The Lie
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Cornwall, 1920: Infantry officer Daniel Branwell has returned to his coastal hometown after the war. Unmoored and alone, Daniel spends his days in solitude, quietly working the land. However, all is not as it seems in the peaceful idylls of the countryside; and although he has left the trenches, Daniel cannot escape his dreadful past.
As former friendships reignite, Daniel is drawn deeper and deeper into the tangled traumas of his youth and the memories of his best friend and his first love. Old wounds reopen, and old troubles resurface—though none so great as the lie that threatens to ruin Daniel’s life, the lie from which he cannot run.
Told with breathtaking poise and exacting suspense, The Lie is a haunting journey through the mind of a tormented man as he tries to fit the pieces of his shattered past together.
“Devastating and triumphant . . . wholly satisfying. Endings are often the hardest beast for an author to tame, but Dunmore does it, with elegance, vigor and clarity.” —The Denver Post
Helen Dunmore
HELEN DUNMORE is a novelist, short story writer and poet. She has written twenty-two children’s books, including Brother Brother, Sister Sister; The Lilac Tree; The Seal Cove; and the bestselling Ingo series. She has written nine adult books including A Spell of Winter, which won the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her poetry collections have won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the Signal Poetry Award. Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Bristol with her husband and children.
Read more from Helen Dunmore
Ingo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Exposure Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tide Knot: A Return to Ingo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBirdcage Walk Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatcoat: A Ghost Story Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Deep Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLove Letters of the Great War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inside the Wave: COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Malarkey Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Crossing Of Ingo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stormswept: The Ingo Chronicles Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCounting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Lie
Related ebooks
Daughter 4254 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEve of Destruction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daughter, Son, Assassin: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Unwritten Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Unusual Life of Pearl Lux Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Book of Air Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sea Music: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chasing Sunset: Tales of Ardonna Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStealing Mr. Smith: The Smith Family Series, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRattlebone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret of the Blue Trunk Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heart of Fire and Darkness: Book 1 of Hearts of the Dragon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhisper: Lords of Khaos: Ironwood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Barbara Vine Mysteries: A Dark-Adapted Eye, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, and The Brimstone Wedding Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blue Mercy: A Heartbreaking, Page-Turning Irish Family Drama Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Angel Born Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Deaths Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Window - Special Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInto the Heartless Wood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Island of Forgetting: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sweet Water: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Captured Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRefuge: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Mother's Keeper Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Shattered World: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren of Monsters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMoonlight Sonata: A Story of Life in the Shadows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWolf Interval: Senyaza Series, #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
World War I Fiction For You
The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ham On Rye: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Orphan Collector: A Heroic Novel of Survival During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Kingdom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mystery of Mrs. Christie: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lake House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Soldier of the Great War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Visitors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Our Time: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don't Push Me Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen I Come Home Again: 'A page-turning literary gem' THE TIMES, BEST BOOKS OF 2020 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 42nd Parallel Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The Uninvited: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grapes of Wrath: World War I Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarie Benedict Historical Fiction Bundle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ragnarok: The End of the Gods Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLast Christmas in Paris: A Novel of World War I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Gatsby (Deluxe Illustrated Edition) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My French Whore: A Love Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girl Waits With Gun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forty Days of Musa Dagh Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5War Cry: A Courtney Family Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The War Nurse: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fallen Skies: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fortnight in September: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ashenden Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSwitchboard Soldiers: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Lie
