The Telling (15 page)

“It wouldn’t have done him any good.”

“But you’re in such robust psychological health.”

“That’s not fair.”

“We could have done this together, in a weekend. Left Cate with my mum. We could have
paid
someone.”

“Someone had to go through it all.”

“And it had to be you.”

“It had to be
someone
.”

“No,” he said, “it had to be
you
.”

There was a silence.

“Are you going to explain that?” I asked him.

“You’ve got this attitude; it’s like this past few years, for you, they’ve been an endurance test, and you’re having the most godawful time, but you won’t let yourself give up; you have to win, you have to get through. You won’t stop and you won’t ask for help. Fuck. You won’t
let
anyone help.”

Of course I couldn’t give up; how could I give up, what was the good in giving up?

“I’m coping,” I said.

Then he said, quite simply, “No, you’re not.”

The peeled man, his blue trace of arteries, his deep red veins, the grey maze of his brain. I shook my head. “I’m fine. I don’t need help. I just need to get this sorted.”

“Right,” Mark said, his tone ironically light. “I see. So. What happens now?”

I didn’t speak. My throat was too constricted.

“Nothing happens now?”

“I’ll stay,” I whispered.

“Stay?” he repeated, louder, an edge to his voice.

“Just another couple of days. That’s all it’ll take. Honest.”

His face was cold, closed. I didn’t blame him.

“We did say. At first. We did say a fortnight.”

He looked at me a moment longer, eyebrows raised, on the verge of speaking. Then he pushed himself upright, away from the breakfast bar. “Right. Okay. Fine.”

He crossed the room and lifted Cate. He held her with one arm, his hand gripping around a plump thigh. Her toy car was falling out of her hands. She wailed at the loss; Mark caught the toy one-handed and gave it back to her. He grabbed a bag with his free hand. My heart tugged towards them.

“Love—”

He turned around and looked at me. It must have been a long time since I said that word, in that way, if it could make him look at me like that. If I could have gone to him then, it might have
been enough. But we were stalled there, too much space between us. His expression hardened and he shook his head. He left.

I felt sick. I walked along the grey track in the carpet to the front door. I went down the steps, and stood at the bottom; I watched Mark lean into the back of the car to strap Cate into her seat.

I came closer, looked in through the gap between the doorframe and the car.

“I’m sorry.”

He tugged at Cate’s straps. She craned her head around to look past him, to look at me. I smiled for her. He straightened up and went around to the driver’s door. I stuffed my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, and raised my eyebrows at him, trying to smile. He gave half a nod, a slight upward movement of the chin. He didn’t kiss me goodbye and I didn’t get to kiss Cate.

He slid into the car, slammed the door and started the engine. He swung the car around and burned off up the village street, leaving me with the smell of petrol fumes, a scattering of gravel, and a grey ache in my chest. The awfulness of it all.

IF EVE HAD FOUND the fruit not to her taste, and spat it out, it would still have been too late. Long before she realized her bodily self, her poor forked and vulnerable nakedness, and could not bear to feel like that alone; long before her teeth met in the dripping sweetness of the fruit, before she listened to the serpent Satan, before she opened her new eyes to blink at the sunlight and the man that she was made for, before the moment Adam’s rib was torn from his side and formed with God’s deft thumbprints, she was already hurtling to damnation; and us, all of us, falling along with her, as unstoppable as rain; because the crime is in the thought that comes before the act, the crime is in the need that comes before the thought, the crime is in the nature
of the being and so must be in her maker, who creates her knowing she must fall, and damns her for being as he made her.

I could not help myself, no more than she. I was made like this.

The church bell was tolling for the morning service; its heavy impatient clang shuddered up the village street, swelling the house with hurry, vexing the spirit. Mam was hooked into her best dress, her bonnet on; she had John by the collar and was brushing at his hair. Dad was already in the street in his dark Sunday jacket, and Sally was halfway down the steps towards him; he swiped his arm through the air at her, hurrying her down. Hair combed and braided, dress neat, shawl pinned, bonnet on, I leaned against the windowsill, and kept quiet.

Mam released John; he bolted for the door. She set the brush down on the dresser, turned to speak to me, to gather me up into the general flurry and fluster. I let my eyelids sink. I frowned slightly, raised a hand to my brow.

“Oh Good Lord, no.” She hurried over, pressed a hand to my forehead. “What feels wrong?”

“My head.”

“Are you hot?”

“A little.”

“Do you feel sick?”

I nodded.

“Sit down.”

She fetched liquorice root from the pantry. I slipped it into the side of my mouth and crushed it between my back teeth. The sap oozed onto the side of my tongue, strong and numbing.

“Keep warm,” she said. “We’ll be back after communion. Will you be all right?”

