The Lie by Helen Dunmore Page B

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.
    ‘The Dennises have gone too,’ he says. ‘Except for Mrs Fearne.’ For a moment I don’t know who he’s talking about, then I realise it’s Felicia. ‘And the baby.’
    ‘Harry Fearne’s daughter,’ I say slowly, deliberately.
    ‘That’s right. You’d a known all of it, I dessay, before any of us.’
    I say nothing. Frederick did write to me, not long after my mother had given me the news. A letter full of jokes and scribble, with caricatures in the margin, and a PS. ‘Our Felicia has become a Fearne. What do you think of that, my dear BB?’
    Our Felicia. What’s mine is thine and what’s thine is mine. That was another thing we swore. Frederick said it was from the Bible. It worked very well with chocolate and Woodbines.
    Geoff was looking at the rise that hid the cottage. ‘Haven’t seen the old woman for months,’ he says.
    ‘She has a chest complaint. Keeps herself indoors most of the time, or else she starts coughing.’ I hear myself explaining too much, in the way of guilty men. Geoff nods, as if satisfied.
    ‘You better get those cuts seen to, boy,’ he says, in the old tone of friendship.
    I put up my hand slowly, to the side of my head, where for a while there’s been the sensation of insects crawling down my scalp. There’s stickiness. I say nothing, as if he hasn’t surprised me.
    ‘I thought the sea was going to have you there,’ he says.
    But he stayed on the path, with the collie bitch. Either he didn’t truly think I was in trouble, or he hadn’t wanted to bestir himself. I don’t blame him. I know how far away such things can seem. You don’t think of all that’s happening to the left or the right of you. You think of whether you’ll get your fag to light with a wet match, and the bit of bad news in Blanco’s letter, about his baby that’s got croup. We thought of ourselves. Our company. Our platoon. Holding a candle flame to the seams of our shirts to get the lice. The time we spent, getting lice. Chatting, we called it. They’d be all over you like fire until you wanted to tear your skin off. Lice go black when they’re full of blood. No matter how many you get, there’s always more. Our boots, our letters. Our Mr Tremough, until the sniper got him. Fags and rumours. Cake out of parcels. The state of our feet. I see Blanco kneel at little Ollie Curnow’s feet, rubbing whale oil into them and then bandaging them, tender as any woman. If you had a parcel you shared it out until it was all gone.
    The fact is we had nothing left. Not to spare, not to go beyond us.
    I look down at my hands. They are scraped and raw, as if from clinging to the rocks to save myself. I’m beginning to feel cuts and bruises all over my body. I’m cold, and very tired.
    ‘I must get back,’ I say. I can think of nothing else now. I’ll let myself down on to the bed, sink into it, go away on a tide of darkness where no one follows