Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Where were you walking to?’

  No, he’s not from here. A foreigner. His ‘you’ is nearly a soft, tender ‘yer’, but he’s not Cornish. Nor London. Where then? It’s not an accent she’s heard before. And yet his manner, his whole bearing, is like a gentleman’s. At least, it’s like that of a man who does what he chooses, and she supposes that means he must be a gentleman. Uncle Stanley walks as if he cares what the world thinks of him, for all his bulk and assertiveness. There is something quite different about this man. A sense of freedom.

  ‘I wasn’t going anywhere,’ she says. ‘Just walking.’

  ‘You should go on as far as the Carracks. There’s rabbits sitting up, and a raven looking at ’em, wishing they were little juicy ones.’

  ‘I know that part well. I’ve often walked there,’ she says coolly, piqued again that this stranger should instruct her in her own landscape. How can he claim to know it as she does, when she has been walking these cliffs and moors and beaches since she was old enough to keep pace without whining at her father’s heels?

  ‘Are you staying near by?’

  There. That’ll show him she considers him merely a visitor. This is her own country. But he looks as if he believes the whole world belongs to him. He kneels on the close-cropped turf, perfectly at his ease. There are hollows under his flat cheekbones, but his eyes are brilliant. If he leaned forward just a few inches, their faces would touch. She ought to be nervous, but she couldn’t possibly be frightened of this man.

  ‘We’re living up at Higher Tregerthen, near Eagle’s Nest. D’you know it?’

  She does. Only just at this moment she can’t quite think exactly where it is… She screws her face up, thinking.

  ‘Is that a part of the Hockings’ farm? Lower Tregerthen?’

  ‘It is, it’s by there, just above the farm. But the cottage doesn’t belong with the farm. We rent it from Captain Short, down in St Ives. I daresay you know him, too.’ A little sardonic sideways look.

  Oh. Yes. Now I know who you are. Or I think I do. You’re the man they have all been talking about.

  ‘Did you ever hear the like of it! Captain Short’s got Germans staying up at Higher Tregerthen. They’ve taken his cottage. A great big German woman, by all accounts, shouting out at him in German just as if there wasn’t a war on. They fight like two devils, not man and wife. And she wears red stockings, you never saw the like of them. And she’s got this little bit of a husband with a big red beard. Queer-looking pair, aren’t they, Mabel?’

  ‘He looks like she found him in a Lucky Dip, that’s what I say.’

  Aunt Mabel and Aunt Mag exchange the smirks of women who have found themselves solid substantial husbands.

  ‘All the same though, there are things not right up there. They say they’ve put different coloured curtains up. In the same window.’

  ‘Why, whatever would they want to do that for?’

  ‘In the window looking over the sea.’

  ‘You mean –’

  ‘Well, it could be, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Signals.’

  ‘Out to sea.’

  ‘Signalling out to sea.’

  ‘The colours mean something. It’s a code.’

  ‘I heard –’

  ‘U-boats. Signalling to those U-boats.’

  Onlooking Stanley cuts in with authority: ‘Three ships we lost in Febr’y between Land’s End and St Ives, to those damned U-boats.’

  ‘Stanley!’ Nan’s voice. ‘We’ll have no more of that language if you please, with the girls here.’

  Stanley growling inside his chest. Wink from Aunt Mag.

  ‘Lot of old nonsense anyway,’ says Nan. ‘Don’t they say he works up at Hockings? Must be all right, then.’

  ‘Free labour.’

  ‘That’s what they’re like, you see, spies. It’s in their nature. They get in with people. They get round them. If they weren’t cunning-like, they couldn’t be spies could they?’

  ‘It’s the Unseen Hand, that’s what they call it. The Unseen Hand working for the Germans. Wasn’t it in your paper, Stan?’

  Stan says heavily, ‘They make a mockery of us, her coming here in her red stockings, singing her German songs. Captain Short should never’ve let the place to em. And him in the Merchant Marine.’

  Nan says nothing more. She whisks her scissors under a piece of navy-blue twill, measures, nicks in the first cut.

  Hannah rolls her eyes at Clare.

