The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ says Felicia, too effusively, as if there’s something to cover up. But there’s nothing. Only Dan Branwell, digging up a flowerbed, as he’s done all his working life. Dolly Quick most likely thinks Felicia’s found some work for me, at the expense of Josh, for old times’ sake.

  ‘Daniel thinks we should plant roses in this bed,’ says Felicia.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. And I’ll make a start on washing the loose covers.’

  Her eyes are on me, then on Felicia, then on me again, as rapid as blinking. She has those dark, curranty eyes you can’t look into.

  ‘That’ll be lovely,’ says Felicia, flexing her own thin fingers, as if she, too, is ready to plunge into the suds. She’s too eager, Felicia, trying to be what people want of her. It never works. Dolly sniffs, and snaps the clasp of her bag. And there’s Jeannie, staggering towards her with a pile of weeds in her arms. She drops them at Dolly’s feet. The lined face softens. She bends down, picks up the child and presses her close. I see how red and raw her hands are. Dolly Quick touches Jeannie’s soft cheek with her knuckle, then strokes her hair. ‘And did you do all that, then, my lovely?’

  ‘She wanted to eat a worm. I expect you heard her screaming,’ says Felicia.

  ‘Did she? No, my bird, you don’t want to go eating a worm. You’ll get a bellyache.’ Still stroking the child’s hair, but in a different tone, she says to me, ‘You’re back with us, then, Dan.’

  ‘As you see.’

  She nods towards Felicia. ‘She’ll have told you they’ve all gone away upcountry, but we keep an eye here, me and Quicky.’

  She always called her husband Quicky. You would hear her asking down the street as the men came up from the lodge: ‘You got Quicky with you?’ Everyone took it from her and he was Quicky all over town. He was a little, lugubrious man, unless he’d had a drink, which was seldom since Dolly was strong chapel. I’m thinking of all this when I see the smile that Dolly Quick gives to Felicia, and the one from Felicia that answers it. Dolly Quick has no daughter, only the two great lumps of her sons. Jabez and Jethro Quick, both prone to fits and exempted by the Tribunal. I remember their mother knuckling their heads even when they were great boys, twice the size of her. I also remember that Andrew Sennen is Quicky’s sister’s son.

  ‘I ent seen Mary Pascoe in a long time. Used to get my eggs from her.’

  ‘She’s been ill,’ says Felicia. ‘Daniel’s been looking after the hens and vegetable garden.’

  ‘I dessay.’ Slowly, she disengages Jeannie’s hands, kisses her, and sets her down. ‘Dolly’s got to go now, my chiel.’ Gratifyingly, Jeannie starts to cry. ‘You going to come along down mine for a while then?’

  ‘It’s a trouble for you,’ says Felicia quickly.

  ‘It’s no trouble. She can watch the boats come in. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘If the Lord spares us,’ I murmur, and catch an ungodly glint from Dolly Quick. Off she goes, to work her black seam of gossip. We listen to her and Jeannie, their voices mingling and growing fainter. Felicia rolls down the sleeves of her jersey, and settles the ribbed cuffs on her wrists. Her hands, which looked so fine and pale by lamplight, are chapped. Her wrists are narrow, and the bones prominent. I wonder if the jersey still smells of Frederick. He used to wear it when we rowed in the harbour.

  ‘She’s always wanting to go to Dolly’s,’ says Felicia. Her face is clouded. ‘We seem to have so many quarrels.’

  ‘What, you and Jeannie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does she know enough words to quarrel?’

  ‘She screams, she throws herself on the ground, I have to hold my hands down sometimes so as not to slap her. Sometimes I wonder what she will say to me, once she can talk properly.’

  ‘She’ll have grown out of wanting to eat worms, at any rate.’

  ‘She’ll have thought of worse things. No, it’s only that sometimes I’m not sure she even likes me.’

  ‘You’re her mother. Of course she does.’

  ‘Dolly was there when she was born, did I tell you that?’ Felicia sighs. ‘Never mind. Let’s go in and have tea.’

  I wipe the tines of the fork clean, and take the weeds to the heap. ‘You’ve mud on your face, Felicia,’ I say, coming back to her.

  ‘Oh! Where?’

  I touch my left cheek. ‘Just here.’ She dabs at the wrong cheek, mirroring me. ‘No, here.’

