The Lie (8 page)

Felicia says, ‘I was in the kitchen. I’ll make some tea if you’d like it.’

The Felicia of the old days would not have known where to find the kettle. In the kitchen, she goes to a small gas ring fed by a rubber pipe, lights it and sets the kettle on it. Beside the ring, the slab gleams coldly. The table is scrubbed white, but the long run of it is empty apart from the plate from which Felicia must have been eating. The kitchen is as chill as the rest of the house, and there’s no smell of cooking. I notice Felicia’s teeth-marks in her bread and butter, before she comes round the table and picks up her plate, as if she wants it out of sight.

‘You should finish that,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘I’m not hungry.’ Then she sees me looking at the food and says, ‘I’ll cut some more bread, and there’s plenty of cheese. I’m sure there must be chutney somewhere.’

I am suddenly so hungry that my mouth floods with saliva. I watch as she takes the loaf, holds it in the crook of her arm and cuts inexpert slices. She fetches a crock of butter, unwraps the cheese from its muslin and lays it on another plate. The chutney jar, when she finds it, is still sealed.

‘Do you think it’s still all right?’ she asks, showing me the label.
Apple & Walnut Chutney, 1916, DQ.
Four years old.

‘I should think so.’

‘There are all kinds of jars in the larder. Jam, and marmalade, even eggs in isinglass.’

‘You should throw the eggs away. But jam and marmalade will be all right. You should eat those.’

Felicia shrugs slightly. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t be bothered.’

We are both looking at the date on the label. 1916. In 1916 we had never seen France. I think of Dolly chopping the apples and walnuts with her black-handled knife. That blade used to flash so quick. There wasn’t an atom of motion wasted. Chop chop chop and the white apples were in equal pieces, plunged into water with a squeeze of lemon to stop them turning brown. It’s a fact: this jar of chutney has outlived Frederick.

‘Get rid of the eggs before they explode, like the rhubarb wine,’ I say heartily.

Felicia smiles a little. ‘Oh yes, I remember.’

The rhubarb wine was bottled too soon, or too late perhaps. Anyway it continued to ferment inside the bottles until they exploded, one by one, in the middle of the night. It made a great story in its time.

‘Have you a spare jar, to put the violets in?’ I ask her, and she fetches an empty fish-paste pot. I fill it with water, and place the violets in the middle of the table.

The chutney is good. As soon as I taste the food, greed flares in me and I have to stop myself shovelling it in. It’s fresh household bread, and the cheese is sharp and salty. I force myself to chew it slowly. It tastes so good, better than anything I’ve eaten since I came back. Felicia makes the tea, and then sits opposite me. She eats a little, chewing effortfully, then pushes her plate aside.

‘It’s very nice,’ I say.

‘How do you live, out there? How do you get bread? You don’t come into town.’

‘I do well enough.’ There must be a roughness in my voice, although I didn’t intend it, because she looks down and busies herself with the teapot. I am sorry for it. She looks tired, and pinched, maybe with cold. There’s a damp chill in the house which is more obvious now that we’ve sat here for a while. It was always a warm house. When he built it Mr Dennis installed a system that no other house in the county could equal for efficiency. Or so he said. There was a furnace deep under the house, in the cellars, and a warren of pipes and passages leading from it to every room. Pipes ran up behind the walls, carrying heat to the bedrooms. There were ducts in the floors, with grilles through which the warm air rose. The same furnace heated water, which was piped to the bathrooms and the bedrooms upstairs. When I told my friends at school about it, they didn’t believe me. It sounded like magic, that you could open a tap at any time and hot water would gush out. Mr Dennis was in a position to care nothing for the price of coke or coal.

For this reason the house was built with only one downstairs fireplace, in the small square room at the front, which used to be Mrs Dennis’s sitting room. She liked a fire, and he humoured her. All that big cold house, and only one room where Felicia could sit in comfort.

‘Why don’t you light the range?’ I ask her.

‘Are you cold?’

‘I would be, if I lived here.’

