Zennor in Darkness

by Helen Dunmore

  Peggy calls back, ‘Are you all right, Clare? Are we walking too fast for you?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ says Clare. It is too much to hope that Peggy’s rather greedy sympathy can be satisfied without constant references to Clare’s pregnancy. She wants every detail. Sickness, tightness of clothes, names for the child. Above all Peggy wants to ask the unanswerable question: ‘But what does it feel like, Clare? What is it really like?’ Clare can only shrug and say that she doesn’t feel so very different, not yet. The baby hasn’t quickened, but Clare is beginning to show now, even though Nan has altered her waistbands cleverly, letting in a panel of matching fabric and taking out tucks. This skirt will do her for another couple of months.

  ‘Where are we going, anyway?’ asks Hannah, but no one knows. Just as far as they can, and then perhaps they’ll pick blackberries on their way back, on the open slope of rough land which catches the sun most of the day and always ripens the sweetest blackberries. But the blackberries are small this year because there has been so little rain.

  In Flanders the struggle for the Passchendaele Ridge continues. The poppy-blowing fields are ploughed by German and English guns, and sown with a litter of lost equipment, a seeding of blood and bone. Soon it will be autumn there too, and heavy northern rains will fall. Men will be listed missing, presumed drowned – a new classification for the lists in the newspaper. They are presumed drowned in the mud in which they live and often die. The men who came ‘right away to Blighty’ with John William will return to Flanders with their new commissions soon. Their training lasts only three months, and then they are wanted back at the Front. Hammond will die on a mission described to him by a senior officer as ‘rather a tricky bit of patrol-work’. His body will not be found. Simcox, a dozen feet to the left of him, will survive.

  ‘Clare, I really think you ought to rest for a while. Let’s all sit down here.’

  Peggy’s sharp blue eyes never seem to leave Clare. The girls sit on hummocks of grass and look out to sea, idly at first, and then they watch another patrol-boat coming close in below them. Patrols have been stepped up again.

  ‘U-boats about,’ says Peggy knowledgeably.

  Hannah sighs in exasperation. Peggy is always the same. If she tells you that the sun’s shining, she manages to make it sound like a piece of privileged information.

  ‘Aren’t they always?’

  Hannah is a little thinner, but nothing can diminish her, thinks Clare, looking at her cousin’s profile. Hannah’s broad brow is exposed by her new way of dressing her hair, without a parting and drawn back. Her lower lip is caught in by two of her bottom teeth. These days Hannah looks puzzled when her face is in repose. The slight line she has always had between her eyebrows has deepened. She has not heard from Sam, but then she couldn’t expect to, Clare reassures her. It would be dangerous for him. Sam. They are looking for him: they have even visited Hannah’s house, to ask questions, thinking perhaps that she was concealing him in the wash-house, says Hannah scornfully. For where is there to hide in a place like St Ives, where everybody knows everyone else’s business? How would they feed him, even, without the shop-people noting the extra quarter of a pound of sago, the extra quarter pound of butter?

  ‘You got a visitor, then, Hannah?’

  ‘No one need know. After all, you might get food from your uncle’s farm. You Treveals could be feeding an army,’ suggests Peggy helpfully.

  But there are no more secrets. Hannah is not hiding Sam romantically in wash-house or sea-cove. Sam remains in London; in Wapping to be exact, where he has melted into a shadowy city-life which accepts what comes and asks no questions. They know; maybe. People in cities are as quick-guessing and inquisitive as people anywhere, but Sam’s girl is the daughter and sister of prize-fighters, and Sam is her best boy, and as such he is to be left alone. So what if he lounges in the courtyard’s one scrap of dirty sunlight, yawning and scratching himself, never doing a stroke of work while his girl pounds clothes at the laundry where she works a ten-hour day for 2/7d? She would be better off in munitions, but her father has sworn no girl of his will ever get a yellow face as a munitionette, no matter what. And she goes along with it all, placidly. She likes the laundry: there is a bit of life there with the other girls, and one day, after the war, when Sam can work, things will be different… For she is not a prostitute, as John William supposed, and as Clare and Hannah now believe. She is not a girl who has picked up Sam lightly out of the whirlpool of war-time London, when girls have money and men have leave and desperation. She is not one of the girls the Bishop of London thundered against; she is not even particularly pretty. But she has a room, and in that room she has Sam.

  Clare’s body is rounding daily, but it does not matter now. Everyone knows. Gossip is like a furze fire: it burns hard, then the wind changes and it flares off elsewhere, racing and crackling. The story of Red-beard and Clare Coyne has died down, though it is not quite dead yet. Some red embers sleep in the white ash, but the flame and the fire are on another hillside now, eagerly consuming the story of Clare Coyne and her dead cousin.

