The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  I make it sound as if everything fitted together. My mother, me, Frederick, Felicia. Mr Dennis mostly a voice behind a closed door, or a pair of long black legs scissoring across the hall as we watched from the top of the stairs. But once he came close.

  Felicia had cried all night with the toothache. My mother was to take her over to Simonstown, to the dentist. I had never been to a dentist and I wondered why Felicia cried harder at the news. She was bundled in her coat and hat with a scarf tied around her face, and they went off in the dog cart. Frederick had his handwriting to practise. It was a disgrace, now that he was almost seven. It was high time Frederick was taken in hand.

  It was Mr Dennis who said that. His voice was loud through the study door. He had to stay up until the early hours of the morning, my mother said, because of his business. Other black legs, not only Mr Dennis’s, scissored to and fro, and bundles of documents lay piled on the hall chest.

  Frederick was in the schoolroom, on the first floor. I was there too, lying on my stomach on the rug. I was reading ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’, out of Felicia’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The fisherman was stupid, and so was his wife, I thought. They didn’t listen to what the sea was telling them. You had to do that. I finished the story and then kicked my heels in the air and thought about whether the whole world could be drowned, if the sea grew angry enough. Frederick wasn’t doing his handwriting. He was singing to himself and drawing in the margins.

  We both heard the heavy steps in the corridor. Loud, strong footsteps, meant to be heard. The door handle went round. The door opened and there was Mr Dennis, all of him, tall, whiskery, in black from head to foot. He wasn’t looking at me, but at Frederick. I shuffled back on my knees, towards the curtain. I knew Mr Dennis mustn’t notice me. He threw a glance around the room, unseeing, scorching. I felt it run over me without stopping and I was glad. Mr Dennis strode to the table and picked up Frederick’s book. It was covered with little drawings: that was what Frederick always did.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  Frederick looked up at him. ‘It’s my handwriting book,’ he said.

  ‘How dare you answer me like that? What’s this diabolical mess you’ve made in it?’

  Frederick dropped his head, and said nothing.

  ‘Answer me!’

  ‘It’s my handwriting book.’

  ‘Handwriting book!’ Mr Dennis picked up the book and threw it across the room. ‘It looks like it. You’re as stupid as you’re idle. Now fetch it.’

  I was almost in the curtains now. I felt the cold trickle of winter coming through the glass behind me. I wriggled back. Frederick got up from the table, and went laggingly across to where the book lay on the floor. He glanced at his father before stooping to pick it up, as if he didn’t want to turn his back on him.

  ‘Bring it here,’ said Mr Dennis. Frederick held out the book to him, and Mr Dennis snatched it and hurled it again, hard, into the corner of the room.

  ‘Fetch it!’ he said, as if Frederick was a dog, and again, even more slowly, Frederick did so. A third time, Mr Dennis shied the battered book across the room. This time he said nothing, but jerked his head at the book, for Frederick to get it. But Frederick didn’t move. Mr Dennis’s glance went round the room again, and he saw me cowering in the curtains.

  ‘Get out,’ he said. I didn’t want to. I was afraid of what he’d do to Frederick if there was no one to see it, but I didn’t dare defy Mr Dennis. It had been drummed into me to keep out of his way and never come to his notice. I let go of the curtains and began to edge out of the room. There was Frederick, standing still, not fetching the book, not looking at me.

  I left the schoolroom, and hid myself behind the grandfather clock on the landing. I heard their voices, a slither of feet, a cry, then the door banged open and Frederick flew through it, skidded across the floor and fell. Mr Dennis was after him. He kicked Frederick with his boot and Frederick’s face went forward and banged on the skirting board. Mr Dennis was shouting at him to get up like a man. Frederick scrambled up, on his hands and knees, and backed away from his father towards the stairs. I couldn’t see him any more because Mr Dennis was over him, blotting him out. Frederick whimpered and wriggled across the floorboards.

