The Lie

by Helen Dunmore

  I can’t live with it. I’m still trapped in it, going round and round. I never believed the stuff they taught us about hell, the burning and the imps running around with pitchforks. All that ran straight off me. But one year there was a Revival with a preacher in a field on the edge of the town. I didn’t mean to go. We weren’t even chapel. I didn’t mean to listen, and as long as he was roaring out, I didn’t. But then he dropped his voice and made it thrilling and silky, and began to talk to us about what hell really was. You’ve all had a nightmare, he said, and you’ve struggled out of sleep and you’ve nearly cried with thankfulness that it was only a nightmare. There’s your bed, and the chair beside it with your clothes on it. Soon you’ll see dawn coming through the window. It was only a nightmare, and it’s over. But in hell that nightmare goes on and on. You never wake up from it. Sometimes you think you’re going to, but you never, ever do.

  It was about the simplest sermon I ever heard, and I never forgot it.

  You reach out to touch all the familiar things: the blanket, the candle-holder on a box by the bed. But there’s nothing there. No box, no blanket. Just thick emptiness that crowds into your lungs and sucks your breath out of you. You slap about with your hands, trying to find something to hold on to, but there’s nothing. I left Frederick lying there and when I came back there was nothing. How can I tell Felicia that? When we came back from France the ship was overladen. She lay low in the water but it didn’t matter. There was no wind, and the dirty grey sea was calm. We slunk over the Channel, going slow. Someone raised a cheer when we saw the cliffs. We’d laughed on our way out for the first time, and mucked about with orange peel. There wasn’t any of that now.

  I turn so that my face is in Felicia’s hair. It smells of her, her body. And something else, a familiar scent that catches at me. I can’t make out what it is. I breathe again, tasting the Felicia smell and then something else. Rosemary. That’s why I knew it. My mother always steeped rosemary in a jug of hot water, and used it to rinse her hair. Felicia must do the same. I used to lie in bed and watch my mother, when I was little. She let me sleep in with her then. She would lean over the washstand, lift the jug, and pour a long stream of water over her bent head. Her hair would be swept forward, so that the water flowed and parted over her neck. I see, as clearly as I see the water flowing, that I should have died with Frederick.

  ‘I ought to have stayed with him.’

  ‘No,’ says Felicia.

  ‘You don’t know how it was.’

  Water runs down the nape of a white neck. Frederick says: I remember everything.

  ‘He’d want you to be alive,’ says Felicia. I feel the words go past my ear on her breath. I want so much to believe them, and yet inside me there’s the part that’s gone, seared, done for. I wish her words could touch that place.

  ‘Move your head a little: that’s right,’ she says. ‘Rest there.’ She takes a sharp, sighing breath. I feel her hesitation. ‘You think I don’t understand. Perhaps I don’t. Perhaps I can’t. But all the same, we’re alike. We don’t want anyone else, now that they’ve gone.’

  ‘You’ve got Jeannie.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘It’s enough,’ I say. I’m not envious. I’m glad for Felicia, that she has something to hold her.

  I feel a shiver go through her.

  ‘Think of that woman downstairs,’ she says, ‘making all those baby clothes, when there isn’t going to be a baby.’

  ‘You should think of something else.’

  ‘What?’

  I lie still, and let my mind float. ‘The cove,’ I say. ‘Us swimming there. I remember one day a seal came right up to Frederick. They’re big creatures, up close. Powerful, too. They’re in their element, and you’re not. But he was only playful, wanting us to swim with him. I suppose we must have stayed in the water too long. We could barely put on our clothes by the time we came out, we were so cold. I can see Frederick now, hopping about to get warm. The seal was still there, lolloping in the shallows. He was waiting for us to come back in and play.’

  ‘I can just see him,’ says Felicia.

  I can too. The whiskers and the glisten of him as he turns on the rise of a wave. But then, as quick as it has come to me, the water changes. I can’t see through it any more. The waves slow to a crawl, thick as mud. It’s a dark tide, eating up the sand, full of things that creep and struggle and clag. They push up through the slime and then they sink again and all the time the mud is moving, swallowing— If it touches me, I’m done for.