I nodded feebly and swallowed liquorice juice. The church bell tolled. She strode over to the door, Sunday-skirts swishing, then glanced back at me. Her expression, so concerned and tender, made me blink guiltily. She smiled, making her cheeks plump up; she looked pretty. Usually we skim past each other, going from paid-work through housework to piecework, barely glancing at each other, our attention demanded by the boys, by Sally, by Dad’s needs, by meals and baking and laundry and cleaning up afterwards. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d looked each other in the eye, not for more than the briefest of moments; I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spoken of anything other than immediate concerns. I smiled back at her, the liquorice root a bulge of pulped fibres in my cheek. She closed the door behind them; I listened to their voices and footsteps retreat. Then I got up and spat the liquorice into the fire.

The room was full of sunlight, smelling of wood and ink. He had his pen in his hand, and the red-bound ledger was splayed out in front of him on the desk; he was reading over something he had written, his brow furrowed with thought or poor eyesight. His waistcoat was unbuttoned. He wore no collar, even though it was a Sunday. I tapped gently on the doorjamb. He saw me.

“Come in,” he said, and started to button up his waistcoat. The church bell tolled. The air quivered with its sound. I came in.

“No church today?” he asked.

“I was hoping I might read.”

“Help yourself.”

He gestured towards the bookcase with an ink-stained hand,
his attention already returning to his work. I went over to the shelves. I was looking for
Robinson Crusoe
, and at the same time I was thinking I shouldn’t waste my time on
Robinson Crusoe
, since there were so many others there to try, and time was short, and who knew when another chance would present itself again, and then the thought occurred to me for the first time, that he must know that I had been in his room, uninvited, and that I had read his
Robinson Crusoe
without permission. The titles and names blurred: I couldn’t distinguish the books beyond their bindings, the leather and board and cloth. In my mind I was playing out again the conversation of the other night, from his taking
Pilgrim’s Progress
, to our hands lying on the table a finger’s breadth apart, and him saying that I may come back when I could, and choose any book I wished. All that time, he had known what I had done.

His chair scraped back on the boards; he came over to join me at the bookcase, his shoulder just level with my cheek, his arm at my side. He reached out and rested his fingertips on the spine of a large blue book. His arm was dark, his sleeve rolled back. The bell tolled out again, fainter still.

“I don’t know what you’d like,” he said. I glanced at him, the underside of his jaw and a trace of the morning’s beard. “There’s Fielding, and Richardson,” he said. “Recently acquired, and maybe neither are strictly speaking Sunday reading. There’s Milton, and there’s Dante, which might be more appropriate. Homer; he was a pagan, but the translator is, as far as I know at least, a model Christian, and if your only chance to read is Sunday, then I’d say you should get what you can, while you can, and not worry too much about it.”

His hand moved back and forth across the shelves as he spoke, lighting on a book here and there, brushing over others.

“So,” he said. “Is that all right?”

I nodded, swallowed: “Yes.” The word came out strangely.

“I’ll leave you to decide.”

He returned to the table. I ran a hand along the spines, bumping from one book to the next. I dug my fingertips into a gap and levered out a volume. It was bound in fine maroon leather, embossed with gilt. I had no idea what it was: Fielding or Milton or whatever else he had spoken of. I had been too flustered, too absorbed in my own reflections, too much looking at his hand, to consider where it paused, or what he said.

The church bell gave its final, dying toll. The service was beginning. I turned from the bookcase, the volume heavy in my hands. He didn’t look up; again, he pushed a chair back from the table with a booted foot; it was his only invitation to sit down. I sat.

My feet tucked in under my seat, my skirts tucked in around my feet, very conscious of my rough hands, I opened the book cover, smoothed the page flat. As I began to read, my thoughts were edged with the gentle scratch of his quill.

The book was the
Principles of Geology
, by Charles Lyell, BA, MA, Oxon., and it seemed almost impossible to me, and yet there was no way under heaven that I would even consider returning it to the shelf unattempted.

Just inside the cover there was an engraving of a strange and ruinous building. There were pillars at the front, and a shallow-pitched roof on top. I sat looking at the picture for some time, at the worn and pitted stone of the pillars, the slender trees behind the building, the sharp rocks underneath. It was beautiful.

“It’s a temple.”

I glanced up.

“A pagan temple. Those are water marks on the pillars. It was built on dry land, of course. But the water rose all the way to lap at the pillars, and stayed there long enough to wear away the marble, then shrank back to the foot of those rocks.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The book explains.”

I tried to read; I got some of the words: I couldn’t vouch for the meaning, not the whole of it: I felt as if I were grasping fragments, as if seeing some wide valley from the far side of a thick-laid hedge; glimpsing it through the gaps. I struggled my way into it. My finger followed the lines, my lips formed the letters. Sometimes the sense was clear as a raindrop, making me smile. Difficulties became like stones in mid-stream; I slid around them, flowed over them; they remained, but I did not let them check my progress. There was no time to waste.

