The Lie (3 page)

I lit the fire. The chimney drew the flames straight up, pulling them like ropes. The wood was blackthorn and the fire burned clear, after the first smokiness of damp. I sat back on my heels and opened my body to the heat, then after a minute I remembered what I had to do and why I had lit the fire. The kettle was dirty, so I washed it inside and out, filled it from the stream, hooked it to the chain and swung it over the hottest part of the fire. I would fill the kettle over and over, and scrub the floors, the walls and even the ceiling until they were clean. I would scrub down the deal table, the two chairs, the bedstead and the box. The bedding I had already buried, and I would drag the mattress out into the air to purify it. I had my own blanket to sleep in.

It took all the rest of the day, and most of the night. I worked by candlelight because I had no oil for the lamp. I thought that people might see the warm light flickering in the windows, so I drew the curtains across. I had beaten the dirt out of them, and would wash them on a warmer day. My nose and mouth were full of the acrid reek of soot, but I didn’t mind. The scrubbing brush was worn down almost to the wood by the time I had finished. I couldn’t sleep on that mattress, so I rolled myself in my blanket in front of the fire, and slept, slept until the birds woke me.

In the light of day, it was another matter. I hadn’t cleaned the house as well as I thought, and there was more to do. I found washing soda, packed hard, under the stone sink, and remembered how my mother dissolved it in hot water and scrubbed with her red, raw hands. The washing soda cleaned much better than the household soap had done. The rain had been followed by strong wind and clouds that chased the sun, and I dragged out the mattress and humped it over the barrow. There were stains on the ticking but I scrubbed them away. I would leave it out all day and night, if there was no rain.

I forgot to eat all that day, but I remembered the goat and pegged her out, and when I milked her I drank the milk again.

By nightfall everything was clean. The wind had dropped and it was cold, with the stars swimming above the sea. Venus was so bright she seemed to dance around the moon. I made myself tea with the last pinch I had in my pack, and drank it so thick and black that it made my heart jump. I was very tired. I stood in the doorway of the cottage with the cleanness of it behind me, and the fire still burning, and looked down at the sea. There was almost no moonlight, because the moon was the thinnest crescent, but there was enough starlight to see the black shapes of the rocks. Tomorrow I would clean out the earth closet. I would need to walk to Simonstown anyway, to buy tea and seed, and I would buy Jeyes Fluid there.

At last I went back inside the cottage and closed the door. I had only one candle burning, but it was enough. The kettle sang on the fire. I would wash myself in warm water tonight, at the sink.

I wrapped myself in my blanket, and lay down by the fire. The floor was hard but I was used to sleeping on earth. I thought of the mattress, with the cold night air washing over it. I wrapped my arms around my body and tucked my head down, ready to sleep.

That was when the smell came to me. It was not the old smell of the cottage, not dirty rags or sickness, not soot or the muck I had scraped off the floor. That had all gone. This was a new smell, and an old one too, so familiar that as it touched my throat I gagged.

It was the smell of earth. Not clean earth, turned up by the spade or the fork, to be sunned and watered. This earth had nothing to do with growth. It was raw and slimy, blown apart in great clods, churned to greasy, liquid mud that sucked down men or horses. It was earth that should have stayed deep and hidden, but was exposed in all its filth, corrosive, eating away at the bodies that had to live in it. It breathed into me from its wet mouth.

I rolled myself into a ball. I put my hands over my face, the hands that I’d washed in warm water and soap, but still they stank of earth.

3

There is an insidious tendency to lapse into a passive and lethargic attitude, against which officers of all ranks have to be on their guard, and the fostering of the offensive spirit, under such unfavourable conditions, calls for incessant attention.

TODAY THE SUN
shone as if it were June and not the end of March. I mended the chicken run, sowed beetroot seed and planted the onion sets. I laid broken eggshells around the young lettuces to keep off the slugs. I have put in three rows of carrots, two of turnips. There is a bristle of green over the black earth. Everything is orderly. I hoed out the weeds, and opened and turned the compost heap.