  ‘Get up those stairs!’ shouted Mr Dennis in a thick voice as if he was drunk. ‘Get up those stairs and don’t let me see you again.’ Frederick crawled upstairs with Mr Dennis behind him, kicking and beating him. Each time Frederick tried to get away, Mr Dennis was on him. Each time he left off, Frederick jerked like a fish.

  A bell rang below: the front door. There were footsteps and a voice. A woman’s voice. Not my mother, or anyone I knew. Mr Dennis stood still, as if he’d forgotten about Frederick. I willed Frederick to run, but he didn’t move. Slowly, Mr Dennis settled his jacket. He put up his hands and smoothed his hair. His hands travelled down his face, over his whiskers, as if he was making sure of who he was. Without looking at Frederick, he turned and went away down the stairs.

  I slipped out from behind the clock. I was frightened that if the man came back he would kill Frederick. ‘Frederick!’ I whispered. He didn’t stir. I went to him and huddled on the stair beside him. He shrank away. ‘Frederick, it’s me.’ I heard him gulping for air, so loud that someone might hear it. I had to pull hard, jerking him, before he would move. I put my shoulder under his arm, the way I’d seen the big boys do when someone was hurt at a match, and we went down to the landing and along the corridor to the back stairs. We could get out of the house through the scullery door, without going through the hall. Frederick wasn’t crying. There was blood on his forehead where he’d fallen against the stairs.

  The garden wasn’t safe enough. ‘We’ll go down mine,’ I said. We slipped through the streets and I held Frederick’s hand tight because I was scared of the way he looked. Rain was pouring, thicker than ever, and it hid us. No one was about. We went into ours through the yard, and into the house. It was dark and cold in the kitchen without my mother there. ‘Take off your boots,’ I said. We went upstairs, and I lifted down the big jug from my mother’s washstand and put it on the floor. She kept clean rag in a basket, and I took a piece, soaked it and twisted it, and wiped Frederick’s face. The cut wasn’t so bad. I wiped off all the blood while Frederick sat there on my bed, not saying a word. He was shivering. I got the quilt from under him and pulled it over us both, and we lay down. Frederick was stiff and cold and I had to push him over to the wall to make room for me. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared of the way he wasn’t talking. I held on to him tight and after a bit he stopped shivering. I kept on holding him, as tight as I could. I could hear the rain rushing off the gutters and into the launders below. The window square was almost dark, although it was the middle of the day. I wished that Mr Dennis would die and Frederick would live with us for ever.

  The rain was still rushing when I woke up, and my mother was there, standing over us with a candlestick. She put out her hand and touched Frederick’s face. Already it was going dark with bruises. I knew her so well that I could see the thoughts moving in her. She was afraid.

  When Frederick was seven and Felicia five, Mr Dennis remarried. Naturally the new wife didn’t like the old order. Felicia made the mistake of clinging to my mother and screaming when her ‘new mother’ tried to take possession of her. Soon we were down the hill again and my mother was back to cleaning. I’d forgotten how to be hungry but I quickly learned again. Even so, those three years of Dennis food set me on. When it came to my army medical at Bodmin Barracks, I was still the tallest in the line.

  I’ve been squatting here too long. The cold has got into me, and my hands are shaking. I grip them tight. The brightness of the day was a deception. I say aloud the name: ‘Felicia.’ I daren’t say Frederick’s name aloud, even out here in the sunlight. I don’t know what he’d say if he saw me here, scratching in Mary Pascoe’s plot of earth. He wouldn’t understand that I’m lucky. Ex-servicemen are selling matches, dusters and fretw
ork boxes all over London, door to door and on street corners.

  I’ve seen them carted down the line through the muck, the lucky ones on their stretchers. I’ve joined in with the grunt of ‘Lucky bastard, he’s got a Blighty one.’ Even a man with his leg hanging at the knee, we thought: He’s well out of it, and pictured him going back and back, out of the line. We thought of the hospital ship we’d seen in harbour, on the way out. Now we knew why it was big enough to hold a townful of men.

