The Lie Read online

  ‘I haven’t been into the town, except to take away my mother’s things,’ I tell her.

  There wasn’t much to take. When my mother died I wrote to the neighbours who had looked after her and told them to have whatever they wanted, apart from a few things that I named. I couldn’t come home for her funeral. All leave was stopped, even compassionate leave. I felt sick when I counted the money my mother had saved out of my army pay, and saw how she had pinched herself for my sake. I had an impulse to throw the money over the wall into the lane for whoever would take it, but of course I didn’t. I counted it again, carefully, reckoning up how many days it would give me, added to what I had left of my final pay, the clothing allowance and the pound from my greatcoat.

  ‘You haven’t been back,’ says Felicia. Her face is hollowed almost into ugliness. She’s much thinner than I remember. As her lips move I see they are dry and chapped. She glances at the cottage door.

  ‘Mary’s ill,’ I say quickly. ‘She’s sleeping.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘She had— She’s had a cough all winter, with fever. She’s very weak. She hardly gets out of bed.’

  ‘She needs someone to take care of her,’ says Felicia, with the old Dennis decision.

  ‘I am taking care of her.’

  Felicia looks me in the face, to see if this is true, and what she sees appears to satisfy her. ‘But you’ll come and tell me if she gets any worse, won’t you, Daniel? I can find a nurse for her. Do you think she’d like me to come in for a minute now?’ She’s eager to help, even flushing a little.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I’m reckoning back. It’s three years since I last saw Felicia, the day before I travelled up to Bodmin Barracks. Frederick had already gone, but I don’t think she believed in his departure, not properly. She talked about the parcels she was going to order for him from the Army & Navy Stores. ‘They send them out, you know,’ and I told her he’d be in England for a while yet, training. She was like a child, round-faced and with her hair in a tangle down her back. She didn’t look at me straight, just kept talking and talking in a way that made me realise that she was frightened of silence. It must have been very quiet in Albert House, without Frederick.

  She’ll be nineteen now. You’d never mistake this woman for a child. She’s not the Felicia we teased and ran away from and picked up when she tumbled on the paths. How she used to bawl. And then the storm was over, shaken out of her, and she was running about again. I see her as clear as if she was in front of me now: Felicia cross-legged in her pinafore, very slowly easing up a scab from her knee to show the new pink shiny skin. Her quick triumphant up-glance. I felt it as if it was my own knee, and the brown crust of the scab was mine to chew.

  Frederick and I were blood brothers. We did it with words from The Jungle Book, using his seven-bladed knife. We be of one blood, thou and I. No one else knew about it. Frederick called me BB, and that was our password.

  ‘You heard about Jeannie,’ says Felicia.

  ‘Yes.’

  Three months after Frederick and I left her, Felicia married Harry Fearne, the brother of her schoolfriend Eliza. Not that I knew him, or any of the Fearnes, except by name. My mother wrote to tell me the news, while we were still in Boxall Camp. No one knew there was anything between them, she said, until the engagement was put in the paper. The Dennises weren’t best pleased, especially Mr Dennis. But perhaps I’d known? I hadn’t. I sat hunched over the letter, hiding it with my body. It shocked me to the core, and I didn’t know why. It was as if Felicia had stolen something away from me.

  ‘You all right, Danny? Not bad news now, is it?’ Mitch squatted on his haunches opposite me, fished two Woodbines out of his breast pocket and passed one to me. I lit it from the proffered match and sucked in the smoke.

  ‘It’s a girl at home. She’s getting married.’

  Mitch smoked for a while, then said, ‘She’s not worth your time thinking about. Let her get on with it. You’ll be all right, Danny. Take it from me, there’s plenty of girls’ll be falling over themselves.’

  I nodded. I couldn’t trust myself to speak, or explain that he’d got it wrong. Mitch was eight years older than me, and a married man. He didn’t ask any more. Carefully, he extinguished the half-smoked Woodbine and put it back in his pocket. ‘Well, this won’t buy the baby a new bonnet,’ he said, and was on his way.

