Free The Lie by Helen Dunmore

kettle on it. Beside the ring, the slab gleams coldly. The table is scrubbed white, but the long run of it is empty apart from the plate from which Felicia must have been eating. The kitchen is as chill as the rest of the house, and there’s no smell of cooking. I notice Felicia’s teeth-marks in her bread and butter, before she comes round the table and picks up her plate, as if she wants it out of sight.
    ‘You should finish that,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t mind me.’
    ‘I’m not hungry.’ Then she sees me looking at the food and says, ‘I’ll cut some more bread, and there’s plenty of cheese. I’m sure there must be chutney somewhere.’
    I am suddenly so hungry that my mouth floods with saliva. I watch as she takes the loaf, holds it in the crook of her arm and cuts inexpert slices. She fetches a crock of butter, unwraps the cheese from its muslin and lays it on another plate. The chutney jar, when she finds it, is still sealed.
    ‘Do you think it’s still all right?’ she asks, showing me the label. Apple & Walnut Chutney, 1916, DQ. Four years old.
    ‘I should think so.’
    ‘There are all kinds of jars in the larder. Jam, and marmalade, even eggs in isinglass.’
    ‘You should throw the eggs away. But jam and marmalade will be all right. You should eat those.’
    Felicia shrugs slightly. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t be bothered.’
    We are both looking at the date on the label. 1916. In 1916 we had never seen France. I think of Dolly chopping the apples and walnuts with her black-handled knife. That blade used to flash so quick. There wasn’t an atom of motion wasted. Chop chop chop and the white apples were in equal pieces, plunged into water with a squeeze of lemon to stop them turning brown. It’s a fact: this jar of chutney has outlived Frederick.
    ‘Get rid of the eggs before they explode, like the rhubarb wine,’ I say heartily.
    Felicia smiles a little. ‘Oh yes, I remember.’
    The rhubarb wine was bottled too soon, or too late perhaps. Anyway it continued to ferment inside the bottles until they exploded, one by one, in the middle of the night. It made a great story in its time.
    ‘Have you a spare jar, to put the violets in?’ I ask her, and she fetches an empty fish-paste pot. I fill it with water, and place the violets in the middle of the table.
    The chutney is good. As soon as I taste the food, greed flares in me and I have to stop myself shovelling it in. It’s fresh household bread, and the cheese is sharp and salty. I force myself to chew it slowly. It tastes so good, better than anything I’ve eaten since I came back. Felicia makes the tea, and then sits opposite me. She eats a little, chewing effortfully, then pushes her plate aside.
    ‘It’s very nice,’ I say.
    ‘How do you live, out there? How do you get bread? You don’t come into town.’
    ‘I do well enough.’ There must be a roughness in my voice, although I didn’t intend it, because she looks down and busies herself with the teapot. I am sorry for it. She looks tired, and pinched, maybe with cold. There’s a damp chill in the house which is more obvious now that we’ve sat here for a while. It was always a warm house. When he built it Mr Dennis installed a system that no other house in the county could equal for efficiency. Or so he said. There was a furnace deep under the house, in the cellars, and a warren of pipes and passages leading from it to every room. Pipes ran up behind the walls, carrying heat to the bedrooms. There were ducts in the floors, with grilles through which the warm air rose. The same furnace heated water, which was piped to the bathrooms and the bedrooms upstairs. When I told my friends at school about it, they didn’t believe me. It sounded like magic, that you could open a tap at any time and hot water would gush out. Mr Dennis was in a position to care nothing for the price of coke or coal.
    For this reason the house was built with only one downstairs fireplace, in the small