Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  The names of Tribunal members were common coin to Grandad. He knew them all, weighed them, judged them. This one was envious; that one fair but hard. This one had a prejudice against farmers keeping their sons on the lands. That one might be bribable. Uncle John, Uncle Arthur and Uncle William listened to Grandad. Gifts of vegetables, butter, cheese, ham, were driven in from the farm. Uncle Stan, sonless, boomed and schemed on behalf of the rest of them. But how long could it go on now that all that mattered was more bodies for the Front?

  Grandad curses himself now for not thinking so far ahead with Harry. Now they are saying that Harry has got sufficient use of his arm. And it is only his left arm. Harry must come up to Bodmin again for a more thorough examination. The war gets hungrier and hungrier, the more we give to it, thinks Clare. It is like feeding a dog which has worms.

  Downstairs Francis Coyne drinks Burgundy. The wine flushes pleasantly through his body, and he reaches out to pour himself a second glass. He has spent the afternoon in Newlyn, where he goes twice a month to fuck neat plump-bodied May Foage. Tuesday or Thursday is his day: he writes her a note beforehand. He walks from Penzance Station past the harbour wall with its slopping green water and blocks of dumped limestone exposed at high tide, and then down the beach road to Newlyn. All the time he walks he thinks of fucking, loving the word for it and the anticipation of it. Under her black skirt and white petticoat she wears no drawers on the day he visits. What he likes is to be let into her white, tight little house, to look at her for a long moment, with her hair knotted smoothly at the back of her neck and her broad white forehead and cheeks unlined, placid, giving nothing away, and her two feet firmly planted on the bit of Turkey carpet he got her second-hand as a sign of her respectability. Then he sits down in her one armchair, and she perches herself on his knee, proper and neat and upright, and his left hand circles her waist while his right feels up her plump white calves (for she has taken off her stockings too) and up her thighs, which he knows have a subtle tracery of blue veins on their insides, and up to knot themselves in her mazy pubic hair. Her head hair is as smooth and brown as a salmon-river, he thinks. And on he slips into the secret moist cleft of her body, with its folds of skin that suck and hold his finger. He loves her childless tightness and springiness. She sits there through it primly, a woman in black perched on his knee, tucking in a smile.

  She has no husband. She had one once who made her Mrs Foage, but he is no more. She is nothing so definite as a widow, nothing so weak as a deserted wife, but her husband is perfectly absent. By gift or charm she has no children, nor does she show any sign that she has ever wanted them. She has other visitors, but he never sees them. She is modest in what she asks for, and modest in how she asks for it. After one brisk, business-like conversation, the subject of money has never had to be reopened. They both know where they stand. She knows how investments are, these days. And long ago she was a St Ives girl and went to school with Susannah Treveal. It gives her pleasure to draw Susannah’s gentleman husband into her house. It gives him pleasure to think of the two little girls with their moist clefts still as tight as almonds, pattering to school and pattering home again, not knowing that one day he would have them both.

  And he has May Foage. He has her more than he ever had Susannah in her white, startled night-dresses. Sly, neat, fuckable May in her blacks. He has licked May’s breasts; he has bitten her shoulders. She has rocked him, and he has heard the waves pouncing on the beach outside her cottage, as he arches over her broad, white, spread buttocks, spread open for him. How delicious she is, jouncing beneath him; how shrewd in her passivities, how nimble in her accommodations. He swirls the wine and thinks of May’s cleverness. His occasional occasion of sin. He drinks the wine, and it slides along his veins, leaving them sunlit.

  And here he is, home again, waiting for the tea (which he doesn’t want) to be brought to him by Clare, who probably doesn’t want to bring it either, since he has just heard her coming downstairs as if reluctantly, stopping on the landing, looking out, no doubt, as she does. Better not have another glass. Here she comes.

  My daughter Clare. Pale face, dark dress in the doorway. Her face is mute and closed in on itself, as she puts down the tea-tray and moves off. She’s incurious. She never asks me where I’ve been on Tuesdays or Thursdays, twice a month. I have never had to lie to Clare.

  ‘What are you doing today, Father?’

  ‘I’ll be out most of the day, Clare. But I’ll be home for dinner. I may go over to Newlyn.’

