The Telling (29 page)

“How long before the troops arrive, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go. Pack up tonight and go.”

“I am an old man—” He seemed about to say something more, but shook his head. “Go downstairs, and go to sleep.”

He closed the door on me, and my throat felt thick, and I was clumsy and stupid. I made my way blindly down the stairs, and lay down in my blankets, and could not sleep. I could hear the noise from the public house, all the way from the top of the village. Shouting and calling, and then music, and the jollity of it made me feel even more miserable, made me feel sick.

The next day I learned that the Reverend Wolfenden had been
seen out on horseback, heading away from the village towards Storrs; it seemed no one had spoken to him. Mrs. Briggs, who was from outside the village and lived in, and Mr. Fowler, were the only servants kept on at the house. The other servants had said that they were striking; I think many of them had been dismissed as I had, because of their families’ connections to the trouble; they just didn’t like to own it. Thomas told me all this, passing on the news in the cool of the morning, as he stood on our bottom step and leaned against the handrail.

“I don’t mean to be peddling scandal,” he said, “just to let you know how the wind blows, so that you needn’t feel so bad about your own circumstances.” He smiled at me. I was grateful to him for the kindness.

The Harvest Dance was to take place that evening. There was a strange holiday air about the village. The women had been out putting up decorations, pinning corn dollies and wreaths of autumn flowers, of fern and bay and ribbons to their doors. It seemed there was no getting out of it.

“Did you finish your dress?” Thomas asked.

I lied and said I had. He nodded, looking satisfied. I leaned there, on the handrail, a couple of steps up from him. Mr. Gorst passed on his strait-cart; it was tied with streamers, a rosette nodded on Poppy’s forelock. Agnes came out of her front door with the baby at her shoulder; I waved to her and she crossed the street to join us. That so much had happened, so much had changed, and that I still had to go to the dance with Thomas; it seemed unjust, it seemed ridiculous, it seemed almost funny.

Agnes stood with us a while, and the baby, swaddled tightly, its head hidden in a white cotton cap, butted at her shoulder.

“He’s hungry,” she said. “I’m trying to keep him hungry for a little while, so that then I can fill him up completely, otherwise all I ever do is feed him day and night, little dribs and drabs.”

Thomas flushed up. “I’d best be gone,” he said, and he went off down the village street towards his mam’s house with that long-legged lope of his.

“How are you now?” I asked Agnes. She shook her head, and looked puzzled, and was almost laughing.

“Every day he changes,” she said. “It’s as though he becomes more like himself. It’s stupid, but I already miss him, the tiny little him, I miss yesterday’s him, and tomorrow I will miss today’s.”

Mam opened the door behind me, and I pressed back against the handrail to let her pass. Her right arm was weighted with a covered basket. She greeted Agnes and commented on the baby’s size. She was at the bottom of the steps when she turned back to me.

“When your dress is finished, will you pick the damsons, and bring them with you when you come up to the green? I haven’t had a minute, but they’re good and ripe and sweet as anything.” Then she went off up the street.

“Well, I must go and feed the little man then,” Agnes said. I stepped down onto the street and kissed her, and said that I would call for her soon.

“I’ll be at the dance,” she said, “though I doubt that I’ll be doing much dancing.”

The damsons were warm and soft and bluish-bloomed. They came away easy from their stalks. I was thinking of the last spate
of books that Mr. Moore had left me, of the bewitched Medea sailing off with Jason, her dismembered brother’s body drifting in their wake. I was thinking of the smell of crackling fat, the skin stretched crisp and golden, a roast child on a platter carried into a wedding feast. These things of such horror and gravity and darkness, that had, at the same time, a kind of conviction and certainty that seemed wonderful to me. A poet lost in a forest and confronted by wild beasts; Ulysses lashing together tree trunks on Calypso’s island; Ophelia adrift in the water, trailing flowers, because there was really nothing left for her to do but die.

