The Telling (6 page)

“Hi,” I said uneasily. “I’m Rachel; I’m the Clarkes’ daughter.”

“Is your mum with you?”

“No,” I said.

“It must have been you then,” she pulled a self-deprecating face. “My eyes aren’t so good anymore. I’m Jean, Jean Davies. Come on in. I’ll make some tea.”

She turned away, expecting me to follow. I went in across the blue- and blood-coloured lino tiles, into the dark hall. I’d have to face it, again. The telling.

WILLIAM STEPHEN WORE THE family christening gown, and howled when the water dripped onto his head, a sure sign of the Devil leaving him. I stood as godmother, and swore to renounce the Devil and all his works. There was a jar of bluebells on the windowsill above the font. The Reverend was solemn, handled the baby with uneasy care, and when I took the hot squalling bundle from him, he smiled at me, relieved, and for that moment, it seemed almost as if all distinction of rank had disappeared and we were not master and servant, nor pastor and parishioner, but God’s children, standing together and equal before our Father to welcome this new, howling Christian child into His family. I smiled back at the Reverend, and took the baby
in the crook of my arm, the white gown dangling in soft folds, his little body struggling, his face red and furious. I dipped my head to talk to the child, to comfort him.

Agnes had her head covered with a light lace scarf, which had been her grandmother’s. She looked pretty, though still pale and tired.

“He’s a fine strong lad. He’ll be a credit to you,” the Reverend said, when the service was over. Agnes’s cheeks flushed dog-rose pink. It was a pleasure to see it; it seemed a sure sign of her full return to health.

It was maybe a fortnight after the christening. It was a beautiful May evening; the sky was deepening blue and there was birdsong from the garden. Agnes had the baby lying in the curve of her arm as she sat, his head turned into her bodice and his nose pressed against the cloth. He was starting to be pretty. The room smelt of his milkiness. I read the story to Agnes, keeping my voice low so as not to disturb the child, and Agnes smiled as I read, but the baby stirred, and mewed, and she lifted him and set him against her shoulder, rocking back and forth, back and forth, crooning to him, and he just went on crying. I stopped reading.

“Is there anything I can do?”

She shook her head, and laid him down in her lap. She unbuttoned her dress, and her breast inside was hard-looking, streaked with blue, and the nipple was welling drops of pale bluish milk. I looked down at my hands. She tucked the baby inside her clothes, and he began to suck. She arranged her shawl over herself and the
child. I looked up again at her and smiled, but she was smiling down at her son.

“Shall I read on?” I asked.

She shook her head, and did not look up. I thought I should say something about little William Stephen, but could think of nothing to say that I hadn’t said already, and so we just sat there in silence, the only sound being that of the baby’s sucking and swallowing and the fire crumbling into coals. She looked up at me, her face pinched.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Sometimes. A little.”

I nodded.

When I bent to kiss her goodbye, she thanked me for my company, and the way she spoke, thin and breathy, mouthing the words at me rather than saying them, seemed to me to be the meaning of it all, and how everything would be from now, nothing left for me in her but the husk, the weightless chaff of words.

The evening was full of birdsong and May blossom. I walked down the coffin lane, the mud hard and dry underfoot. I came to the salmon pool and sat down underneath the hornbeam tree. A heron stood at the far bank, staring down into the water for the flicker of fish. I heard the church clock strike the quarter-hour. An otter slipped out of the water at my feet, saw me sitting there, looked at me with its wet eyes, and turned in one smooth movement to slip back into the water, as soundlessly as if it were formed entirely of that element.

I got back around the three-quarter bell, expecting to be scolded for my lateness, but the house was quiet, and the kitchen
was cool and dim. Dad was asleep in his chair, with his head thrown back and his mouth open, the fire crumbling into ashes at his feet. I put some sticks on the fire and lit a rush-light. I drew a chair over to the windowsill and set the candlestick on the chair arm to have the best of both lights. I got down my
Pilgrim’s Progress
.

Dad started to snore. The smell of old mutton fat from the rush-light was strong and unpleasant; I could have taken a dipped candle but it would have caused more trouble than it was worth. I turned a page. My eyes followed the lines of print. I shook the cobwebs from my head and tried to pay attention, but it wasn’t working; I couldn’t get through the words and into the world beyond. I was stuck there, in the darkening kitchen, with my father sleeping drunkenly in the chair; I was not walking the close-clipped grass at Christian’s side, setting out with him on his journey from Destruction to the Eternal City. All I could think was, Agnes is gone from me. It was right, and proper, and it made me feel that I would choke.

