The Telling (20 page)

One evening, my mam said I looked like I was ailing, and she got the tonic down from the dresser, and poured me an eggcupful. The next morning, she got up with me, and saw that I had something to eat, and another dose of tonic before I left for work. I welcomed the touch of her hard hand on my chin as she tipped the treacly mixture into my mouth. It tasted good: rich, sweet, of aniseed and other herbs; it made me shake my head and shudder, and it softened the edges of the day, helped me drift into sleep at night.

I heard them talking one evening, my mother and father. I was working a basket, turning it in my lap to weave the withy through the frame. I must have looked as if I were dreaming, or dozing, or dazed after taking my tonic. They had their heads close together, closer than they ever usually were, whispering. I heard Mam say,
she
, and again,
she
, the hissing sound of it carrying better than the other words. I kept my eyes on the basket and my hands moving, pretended not to notice. Mam nodded towards me, still speaking quietly to my dad.

“Well, the lad needs some encouragement,” he said out loud.

Mam shushed him and glanced at me, and we looked at each other a moment, and then she looked away.

The next evening, after tea, Mr. Moore and my dad and Mam were all in the kitchen. It was still light and would be for hours yet. The boys were out playing. Mam and I were at the baskets, Dad read his paper and Mr. Moore a book, which I took care not to let my eyes linger on. There was a knock; the kind that does not expect an answer; the door opened. I could hear the children playing out, and fiddle music from up the street. Thomas came in.

He said a general good evening, and pulled the door shut behind him, cutting off the children’s calls, the music and the evening air. He seemed stiff and strange. His eyes skimmed over Mr. Moore, lingered on my dad, and then rested on my mam. He didn’t look at me. Mam dipped her head, almost a nod. Thomas’s expression seemed to ease for just a moment, then to screw even tighter. He turned to me, and cleared his throat.

“The evening’s fine, will you come out walking for a while?”

I noticed Mr. Moore lift his head and look at Thomas, then at me.

I glanced down at the unfinished basket. “I have too much work to do.”

“Leave it,” Dad said abruptly, making me flinch. “The baskets can wait.”

Dad got up from his chair, lifted the basket from my lap and took it over to the stack under the stairs, leaving me without excuse or defence. Mam raised herself from her chair and went to the chest. I stood up to protest. She brought my Sunday bonnet out, and over to me, and set it on my head, and smoothed the
ribbons. She tied them under my chin. I could smell the lavender from the chest. She didn’t meet my eye.

I was at a loss. Finding myself so conspired against, it was impossible to resist without giving real offence. Mam gave me a little push on the small of the back, and I crossed the room towards Thomas. As he opened the door for me, I glanced back, and caught Mr. Moore’s dark gaze. I had a sense that it lingered on me after I had turned away.

Thomas and I walked in silence; I was astonished at what had so easily been managed between them. The evening was a soft one, grey and cool. We walked down to the shilloe beds, side by side, a basket’s distance apart. Thomas skimmed stones, and I watched them bounce and ripple across the river. The heron flapped away, legs trailing.

“Will you come to the Harvest Dance with me?” Thomas asked, brushing his hands.

I watched the heron rise above the hornbeam trees, its slow wing-flap dragging it higher and higher into the air, away.

I said, “If you want me to.”

When I got back, Mr. Moore was still sitting in the kitchen. He glanced up when I came in. Thomas had followed me in, and came to stand by my side. My father regarded us both, somehow differently, as if a change had been effected which was for him a source of pride. For a moment I just stood there, conscious of Mr. Moore’s enquiring gaze, as Dad folded his arms and looked fondly on me and Thomas, and Thomas stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, and grinned.

“Where’s Mam?” I asked.

“Evening milking,” Mr. Moore replied unexpectedly. Our eyes met. I thought of what he’d said about God and the Bible, and how he must have watched me disputing with the carter and known what was said about husbands and
us
and
we
; how he’d stared at me and laughed when I had curtseyed to him and said I’d mistaken him for a gentleman, and how he’d offered me any book of his to read, and had had the grace never once to question how I might have come to read them before he’d given me permission, which proved he was a gentleman however little he liked to own it, and the way he’d said,
Nineteen and a housemaid
, and shaken his head. And the way he was looking at me now as I was standing by Thomas; his expression was so sharp and thoughtful, it seemed as though he were about to speak. The moment was of vital importance; it was the crux of everything; what he was about to say mattered more than I could understand.

