Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I didn’t mean…’

  He has half turned from her, looking out over the sea. Behind him, looking north, the dark deeply folded land, the edge of the world itself, wrinkled and looking westward to America. He would like to go there. Southwards the land narrows, creaming with surf even in calm weather. There is so much more sea than land, and so much more sky than sea. The sky’s perfect blue thins to lavender at the horizon. The sea breathes calmly, its back to the land, lapping, fulfilled.

  It is wonderful to have your back to the land, to the whole of England: to have your back to the darkness of it, its frenzy of bureaucratic bloodshed, its cries in the night. It is heaven to have your back to the long gun-resounding coast of France, echoing against the white face of England. To have your back to this madness which finds a reason for everything: a madness of telegrams, medical examinations and popular songs; a madness of girls making shells and ferocious sentimentality. That blackness is behind him now, and he will not turn round to be trapped by it. It is a slow stain of nightmare, seeping into human minds and hearts. He refuses to let it contaminate his heart. He will keep his eyes turned to the West, towards the light and the place where the sun is going.

  He falls silent. How much has he said? The girl beside him is frightened-looking, her lips parted.

  ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes. I am.’ The words are brief, but he does not sound angry any more.

  ‘Could you tell me… could you tell me what sort of thing you write?’

  ‘What sort? Ah, now there’s a question. It’s lucky you asked me and not the men who review my books.’

  Yes, the anger has really gone, just as if the sun has poured out from behind a cloud. What a face he has! She would like to draw it again, as it is now. She says boldly, ‘You know what I mean. Faces or botanical drawings?’

  He puts his head back and laughs, and his red beard glistens. ‘Faces! Faces every time. And the likenesses are too good, so folk hate ’em, just as your family hates your portraits. How they hate them! They’d like to burn them all up, and me with them. Oh, you’ll meet the book-burners yet, Clare Coyne, and the picture-burners, if you go on drawing. Some of them do it so nicely – it breaks their heart to set a match to you, but for your own sake they’ve got to do it, don’t you understand? And all the time they’re looking at you like a dog does when it wants to bite your leg but it daren’t. Then there are the others who don’t pretend.’

  He is still laughing, but she shivers.

  ‘It sounds horrible,’ she says. ‘Why have they got to be like that?’

  ‘Don’t you pretend you don’t know, Clare Coyne. There’s nothing you couldn’t see if you wanted to.’ He taps the sketchbook as if it contains his evidence. His eyes brighten, daring her.

  ‘I must go,’ she says, glancing up at the sun. ‘I have to cook the dinner and the rabbit’s not skinned yet.’

  ‘Rabbit!’ he exclaims. ‘You’ll make a rabbit stew, I suppose?’

  ‘I will. It’s a tender young’un, it won’t take much cooking. It’ll eat soft as butter.’ Unconsciously her voice drops into the tones of her cousin Kitchie, who’d brought the rabbit that morning, banging limp and warm against his britches.

  ‘Do you keep house for your father?’

  ‘I have done since I was ten,’ she answers.

  ‘Coyne. That’s not a Cornish name, I think?’

  ‘It’s my father’s name. He’s from London – Somerset, really. But my mother was Cornish.’

  ‘Was she? You don’t look it. The Cornish are soft, dark people – aren’t they? Like your cousin Hannah.’

  Soft, dark, stubborn Hannah.

  ‘Yes, Hannah’s pure Cornish,’ she agrees. ‘She’s never been north of Bodmin.’

  ‘And you have?’

  ‘I’ve been to London. Twice. And to Coyne, to see my Uncle Benedict and my Aunt Marie-Thérèse.’

  He scans her. Dark red hair. White skin. ‘You might be Irish. Or Scots? Are you Scots?’

  ‘My great-grandmother was Irish. I’m like her, Father says.’

  He frowns. What is it now? Doesn’t he like the Irish? And yet he fires up at a word against the Germans.

  ‘So you’re a lady, Miss Clare Coyne,’ he says. ‘A lady who skins rabbits. I must tell Frieda. She’ll like that. I wish I could get Frieda to skin a rabbit, but no, she’s such a swell she can’t even put on her own stockings.’