  ‘For God’s sake, let’s get out of here,’ her face suggests silently. ‘This’ll go on all night.’

  And out they go into the wet warm evening. The wind’s blowing salt and ladders of rain pulse down the main street. Hannah links arms with Clare, and they run splashing.

  It’s just a lot of nonsense. But there’s something ugly in it all the same, when the aunts and uncles get together, faces crowded and puffed up with that queer sort of excitement which made Uncle Stanley’s eyes glisten and Aunt Mag’s eyes like little bright buttons nipping glances from one face to the next, not missing a crumb of it. Clare had recoiled, as if it were something that would smear her if she got too close. They are predatory and a bit frightening, even though they are her own flesh and blood. Yes, they were like gulls circling, ready to plunge. And she’d felt as if she should join in too, cawing over the spoils, to show them that she was one of the family, never an outsider on whom they could turn and rip to pieces. But now she remembers how Nan hadn’t joined in. She’d let them talk themselves out, watching with that little ironic reserved way she had.

  Yes, Clare knows who he is now. But what can she say to him? She can hardly tell him that his name is all over St Ives, and that his wife’s stockings are providing something for Uncle Stanley to pull his whiskers and pronounce over.

  ‘Is it really true that your wife wears red stockings?’

  ‘Say some German words so I can hear what they sound like.’

  ‘Don’t you know they’re all talking about you?’

  She can’t say any of it, so she’ll have to leave him innocent of the gossip which perhaps he ought to know. Anyway, he doesn’t look as if he knows or cares what people think of him. And in blue daylight talk of spies and warnings seems to melt away and become ridiculous. He sits on the turf, relaxed in the sunshine. He’s got all the time in the world to enjoy it and her company. His fingers feel blindly and gently at a red clover head. The bee that was feeding there has stumbled on to its next flower. He ruffles the tiny lipped segments of clover, then nods at her sketching-bag.

  ‘You paint, then?’ he asks.

  ‘These are pencil drawings. And I do water-colours.’

  ‘What do you draw?’

  ‘Flowers, mostly.’

  ‘Do you? May I see?’

  In her turn she nods. He is not a person you want to refuse, when he looks at you with such warm, compelling eyes, and seems so interested. She sits still, hugging her skirt round her knees as he unbuckles the canvas straps and fetches out her sketchbook. She hands him the big, public botanical sketchbook, not her own private book. He flips the pages, quick and intent. She waits, her heart beating palpably, perhaps from the heat and the walk, perhaps because it seems to matter what this man thinks of her work.

  ‘You can draw,’ he admits, as if puzzled by something. ‘This, look, this is fine.’ He points to the corner of one page. It’s a white foxglove she saw in a lane-bank. No good to Father, but she liked the shape of the bells lighting into flower, one after the next, up the steep stem. Yes, she agreed. It wasn’t a bad drawing. She’d have liked to paint the foxglove. The nubs of closed buds were lovely to draw. She’d like to paint them, now that she understood their structure through the drawing.

  ‘Then why don’t you? You should paint. See, that little drawing is worth the rest of the book. Why do you draw these things?’ And he points at drawing after drawing, careful, shaded, exact, attentive to the detail of nodes and stipules.

  ‘I draw them for Father. They’r
e for a book he’s writing, a botany book, so they have to be accurate.’ It sounds lame, even to herself. It sounds like a child talking, a child who has never got beyond wanting to please her father. Is she still a little girl coming in from her lessons to show her father a piece of work which she knows will be praised for its neatness?

  ‘Yes, of course they have to be accurate!’ he exclaims. ‘But have you ever really looked at what you are drawing? You’ve looked at the outside, the part everyone can see. You haven’t seen what it is really. See that bud there. Now how can you make me believe it’s got anything inside it? It’s empty – just a husk. You haven’t drawn it as if it’s got any life inside it. I don’t mean you should be sloppy. But look!’ He points at the small clump of sea-pinks stirring in the sea-breeze at the edge of the cliff.