82 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5DNF @ 23%
I'm just not feeling this one. The story seems pretty flat and although the topic of the devastating effects of the WW1 experience is described well, neither the story nor the characters or the storytelling is engaging me enough to want to spend more time with this book. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Although I have by no means read a lot of Helen Dunmore, what I have read is excellent. Her The Siege is incredible. This book does not reach the same heights but is still very enjoyable. She is a poetic writer but at the same time easy to read. My book group in general enjoyed it a lot.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daniel Branwell has returned to Cornwall after fighting in World War I. He lives with an old woman who dies. Instead of reporting the death, he buries her and pretends she is living so he can continue to live in her house. Like many, he suffered the loss of a close friend in the war. That friend was Frederick, and Daniel reconnects with his friend's sister Felicia after the war. He's also suffering from what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or PTSD). We discover lies Daniel has told which make the reader question which parts of the narrative are true and which are not. Dunmore knows how to write a story that will keep readers' attention even if they dislike many or most of the characters. My reading brought to mind a conversation I recently had with a friend who had done her nursing practicum for psychiatric nursing at a Veterans Administration facility. She said it was a great place for that specialty because the soldiers suffering PTSD really did need to be there. It made me wonder how Daniel's life and end might have been different if the disorder and been recognized at the time and if facilities for treatment had existed.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything has changed when Daniel Branwell returns to Cornwall after fighting in the trenches of France in World War I. Daniel's mother has died, and with no other family and no home, he lives in a makeshift shelter near the home of an elderly, reclusive woman. Daniel suffers from PTSD, and he's haunted by memories of the war and by the ghost of his childhood friend, Frederick, who did not survive the war. Although he avoids most people, Daniel reestablishes a relationship with Frederick's sister, Felicia, a war widow at just 20 years old. Preferring his established routines to uncertainty, Daniel lies to Felicia about his present circumstances. Only later does he realize that he's committed himself to maintaining a certain appearance which will become increasingly difficult.Daniel's fragile mental state makes him a somewhat unreliable narrator. Is Daniel's PTSD episodic or unremitting? Just what was Daniel's lie? Was it what he tells readers it was? Or is his entire story a lie? Can readers trust anything he tells us? This book will stimulate discussion about war and its management, its psychological effects on veterans, social class and military life and experience, and society's responsibilities for veterans.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This novel concerns the life of a young Cornish man, Daniel Branwell, in 1920, after returning from the trenches of the Western Front. He is racked by guilt over the death there of his childhood friend Frederick, the son of the local wealthy engineer, who employed Daniel's mother as his cleaner before the war and until her early death. Daniel is rootless and is invited to live in a makeshift shelter on the land of a solitary old lady, Mary Pascoe. He looks after her as she grows ill and then, at her dying request, he takes over her cottage and buries her on the land she loved. He continues to be haunted by the ghost of Frederick, and the associated smell of the mud and death of the trenches, even as he tries to renew his acquaintance with Frederick's sister Felicia, who now has a young daughter, her husband having also not returned from the war. This novel is very well written, but is not for those looking for a fast paced narrative. The eponymous "lie" seems to refer both to Daniel's guilt over the death of Frederick, whom he thinks he abandoned, and to his deceit over the whereabouts of Mary after he took over her cottage. The ending is suitably ambiguous, though I found it a little abrupt.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absolutely brilliant! Couldn't put it down!!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5More of a 3.5. The languid pace of the novel may not suit everyone, but it fit my mood. A young man, Daniel, returns to his native Cornwall after serving in World War I, unscathed physically, but shell-shocked and broken in mind. There are three main strands of the narrative: Dan, growing up with Frederick and Felicia, siblings in a higher-class family, where Dan works as a gardener; World War I; and Dan's postwar [1920] life back home. Scenes in the present alternate with flashback memories, triggered by the smallest incident or remark. Frederick's The muddy figure of Frederick, who died in the war, often appears at the foot of his bed at night. The novel explores the nature of guilt; Dan still holds himself responsible for Frederick's death on that last mission. A lie is covered up and as time passes, influences the story. Present-day 'action' is little enough: connecting again with Felicia, repairing her furnace, and a picnic with her, then the devastating conclusion. The postwar story was weak, but the war scenes were evocative and gripping. I had to get used to the author switching from one time period to the other, often in the middle of a paragraph. A psychological study of Dan and his instability, the novel to me was a cautionary tale: if one tells a big enough lie, eventually there will be retribution. Emotion was conveyed vividly, as were descriptions of the landscape and people. The writing was exquisite. I liked how the quotations from different poems were worked into the text, each having something to do with whatever chapter they appeared, as were the epigraphs from the British Stationery Office of that period on the war. I caught what I believe to be a whiff of homoeroticism.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Soldier home to small town in England after World War I, suffering from what we'd know now as PSTD. Tragic and moving.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Helen Dunmore uses great lyrical prose to describe the return from the Great War Of Daniel to a small Cornish coastal village.