  An image flits into Clare’s mind. She sees Lawrence kneeling, rolling Frieda’s red stockings up her legs past her knees. Frieda’s legs will be white and strong, more womanly than Clare’s own. But there’s a blank disc where Frieda’s face should be.

  ‘You’ll come and visit us?’ he asks suddenly. ‘Come to tea. Come next Tuesday. Frieda will like it. She ought to know more women – she knows no women here.’

  ‘Is that sufficient recommendation – the fact that I’m a woman?’

  ‘And the drawing,’ he reminds her. ‘Don’t forget, I’ve got that. So you’ll come?’

  She hesitates, then, ‘I could call in for butter at Lower Tregerthen too,’ she agrees.

  He nods, and looks back over the moor. ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as the gorse this year,’ he says.

  She watches him walk away. He is a queer figure with his thin legs and corduroys. He is quite different from anyone else she has ever met. She has met so few people who live out in the world. Father is always saying that she meets no one, as if he regrets it. But does he mean people like Lawrence? She smiles. Next time she will get him to tell her about the girls at the Slade. And his books. She would like to know much more about his books. She shades her eyes, and looks after him. He is holding the rolled-up drawing carefully, as if he values it. He walks away fast and lightly, raises his hand to wave, then disappears into a fold of the land.

  Six

  Thursday

  Hannah is angry with me because I did not go with them to meet John William. They did not expect Father to be there at the station. They know he will call later this evening, with a present of cigars for John William. Nan and Aunt Sarah and Aunt Mag have boiled a ham and made gooseberry tarts and cheesecakes. I did not help them. I had my baking to do here. Now Nan will be putting aside pastry crust and ham scraps for Uncle John’s pigs while Aunt Mag and Hannah wash the dishes. Aunt Sarah won’t be in the kitchen. They’ll have shooed her out into the front-room, so that she can sit in the wing chair by the fire and watch John William. It won’t matter to Aunt Sarah what he does, or whether he talks to her or not. As long as she can sit there and watch him being alive. She knows how easily it might have been us crowded into the front parlour to receive visits of condolence, with the smell of black dye bubbling from the kitchen. How thin it is now, and how easy to cross, that line between being dead and being alive. Grandad doesn’t understand it like Aunt Sarah does. He’s sure that the Lord will look after John William. Every night he says the Psalm of Protection for him: ‘A thousand shall fall by thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee…’ I love the words, but how can they charm bullets and shells? How many people are praying them? Thousands, I should think. All hoping that others will fall on the left side, and the right side, and their own will be safe. But I do light candles for him. I would give him a badge of the Sacred Heart if I thought he would wear it.

  Grandad will sit at the other side of the fireplace, drinking in every word of John William’s, so he can go down to the quay and smoke and retell it ‘fresher than the newspaper and more truth in it’.

  Kitchie will interrupt with questions. Albert and Jo and George will lounge in one by one, darkening the room, waiting for John William to come out with them. Everyone knows they’ll take a drink, but as long as nothing’s said, nothing’s questioned.

  Hannah and I stroked the cloth of his uniform when it was new and stiff, when we said goodbye and I kissed him but he wasn’t looking at me. He was lo
oking over my head at Uncle Arthur and Aunt Sarah and the boys and all the family milling on the station platform. I could not read the look on his face. Then Nan slid another packet of sandwiches into his kitbag, and I stepped back. He smiled at me then, and winked, and made us a secret world for a second, like we’ve always had. I wonder what his uniform is like now. He will have to have a new one if he’s going to be an officer. The old one will smell like Sam’s letters, muddy and frightening. When someone is killed, they send his uniform home with mud and blood still on it.

  Nan will let John William smoke in the house tonight instead of making him go out on to the street. The front-room will smell of smoke and food and elderflower cordial. In two years’ time they’ll call Kitchie up, and we’ll never get exemption for Kitchie, even though he’s the only one Aunt Mabel managed to rear.