  Felicia was sixteen then, and seventeen when Harry was killed, a month before Frederick. By the time Jeannie was born, just before Christmas, she would have turned eighteen.

  ‘Jeannie’s fifteen months old now,’ says Felicia.

  ‘I’d like to see her.’

  ‘She’s not like us,’ says Felicia, catching my thought quickly and dashing it down. ‘She’s a Fearne all through. My parents-in-law wanted to bring her up.’

  ‘But you didn’t agree.’

  ‘Of course not. They think of me as a child, but I’m Jeannie’s mother and her home is with me. They can see her whenever they like,’ adds Felicia, with a steeliness I haven’t seen in her before.

  ‘And do they like?’

  ‘Of course they do. They spoil her. They wanted me to call her Harriet.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘Harry wouldn’t have wanted it either.’ She blinks rapidly, making herself look ugly for a second. ‘Do you know, Daniel, I can’t remember his face? I don’t dare tell them that. I don’t dare even think it, when I’m with them. I can’t make out his features. But everyone says Jeannie is like him.’

  ‘That’s lucky, then.’

  ‘My stepmother is having a child too,’ says Felicia. ‘They are hoping for a boy.’

  ‘They can’t be.’

  ‘They can. They are.’

  Mr Dennis is over fifty, his wife forty at least. They’ve been married for years. No one ever thought there’d be a child.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ I say. I’m sorry for Felicia, because she has to live with it. Old people cooing into cradles. Harry Fearne never as much as set eyes on his baby. They’ve taken that from him, along with everything else. Felicia smiles, for the first time. She has a wide mouth and I watch it curl, and then her lips open and I see her teeth, which are the same as ever.

  ‘That’s what I think,’ she says, ‘but no one else seems to. It’s a miracle, apparently.’

  A baby, a half-brother for Felicia, who will be younger than her own child. A child that they’ll call Frederick’s half-brother. He’ll grow up in Frederick’s place. The dead don’t even get a few feet of the town’s soil. We dug them graves and stuck in a wooden cross if we got the chance, then the graves were shelled and then we dug them again. If there was anything to put in the graves in the first place. If those graves had all been dug here in England, they’d have filled up so many fields the farmers might have put a stop to the war, out of pure self-interest.

  There were girls and young men everywhere in London, laughing in the streets. There weren’t any gaps in the crowds that I could see, in spite of all the dead. They were younger than us, and we’d thought we were young enough. They knew I wasn’t one of them. My kind were selling matches outside the theatres. These girls with their bobbed hair and silk stockings might drop in a penny and say, ‘Poor things.’

  They are hoping for a boy. Who’d have thought Mrs Dennis would have it in her? Maybe they’ll have more than one. A little Frederick, and then a little Felicia, and start all over again. With luck there won’t be a war this time. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. My anger cools on me like sweat. Why shouldn’t the Dennises have what they want? They always did.

  Felicia’s looking around, noticing the ground that I’ve cultivated and the shelter in the distance. That’s Felicia’s nature. She used to be always following me and Frederick when we were children, eager to know where we went and what we did. She knew how to discover things without asking questi
ons.

  ‘Tell Mary I was asking for her,’ she says. She guesses that I want her to leave. It’s not that I don’t want her here, it’s just that I’m not used to people. I’m tired, that’s what it is. But behind Felicia the sky is darkening, where she doesn’t see it. Soon there’ll be a squall. Felicia will be caught in the open.

  ‘You’d better take cover here for a while,’ I say to her. ‘There’s rain coming.’

  I lead her up to my shelter, by the fence. We’re on high enough ground here for her to see Mary Pascoe’s grave, but it’s only another patch of earth, with green already well advanced on it. The granite headstone looks like any other boulder that might be lodged in these little fields. Felicia gives no sign of noticing anything. The first hard spatter of rain hits us, mixed with hail. I lift the curtain of canvas from the shelter, and we sit in its doorway, protected, while rain rushes down so thick and white that the cottage vanishes. Felicia’s boots and the hem of her skirt are wet. I tell her to draw back further into the shelter. She’ll realise, if she looks closely, that I am not sleeping here, but she may take that as natural. If Mary Pascoe were as ill as all that, I wouldn’t sleep out of hearing.