  ‘Felicia!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  I can’t do more than whisper it. ‘Hold me.’

  ‘I’ve got you. It’s all right, Daniel, I’ve got you.’

  ‘I can’t feel you.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened. I’ve got you.’

  After a while I begin to feel her. She’s hurting me with her grip. I’d never have thought her arms would have so much strength in them. I draw myself away from her, roll on my back and feel on the floor beside the bed for my packet of Woodbines. I strike a match, light a cigarette and draw in the smoke. The red tip glows in the darkness.

  ‘Could you give me one?’

  ‘No, Felicia, you’d never smoke a Woodbine.’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘It’d make you sick.’ She doesn’t insist. I smoke. The red tip dims and brightens. ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m not safe in my mind.’

  She doesn’t say anything. She raises her hand, takes my cigarette delicately between her fingers and lifts it to her own lips. She puffs in a bit of smoke, like an expert, and blows it away.

  ‘I used to steal Frederick’s cigarettes, sometimes. You never knew that, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll look after you, Dan.’

  She gives me back my cigarette. I finish smoking, get up, and throw the dog-end out of the window. It is cold and clear now. All the rain has been swept away. Above the barns there are stars knit across the sky. From behind me, Felicia says, ‘Maybe he’s still there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The seal, down at the cove. They can live for thirty years, you know. We might see him, one day.’ She’s silent for a while, and I follow her breathing until it breaks with another sigh. ‘I’m so tired, Daniel. Let’s try to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t think I can.’

  ‘Yes, you will. Come back to bed.’

  I lie down beside her, and close my eyes. Her fingers stroke my face, until I feel sleep coming at me like a wave out of a long smooth swell. Maybe she is a witch, as Frederick said. My blessed Felicia. As I go under I wish we could stay here for ever, not moving forward or backwards. Just the rainswept sky outside, the bed here, and never morning.

  20

  Confusion is apt to occur in any assault.

  SERGEANT MORRIS POURS out the rum ration religiously while the box barrage blows our ears off. One by one we take the shell protector and toss back the rum. Reach out, tip back, hand back again. Everyone does it. We’re all blacked up and in our balaclavas. The noise of the barrage rips through every fibre of us.

  One minute Sergeant Morris’s hand, as steady as you like. The next we’re on our bellies in the mud, crawling forward. I’d lost faith in the raid before we were ten yards beyond our wire. You might say that’s hindsight, but it wasn’t. Our wire had a way cut through it, and we’d brought our own wire-cutters for the German wire, not trusting to what we were told would have happened. Ahead I saw the outline that I knew was Frederick. He was counting the men through.

  No-man’s-land was as big as Africa, once you were in it. We knew that it was two hundred and fifty yards wide here, and how we had to cross it. We knew where the biggest shell-holes were. There’d be water in the bottom, but there was no deep, drowning mud in our sector. The ground heaved and rippled ahead of me. It was men moving, humping their way forward on their bellies. Frederick was in front, I do know that. Sergeant Morris was beside me, coming up to Coops, who
was ahead of me on my left. Coops was one of the grenadiers. Sergeant Morris said something into his ear. Coops wriggled sideways and I did too, because I was meant to be following him. Sergeant Morris fell back. After the barrage it was so quiet my ears rang with it. According to the plan we’d crawl four hundred yards parallel to the German wire, to where the barrage ought to have cut it. There’d be a listening post there, forward of our front line, and we’d get a signal.

  I’m not telling this right.

  Start again. What went wrong, I learned afterwards, was our intelligence. That is, Fritz wasn’t quietly waiting for our trench raid. There was no one in the trench we’d targeted. We’d been doing too many trench raids, signalled by too many box barrages, and they were sick of being brained by knobkerries, blown up by Mills bombs or taken prisoner. They wanted to put a stop to it, for a while anyway. At the first sign of our box barrage, the occupants of the nearest German trench fell back through their communications trenches.

