‘Maybe that’s what they always do.’
‘Do you think so? It seems a funny way of going about it to me. Jeannie screamed and screamed. She was all stretched out, flailing in the air. The doctor even slapped her, and she was only about this big – look!’ Felicia holds her hands apart. ‘As if he were punishing her for being born. When he’d gone, Dolly said, ‘You pop her in alongside you,’ and so I had her in with me all night. Poor little thing, she was cold, but after a while she grew warm. Every so often she’d give a shudder, as if she was remembering. I told her nothing like that was ever going to happen to her again. But maybe it was too late, and that’s why she’s like she is.’
I pick up a tiny, glistening pebble and spin it into the air. It goes down and down, catching the light, and vanishes almost without a sound. ‘Did you tell Harry about how it was?’ I ask her. I’m jealous of all those things that have happened to Felicia while I wasn’t there.
‘I didn’t want to write about it in a letter.’
She’d have told him, I suppose, when he came home. But he never came home, or knew what happened when his child was born.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I am. My jealousy falls away. Harry Fearne, one of the unlucky buggers who thought they’d begun something, when it was all finishing for them. But that doesn’t alter the fact that if he were here, I’d want to push him off the cliff.
The time glides on, and I let it, even though the sun is slipping down the sky, hazier than ever as the cloud gains on it. We ought to go back. The mare will be wanting her stable. The light in the cove is over-clear now, and the wind’s rising. Below us, the swell heaves.
‘Tide’s on the turn.’
‘Is it?’
‘Look at the rocks.’
We swam here many times, me and Frederick, when the tide was down. There was only ourselves in the whole bowl of the bay. We shrieked and splashed and then we grew quiet, floating on our backs, letting the cross-current drag us from one side of the bay to the other. When we turned over and floated on our bellies we saw our own shadows on the sand below, quivering so that we looked like strange, forked fish. The sand was rippled up, like corrugated iron.
‘Daniel, it’s starting to rain.’
Sure enough, the sky shakes a few drops out of itself, warning of downpours to come. We get up hastily, pack the bag and roll up the blanket.
‘It’ll hold off long enough for us to get to the farm. We can shelter there until it passes.’
The sky darkens as we hurry up the footpath and then the track. The cows are coming in, jostling into all the space there is. We can’t pass them, and have to stand while the herdsman gets them through the gate that leads to the dairy. It’s raining hard now. I hold the blanket over Felicia’s head, until the cows are through, leaving behind their churn of muck and mud.
When we knock at the kitchen door, a thin middle-aged woman with her hair scragged back opens it. She looks from one of us to the other, as Felicia explains and apologises and asks, all in one smooth breath and a voice no one could refuse. Even so I think the woman will be churlish, but no. She starts to excuse the mess, push things aside, sweep cats off chairs and get us to the table. You wouldn’t believe that her raw face could lighten so. I’ve only ever seen her in the distance before, when Frederick and I dodged round the farm gates, avoiding her. In a minute the big blackened kettle is on the range. All Mrs Thomas’s gestures are quick and nervous, as if she’s half afraid of herself. But I remember her as a big, solid woman, with sons who put the fear of God into us the day they caught us trying to get milk out of one of their cows.
She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t even seem to know Felicia, which surprises me. The Fearnes and the Dennises are known all over. I keep quiet and drink my tea, while Felicia talks to her. She lost her son, the younger one. She will just fetch his photograph from the parlour. Here he is, look, in his uniform. The likeness was taken the day before he went off, at Harbin’s. It’s very like, only a bit solemn, and he was never solemn. His brother was the quiet one, and more so now. They can go a whole evening without a word spoken, him and his father. There are bright spots of colour on Mrs Thomas’s cheeks now.
‘They don’t as much as notice the food that’s put in front of them,’ she says. ‘These apricots.’ She points to a box of dried apricots on the table, half covered by a sheet of newspaper. ‘They were giving these away. Do you like apricot jam?’
