The Lie (12 page)

‘You can eat it tomorrow,’ I say.

‘Will it keep?’

‘Soup keeps for ever, as long as you boil it up every day.’ That was what my mother used to do. Every day, she would feed our soup pot with carrots and onion, sliced potato, some barley, maybe a piece of fat bacon if she had it. This soup could have done with the bacon: it tastes bland. ‘Did you salt it, Felicia?’

A faint colour comes up into her face. She rises, fetches the salt, and passes it to me. Some spills on the table and so I reach out, take a pinch and throw it over my left shoulder. Felicia tucks in her lips, the way she used to when she was trying not to laugh.

‘That’s sent him off with his tail between his legs,’ I say.

‘Who?’

‘Old Nick, of course.’

Felicia doesn’t add salt. She’d sooner swallow tasteless soup than admit that it needed seasoning. Here we are, eating together at the same table again. I watch the movements of her hands and the dip of her head as she brings the spoon to her mouth.

‘Do you still grow flowers?’ I ask her.

‘I clear leaves and cut things back when they grow over the paths. Josh comes up once a week to mow, in season.’

He came every day, before. I wonder how he lives without his wages? He wasn’t called up because of his foot. They grew grapes in the glasshouse before the war, and melons. It was nothing like the scale of Mulla House, but the Dennis house was always full of their own flowers. Now everything is pared, as if a knife has gone round and round an apple without knowing where to stop, so that it isn’t only the peel that has been taken away, but the whole fruit. I wonder if they’re short of money; or rather, if Felicia is, now that Mr Dennis and his wife and coming child have left her to make their own separate household. But he will have done well out of the war. A man like him, an engineer who employed more than three hundred men before the war – he trained up women to replace them, and the work went on. Mr Dennis would have had to throw money over his shoulder, like salt, if he didn’t want to get rich in the war years. Perhaps he forgets Felicia, because his attention is elsewhere. And then I think: all this house, for one girl and a baby. The remarkable thing is that any of them should think it’s right for her to be here alone.

The narrow spaces of the cellars are directly underneath me now. I’ll go down there, because I promised Felicia, but if she doesn’t mention the furnace then nor will I. I’d rather be up here. Her hands move delicately, lifting her spoon, bringing it to her mouth.

When I finish, Felicia ladles more into my plate, with another piece of chicken. The white and brown flesh has melted from the bone, and long fibres of it drift in the liquid. Felicia has finished eating. The noises of my jaw and teeth and tongue are loud, but I’m still so hungry that I have to hold back from leaning over my bowl and supping like a dog.

Felicia’s left hand cups the stem of her glass, her right plucks at the crumb of her bread, which she hasn’t tasted. She sits so still that you’d think her calm, but I know her better than that. I remember her on her knees beside the little patch the gardener gave her. She would make spells with sticks and stones and shells, incanting to herself. Frederick used to say that she was a witch.

Felicia didn’t know enough to realise that the gardener had given her a poor patch of soil, where marigolds and nasturtiums would flourish, but little else. She had her fork and trowel and she was so absorbed in digging that she didn’t hear us creep up behind her. Frederick shouted ‘Boo!’ and she jumped, but then she flushed with pleasure, because we had sought her out.

We ran away from her too often. I don’t know why, now.

Felicia clears the table, while I go to the lavatory. I know that word because of the Dennises. My mother would say ‘out the back’. My father had another word for it, which I do remember. I think it was a Bristol word from his childhood. He would say, ‘I’m off to the jollyhouse.’ That word I thought was apt for the Dennises’ lavatories and their glorious bathrooms, one on each of the upper floors. This big downstairs lavatory has green tiles with dolphins leaping on the narrow border. There are black and white chequered tiles on the floor, and a high cistern with a long brass chain. The door fittings are brass too, with a soft, deep sheen on them. The hook on the back of the door still has a bag of lavender hanging from it. I crush it, but the smell is old and dusty. I used to love the rattle of the chain and the roar of the water refilling the tank, and then I would wash my hands in a deep basin of hot water, soaping them all over. Today, the water in the hot tap is cold and runs thinly. These taps used to spout like whales. I ought to ask Felicia where the tools are kept.

‘Do you know what a Ouija board is?’ Felicia asks. She has poured me another glass of wine, the same elderberry that we drank last time.

