Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  Francis Coyne set off uphill with the child, both of them walking soberly, but not downcast, not easy objects of pity. Then Francis bent suddenly and scooped Clare up on to his shoulders and balanced her there, a smudge of black dress and red hair bobbing against the pale tearing early winter sky. He had hold of her boots, and she gripped him firmly around his neck, spoiling his collar. Both of them leaned forward as the hill steepened, then they went out of sight together.

  Clare lived half up the hill and half down the hill. She eased and flitted between the cottages and the villa, speaking two dialects, learning two pasts, instructed in two faiths. Grandad could not bear the idea of Clare ‘bobbing and ducking’, first in the mission up the hill, and then in the newly built church of the Sacred Heart and St Ia. So he refused to think of it, and absolutely ignored that part of her life. First Communion, Confirmation; Nan might question and remark, but Grandad never would. Instead, he told Clare of Wesley ranging the spine of Cornwall, preaching at quarries which were flooded with people as if with water. She learned the Wesleyan hymns and the legends of John Wesley’s childhood. The rectory at Epworth, the savage parishioners who tried to burn the Wesley children alive, and five-year-old John plucked out of the flames by his rescuers. ‘ “A brand plucked from the burning.” Pray that’ll be true of Clare Coyne.’

  Clare’s education did not begin or end at fixed points. Reading was easy. She would have liked to go to school, but there were delays, bothers that were never specified. Soon there was no need for her father to explain to her why she could not: she understood. There was enough money for her French and arithmetic lessons with dull Miss Purse, and the rest her father taught her. And there were so many people around her who could teach her particular, desirable things. Her cousins taught her to swim and whistle, fish and torment crabs, handle a boat and lie. Aunt Mag taught her plain sewing. Clare liked the tick of her needle through cotton. Nan and Aunt Mag made everything: drawers and petticoats, shirts for the boys, summer frocks for Clarey and Hannah. Clare saw a sampler and longed to sew one herself, so that Nan and Grandad could put it upon the wall in its fine frame. Nan and Aunt Mag made up clothes for the draper’s shop Aunt Sarah and Uncle Arthur kept, where Hannah went to work as soon as she was old enough. They worked in the front-room in good light and bad. Nan did not hold with samplers.

  ‘Waste a time, Clarey, when you could be doing something useful. Here, thread this needle for me. Your eyes are better’n mine.’

  If only Nan didn’t get those sharp, shooting pains in her fingers after a day’s sewing. Sometimes she could hardly hold her cup still. ‘But come next season Uncle Arthur’s getting yer old Nan a Singer. Think of it, Clarey.’ The Singer came, black and gold, with its treadle a criss-cross weave, then a blur as Nan caught the rhythm and fed cloth across the sewing plate. Clare watched Nan’s pedalling feet, so perfect in their black boots which were all out of shape at the sides because of her bunions.

  ‘Mark that, Clarey. That un there’s the tension spring. Never touch him.’ If Clare touched it, the Singer would spring apart and die, and Nan and Aunt Mag would have to go back to sewing every stitch by hand, and it would be Clare’s fault.

  Nan taught her to cook. By the time she was ten, Clare could cook the dinner for her father and herself. Mutton stew with dumplings, spring cabbage, boiled pudding. Sarah, Arthur’s wife, no longer had to go up and downhill with the Coyne dinners. Francis had paid her a consideration, but Arthur didn’t like her to be so tied to another man’s household. Not with the shop to run as well.

