The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ I say.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I would never hurt you, Felicia.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I want to get the furnace going for you, so that you and Jeannie are warm.’

  ‘Not now. You must come downstairs with me, by the fire, and get warm. We’ll eat the pie, and then I have to go and fetch Jeannie.’

  ‘All right. Don’t cry any more, Felicia.’

  ‘I can’t cry when Jeannie’s here. It frightens her. And then I think that if Frederick could see me, he’d think I’d forgotten him – and then I get frightened. I might forget his face. I can’t see Harry’s any more. I told you that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then.’ She takes my hand, just for a second. Her clasp is warm and quick, and then gone. ‘That’s why I come here.’

  We go down through the empty house. I can’t help thinking of that woman, the French teacher, going into someone’s stuffy front room, week after week. I’ve never seen a Ouija board, and I don’t want to.

  Here’s the chair on the landing, where Felicia used to sit, fidgeting, while my mother knelt to fasten her little black boots that buttoned at the sides. Downstairs there was the smell of cooking, the clip of hooves in the yard, the clang of pans from the kitchen. Sunlight lay on the flagstones where the front door was wide open. We heard the drone of Mr Dennis’s voice behind his study door. That was before the day he came out, and beat Frederick.

  Most of what I remember at Albert House comes from before that day. Maybe I make those times better than they were, by going over and over them in my mind. But I don’t think so. A memory like mine is more a curse than a blessing. It cuts into the past, as sharp as a knife, and serves it up glistening. The chair creaks as Felicia fidgets. Frederick hides his new catapult behind his back, so my mother won’t see it. He slides a glance at me. We’ll be free in a minute, cantering on the gravel before we plunge across the lawn and into the wilderness of camellias and tree ferns and gunnera. My mother is always afraid that one of us will take out the other’s eye. How my fingers itch to test the tension of the catapult’s elastic.

  11

  Men removed masks at times when they thought that the gas had disappeared. As a result of this continued removal and adjustment of the mask, the men must have breathed a certain amount of gas.

  GRAVY SPILLS OUT of the squab pie as Felicia cuts it in half. She gives me the larger piece. I hold my knife and fork as she does, but I can’t copy the slowness with which she eats.

  ‘It’s a long time since I tasted proper squab pie,’ I tell her. ‘They put pigeon in it upcountry, did you know that? I had it once in London. I couldn’t eat it. London pigeons, they’re like vermin. You wouldn’t want to put the flesh in your mouth.’

  The thick, fat taste of the mutton is cut with apple. They’ll be from the old tree on the back wall. Pig’s Nose. That’s good keeping fruit.

  ‘You may as well finish it, Dan.’

  ‘You and the little one will want it tomorrow.’

  But she heaps pie on to my plate. When I’ve finished, she rises and goes to the larder, comes back with an earthenware jug covered with a muslin cloth.

  ‘I asked Dolly to fetch me a jug of beer. I don’t know what she must have thought.’

  I know exactly what she must have thought. There she is, my blessed Felicia, with her thin wrists and an expression that gets wiped off the faces of most kids before they’re ten years old. She’s innocent, that’s what she is. Never mind the death of Harry Fearne, the birth of Jeannie. Frederick’s death.

  I push my chair back and take a deep drink of the beer. This is how it must be, if you’re married. Felicia moving around the table, clearing plates, wiping the wood. But if we were married, she’d have made the pie herself. She’s playing at something she doesn’t know how to do. Same with the baby. Maybe that’s why Jeannie cries to go down to Dolly Quick’s, because there’s a sureness in the old woman that Felicia lacks.

  She carries the plates out into the scullery, for Dolly Quick to wash tomorrow I dare say. She leaves the door of the scullery open. It must be damp in there, because a smell creeps out. At first it only touches my nostrils, like a coil of smoke, but then it thickens. I cough, and put my hand up to my mouth. It’s all around me now, thick as fog. Gas gets into the earth and stays there. Nothing could flourish in that soil, except rats. There’s chloride of lime, or creosol, and the ooze from the latrines. We stink worst of all when we unwrap our puttees. No wonder the rats are close enough to lick our hair-grease. They eye us up like chums. You’ll do, they say. You’re worth coming back for.

