The Telling (19 page)

My hands landed on the earth and sank into mulch. It was cold. My elbows buckled and my chest, cheek, the length of me hit the ground. I lay on the leaf mould. There was a smell of earth and garlic and sap. My hand was stinging. Something pricked my
knee through my jeans. Blood thudded in my ears; beyond that, the woods were silent. I lay there, palms pressed onto the earth. I thought, I’m an idiot. I thought, I need help. I thought, I am going crazy here. Slowly, I picked myself up and brushed off wet flakes of leaf-flesh with my left hand. My right arm ached. I felt deeply shaken. My hand was trembling as I brushed away the dirt.

I set the shower going and stripped down to chicken-flesh. I stepped in, my skin flinching at the shift in temperature, at the battering of the spray, as if it were unwilling to believe in the possibility of warmth. I held my hand out to the falling water and let it scald the cut. It had gone pale and thick around the edges. I turned and let the water hurl itself against my back, and the room filled with steam. I breathed a long breath, and closed my eyes, and let my head hang, and watched the red darkness behind my eyes, and felt the gorgeousness of the water on my skin, and the throb of the cut, and the gentle sting of my scar, like a day-old nettle sting, and all of it felt good.

Wrapped in a towel, my hair in wet tangles, I rummaged left-handed in my wash bag for the tea-tree oil that I usually used on spots, and dripped it into the cut. I found a plaster in the bottom of the bag, its paper-casing rubbed around the edges, stained with eyeshadow dust. I peeled it, stuck it on, flexed my hand. It’d last till I got home.

I bundled up my clothes to pack them. When I lifted my jeans, I knew by their weight, its evenness, that the phone wasn’t in the pocket. I rifled in all the pockets anyway, uselessly, knowing the phone was gone. It must have slipped out when I fell. It was
lying in the woodland earth, beaded with rain; its screen-clock counting out the minutes till the battery ran down. I wasn’t going back for it.

I left out underwear for the morning and threw the rest of the clothes into my bag. The house was not packed up; I’d even managed to add to the work with those new books. I switched the lights off as I came downstairs. I would be rational. I would do what needed to be done. In the morning, I would throw my stuff in the car. I would drive home. Five hours down the motorway to an empty flat. Cate and Mark would be back at teatime. The warm weight of her in my arms, the warm vice of his arms around me. The next day, I would go and talk to Dr. Cowan; I’d meet the peeled man’s sympathetic gaze.

Outside, the breeze blew up into a full-on wind; rain was flung in handfuls at the window. The dark out there was massive, boiling. It had swallowed up the house.

I switched on the TV for the noise. I opened kitchen cupboards and fumbled in an open packet of breadsticks. I crunched a breadstick down, squatting to rifle through the fridge, my stomach sore and tight with hunger: I couldn’t remember my last meal. I lifted tomatoes and an avocado from the salad drawer onto the counter above me and dropped a bag of mulching lettuce into the bin. I drew another breadstick from the open packet, crunching on it as I got out a knife and chopping board. The breadsticks were stale. I started on a third. I cut the tomatoes into slices, lifting the first shallow fleshy cup of seeds to my mouth; it was overripe, too sweet, the flesh melting unpleasantly. I peeled the avocado, pared
away a slice, slipped it between my lips. The flesh was buttery and giving and smooth. Calories. The sheer instinctive pleasure of calories.

I lifted out a bottle of wine. It had sat there, untouched and forgotten since Mark’s visit. It seemed like a last drink: no alcohol with those pills. I sloshed wine into a tumbler, took three quick swallows, sat down at the breakfast bar to eat.

The news came on the television. Bodies lying on a dusty road; blackened, broken, uncovered; pools of dark blood in the dust, like oil dripped from a broken sump. Then a woman spoke urgently, her head cowled in dark cloth, the sky above white with dust and sun. A boy was crying and crushing himself into her dark-draped body. She stroked him, pressed him to her, cupping his head against her side, her other hand pushing tears away across her cheeks. As she spoke, a journalist translated. Her elder son, the market where he waited with others, looking for a day’s work; the van that pulled up, the driver who called them over, grinning, not knowing the truth of other people, the agony of martyred flesh. The explosion. The boy lifted his face from his mother’s side, and glanced at the camera, his eyes wide and horrified, his face streaked. Then the piece ended. Back to the studio. I switched off the TV and was left with the ache.

