Zennor in Darkness Read online

  ‘My eye!’ he exclaims gratifyingly; then, ‘That’s Hannah’s skirt you’ve got on.’

  ‘I know. She’s lent it to me for the concert. Do you like it?’

  She can’t resist twirling, even for Kitchie. If only she could cut out patterns like Hannah! – or pay to have someone like Hannah cut out for her.

  ‘Where’s Uncle Francis?’ asks Kitchie through a mouthful of gooseberry tart. ‘This tart Nan’s?’

  ‘Mine’s as good and you know it. Father was in church – I don’t know where he went. He’s not coming to the concert.’

  ‘Well, he never does, does he?’

  Sensing criticism, Clare says quickly, ‘He always sends in money to the Red Cross. He doesn’t like the crowds.’

  ‘Oh, no, it wouldn’t suit Uncle Francis,’ agrees Kitchie tolerantly. ‘You got any more of this tart, Clarey?’

  She goes over to cut him another slice, but at that moment Francis Coyne’s clock strikes the three quarters. Clare snatches Kitchie’s plate from under him, makes a dive to brush off his crumbs with the tea-cloth, and chivvies him out of his chair.

  ‘Come on, Kitchie! There’s no time for that now. Here, I’ll wrap it in a bit of paper and you can put it in your pocket.’

  But he’s aggrieved. He’s a young man in his best, off to a concert, not a kid with his pockets full of sweet-stuff.

  ‘And I never had my tea,’ he grumbles, moving towards the door reluctantly. ‘What’s the rush? It’s only a concert.’

  ‘I know, I know! Never mind the plate, Kitchie – I’ve just got to –’ and she flurries to the back door. She’ll pick a flower. But which? Not a marigold. Hannah’d never forgive her.

  ‘You ought to of asked Nan for one of her roses.’

  He’s watching her fly about, noticing the colour rise in her cheeks again.

  ‘Go on, Kitchie!’

  The door slams.

  Ten

  The woman is bent over, sobbing, shaking out sparks of tears and rage. The solidly beautiful golden flesh of her shoulders is chased over by cloud shadows through the bedroom window. Her face is broad, wet and furious. Her hair spills down in a rough bright rope, over her collar-bone and her breasts.

  ‘And as for you, Lorenzo – ha! I spit on you, you and your dirty little games, your fools of farmers. Just because they will listen to you and think you are God Almighty you run to them every day and leave me here alone. I am nothing! I am the Hunwife! Leave her, she is stupid, she will not understand. Go to Gurnard’s Head to your Heseltines, your Grays, go down to the farm to talk with your William Henrys. I am only your wife! See if I will weep for you!’

  Tears splatter across her face as she feels with a sure hand for a painted Italian plate on her dressing-table, swipes it up and sends it singing through the air at her husband’s head. He steps sideways and the plate thuds against the wall and breaks. But for once he won’t take up the challenge. They are both so tired, and he is beginning to realize how much confidence it takes to fight as they have fought.

  ‘Nu, Frieda,’ he begins quietly, watchfully.

  ‘They are all spying on me!’ she screams out. ‘This hateful spying everywhere. Because I am a German they must hide in ditches and under our windows to hear what I am saying. Fools, nothing but fools. We should laugh in their faces.’

  ‘We should do no such thing. You know that. We should lie as still as hares in the field, and let them forget us.’

  ‘Ha! That is fine from you, you who go around telling the farm-people the war is evil and that they are going down the slope to Hell. Tell me you don’t talk to William Henry and Stanley about the war! I have heard you. And you dare to tell me that I must be silent.’

  He frowns. She is right, and yet not right. Things are shifting so fast now, and so dangerously. The immense apparatus of censorship and surveillance is not new-born and timid any more; it flexes its muscles and looks about it for new opportunities. Three years ago we had freedom, such freedom that we did not even know we had it, and now it is gone.