‘I’ve heard of them.’

‘I hate the thought of it.’

‘It does no harm. It’s a lot of nonsense.’

‘Of course it does harm,’ says Felicia. She is silent for a long while, then she takes a sip of her wine, which so far she’s barely touched. ‘But I know why they do it.’

I wait.

‘It’s because they haven’t a grave to go to. Because there wasn’t a body to wash and bury. All they have is a telegram, like we had about Frederick. And then a letter. We had a letter from a Major Puttington-Bott – can that have been his real name?’

‘I should think it was.’

‘Father liked the letter, but when I read it again, I thought it might have been written about anybody. I don’t believe he even knew who Frederick was. That’s why when I got your letter—’

I have nothing to say to that. ‘What made you think of Ouija boards?’

‘My old French teacher asked if I’d like to go to a session with her. Her nephew was killed. She goes every week, but he hasn’t come through yet.’

‘My God.’

‘I know.’ Felicia looks suddenly weary. She gives a little shiver, and rubs her arms.

‘I ought to see to that furnace. It’s what I came for.’

‘It’s getting late. It doesn’t matter, I’m not cold. The range is lit in here now, and I’ve got a fire laid in the morning room.’ The morning room. Of course. I’d forgotten that was what they called it. They had so many words for things, the Dennis family, but I suppose that, in their lives, such words were necessary and had been devised for a purpose. That is, they described what was real to the Dennises.

‘Is she better?’ Felicia is asking, and I stare at her for a blank second. ‘Mary Pascoe. Is her chest better?’

‘Yes,’ I say, before I’ve thought about where the sentence might take me, ‘at least, she’s not as bad as she was.’

‘Is she out of bed? Can she go outside?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I ought to visit her, Dan. She needs a woman to see to her.’

‘I can see to her as much as she wants.’

‘But there are things—’

I push back my chair. Something must show on my face, for Felicia says quickly, ‘I’m sure you look after her very well.’

She thinks I’m annoyed with her. What if I’d told her the truth at the outset? I almost wish that I had. Felicia might have believed me. I think she would understand how an old woman might die like a bird at the bottom of a hedge, and that it was right for Mary Pascoe to be buried in her own land, instead of under a stone among strangers. It wasn’t a terrible thing, compared to how men lie rotting. But it’s too late now. Felicia will want to believe me, but I’ll see her wondering how it can have been, and why I didn’t tell her the truth from the beginning.

I could ask Felicia to come with me now. We could stand together by Mary Pascoe’s grave. But what if she was afraid? What if she stumbled away from me with her arms outstretched in panic, and her skirts catching on the bushes? I don’t want Felicia to be frightened.

‘Do you still play the piano?’ I ask her, but she shakes her head.

‘Not for a long time.’

She learned the piano, and French. She had singing lessons. It was what girls like Felicia did. She wanted a telescope. She read Frederick’s Euclid, although he snatched it away from her and told her to stop pretending she understood it.

‘You could go to night school, Daniel,’ she says now, following some swerve of her own thoughts. ‘With all you’ve read, and the way you talk—’

‘There’s nothing I want to learn,’ I say.

‘Oh!’ she exclaims, as if I’ve hurt myself. ‘There must be something.’

‘Only how to live quiet, and make the hens lay better,’ I say.

‘You’re not very ambitious.’

‘Trouble with me, Felicia, I’ve fulfilled my ambition, and now I don’t like the look of it.’

‘What was your ambition?’

‘To stay alive.’ I say it meaning to hurt her, meaning to hurt her doubly, maybe. I’ve stayed alive, and Frederick and Harry Fearne will stay dead. I’m eating at their table, as she must long for them to do, but I don’t care a fig for it.

‘So you’ll stay at Mary Pascoe’s for the rest of your life, if she’ll have you,’ says Felicia sharply. She gets up and clashes our soup bowls together as she takes them to the sink. She runs cold water into a pan and hoists it on to the range to heat.

‘And you won’t ever go to Cambridge,’ I say to her back.

We are enemies. I look at her and see the warm quick shape of Frederick moving inside her like a ghost.

‘We could come to an agreement,’ she says, turning. ‘You go, and I’ll go too. I went to night school, you know. I didn’t tell you that. I was the only girl there.’

