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 daylight. 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:-
THE TOP RIGHT-HAND
drawer of the kitchen dresser is full of brown paper bags, each containing seed. Mary Pascoe hasn’t labelled them. I doubt that she knew how to read and write. Nor am I sure how long the seed has been saved here, but what I’ve sown from her bags so far has sprouted.
I sit at the scrubbed table and lay all the bags before me, to see how much seed is left. Some are close to empty. There’s radish, each seed dinted as if a nail has scratched into it as it formed. Carrot seed, slim and fine. Here’s scorzonera; who would have thought the old woman would have had that? We used to grow scorzonera at Mulla House, black-skinned and white-fleshed. I cut a root of it open once to see inside, but I never tasted it. The seeds are long and curved, blunt at the ends. Parsnip seed, round and striped. Tiny spearheads of lettuce seed. There are a few peas and beans left, and a pinch of spinach seed.
I go outside and look at the rows I’ve already planted. I walk right up to the top of the land. Maybe I am imagining it, but it seems to me that the earth over her grave is settling. It is dinting under its fur of green. She wanted to be here, not in a graveyard all chambered underground with corpses. Here the earth is sweet. It will rub her flesh off her bones with brisk hands, like a washerwoman.
I shade my eyes and look up the hill where the furze flares yellow. It is quiet but every inch of the land is known to someone, and any movement on it is seen. Ridge. Copse. Salient. There’s a shattered cottage covered with ivy, but you can’t see it from here.
I want to see Felicia. I turn my face away from the town and set off along the cliffs. There are so many violets that you can’t help crushing them. Stitchwort, primroses, alexanders, campion. Swarms of flowers so that you have to rub your eyes to clear them. There is blackthorn, beaten low and sideways by the wind, but still in blossom. I notice everything and name it. I note every dip and hollow, as if my life depended on it. It’s very tiring.
The fact is that I ought not to be here among these flowers. I wonder what the Ancient Mariner did once he came back to his home country, apart from the times when he was driven by his memories to capture a listener and pour his story into him? He must have been a young man when he set out on his voyage, but now he is ancient. How many years has he lived, I wonder? Perhaps he cannot die. That may be part of the curse on him.
He killed an albatross. It seems petty to me. But the albatross I suppose was not only an albatross. It was the thing without which you can continue to live, but no longer be human.
Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The light-house top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?
But how can it be? If you kill the albatross, you can never come back to your own country. You’ll be happier if you stop hoping for it. Like a fool I turn and look back across the bay to the town. There is the lighthouse, standing sheer on its black rock. Nothing has changed. The white stub of it looks far from shore, but really it’s quite close. When you climb up to Devil’s Mouth and look back, the channel that separates lighthouse from land is narrow. Beyond it the land folds and humps its way northward. The foam creeps around the lighthouse, beating up against it silently, retreating, climbing again. I watch it for a while, until my breathing steadies. My heart beats solidly again, in thick, slow strokes. There is the huddle of the town, where Felicia is.
‘. . . And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread . . .’
There is nothing. No tread. Not a footfall within a mile. Only the wind sifting over the flowers, and a faint smell of coconut from the furze. A bumblebee has got itself in among the thorns and it dips and falls, feeling for a gap. Now it’s in, and fumbling at the yellow mouth of the flower.
A movement catches my eye. I drop down a little, to the level of the bushes. Two figures have appeared, close to the horizon. As I watch they bend, rise and bend again. I think they are leasing stones. Do boys still lease stones, as I used to do? That was before Mulla House. I’d get a day’s work, and miss school. I remember the smell of my hand after I gave the ninepence I’d earned to my mother. Dirty coppers, and a joey. I was proud of giving her every halfpenny and keeping nothing for myself.
I walk on a way. Beyond here the land rises, and the cliffs are sheer. I won’t go that far. Just here there is turf, and then a rough scramble down rock and boulders to a promontory that’s good for fishing. I let myself down backwards, feeling for footholds. There must have been a fall of rock since I was last here, because the familiar ledge has gone. But I wedge my right foot into a cleft and find a spur for my left foot, and then another. There’s a rhythm I’ve almost forgotten, but it’s there, waiting to be discovered. Frederick had it always. You climb best if you never pause long enough for your weight to test the strength of the foothold.
I am down. The sea sucks and drags, but the tide is on its way out. I make my way out on to the promontory, jumping from rock to rock, the sea on both sides now. I go to the very end. Pulses of swell travel in diagonally, hitting the rocks with a shock of spray. It is stupid to stand here. We always used to stand here as long as we dared. Every hundredth wave the swell would gather itself. You would see it coming from far off, a dark hump like a monster travelling underwater. It would wash right over the rock when it came, and would snatch you away. We would watch it, judging the last possible moment. We took turns to be the one who screamed out:
NOW!
and the cry freed us to scramble back to high ground where the swell could only lick our heels. But the one who ran before the other gave the word had lost.