  Does she smell May Foage on me? When I come home I drink wine without washing my hands of May’s juices. Then I drink tea and go upstairs and pour water into the bowl in my room and soap my hands with the cheap yellow soap which is all Clare can get now.

  They say the Germans are making soap out of the cadavers of fallen soldiers. They need the fat from them. Kadaverfabriken have sprung up secretly to process the corpses. It was preached against at Mass. I say nothing. I know the glee of an evil imagination.

  My pale daughter Clare goes out of the room. She is not pretty today. Her features are shrunken, small and tight as they were when she was angry as a child, or when she was unhappy. She drops her eyelids, makes herself absent. She has her own thoughts. Thank God that we each have our own thoughts and that we can live secretly even in this small house. Clare cannot see the marks of May’s hands and teeth on me. She does not hear the cries and sweet succulent noises I hear.

  ‘Clare!’ he calls, a little too loudly, his voice like a seagull’s in the small brown room. ‘Clare! Will you come down with me now and see your cousin?’

  A small collected pause, and her voice from the kitchen, little and purposeful, ‘No, Father. Hannah has lent me a new dress pattern until tomorrow. I’m going to alter my green silk. I shall see John William tomorrow.’

  Her green silk. Poor child, she doesn’t need to specify the colour. She has only one silk dress. He has done nothing for her. Her hands are red with housework, and they rasp when she touches silk. While he is out, she will spread her green silk on the kitchen-table, cut it, remodel it according to Hannah’s pattern, sew it again. She will be well pleased with what she achieves. All last evening she was unpicking the gathers at the waistband.

  It’s the war, he consoles himself. It’s the same for all the girls. They have never known anything else.

  He ought to have been able to buy another silk dress for his daughter, to make her beautiful. But look at Hannah, she has no silk dress at all, and she manages. Yes. Her brave blue and white stripes are upended as she opens her body to Sam. The white thighs of May Foage and Hannah Treveal flex and shine. It is May, the month of May. Mary’s month. He remembers Coyne and his sisters dressing their May altars, fitting more and more flowers into tiny silver vases in front of the statue of Our Lady. And he already ironic, but still liking to see them at it, liking the flush of solemnity of their cheeks, and their smooth parted lips wondering if it was beautiful enough yet, and the way they ducked and kneeled in the chapel, adorning, adoring. His thoughts widen, covering Clare, putting a new silk dress on her, grey to match the slate of her eyes, putting her in mantilla and dark gloves, folding her hands in prayer. Her hands would be smooth and white under kid gloves, her body would be hidden and quite unimaginable.

  ‘And a pious ejaculation to go with it!’ says Francis aloud, scorning himself. He picks up the box of cigars for John William. He takes up his hat and goes out, calling goodnight to Clare, glimpsing through the kitchen door his resourceful girl nipping and tucking at her old green dress in the pale May evening light.

  Seven

  Zennor church door creaks and opens. Outside, the unusual May heat simmers. It is noon and quiet. Dogs lie in the dust. Butterflies skim gravestones and the pointing finger of shadow on the sundial to the left of the church porch is sharply distinct. The Glory of the World Passeth, it says. Lawrence stops to look up at it, notes the name of the sundial-maker. Paul Quick.

  He enters the cool porch, and then
into the church smell of wood and stone and darkness. He knows where he is going. He walks up the aisle, turns right, kneels to touch the carving of Zennor’s mermaid. She floats, round-bellied, arms raised, innocent above the curve of her tail. Her fins flick and scull. He traces the carving of breast and navel. How fine she is. He is surprised that they have not put her out of the church, or gashed her into decency with axe and chisel. They have tried to hurt her, but she lifts her hands blithely above the scars. She belongs here. She is dark and smooth as the little madonnas he’s seen in Bavarian wayside shrines, and she is as faceless as they are. Her body is like a sea-wave, a crest which will never break.

  The church smells of its own sunlessness, as churches do. He gets up from her side and goes out, leaving the door ajar so that sweet air can blow in and ruffle the May flowers on the altar. He’ll go to the farm now and help with the furze-cutting, then tonight he’ll give Stanley his French lesson. He pushes down the thought of Frieda left alone, restlessly writing, restlessly reading.