  We came on. This was the plan that had been taped out for us on the training ground. The earth clung to us, stinking of cordite and gas.

  The flare went up just as we were going through the German wire. I remember being relieved that our barrage had cut it, more or less. Maybe the raid was going to be all right. I thought that, just as the flash came and we were sheathed in its light. They couldn’t have caught us at a better place, crawling through the wire. All they had to do was get the range, which they quickly did. I threw myself down but the earth kicked under me like a horse, trying to throw me off. When I came to I was rolled up in a ball, choking out grit. I spat and ground my eyes with my fists because the earth had blown into them. I thought I’d been thrown a hundred yards. I didn’t even know that it was a German shell.

  It was Sergeant Morris who told me all this, the next day, or maybe it was the day after. His mouth sawed in his long face as he talked about machine-gun fire, and Minnies. He wanted it to sound as if what had happened was made from pieces that he could fit together, not the chaos it had been. My hearing was still bad. I watched him but I didn’t say much. I was afraid of him. I ought to have been glad to see him, but I couldn’t stand it. All he had was a minor wound to his right thumb.

  The only thing that went wrong, from Fritz’s point of view, was that our answering artillery fire did succeed in pinning them down, and so they couldn’t counter-attack. It didn’t matter. They knew that if any of us were still alive, they could mop us up.

  I think that’s what happened, but I can’t be sure. The flare went up and there was all that light where there should have been darkness. I unrolled myself but I still didn’t know what was happening. I swayed there on hands and knees, like a dog that doesn’t know which way to go, looking for where Frederick had been. I was meant to be following Coops, but he’d disappeared. The earth under my hands felt like plough. I was in my own world with no one to say what was happening. I didn’t dare crawl any more: I went on like a worm, while the air was eaten up by the sound of crackling, like a furze fire above my head spurting and bursting out flame.

  When I found Frederick it was his foot I felt first. It was a boot: his left boot on his uninjured leg. I patted it all over, not knowing what it was. Then I felt his leg and I moved up him, patting every inch, not sure if it was a dead man or a living one. He was lying on his stomach with his face turned to the side, or else he’d have choked. I crawled up alongside him, patting and whimpering, like a dog, feeling him all over to find out where he was hurt. There was a warm wet mess on his right leg. I could feel that blood was coming out of it, but it wasn’t the fast pumping that kills a man in minutes. The mess was warm with blood but his hands were icy cold. I lay down and held him close, as close as I could. By then I knew it was him. I had to keep him low and get him into shelter. I was saying his name over and over and cursing but he didn’t answer. Even so I was sure he was alive, and sure enough, when I tried to turn him a groan came out of him, right down in his belly where the sound will come even from an unconscious man.

  Another flare went up and I lay as still as death, but I’d seen a crater only about ten feet away to my left, on lower ground. That was where we had to go. Suddenly I understood that the crackling of furze above my head was machine-gun fire. I had to get him to the lower ground, then I could get him down into the shell-hole.

  It’s dawn now. I look at my watch: six o’clock. The household will be up. I ease myself out of the bed, as silently as I can, go to the window and pull back the curtain, just a little. I don’t want to wake Felicia before time. The yard is hidden by the bulge of the wall, but I hear the cattle lowing. A dog barks, and a churn clangs. Grey light clings to everything like mist. We’ve left the window open a little, and I catch the warm reek of the cows. The men will do the early work, then they’ll come in for their breakfast. We’ll wait until they’ve finished. I don’t want them fastening their eyes on Felicia, and speculating about her.

  I go back to the bed. Felicia sleeps, with her hair spread over the pillow. There’s a glaze of dried spit at the side of her mouth. Her lips are parted, showing the edges of her top teeth. I see Frederick in her, and then she stirs under my gaze. Her face changes, wakes, and Frederick disappears. She opens her eyes and sees me watching her. I think she’ll be confused, or even shocked, but she isn’t. She seems to have held in her mind everything that’s happened, even while she was asleep.

  ‘There you are,’ she says, and she smiles at me.