Outside, the wind was blowing up against and buffeting the house. Inside, all was perfectly still, weirdly still, with the TV off. No hum. Nothing. I felt suspended, sealed up in a bubble. Far away, down streaming motorways and past dark fields and through cities and at the other end of the country, Mark and Cate were safe in the warm cocoon of our flat. The smell of milk and drying laundry. The smell of his skin, and her skin; the smell of
us. And I could be there soon, dazed and floating in blue amniotic warmth. And I wanted to be there now.

A sound. Directly overhead. A floorboard creaked; I lifted my head.

The whooshing buffet of dark air against the house, like wet sheets slapped and snapped against the walls. I strained my ears for indoor noise. The slaty taste of wine in my mouth. A prickle in the air.

Again. A floorboard creaked. Just above me. It must have been pretty much on the threshold to the Reading Room. And as I thought this, it seemed to me that there was an explosion of static: the house fizzing, brimming, overcharged. The wind hit the window. A great woof of air on the panes, pressing them, making them flex.

An old house. A windy night. Creaking was no big deal. But my skin was prickling, the faint hair down my arms standing on end. I did the rational, sane thing. I switched the landing light on and climbed the stairs. The flicker at the corner of vision, the stirring of nerves; it’s just the mind filling in the blanks. It’s evolutionary twitchiness. Stare at it straight, it disappears.

The door stood open on darkness.

“Hello?”

The word was barely spoken and already I regretted it. It seemed ridiculous; it also seemed to countenance the possibility of a reply. The landing light slipped past me, illuminating a strip of floor, a corner of the bookcase. My bag lay open-mouthed near the dressing table; a book was splayed face down on the bed. Through the window, the moon was low and full; clouds bunched and tumbled. Beyond the shaft of light, the bookcase was laden,
swelling, bursting with books, heavy with newspapers, spilling journals, magazines. I glared at it, making it resolve back into a tailing-off half-shelf of books.

Something moved. At the window. I looked straight at the dark panes. I wouldn’t let this happen, not again; I wouldn’t let my mind fool itself.

A floorboard creaked under my foot. The air seemed to thicken, to condense. The wind tore at the slates, buffeted the glass. The dark was tussling outside; something was reflected on the glass, a pale shape. The pane rattled and the reflection juddered. I moved towards it, and it came clearer and closer: just me. My reflection. That was all. Beyond, the trees were in constant movement, the clouds massing and shredding across the moon.

The image was thin against the dark. A suggestion of pale skin, dark eyes. I blinked, and was vividly conscious of what is normally an instinctive unnoticed act; she was using my eyes; she was watching me. The fizzing in the air changed, grew into a hum, a vibration; the boards were shivering under my feet and a new light glimmered through the room. The air seemed to coalesce into something else, something more dense.

I thought, this is it.

The image grew clearer. Dark eyes in deep shadowed pits, the line deep between her brows. The air was humming, shuddering with sound; light gathered, thickened. Her features were becoming more distinct. All sense of mutedness, of pinned-down restraint was now utterly dispelled. It was happening. She was coming. She was here.

“Elizabeth?” I breathed.

The buzz exploded into a roar. Light swept the room. Everything
was thrown into stark brilliance. The reflection stared back at me, blank with shock. The growling rattle of a diesel engine; a tractor spun past the house, its headlights raking through the window, tearing across the room, spattering me, the bed, the almost-empty bookshelves with sudden searching light. The tractor ground on up the village street, some piece of complex farm machinery chinking and clattering behind it. The roar fading out again into a hum, a buzz, a prickle in the air, and then quiet.

I let a breath go. The breath shook. I watched my own faint reflection in the window. I tried to laugh; it didn’t come out right. I went downstairs. I plucked the cork out of the top of the bottle. I filled my glass to its brim. No pills to be had: I needed to use what came to hand. I’d switch myself off for the night. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’d go home. I’d get my pills.