  The thrash of rain on canvas and corrugated iron is so loud we have no need to make conversation. I am back in the earth, in the rain, waiting. Her profile, when I look sideways, is too familiar. In spite of the chill, I’m sweating, and I move slightly away, in case Felicia smells me and knows that I’m afraid. She sits very still, watching the curtain of rain as it moves around us. I clench my hands. I’m afraid that the pictures will come, but they don’t. The turned earth smells sweet and sharp, as if it wants to grow things. The stench of mud is absent. I look at the stalks of the alexanders that crowd up to the shelter. They grow so thick and rank that they half hide it. There’s a dusty flock of sparrows that lives in the blackthorn hedge, chattering from branch to branch. They’ll be deep in the hedge now, sheltering, dun and brown and bright-eyed. When the rain’s this thick, they don’t even cheep.

  ‘What’s that tune you’re whistling?’ asks Felicia.

  ‘It’s nothing. Just a habit.’

  I was brought up never to whistle at night. The fishermen would tan your hide if they heard you at it. But in France we had different superstitions.

  ‘It’s passing over,’ says Felicia. She clambers up awkwardly. Her skirt swings and I see her stout little well-made boots. I bet she doesn’t know how short the girls in London wear their skirts. I wait until she’s moved into the open, and then I follow her.

  ‘You must get back quickly, before it comes again. They’ll be wondering where you’re to.’

  ‘It’s all right. Dolly Quick has Jeannie.’

  ‘I meant your— Mr and Mrs Dennis.’

  ‘Oh no. They don’t live here any more. They’ve gone up to Truro,’ says Felicia.

  ‘I hadn’t heard that.’

  ‘My stepmother said that she wanted a fresh start, with the baby coming.’

  ‘But they haven’t sold Albert House?’

  ‘It’s not theirs to sell.’

  I wonder at this, but let it pass. ‘What about the books? Did he take the books?’

  ‘They left most of them. My father would have taken more, but she wanted things new.’

  I think about the books. I wanted them from the moment I first saw them. Yards and yards of books, in dark red livery, with gold names printed into the spines. Later, I understood that they were bound like that for the look of it, and that Mr Dennis had made a library by writing a cheque. There were all the novels of Charles Dickens, with dark and dazzling illustrations. There were Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Woman in White. How I wished I could draw, like Walter Hartright, and become a great man. Someone had read The Woman in White before me, because there were marks on the pages. Most of the books had never been opened. There was poetry: Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Mrs Hemans, Adelaide Anne Procter. There were the Complete Works of Shakespeare in seven tall handsome volumes, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. There was Lord Byron on a high shelf.

  Those were the books that I read like a wolf. I took them out of the house one by one, under my jersey, and devoured them on the beaches, or propped against the rocks at Giant’s Cap. I read at work, whenever I could. Anywhere that I wouldn’t be observed. Even Frederick didn’t know how many I took. Once, the book I was reading slipped over the edge of the rocky shelf where I perched, a hundred feet above the sea. It was Kidnapped, and I was David Balfour fleeing the Redcoats, lying up, watchful, hidden. The sun had made me sleepy. I must have nodded off without knowing it, and loosened my grip. The book went down, turning, and vanished into the sea. In my terror I almost threw myself after it. For weeks I waited in dread for Mr Dennis to notice its absence, and for roaring rage to descend on me, but no one said a word.

  I would read the dialogues aloud, throwing words into the wind. They held patterns and rhythms I had never heard before. I learned so easily that I could read a poem once and have it lodged in my mind for whenever I wanted it. Mr Dennis was no longer the owner of his books: I was. I would bring out their contents as I weeded long rows of carrots and onions, or wheeled horse-muck to spread around the roses. I changed my speech to match the sentences I read, although even to myself it sounded strange. I hoarded new words and brought them out like coins.

  Now there is only Felicia to read the books.

  ‘So you and Jeannie are on your own there,’ I say.