  I reach out to show her, without quite touching her. Quickly, she scrubs at her skin until a red mark comes.

  ‘It’s all gone.’

  I smelled her skin as I came close. It’s not like roses at all and I don’t want it to be.

  ‘She’ll have left a cake too,’ says Felicia, as if she needs to tempt me.

  I suppose we’ll eat in the kitchen again, but Felicia loads up a heavy tray with tea things and cinnamon cake.

  ‘There’ll be a fire in the morning room,’ she says.

  The fire is laid, but not lit. A fine spatter of rain hits the window as Felicia kneels to put a match to the coils of paper. They catch, and lick the kindling. We watch, without speaking, as the fire grows. There’s the noise of the rain and the puckering of flames, and then Felicia pours tea into the cups. The Dennises have the smallest, thinnest cups I’ve ever seen. You can drink them off in two gulps. It’s like a doll’s tea party, until Felicia cuts thick slices of cake with the black-handled knife that I remember the knife-grinder sharpening, with all the rest. It’s good cake.

  ‘Have another piece,’ she says, lifting it towards me on the knife blade. She refills the teapot from the hot-water jug, and pours me another cup. She seems to be pouring and handing every five minutes. I lift my cup, take a drink, and it’s empty.

  ‘I know,’ she says, catching my eye. ‘We could have had the big kitchen cups, but I thought—’ And then she blushes, as I’ve never seen her blush before. Suddenly I understand why. She’s not wanted to bring in the kitchen cups, in case it seems she thinks they are good enough for Dan Branwell. She’s used her fine china. She’d have given Frederick his tea in a kitchen cup, I’m sure of it.

  I watch her thin, clumsy fingers and my heart slides in my chest with longing, but I still don’t know what I want. This room ought to be comfortable. It smells of damp, but the fire warms it, and the brass fender gives back the dance of the flames. There’s a clutter of children’s toys on the hearth: bricks, rag books, and a knitted cat. A rag doll.

  ‘Is that Pip Lily?’ I ask.

  ‘Fancy you remembering. She’s a bit the worse for wear, but Jeannie likes her.’

  Most of the paintings that used to be on the walls are gone, but there is one left that I remember: Frederick and Felicia, hand in hand, golden-curled as I’m sure they never were. Mr Dennis must not have wanted to take the portrait with him. Felicia has followed my glance.

  ‘Isn’t it hideous?’ she says quickly.

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Mother had it done, not long before she died. We sat for it in this room: look, you can see where he’s painted a corner of the fireplace. But he wasn’t a very good painter. Father always thought it was sickly.’

  ‘He painted what he thought your parents wanted.’ I look at the four faded oblongs on the wallpaper. ‘What’s happened to your photographs?’

  ‘They’re not here any more.’

  They must be with her father and the new Mrs Dennis. It’s raining heavily now.

  ‘Dolly won’t bring her home in this,’ says Felicia. ‘I’ll go down for her after our dinner. And then there’ll be another screaming match. She won’t want to come home. Dolly makes such a fuss of her. Jeannie has a little bed made up down there, and her own cup and bowl.’

  The heat of the fire is making me drowsy. I think of the long walk back, battered by wind, with sheets of rain swaying in across the sea. Sometimes it feels as if the sky is down on you like a lid, and you can’t get away.

  ‘I’ll put the pie in the oven,’ says Felicia, and
leaves me alone in the room. I gape into the fire, and eat more cake, and picture Felicia moving around the kitchen. The minutes lengthen. This is the afterlife. This is what we dreamed of, in France. Fire, and four walls, dry feet, a belly warm with food. Children’s toys on the floor. We talked about such things as if they were gone from the earth. You couldn’t believe in them. I still can’t, even though I’m here. I say Frederick’s name, but the room doesn’t answer. The grinning yellow-haired boy in the painting doesn’t know who I’m talking about. I hold out my fingers and squint at the firelight through them. I’m in Mrs Dennis’s own room. I used to scuttle by under her window, head down so she wouldn’t see me. But there’s no victory in it. I’m tired, that’s all.

  Felicia’s been in the kitchen a long time. Maybe she’s seeing to the pie. I don’t know, though. Something in her absence makes me uneasy, as if I’ve no right to be in the house unless she’s with me. The Dennises are gone, I tell myself. There’s no tall black roaring man behind the study door.

