Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  Now there’s this business of the Red Cross concert. I suppose she’s going because John William’s home on leave. They’ve always got on well. The two of them talking, talking, thin clever faces across the kitchen-table. But that was a long time ago now. Ah, well, she’ll be safe enough with Hannah and Harry and John William, listening to the warblings of some lachrymose Belgian. All the cousins are going, apparently.

  Clare hears the church door thud shut behind her father. She presses her face deeper into her warm hands and gabbles through her prayers of preparation: ‘I desire now to confess sincerely all my sins to you and your priest, and for this purpose I wish to know myself and call myself to account by a diligent examination of my conscience…’

  Her mind scutters through prayer after prayer. The worn phrases click and whirr. But it isn’t true. I don’t desire it. I don’t want to know all my sins and call myself to account. So what am I doing here? John William’s grin. John William’s warm arm around her waist, his hand on her stomach, the spreading tingle in her breasts, the sweet heaviness in her groin. That’s why I’m here. Because all that is sinful.

  ‘Grant me, Father, this change of heart…’ But a song is hurdy-gurdying round inside her all the while.

  We’re here because we’re here because we’re here

  because we’re here because…

  There’s no beginning or ending to this song. It goes on for ever, picked up by one voice as soon as it’s dropped by another, just as the army lives on while the individual men die, one by one. It’s a song for marching. It goes with the lift and crash of thousands of boots, and with the weary stumble of men who can scarcely put one foot in front of another any more. The army goes on for ever to the noise of boots and trench songs:

  Send out the boys of the Old Brigade

  Who made Old England free,

  Send out my mother, my sister and my brother,

  But for Gawd’s sake don’t send me.

  Sam sang the song to Hannah and Clare. At first they were shocked, though they wouldn’t show it to Sam. Later, talking in Clare’s bedroom, Hannah said, ‘But you have to look at it their way. When you think of it, all the time they’re singing they’re getting closer to the Front.’

  Sam has got a girl up in London. They’ll go to the music-hall together. The last number is always a throbbing romantic song, and there’ll be swaying rows of soldiers up on the balcony with their best girls, the girls they’re treating tonight. Then it’s over and the lights go up and they’ll spill out into the dusk, art silk rubbing against khaki, pressed close together and not giggling any more but solemn, drifting away down the streets, away from lights and music and the smell of wine and beer on warm breath. They’ll go into the parks where there’s a smell of jasmine and rank laurel and the night policeman turns a blind eye to movements in the shadows.

  She sighs and shifts her weight to her left knee.

  ‘I wish Hannah was there for Sam.’

  She is being stupid anyway. Sam will not dare to go to a public place for fear of the military police. John William must have been joking when he said Sam was going to a show.

  ‘But what will it avail to know my sins if you do not also give me the grace of sorrow and repentance?’

  Sam is sinning: Hannah is sinning: I am sinning. Clare presses down a bubbling giggle. She’s reminded irresistibly of the conjugation of French verbs. The perfect, the pluperfect, the imperfect. I shall have sinned, he will have sinned, we shall all have sinned…

  Mrs Hore sighs enormously and creaks off her knees and into a box. She is so heavily in mourning she seems to drip black behind her. You look for a slow stain of black spreading out on the floor where she’s been kneeling. Muttering begins again from the confessional. There’s no one before me now. She glances sideways. It’s the Driscoll girl who works as a maid up at Middleton House. Bouncy, red-faced Driscoll girl, not bouncy any more. Things have gone badly for her. Her brother, Caddie Driscoll – what was it they said about him? Poor soul, he was not right in his mind any more, not since he came home from the war. And the Driscolls had been going about boasting that they’d got him back without even a Blighty one, before they realized what it meant and that they’d got him back without the spirit in him any more. He’d never have been sent back unless he was fit for nothing but to be spat out by the war. Shell-shock was what he had. Clare had seen him bobbing and trembling in the back pew at Benediction. But he had to go out of the church because he could not bear the noise, and the smoke from the censer frightened him. His face was as white as a wax candle.

  She turns and whispers to Annie Driscoll: ‘Should you like to go before me?’