  Did you know that a rat gets finicky if he’s overfed? He’ll eat the eyes and liver out of a dead man and leave the rest. He’ll pop out of the hole he’s made in a dead man’s cheek. As dainty as a cat and about the size of one, but he comes through that hole like water.

  She’s still in the scullery. I can hear the plates. Drink your beer, Daniel. Drink your beer, old son, and have a coffin-nail.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke, Felicia?’

  ‘Of course not. I like it.’

  She likes it because it reminds her of Frederick. I taught Frederick to smoke. He was green as grass the first time. Pallid and sweating before he chucked up his breakfast over the sand. But he kept on going, and soon he wanted a Woodbine as much as I did. You get used to things, that’s the curse of it.

  I draw in the smoke from my cigarette, and look at Felicia. She smiles. That’s her innocence.

  ‘I’ll finish this, and then I’ll take a look at that furnace. Unless you want to fetch Jeannie first?’

  She glances at her wristwatch. ‘It’s still raining,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’s better if she stays. Dolly will like to have her . . .’ She hesitates, rocked this way and that by different thoughts. I wish she would go and get the child, and yet I want her to myself. ‘It’s too late, really,’ she says. ‘She’ll have told Jeannie she’s staying the night. I’ll come down to the cellar with you.’

  The way you get to the furnace is through the cellar. Felicia takes candles, tapers and a lantern, and goes ahead. Albert House has fine dry cellars. Mr Dennis, being an engineer as well as a gentleman, gave a lot of thought to the construction of his house. The architect’s drawings used to be displayed in a case in his study, with his own handwritten remarks on them.

  There are eight steps down, then a turn, and four more steps.

  ‘Wait until I light the lamp,’ Felicia calls to me. Seconds later a gas lamp on the wall hisses into light, and I see the good order in which everything’s kept. The coal cellar and the coke cellar sit side by side, and a wood store beyond. Tools are ranged on shelves and hooks.

  ‘My father’s wine cellar is through there,’ says Felicia. ‘I don’t think we ever went into it, did we?’

  I did, with Frederick. He wouldn’t allow us to taste the wine: we had to take a whole bottle, he said, otherwise they would find out. We drank it on the clifftops, but I didn’t like it, and Frederick only pretended to. We poured the rest of the bottle away, dark red until it sank into the earth.

  ‘They took the wine with them. All of it. Even the claret that was laid down for Frederick’s twenty-first birthday.’ Her face and voice are expressionless.

  ‘But they left you the coal.’

  She smiles faintly. ‘The house is mine, did you know that?’

  ‘Yours? You mean, because you’re living in it?’

  ‘No. It’s really mine. It was my mother’s money that paid for building it, and it was always in her name. You didn’t know that, did you? No one did. Everyone thought my father was the one who made us rich, out in Australia. Well, he did make money, but she had money. The house came to me and Frederick. It was held in trust, until he was twenty-one.’

  ‘He wasn’t twenty-one when he died.’

  ‘My mother thought of that. In case of Frederick’s death before he came of age or had an heir, the hous
e came to me. She tied up everything, so that it couldn’t be unpicked.’

  ‘Your mother thought your father would marry again, mostly likely.’

  ‘She must have known he would. He tried to have her will overturned, you know, after Frederick’s death. He went to lawyers in Truro, and when they said the will had to stand, he went up to London to the Inns of Court. He came back in a black temper, because they told him there was no doing anything about it, and he’d spent all that money on lawyer’s fees. She went up to London with him, and when they came back I knew we couldn’t live together any more. She’d changed, as soon as she knew they were going to have a baby. They blamed me for the will. They wanted me to sign some documents, giving them a lifetime interest in the house – the right to live here – but I wouldn’t. It was my house, from my mother.’