“Had a good night then, my lass?” Dad asked.

The moment broke, our gaze fell away from each other, and I was left with a hint of something wonderful, something I couldn’t really believe.

“It’s lovely out,” I said. “Just beautiful.”

“I asked Lizzy,” Thomas said, “and she said she would, but I wanted to ask you too; can I take her to the Harvest Dance?”

Dad expanded happily. “Of course you can, son.”

Thomas made as if to reach out a hand towards me. I pretended not to notice. Mr. Moore stood up. He turned to lift a book from where he’d left it on the windowsill. I could still feel the place on my arm where he had touched me all those weeks
ago; though painless, it was almost as if I’d been branded there; if I were to roll up a sleeve, there would still be his mark upon my skin.

“Goodnight,” Mr. Moore said, to no one in particular. The stairs creaked under him.

It was still light out when I went to bed. I thought that I might read a while. I padded over to the dresser in my shift and considered the chapbooks, the Martyrs and Saints and Pilgrims, without enthusiasm. And that was when I noticed it, slipped in between the
Progress
and the Bible; the thick red spine of an unknown book. I drew the volume out. The cover was soft cloth, worn about the edges so that the threads were bare, and the grey board beneath showed through.

I could not help myself. No more than Eve. I bit deep.

It was a book of natural history; I’d never seen anything like it before. I was enchanted by the engravings. A bramble stem and flower; I gazed at that plate a long while in the evening light, the way the dark fruit glowed, the way the petals had that pale delicacy that they have in life, like the skin beneath the shell of a boiled egg.
Rubus fruticosus
, I read, spelling the words out in my head, and I was nervous, because I knew that this was Latin and Latin was religion, and Catholic at that, and that if this book was religion and Mr. Moore’s I should certainly not read it; but I couldn’t leave it now.

The bramble was near relative of the rose, with stems that
arch and scramble in hedgerow and scrub. Flowers white or pink, solitary or clustered, petals five, stamens many. I turned the page. Water Avens, I read, Wood Avens, Wild Strawberry. Head of achenes, styles persistent, becoming hooked. The words were strange, but linked to such familiar things, they gained a kind of resonance and poetry. The book was a study and celebration of God’s creation: it seemed therefore that it could not be wrong in matters of doctrine. The pictures showed the plants laid out whole and in their parts against a blank background, like skinned and gutted animals. I recognized many from the hedgerows, fields, marshes and fells, and at the same time I felt that I was seeing things for the first time, entirely new. I had picked wild strawberries, and eaten them, relishing the sweet graininess of their flesh, but I had only known the plant as an animal knows it, as being good to eat. This book set each plant apart from all other plants, from all other things, from every other part of creation, and considered it for itself alone, and when that was done, it drew, as it were, a spider’s web of relation between it, and all its relatives, and everything else with which it had connection, from the beasts that ate it to the butterflies that laid their eggs on it, to the wet or dryness of the soil in which it flourished. I had never thought that there could be a book like this. I learned that sorrel was a sister to the dock, that what we call Queen Anne’s lace, elsewhere others call cow parsley.

The light faded and my eyes were sore. I let the book fall shut. That night, my dreams were tangled and overgrown, and blossomed with white flowers.

That day at the vicarage was the bottling of plums. The kitchen was all steam and scalds and burning sugar and bad temper. I didn’t care: the book would be there when I got home. I’d slip it into my apron pocket and say I was going over to see Agnes. Then I’d head down to the river, sit on the shilloe, where Thomas and I had gone the night before, and read for an hour or so undetected.

But when I returned the book was gone. There was another in its place; a small blue volume. I turned around to Mr. Moore, my lips parting to challenge and complain. Mam was setting the kettle and Dad was hanging up his jacket. Mr. Moore sat at the fireside, his eyes rigidly set upon his book, his lips pursed tight as if to hold back a smile. I realized I could not risk saying anything.