‘Very much,’ says Felicia.
‘And your husband, I’m sure, if you made it, would be glad of it.’ She glances at me for confirmation, and I wait for Felicia to explain, but she says nothing beyond ‘You’re always hungry, aren’t you, Daniel?’
‘That’s the way a man ought to be!’ exclaims the woman. ‘But I may as well tip these apricots on to the midden, for all the pleasure they’ll give to anyone.’
‘It is very annoying,’ sympathises Felicia.
A squall spatters against the windows, and the woman laughs a high, nervy laugh and says, ‘I should think you’d better stay here tonight.’
‘Oh no, we couldn’t do that. Your husband and your other son will be coming in shortly.’
‘They’ve gone to market. They’ll stay out as late as they like, on market night. Maybe they won’t come home at all,’ she says astonishingly, her eyes bright and wild. I wonder if she’s all there.
‘We’ll go on, as soon as the rain stops,’ says Felicia. ‘Our mare is in one of your fields, you know.’
‘A horse won’t die of a drop of rain. She can be brought in and stabled presently. I’ll send Sammy down. You’d do much better to stop here.’
She wants us here, I see that. She’s on fire with the idea of it. Now I see that all the sewing on the table is for baby clothes. Maybe her son is married, and has a child coming. Felicia picks up a little vest, and admires the stitching on it.
‘Is it for your grandchild?’
‘Oh no! Oh no! Nothing like that.’ The woman folds and smooths the cloth with anxious fingers. Felicia’s right, it is beautiful work. She must sit here stitching and stitching.
‘I’m worried about Jeannie,’ says Felicia quietly, when the woman gets up to attend to a pot that’s simmering on the range.
‘She’ll be all right. You said Dolly Quick often has her overnight.’
‘She does, but – they won’t know where I am. They’ll think something’s happened to me.’
‘They won’t think that. Listen to that rain: she’ll know you had to take shelter.’
She wants to believe me. My head is throbbing. The woman believes that we are man and wife. If we stay here, she’ll put us into a room together. And Felicia’s said nothing to contradict her.
19
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
‘DO YOU THINK
that this was her son’s room?’ Felicia puts the candle down on the washstand.
I look around. It’s a narrow bedroom, very clean. The walls are freshly distempered. ‘I shouldn’t think so. She’d leave his room as it was.’
‘I don’t know.’ Felicia moves nervously around the room. There’s an iron bed, a rag rug, a washstand with jug and ewer. A chamber pot under the bed. On the wall there’s an embroidered text:
And God saw every thing that He had made
And behold, it was very good.
‘He wasn’t looking very hard,’ I say.
Felicia is at the window, staring out at the darkness and driving rain.
‘We can’t go back in this,’ I say.
‘I know we can’t.’
‘She wanted us to stay.’
‘Poor woman, she’s half mad with loneliness.’
‘Maybe she’ll keep us here.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘We can leave as soon as it’s light. She’s all right; at any rate, she’s harmless enough. She was glad of the money.’
The floor creaks as we move. We’re up two flights of stairs, under the eaves, tucked away. That chamber pot. I push it a little farther under the bed with my foot. We shan’t need it, I hope. We went out to the privy in turn, in spite of the rain, shielding the candle. The flame gulped and sizzled when a spot of rain fell on it, but didn’t go out.
‘Well,’ says Felicia briskly, ‘we’d better get ready.’ She pours water from the jug, splashes her face and hands, dries herself and then sits on the bed to unlace her boots. She arranges them tidily, clambers into bed in Anne Paddick’s breeches and pulls the covers up to her chin. She even shuts her eyes tight, like a child pretending to be asleep. I nearly laugh out loud. Well, if that’s the game . . . And then I think of what she said about Jeannie’s birth. Felicia knows everything that a woman has to know.