  Nan has a way of putting things which is almost magically effective in silencing vicious tongues before they can begin to cut. Nan knows exactly what gossip she wants to seed. She must have thought hard and well in the long night after Francis Coyne came down to her cottage and talked to her alone. She must have known that Treveal secrecy would not serve the family now. The Treveals must bend if Clare was not to be broken; or they must appear to bend. Nan knew in whose ear to drop her flattering confidences, in the sure knowledge that they would be passed on with an insider’s pride in her source of information. Soon everyone in St Ives would know that Clare Coyne had had an understanding with her dead cousin, and that the two would have married on his next leave if he had not died for his country. The Treveals had kept it close, but didn’t they always? But now secrecy was beyond them. They have broken the habit of generations and made the town privy to their family secrets.

  ‘They do keep themselves to themselves, the Treveals, but Mrs Treveal said to me that at times like this you have to go outside the family – and since we’re old neighbours she came to me…’

  Clare is drawn into the curious embrace of the town as her story passes like a delicious spice from lip to lip. She is one of their own again, shared among them. And wasn’t John William a soldier, going for an officer? The mothers and fathers of exempted sons know better than to open their mouths against John William and Clare Coyne: And it has to be admitted that these things do happen. How many young people of the town anticipate their weddings, and then draw a quick veil of respectability over a too-short pregnancy? And are we to blame Clare more than all those girls, just because her young man died before he could marry her? And he would have married her. Everyone knows the Treveal closeness. They would never bring shame on one of their own. Whatever you may think of first cousins marrying, there is no doubt that a wedding would have taken place.

  Nan watches, bird-sharp and apparently indifferent. Nan listens with satisfaction to the coupling of her grandchildren’s names. The breath of open scandal has licked at Clare, and receded. She is safe for now.

  Even the Church has hesitated to condemn Clare. That first Sunday after her pregnancy became talked of in the town, she came up with her father to first Mass. She had been seen going to confession the evening before. Her father gave her his arm, his face impassive as the two of them walked into the church. Now his long-cultivated distance and indifference worked in his favour. There had never been such a show of style in St Ives. The daughter did not blush or look aside from the devouring stares; the father bowed slightly to one or two acquaintances, and showed no consciousness of any change in his own position. Almost against their will, his fellow-parishioners have found themselves treating Clare more as a young widow to be commiserated with, than as a fornicatress who is likely to burn in Hell if she should happen not to survive childbirth. And fortunately the priest who heard Clare’s confession
is likely to remain silent upon the subject. A little of her father’s indifference has rubbed off on Clare. Shielded by the child, she does not care so very much what people think of her now. As long as they believe that John William loved her, she does not care how sinful they think she is. And since she does not care, they find themselves chatting to her for a few moments in the porch, on ordinary topics, quite as usual. And then the chance to scorn Clare Coyne has gone, if they ever wanted it. Everywhere there is news of death, and more death. Perhaps that is why the news of a birth does not seem so terrible.

  ‘It just goes to show,’ says the less charitable Methodists of the town. ‘How those Romans do think nothing of their sins.’

  But they do not say it very loud, for Nan has vanquished them. One or two strong Chapel women are even to be seen knitting for the little Coyne baby. Their fingers, hypnotized by Nan, click over their white-woolled needles.

  Peggy looks down at the sea nostalgically.

  ‘No more swimming this year,’ she says. ‘Remember that swim we had at Hayle, Clarey? May, wasn’t it? Ooh! I could’ve died of the cold!’ The other two exchange glances and smile.

  ‘I made sure I’d catch pneumonia and die,’ continues Peggy, then stops abruptly, for it is not right to talk about death with Clare in her present condition. ‘But I didn’t,’ she adds lamely.

  ‘Scarcely surprising, Peg, considering you were never in the water,’ remarks Hannah.

  ‘Yes; I remember it,’ says Clare, answering not Hannah but some train of thought of her own. And next year, she thinks, the baby will be three months old. Old enough to have his toes dipped in the water.

  ‘How old were we when we started to swim?’ she asks Hannah, who shrugs.

  ‘I don’t know. We were always swimming. Johnnie – ’ She’s said his name. She doesn’t often. ‘Johnnie was the one for swimming.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A beach. Cold footprints in cold incoming sea. Bare skin tingling with sunburn, but beginning to chill.

  ‘Quick, get your clothes on.’

  ‘I can’t find my drawers!’

  ‘Why, there they are, Clarey. You weren’t looking.’

  ‘Where’s John William?’

  ‘He’s still out there. Can’t you see him? Look. Out past the rocks. He’s gone too far out again. Johnnie! Johnnie! You shout too, Clarey. Nan’ll kill me if we’re not back in time.’

  ‘John Will-i-am! John Will-i-am!’

  He turns, his black head sleek with water. He turns and dives to tease them. The water grows smooth over his head. He’s gone.

  Francis Coyne watches from the window of Clare’s bedroom as the girls set off on their walk. He has the afternoon sun in his eyes, but he can still see the three figures distinctly: Hannah, Peggy and his Clare between them. The slight breeze blows back their skirts over their legs. Three young girls against the softly glowing sea. They look mysterious now, the way people you love look when they walk away from you and disappear into a landscape, their colours melting into pleats of light and shadow.

