Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘There’ll be plenty closer who should have it, surely. He’d no son, a course, but maybe there was a girl?’

  ‘Not many close when he needed us,’ said Francis, putting the watch into Hammond’s hand.

  Now he is coming home with ten pounds, and a story no one is going to hear. He thinks of May’s eyes glazing over briefly, masking her irritation that he should try to harrow her with it. Isn’t there enough to think of in life without wallowing in other people’s troubles?

  Old Mrs Treveal knows. He’s sure of it. He doesn’t think that she will ever allude to it, or ask questions of him, but he has seen that she knows. And perhaps she won’t ever need, to tell or to talk about it. That’s strength, he supposes. She also knows what people are made of, and that Sarah and Arthur won’t be able to stand knowing what has happened to their son. How quick she was to assure them that Francis must go to the camp, not them: they have fixed it up together, he and Nan, like a couple of conspirators. She will protect the family, even from its own child, even though there’s no doubting that she loved John William purely, wanting nothing from him but that he should flourish and grow away from them. She’ll forgo walking behind his coffin; she’ll never be able to visit his grave; she’ll silence the murmurs of townspeople who ask why the Treveals couldn’t have brought home their John William.

  And now for Clare. The weight of it: can she stand it? She will have to stand it. He will tell Clare what has happened to her cousin. They will share the weight of it. They will share everything, and there will be no secrets between them any more. They have drifted so far apart; he had his own life, and thought that by having it he did not injure his daughter. But it is not so, he thinks now. The Church is right; our sins are small seeds which grow and flourish until they are great trees with shadowing branches and sucking roots, drawing the light and life out of the house. He will stop going to see May. It will be his sacrifice.

  All that is over, he tells himself, exalted. He will never again see that closed look on his Clare’s face. She will turn to him, her face cleft with grief, and he will hold her. There’ll be an end to the two of them in the house, picking their way over silences. They have grown too far apart, and it is dangerous. He has let her smooth out his life for him and serve him, but he has not watched over her. He has let her go her own way, and the world is a wilder place than she knows. Even down here in St Ives we are blown by the desperate breath of those men struggling with their feet lodged in mud and foul water up to their lips.

  Her cousin is dead. And he, her father, has been half asleep. He has let his Clare form an acquaintance with those Lawrences without bothering to find out if they were suitable people for her to know. Now he finds that they have roused the hatred of half the county. Now he hears that the Rector of Zennor fears the corruption of his parishioners.

  God knows if there is any truth in what people say of them, but Francis Coyne knows the power of local voices. He knows the tentacle-grip of gossip. He ignores it, usually, and lets it flow past him without ever discerning the words. Gentlemen do not listen to gossip. It is less troublesome that way. But he came alive at the hint Sarah let drop, half fearful, half daring. Coupling the Red-beard’s name with his Clare. The weak look of triumph on Sarah’s face, as she taunted him with something she knew and he did not. He did not want to question her, for it would seem to give some credence to what she suggested. Anyway she had taken fright and hidden behind her easy tears, her fog of denials. He went home with sharp, prickling alarm in his breast. And then the Rector’s curt, disgusted repudiation of Lawrence, and behind it a hint subtler than Sarah’s, man to man, gentleman to gentleman.

  But I did not know, Francis Coyne tells himself. How could I have stopped her meeting him?

  You did not choose to know. You did not want to know. You left her unprotected, says the voice he is accustomed to calling his conscience.

  It will end now. He will give up May. He’ll give up hearing the cluck of water against the harbour wall at Newlyn, and the little intimate creak of May’s door going backward and forward in the draught. He will not say her name softly any more, as he steps into her room. He will not trace the greeny branches of her veins, or lay his cheek against the mound of her belly and listen to the sea-like movement of food and blood. He will not run his tongue around the knobs of her nipples as they stiffen in the cold air of her bedroom. She lies on her back, eyes shut, mouth askew, breath quick.