  He has seen which way the wind is blowing now, how hard it is and how cold. He no longer hopes to sway, to convince, to stand in the shallows and hold back the tide of the war. He is holding tightly, light-footedly now, clinging on to the rocks while the war lashes at his feet, hungry to tear him away and smash him to pulp. The militarism he has spoken against and written against for three years is now as powerful as he foresaw it would become. It can swat him, humiliate him, destroy him. It can force him on to a train to the barracks at Bodmin, it can strip him naked and part his buttocks to stare up his anus as part of a ‘medical examination’. It can jeer at him. It can open his letters and question his friends. It can treat his wife as a creature less than human, to be watched and judged. It can talk over his head, civilly, smoothly, so that his writing is stoppered and even his friends feel entitled to juggle opinions about him.

  He is extreme. He is half mad. He is doing himself no good, and he makes enemies everywhere. If only he would keep quiet. Who is he to preach and lecture to us? Can’t he understand how people take it? You would think he’d be more careful; after all, he has a German wife. That’s the root of it. Frieda has changed him. She is ruining him. All that brilliance – do you remember? Now she has crammed him full of her German ideas, this semi-mystical philosophical rubbish which no one wants to read. And how charming he used to be. It is the fault of that German woman…

  ‘We must keep ourselves apart, in our souls,’ he says, frowning, disliking the words even as they come out of his mouth. There are too many words. He has spoken too many, written too many. Just now, just this summer, he has had enough of words. He prefers to walk down to the farm and help with the hay harvest, and collect eggs, and eat fried potatoes with the Hockings in the farm kitchen, and teach Stanley French. It reminds him of his days up at The Haggs, years ago when he was a boy, teaching Jessie French, peeling a basketful of pickling onions for Mrs Chambers and going up with the men to work in the hay-fields at Greasley.

  The war wants to crush him, he knows that. And he knows now that he can be crushed as easily as a snail is battered to bits by a thrush which does not even want to eat it. He is no good to the war. Any military doctor can tell it at a glance. He is white, and thin, and when they listen to his lungs they can hear the harsh noise of his breathing. He has had pleurisy twice, and double pneumonia, but he can manage his body if he is left alone. It is serviceable to him. He cannot bear the way they look him up and down, these doctors, sneering and dismissing him. They would like to play with him like cats with a mouse. They would like to pass him ‘Fit for Non-military Duties’, so that they would have him to play with until he was broken. They want to force him to clean out latrines. He must be cleverer then they are, he must be still and watchful and keep out of their snares. He will be as wise as a serpent, as silent as an adder. He will write careful letters to his friends. And he will cry out against Frieda if she dances in the wind with her scarf flying above her like a banner. She dances for pure joy, but the war does not recognize that kind of dancing. It knows that she’s twirling her scarf in a prearranged signal to the U-boats lying out offshore, waiting. And how shocked she is when he shouts at her for a fool, because, for all her passionate antagonism to the coldly watchful times in which she finds herself, Frieda does not yet realize how much she is hated. They would be glad to knock her over the cliff, and him too, if they could get away with it. But they do not quite dare; not yet.

  He has a quick, bright vision of his vegetable patch. His onions are already swelling on the surface of the soil, strongly fattening themselves, half secret and half exposed. Water drains away quickly here, and the ground is dry. His hoe scratches between the onion rows and lettuces. Perhaps they’ll have rain soon. The bare, blowing slopes between Higher Tregerthen and the sea are enough for him now. He will go no farther. Besides, the return fare to London is three pounds, ten shillings – money they haven’t got. They have their cottage, where they can live chea
ply. They have even bought a cottage piano, as well as their rosewood table and the chairs he has mended and painted.

  Why isn’t it enough for Frieda? A year ago he would have chased her around the kitchen-table and given as good as he had got for the throwing of that plate, but now he hasn’t the heart for it. Besides, she is very strong. A powerful woman, Frieda von Richthofen, he thinks, looking at her admiringly, ruefully. A woman who would crack a plate across your head when your back was turned. And indeed has done so.

  She is not crying any more. She gets up wearily, pads to the window, stares down.

  ‘Why can’t they leave us alone here?’ she asks. ‘We need so little. Just this house. Why can’t they let us have our home in peace?’