Still haunted by the loss of his best friend in battle, Daniel is troubled by shell shock and the guilt of his survival.
Daniel's story is told in the first person and this gives great insight into his mind and his attempts to keep his sanity.
This book is a haunting read and highly recommended amongst the plethora of WW1 books coming out at the moment.
Book preview
The Lie - Helen Dunmore
The Lie
ALSO BY HELEN DUNMORE
Zennor in Darkness
Burning Bright
A Spell of Winter
Talking to the Dead
Your Blue-Eyed Boy
With Your Crooked Heart
The Siege
Mourning Ruby
House of Orphans
Counting the Stars
The Betrayal
The Greatcoat
The Lie
HELEN DUNMORE
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Helen Dunmore
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hutchinson an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, London
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2254-4
Jacket design by Wendy Birch
Jacket photographs: soldiers © Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel;
landscape © Simon Plant/Getty
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
14 15 16 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
1
The use of veils and coats of a colour to match the background is useful. If near sandbags, an empty sandbag worn over the head is a good disguise. Against an earth background a brown gauze veil, against grass a green one are both difficult to detect. Grass, weeds, wood or branches may give concealment.
He comes to me, clagged in mud from head to foot. A mud statue, but a breathing one. The breath whistles in and out of him. He stands at my bed-end. Even when the wind is banging over the roof that I’ve bodged with corrugated iron, it’s very quiet. He doesn’t speak. Sometimes I wish that he would break the silence, but then I’m afraid of what he might say. I can smell the mud. You never forget the reek of it. Thick, almost oily, full of shit and rotten flesh, cordite and chloride of lime. He has got himself coated all over with it. He’s camouflaged. He might be anything, but I know who he is.
I light my candle and get out of bed, because I know I won’t sleep again. The wind bangs, and behind it I hear the sea booming at the base of the cliffs. It’s night, but I can still work. I light my lantern and get out needle and thread from the sewing box Mary Pascoe left to me. My trousers want patching. They are good, heavy corduroy, worn thin at the knees. I may not be nimble at sewing, but I can get the job done. They want leather patches but I haven’t got leather, so I use cloth from inside the pockets. I sew the patches all around, as firm and as neat as may be. I look at my work and then I go round again until I am sure that the patches will hold.
When I look up out of the dazzle of stitches, he’s gone. At the foot of my bed there’s nothing but the heavy pine box with Mary Pascoe’s initials burned into it. The box was black with smoke, but I’ve scoured it.
I think about how he comes. Does he displace the box? Is he in it, or is it in him? I shouldn’t think of it. It makes my mind dazzle, like my eyes.
Tomorrow I’ll plant main-crop potatoes. I’ve prepared the ground. In October, soon after I came here, I dug the earth deeply and then covered it with rotted seaweed from the pile that Mary Pascoe carried up from the shore, when she was still able. She said that seaweed made the potatoes grow clean of disease. My seed potatoes lie ready in their trays, sprouting. The sprouts are strong.
Frederick. I can say his name aloud now, without danger. He won’t come again tonight. I have thought that if he ever came by day, I’d take him to the horse-trough in the next field and wash him until white flesh appeared. Or he could stand by the stream while I poured water over him, bucket after bucket. It would be like taking new potatoes out of the soil. But I know that he’d be back again the next night, with the mud still on him. It never dries or forms a crust. It is always wet and shining, like the eyes of a rat in the back of a dugout. He’s been out there in the wind and rain, rain sluicing over him, turning the land to mud that can drown you.
A man stuck in the mud can’t free himself. He needs two men to help him. You lay a piece of wood down on either side of him. You work him out, one boot at a time. It’s a slow job. Often there isn’t time and you have to leave him. Usually it’s not that the mud is so deep. It doesn’t come above his knees but he can’t free himself, and if he loses his balance and tips forward, he will drown. You hear the cries of men caught like that. But that was later. Frederick died before the worst of the mud.
