The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  We had clean straw mattresses in the loft of a barn, clean water, a village that was more or less undamaged to walk about in, the Cat Fur for the evenings. We could watch women working in the fields, as if there wasn’t a war at all. It made me realise that up the line it was a new kind of country, man-made. No one had ever seen it before, and no woman had ever been there. You could get fresh eggs and milk every day in Estancourt, if you didn’t mind being cheated. Better than all of that, we had three more clear days’ rest.

  ‘You seem to get on all right,’ he said, his voice strange. ‘I can’t believe how well you’ve got yourself dug in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I suppose I wasn’t expecting you to have changed.’

  ‘We’ve all changed.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  There was silence. I felt that he was disappointed in me, and I was angry with him for being disappointed, even though I knew why it was. Why hadn’t he wanted to talk about the poem?

  ‘I hated poetry at school,’ said Frederick, and now I heard the appeal in his voice. ‘I’m all right as long as I’ve got you to explain it for me.’

  My throat had tightened up again. I cleared it, and said, ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another . . .’ There’s nothing difficult about that, is there?’

  ‘I suppose he wrote it for the woman he was in love with.’

  All the night noises came clearer than ever. There were shouts from the Cat Fur, and an engine revved somewhere farther off. The wind rattled the twigs lightly. No heavy firing, just the odd burst. Enough to make you glad you weren’t there, and a bit anxious too, as if you ought to have been. As if where the firing came from was the only place that was real. But that was all rubbish. Frederick was so close that I heard the little catch of his breath before he spoke.

  ‘There’s a bit of a push coming,’ he said. ‘We’re having another shot at that ridge.’

  ‘Soutines Ridge?’ I couldn’t believe it was happening again.

  ‘We can’t let them hold a position like that,’ said Frederick, as flat as a pancake. He shouldn’t have been telling me any of it. It was for officers to know and men to be told in due course, preferably only hours beforehand so they didn’t have time to get the wind up. I’d heard rumours, but hearing it from Frederick’s mouth was a different thing.

  ‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ said Frederick, ‘try, try and try again.’

  I said nothing. Fritz could hold on to Soutines Ridge for the rest of eternity as far as I was concerned, if the alternative was the same happening to us as had happened to the Third. In our present position we couldn’t advance, but we were lucky. It was a quiet sector. We kept our heads down. It might seem strange, looking back, that all we wanted was for nothing to happen, because that would have meant that the war would go on for ever. We’d be rotating in and out of the line until kingdom come. But we knew that the fewer big ideas the brass got, the better it was for us.

  ‘D’you fancy a trench raid?’ asked Frederick abruptly.

  ‘What?’ I was still thinking about Soutines.

  ‘I need volunteers.’

  ‘You can’t retake Soutines Ridge with a raiding party,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘No, you blithering idiot, this has nothing to do with Soutines. It’s not very likely they’d be asking a second lieutenant to recruit for that, is it? Soutines is a pleasure for the future, like Christmas. This is a minor company enterprise, a little piece of night work just for us. One officer, Sergeant Morris, a couple of corporals and forty-eight men picked from all four platoons. Volunteers,’ he added, after a pause.

  He kept his voice light, with its bantering edge, but I knew him better than that. He’d been cut up at Soutines, even though he only had those shrapnel fragments in his forehead to show for it. They’d healed, but they gave him a queer look. There was something in him now that all the men felt. No one put a name to it. He’d lost his luck, you could say, if you wanted to, but that wasn’t it. You might call it the war, but it was more than that. It was what happened when nothing mattered, or everything mattered in the same dull, ugly, pointless way, day after day after day. It was how I’d felt for a long time, after the fight with Andrew Sennen. But I didn’t feel it that night in Estancourt, not as Frederick did. I suppose it was knowing that when I went back into the Cat Fur they’d all budge up on the bench for me and there we’d be, packed in, swallowed up in noise and heat and fug. No one in our platoon said anything to me about Frederick, but they didn’t warm to him.

  Still I said nothing. I knew enough never to volunteer, but at the same time, as sure as if I’d been shown a picture postcard with my face on it, I knew I’d be there.