  But it’s not enough any more to have few wants and try to hide away from the war in the hollow of an empty landscape. There aren’t any empty landscapes, though you think there are when you first arrive, full of pure naïvety and hope. It won’t work. Ordinary things are dangerous. They must not show a light, they must not tar their chimney, they must not have curtains of different colours hanging in the same window, they must not sing German folk songs on Christmas Eve in the tower with the Hockings. They must not try out Hebridean lullabies in case the outlandish sounds are taken for coded German. A block of salt in a bag may be a spy’s camera. Oh, it’s not the civil police – they are decent enough men. They don’t like what they are doing. They aren’t yet in the habit of believing that a man’s life is not his own affair. It is the military police, tumbling over themselves to produce reports, to magnify gossip, to lurk shamelessly under windows and garden walls. They are ridiculous, really, but they don’t care that they are ridiculous. They are only doing their job, and their job has to be done.

  Yes, it’s the military police, thinks Frieda. Never would she have believed it possible, but now she has seen it with her own eyes. She should laugh in their faces with derision, but by now even Lorenzo has realized that this is dangerous. But her anger comes up – she cannot help herself. They are opening letters from her mother in Germany, she knows it, and letters from Nusch. And there’s the way even the decent people look at you now, so that she scarcely ever goes into the town any more. The Cornish people are still human, still individuals, but the war is winning. People don’t meet her eyes, or they go past with an embarrassed, regretful half-nod. They have read about Hunwives in the newspapers, and how they must be on their guard.

  Shame it has to be like this.

  We didn’t want it, you know.

  But still. While there’s the war on…

  This isn’t the right place for you.

  And the others, the ones who hate nakedly. Poison seeps out of their eyes as they watch Frieda lugging her shopping up the long, lonely road to the cottage.

  Big bag she’s got there.

  Makes you wonder what she’s got in it.

  It does.

  They ought to do something about it. It’s not right.

  They are foreigners twice over, he with his red beard, she with her red stockings. There she goes with her loud voice, unashamedly German, with her big scandalous body vivid with life when so many good men have died.

  Letters, she gets.

  And sends them.

  We know.

  Who is not for me, is against me. Who does not love the war, will lose it.

  He sighs. He cannot fight with Frieda now. The vigour of it’s gone, and they are unsafe and exposed enough as it is.

  ‘Put your shawl on, Frieda, and come out for a walk.’

  ‘I suppose you have hidden away my white scarf,’ she says bitterly.

  He watches her as she twists up her hair again. She never looks in the mirror save for one confident narrowing of the eyes when she is finished. Her hands seem incapable of making a wrong move. Her body cannot be awkward. Now she ducks her head round and looks at him, her face bathed in sudden radiance. ‘It looks nice, I think, my new blouse?’

  They walk up the lane side by side. They will walk into Zennor, proudly, her blouse glowing. Frieda walks quickly because, although she is not angry any more, there is still anger in her body. They link arms and he feels the pace and heat of her movements, and knows why she is walking so fast. No matter how furious she makes him, he loves her perfect physical honesty. If she is angry she spits and throws things. If she is happy she runs and dances. If she is sad her whole body is heavy with it. She does not lie or cover things up. He has never met another woman like her.

  The lane turns and they see William Henry sauntering down from the high road, bare-headed, the collie bitch at his heels. He walks slowly towards them, nods to Frieda. The bitch growls but a sharp word silences her.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Lawrence. Shall you come down to see us tonight?’ he asks, turning to Lawrence, who hesitates before he answers,

  ‘I have some new music from London – you know, Frieda, the songs Dollie Radford sent. Perhaps Stanley would like to learn them? I’ll bring them down and show them to you after supper.’

  ‘Will you come, Mrs Lawrence?’ asks William Henry.