  ‘How can you look at that without wanting to draw it as if it’s alive? See how long it is! Think how the roots must grip down deep into the turf, to keep it here through the gales. And it has a little frail flower bobbing right on the edge of the cliff. See how the stem gives way to the breeze. I should think it’ud lay itself down flat before the gales; but it would spring up again, as soon as the sun shone. Don’t you admire it? Isn’t there something courageous about it? Look how fine it is, all the time stirring with the wind so it shan’t get knocked to pieces.’

  Clare smiles. When she was little she used to pull heads of sea-pinks apart. The stems were so tough they bit into the tender palms of her hands. She knows what he means.

  ‘See, now it lies right down, to protect itself. It’s tough, really, not tender. Could you draw that?’

  She shrugs. She feels a devil in her, to teach him something when he thinks he has everything to teach her. ‘I could draw you,’ she says.

  He laughs, turning to her with delight, his eyes narrowing. His blunt stubby face is nothing special but for those eyes. Can she really draw them?

  ‘I can, if you want me to.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then move back a little. Like that. No – stop. That’s enough. Now if you look down there, at that thorn-bush, and then keep your head just as it is. Good.’

  He sits perfectly still while she takes her second, smaller sketchbook out of her bag, and an H B pencil.

  ‘Shan’t you need a rubber?’ he teases. ‘I hear all the girls at the Slade have bits of bread to rub out their mistakes.’

  ‘Do you know any girls at the Slade?’

  ‘I do, some of ’em.’

  ‘Do you? What are they like?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve a long way to go if you want to be a Slade girl. You’ll have to get your hair bobbed and get rid of your Christian name. The girls call each other by their surnames there. And they live in diggings – should you like that?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She’s not really listening. She’d like to know all about it, but not now.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she mumbles. ‘Go on talking. It’s better to draw you when you’re talking.’

  He falls silent.

  She wants to get the whole pose. The lines of face and neck flow so naturally into the body. Light, thin limbs in green corduroy trousers. Head very upright and alert, a bit bird-like. But she mustn’t overdo it and turn the drawing into a caricature. The corduroy is worn and soft, so that it shows the shapes of the limbs. The face has no good bones in it, and the hair grows oddly, flat and springy at once. You could so easily make the face common, even mongrelish. Yet it is so quick and alive. Even mischievous. In spite of all its faults of colouring and structure, it’s attractive.

  She draws on. It’s coming. But it isn’t quite right. She hasn’t been drawing enough lately, and her line is not as fluent as it should be. Also, she knows he is right. She is out of the habit of looking, really looking closely. Perhaps because there are things she doesn’t want to see. Shuttered eyes again, only this time shuttered so that they cannot look within. She is so many people; our Clarey, my Clare, cousin Clarey, Clare Coyne, the Treveals’ Clare, poor dead Susannah’s daughter. But inside she is none of them. Once she stood at her window and said her own name, over and over, ‘Clare, Clare, Clare, Clare’, until it meant nothing.

  She’s lost the bold, accurate line her drawing has at its best. Has she lost it through finicking at flower drawings? She frowns, tears her first sketch off the block, scrumples it, starts again. She would need to paint him, and not in water-colour either. He ought to be painted in oils, to get the colour of him: the brilliant beard and eyes, the sunburn over his pallor. Behind him the sea, aqua and dark purple, wrinkling a little in the breeze. But she has no oils, and she doesn’t understand the technique. There are so many things you can’t get from books. The materials are too expensive for her, and Father would not think she needed them anyway. They would be of no use for colouring flower drawings. He likes her work to be meticulous rather than flowing and alive, as she would like to be. And like everyone she knows he is too easily impressed by her work. She knows that whatever talent she has is a curled up, deeply rooted thing. It has scarcely begun to unfold. She is not hard enough on herself, and no one is hard enough on her. There are so many things she doesn’t know: technical things she tries to discover laboriously, from books. She flounders as she feels her way forward, and she wants criticism, not easy praise. But her father persists in believing that her botanical drawings represent the admirable sum of what she can achieve. This man doesn’t, though. He is prepared to criticize and challenge her.

  She sighs. ‘It’s not really finished, but I’ll only spoil it if I go on.’