  I get up, and overbalance because my legs are cramped. My clumsiness disturbs something by the wheel of my barrow, where last night’s rain has puddled. A toad. It hops, with heavy grace, into a patch of sunlight. I have never thought of a toad as liking sunlight. It hunkers, its legs packed away again, its body pulsing. We used to say there was a jewel in the head of a toad. I remember Jimmy Kitto got hold of one and dug into its forehead to see where the jewel was, but he found nothing. Only blood, and some whitish stuff which might have been its brain.

  A jewel. The toad looks at me and I look back. Its eyes might be the jewels. They are hooded and ancient. They are the kind of eyes that believe in nothing but what they see in front of them, and maybe not always that. The toad is so close that I can see the snake-like scaling between its eyes, and the dabs of cream and greenish-brown beneath its chin. Its mouth is a thin line.

  For Christ’s sake, it’s only a toad. I never saw many in France, although often the shell-holes were full of frogs. There are enough slugs here to feed twenty toads. It’s waiting for me to go, so that it can slip back into the shade. I put my hand towards it. Into my head there comes a picture of my own hand lifting a piece of granite, smashing it down on the toad. I see the forelegs sticking out from the mash of the body.

  These pictures frighten me. They are too sharp and too bright, much brighter than the day around me. They flash on to my mind like the flash of a shell-burst, and they mark it. I put my hand down flat on the earth and press hard, keeping it still. The toad stretches itself and hops leisurely out of the sunlight, and back to its puddle. In the shadow of the barrow, it’s almost invisible.

  It’s good to have toads in a garden. They rid it of pests, and besides, they are company. The hens pother about, picking grubs and insects, but a toad works seriously, all day long.

  I’m very tired. I ought not to have let myself think about Frederick. It seems safe enough to do so in the daylight, but there’s an afterlife to every thought. I stretch myself, like the toad, to ease my back. From here, I can see the footpath to Senara, although I can’t be seen. If anyone walks by, I keep still. They might glance across and notice that Mary Pascoe’s land has been dug and planted, as it was years ago. What I fear most is the sight of children. Those terrible pictures rise up in me. I see a child hurled off a cliff, with its petticoats blowing. I see a child on the ground, bloody and broken.

  I am afraid to go into crowds. In Turk Street it seems to me that every creature is in disguise. Their skin is a veil to hide the intestines and the raw, slimy flesh within. I see how their bones would split and separate. I see a jagged edge protrude through a thigh or an elbow. I see bodies picked up, torn to pieces, flung on to the ground.

  As I ease my back, the sun slides out from the clouds. I look towards the bay and the sea comes out in patches of turquoise, where the white sand lies beneath the water. There’s a lugger bucking its way around the Island, where the swell is high. The harbour, of course, is hidden.

  The Ancient Mariner is a strange choice of poem for children, you might think. We learned reams of it, the year I was ten, before I went to work, and it stayed in my head during the long days at Mulla House. There was Mr Roscorla, the gardener, and another boy, older than me, but we were always set to work apart so that we couldn’t waste time. I liked the work but it was lonely. All the hymns and poems I’d learned at school came alive inside my head. Even when I was in company, the rhythms wouldn’t leave me alone.

  I would chant verses aloud to Frederick, as we sat propped against the harbour wall. It was his summer holiday. I worked Saturday mornings until one, but not the afternoons. He brought sandwiches, and so did I. His were beef, thickly sliced, black-edged and pink inside. It came from a sirloin joint, larded with its own fat. He would bring gingerbread in waxed paper, and cherries. I had bread and cheese and a slice of heavy cake. I don’t know which was the more delicious. I’d given my wages to my mother and she had given me back a penny. I was hard-working and learned quickly. Mr Roscorla, who was a fair man, let me plant a potato patch behind the greenhouses. I paid for seed potatoes against my wages, and took home eight stone of potatoes the first year.

  Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed

  The light-house top I see?

  Is this the hill? is this the kirk?

  Is this mine own countree?

  I made the hill and the lighthouse and the church into our own, inside my head, as I am sure we all did. The classroom hummed with our repetitions. In my mind the ship full of dead men sailed by the Garracks and Giant’s Cap, past the Island and into harbour. Every plot of land in the town and the country round about belonged to others, yet it was all mine, every roof and furze bush, every grain of sand. The sun soaked us through as we lay propped against the harbour wall, and we were utterly content.