  His eyes are so dark that they are quite unreadable. Lawrence is right, there is something uncanny about him, as if he scarcely belongs to this century at all. Once, in a rare moment of expansiveness with Frieda, he told her that his fields were still the same shape as they had been in Celtic times, when the Celtic farmers had cleared the ground and made granite hedges of the boulders. He spoke as if those farmers were as close to him as his own grandparents, as if he could turn and see the shadows of them working his fields.

  ‘Thank you, not tonight,’ she replies.

  No, he did not want her to come. He nods quickly at her refusal.

  ‘You been walking over to St Ives by the coast,’ he remarks to Lawrence. It is not a question.

  ‘Yesterday, you mean? No, not all the way. But I walked along the cliff-path.’

  ‘That’s what I heard. They say you met Miss Coyne – the Treveals’ Clare.’

  Lawrence’s nostrils tighten. Frieda knows how such gossip annoys him, as much the sly satisfaction with which it is brought out as what is actually said.

  ‘I did. We spoke about painting. We hope she will come here and meet Frieda.’

  ‘Oh. Yess,’ says William Henry, drawing out the long soft Cornish s. ‘That’ud be the way of it. I made sure it’ud be something like that. But you know how folks are here in Zennor. They’d say she didn’t belong to be roaming off by herself, since she’s half a lady.’

  ‘Can’t a girl do something as harmless as go for a walk without people watching and tattling about her?’ bursts out Frieda in disgust and quick sympathy with Clare.

  ‘Oh, she can,’ says William Henry, watching Frieda. ‘She can do what she like. But folks’ll talk, for she’s Francis Coyne’s daughter.’

  Frieda shrugs. ‘Well, I’m sure we shall take no notice of what they say,’ she remarks with an hauteur which goes straight back to the court of Kaiser Wilhelm.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ says Lawrence. ‘If we want our walk, we must go on now.’

  They say goodbye to William Henry, and he lounges off down the lane towards the farm, the dog pattering behind him.

  ‘What foul gossip,’ says Frieda.

  ‘William Henry is my friend,’ remarks Lawrence. ‘So you can imagine what the rest of ’em are saying. It was good of him to warn us.’

  Frieda gives a slight, impatient toss of her head, and walks on. After a while she asks, ‘Is your Clare like the Hockings?’ He glances sideways at the word ‘your’, but there is no weight behind it. She is offended by William Henry and the whole population of Zennor and St Ives, not by Clare or Lawrence.

  ‘Why, she’s not my Clare! You know that. I hope she’ll be yours, really. She’s so quick and bright, yet I’m sure she’s never met a woman who thinks for herself. She knows scarcely any educated people. You could show her so much.’

  A breath of Frieda’s pioneer spirit stirs in her at the though
t of a girl who is gifted and eager and new to everything. But a breath of suspicion counters it. Is he offering her Clare so that he can have William Henry? She brushes the thought away. I am tired, she thinks, and I am letting myself grow weak and afraid. I must not be afraid. We started from nothing and look, here we are, in this place which can be more beautiful than anywhere in the world when it wants. We have our little house, and I am not ill any more. And Lorenzo says the sea-air is making him stronger. We will not have another winter such as we had last year. Let this Clare come and see what we have.

  Eleven

  Clare sees John William coming along on the other side of the road from where she stands tucked right in at one side of her window, with her hand on the curtain to twitch it over if he looks up. How strangely he walks. This is not John William, who walks with easy grace and never seems to hurry. This is someone holding himself painfully upright against a storm. Yet the evening is perfectly still. He comes closer, and she sees him glance up at the house. Suddenly her blouse feels dreary and everyday. But there’s no time to do anything about it, so she hoists in her belt another notch, ducks down to the mirror which plays back leaping lozenges of light and tells her nothing, then skims across her room, across the landing, and down the worn stair-carpet to wait by the newel-post, her heart thumping. She isn’t going to be caught just inside the front door, where he can see her through the stained glass. But what if he goes round the back? No, he won’t. Even when he was the grocer’s errand boy, bringing up her pound and a half of lentils and yellow soap, he was too proud ever to go round the back entry. And here he is, fine and soft and clean in his uniform. She’s flustered at the suddenness of him and the way he fills up the hall.