The Lie by Helen Dunmore Page A

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