  ‘Mrs Quick comes in every day.’

  I think of Felicia living there with the child, in the square house with the floors my mother used to polish. When I was in France that house seemed as far away as the courts of heaven, that we used to sing about when we were children. And now it’s close, but I don’t want to go there. Just as I am thinking this, pushing Felicia far away from me so that I’m safe from everything to do with the Dennis family, she rounds on me.

  ‘No one speaks about Frederick!’ she cries out.

  When Felicia is out of sight, I go back into the cottage. It’s cold, but too early to light the fire. For the first time since I arrived, and Mary Pascoe let me stay here, I have no idea what to do with myself. There doesn’t seem to be any little job of work I could do. I could lie down, I’m tired enough, but I can’t do that in daytime. I stand in the middle of the room, and let my thoughts carry me. I don’t do that very often. I keep myself busy. But today, after seeing Felicia, my mind has new things to feed on. I stand there for a long time, with my head bowed and my thoughts coming and going. Maybe I’m not even quite awake. If I was a sentry, they’d shoot me. Sometimes when you’re on duty the longing for sleep comes over you so strong you’re sick with it. Your thoughts loll. The ground rocks and falls away, and then you catch yourself, sweating.

  There’s a shaft of light, with motes running up and down it. Little bit of dust, they are. And here I am too, Daniel Branwell. There’s no one in the world now who can stop me. I’m swinging, that’s what I am, swinging on the bell of sleep.

  Now I’m lying in Mary Pascoe’s bed, with my blanket wrapped around me. I listen to the shock and boom of the waves at the base of the cliffs. A while ago, I heard an owl hunting. They take voles. Some years there’s such a plague of voles that the owls multiply along with them.

  I could go out and walk down to the cliff edge, taking care not to stumble. This room wants to push me out, send me away. But I won’t let it. I’ve been outside too long already, hunkered down through winter.

  I see Frederick on the fire-step. He is about to order the stand-to. He looks back at me: at least, I think he looks back at me, but really he is looking back at us all, because he is responsible for us all. And there’s something in me, mutinous, that doesn’t want to respond. It won’t agree that he is responsible for me.

  Even as I’m thinking, I know that he is here. The blanket wraps me tight but I’m growing cold, and there’s the faintest whistling, the same that goes on all day long only I can cover it in the dayl
ight. We are the ones whistling. We’ve jerked and bumped for two hours from the sidings to where the railway track ends. They are not coaches, but trucks which usually transport animals. We sway this way and that, holding one another steady, jostled by our packs. We are going up the line. Everything is new to our eyes but we try not to show it. There is a dead horse, split and oozing, hauled to one side of the street so we can march past it. Someone behind me mutters, ‘Poor bugger.’ That shows how green we are. There are no people, only smashed buildings. The ground is smashed too, but the worst of the holes have been shovelled full of rubble. We move our eyes sideways, keeping our heads pointed forward. We pass a pile of empty ammunition boxes.

  Frederick stands at the foot of the bed. This time his back is turned to me. He is looking away from me, into a distance that I can’t see. There is the round shape of his head, his cap, his shoulders. He is higher up than he ought to be, if he were standing on the floor. He looks at the wall, or at least in the direction where the wall is. Words are skidding about inside me but I don’t make a sound. The air around me is thick, like water that will drown you if you try to breathe it in.

  5

  The disease known as ‘trench feet’ is caused by prolonged standing in cold water or mud and by the continual wearing of wet socks, boots and puttees. It is brought on much more rapidly when the blood circulation is interfered with by the use of tight boots, tight puttees, or the wearing of anything calculated to cause constriction of the lower limbs. It can be prevented by:-

  Improvements to trenches leading to dry standing and warmth.

  Regimental arrangements ensuring that the men’s feet and legs are well rubbed with whale oil or anti-frostbite grease before entering the trenches, and that, so far as is possible, men reach the trenches with dry boots, socks, trousers, and puttees.

  By taking every opportunity while in the trenches to have boots and socks taken off from time to time, the feet dried, well rubbed, and dry socks (of which each man should carry a pair) put on.