Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Better be going,’ he said. ‘I’ve got night-school. Got to get over there by seven.’

  That night-school. It had rocked the small row of cottages where Uncle Arthur and Uncle Stan lived within a few doors of one another. Nan’s was just round the corner, where the alley steepened: you could tell Nan’s with your eyes shut because of the pot of sweet marjoram she kept by the doorstep. Everyone rubbed their fingers on the leaves before they came into the house. Uncle William’s was further down the hill, with Aunt Mabel’s just-perceptible mist of sluttishness on windows and curtains and doorstep. All of them had been fetched up to Uncle Arthur’s to reason with John William, who had declared his intention of going to night-school to study. And nothing useful like book-keeping or arithmetic either. He was planning to study physics, chemistry and biology, if you please. He was going to take exams. He had been writing secretly, behind their backs, to places in London, about exams and qualifications. He had been uncovering those things which were mysteries to Aunt Sarah and Uncle Arthur. He was not going to follow Uncle Arthur into the drapery, though there would be a place made for him, and a small wage which would be all he could need, living at home. The whole family must gather.

  ‘Let’s hear if you’re brazen enough to tell your Grandad to his face how you’re going to throw away everything we’ve worked for.’

  He was. Mute and stubborn, playing his hand after years of keeping his cards hidden. He had watched them for a long while, weighing what it was worth, this life they led. He had been the brightest and the quickest of them all at school, doing sums for all the Treveal cousins, writing an impassioned essay on Mary Queen of Scots which earned him a bronze medal, a shilling, and the permanent mistrust of his parents. The other boys would have bullied him for his cleverness, if he had not had a reputation as a wild, unpredictable fighter, calm for months, then suddenly lashing out and fighting until the other boy writhed and screamed out, and still he kept on until three or four of the other boys had to pull him off. He never rolled and wrestled behind the school wall as the other boys did. He went with Uncle Stan to bare-knuckle fights, held in secret with a look-out posted, in quiet hollows on the moors. He saw how one fighter danced and struck, blurring in the dazed vision of the other, then came in to strike again, splitting the skin under a man’s eye, sending him blind with his own blood. He would fight like that. He concentrated, sitting tense and still, not noticing Uncle Stan and the other men crouched in their circle, making noises like dogs held back and dragging their leashes as the square of uncut corn grows smaller and smaller and the rabbits double back and forth inside it with stretched panicking eyes, and the men wait for the moment to let slip the dogs.

  He would stay in the grocer’s. He would earn money enough to give Aunt Sarah his keep. He would go to night-school. He would obtain qualifications. Weren’t there all the others to go into the farm and the shop? Weren’t they glad enough to go where they were told? Look at them. He counted on his fingers: his brother Harry, Hannah, Uncle John’s Albert, Jo and George, Uncle William’s Kitchie.

  Harry and Kitchie stood just inside the door in stockinged feet. Hannah had run down to the quay and fetched them up just as they were, raw from fooling about on the quay with the other lads. They had their boots in their hands. They looked and listened while the storm raged. Father crashed his chair back from the hearth. Grandad and Uncle Stan and Uncle William stood round him, holding him back. Mother shivered in the kitchen, secretly thrilled at the prospect of a discount on her groceries. Harry and Kitchie exchanged glances, wiped their hands on the backs of their trousers, and went back down to the quay. Best off out of it. And there’d be no shifting John William.

  Clare had missed it all, at her music lesson, plonking out ‘Für Elise’. The juice of it was related to her that evening by Hannah, but the great scene which would be embroidered and framed in family history over the years had an empty space where Clare ought to have been.

  ‘Are you taking any exams this year, John William?’ she asked timidly.

  ‘I don’t know enough for that yet,’ he answered. ‘But I shall.’

  ‘Does Uncle Arthur know? Doesn’t it cost a lot to take them? Father said it would.’

  ‘I shall get it. I’ll tell you something, Clarey. I’ve got money none of em know about.’

  ‘Have you? How have you? Where did you get it?’

  ‘I get a shilling a week more in my wages than they know of. I said to old Trevithick I’d do his books for him, when I saw all his figuring was wrong. I save it for fees. And Dr Kernack gave me a guinea. And I get given money – Christmas boxes. I don’t tell em.’