  ‘There’ll be two days’ training,’ said Frederick. ‘It’s a tricky piece of work.’

  ‘Just to get a prisoner?’

  ‘It’s a bit more ambitious than that.’

  Two more days behind the line, in a cushy billet. Most trench raids, you were picked a few hours before, when you were already up the line. I wondered what was so special about this one. Two days’ training. That must mean that we were more than usually likely to get our heads blown off. And then I thought: Why not? My death was waiting for me somewhere. Maybe not yet, maybe not here. I was careful, or as careful as I could be, but that made no difference. I didn’t want to stir death up, by trying to outwit it. That was the kind of logic I used to convince myself. But deeper than that, I knew that if Frederick was going on a night raid, then I was going too. The thought of the raiding party made my guts crawl, but I was used to that.

  ‘You never know, we could get a Blighty one before Soutines,’ I said.

  ‘Bugger Soutines,’ he said. ‘Are you on then, BB?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Wot Larks,’ he said.

  I was startled. But then I remembered one morning when we walked over the downs together, with shadows bulking at us out of the mist, and I told him about Pip and Magwitch, and he liked it so much I went on to tell him everything I could remember, about Joe and Pip in the chimney corner, and each of them biting a shape out of his bread and butter and holding it up to show the other, and Joe sending his message to Pip after Pip thought he was already more than half a gentleman: Wot Larks.

  Those days had vanished like smoke. But Frederick was real, even in the ghostly gloom of the garden. He was always more real than anyone. There he was, scrabbling at gravel in the dark with a stick, drawing lines and rubbing them away as if they were sums that wouldn’t come out right. Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain . . .

  I touched his arm, to bring him back from whatever dark place he’d gone. ‘All right, boy?’ I said.

  ‘All right? Christ!’ He shook off my hand. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I need a drink.’

  A man drank if he had the money for it. It was natural, given where we were. I thought of the red wine we’d taken from Mr Dennis’s cellar, spilled on the ground because we didn’t like the taste.

  ‘You go down that whisky bottle fast enough,’ I said.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean?’ He barged against me. I wasn’t expecting it and I went sprawling. The gravel would have been all right, but I struck the back of my head on an edging stone and bit my tongue so hard that a rush of salty blood filled my mouth. It tasted like iron filings. I rolled over, spat it out, retched, spat again. Frederick was down on the ground with me, trying to pull me up, asking me if I was all right and if I could see straight. It was too dark to see at all. His breath was in my face, hot and quick. His hands came around my face and held it.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  I grunted.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘when I heard your head crack on the stone like that, I thought I’d killed you.’ His hand slid around the back of my head, exploring it. ‘You’re bleeding.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I mumbled thickly, through the blood in my mouth. It hurt, but somehow I wanted to laugh. It was r
idiculous, the two of us. Me and Frederick, fighting in the middle of a war. And as well as wanting to laugh, I wanted his hands to stay there, holding me. I didn’t want him ever to move.

  ‘You old blowviator,’ said Frederick in relief, ‘I believe your head’s made of iron.’

  ‘Put a round into me, all you get’s a hole in the bullet.’

  We were laughing. He was hauling me up. We staggered together and I could smell the drink on him as well as on me. I felt drunker than I’d been all night. I don’t know what happened then except our faces must have got close. I tasted my own blood and then his mouth, his spit and the taste I seemed to know already because I knew the smell of him so well. Him, himself, as if we’d come out of the same womb. How good he tasted. We were no use on our own, either of us. If I was ever going to be myself, I needed him.

  We pulled apart and I tried to look at him, but he was all shadows.

  ‘You old fucking blowviator,’ he said. His hands dropped to my shoulders, and he shook me, lightly, as if to say: Here you are. I could hear him breathing. I wondered if my blood had got smeared on him somehow. We were already blood brothers, from long ago. We belonged to each other, I knew that now for sure.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ I said, God knows why. He’d be leading the raiding party, not me.