  She had resisted them. I’ve got it all wrong. I thought Felicia was left here alone and grieving, clinging by her finger-ends to her childhood home. Abandoned. But it was Felicia who told them all to go. She had the power.

  ‘You know how my father was always talking about duty,’ says Felicia. ‘He had a duty to me as well, but he didn’t care about that. All he thought about was himself – and her and the baby they were going to have, I suppose.’

  ‘People are like that, most of ’em.’

  ‘When I die, everything will go to Jeannie. I’ve made my will.’ She stands there, mostly in shadow, with the light from the lamp coming sideways over her shoulder. She’s been to a lawyer and made her will. I’ve seen blokes scribbling down things on bits of paper, saying who was to have what. I never bothered.

  Felicia points, and the shadow of her arm leaps on the whitewashed wall to my right. ‘You remember where the passage is, Dan, behind this door. I’ll come with you if you like.’

  ‘You stay here. I’ll have a dekko at the furnace, and see what tools I need.’

  ‘You’ll need the lantern. There’s no gas in the furnace room. Some light comes through from the ventilation shaft in daytime, but it’s getting too dark now.’

  They have whitewashed the brick passage-walls that I remember so dirty. I have to duck down, but then I’m tall for round here. They put all the short-arses into bantam regiments, like hens.

  The passage opens into the furnace room, and there it is, a big, cold thing squatting like a toad, waiting to be fed. There are dials and gauges. It looks as complicated as a ship’s engine. Mr Dennis was like that: he didn’t want things easy, he wanted them perfect. I can’t help thinking of the river of money this house has swallowed.

  It’s the kind of furnace that ought never to be let go out. You can regulate the flow of hot air to the ducts, or even switch off the flow entirely, so that the furnace only heats water in summer. The furnace room is cold, but it still smells baked and cokey, and the air catches at the back of my throat and makes me cough. The lantern throws a fair light. It’ll be a long job to work out what’s wrong, and what’s needed to fix it. I’ll come again first thing tomorrow. Dolly Quick can think what she likes.

  12

  Men’s faces and hands should be darkened. Khaki woollen caps or Balaclava helmets have been found a suitable head-dress. Woollen gloves to be worn while crawling forward and thrown away on reaching the enemy’s parapet have been found useful.

  Men should be armed according to the tasks they are to perform. Bayonet men should carry rifles and bayonets and fifty rounds of ammunition. Revolvers, knobkerries and daggers have been used. Men to carry revolvers must be carefully trained in their use.

  Electric torches tied to the rifle with black insulating tape have been found useful for men detailed to clear dugouts. The insulating tape conceals the bright metal parts of the torch and prevents short circuiting.

  The raiding party should be provided with the most powerful wire cutters available. Men for wire cutting should be provided with leather hedging gloves.

  IT SEEMED FROM what we learned at Boxall that we’d be fighting most of the time. We marched and drilled, stabbed and shot, until you’d have thought we’d be killing Germans night and day. It wasn’t until we got to France that we knew the war was the biggest job of work there’d ever been. You had to wait and see where they were going to slot you in. And then you waited some more. Ned Causley worked in a paint factory up in Plymouth and he was a union man. He said that if they ran a factory like they were running this war, there wouldn’t be a can of paint out of it this side of Christmas.

  First there was getting there. Weeks it seemed to take, not days. The cloud was down when we marched out of camp. It clung to us, greasy and dripping, all the way to the station where we were to entrain. The thud of our boots was hollow in the fog.

  Our train went slow at first, jolting and stopping for long halts at Saltash and then Plymouth. When we crept over the bridge I knew that we were leaving Cornwall, which I’d never done before. We were coming into new, broad, fat country, and the train ran faster. From Exeter it was a troop train, that would take us straight through with only a change of engine. There was a long wait between London and Dover. No one knew why, but rumours went up and down the train that we were being held for the passing of hospital trains. We were in a siding for two hours, but the trains that chuntered past us looked like passenger trains to me. It didn’t matter. We’d been given two days’ rations, besides what we’d bought from the camp canteen. We were packed in and still jolly. There’d been girls to see us off, and the town band had played outside the camp as we marched. There were crowds at Exeter station, milling about. Lots of women in black, and men with black armbands. You noticed it more outside Cornwall, because there were more people.