  Clare glowed, relaxing. This is how it used to be, with John William telling her secret things he tells only her and Hannah.

  ‘But why did Dr Kernack give you a guinea?’

  John William hesitated. ‘Keep a secret, now, Clarey? Don’t tell a soul, not even Nan?’

  ‘Swear to God.’

  ‘Cos he knows what they don’t know – what I’m doing it for. I want to be a doctor, Clarey. Course it’s hard. I got to do better’n any of em in the exams. And I can do. Cos they’re lazy, see. They don’t want things enough – not like you got to want em. They don’t know about really wanting. I can beat em all. Don’t you believe it, Clarey?’

  She looked at him. She believed it. John William had set himself like an arrow on this one thing, leaving no space for anything else, and leaving no space for it to fail to happen either. She had never thought in that way herself, about wanting things. She had only thought that you had what you had, and that was all. Now she realized that she was far behind him, and that it was no longer just because of the few months between them. But there was danger in wanting anything that much, and showing that you wanted it.

  If he doesn’t get it, it’ll finish him, thought Clare, and she believed him.

  ‘Only you’ll have to talk like me, if you want to be a doctor,’ she teased him, paying him back for the hundred times they’d all jeered at her for talking like a lady. She thought he would laugh at her again, but this time he didn’t. He was thinking. His forehead tensed as he took in this one more thing he would have to consider. One more part of his plan.

  ‘You can help me with that, Clarey,’ he stated. His narrow eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘I can listen to you while I’m scrattin over my books.’

  ‘Just think. You might end up rich!’ she half laughed.

  He looked at her and saw her believing in him. There was Clare, not doubting that he could do it. His sore, lonely self-confidence yielded to her for a moment. He ducked his head, embarrassed to let her see how it moved him.

  Was he cross? Had she said too much? She hovered, twisting her hands inside the coarse grey cloth of her wrapper.

  ‘I’ll be off, then, Clarey,’ he said, and in a suddenly awkward flurry he was beside her and had leaned to kiss her warm white cheek. For a second he was so close she saw something she’d never noticed before: that the iris of his eye was rayed with black streaks and then there was a thin ring of black between the iris and white. He smelled of toffee and fresh air.

  Clare remembered Nan’s voice. How old had they been? Six or seven. John William hadn’t wanted to kiss her when she was going away to Coyne with her father. ‘Give your cousin a kiss, John William. Go on, nicely now. She won’t bite you, will you, Clarey?’ Everyone had laughed, and John William had stood frowning in his boots, hands behind his back, not kissing Clare.

  Kisses. Just today, at dinner-time, Hannah panting at their front door, her face flaring dusky red under its usual clear brown,

  ‘I’ve run all the way from our Nan’s. We’ve had another letter. John William’s coming home. Coming on the London train. Will you go with us to meet him?’

  ‘What’s taken him so long?’ snaps out before she can stop herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Hannah! You know I’m glad really. But it’s days since we had that last letter. What has he been doing?’

  ‘I expect there we
re things he had to see after. Uniform and such,’ says Hannah vaguely. ‘Never mind that. He’ll be on his way already. Quick, Clare! I’ve got to get back to the shop. I’ve had no dinner and I’m late as it is and we’ve a new customer coming to choose curtain stuff.’

  Clare feels the heat of Hannah, standing so close, her pulse throbbing in her neck after her run uphill.

  ‘Hannah – was there anything else – any news from Sam?’

  Hannah frowns. Reluctantly she says, ‘Yes. I had a letter yesterday.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say? You could have told me!’

  ‘Wasn’t anything to tell.’

  Her face has shut. She turns to go, then turns back. ‘Clarey. Uncle Francis gets the newspaper, doesn’t he?’ She fumbles for the words she wants. ‘Course they can’t put what’s really happening into the newspaper, now can they?’

  Clare thinks of the newspaper reports. Movements. Advances. Salients. The same names of ridges and fields and woods, repeated over and over again. And the lists, day after day after day.

