The Telling (22 page)

“The one you’ve been writing in. The ledger.”

He raised his hands to his face, wiping his fingers across his dust-stuck sweaty skin. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“The only book in the entire collection that I forbade you,” he said. “When I laid out every other for you, even put out the ones I thought you particularly would enjoy on your own shelf for you to read, you took the one book you were forbidden and you read it?”

I spoke low, ashamed: “Yes.”

He looked at me in silence. I was too young, I remember thinking: I was too young for this, far too young to deal with him. He looked tired, hot, and older than I’d thought him, the wood dust smeared into his sweat. Then his face broke into creases and he laughed.

“Good for you,” he said. “Good for you.”

He took a bottle of beer from his bag and uncorked it. He offered it to me, and I took a sup, and passed it back: the beer was soft and malty on the tongue. He drank, then pinched the dampness from the corners of his lips with thumb and forefinger.

“Reverend was asking me about you,” I ventured. I felt lighter for the confession.

“When was this?” he asked.

“The day after the first meeting.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Not much. I didn’t know anything. But I was wondering, how did he know?”

“Know what?”

“That you’re a Chartist,” I said, trying out the word, “and an agitator and a democrat and a viper.”

“Is that what he told you?” He shook his head, half-laughed again. “D’you think I’m a viper?”

“I could think of better words.” He glanced at me, almost smiling. “But the thing is, he seemed to have heard of you already. He knew about you.”

“You stick your head above the parapet, and people notice. And take shots at it.”

He set the bottle upright between us and leaned back on his hands, stretching his legs out in front of him. I felt strangely at ease, as if this was as it should be: someone seeing us would think we were a courting or a married couple, taking a pause from work together. Someone hearing us would know different.

“I didn’t know what the Reverend meant by Chartist and that. Having seen some of your book, I think I begin to understand.”

“It’s simple enough. Chartists support the Charter; the Charter is the statement of our demands. We want representation: a vote for the working man, and changes to the current system that will allow working men’s votes to count, and enable working men to become members of parliament. That’s the kernel of it all.”

“Because of the hunger? Because of the woman and the baby? How would it help?”

Mr. Moore shifted his position, brushing the scraps of bark and grit from his palms.

“Last week,” he said, “in Preston, in this same county palatine
of yours, four men were shot dead. Many others were wounded. The men had stopped the works to protest at dangerous working conditions, at their low wages. In striking, and inciting others to strike, they were endangering the mill-owners’ profits. So the mill-owners called in the army, and the army shot the workers.”

I watched the lines and creases of his face; “No,” I said, but I could see that he was telling the truth.

“Men are cheap. There’s a glut of them; they’re to be had in plenty. But profit and property, they must be defended at all cost.”

“No.”

He was sitting forward now, leaning towards me, animated, even with the fatigue of the long day. “And this is what we must change. I don’t just mean money, I mean opportunity, the opportunity to be more than just a pair of hands, employed at others’ work, to be shot for stepping out of line, for insisting that there will be more to your life than work and hunger and death. In this country, privilege and property and opportunity are inherited, passed from parent to child, and poverty’s the same; like having blue eyes, a talent for music, or a weak chest. We need the vote. If we are to effect change, we must have the vote.”

I felt a strange kind of shyness, speaking of it: “There is Heaven, Mr. Moore. We may trust to that. That there will be consolation in the hereafter.”

“What good is consolation?”

“You may not believe,” I said, “but I do, I always have, as long as I can remember. A world without God…”

He raised his hand, palm turned towards me, asking me to stop; it was creased with grass marks and a fragment of bark
was stuck to the ball of this thumb. “Even by your lights, then, it still holds true. This is not the world as God created it. Satan has worked his evil. You’ll remember, in Genesis, God created Man and Woman, not Rich and Poor.”