  ‘Are you not ready?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  No, I’m not ready. More prayers. Can’t leave now when there’s six behind me, all murmuring, knowing, watching. And a quizzical face with a blazing beard questioning in front of my eyes.

  O purify me, then I shall be clean

  O wash me, I shall be whiter than snow…

  She’s loved those words so much, but today they don’t work. She doesn’t want them to: she’d rather cling to the sweetness of John William. The Driscoll girl ducks her head as she comes out, flushed, with her curls bobbing against her cheeks. A pause while the queue waits to see if Clare’s piety will lead her into a yet more scrupulously lengthy examination of conscience. The pressure of their waiting defeats her and she goes in.

  She drops to her knees, rubs her fingers against the splintery wood of the ledge below the grille, and speaks. In the close, dark silence her panic dissolves. The statue of Our Lady floats in her niche above Clare’s head. The cool syllables of the priest’s listening voice fall across her restless conscience as they have always fallen, quietening it. She accuses herself of impurity of thought and deed and thanks God for the phrases which shawl her meaning even from herself as her words leave her lips. It will not happen again. In the dark she detests her sins. For the first time that day she can think of John William without a prickle in her conscience or her breasts. Now, with the cool web of the Church embracing her, it seems impossible that she has burned all day long, her heart thudding suddenly each time she realizes that she’s one hour nearer to night, to seeing him again. It seems impossible that she, Clare Coyne, has spent her whole day planning, intending, longing to commit the sin of fornication with her cousin John William. How easy it is to resist sins once they are put into ugly words. It is all so much easier than she’d thought it was going to be.

  The mild implacability of the priest’s voice warms after absolution, as he blesses her. Here she kneels in the confessional’s wooden heart as she’s done from the age of seven, confessing to greed over sweets, to disobedience, to anger, to stealing a red hair-ribbon which belonged to her cousin Hannah and which she never wore but hid away in her underclothes drawer. It wouldn’t have suited her anyway, she knows that now. Gorgeous on dark-haired Hannah, infinitely desirable, but a flat glare of colour against her own complexion. Here she kneels, empty and grateful. She is still Clare Coyne, the same Clare Coyne, brushing dust off her skirts as she stands, her cheeks pale now that the rare high colour which has flared in them all day has gone. Her hips sway composedly as she taps her way across the floor and into a pew to say her penance, which is going to take her some considerable time.

  Clare threads her way quickly down Tregenna Hill, up Gabriel Street and through Wesley Place. On and up she goes, up Windsor Hill with her quick, elastic, virtuous step, on and up to crest the hill above Barnoon Cemetery. Her head is down. She is not so much praying as telling over her prayers like beads.

  A shrill whistle. She looks up.

  ‘Clarey.’

  She looks wildly left and right, and there’s Kitchie sitting on the cemetery wall, his head framed by a bent Scotch pine. He lounges, looking at her satirically. He knows the Coyne religious routines, and has his own Treveal reservations about them.

  ‘Been to get it all off your chest?’ he inquires.


  How long his legs are now. He’s nearly a man. Kitchie’s cap’s always been too big for him – that’s just Kitchie. But now it fits him. And his hair springs less wildly than it did. He is like her mother, they say, but she can’t remember her mother as a distinct face. Only the shape and smell of her. Kitchie puts oil on his hair now, she supposes.

  She grins back. It is always good to see Kitchie.

  ‘Don’t you wish you might do as much, you cheeky monkey. I’m glad I haven’t got your conscience. What are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘Waiting for you. Knew you’d come up this way.’

  ‘Did you! Then next time I’ll go round by the beach, just to spite you.’

  ‘Then you’ll spite yourself with a longer walk.’