‘You said you didn’t want to leave here—’

‘I know. I say all kinds of things. But he’s not here, is he? I could pull the house down brick by brick and I wouldn’t find him.’

‘Could you do so, Felicia?’ I say, looking at her tender, narrow hands.

‘I could cause it to be done,’ she says grandly, in the way she would talk with her head in the air sometimes after we’d teased her too long.
Oh my blessed Felicia
, said Frederick once, and he caught hold of her, squeezed her tight, lifted her off the floor. I saw his face, surprised with love, and hers, radiant; and surprised too, because she didn’t know what she’d done to please him.

I want to say it to her now but I don’t dare. I was jealous of her then. I wanted Frederick to look at me like that, not at Felicia. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ I say instead. ‘Have you any tools, or did they take them?’

‘There’s a rack full in the cellar. I don’t know what you need. I think there are some special ones for the furnace. Nothing’s been moved. I could come down with you and hand them to you as you needed them. But I must be able to hear Jeannie. If she cried and I didn’t hear her—’

‘You can’t go down there. Those tunnels must be filthy.’ I remember the way the furnace squatted in the middle of the cellars, with tunnels leading from it, like veins. I would have to crawl down them to clear the hot-air passages to the vents. If they’ve been neglected—

‘There might be fumes; or bad air, anyway,’ says Felicia. ‘You shouldn’t go down there alone.’

‘How long since the furnace has been lit?’

‘Not since January. It wasn’t working well, even then. The hot air came out of the vents in the hall, but not in any of the bedrooms. We’ve made do with the range and fires.’

‘Then the main upstairs flue must be blocked. That could be why the furnace keeps going out.’

We look at each other. We have a plan. I’m to come tomorrow, and then maybe another day there’ll be another thing to mend. I have the freedom of the house now. I can go into all the rooms. I used to meet Frederick in the garden, and come into the house only when Mr and Mrs Dennis were absent. The house had an engine humming inside it, which was their life. I barely saw it, after the second Mrs Dennis came to the house. I crept into their library, secretly, with Frederick as my lookout. When it grew dark Frederick and Felicia sat together in her schoolroom, while the gaslight hissed. He said to her:
My blessed Felicia
. He never saw Jeannie.

I think Felicia has forgiven me for saying that she won’t ever go to Cambridge. At any rate, she comes and sits at the table with me again, resting her chin on her hands.

‘You should go away,’ she says. ‘Do you remember my grandmother, Dan?’

She wasn’t really Felicia’s grandmother, but her great-grandmother. She was more than eighty years old, shrivelled and silent. I never remember her speaking, but I saw her eat. They gave her bread-and-milk which she mambled round and round with her gums, because her teeth were gone. She came from another time, before the Dennises were rich and built Albert House. One day she died and was put into a little coffin, like a child’s coffin, and buried. The mist was down and I peeped at the mourners over the graveyard wall. Felicia, draped in black, stared back at me.

‘She left Frederick ten thousand pounds,’ says Felicia, ‘and now it’s come to me.’

‘How did she get that?’

‘I don’t know. My great-grandfather was in India. I want you to have half of it, Daniel.’

The breath is sucked out of me.

‘It’s what Frederick would have wanted. You could study. You could do as you liked. You could go where you liked. You’ve no one to keep you here.’ She looks up at me and I wonder if she knows how harsh it sounds, as if she’s nothing to me, or doesn’t want to be. As if there’s no relation between us. But Frederick—

I am back underground.

Frederick breathes heavily, snoring almost. I have him propped against me. Of course they will retake the shell-hole. Some of us must have blundered back to safety, those that aren’t dead or trapped like Frederick with legs that won’t move them. I saw Charlie Hassell crawling the wrong way, with blood in his eyes. Going side to side like a cut worm. I did nothing to help Charlie, didn’t even wipe away the blood so he could see. This morning he’d made tea in a billycan, thick and black and sweet, and I’d dipped my mug into it.

‘Frederick,’ I say in his ear, ‘don’t go to sleep. We can’t stay here.’

They’ll lob grenades down, there’ll be no risk to them. That’s what I’d do. The shell-hole’s deep, but not deep enough to hide us. The dead, rotten smell of water. The smell of Frederick’s blood. A wet wall of earth at our backs, squeezing out drops of slime.