I have a calendar on my wall and I mark off the days. I keep records of how many rows I’ve planted: early potatoes, turnips, carrots, beetroot, spring cabbages and all the rest. This mild spring has made the earth soft and ready. I’ve planted gooseberry bushes, because they’ll stand the wind. Mary Pascoe made hedging around her vegetable patch. She didn’t look after her cottage: she stuffed her windows with rags and let birds nest in the chimney, but she always knew how to make her bit of land feed her. She left me the cottage and the land around it, which maybe never belonged to her at all, but which she’d made her own. Why shouldn’t she have her bit of land, my mother used to say, when there’s others that own half the county? Mary Pascoe left me her goat and her chickens. She used to keep a pig, she said, but I don’t remember that.
I knew her more than the other children did, because of my mother’s friendship for her. I’d see her striding into town, with a basket of eggs on a strap. Sometimes, Frederick and I met her on the shore, picking mussels, when we were walking out to Senara or beyond. Me and Frederick, side by side, swinging out. We had bread and cheese in our pockets, and he might have brought chocolate, or a handful of plums. He shared between us so easily that you couldn’t tell what was his and what was mine. I never met anyone else who had that gift, until I was in the army. We had poetry books, or rather Frederick brought them from his father’s library, and I read them. Frederick was going to be a lawyer. He’d stayed on at school, gone upcountry to Truro for his education, and then farther still to boarding school.
I left school when I was eleven, a year before I ought to have done, but in the circumstances a blind eye was turned. My mother needed my wages. She had no other family to provide for her. For years, when I was a child, she went out to clean in the big houses: Lezard House, four or five of the houses along The Row, Carrick House in the summer season, when the family that owned it were down from London. When I was ten she had rheumatic fever, and after that she hadn’t the strength for cleaning. She was soon out of breath walking uphill, no matter how slowly she went. Sometimes she had to lean on me. I hated it. I’d like to think I gave her my arm willingly, but the truth is that her weakness frightened me, and made me ashamed of us, the two of us, when I wanted to be proud. Bolts of shame would go through me as we struggled up the hill, like flies in milk.
I remember how I knelt on the bare boards of the bedroom, on the night my mother was so ill that she didn’t know I was in the room. I’d never known her not to come to me at the lightest sound, if I woke from a bad dream. But now she didn’t know me. Her eyes went beyond me. She was talking all the time, in a low quick mutter, but not to me. I heard my father’s name and my grandmother’s. She cried out for them once, her voice rusty and tearing, and she tried to heave herself off the pillow, but Mrs Jelbert held her. I sank down to the floor, and pressed my face into the quilt. All the prayers I’d ever been taught jumbled in my mouth.
‘You go on downstairs, boy,’ said Mrs Jelbert, but I couldn’t. ‘Don’t you fear, my chiel. We’ll slock ’er round.’ I was beyond believing her. A black wind of terror blew through me and I prayed for my mother until sweat trickled down my back. No one answered me, nothing spoke.
Mrs Jelbert sent a boy for Dr Sanders. He came that night, and stayed until morning. He refused to let her die, even though it was clear that she had left us in her mind. She was with those other ones, those ghosts I’d barely known but who called her more strongly than my own voice could call her. But Dr Sanders wouldn’t let her stay with them. He bent over her, hauling her back, hurting her I thought from the way she cried out.
I’m not sure that my mother ever came back again, truly, but she was good at pretending. She got better. All through, Dr Sanders treated her for nothing, and afterwards he bestirred himself to find work for me, and settled it with school that I was to leave early. I was taken on as gardener’s boy at Mulla House, two miles’ walk from the town.
‘You’re the man of the house now, Daniel,’ Dr Sanders said to me.
The doctor called me Daniel in deference to my mother’s wish, although most people called me Dan. She always said, ‘Daniel is his christened name.’ It may seem strange that a doctor whose house my mother cleaned should show her this respect, but it was a fact. My mother was always someone you wanted to please. She was dark-eyed and dark-haired and her face was made so that you had to turn and look at it again, to see what it was that had struck you so. Even I felt it, and I was her son. It was anguish to me when other people looked at her. One of the artists who came to the town wanted to paint her, but she wouldn’t even answer him. I can see her now, drawing her shawl around her face, turning away. She was a widow. What she had left was her good name. The artist wouldn’t take no for an answer, and annoyed her more by saying that she had ‘the most spiritual regard he had ever seen, outside Italy’. Spiritual! She was hungry. We were both hungry, in the years after my father died.
