Reading by Lightning (26 page)

I would happily have followed George until dawn, but Madeleine said she was cold and so we turned back. Crossing the garden on the way in, I felt a hand take me by the wrist. Don't go in, George mouthed, his lips barely moving. While Madeleine walked Jenny to her door and Monty rolled a last cigarette, I stood against the shed and waited, cradling my arms against the cold, feeling my hand burning with the imprint of his hand out on the path (his hand that had slid up my leg at the New Year's party). I stood trying to contain my heart thudding painfully in my chest, seized by the realization that love (which had sent me to this dark moor) was about to claim me at last.

We stepped into the potting shed, and I ran my fingers through my damp hair. George fumbled around and a match flared up. He was lighting the lantern, and so I saw that it was a declaration I was about to receive, not a kiss. He set the lantern on the ledge beside the skull and we stood facing each other, blinking in the sudden light.

I want to show you something, he said. He reached for a brown paper bag lying on the workbench and fished something out of it. Here, he said. Look at this.

The stone he pressed into my hand was oblong and black. I was so taken aback that I almost dropped it.

It's
dung,
he said. Fossilized hyena dung, from the caves at Kirkdale. That's in Yorkshire, not far from here. They found the bones of five hundred hyenas in those caves! And the remains of lynx and lions and bears. Can you believe it?

It's a stone, I said, setting it on the workbench. Everything was a little distant, as if I were looking through a wash of water.

Well, that's because it's fossilized, he said, picking it back up and bobbing it in his hand. It's coprolite. If you cross-sectioned it you'd find bone splinters inside — bones of all the animals the hyena was eating.

It looks like an ordinary stone to me, I said. My heart had slowed its pounding.

Well, yes, he said. He eyed me warmly. The fossils made it hard for people to classify things. Early on, I mean. Everything was stone. They were finding stone fish in the rocks. And so they didn't have a clear line between what was organic and what was mineral.

Maybe there is no line, I said. Rock can grow.

He bent down from his height, his face suffused with thought. Okay, yes, he said. Stalactites, I suppose. Or coral. A lot of people think coral is rock.

Rock can grow in your body, I said, thinking of Mrs. Feazel. Gallstones.

Yes! he cried. Gallstones! He laughed, he was delighted by the thought of gallstones. Gesner classified gallstones as gems — like pearls. Conrad Gesner — you haven't heard of him? He set out to classify everything — stones, shells, fossils, animals. This was in the sixteenth century. But then he died in the plague. In Zurich. So just to amuse myself, I'm working on the index for his encyclopedia. Look, these were his categories. He pulled a folder stuffed with papers off the shelf and opened it. On the top sheet was a list of headings:

On Stones Resembling Aquatic Animals.

On Objects Resembling Human Artefacts.

On Fossils Reflecting the Qualities of the Heavens.

And, simply:
Problematica.

The light from the lantern wobbled and I bent closer over his chart. Starfish, I said, recalling the specimen on the shelf in his room. How did he classify starfish?

I seemed to be participating in this discussion, but really I was not, for the worm of romance had entered my heart.

So it wasn't George's hand that crept onto my thigh when we were all fishes pressed together by the shed. In a flash I discarded the hand, tossed it out of my heart with a shudder. But the night we walked on Oldham Edge was as memorable as if I'd been given the kiss I longed for. I had tasted romantic hope, and then been thwarted. And this thwarting, this wound to my vanity (a tiny wound, after all, for I hadn't let on what I was thinking), had a more potent effect on me than a kiss would have had, hardened my resolve to make of George what I wanted him to be.

I moved that night into a period of my life where every single new thought led swiftly back to George. I was with his family — every encounter was a chance to learn more about George. I'd sit on my bed reading and Uncle Stanley would appear in my doorway as if he'd stepped off a colour plate from a military history — it was Legion night, he had his puttees wound round his legs. He had my shoes in his hand and thrust them at me. I'd left them in the downstairs hall, apparently. Apparently that wasn't allowed. I got up and took them from him and he turned and walked heavily back down the stairs without a word. From my bedroom door I watched the crease in the back of his neck disappear around the landing, watched him with interest. How had a man like Uncle Stanley ever come to raise a boy like George?