  *

  When the wind blows hard at night, the cottage door bursts open under its pressure, and the rain slashes in across the floor, bringing darkness and the noise of the sea. I think I hear the friends of my childhood and all the young soldiers of Marienbad who marched past our garden walls to the parade-ground. My sister Nusch and I would throw apples and pears down among the marching men, to see their perfect lines falter as the soldiers scrambled for the fruit. Now they are gone, swallowed up like all the other thousands upon thousands, and I am here on the farthest outside edge of a country which hates me. I can do nothing. I am the Hunwife. The darkness is alive and wild. A south-westerly gale bangs the waves against the base of the cliffs with a sound like gunfire. I force the door shut and look around the safe, violated room. The walls are pale pink, glowing, and the furniture we got so cheaply at Benny’s Sale Rooms in St Ives is so beautiful. And yet no one wanted it. But for us it makes a home. How many more homes will we have to make? Spreading out shawls on ugly chipped chests, bargaining for furniture, hanging embroidery on the wall, finding china for sixpence to put on the dresser. Such queer, beautiful bits of china, none of them matching. The bowls with peacocks on them. I tell Lorenzo that we are gypsies, and I laugh and make a joke of it, and he believes me when I say that I don’t mind it.

  I think about growing up in Metz. Those white dresses we had, and our stiff-sided boots, and the hats which could never crush down my hair. There was so much of it always, springing out and curling. Like a lioness, my mother said. She called me her little lioness and she said white didn’t suit me. But never mind, I would wear colours when I was grown up. Then, when we went out to walk around the garrison, my big sister Else held my hand and told me to keep close to her and walk with small steps, but I could not. Something inside me made me break out and run. If I tore the lace on my petticoat, I would throw it to the floor and kick it into the corner of the room for my maid to find and mend.

  Then we were at the court of the Kaiser. We were the daughters of the Baron von Richthofen, Nusch and Else and I, and so we must talk in this way, and dress in this way, and laugh in this way. So stiff – such nonsense! – I never cared for the Kaiser. But my cousins I loved, my bold cousins with their jokes and teasing and their brilliant uniforms. They would come into a room and the air would seem to dance round them. And now when I hear of the U-boats sunk and Germans killed, I think of them all, not skating or dancing or buying flowers for us any more, but men at war, as stern and stiff as even the Kaiser would have wanted.

  So I read the Berliner Tageblatt and scour up and down the lists of the dead, but when I have finished I hide it under a cushion or the whole day will darken for me each time I see it. I will not let the war do that to our life. So many good things come each day. I was ill – I was in such pain I could not move out of my bed. And now I am quite well again and I can walk on the cliffs, five miles, six miles, and come home and eat the pea and ham soup which Lorenzo has made. There are so many good things each day.

  Only, the children. I am not fit to see my children, they say: only for half an hour in a solicitor’s office with a clerk coming in to tell me when it is time for me to go. When I gave each of the children ten shillings, my husband took it from them and sent it back to me.

  ‘You left them. You chose to leave them. You preferred to abandon your own children rather than give up that man. Now you must live without them.’

  He would like me to die without seeing my children again. Monty and Barbara and Elsa. They have grown so much. If I held out my arms, they would not fit there as they used to do. I think of them at night, if Lorenzo is down at the farm and I’m alone. Have they gone to bed yet? Are they sleeping, or are they lying awake too, staring at the dark and imagining they see faces in it? Do they see my face? Or do they see nightmare faces and cry out for me in the dark, and I never come?

  I wrap myself in the Paisley shawl Lorenzo bought and mended for me. He mended it so patiently. It was a cobweb of rents and tears, but it only cost sixpence and he saw that he could make it beautiful for me. He is late again. If he was here he would be moving around the room, quick and deft, heating some milk and chiding me for my laziness. I would play the piano, and sing, and he would sit in that chair with his head thrown back, listening to me, eyes half shut. But he is down at the farm again, laughing with William Henry and Stanley.