  21

  The other was a softer voice,

  As soft as honey-dew:

  Quoth he, ‘The man hath penance done,

  And penance more will do.’

  FELICIA DOESN’T COME back to Venton Awen with me. We part on the high road, and I lead the mare down to the farm, to no very warm welcome from Geoff Paddick. I explain that we were caught by the rainstorm, and had to shelter. We sheltered until the worst of the weather passed, and by then it was very late. I took Felicia straight home, and kept the mare with me overnight rather than disturb them at Venton Awen. This is the story that Felicia and I have agreed. As long as Dolly Quick didn’t wait up for her at Albert House, then no one will know that Felicia didn’t slip in late at night, and sleep at home. I don’t think Dolly will have gone up to the house, because she wouldn’t have wanted to leave the baby. She’ll have stayed at the cottage, waiting for Felicia, worrying, no doubt, but finding a good reason for her absence in the rain sluicing down and the rising wind. She believes I’m some kind of devil anyway, sent to lead Felicia on to the primrose way. It’s me she’ll blame.

  Felicia is at home now. There’s been no harm done. She trusted me enough to let me sleep beside her.

  Something’s over, but I don’t yet know what it is. We synchronised our watches, the night of the raid, according to the time given by Frederick. I couldn’t get beyond that time. Maybe now, time’s been given back to me: my time, I mean. I don’t know what to do with it yet. I’ll have to work at it, like a blind man trying to put sight into his fingers.

  After the wildness of the night, the day is still. The grey sky has thinned into blue, although the sea still heaves and surges, breaking white around the lighthouse. I’ve told Felicia that I will close up the cottage today, go over to Simonstown and sleep there, then catch the early train to London. She’ll send Josh up later, to take the goat and chickens to Venton Awen. She’ll persuade Geoff Paddick to give a good price for them.

  I’ve agreed to take a hundred pounds from Felicia. Enough to travel to London, and live there until I can find work. She was as pleased as she was the day we let her into the wigwam with us. Felicia says she’ll go to the bank this morning, as soon as it opens, and she’ll come up later with the money. I’ve never seen a hundred pounds together in one place. I wonder if it’ll be gold, or paper money.

  The breeze floats around me, as if to say: Look how gentle I am. How can you think that I ever made a storm? But I don’t believe a word of it. I can hear the sea pounding in under the cliffs. />
  Even though I’m leaving, I take my hoe and go up to the vegetable garden. Weeds are pushing up already, with the mild weather. The earth is soft with rain, and easy to hoe. I bend my back to it and work steadily. Sparrows come out of the furze in a cloud and peck over the soil. I have the feeling I get sometimes when I’m working, as if I’m balanced on the rim of the earth and can feel it turning under me. I know I’m not going to eat these crops and yet I still don’t believe it. I thought I’d never go to London again. I thought that was all over. Felicia says she’ll come. She’ll take rooms for herself and Jeannie, and spend a week or two, once I’m settled. There’s so much she wants to see.

  There we differ. There’s almost nothing I want to see, except these fields. Even then, it’s not a warm feeling. I’m like the boy in the story, who had a splinter of ice in his heart. Felicia loved that story. She thought of herself as Gerda, going to the rescue of her brother Kay, pitting herself against the Snow Queen. I read all those coloured fairy-tale books Felicia had. I read anything.

  I straighten my back, and turn. There’s the lighthouse, and a line of white farther out, where the swell hits the reef. The grey roofs of the town. I haven’t even asked who’s living in our cottage now. I drop my hoe, and tread along the strip of turf I’ve left between the squares of my vegetable plots. I go up to the farthest part of Mary Pascoe’s land, where she lies. The bright green ground betrays her. Maybe I should plant something here. A rose, maybe, a yellow one like my mother’s. The granite boulder I rolled to her grave to mark it looks like an accident. I can’t imagine what it’s like, to be inside the earth as she is. We only talked about Blighty ones, not the dread of death that jabbered inside our living bodies. But death came to her slow. I should think that if death seeds itself inside a person bit by bit over the years, it grows more familiar.