I was three years old when he was killed. He was leading Brittan’s cart on a steep downhill, with a brake on the wheel. The brake slipped and gave way, the cart came down on the horse which stumbled and plunged so that my father was flung sideways against a wall. Even then it wouldn’t have been serious, but a protrusion of granite caught his temple. He was twenty-two, barely a year older than I am now. My mother was twenty. There was no insurance.
Soon it will be light. Nothing visits me in the daylight. There’s only the wind soughing, the wrinkling of the sea even on the quietest days. I dig, and mend the chicken wire. The cottage and the land are mine now. Mary Pascoe’s nanny goat, her ten chickens, the midden, the little stream that barely grows wider than a child could step over, the clean, difficult land, full of stones. She grew too old to tend them. Her eyes were milky and had lost the wildness that scared us when we were children, but she still knew me when I came along the path with my pack. She said, ‘Is that you, Daniel Branwell?’ and I said yes. Then she said, ‘Come in, my chiel.’
That was the first time I ever heard of anyone going inside Mary Pascoe’s cottage. It was full of smoke, and the walls were black with it. The house and everything in it was kippered. I coughed until my eyes watered, but she seemed untroubled. There were other smells, of age and sickness and the two cats that she used to keep, which twined around her legs and gave her the reputation of a witch. I’d always known that she was no such thing. The cats are dead now. My mother used to visit her, taking a bunch of yellow roses from our yard, the flowers no bigger than buttons but sweet-smelling. They talked on the threshold, never inside the house. I was jealous of those visits.
Mary Pascoe gave me a cup of sage tea. She knew that I’d been in France but she asked nothing about it. ‘Where are you living now, Daniel?’ she asked me. She also knew that our cottage had gone back to the landlord, because there was no one to pay the rent.
‘Here and there,’ I said. I asked her if I might make a shelter from corrugated iron and canvas, on the edge of her land. She nodded. She told me where the spring was, and that I should dig myself a latrine. She had no doubt I’d know how to do it, having been in the army. Neither had she any hesitation in mentioning such things.
‘Come in when you want a warm,’ she said. She’d made the sage tea in her black kettle, and even that tasted of smoke. She moved surely, feeling for things. I wondered how much sight she had left.
‘I went to see your mother before she died,’ she said. I started as if electricity had gone through me. By the time I’d come home, my mother was already in the grave we’d visited together every Sunday throughout my childhood: my father’s grave. The wind used to pucker up the grass, and the sun shone on her hair as she knelt to tidy and tend. Below us, the sea glittered. I never remember it raining: perhaps she only took me there on fine days. She would talk about him sometimes. That’s how I learned most of what I know about my father.
When I came back, the grave was narrower than I remembered it. I couldn’t see how there would be space for me there, as well as them. I wanted to know what my mother had said and how she’d looked before she died, but no one would tell me. The doctor said she died peacefully. I didn’t believe a word of it.
‘I found some buds on that rose of hers, and put them in her hand,’ said Mary Pascoe. She said nothing more on the subject, then or ever. She stirred the sage tea and said that it could do with sweetening. Even with her milky eyes she still seemed more like a bird than a woman. We used to call her a buzzard when her cloak flapped in the wind. Now she was hunched and silent. I was glad that the humanness in her seemed to have been parched away, so that she was light enough to fly.
That was five months ago. She never ventured as far as my shelter. I dug myself a latrine pit, and boiled water from the stream. I knew it was pure enough, but I had army habits now. I dug a trench around the back of my shelter, to carry away the winter rains. I had money. My mother had saved as much as she could from the pay I sent her. She put it away in the tobacco tin that belonged to my father. If she hadn’t saved it, she would have been warmer and better fed, but the doctor said it would have made no difference. The valves of her heart were damaged by the rheumatic fever she had when I was a boy, and it was her heart that killed her.