  She stops and frowns at what she’s just written. It sounds coarse, like a farm diary. She raises her pen to score it through, then sighs and leaves it as it is. It’s true. Draw faces, not flowers, Mr Lawrence said. A blob of ink falls on the page and spreads.

  John William is very brown, they say. Hannah was shy of him when he stepped down off the train. He was like a stranger, so dark and broad. He’s weathered like Albert and Jo and George now, only it’s not from farm-work, and he’s grown a ’tache. He’s handsome now, Hannah says. I hope she didn’t notice how surprised I was. Didn’t she think he was handsome before? His face has changed too, Hannah says, but she couldn’t tell me how.

  ‘You ought to have come and met him for yourself, Clarey. He asked where you were.’

  Did he? Or is that just Hannah saying it, knowing I want her to say it?

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to crowd him, that first hour. There are so many of us.’

  ‘How could there be too many of us?’ asks Hannah. ‘You’re family, aren’t you?’

  I couldn’t say to Hannah that I wanted to be the only one. I wanted the train to stop, and the steam and smoke to billow round us as John William stepped off the train and folded me tight in his arms, tight, so tight I couldn’t feel anything but him, so close I couldn’t see anything but him.

  My cousin is back from the war. There. Do I feel something? I should. I could walk down the hill in five minutes and look through Nan’s geraniums in the windows and see him. I could lift the latch and Nan would fetch me a plate of cold ham and call through, ‘Here’s your cousin come, John William! It’s Clarey!’

  Here he is, close enough to touch, eating gooseberry tart.

  No. He isn’t really ours any more. He won’t be ours as long as the war lasts. He doesn’t belong to us now, he belongs to the war. Even when the men are wounded they aren’t allowed to come home, not if the war still thinks it can use them. Even if they are dead they can’t come home. The war takes care of it all. We never see the dead men coming back, and it’s so bard to believe in what you never see. Mrs Hore told me she still expects to see her William coming down the street. She thinks she hears his step in the entry. He had his own way of whistling under his breath as he fiddled with the latch-string. If only she could have seen him in his coffin, she says, she would be able to stop listening for him.

  Can they make enough coffins for them all? How many coffins, and who makes them? The chaplain wrote and told Mrs Hore that William had his rosary beads twisted around his rifle butt when they found him. Father O’Malley encouraged all the men to do that, so they would have their rosaries with them, whatever happened. They would have two essential things by them, their rifles and their rosaries. William was killed instantly, Father O’Malley wrote. Mrs Hore said it was good of him to write and tell her that. It set her mind at rest. She knew William hadn’t suffered. But I wonder. Sam says they always write it. Shot through the head, or shot through the heart. Then Sam said something I can’t forget: ‘We pick up what we can find, enough to make a decent burial.’

  William Hore made his First Communion with me, but he wasn’t very holy.

  Who made me? Why did God make me?

  I should not be writing this. I should keep it shuttered. I’ll have that dream again.

  I won’t go down to Nan’s with Father. I can see John William tomorrow, after he’s had a night’s sleep. It’ll be quieter then, and I’ll see him alone.

  Clare blots the page, shuts up the book, then leans forward with her elbows on her little desk. The desk is set in the bay window of her bedroom, looking out over the sea and the long flank of the cemetery. The sea is dark, wrinkled by a cool evening breeze. It is bald and empty. The war again. But long before the war, things had changed. She’s heard Grandad talk of the drift-boats coming into St Ives from the herring fishery on the Irish coast. The Agenora fell in with a shoal of pilchards on her way back, and brought in twenty thousand, so he heard tell, for even Grandad wasn’t born then. There are no catches like that these days. The seas have run dry.

  Grandad told her it was more than fish they brought back from Ireland. They’d go ashore there to buy and sell, and this time they brought back some old clothes from a woman who was selling them cheap. But she didn’t tell the fishermen why she wanted to sell them. Her son had died of cholera, and the clothes were full of disease. So our boats came back not knowing what they brought with them and spread cholera to the people of Newlyn, so that a man in perfect health could eat his breakfast, say goodbye to his wife, go out to his work, and be dead by nightfall.

