I shake my hand to free it, but the egg clings, dripping from my fingers. I tear up a tuft of grass and scour myself furiously with it. The egg has gone. I am clean. I clench my fists to calm myself, but the panic inside me is too strong now and I lay the wooden tray of eggs on the ground and stamp into them, crushing them. I stamp and stamp, sweating, until the shells are mashed into the straw.

There are no eggs now. I have nothing to take up to Enoch’s. Very slowly, trembling and looking away, I empty the mess into the bushes, scrape the tray, wash it in the stream and put it to dry. The hens peck up and down their run, unconcerned. The chicken wire is strong and good where I’ve repaired it. I wash the slime off my boots, and then everything is as it was before.

I am afraid that I will end up like Enoch. I want to see Felicia, but I’ll wait until dark so that no one sees me go into the town. I’d like to take her something but I can’t think of anything that she’d like, until a memory comes to me of the Gethsemane gardens we used to make at school, at Easter time. There was fierce competition, among the boys as well as the girls. We would lash twigs together to make the three little crosses, and girls would bring in flowers wrapped in wet moss. Tiny wild daffodils, herb Robert, primroses, violets with their smooth leaves. If a girl liked a boy, she’d bring in flowers for his garden. We shaped the hill of Golgotha, and to one side of it the tomb with the stone rolled away from the entrance. I remember one girl brought in a piece of broken mirror and made a pond in hers, with flowers all around. We were envious of her and wished we’d thought of it first. The gardens were laid out on a long table to be judged.

Felicia always liked flowers. She had her own patch in the garden, full of nasturtiums, cornflowers, candytuft and sweet williams. The kind of easy flowers that children grow. She used to make posies of them. She gave me a posy of marigolds and love-in-a-mist, but I dropped it as soon as she was out of sight. I hope she didn’t find it wilted on the ground. I’ll take her a bunch of violets wrapped in wet moss, as the girls used to bring them in for the Gethsemane gardens.

I wash myself and comb my hair. I have a clean shirt and my old Sunday trousers, which I haven’t worn since before I went away. They were in the bundle that the neighbours kept for me. I must have grown while I was away, because the trousers are too short, but not so that it matters. I clean my nails carefully, and pare them with my knife. Around seven o’clock, towards sunset, I set out for the town. I walk quicker than I mean to, and it’s not dark enough by the time I reach Giant’s Cap. I sit there, waiting, while the sea thuds in beneath me. Frederick and I used to say that there were lions living in the sea caves under Giant’s Cap. Slowly, the line of surf grows dim. In the windows a few lights show, like buds. The tide is out and I climb down awkwardly, because of the violets, and make my way along the rocky shore to the sand. When I reach Venton Wenna, I dip the flowers head-down in the overspilling water.

I’ll go uphill, skirt the town and make my way secretly to the Dennises’ house. This is what we always called it, although it had a grand name: Albert House, named after the Albert Memorial in London.

Because of the way the land folds here, this is one of the few places in the town from which the sea is invisible. Even from the attic windows you can’t see it. There are sycamores around the house, which have grown taller since I was last here. They bend over it, inside the high granite walls. Mr Dennis wanted his own gates, and a short sweep of drive. When the house was new and raw, he bought land around it so that no other houses would swim up the slope to touch his. He planted two monkey puzzles in the front garden, but they are slow-growing things and still unimpressive.

The gates are shut, but not locked. I trace the name of the house, carved into the granite side-pillars. Albert House. And now I’ve seen the Albert Memorial too. It’s an ugly thing. I’d never name a house after it myself. I open the small side-gate and go inside. The gravel is weedy, but the camellias are in flower, big white ones that show up in the dusk and go brown when the rain beats on them. I remember those camellias too. There is a light on in the bottom right-hand window. Mr Dennis had the ambition of generating his own electrical supply, using water power, but it came to nothing. They lived by gaslight and candles, like the rest of us.

The curtain to the window is not drawn. It’s Mrs Dennis’s old sitting room, empty, but there’s a small fire burning in the grate. One wing chair is set close to it. I go round to the front door and pull down the bell chain. Deep inside the house, I hear it ring. Only one person can possibly answer it. All those others have gone.

Even though the door is thick, I’m sure I hear Felicia’s light, firm footsteps, and then the drawing back of the bolt. A moment later the lock turns. She opens the door, and light spills out of the hall behind her.

‘Oh!’ she says, seeing me. ‘I thought it was Dolly Quick come back for something.’

‘You ought not to be so trusting. I could have been anyone.’

‘But you were you.’ Her voice has lightened, but she makes no move to welcome me inside.

I take my hand from behind my back. ‘I brought you these violets. I remember how much you liked flowers.’

She looks puzzled, almost wondering. I hold the flowers towards her and she touches them lightly. ‘They’re wet, Daniel.’

‘You hold them upside down like this, dip their heads into water and shake it off. They’ll keep for five days then.’

‘Oh, I see.’

Her voice strays into the night, like a child’s voice. I keep on talking about violets, but she wants me to go. She touches the flowers again, and half turns. The line of her body makes a shallow curve against the light. My breath goes out of me. I look down at the violets, which she still hasn’t taken.

‘Goodnight, Felicia.’

‘Won’t you come in for a minute,’ she says quickly, ‘after your walk? Jeannie’s asleep.’

I hesitate. Now that I’m at the threshold, I’m not sure that I want to cross it. Until I enter the house, I can remember it as it was. I’ve always thought that there was very little resemblance between Frederick and Felicia, given that they were brother and sister, but now I’m not so sure. Her face has grown thinner and the cheekbones shape it now, as they shaped his.

We are in the hall. The big pewter plate that used to stand on the black oak dresser has gone. There are no flowers. The house has lost its confident smell of roast beef gravy and floor polish, and there are pale patches on the walls where pictures and photographs used to hang.