I have some money left. I feel the weight of the tin where I keep my coins. I know there are florins, some sixpences, a few joeys and a heap of copper. I saw a woman selling bunches of primroses in Turk Street, and it came to me that I could do the same. There are more violets in the hedge-banks this year than I ever remember. You have to set them off with leaves, fasten them with a wrap of thread, then douse their heads upside down in cold water so that they are fresh for morning. There I’d be in Turk Street, with violets spread in a wooden tray covered with damp moss. You could sell a bunch for threepence I’m sure.

There’d be people I knew among the market-day crowds. I’d have to speak to them.

The best thing I’ve bought with my money, apart from vegetable seeds, is the fishing line I use to catch mackerel off the rocks. The fish come in close, nosing for rot. I let down the baited line stealthily, and if the water’s clear enough I glimpse the iridescence of the mackerel, twitching under the rocks before they rush for the hooks. Mackerel is a strong fish. Its colour changes quickly in death, and it never tastes as good as when it’s first out of the sea. I split the fish down the belly, gut them and cook them within the hour, so that their flesh is white and clean. I keep a few strips back to use as bait. Mackerel are like crabs, which will scramble over themselves to eat their own kind.

I drink milk at midday, and eat the heel of a loaf. The sea shines like pewter. I squat down out of the wind, and smell the wild garlic. I know everything that can be eaten, for five square miles around. Mussels on the rocks, samphire growing around the estuary in season, spider crabs and wild strawberries, blackberries, elderberries, bread and cheese from the hawthorn, new dandelion leaves for salad, chervil, nettles for soup in spring. But it would be a lie to say there was ever enough to do more than blunt our hunger, or flavour the soup my mother made from a handful of bones, potatoes, a parsnip or two, a couple of carrots. Every child in the parish was out after the blackberries, and although I knew the best places, we didn’t always have enough sugar to preserve them.

Once Frederick and I milked a cow, secretly, in one of the small fields set with loggans, up beyond Senara towards Bass Head. It was one of those wild little cows they keep there, and it backed off from us, lowering its head and digging its front hooves into the pasture. But slowly, with the two of us chirruping and gentling, we came on, one from each side. Frederick flashed me a triumphant smile as the cow stood still at last, trembling, and let us touch her. I knew how to milk, well enough, and we filled our cupped hands and gulped it down, warm and frothy in our mouths. The farmer would have tanned the hide off us. Frederick said it was a pity we hadn’t a pail. We drank and drank, and then we heard a yell and two big lads erupted over the gate. They must have been the farmer’s sons. We ran like hell until they stopped chasing us, then we flopped down by a stream. I saw that there was brooklime growing, which Frederick had never tasted. He said it was bitter, and spat it out.

‘Why do you eat that muck?’

‘It cleans the blood.’

He rolled on his back, laughing. Frederick ate meat every day, once if not twice or three times. They had eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning, and kidneys in a dish. His father ate chops, with Worcester sauce, but no one else was allowed them. His father was a mining engineer who had gone out to Australia, not as thousands of other poor men went, in search of work, but to introduce a new type of winding gear. Mr Dennis took his payment in shares in the mines he worked on. Frederick explained to me how that was better than money. Sometimes he drew a blank, but even so he sailed home three or four times richer than he’d been before. Or richer still, maybe; no one ever knew. He married, and then he built a square granite house surrounded by a high granite wall. It wasn’t beautiful, but it would stand for ever. Frederick was going to be educated at the Cathedral School in Truro. But when Frederick was four and his sister Felicia two, their mother became pregnant for the third time. She died of puerperal fever, and the baby died a fortnight after her.

This was how I came to know Frederick. My mother cleaned for the family, and Mrs Dennis had grown fond of her, as people did. After Frederick’s mother died, and his father took to work as he might have taken to drink, my mother looked after the children more and more. I might have been jealous, but my mother always had me along with her. I learned the world of Albert House. There was Mrs Stevens who came in to cook, and there was Annie Noble who cleaned now that my mother was so taken up with the two little children. It was the best job my mother ever had, and it lasted three years. I ate at the Dennises’ table with Frederick and Felicia, and I grew until I was the tallest boy in my infant class. If either Frederick or Felicia was ill, my mother would stay all night, and a little bed would be put up for me in the slip-room by the nursery.