  He sighs, and turns his back to the window, and cracks his finger-joints in the way he is trying not to do when Clare is with him. It’s a new habit, and one which maddens her. He goes down to his study, which is dim and cool. There is no work on his desk. He has not touched his book for weeks; he has had other things to think of. Money. They must have more money. He knows now that prices will never come down, not even after the war is over, and his investments will never right themselves. He cracks his knuckles and thinks of money and how he can get it. Clare is quite sure. Her confidence astonishes him. Sometimes she frightens him, for she seems so changed. She goes here and there and she makes inquiries and she comes home and tells him what she has done. She is going to take up her portrait-sketching seriously, and sell sketches of summer visitors. She is sure they will pay a good price, especially for sketches of their children. She has been to talk to a lady at the St Ives Arts Club who liked Clare’s drawings and thought her plans perfectly possible. She is going to give Clare some introductions. She has heard Clare’s story, though she does not tell her this, and thinks it is romantic. Very Cornish, she thinks. And she finds it quite moving, she tells her friends from London, the way the people of the town accept Clare and look after her. She is one of their own really. You would not find that spirit in Lewisham, she laughs.

  Francis will continue to sell whatever he has of value, though there is not much left. He will swallow his pride – or that’s what he’ll call it, though he will neither feel nor seem in the least humble – and he will ask his brother for money. He has never asked for himself, but he will ask for Clare. He will give Benedict and Marie-Thérèse to understand that she had actually married her cousin, and it will suit them very well to accept what he tells them.

  And no one will ever know the truth. He is amazed at Clare’s silence and how she has kept it up. She has never so much as hinted at where the real blame lies. She sticks to her story, and it is a good one since the only man who might have contradicted it is dead. She astonishes him. He had thought a girl in her position would melt with shame and grief and sob out her accusations against the man who had seduced and then betrayed her. For she has been betrayed. What story can that man have told her? He must have taken her by surprise, in her innocence. She will not tell anyone, and it seems she is too proud even to tell her father, who would defend her against the whole world, he feels now with a rush of emotion he has not known since he took her away from the Treveals after her mother’s funeral. She is his Clare, his daughter, part of him. And they are so alike that she cannot keep the truth from him. He knows that her cousin’s part in this baby is nothing but a convenient fiction, but he does not blame her for using it. It is not such a slur on John William’s memory. There’s a sense of gladness in the Treveals, even, now that they are used to the idea.

  He had gone to the cottage that night in desperation, ready to confide all his fears in Nan, but he did not need to. When he met her blue gaze, even he could believe for a moment that the baby could only be John William’s. Her eyes presented no other possibility. Yet in the depths of their directness secrets swam. He could never fathom Clare’s grandmother, but they could work together. He has watched with admiration the skill with which Nan has handled the gossips of St Ives and has helped Francis Coyne to protect his child.

  Clare’s cousin is buried now and can never deny the child she is fathering on him. Surely John William would want to help Clare? They were always close. It cannot really harm him to be thought the father of her child. Clare has put her child first, not her own sense of betrayal or her desire for revenge. She must desire it. She is his daughter after all. But however bitter it feels he must not punish his daughter’s seducer, if by doing so he exposes Clare. There’d be no place for her in the town once the truth was known.

  There was gossip in the town and he heard it. It flared up and he saw the danger, but with Nan’s help it has died down. He has seen idle malice in street-corner faces as he passed them, but he thinks Clare never knew of it. She never knew that she had been seen with that man on the cliffs. That she had been seen talking alone with him in his cottage garden. That he had called her across the concert room to him, and she had gone, dragging her cousin with her. That they were watched as they laughed and lolled on gravestones in Zennor churchyard. All this people saw, and her father knows. They say Lawrence visited her in her father’s house, in her father’s absence.

  The voices have been silenced and the ash of gossip looks cool. But can Lawrence be trusted to keep quiet? A man who writes about the most sacred and intimate aspects of life as if he were a dog in the gutter, the Rector told Francis. What if Lawrence should take it into his head to notice the gossip and speak of Clare? What if the Rector were to say what he saw and what he knows? So far the rumours have done nothing but deepen local hatred of the Lawrences, but fire can spurt up and run with the wind again, Francis knows.

  Francis knows the truth. He has se
en Lawrence with his own eyes, elbows on the table in the Coyne kitchen, familiar. The man must have known her father was away and Clare was without protection. He had seized the opportunity of John William’s death. In Francis Coyne’s house he sat alone with Clare. God knows how long he had been there, or what he had done to her. And then he got up and went out with his red beard jutting in front of him. Now everything is clear. Clare’s weeping, her anger, her wild ideas. Everything that had puzzled her father. All of it had come from that man. He would have made her hate her own father if he could, and her home, and those who loved her.

  The gossip has only died down because a better rumour killed it: Clare Coyne carrying her cousin’s child. No one couples Red-beard’s name with his daughter’s now. Perhaps they think there was nothing in it.

  Thank God, thinks Francis Coyne, that my daughter has red hair. There will be nothing remarkable in her having a red-haired child. There will be no link with him.