Once Frederick left it too late to shout, and the wave went right over me. I clung to the rock like a monkey but it picked me off then threw me back again. Water rushed over my eyes and I choked but the second time I dragged myself up and got away. Lucky it was calm. On a wilder day the sea would have had me. Frederick was there, reaching down, pulling me out. I was cut all over, and bruised, though I didn’t feel it at once and didn’t know it until I looked down on myself and saw blood.
We be of one blood, thou and I.
I stand for a long time, but there is no hundredth wave. They break regularly, some a little higher, some lower. The tide is farther out now, and a small apron of wet white sand has appeared at the base of the cliff rubble. I climb back over the rocks. The patches of sand were always shifting after winter storms. We brought wood down to make a fire, and once we roasted gulls’ eggs.
I strip off my clothes, lay them on a dry rock and weigh them down with a stone. In the lee of the promontory the water is calm. There are rips all around this part of the coast, and even Frederick and I, foolhardy as we were, never swam into deep water. We would bathe close to the shore, where it was shallow.
The sand goes on under the water. I feel my way out, looking down, following the pale tongues of it in between the black rocks. When I’m thigh-deep the tug of the current grows strong. I give way to it and crouch down, gasping at the cold of it. It pulls at me but the sea isn’t deep enough to take me with it. There is only sand and rock and water. No earth to turn to silt or mud. The salt scours me clean. I must be moving without knowing it, because when I look back my pile of clothes is yards from where it was. But the sea can’t take me far. It’s going out, sucking what it can with it. I move my arms and push myself backwards, towards deeper water, but it’s still not deep enough. It refuses to take me. Even if it did, I would fight it. I would cling and scrabble, as I did before. My mouth and eyes would fill with blood and I would think of nothing but myself.
Slowly, shuddering, I clamber out of the sea.
If I had not been so cold I would have noticed him earlier. I dry myself on my shirt then knuckle myself stiffly into my clothes, not seeing. But when I do turn and look up, he’s there on the cliff path, watching me, one hand on the head of a collie bitch who is also pointing her nose at me. I nod, thinking he’ll walk on, but he doesn’t. He waits while I climb the rubble of rock and the low cliff, and heave myself over the lip of turf again. I brush myself down as if I’m alone. I’m damned if I’ll speak first. I know him.
‘Heard you were back, Dan.’
‘It’s no secret.’
‘Living at Mary Pascoe’s.’
I nod. His dad had Venton Awen farm. A finger of their land points down to touch Mary Pascoe’s, but it’s poor land, steep and stony, and they’ve never cultivated it. He went before the Tribunal, the year before I was called up, and he got exemption. It seemed the farm couldn’t get on without him.
His look flickers over me. ‘I’m sorry for your mother’s death.’
‘Are you?’ I mutter, three-quarters to myself.
Anger, or maybe some other emotion, fills his face. It must have gone down into the hand that held the collie bitch, for she whines and shivers. ‘You haven’t changed,’ he says.
He was a year older than me in school. Geoff Paddick. I liked him then. He had one of those faces you want to please. A farmer’s son, tramping in with his cold bacon sandwiches and a bottle of sweet tea. He had too many sandwiches once, and gave me one. Their bacon was cured with brown sugar and treacle. He was the only son and the farm would be his; he knew where he was.
‘My mother and the girls went to her funeral,’ he says.
I’ve lost my judgement of people. They were there and I was not: that’s the fact of it. Geoff Paddick may well mean no harm by telling me. I want to ask him everything. How my mother’s coffin was carried in. What Mrs Paddick saw when she turned her head to watch it. Who was sitting in every pew. But the thought stings me that the people from Venton Awen went to the funeral only because my mother worked there long ago, when she first came to the town. She was fourteen, a poor girl from the other side of Camborne, away from home for the first time to cook and clean and help old Mrs Paddick, Geoff’s grandmother. My mother used to tell me about the orchard at Venton Awen, and its low, twisted little trees, with their sweet fruit. I also think: If
you’d
been in France, Geoff Paddick, then maybe I’d have been at home, at my mother’s side. There’s no logic in such thoughts, but they burn in me just the same. I see him at Bodmin Barracks, not me, naked, canted over for the doctor to peer up his arse.
‘I hear Mulla House is closed up,’ he says. He hears a lot, that’s clear: all the whispers that come trickling along the stone hedges.
‘It’s to be sold in the autumn.’
‘And your job along with it.’
I shrug. I was sorry about the garden at Mulla and that was all. By the time I was called up, I’d risen to under-gardener, in charge of the kitchen garden and hothouses. But that was in another life. I would never have gone back there, even if the job had been waiting for me.