I make it sound as if everything fitted together. My mother, me, Frederick, Felicia. Mr Dennis mostly a voice behind a closed door, or a pair of long black legs scissoring across the hall as we watched from the top of the stairs. But once he came close.

Felicia had cried all night with the toothache. My mother was to take her over to Simonstown, to the dentist. I had never been to a dentist and I wondered why Felicia cried harder at the news. She was bundled in her coat and hat with a scarf tied around her face, and they went off in the dog cart. Frederick had his handwriting to practise. It was a disgrace, now that he was almost seven. It was high time Frederick was taken in hand.

It was Mr Dennis who said that. His voice was loud through the study door. He had to stay up until the early hours of the morning, my mother said, because of his business. Other black legs, not only Mr Dennis’s, scissored to and fro, and bundles of documents lay piled on the hall chest.

Frederick was in the schoolroom, on the first floor. I was there too, lying on my stomach on the rug. I was reading ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’, out of Felicia’s
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The fisherman was stupid, and so was his wife, I thought. They didn’t listen to what the sea was telling them. You had to do that. I finished the story and then kicked my heels in the air and thought about whether the whole world could be drowned, if the sea grew angry enough. Frederick wasn’t doing his handwriting. He was singing to himself and drawing in the margins.

We both heard the heavy steps in the corridor. Loud, strong footsteps, meant to be heard. The door handle went round. The door opened and there was Mr Dennis, all of him, tall, whiskery, in black from head to foot. He wasn’t looking at me, but at Frederick. I shuffled back on my knees, towards the curtain. I knew Mr Dennis mustn’t notice me. He threw a glance around the room, unseeing, scorching. I felt it run over me without stopping and I was glad. Mr Dennis strode to the table and picked up Frederick’s book. It was covered with little drawings: that was what Frederick always did.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

Frederick looked up at him. ‘It’s my handwriting book,’ he said.

‘How dare you answer me like that? What’s this diabolical mess you’ve made in it?’

Frederick dropped his head, and said nothing.

‘Answer me!’

‘It’s my handwriting book.’

‘Handwriting book!’ Mr Dennis picked up the book and threw it across the room. ‘It looks like it. You’re as stupid as you’re idle. Now fetch it.’

I was almost in the curtains now. I felt the cold trickle of winter coming through the glass behind me. I wriggled back. Frederick got up from the table, and went laggingly across to where the book lay on the floor. He glanced at his father before stooping to pick it up, as if he didn’t want to turn his back on him.

‘Bring it here,’ said Mr Dennis. Frederick held out the book to him, and Mr Dennis snatched it and hurled it again, hard, into the corner of the room.

‘Fetch it!’ he said, as if Frederick was a dog, and again, even more slowly, Frederick did so. A third time, Mr Dennis shied the battered book across the room. This time he said nothing, but jerked his head at the book, for Frederick to get it. But Frederick didn’t move. Mr Dennis’s glance went round the room again, and he saw me cowering in the curtains.

‘Get out,’ he said. I didn’t want to. I was afraid of what he’d do to Frederick if there was no one to see it, but I didn’t dare defy Mr Dennis. It had been drummed into me to keep out of his way and never come to his notice. I let go of the curtains and began to edge out of the room. There was Frederick, standing still, not fetching the book, not looking at me.

I left the schoolroom, and hid myself behind the grandfather clock on the landing. I heard their voices, a slither of feet, a cry, then the door banged open and Frederick flew through it, skidded across the floor and fell. Mr Dennis was after him. He kicked Frederick with his boot and Frederick’s face went forward and banged on the skirting board. Mr Dennis was shouting at him to get up like a man. Frederick scrambled up, on his hands and knees, and backed away from his father towards the stairs. I couldn’t see him any more because Mr Dennis was over him, blotting him out. Frederick whimpered and wriggled across the floorboards.

‘Get up those stairs!’ shouted Mr Dennis in a thick voice as if he was drunk. ‘Get up those stairs and don’t let me see you again.’ Frederick crawled upstairs with Mr Dennis behind him, kicking and beating him. Each time Frederick tried to get away, Mr Dennis was on him. Each time he left off, Frederick jerked like a fish.