The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  The day of the fight was soon after that, and it showed me something that had swarmed beneath the surface for years, like the bubbles in Felicia’s soup. My mother was a Camborne girl, not from the town. My father was an upcountry man, from Bristol, and dead. When the net of family was cast, I was by-catch. I went about with Frederick, not the knot of boys I’d gone to school with, even though I was poorer than any of them. I had a book in my pocket, and when I forgot myself I used too many words, for the pleasure of tasting them in my mouth. But the other boys would have left it at that. There was an easiness in the town that would have made room for me if I’d let it. It was my fight, and I brought it about.

  Andrew Sennen got his scholarship, and he was going to the grammar school the next September. He was a big fair boy, humorous, with a slow smile that changed his heavy face. He liked himself and others liked him. His father kept the ironmonger’s and there was money there. We were never friends but he was his same easy self with me as he was with everyone.

  I picked the fight with him. I was a wasp, buzzing around his head. The poison in me was bursting and burning, and I saw his look change. He knew he was stronger than me but he didn’t know how strong the poison was. I saw him going in through that gate along with all the other boys of the grammar school. He would be one of them. I wasn’t stupid, and I knew that even if he wasn’t as clever as me, he would soon go to places where I couldn’t follow him. He would be part of that hive-noise of learning. Andrew Sennen had got it so easy. He didn’t even want it. He’d have sat the scholarship only because he was told to and because they had the shop and didn’t need his wages.

  We shoved and pummelled ourselves to the back of the Parade Hall, with more and more boys crowding up to us, and girls too, the noise of them all sawing in my ears.

  I would have killed him. I felt the wickedness in me leaping and making me as strong as twenty men, like in the Bible. I got him on the ground and battered him, not the way we fought in the playground but real. I locked myself on to him and banged his head on the ground so that he jerked all over like a dog in a fit. I was on top and he was down but I wouldn’t stop. He flapped his left hand. The noise changed. My name was being screamed and Andrew’s too but in a different way, frightened now. Suddenly the air above me darkened like a cloud of gulls coming down on a fish-head and hands came down on me, pulling me off him. It was Mark Relubbus and two other bigger boys who had hold of me and there was Andrew on the ground, holding his face, twisting with his knees up, jerking side to side while his sister pushed forward and knelt by him with her pinafore in the dirt. I hung forward sobbing for breath.

  ‘You bleddy addled, you!’ screeched the sister.

  They got me for it three days later. I saw them coming as I went down Redeemer Street. Five Sennen cousins, all of them bigger than me. I ran and swerved but they got me out into the open like dogs flushing a fox. There was the chapel ahead. I was fast but they might trap me there by the rocks, coming at me all ways. Better to race for it over the beach. They were bigger than me but that made them heavier too and I would go faster on the sand. But the wind was against me, pushing in from the southwest, and now my lightness was dangerous because they had more weight to push against it than I did. I ran on with fire spreading through my lungs and my legs pumping slow like legs in a dream. They were behind me, spreading out like a net. I was making for Bullen’s Head and the cliff path and they knew it. I’d be quick and light on the rocks and if I got into the furze I could cotch down and they would never find me. But they had thought better than me. They were running me down to the margin of flat wet sand where the sea was. There they could close on me. I glanced back and three were still behind me but two had peeled off and gone higher up the beach. I saw them running to my left, gaining, ready to come down on me. I began to twist and jink, as if I could slip myself through them, but my boot caught. The heel churned in the sand and brought me down, and then they were on me.

  I thought they would kill me. I rolled myself into a ball, closing my arms around my head, screwing my eyes shut so I could see nothing. They kicked me, their boots in my back and ribs and arse. But they could not open me up without getting hold of me as I squirmed in the sand. I went far inside myself where there was not even a sound, although at the same time I could hear the noises I was making and the grunts and curses of the Sennen boys. There was a last kick that drove my face into the sand and I felt myself jerking all over like Andrew Sennen, but I held tight so that the ball of me only shuddered a little way along the sand.