I read about great sores in the land that spewed forth ash and molten rock, devastating the country for miles around. I read about the rock cooling, and hardening, and being worn away by sea and wind and rain and frost. I read about the warm shallow seas alive with creatures, tiny and delicate as lace, that died, and sank down to the seabed, and laid their bones and shells and scales there like snow. I read about the land rising and the seas drying, and the ground covering itself with plants, that flourished and grew, and then died and fell, and fallen, rotted into the earth. I read about the ice that came and pushed across the land, scraping away the earth, revealing the stone beneath. The stone that
had once been innumerable drifting creatures at the bottom of a shallow sea, and then was covered with earth and plants, and then with ice, and now is bare as bone, cracked with ancient frost and worn with ancient water, right up on the roof of the world, up on the tops, the moors, the fells.

He had spoken. I raised my head. He was looking at me, his dark eyes. I had no notion of how long he had been watching me.

“Lyell,” he said, “an interesting choice—”

There were creases at the corners of his eyes. He was talking. I had to gather my wits and direct them to what he was saying. It was about the book, but I’d missed something: I couldn’t make out what he was asking me. I shook my head.

“Just, that it seems to have caught you.” He leaned back in his chair, his face softening with that smile. “Go on, tell me. What do you think?”

My thoughts were formless, but in that moment his expression made him seem almost young, almost an equal, and I began to feel as if I knew him. I spoke, and as I spoke the thoughts came together, like butter out of churning milk.

“There are two kinds of stone around here. There’s limestone, which can be burned, and the ashes spread on the fields to help the crops, and unburned it’s used on the roads, which is what makes the roads so white; you get that from the tops, from the fells and crags. There’s also sandstone; it’s golden; the houses are built out of that—it’s a lowland stone, a valley stone. I read here, the white stone, limestone, is made out of the bodies and bones of ancient sea creatures, and that sandstone is compounded sand, and that the sand itself was once solid rock, but was worn down
by an ancient sea, which must have been just here, right here where we sit now. And it just seems extraordinary to me, that there should be so much time, that a fish can turn into a stone, and rock can turn into sand and then turn back into rock, and that we all march the roads every day, and spread lime on the fields, and sit in our homes, and we never think beyond our brief lives, and don’t consider the nature of things, but just the use we can put them to.”

The creases deepened at the corners of his eyes.

I took a breath. “I mean, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I think of it. I’m sorry.” I pushed back my chair and was on my feet to go. “I’ll leave you in peace, I should be—”

“No.” He put a hand on my arm, and I looked down at it, resting there on the holland sleeve, and felt the warmth and heaviness of it. “Stay.”

My heart, I think, must have held itself still. I sank back down onto my chair.

“Go on,” he said.

But his hand was still on my arm. I wouldn’t look at it again, the dark skin, the creases around his knuckles like knots in wood. I couldn’t speak sense: there was no sense in me to speak. He lifted his hand away, but the touch, the sense of weight lingered, as if flesh has a memory of its own, independent from the mind.

“I don’t know that I can,” I said. “It’s just. I’d never thought like this before. I’d never thought about what lay beneath, about the bones of the earth; I’d never seen time like this, beyond the turn of the seasons and day and night and the chiming of the church clock. All I ever knew about land was that some of it was good and some of it was less good, and some of it was bad, and
that we all had a share of it, good and bad, before the Enclosure, you know my father after a drink, he’s told you all about that.”

He dipped his head slightly. “Enclosure is widespread, and well known.”

“Oh?”

“It happened all over the country; it’s still happening, it’ll happen everywhere.”

“I remember the barley,” I said. “There was nothing quite so beautiful as that field in early summer.”

“I think we forget, you know, that this world is not young; that it can’t drink up our filth and poison forever, and still be beautiful.”

“What do you mean?” I was leaning forward, the book set aside, my eyes fixed on him.

He pulled a face, as if in discomfort. “You don’t know the cities. The manufacturing towns. You haven’t seen. A child there might grow up and grow old and die without ever seeing clearly the blue sky, or the stars, the moon; the sun is reduced to a bloody glare. The smoke and dust are such that the trees die, the flowers die; there are no birds.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “It sounds like Hell.”

“And no sin required to enter,” he said, “unless you count poverty a sin.”

“I saw your shoes,” I said. “The way they’re mended: I thought, you must have been halfway around the world to wear your boots into holes like that.”

There was a silence; I’d said something wrong, but I didn’t know how to retreat from it.

“I’ve been to London,” he said eventually, and then, “You’d like London.”

The words seemed to gather, swell, like a drop of water on a leaf, suspended for a moment before falling. He’d thought of me. He’d thought of what I might like.

“Other places, too. I’ve been through the West Country,” he went on, “lived for a time in a town called Sherborne; dead really, and its deadness near did for me. I’ve spent time in Cheltenham, Northampton, Leeds, Bolton, Birmingham, Sunderland, Aberdeen and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Dumfries.”

The names as he spoke them were like a litany to me, beautiful, conjuring inexplicit wonders. I’d never been beyond the boundaries of the valley; had only been as far as Lancaster in one direction, Kirkby Lonsdale in the other.

“And you didn’t settle anywhere? What made you keep on moving?”