  I wait a while longer, then go to the door, open it, listen. There is only the house, creaking and settling as the wind rises. I pad across the hall, through the green baize door and into the kitchen. There’s no one here. The kettle is drawn to one side of the plate, and singing very quietly to itself. There on the slab is the pie.

  My boots clop on the flagstones as I go back through the hall. I remember the old days, when I would flit about the house in my stockinged feet so that no one would hear me. I bend down, unlace my boots and put them aside. The stairwell rises into shadows. Felicia must be upstairs. She wouldn’t have gone down to fetch Jeannie without telling me. I could go back into the morning room and wait for her. No. I want to find her.

  These stairs. My feet know every tread. I go up lightly, feeling the give and creak of each stair beneath my weight. On the first landing, the staircase divides, curving left and right. Right is to Frederick’s room. My feet are already moving towards it when I remember that Mrs Dennis turned Frederick out of his bedroom. She didn’t think he’d need it again. She put him in the Blue Room.

  I know where that is. It’s the little room two doors down from Frederick. My mother told me it was where the baby was going to be, the one that died along with Frederick’s and Felicia’s mother. She’d made it into a nursery, but then everything was taken out again, the walls were stripped and afterwards there was blue paper put on. Visitors slept there sometimes.

  The clock in the hall strikes the quarter, and I stand stock-still. When the house closes over the sound again, I move forward. Felicia’s room was right at the end of the corridor. I suppose she must be there. On my left a door stands wide, into an empty room. Part of the carpet is cut away, as if it used to be fitted around a piece of furniture, and there is newspaper over the bare boards. The curtains have gone. They used to call this room the night nursery. All those names they had.

  Felicia’s room has a white china doorknob with forget-me-knots painted on it. The door is closed. If I knock, she won’t know who it is. She might be afraid. I turn, and go to the door of the Blue Room. I put my hand on the doorknob, gather it into my palm, and very slowly, very cautiously, I begin to turn it. It goes easily, without a click. I push, just a little, until a line of light appears between door and frame. I push farther. At the same moment there’s a noise from inside the room. A stifled, animal sound. My hair crisps. I want to turn and run but I look down at my hand and see that it is pushing the door wider. I open the door.

  Felicia is lying on her stomach, across the bed. The room is full of stuff: piles of books, photographs, Frederick’s school trunk with his initials on it in red, a heap of clothes in the middle of a sheet on the floor, as if someone was sorting them. Cricket pads lie on the windowsill. Chairs, desk and wardrobe are stacked against the wall. There is hardly room to move around the bed.

  Felicia’s face comes out of the pillow, swollen with weeping. Red patches have come up on her skin. She pushes back her hair, looking bewildered, as if she doesn’t know where she is.

  ‘Felicia, it’s only me.’

  She rolls over, clutching the pillow to herself.

  ‘Why did you come up here?’ she asks angrily, as if I’m a stranger.

  ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  ‘You didn’t frighten me.’ She sits up, swings her legs over the side of the bed, and punches the pillow back into place. ‘I didn’t expect anyone to come up here, that’s all.’

  This is a junkyard, not a bedroom. I can’t believe that Frederick ever slept here. They pitched his stuff in anyhow, and left it.

  If the Dennises were poor, this would never happen. A room wasted, not taken care of, possessions strewn anywhere. There’s no feeling in it. There are his schoolbooks on the floor under the window, textbooks and exercise books thrown down in a heap. I pick up an exercise book. It smells of damp, and the pages are stuck together. There’s another smell too, that makes my skin prickle. It’s not coming from the exercise book. I take a deep breath, to steady myself, and peel the pages apart. The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts . . . On it goes down the page, in Frederick’s awful handwriting. For once, there are no drawings in the margins. I stoop, and replace the exercise book on the slipshod pile.

  ‘What were you doing in here, Felicia?’

  ‘I keep thinking I ought to sort it out.’

  ‘It’s best left, I should think.’

  ‘I can’t. These are Frederick’s things.’

  Frederick’s things, thrown down as if they are nothing. A pullover with empty sleeves. A cricket bat no one will handle again. They pitched the lot in here, and shut the door on it. But Felicia opened the door. She couldn’t keep away.