Once I had picked the damsons, I would have to finish the dress. There was only the hem left to turn. Then I would wash and dress and pin up my hair and go to the dance, and I would dance with Thomas. And Mr. Moore would leave, if not today then very soon; he had to leave; he had to be made to go. I would stay, and Thomas and I would marry, unless I could think of some way out of it, and I was beginning to see that I could think of no way out of it at all. I felt angry with Dad, and with Thomas, and with Mam, and with Mr. Moore, but most of all, I felt angry with myself. Other hands may have cut out the pieces, but I had sewn every stitch of my situation.

I was standing underneath the drooping damson branches, my bowl not yet half full. I had stood there I don’t know how long, without picking a single fruit. I closed my eyes and took a long slow breath. The gentry were fled. The clergy were gone. The strike continued. The troops were on their way, no doubt of it. However little I wished him to be gone, he had to be made to see that he must go. He had stayed too long already. I had to make him leave; I had to know that he was safe, even if that meant I
could never see him again. He could not be sent half a world away to die. I would not let it happen.

He’d left the door open. He was sitting on his bed with his legs stretched out over the counterpane and his patched boots dangling over the edge. He was leaning back against the wall, so that he could look up the village street, at the passers-by, the flower garlands, the corn dollies, the streamers. I watched him in silence for a moment, then he turned from the window to look at me. His face was drawn; it seemed to be in strange contrast to the childlike way that he was sitting.

“There you are,” he said.

I nodded. He had been thinking of me: the realization made other thought difficult.

“Did you get your dress finished?”

The question was even more unsettling. I watched his right thumb stroke the back of the left, following the length of the white scar.

“I haven’t done the hem yet.”

Then the band started up on the green. It was faint enough due to the distance, but the music seemed to buzz around me, and I wanted to bat it away, like a wasp. An annoying tune, bright and cheerful.

“You’d better get it finished then,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Your mother will have your hide.”

“I know.”

His fingers interlocked, separated. Nails pinched at a scrap of
skin, pushed back cuticles; just like that first night, his hands were restless, never still.

“That boy will be lucky to get a look in.”

I shook my head, vexed by the distance between his thoughts and mine.

“With you in your new dress,” he said, “every man there will want to dance with you.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Anyway, they won’t. It doesn’t matter.”

His eyes were so clear and direct that although I was colouring I could not look away. I was still holding the bowl of damsons; I hadn’t thought to put it down. I knew I must look bad-tempered and ridiculous; it didn’t matter. I took a step towards him, into the room.

“You must go, Mr. Moore.” The subject finally broached, words kept tumbling out. “There was a boy hurt last night, up at Storrs; Sammy Tate.”

“Sammy? Is he all right? What happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. But you must leave now, as quickly as you can, you must get out of here before they blame you for it.”

He blinked. “I can’t leave you.”

And though everything was just as it had been, the bookcase, the bed, the table and chair, and him sitting there looking pale and tired and like a child, it was as though the sun had come through clouds and lit everything differently, and everything seemed transformed. He shifted himself to the edge of the bed and got up. The wooden frame creaked just like it used to.

“I know you hate to sew,” he said. “I know you have no patience for it. Every time you’ve picked up that dress to work
on it, your face has been a picture of vexation, and you don’t know it but you look so—your skin, and the cotton in a heap in your lap, it’s the perfect colour for you, that boy isn’t entirely witless. And the light catches in your hair, and maybe you don’t know that there’s a tint of red there, and you sit there squinting at your work, and your forehead’s all furrowed and you’re muttering under your breath.” He took a breath then and let it go thinly, between narrowed lips. “It’s been breaking my heart every day, watching you, knowing that you’ll wear the dress for another man. For him.”

I felt that I was standing in openness and sunshine and air, the sky great above me, the prospect limitless. He came closer.

“Not even a man; a youth, a
boy
. I have to ask you, I’m sorry, but I have to know. Are you going to marry him?”

Up on the green, the band lost their timing, the individual instruments stumbling to their separate halts. For a moment there was peace.

“My parents think I should.”

“And so you will?”

“I have to do something, I can’t go on living here forever. It’s been far too crowded since they let out my room.”