  Francis thought Clare was still a child, but to the Treveals a child of ten was a worker. Her boy cousins earned money packing fish. They laid slim mackerel head to tail in salt and ice in the spring; in the summer it was hake, cod, ling, skate, halibut, and a market for all of it. In the late autumn the kipper girls came, and they teased and played rough with the boys between hours of labour. The boys were not allowed to touch the lobsters yet, for fear they’d damage a claw and spoil the price in the London market. Boys were wild and wanted watching. Their hands were raw with brine, nicked, fiery. They stank of fish, and they were proud of it. Their elbows glittered with scales. Then John William got a job after school and weekends as a grocer’s errand boy. It gave him the use of the shop bicycle, and he liked it better than fish, he said, as he pushed his cycle uphill and freewheeled down, and kicked away house-dogs with his stout boots, and got given pennies. He knew all the secret drives of the big houses, with their curvy lining of blue hydrangeas and their camellias on the terraces. Hannah would go into the shop. Already she had learned the ways of it. She was quick, and deft, and she did not break things or spoil them, or make marks on cloth. By the time she was twelve she could handle the Singer better than Nan herself. She even dared to touch the tension spring, because she knew what it was for.

  John William, Hannah, Harry. Kitchie, William and Mabel’s only child. And Albert, Jo and George, Uncle John’s boys, up on the farm and working almost since birth. They hoed potatoes, cleared furze off the crofts, leased stones, stood round while the pig was killed. The farm was small, but the land was fair to middling; with a man and three strong sons on it, it might amount to something. The farm came from their mother, who had been a Lee before she fell in love with John Treveal. She was the lucky only child of elderly parents who had nearly worked the lives out of themselves, keeping back a wilderness of gorse from their land.

  The cousins grew older and worked harder, while Clare drew. Her music lessons were suspended. Her accomplishments hung in mid-air. There was tension plucking in the atmosphere, louder than piano strings: investments dipped, and her father’s small income shrivelled a little smaller. Anyway, she’d hated the noise she made. Under her fingers the piano shot out notes like a machine, not a musical instrument. She’d learned enough to play songs and please Nan and Grandad with them: one good year Grandad bought a cottage piano, and he took pains to have it tuned for Clare. Her style of playing worked for Grandad’s hymns. Once, when Grandad was out of the house, Hannah said, ‘Clare, play one of your hymns.’

  Hail QU-EEN of HEV’N,

  thee oh-oh-cean STAR

  crashed out Clare, then stopped suddenly, homesick for something that often didn’t even feel like home.

  ‘Is that all there is to it?’ mocked Hannah.

  Clare drew flowers, not because she liked to, but because her father couldn’t draw and needed illustrations for his book. She preferred to draw faces. It didn’t matter: she enjoyed accuracy of structure and colouring, and she was working. She was illustrating a book for her father. The shading of a corolla counted as work, just as much as lugging baskets full of stoned raisins, kitchen cheese and tapioca up the drive of Little Talland House.

  ‘Clarey’s keeping house for her father. And she’s doing the pictures for his book, aren’t you Clarey? Show us that one you showed Grandad. Beautiful.’ Where Nan praised, no one else would disparage.

  Clare is nearly twenty. She cooks quickly and off-handedly but well. She keeps the house clean, though she doesn’t scrub the floors. Hat comes in to do that every Friday morning, and brings up with her the fish the Coynes will eat for their Friday dinner. But Clare does everything else. She ties up her hair in a white bandeau, puts on a long grey wrapper and polishes, scours, lifts, disinfects, bangs clean. If she could do it without being seen, she’d whiten the doorstep and clean the windows too, and save the money they pay Hat. Francis carries in the coals, because a young woman should not lift coal, for fear of doing something to her insides. He splits kindling in the back garden. For a botanist he is a poor gardener, but Clare grows nasturtiums and mignonette, candytuft, bushes of lavender and rosemary around their small parched lawn. Clare rolls up her father’s Turkey carpet and takes it out to beat it over the clothes-line. Her figure bends and plies. She will leave the carpet out in the sun for the sea-air to sweeten it as it blows over the peninsula. She’s working. None of the Treveals can criticize her for idleness.

&n
bsp; The remains of the Coyne meal sprawl on the table. Plates smeared with ham fat and butter but no leftovers. Last week Uncle John sent them a pound of butter wrapped in muslin. They say the soldiers are sending back butter from France, but the Post Office is going to stop it, now the weather’s getting warmer and oily butter is seeping out of its packaging. Clare stirs her tea. Her father’s eyes flicker down the newspaper.