I let the book fall closed, and held it at the flyleaf. I looked at my name written there in Mr. Forster’s hand, my name, my prize for Scripture, the date of my leaving school. I’d been an idiot all this time. Since I first heard that there was going to be a baby, I’d thought somehow that it would be just like a doll that we could play with when we wished, and leave aside when we chose to.

I wanted more than anything just to lay my head down and close my eyes and be alone, but there was Dad there, snoring out drink fumes, and there would be others home before long; the house was always either full or threatening to be full. Sally had had the right idea, to go and be prenticed. At nineteen, I was too
old, and I didn’t need to ask to know that there wasn’t money for it, with the boys sent out, and Sally to be indentured now. To get away meant to go as a live-in servant in another village or in one of the towns, it meant millwork in the city, or it meant getting married.

The clock struck ten. The rush-light was burning low, sputtering. I licked my fingertips and pinched out the light. I levered off my clogs and carried them upstairs. I was going to lie down on the boys’ bed. I would stay there till they got home and turned me out.

On the landing, light slipped out under Mr. Moore’s door, pooling on the bare boards. I could smell the honey-scent of beeswax. A chair creaked. There was a breath, like a sigh. He moved: I heard the scrape of the chair on the floor. I shrank back into the darkness, but then the light was gone, pinched out. I heard the rustle of tugged covers, the creak of the bed. I leaned against the wall, pressing my head back into the rough stone and let a breath go shakily.

He had my room, he had my bed, he had beeswax candles and I had stinking rush-lights and was begrudged them. He passed me in the house as if I were a ghost. He was the stranger, but he had made me a stranger here.

I crept into the boys’ dark, untidy bedroom and lay down in my clothes. The pillow was musty and sour. My old bed was just a single course of stones away. Mr. Moore lay, so to speak, within arm’s reach of me. I turned and curled around, tugging the covers close, then twisted back again. My thoughts softened, started to drift, and in the darkness I was in my old room, and Mr. Moore was in my bed, and I was standing over
him, watching him sleep, and his eyes flicked open, and he looked up at me.

Ted woke me in the cold dark, shaking me by the shoulder. I heaved myself out of bed. The landing was dark and Mr. Moore’s door shut. The house was silent as I went downstairs. Dad had gone and Sally was asleep on the rug. I lay down beside her, and listened to her breathe. I couldn’t sleep. The images of my dream would not be shaken clear: Mr. Moore lying in my bed, looking up at me.

I must have drifted off eventually, because the five o’clock bell woke me cold and sore on the hearthrug. I washed my face and hands and neck, struggled into my clothes and clogs, drank some cold tea, ate some bread, and left the house as the sun was rising. The sky was salmon-pink with little wisps of golden cloud. I turned my back to it, headed down the village street, towards the vicarage.

I have never liked the way the vicarage looks at me, its big sash windows somehow blank, whatever the weather, whatever the light. Crunching up the gravel drive, through the dark yew trees and underneath the willows, I could feel the dim glass blink at me through the gaps in the shrubbery, making me feel guilty, making me feel ashamed, as if it were wrong for me to walk the same drive that was crushed by horses’ hooves and carriage wheels, by the slender soles of ladies’ shoes. I ducked around the side of the house, and in through the servants’ entrance. The smell of mice in the scullery was terrible; as usual there was no sign of the cat; Petra was too well-fed to consider catching vermin. I undid my clogs and put on my work slippers. My apron fastened in a careful bow, I straightened my cap in the vague coppery reflection of a milk pan.

We beat the bedroom carpets that day: it’s a nasty job. When they’re rolled up, carpets slip out of your grip, they slump and loll and are a trial on the stairs, and there is nothing to get hold of. Maggie was at the top end, staggering and sweating by the time she got to the half-landing, and I was at the bottom, stepping uneasily backwards down the stairs and taking most of the weight. The carpet drooped heavily between us. Mrs. Wolfenden watched from the landing, not because we needed watching; we’d been in the household longer than she had. Maggie and I had to bite our tongues all the way from the bedroom to the scullery. It was only once we’d heaved the carpet out into the yard that we were free to mutter and gripe, though the freedom was short-lived. We slung the carpet over the rope, and started beating, and then there was no more opportunity for complaint; talk meant getting a mouthful of dust.