  John William lies on his hard wooden board, bandaged into shape. His mouth and nostrils are icy as the entrance to caves. A cold foul air sifts in and out of them. He is hard all over, his head cocked and propped so that it makes him look as if he is still listening.

  Francis Coyne imagines, and blames himself. He ought to have listened; he ought to have watched. He has abandoned John William just as he has neglected his Clare. No eye has looked on John William’s body with love. No one has lit a candle at his head or at his foot, or twisted flowers into his hands, or kept watch over him through the night.

  But he will tell Clare how her cousin died. She will understand the weight of it. She will cry out with her soft lips parted, and she will turn to him.

  ‘Clare,’ rehearses Francis Coyne. ‘I am telling you this because…’

  Twenty-one

  Clare opens the door.

  And there he is, Mr Lawrence in his worn green corduroy jacket, with a paper parcel under his arm which is neatly tied but which sifts out a thin stream of black soil from its corner.

  ‘May I come in?’

  She glances up the street and says, ‘My father is away.’

  ‘Surely you don’t care for such things? And there is no one about.’

  She laughs. ‘At least six people will tell another six people each that you have been here. This is not London, you know.’

  ‘And I am not a Londoner, tha knowst,’ he says, teasing out the soft Midland dialect as he steps through her doorway.

  In the hall both their smiles disappear.

  ‘I heard in the town that your cousin was dead,’ he says.

  She waits for the conventional expressions of sympathy, but they do not come.

  ‘I wrote once,’ he says slowly. ‘It was to another woman; very beautiful she was, in the English way, you know? With her little air of being somewhere else even while she was talking to you. Her brother was killed. I wrote to her that I would rather put out my eyes than stand as a witness to this deliberate horror. And I believed it. But now I would not put out my eyes. I need them to look on other things – flowers, and beasts, and a little hut in the mountains. So I set myself to keep separate –’ He breaks off.

  ‘He was killed in an accident,’ she says. ‘When we thought he was home safe.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says quickly, looking intently at her face as if willing her to follow his train of thought. ‘You know that I was with your cousin after we left you? We walked up to Zennor that night after the concert.’

  ‘Yes, when I came to your cottage for tea you told me you’d talked to John William that night.’

  What did they say, she wonders? Did John William mention it? But she can’t remember anything now, except, ‘You don’t know how nice you are without your clothes.’ She feels her skin warming.

  ‘He was sick to his soul too, though there wasn’t any wound to see,’ says Lawrence, looking at her out of his taut, white face. ‘Perhaps that’s what is coming – a time when men will go clean out of their minds. Except a man who can sit apart in his own soul and watch the foxgloves come out.’

  ‘We can’t all do that,’ says Clare sharply.

  ‘Why not? Why not, if it’ll keep us living – really living, in the middle of all this madness?’

  ‘John William wasn’t mad,’ says Clare. ‘He knew what he was doing.’

  ‘No one knows what he is doing any more. He is joined to a machine. He is not free to act as a man any longer. He is part of a machine of colossal stupidity. And I think your cousin knew it. He was a brav
e man, but he wasn’t blessed with stupidity. It would have been easier for him if he had been able to sink into a state of mindlessness and forget that he was a man with a soul of his own for which he was responsible.’

  ‘You talk of soldiers as if they were doing wrong – as if they were animals!’

  ‘No; they are not animals. Perhaps it would be better for them if they were. An animal does only what is in its nature to do. It cannot kill its own instincts. Think of a fox when you come upon him suddenly. He looks straight at you, and knows you, and then he trots away, quite self-possessed. He knows whether you mean him harm or not. You can’t fool him. But you can fool a man’s soul out of him, if you set yourself to do it. The war has fooled England’s soul out of her.’

  He must have talked to you too, the way he talked to Father, thinks Clare. He showed you things about the war. But he wasn’t like that with me. It was like when we were children. Why? Was it because he thought I wouldn’t understand if he told me about men dying? Because he thought he had to protect me? Or perhaps he didn’t choose at all. She remembers the lion roar of water under their bodies that night. John William’s face, wiped clean and astonished back into the naked lines of childhood. He did not look like that the next day. The line of his body was stiff and burdened then.