  ‘They’ve moved Sam, we think. Hannah hasn’t had a letter,’ says Clare.

  ‘Ah. You’ve seen Hannah today?’

  ‘Yes, I told you, Father.’

  ‘Does he say where? No, I suppose not.’

  He looks down at the paper. Lists of dead, figures as high as cricketing scores. There won’t be much village cricket, this year, up at Coyne. He thinks of Coyne. Mama rolling bandages and praying for the dead; Benedict and Marie-Thérèse praying as each year the war goes on and one more son becomes old enough to enlist. They have been lucky so far. Young Francis is C2 on account of his eyesight. Stephen is in a staff job. Lucky so far. May 1917. If the war goes on for five more months, it will get Gerard. Gerard is in perfect health, unfortunately. Besides, they are passing young men now who would never have got through their medical boards a year ago. So many men have been lost, and must be replaced.

  ‘No,’ says Clare, ‘she hasn’t had a letter this week.’

  ‘Did you read the letter from John William?’

  ‘Yes, Nan showed me. But it only said what Kitchie told us.’

  ‘Ah, it’s excellent news. Excellent. All the same, Sam might have sent Hannah a postcard.’

  He hears his own voice, ridiculous, as if the boy is on a seaside holiday, failing to write home that he is having a good time.

  ‘John William will be home soon.’

  ‘We’ll have to have him up here for dinner.’

  But he doesn’t continue. Clare will know what he means. He is your cousin. They are going to make him an officer. Even if he is a Treveal. They are hungry for officers now too, since half the product of the public schools has been scythed down already.

  Francis half rises. The room is chilly now. They ought to have a fire, but Clare has stopped laying fires ready in the grate, to be lit in the evenings. He’s been sitting too long. He feels cold. Better not to look at the lists. It doesn’t do any good. He thinks back to Coyne, and rabbiting in the woods. There’s so much blood, just from one dead thing. And the smell of it is cloying, like water from, a spring full of iron. When a creature is freshly killed and its blood spurts out, it makes steam on a winter morning. Reeking. Does Clare know that? What does his daughter think of when she reads the lists:

  Missing,

  Missing, believed killed in action.

  Killed in action.

  Perhaps she doesn’t read them. Those girls, what do they talk about when they’re alone?

  One day last September he was walking round the rocks at low tide. He turned and saw into a cove, steep, dry-sanded, trapping the sun’s late warmth. There was a girl on her back, eyes shut, mouth slack, unrecognizable. But he knew the young man straddling her, working away at her. Then he knew the stylish blue and white stripe of the girl’s skirt. Goods at a discount. Hannah. He turned away to stop himself looking at her white legs, straining apart on the sand, wider and wider, to draw the man deep into her body. She knew what she was about.

  Now he watches Clare’s hands as she stacks the china, scoops fragments of waste food on to one plate, pours dregs of tea into the slop-bowl. Her hands are calm and capable. He thinks of all that her hands have learned. She can do so many things which he has never learned to do. She can cook, sew, wash, play the piano. How can he know what she talks about when he’s not there? Futile even to want to know. But he does. He imagines the girls leaning together, confiding. He pulls back sharply from the thought, flinching at his own prurience. Again he thinks of the lists. Of Hannah’s spread legs. Of Sam with the sun on his back. Now Clare feels his look on her. She glances at him and half smiles, but does not stop what she is doing.

  Four

  Day after day it doesn’t rain. Mid-May, blazing hot, with blackthorn fully out and bluebells bowed over, hanging their sappy stems in the heat. The air smells tauntingly of honey and salt.

  When the gorse is out of blossom

  Kissing is then out of fashion…

  Clare can’t get the rhyme out of her head. Her head has turned into a drum echoing it. And on this perfect afternoon she can’t endure to be in the house, which is fusty for all her spring-cleaning, and dark, and dusty-windowed. She hurries downhill past the cemetery gleaming white and grey in the sun, each gravestone lapped with new grass. She skirts Porthmeor Beach, and on to the coast-path. The word kiss clings to her like a web she has walked through.