JUST AS MRS. BRIGGS was due to dish up the servants’ dinner, I was called for to dust the morning room. The curtains were drawn against the harsh summer sun, and it was dim and pleasant there. I skimmed the little tables, the windowsills and over mantel with a cloth; wiping down vases, ornaments, commonplace books and books of engravings, and whisking my feather duster over the clock, the carved flowers and grapes on the mantelpiece, enjoying the feel of things, the cool of alabaster, the give of carpet, the palm-shaped curve of carved chair backs. I returned to the kitchen with my nails grey, the cracks in my hands lined with grey, and ready for my dinner. As I came down the kitchen steps, into the smell of mutton stew, the morning-room
bell jangled overhead. Maggie straightened her cap and trotted up the stairs to answer it, and I continued on to the scullery, put my cleaning things away and washed the dust off my hands. I was scrubbing at my calluses, trying to get the dirt out of the hardened skin, when I heard Maggie’s voice in the kitchen. It was pitched high and going fast; I couldn’t catch the words. I came through, drying my hands on my apron. Mrs. Briggs, Mr. Fowler, Clem Taylor and Alice were all sitting at their places, their dinner steaming in front of them; there were two places vacant, one for Maggie, who was standing on the kitchen steps and telling her tale, her hands on her hips in delighted scandal, and one for me. Maggie saw me come in, and her mouth snapped shut like a snuffbox. Mrs. Briggs glanced around, her raised eyebrows pushing her forehead into sweaty creases. Maggie pitched her voice at me as a child might pitch a ball: “Madam says, you’re to go back, and do it properly this time.”

Mr. Fowler took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

“There’s not a dust-mote left,” I protested.

“That’s not what Madam said.”

“But it’s as clean as a whistle.”

“It doesn’t do to defend yourself, lass,” said Mrs. Briggs. “Madam wouldn’t complain for her own amusement, and if there’s fault to be found then it’s your fault. Get your things and go and do it again.”

I went back to the scullery for clean cloths, troubled and confused. I left them in the kitchen eating their dinner, with mine cooling on the table. I dusted the morning room again; every inch, every single thing, and I couldn’t find any fault with what I’d done before. Afterwards, I ate alone, standing with my plate and fork
in a corner by the door, out of Mrs. Briggs’s way. The stew had gone cold, and clots of fat had gathered in the gravy.

That afternoon, I swept the bedrooms. The rooms were still and sun-warmed, as if sealed like jars. From Madam’s dressing-room window, I could see the first reapers up on the high meadow; Blacows’ land. They moved together, each body turning in one strong movement, like a salmon’s leap, to swing the scythe, each one for safety’s sake keeping pace with and distance from his fellows, so that they passed in a steady line across the field. The stubble lay dark and blunt behind them, heaped with glossy mounds of fallen grass. Haytime. I flung open the sash, let the sweet breeze come in. The air was full of the scent of cut grass, linden blossoms, lilac. The sweet smell of high summer.

Haytime meant reprieve.

Only Mrs. Briggs stayed at the vicarage during those weeks. School was suspended; home life paused; no clogs were made, no roofs repaired, no baskets woven. Everyone who was fit for it turned their hand to the hay. It must be cut, and dried, and stored, before the rain could come and ruin the crop. Nothing else mattered, for a time.

It was a holiday feeling, at least at first; the sky wide and blue above, the country stretching wide and softly green around us. For that short space, there would be no scrutiny. Not of mother, father, master, mistress. In the fields, all were equal in the pursuit of the common goal; the bringing in of the hay.

Tossing the grasses into the air, watching their silken rustling fall, heaving the pitchfork under the heaped stems again, lifting the lower levels into the sun, I felt such a pleasure in the warm sun on my cheeks, the fresh open space, in the satin hand-smoothed feel
of the pitchfork’s shaft. There was the simple, almost animal satisfaction in the work of my body, in its strength, its staying power. At dinnertime, we sat in the shade of the hedgerow, and drank tea from our bottles, ate our bread and cheese and onions, and I was happy, mute with the sky’s dazzle, my body slack, my palms hot with wear. I closed my eyes. The red glow was patterned with the shadow of stirring branches.