My dad sat down and started talking to Mr. Moore. Thomas was a good lad, he was saying, but his father was a villain, which is how he’d got to be so prosperous, more prosperous than other folk. Mr. Moore closed his book, keeping his thumb between the pages to mark the place, and set his face in a listening expression. The only thing for it, Dad said, was to make more baskets, and if that meant making them faster and less well, what matter, since as it was no one else seemed to recognize their quality anyway.

Dad occupied with complaining, I took the book down, examined it discreetly. The pages were thick and creamy. It was by Reverend John Milton, and called
Paradise Lost, A Poem in Twelve Books
. I glanced over again at Mr. Moore. It seemed to me that although his eyes were fixed on my father’s flushed face, his attention was somehow directed towards me. I watched his profile. I watched the lines around his eyes. They seemed to deepen, even though his lips did not smile. I slid the book into my pocket.

“I’m just popping over to Agnes’s for an hour or so,” I said; no one seemed to notice.

The sand martins skimmed over the river, catching flies. The willows made a screen from passers-by. Those first lines were more difficult than anything in Mr. Lyell’s
Geology
, and there were no engravings or plates to admire; but I would not be put off, I would not be beaten. With persistence, I got the pattern of the verse, the way the meaning stretched and twisted and slid through the lines. Since it was written by a clergyman, I read it without qualm, and was soon caught up in the familiar inevitability of the story. I didn’t notice the passing of the hours, the dimming of the light, the striking of the bell; it was only when I started to shiver in the evening chill that I realized that it was late, and that I would be in trouble. I had to run most of the way home.

The kitchen was empty. No one had sat up, worried or angry, waiting for me. I made my bed, and lay in the last glow of the fire, and read about Sin, who was beautiful, and lived in Heaven, and whose father was Lucifer himself, and who I hadn’t read of before, not as a person, not in the Bible. Sin never had a mother, but was born straight out of her father’s head, and he left her to grow up in the company of angels, and when she was grown, Lucifer met her again, and saw how beautiful she was, and wanted her. He had his way with her. When Lucifer was cast out of Heaven, she was cast out too, and fell when all the other rebellious angels fell; but she was alone, outcast from their company, which was a double cruelty, since she had not been so much
rebellious, as obedient and abused. Fallen and alone, kept in utter darkness, she was made keeper of the Gate of Hell, entrusted with a key and made to wait there, and forbid passage to anyone who came that way. A baby was born, a son to her father, and the child was Death, and he grew up fast, a demon of a child, and he forced himself on her. She grew hideous and serpent-like in her dark maternity, and bore to Death a swarm of vile creatures, which crawled and clawed all over her and in and out of her, and bit at her and sucked her blood, and she lived there in darkness, loathsome and tormented, till Lucifer came to the Gate of Hell, seeking his escape, radiant with the light of his own beauty. He didn’t know her for his daughter and the woman he had ruined, she was so hideously transformed; Lucifer, for all his evil-doing, for all his accursedness, had been allowed to keep his beauty. He told her to open the gate, that he might make his escape from Hell, and since he was her father, she obeyed. My eyes were becoming too tired, and were falling shut, and I let the book drop onto my chest, and closed my eyes, and fell straight asleep, and when I woke the next morning, the book was splayed like a dead bird on top of me. I put the book back on the shelf, but with some anxiety; I had not finished it; what if it went the way of the red one?

I was walking down the village towards the vicarage, the warm early sun in my eyes, my mind still locked up in the darkness of that story, and thinking why God would have made a gate to Hell; He could have dropped the falling angels in from above, filled Hell up with syrup and pressed a lid down tight and sealed it, and kept them there like bottled plums for all eternity, and never let Lucifer and Sin out to torment us. I came up to the servants’ door, and
went into the dim hallway. Petra stalked through, her tortoiseshell fur sleek with pleasure; for once she had a dead mouse hanging from her jaws. I let her out. I sat down on the bench, untied my laces, and pulled off my clogs. I pushed my feet into my slippers. Wiser minds than mine had almost certainly settled such questions long ago, but I couldn’t forget Sin, and what seemed, to me at least, the unfairness of her situation.