  ‘Let’s throw un into the sea,’ said one.

  I thought they would do it. Maybe they would have if I’d been sprawled on the ground, and they could have picked me up by my arms and legs and swung me out into the waves. But curled up as I was like a sowpig, they couldn’t get at me, or else they didn’t want to. I lay still. Maybe I frightened them for I heard muttering and then they were on their way, voices growing louder again with distance, telling themselves what they’d done.

  I lay for a long while, until a spill of water pushed against my face. I coughed as the salt caught the back of my throat. The tide was coming in. I could keep on lying if I wanted, and it would cover me. I rolled over, away from the water, to get my mouth clear of it. I had to uncurl myself if I was going to crawl away, but the clench of my body was too strong for me. I rolled again, a little way up the beach. I tried to be like an adder I’d seen once on the coast path, whipping itself from side to side to get into the furze. The shuddering in me grew stronger. Maybe I was cold or maybe it was the force of the blows. I shook so hard I bit my lips and tasted blood. After a long while the shaking stopped and I knew I had to get away from here before I was too cold to move. The wind scoured every drop of warmth from my blood, and the sea was coming in fast. I didn’t think about my mother. I thought about my father, although all I remembered of him were the memories that my mother told me. If he saw me now in the far distance, like a heap of rubbish that the tide had spat out, he wouldn’t know it was me.

  I don’t know when it is that Frederick leaves me. I would swear I never took my eyes off him, but one moment he is there at the bed-end, and then he is not. He has never stayed with me for so long before.

  Frederick is the only person, besides myself, who knows that Mary Pascoe is lying at the top of the field, under a deepening fuzz of green. He knows everything I’ve done. I wonder, if I went up there now, if he’d come with me. He’d look into the green earth, at the grave he’d never had for himself. He wouldn’t begrudge her that quiet space. Frederick would look consideringly, measuring up the bright oblong of new grass. Under it, her bones lie as they should. Her arms are crossed over her breast, and her eyes are closed. I laid her out straight and sure. It’s not an easy thing to bury a grown woman, even one who’s light and shrivelled with age and sickness. I had to climb down into the grave with her, to be sure she was laid as she should be, and I folded the canvas over her so that no soil would touch her bare face.

  I did what I could. You are the only person who understands that. There was nothing. Nothing to be done. I turned and you were gone. You were a rain of earth, a fine rain and wet with your blood, your body, every bit of you gone into it. You threw me back. I thought it was you and not the shell-blast. Your arms shoving me into safety. I cried out Frederick! but my mouth was stuffed with earth.

  If we were at Bass Head now, and you said, ‘Let’s sleep out on the cliffs,’ of course I’d say yes. We could build a shelter easy enough. We could lie hearing the sea breathe beneath us, and the gulls that cry out in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t be so bloody soft as to unhitch that pony and plod all the way back home.

  10

  The essence of the following games is that they should be conducted with the utmost amount of energy and the rigid observance of all the details connected with them. Executed in this way, they inculcate discipline and develop quickness of brain and movement, whereas, if carelessly carried out, they may do more harm than good
.

  ‘FELICIA?’

  The front door is ajar, wedged with an iron doorstop. I push it open. After the sheer spring light, the hall is dark.

  ‘Felicia?’ I call more loudly. The flags are wet. Someone’s been washing the floor. Dolly Quick, of course: I’d forgotten her. That’s why the door is open. I move away. I have no wish to meet Dolly Quick. Behind me, footsteps crunch on the gravel. It’s Felicia. She’s wearing an old blue jersey of Frederick’s, and her skirt is kilted up. Her boots are covered with earth.

  ‘We’re in the garden,’ she says. ‘I’m digging over the moon beds.’ I follow her to the crescent flowerbeds that used to be filled with lilies, phlox and sweet williams. Felicia has been turning over the soil with a spade, clumsily, leaving the clods full of weeds. She has spread out a blanket for Jeannie on the grass, but the child squats in the dirt, poring over something in the cup of her hand.