  FALLEN OFFICERS. ROLL OF HONOUR: LOSSES IN THE RANKS. Missing Believed Killed, Seriously Wounded, Missing, Missing Believed Wounded, Prisoner in Enemy Hands, Died of Wounds… Every shade of loss has its own category. But Hannah knows that. Column after column of names, spreading out from under the classified advertisements. And then a dispatch on another page about heavy enemy casualties, and a significant advance. Clare doesn’t read the dispatches any more. They are just words which mean nothing. Father talks over the war news in the porch after Mass and it sounds like the same war news he was talking about two years ago. Except that it was new then.

  ‘The dispatches don’t tell you much,’ she says, looking at Hannah carefully and choosing her words. ‘You know how it is. You have to guess what they really mean. They can’t put everything. What did Sam say in his letter?’

  Hannah stands there, looking back at Clare. Calm, shrewd Hannah waits for something Clare can’t give her. The air’s gone quiet: that means the schoolchildren have gone in from their dinner play-time. Hannah bites her lip, waiting.

  ‘Only I’ve never had a letter like that from Sam,’ she says suddenly.

  ‘What’s he say?’

  ‘He sounds all wrong. Not like him. I don’t know.’

  Kisses. Hannah and Sam, locked, melting, in the shadow of the harbour wall when Clare walks by to Nan’s in the dusk. Hannah’s back arched, Sam’s lips on hers, his hands round her buttocks. And more than that. Clare shared Hannah’s week of dread last autumn, after Sam went back to France and Hannah’s visitor failed to arrive. Patches of crimson flaring on Hannah’s cheek-bones as she slid past Clare in Nan’s kitchen, hissing the good news, the relief of Mafeking.

  ‘He sounded all wrong, Clare. And the letter – well, the letter didn’t come from over there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Hannah looks quickly up and down the road.

  ‘Don’t say a word.’

  ‘I shan’t.’

  ‘It was posted in London.’

  Clare is silent for a moment, slow-headed in the sunshine. Then she opens her mouth, bubbling with questions, but Hannah’s turned with a switch of skirts and run off waving one hand, too far already to be called back. Already wishing she hadn’t said so much. She wishes she hadn’t told me, and Hannah’s always told me everything.

  Thank God to be away from it, away from fear and newspapers, away from letters which come too late and messages which nobody understands. Now there is not another human being in sight. Soon, John William will be here. Tomorrow morning he’ll jump down at St Ives Station. He’ll walk along with me and Hannah, and we’ll talk. We’ll be one on each of his arms. Everything will be clear again.

  Clare is too hot in her plain white blouse and long dark skirt. She loosens her belt by a notch, and rolls up the sleeves of her blouse to the elbow. She has been tramping the cliff-path for over an hour. The dry turf echoes under her boots. She’s turned her skirt over at the waistband to stop it from dragging in sheep and rabbit droppings. Anyway, skirts are shorter now. They have risen five inches since the beginning of the war, but not in St Ives. Even Hannah, who reads the fashion papers from London and can make up her own paper patterns, has only turned up her hems cautiously, for fear of Grandad. There are flappers in London, and all sorts of ungodly goings-on in London parks, according to Grandad. The Wesleyan Conference last year was forced to hear of some shameful goings-on in cinemas. But Hannah has other reasons for refraining from slashing off the bottoms of her skirts. You can’t chop at your clothes and expect them to look right. You have to alter the whole proportion of the skirt. The girls pore over last month’s Tatler, passed on to the drapery by the Veryan young ladies. They scan a cloudy, radiant picture of Lady Diana Manners making her début at Blenheim. Hannah looks minutely at her face and clothes.

  ‘Butter wouldn’t melt,’ she remarks, as she snaps over the page.

  Clare clambers up the worn, sandy middle of the path. The sun is so strong it oozes through the straw pattern of her hat brim. She’ll just get up to the boulders, she thinks, then she’ll stop and rest.

  But she doesn’t. She tugs her blouse out of her waistband and trudges on. She doesn’t look at the cliff-edge on her right side, high and sheer now, deeply cleft with gorse and bramble tangling over the drop, above dark turquoise and purple water. She changes her canvas sketching-bag to her left shoulder and watches her boots as if they were someone else’s, tramping on and on up the hot path, pebbles skidding away under them, puffs of sand and dust rising. Her ears are full of her own labouring breath and the pumping of her blood. She knows she’s walking too fast. If she’d any sense she’d slow down to the easy swing which takes her ten miles without tiring her, the way her father taught her to walk on these cliff-tops and hills when she was five years old. But she can’t slow herself down. The throb of the sun and the throb of her heart are the same thing. Hannah’s face shifts and melts into John William’s. Hannah’s back arches, John William closes the kitchen door and leaves Clare alone with the flies buzzing in the larder.