I never went into town. I would walk to Tremellan, or Senara. On market days I walked as far as Simonstown, to be there when prices dropped at the end of the day. I fed Mary Pascoe’s hens for her and soon I was taking care of them entirely. She said I should have the eggs, because she couldn’t stomach them now. She still drank the goat’s milk, but there was plenty of that for both of us. I remember when she used to make goat’s cheeses, wrap them in nettles and sell them, but such things were beyond her now. All the time, I was thinking about how the land could be used. She had been famous for her vegetables once. The sweetest and earliest potatoes came from Mary Pascoe’s patch. She grew white lilies and sold them in the church square. But now, the hill was taking her land back to itself. Much of her hedging had disappeared. The fencing around the chicken run was in poor condition. Bracken, furze and briars were swallowing her land, and stones were breeding in it like rabbits. I began to clear it. Of course I knew that I would be observed. This is my country. I know how many eyes it has.
On the afternoon of January the fourteenth I heard her calling to me, her voice high and wild. She was like a curlew, I thought, because I was still trying to put a name to the kind of bird she was. I ducked my head and went into the black cottage.
She lay in her nest of rags. She looked up at me, but her eyes were now skeined over with milk, and completely sightless. She wanted water, so I fetched her a cup and held it while she drank. She was hot. I took her wrist and felt her pulse, which was rapid but light as a thread. I’d seen the doctor do this with my mother.
‘Shall I fetch the doctor?’ I asked, but she moved her head from side to side: no. I saw that she was gathering her strength to speak. I gave her more water and told her I’d mended the fence of the chicken run. I was glad, really, that she didn’t want the doctor. He would come, and then more people would come after him. She was gathering herself for an immense effort. She took more water, coughed, and then said, ‘I want to lie here, not under a stone in the town. You’ll do that for me, Daniel.’
When I say that she said this, I mean that she brought it out between deep, harsh breaths, and twice a coughing fit stopped her. I was afraid she would die saying it. There was sweat all over her face.
‘You’ll stay here after me, Daniel,’ she said. I nodded, then remembered that she couldn’t see me, and said: ‘I will.’ It was enough for me, to hear her say that. After this she was exhausted and slept for a while. I stayed with her because I was afraid that if I went back to my work she might be too weak to call me. The fire was nearly out, so I put more wood on it. Smoke was better for her than cold. Outside, the light was going, and it began to rain. I thought of the pliers I’d left outside, at the chicken run, but they would still be there tomorrow and I could oil them before they had a chance to rust. She opened her eyes and looked about blindly. I thought she wanted more water and I held the cup to her lips, but she moved her head away.
‘Is it Daniel?’ she asked. I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me and said, ‘Yes, it’s Daniel.’ It seemed as if she were searching my face, and then looking to my side and beyond me. I knew that she could see nothing. She said, ‘Who have you brought with you?’
2
Dead, disposal of: Bodies of dead men will be taken right away from the trenches to be buried.
It will frequently happen that substantial buildings are found close to the selected line of defence. The question then arises whether to occupy them or to demolish them.
I buried her at the very edge of her land, at its highest point. I knew what she wanted, and there was no sense in waiting. If my mother had been alive, I would have gone to tell her, but I couldn’t think of anyone else in the town who would want to come to Mary Pascoe’s burial. Or would have any right to come. I dug down, always expecting to strike a shelf of granite, but the soil was deep enough. I dug her a decent grave, and lined it with dry brown bracken and branches of the rosemary bush that grew close to her door. I wrapped her in a piece of the army canvas that I hadn’t needed for my shelter. The smell of her was bad when I lifted her, like a bird that you find crawling with lice and maggots after it has gone away to die in the foot of a hedge. But I didn’t mind it. I had worked all day on her grave and I was sweating in spite of the cold. After the burial and the infilling of her grave, I stamped the earth down to settle it. I rolled a granite boulder to the head of the grave. I knew how quickly green would cover the turned earth.
The stream was running full after the heavy rains we’d had. I filled a bucket, took it to the outhouse where the goat was tethered, and stripped off my clothes. I thought that every pore of my body would be black with dirt, but my skin was white where my clothes had covered it. My hands and wrists, neck and face still held the tan of exposure. I washed myself with household soap, and when I was finished I sluiced