  The Hockings are not comfortable when I come down to the farm. The talk and the laughter stop as I open the door. William Henry stands up. They do not know how to treat me, for I am a lady and a foreigner and not one of them, and yet I live in a labourer’s cottage which they would not live in. Even Lorenzo looks at me across that farm kitchen as if I do not belong. So I don’t stay long. I say goodnight and lift the latch and walk out into the darkness, and as I go I hear laughter and talk spurt up again, the way it always does when he is there. The yard is cool and I can smell the cattle crowding up to the field gate. I walk up to the cottage, and look down at the long slope of the fields, and the sea with the stars coming out over it.

  At least there are no dark shadowy rooms leading off this one. There is only this one little pink room, with its low boarded ceiling and boxy staircase going up the wall opposite the fireplace. One warm lit room and then the window looking westward towards America. Wind and space and strangers. No Katherine next door any more. The Murrys did not like it, for it was too wild for them.

  We made a home for them here. We willed them to like it, but they would not. Never shall I forget Murry squatting on the bit of rough grass outside their cottage, painting black the kitchen chairs we had bought for him, as if it were a funeral, while Katherine settled her things so that she could write. But she could not, she told me: she could not stand the way the wind blew, and the rain slashed at her ankles every time she went out. How she made me laugh! It made me feel I had never had a woman friend here in England, a real woman friend I could tell things. No one tells stories like Katherine, Lorenzo said. Before they came, he thought it was all beginning. He wrote letter after letter, talking about ‘Katherine’s tower’. We would be able to start the community he is always dreaming about. Well, I did not care so much about that. But I cared for Katherine: she was so fine, and small, and she made us laugh and forget the war.

  It was hard for Lorenzo. Before they came here he found the cottage for them, and helped them to furnish it. He scrubbed the floors for them, and bought iron pans for their cooking. Katherine does not like to cook. She is like me, always half expecting to turn round and find a maid has slipped into the room to tell her that it is time for dinner.

  Now he has shaken off his disappointment, as he does. He knows that he will never build his community here, his dream of Rananim. The Murrys could not stand it and who could blame them? This is not the place for them. Katherine talked of Bandol, and the smell of almond blossom. Here it rained all the time, and Katherine was cold, and the fires smoked and the lanes were full of farm mud. Lorenzo and I fought every
day. I saw Katherine’s face when we fought, when Lorenzo chased me around the table and hit me and called me a hussy and said he would make me scrub floors on my knees. I fought as hard as he did. He never got the better of me. But Katherine did not understand it; she would go away without speaking.

  They would not stay. Lorenzo raged against them for weeks, but I could not. Yet it was so good to have another woman to talk to, another woman close by. Katherine was like a little mermaid herself, swimming in the cove, so slender-boned and well made in her odd, perfect clothes. Murry said it was too cold for her after Bandol, she must have the south. So they found a place at Mylor, on the south coast where it would be gentler for them, out of the storms we have here. Lorenzo says that Murry has abandoned him and betrayed the Blutsbrüderschaft between them, so now he goes down to the farm and talks with William Henry. I do not like William Henry. He looks at me as if I am nothing, not important, just a thing belonging to my husband. But who is William Henry to look at me like that? A farmer. A peasant. Always he is dragging Lorenzo down into his fields, his farm, pretending to want to learn geography and French so that Lorenzo can explain to him and teach him as he loves to do. Then Lorenzo comes home to me and tells me I do not understand William Henry, his mind is fine and quick and he is hungry to discuss ideas. I can see that he is hungry. But for what is he hungry? There are so many people like him, who want Lorenzo and what he can give to them. They see he has a gift and they want it. But I have lived with him for five years and I know they cannot capture it.

  *

  At Zennor the wind never quite sleeps. The typescript on the table is held down by a piece of granite, but the edge of the pages still riffle and words jerk into movement like those cinematographic images children make by drawing stick figures on the corners of a notebook and flicking the pages. Lawrence works swiftly, writing by hand in margins and between the typewritten lines, making his final revision. He is writing his article on ‘The Reality of Peace’. He works with intense concentration and his handwriting flows across the page. The article is nearly finished, but he senses that there is something missing: the ideas are naked, like signposts. He stops and shuts his eyes. The blind, lost faces of the men on the special conscription train rise in his mind like the faces of drowned men. He leans over the paper and writes again, faster. Then he tucks the typescript under the stone again and goes in to scrub the potatoes.