  ‘This is the blue cholera I’m speaking of,’ said Grandad.

  And the people were so fearful that they ran away, leaving the sick on the ground to die alone. A man would leave his wife, and a wife would leave her husband. The whole country was bent down with bad news like a field of wheat under the wind.

  ‘They would publish lists of the dead on the walls, and there were midnight funerals with hearses going through the streets at midnight to keep the disease from spreading.’

  ‘Why was it called blue cholera?’ asked Clare.

  ‘For a good reason. It turned a man blue, see, before he died. It was the way the disease worked in a man’s body, and it was a terrible thing to watch.’

  ‘You wouldn’t leave me and Nan, would you, Grandad, even if we turned blue? You wouldn’t run off from us?’

  ‘Ask God to spare us that trial, Clarey.’

  That was just like Grandad. He clung too close to the truth to give her easy assurances.

  ‘Ask God to spare us from trials and temptations, Clarey.’

  Grandad did not like the Irish. But she had to like them, for she was part Irish herself. How could she dislike part of herself?

  But when you think of it, cholera was nothing to the war.

  ‘A thousand shall fall by thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand.’ A thousand thousands, and yet we don’t run away. Anyway, there is nowhere to run. Everything stays so calm, as if we could go on like this for ever. We don’t have burials at midnight to hide the numbers of the dead, because we don’t have any funerals at all. Not here. We’re not supposed to pray for the war to end. We’re meant to pray for victory. The boys go out to France just as they used to go off on the drift-boats, or down the tin-mines, or to work on the farms. They all go: Medlands and Pascoes, Vivians and Trethakes, Popes and Mawgans. A whole landscape of family faces crushed into thin black lines, so dense you could not read them but that your fear and curiosity made you read them. You looked out for local names. What was cholera compared to the emptiness of the sea, the quiet streets, and the clumsy-booted young men, first time away from home, entraining and vanishing through the foggy curtain of war. We don’t know what’s happening behind that curtain. There’s a silence which all the yammering headlines can’t break.

  Clare thinks of the train journey she loves, from London to Penzance. Drowsing and jogging through the heavy green fields of Devon. Then the bright red sea-cliffs at Dawlish, and waves breaking nearly on to the line. As you crossed into Cornwall you seemed to go through a curtain of light. You were sealed away f
rom darkness and soot-smells and tall crowding buildings. Even the smoke of the train seemed to blow sideways whitely and buoyantly. You were safe and nothing could snatch you back.

  But since conscription the trains had been going north and east heavily laden with boys off fishing-boats and farms and shops. It’s taken a long time for the war to get down to them, but it has managed it at last. The war’s long fingers can winkle a boy out of a lonely cottage on Bodmin Moor just as easily as it can pluck one out of the Manchester mills. There’s nowhere safe from trains and telegrams and call-up notices. There are medical examinations held at Bodmin. Classifications. There’s a class for everyone, no matter what the shape of your body or its powers and aptitudes. If you have two arms and legs, the war can make something of you for its purposes. Fit for active service. Fit for light duties. Fit for non-military duties.

  IS YOUR BEST BOY IN KHAKI?

  As for the dead, Clare has seen none of them. There would not be enough room for them in the graveyards, and they are as near to heaven in Picardy as they could be in the long sea-resounding graveyard of St Ives. So don’t mourn because there is no funeral.

  I’m one of the lucky ones. I haven’t lost anyone. Well, no one close.

  The fingers of the war are pulling harder. They are after Harry now. They want to reclassify him, in spite of his weak arm. Combing out, it’s called. Like combing lice out of hair. Kitchie is still too young for them. Albert and Jo and George were too quick for them. Before enlistment gave way to conscription Grandad had seen the way the wind was blowing. He and Uncle John conferred late into the evenings. George was a coast-watcher already, and now Albert and Jo volunteered. Food-producers, coast-watchers, patrollers, they had kept their exemptions so far. And how could the land be worked without them? The country must have food.