  She looks at Lawrence’s face, clenched with marks of pain. There is no light in it any more. The vitality which would draw a friend to him across a crowded room has sunk down deep inside him. It is not a clear flame now, but something that smokes and smoulders and throws out long, frightening shadows. He talked to you, she thinks. And what did you say to him? What answer did you find?

  ‘How did your cousin die?’ asks Lawrence.

  ‘It was an accident. We do not know any more yet. My father has gone to the camp, to talk to the commander.’

  ‘An accident. Yet he was two years in France, I believe?’

  He looks down, frowning. She hasn’t offered him so much as a cup of tea, she thinks: and yet he and Frieda made her tea, and cake, and had flowers in the vases. Her boiled egg was set perfectly, its deep yellow yolk steaming as she cracked the top off it. Lawrence had kept cutting her more bread and butter, for he could not bear girls finicking at their food, and she had had a long walk. She had eaten five slices and he had wanted to wrap up a loaf for her to take home in greased paper, since she liked it so much. But today she stands in the hall with him, tense and fearful. She does not want to draw him deeper into her house. He makes sweat prickle on her palms and her breath come quickly. She is afraid he will tell her something about John William which she does not want to know.

  ‘I brought you these new carrots, from my garden,’ he says, unwrapping the parcel a little to show slender, clean roots. More soil falls from the paper.

  ‘Come into the kitchen with them. I will make us tea.’

  ‘Frieda eats them raw,’ he says, following her and sitting down at the kitchen-table. ‘She has fine teeth. I should leave them in the earth a little longer, to fatten, but they are so good like this.’

  He unpacks the fronded bundle of carrots, and some spring onions.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, thinking of Frieda’s white teeth. She is alive, eating Cornish carrots with her white German teeth, looking out over our sea and exclaiming how beautiful it is, while John William is dead. There they live in their cottage, untouched, growing their vegetables, singing their songs. A pang of horror sweeps over her like sickness. John William has got to stay in the same place for ever. She won’t ever see him swing round the corner towards her, frowning against the sun, lightening as he sees her.

  ‘I am glad you like them,’ says Lawrence. ‘I shall send more down for you, on the farm trap. William Henry will bring them for you, when he comes into market. Shall you like that?’

  ‘It is very good of you.’

  ‘It’s good for us to make a new friend. Frieda is lonely; I have the farm-people, but she has no one.’

  He’s told her this before – does he think she cares so much for his wife? He looks at her with simple pleasure in his face. He changes so quickly! – she cannot keep up with him. His face is warm again, because he has forgotten about the war for a moment. Let him forget it. It is all talk; all words. He did not know John William and John William’s death is nothing to him.

  He does not know me either. All I am is a girl who can draw, who might make a friend for his wife. She is lonely, is she? Let her get used to it. She likes me, does she? More’s the pity. Why does he sit here looking like that, making me think?

  ‘Perhaps you ought to go back to London,’ she says lightly, pretending innocence, pretending that it scarcely matters if the Lawrences live in London or in Zennor. They think they are at home here. She hands him his cup. ‘Perhaps you ought to think of leaving, if Frieda is so lonely. It is hard to make friends with Cornish people, they say.’

  He looks at her, surprised, as if he is readjusting his ideas about her – as if she has proved less intelligent, or less perceptive, than he had thought. And she wants to cry out and reassure him. But he smiles, and explains:

  ‘No, we are much better here. We have lived in so many places, and this cottage is ours, you know; we found it for ourselves. We pay the rent, and it is only five pounds a year. We can afford to stay here. And London is vile now; it makes me wretched to think of it. I should go mad if I had to live there now. But in Zennor we have a wild place of our own, where no one bothers us.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh – they try. They would like to. They would like to get their hands on the life we have and smear dirt all over it and make it vile too. But they do not quite dare. I am not speaking of the ordinary people, you understand; we have nothing to fear from them. It is the little officials of the war. Some of them are decent men, and they don’t like what they are doing. But there are others who have wanted this war all their lives without knowing it. They have wanted the power it gives them. They would like to destroy us, but we don’t let them. We lie low.’