  He stands up, his long thin legs stretching above her head where she still sits. He comes round to her side and kneels, looking at the drawing over her shoulder. He is so close that she can feel his breath on her neck. She shivers slightly and hopes that he hasn’t noticed, but he is intent on the drawing. She lets the book lie open, and wonders what he’ll make of it. She feels curiously unworried. It’s as good as she can do.

  He studies the drawing, picks up the book to look more closely. ‘Will you give it to me?’ he asks abruptly.

  ‘If you like,’ says Clare. Gently, she eases the page with the drawing on it away from the sketchbook’s binding. ‘You’ll have to carry it as it is,’ she says. ‘I’ve nothing to wrap it in.’

  But he’s still looking down at her sketchbook. ‘May I look through it?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘This is just a private sketchbook. Drawings I do for myself.’

  ‘I should like to see one or two,’ he responds, almost wheedling, almost wistful. But she glances up and catches the comic look of determination on his face. Just because she won’t let him! It makes him want the more. Clare smiles.

  ‘There’s one of my cousin Hannah you can see,’ she says, and opens the book and riffles through to find the sketch of Hannah sewing at the Singer. It hadn’t been easy to get Hannah to pose like that, frowning, concentrated, with all the strong moulding of her face exposed. It was the best she’d ever done of Hannah. No one had liked it, though. They thought it did not do Hannah justice.

  He looks up at her and smiles delightedly, as if he has suddenly recognized her as a friend. Her mouth curls into an answering smile.

  ‘It’s very good,’ he says. ‘Did your cousin Hannah like it?’

  ‘She didn’t. If she had, I’d have given it to her.’

  ‘You don’t make her pretty, but you make me want to know her. What does she do, your cousin? Is she a schoolteacher?’

  ‘No, she works in my uncle’s drapery. And she does dressmaking. She’s very good at it. She wants to do more, but my uncle needs her in the shop.’

  He looks closely at Hannah’s face. ‘She reminds me of a girl I used to know. Not that they’re alike – but there’s a look of her.’

  Clare closes her book. She feels he has stared at Hannah long enough.

  ‘I should like to know her,’ he repeats, with the same wistful persistence.

  ‘I don’t suppose you shall,’ says Clar
e briskly.

  ‘Will you sign my portrait for me? You know it adds to the value when it’s signed by the artist.’

  He’s laughing at her, but she doesn’t mind. ‘Then I will,’ she says. ‘And when I’m famous you can sell it and make your fortune.’

  ‘So I can.’

  She takes the drawing back, about to sign it, then pauses. ‘I ought to write your name too.’

  ‘You should. Put D. H. Lawrence, by…?’

  ‘Clare Coyne. But I can’t put D.H. It won’t look right. I need your full name.’

  ‘It’s David Herbert.’

  She writes carefully, David Herbert Lawrence, by Clare Coyne, May 1917.

  ‘There. But what do they call you? David or Herbert?’

  ‘My wife calls me Lorenzo. My friends call me David, or Lawrence. My sisters call me Bert. My enemies call me –’

  He breaks off, his face laughing but half savage. Clare hardly notices: she’s too much intrigued by the name his wife calls him.

  ‘Does she? Why does she? I mean – she’s German, isn’t she, not Italian?’

  A mistake, she knows at once. A bad mistake. His face closes over.

  ‘Yes, my wife is German. Her name is Frieda. That means peace. Do you understand German?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This foul talk,’ he says. ‘I suppose the town is stewing with it.’

  ‘Not as much as that,’ she says quickly, stung by the contempt in his voice when he speaks of the town. It was as if he’d seen Aunt Mag’s babbling eyes himself, and heard Uncle Stan turning over the dirty business of the Lawrences in his big, raw fists.

  ‘Because my wife is a German. Because she is a von Richthofen. And we want to live alone, to ourselves.’

  She recognizes the pride in his voice when he says his wife’s family name. She’s familiar enough with that pride herself. Her father talking of the Coynes, affecting to laugh at what they stand for, gently mocking their enclosed, inturned world of Coyne Park and Coyne village, yet something in him always unhappy until strangers know of Coyne, and where he comes from. But surely there is nothing to be proud of in a German name? The name is familiar too. It has a newspaper ring to it. Where has she come across it?