His face went as grey as ash. “You can’t resign yourself to this, to being a beast of burden, a brood mare—”

“Do you have a better idea?”

I couldn’t help but smile. He caught my smile and answered it.

“Yes.”

I didn’t know why there were tears. I moved towards him, and his arms were open to receive me, and there was a moment’s space between us, and my eyes were on a level with the open neck of his
shirt, the brown skin and soft curls of hair. Then he put his arms around me and drew me to him, and I reached my arms around him, and his body was warm; I felt the warmth of him, and rested my head against his shirt, and pressed myself tightly to him, and I could hear the thud of his heart, and feel his breath press against me, and I could hardly breathe for happiness.

Each type of wood has its own particular scent. Where woodlands are old and mixed it is not always easily determined, but where only one type of tree is planted for timber or coppiced for charcoal or basketwork, or where one tree stands alone, distinct and separate from all others, the individual scents are unmistakable. In sunshine, after rain, sycamore has a greenish sappy scent, beech trees smell sweet and nutty. Shelter under an oak from a shower, and you will become conscious of the fragrance all around you, a wholesome smell like moss and oatmeal. Willow, on the other hand, retains through all processes a bitter yellow taint: it seems to linger on the senses, remain a sourness in the throat.

Robert Moore smelt of oak.

I know I smell of willow, it is worn into my skin.

We ate the damsons, sucked the melting toffee flesh from the stones. We lay there without speaking, lying on the bed, on my old bed, on my old patchwork quilt, me in nothing but my shift and loosened stays, him in nothing but his shirt. I felt shy of him, very conscious of the sounds of my eating, and of the places where our limbs still touched. I turned a damson stone around on my tongue, and picked it from my lips, and held it warming in
my hand with the other ones, not knowing what else to do with them. The street was quiet below, and there was distant gentle music from the green.

He touched the cool flesh of my arm with his scarred hand. I glanced around at him. He smiled an awkward, shy smile.

“Now you have to marry me.”

My future had seemed set in stone, but we had thrown that stone into the air, and it had landed with a smash and shattered, scattering into a thousand little pieces, and the pieces had rolled and tumbled, and were settling into a new pattern; a beautiful new pattern, any pattern at all: I could arrange it as I wished.

“Do you remember how you told me about that shrew?” he asked.

He lifted the empty damson bowl and held it to me: I dropped the fleshless stones into it; he tumbled his palmful in after.

“I remember.”

“And you said,
We flicker into life, and out again, like candle flames
. Do you remember that?”

He put the bowl down beside the bed; I closed my hand, feeling the fruit-juice film of stickiness.

“I think so.”

He turned back to me. “And you said about fishes turning into stones, and everyone going about from day to day ignorant of the fact?”

“Yes.”

“I always thought that you were pretty. But since that day, the idea of you with that boy—” He shook his head.

A thought blossomed in my head, making me smile: “Is that why you kept lending me the books, to keep me from my sewing?”

He smiled back at me. “My motives there were purely scholarly.”

The clock struck the half-hour, and he asked what o’clock it was, but I didn’t know. He said that we should get dressed and I agreed, but neither of us moved. We lay in silence for a while. My shyness had melted entirely. He reached out an arm, and I pressed myself to him; his arm under my head, my cheek on his chest, a knee curled onto his leg, an arm around his waist. His hand touched my hair.

“It’ll be unsettled, Elizabeth. Our life together; it’s bound to be.”

“I don’t care.”

“It’ll be difficult.”

“I don’t care.”

And I really didn’t. No obstacle was insurmountable; anything could be achieved.

“I’ve been thinking about America. Could you fancy America?”

America. The boy had sailed there in the ballad. In a ship with sails that bellied out like linen on the line.

“I think I could.”

The three-quarter bell struck, and he stirred, slid his arm out from underneath my head, and he got to his feet, and then took my hand and I stood up with him, and he took a step back from me, and just stood looking at me as I stood there, and he was so serious and sober in manner, that I didn’t feel ashamed, and I knew that this was a time more real than any other, and unchanging, permanent. He pulled me to him and held me again, the length of his body pressed against mine.