You can work as hard as you like at other work, but nothing can prepare you for haytiming. My palms blistered, and the blisters broke, and the loose skin wore into rags and peeled off. I rolled seed-heads between my palms; they leave behind a soft purple dust that’s good for drying haytiming sores.

The stars were out; it was a beautiful clear night. We were walking up from the water meadow along the wash-house lane. My shoulders burned with fatigue, my brow and cheeks were hot and tight from the long day’s sun. When we got home, Mam and Dad and the boys would all stream off to their beds like mice into their holes. I could just lay down on my blankets, and drop into the deep dark hole of haytiming sleep. The trudge up the hill was only bearable for this, that at the end of it, I could lie down, and I could sleep, and not have to think about anything, not have to think at all.

We reached the gate and waited while someone at the head of the party unfastened it. We were next to Agnes’s house and as I glanced at her side window I saw a faint light burning inside. A jar of flowers had been set on the windowsill; a few campions and Queen Anne’s lace screened the room. Beyond, faint in the dim
light of a single rush, softened by the ripples and bulges in the glass, a movement caught my eye. She was in the rocking chair, gently rocking the child. Her skin was shades of shadow-blue and gold in the dim rush-light; her bodice was open to expose her breast and her head was bent to watch the baby feed. She must have been unconscious of almost everything, perhaps even half-asleep; she didn’t seem to notice the noise of the passing hay-timers. I felt a warm flush of tenderness and guilt. I missed her.

The workers on the new Hall were not spared to help, even with the Oversbys’ hay. They must have lived on short commons those weeks, with their landladies out in the fields. They must have welcomed the end of that time as much as we did, with the last drift of hay shut up tight into the final barn to wait the winter. The farmers sent pies and pastries and cheeses and fruit, and we had our dinner on trestles on the green. I drank Haytime Ale and ate a slice of pork and apple pie, and slipped into the hazy trance of bodily exhaustion. Joe Stott had brought his fiddle, and Thomas asked me to dance, but I shook my head and smiled at him, and told him I was way past dancing, there wasn’t a single step left in me that I didn’t need to get me home.

Long before the celebrations ended I was making my slow way back along the village street. The moon was pale in the still-blue sky; there were no stars yet; fiddle music drifted from up on the green. There was a candle burning gold in Mr. Moore’s room. I ignored it. I slept like a stone.

Haytiming done, Dad came back from Storrs and the Williamses’ with a faggot of willow-wands on his shoulder, and
pale cold foul temper on his brow. I ducked out into the garden and listened to the raised voices from within the house. Greaves was a bastard, my father said. It was lies, all lies, that he could get his baskets better and cheaper elsewhere, because whose baskets were better nor cheaper than ours? Mam made some placating remark, which I couldn’t hear, but must have been to do with the fine lot of willow he’d brought back, and how she and I would have it turned into baskets in no time, and we’d sell them at Hornby Market if not at Storrs. Williams was a thief, Dad announced; whatever else might be going on, it had to be said now loud and clear that old man Williams was a swindler and a crook. He’d charged Dad twice as much as usual for the willow.

“Coming to the end of the season, that was his excuse.”

“Well, we are, I suppose,” Mam answered.

Dad swore; there was a scuffle then a sudden crash. I went back in; the tea canister lay on the floor, dented, the tea all spilt on the flagstones. Mam was crouched beside it, scooping the tea back into the canister. Dad stood flushed, his gaze challenging. I crouched down beside Mam and quickly checked her face. She didn’t seem to have been hit, she was just a little pale and contained-looking, a lid firmly pressed down on her feelings. I helped her gather up the tea.

“You’re a good girl, Lizzy,” she said.

It was meant to annoy Dad as much as please me. He snorted. “Aye, right. The model child.”

He turned and thumped up the stairs, and we could hear him for an hour afterwards, debating noisily with Mr. Moore, as we picked grit out of the tea leaves until I suggested that it would
probably sink and get left in the pot, and no one would really notice it.