  There was a roaring from beyond the garden. It took me a moment to realise that it was my name they were calling.

  ‘Danny! Daaaannnnneeee!’

  It was time to get back to the others. They wouldn’t leave off calling until they found me, for fear I’d dropped down drunk somewhere and would end up put on a charge.

  ‘Danny! Daaaannnnny. You there, boy? DAAAANNNEEEE!’

  I didn’t have to say to Frederick: You wait here, I don’t want us to be seen coming out of here together. He drifted into the shadow under the wall, and I saw a spurt of flame as he lit a cigarette. I thought of it in his mouth as I went to the wooden door, passed through it, and made my way into the world outside.

  13

  It is seldom advisable to persevere in a minor enterprise if the enemy are found ready and prepared.

  YESTERDAY SEEMS A long way away. Today there’s a beautiful morning, with the sea so bright you can’t look at it straight. I eat my porridge and drink a mug of milk. I was late back last night and I felt ashamed when I heard the goat bleating her distress across the field, tethered as she was.

  I lay the morning’s eggs carefully with yesterday’s, ready to take to Enoch. One of the hens is bloody from a pecking, and I take her out of the run. Once the other hens start on her, they won’t leave off. I keep a small, separate run for any hen that shows signs of sickness, and I put her into it. At once she begins to run up and down, squawking, as if I’ve done her harm. After milking, I take up the goat’s post and tether her in a new spot. I decide to take some eggs to Felicia, choose four fine ones and lay them in straw in a brown paper bag. Let’s see if I can get them to Albert House without as much as a crack. Maybe, if that henpecked fowl can’t settle with the flock again, I’ll wring her neck. Felicia can have her for the pot.

  I know Felicia can go into the shops and order anything she has a mind to. She doesn’t need eggs from me. I suppose I like to do it. You get tired of looking out for yourself.

  I go the long way round, to avoid the town as much as I can. It’s the brightest, purest, sunniest morning imaginable. It reminds me of when I used to slam the house door shut behind me and run up the street on my way up to Mulla House, my boots striking on the cobbles. My mother had iron tips nailed to them, sole and heel, to make them last. I dashed them down, and they rang on the stones. I was earlier than the schoolchildren but not as early as the fishermen, who were gone already on the tide. I used to feel a flash of pride when a man nodded to me, ‘All right, my boy?’ knowing that I was off to work. All I had to carry was myself, since we were given dinner in the back kitchen. Maybe a cart would go past me and I’d get a ride.

  Felicia comes to the door. She looks preoccupied, not welcoming as I’d hoped and half expected. She has Jeannie by the hand, dressed in a little velvet coat and hat. Jeannie looks up at me with her finger in her mouth.

  ‘Oh, Daniel.’ Felicia shades her eyes against the light. ‘I was just on my way to church.’

  ‘Church?’

  ‘It’s Sunday, Dan.’ She expands, as women do when they want to put you off, with their tender way of explaining how the world works. ‘Surely you know it’s Sunday.’

  And sure enough, the bells are banging away, down on the quay. I hadn’t noticed until she spoke.

  ‘Do you always go to church?’

  She looks down. ‘Not as often as I should. I take Jeannie sometimes.’

  ‘Should? What do you mean? Why should you do anything you don’t want?’

  Jeannie sees a baby sowpig crawling over the threshold. She lets go of Felicia’s hand and crouches down to watch it. She puts her finger out and I’m afraid she’ll crush the little creature, but she doesn’t.

  ‘I do want to,’ says Felicia. ‘It’s good for Jeannie. She likes watching everybody, and it gives me time to think. It makes me – I feel nearer to Frederick.’

  ‘Nearer to Frederick? Because you run when the bells ring?’

  ‘I don’t run, I walk. I’m not a little girl now.’

  The bells rise to a clamour, and then they stop. Felicia doesn’t move.

  ‘One thing I do know,’ I say, jerking my thumb churchwards, ‘is that Frederick’s not down there.’

  She tugs on her gloves. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

  ‘I came to mend the furnace, but I suppose you won’t agree to it, given it’s Sunday.’