  There was a long wait at Dover, before our train slid into the shed next to an empty hospital train, marked on the sides with red crosses. They said a hospital ship was being unloaded. We couldn’t see anything, but the thought of it quietened us. They marched us away and then we were fallen out to kip down on our packs on the pier. Our escort was still out in the middle of the Channel, so the sergeant said. We were all weary, or what we thought was weary then. The sea was a dark, dirty grey, slopping about like water that clothes have been washed in. There was a destroyer lying close in harbour, which had come in with the hospital ship. Late in the afternoon the sun shone and made the sea gleam like a pewter mug. But it was nothing like the sea at home. We could hear the dockers shouting, and men giving orders. The hospital ship was white with a green band around it. It was such a huge ship that you wouldn’t think there could be so many wounded to be brought home at one time.

  I saw cattle put into a boat for the Scillies once, at Newlyn. I’d never thought of live cattle being transported by water. They were swung out one by one, in a sort of sling, lowing loudly. They were big, fat Friesians, not like our wild little Zennor cattle. You could see the shit fall from them as they were swung.

  I wondered if the war had forgotten about us, although I knew it couldn’t have done. A man in overalls shinned about in the girders above our heads, tapping nuts and tightening them. He didn’t care a bit about the drop beneath him. It seemed queer that all this ordinary business was going on. The man whistling, and the tap of metal. Then there was an order: we were to march to another quay, where the troopship lay.

  I’d never imagined a vessel as tall as that one. It looked as if it could carry a city of men. Some were already up there, moving about like ants. Khaki ants. But my feet were still on solid earth. I wondered how I should ever come back. It seemed like a dream, that the ship was going to take all of us away with it, to another country, and that maybe we’d come back in that white ship with its green band, or maybe we wouldn’t come back. I wondered if the others thought of it, but no one said a word except about when we’d next have a brew, and what the tarts were going to be like in France. The crossing was roughish and we had to wear life-jackets in case of mines, or maybe submarines. Some of the boys were sick. We sat on deck and smoked, and saw England sidle away backwards, as if it was trying to escape. Ra
in was spattering out of the clouds, but not much. Being on that boat was something and nothing. We were in the army, but the army doesn’t fight on water. We weren’t in England and we weren’t in France. I didn’t mind how long the crossing lasted.

  When we landed, we were in France. After all the talking and training, there it was, an ordinary town with gulls flying up against the houses and people going about their business, not stopping to look at us because they were so used to the sight of us I suppose. It smelled different from England and the houses were higher and narrower, crowding together. The sky was white and it showed up the peeling paint and the posters that were coming off the walls. The notices were all in French, which surprised me, though it shouldn’t have done. Some of the lads began to sing ‘Inky pinky parlay voo’ in a defiant kind of way, as if they were daring the French to know that we’d only just got here. We marched through the town to the railway station, and I wanted to buy some cakes a girl had in a little tray around her neck. She ran alongside us chattering all the time in French, about the prices I should think, but no one knew how to work it out and I didn’t want to give her English money in case she cheated me. I can see her now. A clean, dusty-blue apron, and seven or nine little cakes, round and glistening fat, on a nice sheet of paper. It was an odd number of cakes, I do remember that. I wanted one so much that my mouth watered, but I never got it.

  They put us in cattle trucks. Some of the lads made mooing noises and shouted, ‘Get on up there, Daisy!’ but it stood to reason, really, that there couldn’t be enough railway carriages in France for all the men that were coming through. Our train ran along briskly for twenty minutes, showing us country that looked much like what we’d seen on the other side, as we came through Kent. The fields were bigger, though, and they laid their hedges differently. We stopped again, in the middle of nowhere. I thought: This is France. I’m in another country – but I couldn’t feel it. I only had the same knot in my stomach I’d had for days, and on top of that a peaceful feeling, because I couldn’t do anything about anything any more.