  Yes, he’s nearly a man. He has thickened up this past year. He is still the noisiest of them all, and he never seems to know what he’s going to say until he’s said it, but he’s a good worker up at the farm with his cousins. He has the kind of hands which can repair anything. Quick and instinctive, they feel for the right place to slot a newly oiled bolt, or a strip of leather he’s cut and stitched to repair the harness. But however good he is, however valuable he is to Uncle John and Aunt Annie, they won’t keep him on the farm once he reaches call-up age, not with Albert and George and Jo, their own sons, precariously holding on to their exemptions. One more application might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and all the Treveal boys would whirl together into the mouth of the war. That must never happen. It’s agreed. Kitchie’s mother knows the war’s got to be over by the time Kitchie’s eighteen. How can they take her Kitchie from her, when he’s the only one left to her out of the four children born to her? Dead Florrie, dead Rebecca, dead little William. Clare remembers their blue wizened faces in their small rough coffins which Aunt Mabel lined each time with the shawl she crocheted for each baby as she waited for it to be born. A waste, Nan muttered. There were plenty would be glad of the warmth of those shawls. But she helped Mabel to fold in the shawls around the small skulls with the deep dip of the fontanelle in them. Nobody would dare say anything to Mabel’s white, frantic face.

  They can’t take Kitchie from Aunt Mabel. Why, it’s impossible.

  But Clare knows that they can, and that nothing is impossible any more. There is no language to describe the world she lives in now, where lists of thousands of dead are published in the newspapers each morning as routinely as the small advertisements. She reads the newspaper. Not in The Times, but in Grandad’s Daily Mail there are stories of heroic mothers who give up eight sons, or ten sons, to conscription. Stories of families who have eighteen adult males fighting at the front – sons, cousins, husbands. And all we have is John William. Of course they’ll take Kitchie. Her heart tightens as she looks at him in his best white shirt and a waistcoat she recognizes as an old one of John William’s. He’s brushed his hair down flat for the concert, and his Sunday boots are carefully cleaned and polished. He’s ready and she’s not. Quick, she must get changed – John William will be here at seven.

  ‘Hannah sent this up for you,’ says Kitchie. Messenger-boy Kitchie – now she sees that there’s a flat brown paper parcel on the wall beside him, beautifully tied with string. A draper’s parcel. Kitchie’s grin widens as he hands it to her.

  ‘Go on, then – open it. I know you want to.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Kitchie, not out here. But thank Hannah for me and tell her I’ll see her down at the hall with the rest of you. She is coming, isn’t she?’

  ‘She wasn’t going to, but John William brought her round. She’s thinking of that bugger Sam.’

  ‘Kitchie,’ Clare murmurs, automatically reproving. But he has never minded his language in front of her. And she doesn’t mind either. It’s part of their shared escape from Nan and Grandad.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ he reminds her.

  She starts. How stupid of her. She should have remembered how much Kitchie likes coming to the Coyne house.

  ‘You’ll come in and have a cup of tea with us? Then I’ll have to get dressed.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he says, and swings himself off the wall and into step beside her as they cross the road up from Porthmeor Beach and into Clare’s row of villas.

  Kitchie scans the sea to their right. ‘They say those U-boats come skulking in round Zennor Head Wednesday night. I heard tell yesterday they’ve got a cache in under Tregerthen cliff. Fuel and food. The coast-watchers’ve been up and around there, Jim Bossinney told me.’

  ‘They’re always up and down there. It doesn’t mean anything,’ says Clare.

  ‘How can you say that when they’ve sunk so many good ships?’ says Kitchie in passionate reproof of her automatic coolness and good sense.

  And Kitchie doesn’t speak alone. As their footsteps clip along the pavement to Clare’s door, he is joined by innumerable, swelling voices. The air is thick with them. The war is not going well. After three years it is bloated and invalidish. And each month it grows trickier to handle. Generals shift and scramble and make stratagems and bury their mistakes. U-boats nose impudently all along the Western Approaches, drowning men, sinking ships full of supplies while bread queues lengthen. Rusty, split tins of food are washed up on the beaches. Three ships sunk between Land’s End and St Ives a couple of months ago. And in January farmers had to watch from the cliffs above Zennor as a Norwegian vessel wallowed and her crew drowned in front of their eyes. Lords and politicians quietly panic inside the fastnesses of the War Office.