  ‘Oh! I’d forgotten. I’m sorry, Dan. I ought to have remembered.’

  ‘Yes, you ought,’ I say. ‘You can’t go forgetting things you’ve agreed with other people, not if you want to keep your friends.’

  ‘Are you my friend, Dan?’ she asks, soft and wheedling, and smiling a little too, as if she thinks it’s funny to be the Felicia who can speak to me like this.

  ‘That’s not up for discussion.’

  She laughs outright, a crow I haven’t heard out of her for ten years maybe, and then she strips off her gloves. Jeannie looks up at the sound of her mother laughing, and abandons the sowpig. ‘You’d better come inside,’ says Felicia. ‘Jeannie, come here. Let me take off your coat and hat, and you can play with your horse.’

  ‘Seeing as you’ve just damned your immortal soul, maybe you don’t need the furnace lit after all.’ And then I remember the eggs, and lift them out of my coat pocket tenderly, and give the bag to her. ‘New laid this morning,’ I say. She puts her fingers into the straw and strokes the shells.

  ‘They feel warm,’ she says. ‘Do you think they’d hatch, if I put them by the range?’

  ‘They’re for you to eat.’

  ‘I’ve got enough to eat.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you had.’

  ‘I’d like to keep chicks.’

  ‘They’re work, Felicia.’

  ‘I know that. But it would be nice to have them running about. Jeannie would like it. We haven’t even got a dog. I haven’t got a dog,’ she corrects herself.

  ‘You could get one.’

  ‘Of course I couldn’t. I don’t know where I’m going to be. You know I’m going to sell this house.’

  This chills me so much I’m silent. Felicia’s life alarms me. She camps in the house as if she’s been billeted there, not as if it’s her home. She might forget to eat. She’s thin and pale enough as it is. When she piles her hair up on her head like that, and puts a hat on top, she looks as if the weight of it will break her neck.

  ‘I saw girls with bobbed hair in London,’ I say. ‘Running for omnibuses.’

  Felicia makes herself busy with Jeannie, and doesn’t reply. I follow them into the house. Felicia takes off the little velvet coat and hat, and hangs them up carefully. I watch the bend and sway of her, and the li
ne of her body as she stretches up to the peg. It’s hard to believe this child ever came out of Felicia’s body. I turn my thought away quickly. Under the coat, Jeannie is wearing a red woollen dress with smocking. Felicia takes a pinafore off another peg, and buttons the child into it.

  ‘Now you can play,’ she says.

  ‘You should have a peg low down for her, so she can reach it. She’d soon learn to hang up her own things. I’ll put in a peg for you if you like,’ I say.

  Jeannie’s horse is a battered plush horse’s head on a pole, with a mane of real horsehair. I remember Felicia riding it. Jeannie is too young for that, but she sits on the floor with the horse’s head in her lap, and croons to it.

  ‘She loves that horse,’ says Felicia. ‘She takes it into bed with her.’

  ‘Can you leave her to play here, while we go down to the cellars?’

  Felicia laughs. ‘Of course I can’t. You don’t know much about children, do you, Dan? I’m with her every hour of the day, unless Dolly has her. But I went down early to fetch her home, because I didn’t want Dolly taking her to chapel. Jeannie’d be frightened if I went down to the cellar and left her. I can carry her. It’ll be an adventure for her.’

  ‘I’ll carry her, if you like.’

  ‘You can try.’

  I can see Felicia doesn’t expect the child to come to me. I pick her up, and she’s stiff in my arms at first, resisting, her face turned away. I’m afraid she’ll cry, so I gentle her as if she’s a pony we’ve stolen out of a field.

  ‘You’ll come down with me, won’t you, Jeannie? Your mother’s going to hold the light and we’re going to follow after her. You’ll be able to see her all the while.’

  After a minute, I feel her body yield and curl into my shoulder. Felicia’s looking at me, her face softened.

  She leads me back to the cellar steps. I duck down, shielding Jeannie’s head against the low doorway. This time Felicia has brought two lanterns, in spite of the brightness of the day.