  ‘Jeannie, leave that!’

  ‘What has she got?’

  ‘She’s playing with a worm. She’ll eat it.’ Felicia crouches down, eases open the child’s fist, takes the worm and flings it away. Jeannie’s face goes purple, her mouth squares, and she roars like a bull. ‘Leave her,’ says Felicia, ‘she’ll get over it. She wants to eat everything, that’s her trouble.’ The child turns into Felicia’s skirts and butts her head furiously against her mother’s legs. ‘She’s trying to bite me, but she won’t be able because this skirt’s too thick.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘Do you think roses here? Or lilies, maybe?’

  ‘You’ve got to get the weeds right out first. You need a fork, not that spade.’

  ‘I’ll fetch one.’

  The storm’s over. Jeannie follows her mother to the shed, hiccuping but calm. The sun catches on Felicia’s hair, which is never pure black when she’s out in the light. There are sparks of red in it, and even blue. How can there be blue in a girl’s hair? Her baggy clothes hide her body, but she moves inside them the same as ever.

  The fork isn’t as clean as it should be.

  ‘You should tell Josh to oil your tools. He’s not doing his job. There’s rust on the tines.’ I wipe them carefully on a tuft of grass, wishing for an oily rag. Felicia watches, and all of a sudden I’m thrown back ten years. I’m the gardener’s boy, a crouching shape you barely see as you walk around the lawns with your friends.

  ‘Have you ever been to London, Felicia?’ I ask her, and the gardener’s boy slips out of sight.

  ‘I was going to,’ she says quickly. ‘On Frederick’s next leave, I was going to meet him—’

  Why the hell did I start talking about London? Because I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t the old Daniel, who’d never done anything or been anywhere. I rub at the rust, to give her time to settle her face, then plant the prongs deep in the bed, rock down on the fork and ease it through the soil, taking care not to break the taproots of dock and dandelions. There’s couch grass and creeping buttercup. Jeannie and Felicia stand there watching me, hand in hand, their hair and skirts blowing in the spring wind.

  ‘You can pull out the weeds as I dig them loose,’ I tell Felicia. ‘You have to keep going over the bed until the soil’s clean, or else the weeds come back.’

  Felicia makes a heap, and Jeannie pulls it about. As I dig I think of little Felicia scratting in the earth, planting her nasturtiums and love-in-a-mist. ‘So what’s it to be then, lilies or roses? You could have both.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sits back on her heels and smiles at me. The wind has blown her hair loose from the knot at the nape of her neck, and there’s a streak of earth across her cheek where she’s pushed back the tendrils. ‘I thought I’d ask you. No, Jeannie, not in your mouth.’

  I glance up at the sky. ‘It’s about the sunniest bit of your garden. Good for roses. If you planted “Ophelia”, say, you’d get the scent through the back windows.’ ‘Ophelia’ would be the right rose for these beds. The scent would drift all over the garden, there’s not another as strong and sweet. And it’s like Felicia, somehow.

  ‘What colour is it?’

  It is like Felicia’s skin, now that the sun and wind have blown some colour into it.

  ‘White, with a bit of pink in it, not much. Not sugar pink, more brownish. Maybe even a bit of green on the curl of the petals.’

  Felicia makes a face. ‘Sounds wishy-washy to me.’

  I bend to my digging. Maybe she says that because she knows what I’m thinking: that the rose is like her. She doesn’t want the comparison. She’s pushing me away. My hands sting from gripping tight to the fork handle and I can’t look at her. I’m back at Mulla House with the ladies faffing endlessly to Mr Roscorla about what should be planted and where, when none of them knew any more about roses than how to spend a whole morning massacring them into vases. My thoughts must have shown on my face that day, for Mr Roscorla spoke harshly to me after: Don’t you ever forget who’s paying your wages.

  ‘I’ve made you cross, Daniel.’

  ‘I’m not cross.’