I never went with the French tarts. I said I didn’t want to catch a dose. I wasn’t the only one. I thought of it more than I ought to have done. They used to light up the red lamp and there’d be so many shoving to get in that it was easy to slip aside. That red lamp. It was all organised for you. I knew I ought to want it, but I didn’t. There were others who didn’t as well, strong Bible Christians or married men with scruples. Some of them, like me, didn’t give their reasons. Every night there were the tales afterwards, going on and on, but you could let them wash over you without listening.
I take off my own boots, and swill my face and hands as Felicia has done, before creaking round to the other side of the bed. The springs groan even more loudly than the floorboards. There we are, side by side, on our backs like effigies. I can hear Felicia breathing. That woman thought we were man and wife.
The rain spatters. It could have been like that, in another world. How Mr Dennis would have hated it. I don’t know what Frederick would have thought. There’s Felicia, breathing. No, it could never have happened.
This is a cushy billet all right. Out of the wind and rain and mud. Nothing to think of until morning, except sleep. But I can’t stop my heart banging away as if morning’s here already. Now I listen, I can hear the sound of the waves thudding in under the cliffs. It never stops. Like gunfire. Even in England you could hear it, they said. If you were in the southern parts, looking out towards France, you could hear the guns.
All at once I know he’s going to come. The dead aren’t tied to one place. He’s as fearful as I am, more maybe. He knows what’s coming to him, and he can’t get away from it. Something’s gone wrong. Things ought to stop, once they’re finished, but this won’t stop. They say the war’s over, but they’re wrong. It went too deep for that. It opened up a crack in time, a crater maybe. Once you fall into it, you can’t get out again. The mud is too deep and it holds you. I’ve left him there. He thought I was coming back, and I never did.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I didn’t mean it.’ I’m shaking all over and the bed is creaking too, banging off its springs. Felicia’s hands are on me, touching my face, trying to wake me up, but I’m already wide awake and it still goes on. ‘I’m sorry, Frederick. I’m so sorry.’ I keep on saying it but he can’t hear me, because there’s nothing of him left. Now I want him to come. I must speak to him. I want him here, all clagged with mud, even if we both have to die for it.
‘Frederick!’ I say, and I’m bolt upright with my arms out, feeling for him. ‘Frederick!’
She has hold of me. She grips me and clings to me, saying my name. ‘It’s all right, Daniel. I’m here. It’s all right. It was a bad dream. I’m here.’
She gets me down on the bed again and lies alongside me, holding me. I burrow my face into her neck and hair, hiding myself. Her hands are on the back of my neck, holding me in.
After a long time, I raise my head from her hair. She eases me into the softness of her. I can feel her bubble of laughter as she says, ‘You were making a terrible noise. We’ll have Mrs Thomas up here if we’re not careful.’ I am so light and empty that I could float away. ‘He isn’t here, you know,’ she continues. ‘You think he is, but he isn’t. He’s gone. He’s quite safe.’ Her words sink into me. I can feel her breath, coming and going. ‘We’re alive, and he’s not. We can’t get away from that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do.’
‘It wasn’t like I said in the letter.’
I feel the deep, caught breath in her.
‘I know. It’s what they tell people, isn’t it, to make them feel better? Everyone had a letter like that one we had. You can tell me the truth if you want.’
‘I was trying to get help for him.’
Her hands grip into me. I don’t think she knows how hard. ‘I know you were.’
‘But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I only told myself that was what I was doing. I ought to have stayed with him.’
There, it’s said. The words don’t explode, they fall into silence like any other words.
I should have stayed with you
. You know that, just as much as I do. That’s why you keep coming back. You can’t find peace, any more than I can. We ought to have been together. I’d have been gone, like you, inside a second. With you. I’ve thought about it so much: how can a man be there, entire, one second, and the next there is nothing of him? It ought not to be possible. Even if you’ve seen it you can’t believe it. It’s the filthiest conjuring trick you can think of.
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.