The boys were playing in the street when Thomas came. I heard them shout to him and heard the scuffle and laughter when he joined in the game. I’d washed my face and hair, and the rest of me at the washstand in my parents’ room, stripped to my shift, while Sally leaned against the inside of the door to keep anyone from coming in, talking about Mrs. Forster’s new bonnet as I scrubbed off the carpet-dust and perspiration and mumbled my replies. Sally left her post to help me rinse my hair, pouring the water for me, making me catch my breath at the cold, at the rill she let run down the back of my neck and on between my shoulder blades. After, as we tidied away the tea things, I could feel the faint dampness of my braids against
my head, the scent of sage and rosemary, the crispness of fresh clothes, the cool tautness of my skin. It was pleasant to feel so clean.

But now that I heard Thomas about to come in it seemed an awkwardness; he might notice, he might say something. I stacked plates, then wiped the table, trying to cover my confusion, knowing Sally wouldn’t miss it, because she misses nothing. There were other voices too; men’s voices, kept too low to distinguish the speakers. Then the door opened and Dad came in, his cap pushed back. Thomas followed him, took off his cap, nodded to me and Sally, said good evening. Then Mr. Moore came in. He said nothing. I noticed that he looked at me, and that his eyes lingered a moment too long. He took off his hat, and went over to the dresser, and stood considering my books.

“All right, young Williams?” Dad said.

“My dad’ll be up shortly,” Thomas replied. “The Huttons and Mr. Gorst are coming too, from down our end of the village. Once they’re done for the evening.”

Dad brushed down his jacket front, drew himself up a little taller. “That’ll do rightly, lad.”

“We should be getting on,” Mr. Moore observed.

Dad agreed effusively and gestured Mr. Moore towards the stairs. Thomas seemed suddenly very conscious of himself. I caught a glance of his, there was a pinkish flush to his forehead. He followed the two older men up the stairs, and I just stood there, holding a dish and a teacloth in my hands. I heard them move around above me: they were in my room.

“Come on,” Sally said, “or we’ll be here till suppertime.”

She finished clearing the tea things, and I poured the hot water
from the kettle into the tub and washed up the crocks. I listened to the movement and the ongoing exchange of conversation upstairs but I couldn’t catch the words. It seemed to be Dad’s voice mainly. When Mr. Moore spoke, it would cause flurries of agreement from my dad; Thomas didn’t seem to say anything at all. Sally set down a dried dish, and waited for the next, and she looked at me as if to say, Of course
I
know what’s going on; so there was no way under heaven that I would actually ask her. The chimes began for half-eight, and I handed her the last tea plate, and she dried it, and put it down on the stack, and I went out of the back door with the tub and slopped the water onto the herb patch. I took a pinch of melissa, and rubbed it between my fingers, then tucked it into my bodice for the scent. I came back in, dangling the tub from one hand, as Mr. Gorst was coming in the front door, tobacco trailing after him, and behind him came Joe Stott and then the Hutton boys. Sally and I said good evening, and they nodded politely, and went upstairs, to our old bedroom. My face began to burn. The door had barely closed on them when there was a knock; I opened it and there was Mr. Bibby, his nose red as a rosehip, and Mr. Jack and his son from up Locka way, smelling of sheep, and then old Jimmy Williams, Thomas’s dad, with his hands still black from the byre; all of them coming in with red cheeks and a cloud of evening cool air, going past us with a nod and up the stairs, and joining the crowd in our old bedroom. The press of weight on the boards above us, the low rumble of voices, were like a gathering storm.

Then Thomas came back down, and lifted the two fireside chairs.

“It’s a pity you can’t come, Lizzy,” he said, sidling back past us. “It’d be just your kind of thing.”

“Indeed.”

“I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.”

“I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

“It would be no trouble at all,” he said, his cheeks reddening. Then he went upstairs, the chair backs tucked up under his arms, the seats hanging like panniers at his sides, and we were left with a blank expanse of cold stone floor, a rag rug, and the boys’ creepy-stools.

When Mam came in, Sally and I were sitting back to back, on the rug, working on our baskets, and I was envying the Wolfendens their carpets. She sat down with us, beside the stove, leaning against the wall. I got up and fetched a blanket, folded it and slipped it between her and the bare stone, to make her more comfortable. She didn’t comment on what was going on, and I wouldn’t ask, not in front of Sally, who already knew. At first, there was just the weight and restlessness of the men on the boards above our heads, the general grumble of voices, and the creak and tap of the willow as we worked it. Then Mr. Moore began to speak and all the other voices fell silent. Sitting there below, half drunk with tiredness, it seemed not so much a sound as an absence of sound, as though a dark space was opening up above our heads. I couldn’t make out the words.