  Dry kisses. The smell of her father’s hair when she lets her lips rest on his fine-grained forehead. When she bends down over his chair arm to kiss him he looks up at her with unrecognizing, dark-pupilled eyes. He is always surprised by her touch, as if for a minute he doesn’t know quite who she is. Kisses. Fierce kisses for Nan when she was little. Grappling Nan’s black skirts to her, snuffing Nan’s apron, scrubbing her head against Nan’s waist. Grandad was never much of a one for kisses, but he liked to have Clare on his knee when he smoked his pipe, and he would let her fill it with tobacco for him. Her fingers were neat at tamping down the shag. She loved Grandad’s tobacco pouch too, and he would let her unroll it and breathe in the dark, rich smell which was so much more fragrant than the smell of his burning pipe. But then she had to roll it up tight and not touch it again, for fear of the expensive tobacco drying out and losing flavour.

  Kissing Hannah, when they pretended to be married under the mock-orange bush in Clare’s back garden, then spitting and raging at Hannah who wouldn’t take her turn as bridegroom, and who pummelled their crown of blossom to brown slime rather than let Clare have it. Hannah’s raking nails left red stripes in Clare’s white forearms, and Clare could not retaliate because she had bitten her own nails down to the quick. No one else had skin as white as Clare’s. It went with her hair, they said, and she must mind herself and not get freckled or nobody would want to marry her. But even then it would be all right, because Nan could cure freckles with lemon juice.

  Kisses. One hot afternoon when she was twelve and opened the door to the grocer’s boy, John William. He walked past her, slapped their order down on the kitchen-table. First time they’d sent him up here. He’d always got out of it before, given the order to one of the other boys, taken a longer round and a heavier load rather than deliver rice and yellow split peas and suet to the Coyne house. The Coyne grocery order was not impressive, and he hated the thought of being sent to serve Clare.

  There stood John William, thirteen already. This was the unfair time of the year when John William would seem to be a whole year older than she was, though the difference was only seven months. His face was impassive. His tan hid everything. And there was Clare, caught out in the middle of her washing, with her hands red and chapped from washing-soda. She hid them in her wrapper and said, ‘Let me make you a cup of tea, John William.’ If she’d had warning she’d have gone up and rubbed cold cream into her hands. She would have combed her hair too, for it was straggly and sticking to her forehead with the steam from the copper.

  ‘I got to get on,’ he said. He was beginning to be awkward with her, not only when he was with the other boys, but even when they were alone. He had grown so much this past year. He was well past her father’s shoulder, and now he wore his black, soft hair in a side-parting and smoothed it down like a man. The bones of his face were strong. People thought he was older than he was; fifteen, or sixteen even. The shape of his cheek-bones was like Hannah’s, but Hannah’s face was softer, and fuller and her skin was not so dark. Their bones underneath would be the same, thought Clare. They would have the same skeletons. She was not sure if she liked her own difference from them, or if she was sorry for it.

  ‘I’ve made some lemona
de. It’s keeping cool in the larder. Shall I fetch it?’

  ‘All right.’

  She went through the scullery and undid the larder door, where flies buzzed at the fine-mesh wire. Her lemonade stood covered on the slab. She poured a glass for him, and took a couple of squashed-fly biscuits out of the tin and put them on a plate. It seemed right now to treat him like a grown-up visitor. He always used to like squashed-fly biscuits. He was still standing by the kitchen-table when she came out. She pulled out one of the deal chairs for him but he would not sit down. He drank off his lemonade in long, smooth draughts. He was always neat as a cat in his eating and drinking. ‘That’s good,’ he said.

  He was thirteen, had just left school and was working full time at the grocer’s for now. Errand boy but serving behind counter too, slicing cheese and sifting dry goods from sack to blue paper bags. She had seen him cutting cheese with wire, perfectly, but he did not look as if he was in his right place there.