She sighs. ‘It’ll be lit again tomorrow. Dolly let it go out so she could clean it properly, and blacklead it. I’ve got the gas ring. The house is warm, usually, but there’s something wrong with the furnace. I need to get someone to look at it, but no one here understands the system.’ Again that small shrug, an indifference deeper than her words.

‘Who used to look after it?’

‘Bert Rosewall, but he was called up a few months after you. My father showed Josh how to manage it, but now it keeps going out every time he lights it.’

‘I could look at it for you.’

‘Could you?’

‘Bodging’s a speciality in the army. They train us to be handy.’

She looks down. ‘Of course. I didn’t mean I thought you couldn’t, Dan—’

It’s the first time she’s called me Dan.

‘Is the house warm enough for the baby?’ I ask her.

‘Oh yes. She sleeps with me, and there’s a fire lit in my bedroom. She’s warm enough.’

The damp and cold didn’t bother me. Square-bashing didn’t bother me. The food was better than I was used to, although I kept that quiet when I heard the others grumbling and comparing it to what their mums cooked. I carried on, bulling my boots and belt, marching, jabbing my bayonet into a straw figure while it jounced and shuddered. All the while there was the war, that Sergeant Mills knew about and we didn’t. What it was like to kill a man, or come under enemy fire that was meant to kill you. I didn’t think about it too much. Each day was enough in itself, and Boxall Camp made a separate world between Mulla House and the war. I thought I’d be all right, even when they started us on gas drill. I was green as grass. And then there was first aid drill, which was like no first aid I ever saw in France. We had a dummy which kept still and didn’t scream, bleed, or stink of shit because its insides were falling out. They taught us to tie a tourniquet, and apply field dressings, and that gas lies in pockets close to the ground long after you think it’s cleared.

My eyesight is more than perfect. My aim too. When we got out on the rifle range, I was on the target time after time. I knew my rifle, knew what it could do, knew what to do if it was firing high. I could have set my sights on a sniper detachment, but I didn’t want to stick my neck out. It seemed then that if we all kept together, it couldn’t be so bad. We were taught to look after that Lee-Enfield like a baby: oil it, clean it with metal gauze that we didn’t yet know you could hardly get in the trenches, clean it with boiling water when it was fouled. You don’t separate yourself from your weapon, any more than you separate yourself from your arms or legs.

I knew it wasn’t so much that I had a better aim, but that I could see better. Or faster. Perhaps it comes to the same thing. Frederick’s eyesight was perfect too, he always said, but it was never as good as mine. He used to argue about that when we were children, and I glimpsed a shoal of mackerel or a seal’s muzzle, always a second ahead of him.

Frederick dropped out of my life like a stone. He was an officer cadet, because he’d been in the OTC at his school. Off he went to officer training school. In my ignorance, I’d thought it would be me and Frederick together, and we’d set sail for France in the same boat. I didn’t realise that the training for a man who was going to be commissioned would be quite separate, although I should have done. Once I was in camp, I knew almost at once how mistaken I’d been, and what the distance was between an officer and a man. They were creatures from another world. But Frederick wrote to me, in his crabbed handwriting:

This is a very, very rum do indeed, isn’t it, BB? I wonder if it’s any rummer here than where you are. Rain pours through our huts like a river, and I am to referee the men’s boxing match on Sunday. Mrs Dennis
(
he never spoke of his stepmother in any other way)
writes that my room is to be repapered. She has chosen a nice light pattern which will do very well for nursery wallpaper. Her sister and family are coming to stay for several months, and Mrs Dennis thinks that my room will be best for the children. She knows that I will be quite comfortable in the Blue Room, since I shall be home so seldom. (Or at all, my dear BB? What do you think? How far shall I oblige her?) Mrs Dennis is having a most troublesome time over the nursery furniture. She supposes that she must blame this wretched war, which seems to have turned everything upside down. However, she is glad to know that I am doing my duty.

Felicia has knitted me a scarf which would wind around a baby’s finger at one end, and the whole of the regiment at the other. She says they knit comforts for soldiers at school, while Miss Tringham reads aloud from
The Wide, Wide World.
Thank God, Felicia has not yet attempted socks. Was ever a girl so unhandy as my sister? I have no gift for words, my dear BB, but I speak truth. Please notify degree of rumness your end.