So now Mam and me had another batch of greenwork to do, at twice the cost and expecting half the payment, and with our hands already raw and weeping, our limbs still stiff and aching from the pitchfork and the scythe. The sap stung my sores, and then began to numb them; willow has this virtue, that it can make you numb. My flesh seemed to cure, like bacon, my palms taking on the darkened hardness of dried meat, and the bitter smell of willow. Even at the vicarage, when I scrubbed pewter or polished brass or silver, or waxed the hall boards for the second time that day, even if there was tallow or baking or a roast spitting in the oven, I could smell the bitterness of willow about me. It was worn into my flesh; I could taste it in my mouth, every moment, every day.

Reverend Wolfenden never asked for me, unless it was to clean again something that I had cleaned already, to do something right that I had done perfectly well just moments before.

It was around then, after the hay, before the corn, that I began to notice the change in my father. One night, he and Mr. Moore were sitting downstairs after supper. Mr. Moore was quiet and Dad was talking about the poorness of the season, the late frosts we’d had that spring, the rains he’d expected to ruin the hay, that hadn’t come but when they did the ground would be so dry and hard that there would be floods, no doubt about it, floods to rival Noah’s, and the corn would all rot. The chill in the air now, even though it was but turning August. What was certainly a hard winter to come. The scandalous cheapening of baskets. The scandalous dearness of bread. The Corn Laws that suited the gentry
and the Poor Laws that suited the manufacturers, and no laws that suited the likes of us at all. It was like learning a new word; having seen it once, I noticed tokens of the change in him all the time: a new eagerness, a sharp eye for trouble, a looking-forward to disaster, a keenness to apportion blame. Mr. Moore would sometimes nod, sometimes speak; his words were like dark spaces in the air. I felt a note of caution in his voice, but did my best not to hear the words.

The meetings started up again, after the haytiming. My father went along, and so did Thomas, and so did the other men. There began to be noise, and voices raised. I couldn’t make out what was being said, since the words were muffled and obscured by the floorboards and the closed door.

I wanted to ask Thomas if the Reverend had spoken to him, and what he might have said in reply. Whenever I saw Thomas, he was in the company of other men and I never got the opportunity to ask.

That August, Sundays, rather than being a looked-for rest, became like a storm cloud hanging over the whole week, as the Reverend’s sermons grew more fiery and fierce. I sat in the free-seats, between my mother and the boys, my father wedged glowering at the end of the pew. Hot sun pooled on the flagstones like molten lead. There was no air. The nave was full of shuffling and rustling, of the smell of close-pressed people, of Sunday clothes taken straight from the closet where they’d hung since last week’s wearing. As the sermon began, I bent my head, and kept it lowered all the time that the Reverend spoke. I hoped it looked like piety. My
eyes swam; tears fell onto my clasped hands as the Reverend spoke of the torments of Hell, and the sinfulness of the human state. I could not pray. I felt so far from God. My soul would not be soothed.

One night as Mam and I sat half-sleeping over our work, the door upstairs was flung open with a bang, making us start awake, and Mr. Gorst came thumping down, and touched his cap to us sitting by the hearth, and we said good evening, and he left the house.

“Isn’t Jack Gorst still up there?” I said, meaning his son.

“I think so.”

Mam and I both craned our heads to listen. The door was standing open upstairs; I heard Mr. Moore’s voice clear as though he were standing beside me; it was raised above the clamour of other voices.

“It seems to me that when all is reckoned together,” he said, “the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man should therefore set himself up as an authority over another, simply by virtue of the class into which he was born, and claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.”

Recognition made me catch my breath. I could not have said it, in such a way, but I’d felt it, when I was standing in the library while the Reverend had sat rehearsing Martha’s tale. Mr. Moore’s words went as the crow flies, straight, and I could feel the justice and the truth of them; but I could not let myself listen to him, could not let myself fall into sympathy or agreement with him: if my feelings matched his words then both were wrong. He walked in darkness; he refused the light of Christ.

Then the door above was slammed shut, and the words were
lost, and all I could hear was the sound of his voice, like an emptiness welling overhead.

I was unhappy. I was desperately, sickly unhappy, all through those long late summer days. I was unhappy at work, I was unhappy at home, and there was nothing else but work and home. Agnes didn’t want me; she was barely there, and I couldn’t be easy in her company. I couldn’t read: I couldn’t face my books; I couldn’t bear that he was there to watch me trail along their well-trampled tracks again.