  She laughs, imagining Frieda lying low.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’

  ‘Because you are wrong. Because everyone sees everything here,’ she says, meaning to disturb him, to hurt him. ‘Just as they will be wondering why I should have you in my house, with your German wife, when my cousin has just been killed.’

  But he does not take offence, as she expects.

  ‘They would think that. It’s only to be expected,’ he says, his face hardening again with contempt. ‘But you know better.’

  You take too much for granted, she thinks from a cold hard space inside herself. You don’t stop to think that I too might be wondering what I am doing.

  The front door clicks, opens, closes gently.

  ‘My father,’ says Clare, jumping up as he calls her name from the hall.

  ‘I had better leave you,’ he says quickly. ‘You will want to talk to him.’

  But Francis Coyne is down the hall and into the kitchen. The two men will have to meet now, and as she realizes this Clare also realizes it would have been much better to keep them apart. Clare sees the scene as her father will see it: the cups of tea half drunk, carrots spilling across the table, her own hair pinned loosely and her sleeves rolled up, ready for housework. He hates other people to see her like this. Lawrence stands at one side of the table. His red beard flames and his deliberately self-possessed thin figure seems combative. Clare sees that her father is exhausted. His cheeks are sunk and white under his cheek-bones, and there is a light film of sweat on his forehead. He knuckles his eyes for a moment, bewildered. He cannot take in what this man is doing here.

  ‘Mr Lawrence,’ he repeats.

  ‘Mr Lawrence has taken a cottage at Zennor – Higher Tregerthen. You remember, Father, I visited them.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I have heard about you,’ says her father dryly. He straightens himself and scans Lawrence with cool, open dislike. Is it his clothes? Or his beard? What is it about Lawrence that her fathe
r dislikes so much? He did not react like this when she first told him she had met the Lawrences. And he is so polite, usually. Perhaps he is angry because Mr Lawrence has come to visit when she is alone in the house. Clare blunders on, ‘Mr Lawrence came because he heard of John William’s death. He came to offer his sympathy.’

  ‘Very friendly of you,’ says Francis Coyne. ‘Now, Clare, if you will excuse me.’

  He has not even offered Lawrence his hand. He mounts the stairs, thud, thud, thud, to his bedroom. The door shuts.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Clare. ‘I’m so sorry. He is distressed – and the journey – ’

  But now she wants only to be rid of Lawrence. Something has happened – something terrible. Is it something her father has found out? What have they told him about John William, to drain the colour out of her father’s face and make him look as if he does not know where he is? She must go to him. She gives her hand to Lawrence to hurry him out of the house. He bows, a small bow. His hand is warm and hard and he does not let go of hers; he looks into her face. He wants something more from her, some warmth to heal her father’s coldness. But she has nothing to give, and he is too quick not to spot this at once. He looks at her consideringly for a minute, holding her hand in his, then he says, ‘Goodbye, Clare. Remember Frieda – won’t you?’

  She cannot answer him. She feels an absurd desire to raise his warm hand to her cheek, and pillow her face against it, and sleep. To be in the darkness where none of this is happening. Then he smiles and he’s gone.

  He’s gone. She flies up the stairs and knocks at her father’s door. He is sitting on his bed, taking off his boots.

  ‘I don’t want that man in my house ever again,’ he says. ‘What were you thinking of to ask him here, Clare?’

  ‘But, Father – you knew I had met him. You knew I had been to their house. And I didn’t ask him; he heard of John William’s death in the town, and called in.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized. I hadn’t thought. I have been remiss towards you, Clare. Your Mr Lawrence is a dangerous man. There’s talk in the town, and it isn’t just the usual gossip, I believe. You may not have heard it, or understood what it means. You can’t understand what it might mean to have your name coupled with a man like that. He has a reputation. And his wife’s a German. They are not fit people for you to know.’