  And now we need more enemies. Even the Germans are not enough any more. So many men are gone, so many are wounded. So many have their minds and spirits destroyed, and the news of this leaks from family to neighbour to acquaintance and spills into newsprint. Look at this group photograph of wounded veterans. Seven of them. Count the limbs. Between the seven of them they have one leg, and even that one leg lacks a foot. Their faces stare unreadably at the camera. Their hair is mostly parted to the side, but one has an exquisite, knife-sharp central parting. Two are moustached, five clean-shaven. Their round collars are white and immaculate. Behind them dense, heavy summer foliage stirs a little in a breeze which also ruffles the hair of the one man who looks upward, away from the camera. He is perhaps the oldest of them, with a bony, vivid face. He must be thirty at least. He looks like a man standing on a cliff in the face of a sea-breeze, wondering if the weather is about to change. He cannot bear to look into the camera. On his far right there are two handsome legless boys, one with his hands folded in his lap, the other with his trunk perched on a high stool between wheelchairs, balancing himself with an arm round the shoulders of the men on his right hand and on his left hand.

  Up and down, even and then uneven, runs the row of heads.

  The faces are young, fully moulded and perfect. There are no lines on them but for the tight line of each mouth holding back what it is never going to say, not now, not here. The youngest of them is only three or four years older than Kitchie. No wonder he cries out.

  In the dull anger of late May 1917 Kitchie’s not alone. Shops open and close, newspapers are printed, girls make their summer dresses and make themselves beautiful even though they have more best boys among the dead than among the living. An animal anger growls and murmurs. The war is full grown, lolling over its attendants, sprawled like a giant child which still won’t fend for itself. The War Office scuttles to shovel it full of living food, for who knows what will happen if it gets hungry? And we’ve got Lloyd George now, not Squiffy Asquith. Lloyd George knows how to talk to people. He understands from deep inside himself the sway of public passions, and how to point them out and away from himself. He is the master of the jabbing finger, the whipped-up passion, the sweet permission to hate. Revenge is good and revenge is justified. As for enemies, let us also look within.

  ‘Come on in, Kitchie,’ says Clare, holding the front door open as she counts over the contents of her larder in her mind and wonders what she can offer him. She�
�s prepared a cold supper for Father and herself. Hard-boiled eggs from the farm, lettuce, new potatoes, a bit of gooseberry tart Nan sent up. That’ll do. She wouldn’t have time to eat hers anyway.

  ‘Will you have a bit of supper here, Kitchie?’

  He will. He can always eat.

  She leaves him breaking open white, fresh potatoes, like little eggs themselves, and picks up Hannah’s parcel as she goes through the hall and up to her bedroom to change. Her room is warm with trapped heat, even though she’s left the window open at the top. She drops the parcel on to her bed and tears it open. A blue and white striped fold of cloth ripples out. Hannah’s new summer skirt. And a note: ‘You can wear this to the concert if you like. Wear your white Sunday blouse with it, and your white belt.’

  Hannah can’t be going to the concert, if she’s lending me her skirt. Clare strokes the material. It still smells of newness to her, although Hannah has worn it and washed it. It’s a heavy French cotton, pre-war. If Sam had come home, Hannah would be wearing it and they’d be out, strolling along the beach or down to the harbour, having a quiet hour together after tea at Nan’s.

  But, in spite of her scruples, Clare can’t bear not to wear it. She strips off her grey dress and washes quickly. Her white petticoat is clean, and her white cotton stockings. She steps into the skirt and shakes it out around her. It hangs beautifully, but the waist is too big – she’ll have to thread the loops through her belt and pull it in evenly all the way round. There. She glances back at the brown paper and string on the bed and sees something small and round tucked into the corner of the parcel. She picks it up and examines it. Rouge-papers. She rubs her cheeks carefully, over the bone, then damps her lips and rubs the paper over them too. In the glass her eyes are big and hectic. The rouge changes her face into a narrow, inviting muzzle. She runs her hands carefully back through her hair to loosen it, so that it will cloud a little around her temples. The blouse is dull, but it will do. The skirt says everything. She turns, making it switch at her hips, then she kicks her grey dress under the chair and goes out, running lightly down the stairs to show Kitchie.