  I’d told Frederick that he must read The Ancient Mariner, and he’d found a Coleridge in the library of books that his father had bought, rows of them, all in the same livery. It lay on the sand beside us, and after we’d finished eating, he picked it up and began to read. He came to the lines I could hardly bear, even as badly as Frederick read them:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread . . .

  I reached over, snatched the book away from him and shut it up.

  ‘You don’t really believe there’s any such thing as a fiend?’ Frederick demanded, with the lazy scorn he was beginning to learn at his school. ‘It’s all superstition.’

  ‘It’s in the Bible,’ I countered, though it wasn’t the Bible that made me shudder. ‘Besides, what do you know? I’d like to see you walk back alone from Mulla House across the moor on a winter evening, when the light’s almost gone. You get lugged about everywhere by pony and trap, with a lantern.’

  My words stung Frederick satisfactorily.

  ‘I can beat you in a race any day, you ass!’ he said, but it was feeble. I had won. He might bamboozle me with the rules of a queer game called Fives, but I was the hardened venturer, alone on the road in the dark. I couldn’t get the words of the poem out of my head. After Frederick and I had parted that evening, they drummed in me all night, and for weeks afterwards. I didn’t dare turn on the road, even when it was white with summer dust and the sun was high.

  I must not let my mind jump from point to point. It’s time to go inside, fill the pot with water and make soup with potatoes, a handful of barley and chives. Mary Pascoe’s block of salt is almost finished. That’s another thing to be bought. I haven’t done well today. I’ve idled since midday, although there’s a job to be done wherever I look. Tomorrow will be different. Better. And then, just as I turn, I see a figure on the path, far away, coming from the town and working its way uphill. I freeze. It will pass by on the coast path, which doesn’t come close to the cottage. I keep on watching. Now the figure is near to where the paths fork. The path to the cottage runs left, and up through high banks of furze. It is overgrown, and I haven’t cleared it. I hold my breath, and for a second I no longer see a human figure. Instead, it takes on the sharp, pouncing gait I imagined when I was a child and did not dare look behind me on the road from Mulla. And then my mind clears, just as the woman’s shape vanishes between banks of furze. She has turned left, and is coming towards the cottage.

  4

  All parties must be kept
closed up while moving to and from the trenches; the pace in front must be very slow. An officer should always be in rear. On dark nights it is often advisable for each man of the party to hold the bayonet scabbard of the man in front. Nothing causes confusion, unnecessary fatigue and loss of morale so much as men getting lost from their parties while moving up to the trenches.

  THE WOMAN’S SHAPE dissolves into one I know. I see her head first, coming through high walls of furze and bramble. Her neat dark head, very round because her hair isn’t loose any more, but coiled and pinned. She isn’t wearing a hat. As she reaches the cleared ground, and halts, I see that her hat is swinging from her hand. I thought she’d be wearing black, but no. Her skirt is dark blue, and her coat, too, which is shabby and too short. Her wrists poke out from the sleeves. I know that coat. She wore it to school, when she was fourteen or fifteen. I remember the braid on the sleeves and hem. I touched that braid once, and it was knotty but also smooth. Felicia told me that it was called silk cord.

  I can’t believe that the Dennises have fallen on hard times, not with a war to make them rich. So why is she wearing that old coat?

  Her step falters. ‘Daniel,’ she says.

  I nod at her. My hands feel clumsy on the end of my arms, like a clown’s. I can’t think of a single word to say to her. Her face is so pared and pale. I used to think Felicia would be lovely when she grew up, but it hasn’t happened.

  ‘I heard that you were here.’

  ‘It’s no secret, Felicia.’

  She pushes back from her forehead the hair that has come loose in the wind. ‘Why haven’t you come to see me, Daniel?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure that you would be there.’

  ‘Where else would I be?’ she demands.

  We stand still, and a little farther apart than seems natural, as if there were a stream running between us.