  ‘Look,’ she says, pointing, ‘there are his things that they sent home.’

  I see it then. The squat bundle of his kit, by the end of the bed. That’s what the smell was. Everything that’s been near that mud smells of death.

  ‘Haven’t you opened it?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘They’re not the clothes he was wearing when he was killed,’ I say, and at once I realise I’ve said too much. But she doesn’t seem to notice.

  ‘They sent Harry’s kit back too,’ she says, ‘but that was all right. I went through it to see if there was anything I could keep for Jeannie. I thought there might be a postcard, or a souvenir he’d picked up. But there wasn’t.’

  I watch Felicia’s hands, turning over and over. Her chapped knuckles, her thin wrists coming out of her too-short sleeves. There’s that smell again, that you never know before the first time you go up the line. Raw mud, old gas, cordite, shit, rotting flesh. I don’t suppose these windows are ever opened. It’s airless and the room is too small. I glance behind me. The door is still open.

  ‘You shouldn’t come in here,’ I say to her. She doesn’t answer, just looks at me with unreadable eyes. I reach out and take her wrist. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’

  She takes a deep, noisy breath and a smile quavers over her face. Gently, she withdraws her hand. ‘I wish he’d stayed in his old bedroom,’ she says. ‘But you wouldn’t recognise it now. It’s got wallpaper with lambs and daffodils all over it.’

  It’s cold in here. Even the books are cold. Felicia ought to come away. The cold is getting into me. I step back from the books, stumble over the edge of the trunk, and catch my balance by grabbing the bedpost. The iron is icy.

  ‘Felicia,’ I mutter. My lips are thick and clumsy now. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  I step back through the open door, and into the corridor. I am trembling and although I am freezing cold, sweat is starting out all over my body.

  ‘Felicia.’

  I’ve got to get her out, but I can barely speak. I hear the bedsprings and then her footsteps on the drugget. I sink to my knees and cover my head with my arms and rock myself to stop the trembling. I think that I cry out.

  I daren’t look up. I rock and rock, easing myself, with my eyes scre
wed tight shut so I see nothing. There’s a bad taste in my mouth. I hear footsteps going away and then coming back. Something cold and wet touches me. I open my eyes a chink and see an old enamel mug full of water.

  ‘Drink this,’ says Felicia.

  My hands shake so much as I bring the lip of the mug to my mouth that lumps of water jolt over my clothes. Some goes into my mouth. I look only at the mug. There’s a chip in the enamel.

  ‘Can you stand up?’

  I shake my head. She’s kneeling in front of me. I look a little way beyond the mug. I see her wrists, and the dark blue wool. We stay like that for a long time, while my heart steadies.

  ‘Don’t go in that room,’ I say.

  ‘Hush. It’s all right, Daniel. It’s only a room.’

  ‘Don’t go in there again.’

  I am able to look up at her now. The red patches on her temples are fading. She can be ugly and she’s ugly now, pale and draggled, the bones of her skull showing through her skin.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can you get up now?’ she asks me.

  Can you get up now? Can you move your arms? Your legs?

  The stretcher party came for me, but not for Frederick. There was no sign of him anywhere. Only blown, sticky mud over everything. A shudder takes hold of me again, as if I’m a child being shaken by a grown man. ‘Felicia,’ I say, very quietly so no one will hear, ‘is there anything behind me?’

  ‘Only the door.’

  ‘Is there anything on my hands?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Touch my hand. There, like that. Now wipe your hand across. Is there anything? Can you see anything?’ I can still smell it. Raw earth, raw iron, meat, explosive. It rains around me but it is invisible. Felicia’s hand is clean. ‘That’s good,’ I tell her. ‘Look again.’

  ‘There’s nothing there.’

  ‘Felicia. Hold me.’

  I’m shaking now. If she holds me now, I’ll be still. She takes hold of my shoulders, patting me clumsily.

  ‘Hold me.’

  She doesn’t know how. ‘You’re trembling,’ she says.

  I don’t answer. I’m trying to keep my teeth from chattering. I’m ashamed. I was never this bad, not in France. It washes over me like the hundredth wave and I cling to the rock. When I come to, our eyes are inches apart. She is still crying, but silently now. A tear slides down to her mouth, and she licks it away.