In the margin was a sketch of Frederick, flat on his back in the middle of the boxing ring while Mrs Dennis waved her paste-brush in triumph and a sergeant with ferocious moustaches counted him out.

When we first got to Boxall, there were no places in the huts. There were too many of us. It was winter, and our tents filled with rain and blew down in the wind. We slept crammed together, moaning in our sleep, farting, easing our stinky, blistered feet out of our boots at the end of the day. There wasn’t any poetry here, except what was in my head. You were never alone and you were raw with being pulled out of everything you knew, and turned into something else.

I was pig-ignorant. I didn’t know that at first, but camp soon taught me. Pig-ignorant, green as grass, a walking disaster in khaki. What I knew after the first week’s basic training was to keep my head down and my nose clean.

Care of weapons soothed me. Stripping down, cleaning, oiling, reassembling. Sergeant Mills spoke to me about being on the Lewis guns, and about sniper detachments. He told me there were army schools in France now, where I could get specialist training.
You could make something of yourself out there, boy
. I thought about it that night, and the next day my aim wasn’t so good. It was too soon to get picked out, before I knew what that might mean, even though it meant extra pay. I’d wait. What I hadn’t reckoned with then was that the war was patient too. It had time for everyone. I learned that. I was fool enough to think that a human being could be cleverer than a war. You might keep your head down, or you might work your guts out to get a commission, but the war didn’t care either way. It had room for everyone.

One of the last courses we did was wiring. There was a song in my head all that time:

You can’t get over it

You can’t get under it

You can’t get above it

You can’t get around it –

That was wire. When you put in a post for wire, you don’t hammer it, you screw it in. I was too pig-ignorant even to know why. It was so you wouldn’t draw fire, banging away at the posts by night. We learned so many things, all of them given equal weight, and it wasn’t until later that we worked out which ones might keep us alive. I’d see faces go blank, because they couldn’t take in any more, and what they couldn’t take in might be the one thing that they needed to know. Such as not drawing on a lit Woodbine at night. You wouldn’t believe how far off that little red core is visible. Such as making gooseberries out of wire, and throwing them in to thicken the tangle.

Felicia is speaking. ‘I’d be very grateful if you would look at the furnace for me,’ she says formally. I think she thinks that she’s offended me. I’ve been quiet a long time, I know that. It happens. I go back in my mind. It’s not the same thing as remembering, because it has colour and smell and taste. ‘But not tonight,’ she goes on, ‘it’s late. You must be tired.’

I agree. I’m not tired, as it happens. I’m lit up, in spite of the cold. But it’s good about the furnace, because it gives me a reason to come back to the house. Besides, I have a hankering to get at that big cold mechanism and make it come to life. Felicia smiles. ‘You must have a drink before you leave,’ she says, and goes off to find a bottle of elderberry wine. Her father has taken the port wine and the spirits. A strange thing, to take the bottles and leave furniture behind.

The bottle is encrusted, but when I draw the cork the wine pours out a clear dark ruby. It smells strong, not sweet. She has brought two little glasses, and I fill them both to just below the brim.

The glass is so fine that I fear breaking it with my lips. The liquid slides down my gullet, warming me but making thoughts leap up that have been lying still. Felicia’s thin face takes on a little colour. She rests her elbows on the table and sips from the glass she holds in both hands.

‘What do you do, Felicia?’ I ask her.

‘I take care of Jeannie, of course, unless Mrs Quick can watch her for a while. In the evenings, when she’s in bed, I study mathematics.’

I nod. I was always the best at school, but when she begins to talk I realise that I know nothing of what Felicia means by mathematics. She’s been reading the bulletin of a French mathematical society, she says. Fortunately, all those years of French at school have turned out to be good for something, because it means she can read the journals in the original. There’s a man called Fatou – Felicia’s hands grip the glass. Her eyes shine. Maybe it’s because I’m jealous of that sudden life in her that I say, ‘I didn’t think girls were interested in mathematics.’

But I wish that I hadn’t, because her face hardens. She puts her glass down on the table.