My Uncle Stanley fought in the Great War and was wounded at the Somme. He was in a hospital in France for a long time. It was just a flesh wound but it turned septic, and finally they brought him back to England. By then Aunt Lucy had left the linen shop and trained as a nurse, and she was working at the military hospital in Manchester. When they brought him in she was in the storage cupboard with a friend, bent over a letter a soldier had written to them both, and the Sister had to call for five minutes before she heard her and came out with her rosy face all covered with apologies.

Stanley Sheffield was handsome and well spoken, but there was something peevish about him. Aunt Lucy never saw this as who he was. She put it down to the misery he was in, the fleas he had brought with him from France and the smell of putrefaction rising from his bandages. The nurses were used to peevishness and just jollied the boys along. Shortly after he came to the hospital the papers were full of talk of a negotiated peace, and he asked her for help in getting what he needed to
write a letter, and then had her post it to both the
Manchester Guardian
and the
Times
of London. It was a one-sentence letter:
Reading your newspaper today I discover that I have lost the use of my right leg so that Mr. Woodrow Wilson can demonstrate his beneficence to the Huns.
He had not lost the use of his leg, that was just a bit of rhetoric, but he did fight the infection for months and months before the wound finally healed over. When the infection went away and the petulance stayed, my Aunt Lucy said the war had changed him. Why would a tall, dark-haired, well-educated young man from a good family turn that sort of face to the world otherwise?

He was an only child, raised in Birmingham, the son of an actuary. He said
hospital
and
bottle
properly, so you had to appreciate the independent good sense he showed in marrying the daughter of a toll keeper. But there was a diffidence in Aunt Lucy that might have made him think he could reshape her. If so, I think he must have been thwarted: her diffidence was not a lack of definition, it was who she was. She was artless and unthinkingly kind. Why she was drawn to him, that's another matter. By then she was twenty-four. With so many of the boys gone, it must have been like playing musical chairs, you grabbed the one nearest you and were glad of it, especially when the one nearest turned out to be a handsome man with a bit of money. They were married soon after Stanley got out of the hospital, even though the war was still on. Stanley thought he would go back to France, but that's not where they sent him. They assigned him to Lyndhurst as a drill master for the wretched boys and middle-aged men they were sending up by then.

After the armistice he took his discharge, and his uncle helped him get a place as an overseer at the mill in Oldham. Oldham was a step up for Aunt Lucy, a mill town but a more vigorous one than Salford, with a bustling market. Far enough away to feel she had her own new life and close enough that
she could take her kiddies to see their grandparents. She was ready for that, so ready that she never had the nuisance of a monthly period as a newlywed. But she lost that baby in the third month, and after that, three years went by with (as Aunt Lucy put it) no sign of nothing. She'd escaped Nettie Nesbitt's fate, but now she feared the Shillingfords', bending politely over other people's prams in the street, eating Christmas dinners with your neighbours because you had no one around your own table, growing thinner year by year instead of stouter.

Then one morning after Stanley had left for work, a knock came at the front door. It was the vicar and his wife. The wife was holding a wee baby wrapped up in a towel. It was tiny, just born, and its face was as red as a brick. Lucy invited them in and put the kettle on, and the vicar told her that the baby had been born the night before to a local girl. Aunt Lucy asked who the mother was. She's a girl from a good family, the vicar said, just a little errant in her ways. Maybe we'll leave it at that, he said. The baby was fussing then, and the vicar's wife asked Lucy if she wanted to hold him. Lucy put her finger to his mouth and he started to suckle it. And so she said she would keep him until Stanley came home from work and then they would make up their minds. There was a woman on the lane with a baby, and when the vicar and his wife had gone she went straightaway to borrow what she called a “bokkle” so she could feed him properly. She'd told the vicar she would have to ask Stanley, but by the time Stanley got home, she was that stuck on the little flamer that Stanley didn't have much of a say in the matter. It still broke Aunt Lucy's heart to remember George with his thin little hands trembling in the air, making silent shapes with his mouth, and to think of the girl walking shakily down the street at dawn with her baby wrapped in a towel to hand him over to a stranger. People can say what they want about a girl like that, said Aunt Lucy, but it takes a lot of pluck.

She didn't drink
lye,
I said. She could have killed herself before she got too far along. I was sitting at the table eating a poached egg.

Aunt Lucy looked at me, startled. Oh, lovie, there's no need for that, she said. She stopped as if to catch her breath and regarded me, troubled. That girl didn't just leave her baby on the steps of the orphanage, the way some do, she said finally. That's what always struck me. She cared enough to knock on the vicar's door, and she told the vicar that the baby was to be named George.