Free The Lie by Helen Dunmore Page A

square room at the front, which used to be Mrs Dennis’s sitting room. She liked a fire, and he humoured her. All that big cold house, and only one room where Felicia could sit in comfort.
    ‘Why don’t you light the range?’ I ask her.
    ‘Are you cold?’
    ‘I would be, if I lived here.’
    She sighs. ‘It’ll be lit again tomorrow. Dolly let it go out so she could clean it properly, and blacklead it. I’ve got the gas ring. The house is warm, usually, but there’s something wrong with the furnace. I need to get someone to look at it, but no one here understands the system.’ Again that small shrug, an indifference deeper than her words.
    ‘Who used to look after it?’
    ‘Bert Rosewall, but he was called up a few months after you. My father showed Josh how to manage it, but now it keeps going out every time he lights it.’
    ‘I could look at it for you.’
    ‘Could you?’
    ‘Bodging’s a speciality in the army. They train us to be handy.’
    She looks down. ‘Of course. I didn’t mean I thought you couldn’t, Dan—’
    It’s the first time she’s called me Dan.
    ‘Is the house warm enough for the baby?’ I ask her.
    ‘Oh yes. She sleeps with me, and there’s a fire lit in my bedroom. She’s warm enough.’
    The damp and cold didn’t bother me. Square-bashing didn’t bother me. The food was better than I was used to, although I kept that quiet when I heard the others grumbling and comparing it to what their mums cooked. I carried on, bulling my boots and belt, marching, jabbing my bayonet into a straw figure while it jounced and shuddered. All the while there was the war, that Sergeant Mills knew about and we didn’t. What it was like to kill a man, or come under enemy fire that was meant to kill you. I didn’t think about it too much. Each day was enough in itself, and Boxall Camp made a separate world between Mulla House and the war. I thought I’d be all right, even when they started us on gas drill. I was green as grass. And then there was first aid drill, which was like no first aid I ever saw in France. We had a dummy which kept still and didn’t scream, bleed, or stink of shit because its insides were falling out. They taught us to tie a tourniquet, and apply field dressings, and that gas lies in pockets close to the ground long after you think it’s cleared.
    My eyesight is more than perfect. My aim too. When we got out on the rifle range, I was on the target time after time. I knew my rifle, knew what it could do, knew what to do if it was firing high. I could have set my sights on a sniper detachment, but I didn’t want to stick my neck out. It seemed then that if we all kept together, it couldn’t be so bad. We were taught to look after that Lee-Enfield like a baby: oil it, clean it with metal gauze that we didn’t yet know you could hardly get in the trenches, clean it with boiling water when it was fouled. You don’t separate yourself from your weapon, any more than you separate yourself from your arms or legs.
    I knew it wasn’t so much that I had a better aim, but that I could see better. Or faster. Perhaps it comes to the same thing. Frederick’s eyesight was perfect too, he always said, but it was never as good as mine. He used to argue about that when we were children, and I glimpsed a shoal of mackerel or a seal’s muzzle, always a second ahead of him.
    Frederick dropped out of my life like a stone. He was an officer cadet, because he’d been in the OTC at his school. Off he went to officer training school. In my ignorance, I’d thought it would be me and Frederick together, and we’d set sail for France in the same boat. I didn’t realise that the training for a man who was going to be commissioned would be quite separate, although I should have done. Once I was in camp, I knew almost at once how mistaken I’d been, and what the distance was between an officer and a man. They were creatures from another world. But Frederick wrote to me, in his crabbed