  ‘You are. I’m sorry. I’ll get Mrs Quick to make us some tea.’

  ‘Don’t trouble her, she’s scrubbing the floors.’

  ‘Daniel!’

  I lean on the handle of the fork. Jeannie is clambering in her mother’s lap, reaching up to stroke her face. Felicia leans down towards her. Their foreheads touch, and knock. The baby crows with laughter, expectant.

  ‘Again!’

  ‘She always does that,’ says Felicia.

  ‘I didn’t think she’d be able to talk.’

  ‘She says a lot, but I don’t always understand it.’

  ‘Again!’

  But this time Jeannie throws herself forward much too hard. Her head cracks against Felicia’s, and she screams.

  ‘Oh God,’ says Felicia, taking hold of the flailing child. ‘It’s always like this. Every game she plays, it ends in tears. It’s all right, Jeannie, don’t make that noise. She goes on as if she’s half killed. She’s so – she’s so intransigent. And so are you, Daniel.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

  ‘All right. You tell me what roses to plant, Felicia, and I’ll plant them.’

  Felicia folds her arms around Jeannie. The sobs die down with the drumming of Jeannie’s little boots against her mother’s thighs. Felicia wipes her hair off her forehead wearily.

  ‘It’s all in your head, Daniel, not mine.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You get so angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘You are. Just as you were about the five thousand pounds.’

  ‘Felicia, I’m—’ But I’m not sure what to say. ‘I’m your friend, how can I be angry with you? If you think this is anger, then you don’t know much.’ I can’t say that. ‘I’m not against you, Felicia.’

  ‘I know you’re not. But you think that people are against you.’

  ‘Maybe they are. Maybe it’s a habit I can’t break, from having thousands of ’em shooting at me.’

  ‘I’m not shooting at you.’

  I nearly laugh, looking at her fine, clumsy hands.

  ‘I’m not shooting at you, Daniel.’

  I shrug. ‘I know that.’

  ‘You don’t act as if you do.’ She reaches out, hoisting Jeannie sideways on to her hip, and takes the fork from me. I let it go. I don’t want us tussling. ‘I don’t want you to do this any more,’ she says. ‘Besides, Jeannie needs her tea.’

  The weeds are already growing limp. The bed isn’t half finished, and the day is spoiled. Felicia is stubborn, I know that. They would put her into a frilled white pinafore and she would glower. She would run away as far as the edge of the lawn, and I would peep through the leaves, out of my hiding place, and see her. They would call her, and she’d pretend not to hear, but she’d have to go at last, laggingly, looking behind her. She wanted to be with me and Frederick, in the shrubbe
ry. We were little then, too young to go raking over the downs and clifftops, and we were building a secret wigwam in the bushes. Felicia knew that as soon as she was corralled into the drawing room with the visitors, Frederick would run away to join me where I waited, hidden under the gunnera. The Dennises didn’t know I was there, nine times out of ten. I remember the sound of rain falling on the gunnera leaves above me. Those leaves were as good as an umbrella. I waited for a long time, it seemed, and then there was a rush through the branches of the laurels and camellia, and Frederick was there, triumphant. ‘I’ve shaken them off!’

  Felicia never gave us away, although she must have been tempted.

  I knew how to climb the wall and glide through the garden like a Red Indian. No one saw me. If Frederick couldn’t come out, I would creep inside the wigwam, and where the sky showed through I would thatch it with twigs and moss. The wigwam lasted a summer, maybe less.

  I want to go back to the moment when she smiled and said, I thought I’d ask you. But she’s busying herself with the child, setting her down on the ground again, folding the blanket. I see Dolly Quick before Felicia does. Neither of us heard her coming, and I don’t know how long she has been there, five yards from us. She has her coat on, and her felt hat is stabbed into her hair with a jet pin.

  ‘There’s squab pie for your supper, on the slab,’ she says, addressing Felicia, slipping me a glance. ‘I’ll finish upstairs on Monday.’