  Clare thinks of Lady Diana Manners, wide-eyed, flaunting herself. Parties and balls. Débuts, coming-outs. That is the language of her father’s past, even though he doesn’t speak it any more. She remembers Hannah flicking over the page, her face expressionless in its absolute withholding of respect.

  Faces. What’s mine like? Sweaty and hot. This hat is too tight. I’ll have a dent in my forehead. Hannah’s face. Could I draw it again? Might try, if she’d sit to me. I could tell her I’d do a sketch for Sam as well. John William’s coming home tomorrow. His face.

  Lists of names in long columns down The Times and the Morning Post, as long as columns of marching men. As many names as there are grains of sand in the sea.

  She stops. The sea sighs. The long, sloping Atlantic swell moves in at a diagonal to the cliffs. Today might be windless, but yesterday there was a strong south-westerly blowing up the dust in the streets of St Ives. The narrow land here is just a snag in the sea’s passage. It’s always trying to find a way through, thinks Clare, picturing the maze of passages under the cliff, and the sea fingering its way through from cave to cave, through membranes of rock. She knows of swimmers caught by the current, rolling in here puffed up and sodden white, bumping against the roofs of caves, splitting their swollen skins on projections of rock. It happens. Sometimes the sea wins. A boat wallows and breaks up in sight of the town. There are hymns on the edge of the sea, and a memorial stone. Nan ducks clothes in a vat of stinking, steaming black dye. Even white petticoats must be dyed black for decency. Dinners are brought in covered pails for the widow. The cost of the orphans’ boots is shared among eight families. Nan lets her neighbour weep long enough, then tells her she must brace herself, have a cup of tea, think of her children.

  There’s a gap in the gorse here, and a patch of smooth, nibbled turf. A clump of thrift bobbles right of the lip of the cliff. Clare throws off her sketchi
ng-bag and lies face-down a few feet from the edge. She wriggles forward. Beneath her the sea booms into an undercliff cave, then sucks out. Close turf makes little pricks against her cheek. She hears the drowsy sound of a bee in clover. Clare’s heart slows. She’s dizzy with walking so fast. She lies under her hat in a small golden haze, hearing the sea drain from its chambers, then come in again. She can feel it right through the rock. She listens. The water shocks, withdraws, shocks, withdraws… Too hot here. Drowsy herself, she rolls over –

  ‘You’re very near the edge,’ a voice remarks.

  Clare shoves her hat back and scrambles up on her knees. This sudden change of posture turns her dizzy. She has to look down and clutch the turf while the world heaves under her.

  The man who has spoken from the path comes over to her swiftly. She feels his shadow cross her.

  ‘Move back a little from the edge. You’re very close, did you not know?’

  A foreign voice, not from round here.

  ‘I don’t mind heights,’ gasps Clare.

  ‘Oh,’ says the voice. ‘So you thought you’d swank by going to sleep on top of the cliff?’

  That’s better. The swirl of black grains in front of her eyes settles into turf, minutely studded with pimpernel and speedwell. She curls her legs round carefully and sits up, smoothing her skirt over her knees. The man drops down beside her. She turns and looks at him.

  Five

  She sees lively, bright blue eyes looking straight at her. They are piercing but homely too, because they remind her of Nan. They are not the same colour as Nan’s eyes, but they have her warmth and quickness. Not many people ever look directly into another person’s eyes. They are frightened of what they may find there. There are so many shuttered, timid eyes.

  But his beard is astonishing. It juts from his face, wiry and bright red, and then the sunlight catches it and it’s all the colours she’d never have thought human hair could be: threads of orange and purple like slim flames lapping at coals. And yet the hair on his head is so mild, smooth and mousy, lying flat across his head and parted at one side. It doesn’t lie very well. It doesn’t look elegant, like her father’s parted hair.