Images of Sin, and of Eve and the serpent and the fruit filled my inner sight, and then Agnes, pale as the sheets on which she lay, and the bucket full of bloody cloths, and her eyes closed and her mouth open as she was crushed by the birthing pains.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in answer to my quiet. He sank back again, his palms pressed onto the earth, his arms locked. “Perhaps if I felt there was another world, I could rest easier about this one.”

We sat in silence. The heat of the sun brought out the scent of the tree, a scent like moss and oatmeal. We looked across the water meadow, across the valley, towards the terraces of cottages at Melling, and beyond. There’s a house on the top of the far hills; a lane runs up to it, it stands square against the sky. I always thought I might walk there one day, knock on the door, and find out who lives there. Stand on their doorstep to look back across the valley, to see what the village looks like from there.

“Perhaps it does not help to speak of God,” Mr. Moore said after a while. “Think perhaps of the Church; this is what bothers me most, that a man like your Reverend Wolfenden keeps a grand house and a good table and a wife dressed in silk, who is herself a luxury, a fancy toy that plays music and looks pretty and is no use or good to anyone. This is all on your goodwill, paid for by your labour, by your tithes. And what bothers me is, what law did God lay down that you, Elizabeth, must labour to keep
Mrs. Wolfenden in fine clothes? Did Christ insist that his priests have grander houses, better food and clothes than the rest of his flock—did Christ insist that he have
priests
?”

I was picking at a patch of parched moss, watching its fibres come apart. I looked up at him. “They look after us. The Wolfendens do.”

“Are you children?”

“They give charity. They have wealth so that they can give charity.”

“So you are given treats for being good. Is this any way for grown men and women to live?”

“But he’s—” I said.

Mr. Moore finished my thought, “A gentleman?” We were looking at each other. He made a comical face, his eyebrows raised, his lips pressed together, as if the phrase were meant to explain and answer everything, and that we both knew that it was entirely inadequate. I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

“That book. The one that you’re writing, what kind of a book is it? Is it like
Crusoe
, where everything happened but happened differently to someone else, or is it…” I was going to say Gospel Truth, but didn’t.

“It really happened. Everything in that book; it really happened, and to me, or in my presence. I was just trying to get it down as coolly as I could.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I thought it would be quiet. Oversby had not heard of me, but perhaps, by now, he will have: Wolfenden must have spoken to him.” He thought a moment, tilted his head: “It would explain the way Greaves has been working me lately.”

He lifted the bottle and drank. I watched the roll of his Adam’s apple, the sheen of his sweated skin.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” I said.

He spluttered, coughed, and beer ran down his chin. He wiped it away. “You really have seen nothing of the world. I’m common as a sparrow. There’s a meeting next month, on Caton Moor. We expect at least five hundred there.”

Something caught my notice, some movement in the water meadow, over in the far corner. On his way home from the willow holts, with that long-legged lope that you would know a mile off. He crossed the stubble in full sun, his head low, a bundle of green willow on his back: Thomas.

“The meeting is just a step. A show of strength and purpose. Today, we’re kept like children, and so, like children, we can only sulk and refuse to do our chores, and be beaten for our disobedience. But when the Charter becomes Law, there’ll be a vote for every man. We’ll all have a hand in the making of all other laws, in the establishment of taxes, in the conferring of rights and obligations on our fellow men, and we will be treated as children no longer. And then you will see what a fine world we make of this.”

I stood up, lifting my shawl. Mr. Moore raised himself on a hand to let it slip out from beneath him.

“So I will have a vote?”

I shook out the shawl.

“Your husband will.”

There was silence. I folded the shawl and drew it around me. I saw Mr. Moore’s gaze catch on the figure of Thomas.

“Are you going to him?” he asked.

“I have to,” I said, meaning that he might have seen us, or
might soon, if I didn’t leave. Mr. Moore nodded and looked down, watching his forefinger picking at a crumb of loose bark.

“Goodbye,” I said. “Thank you.”

He glanced up, shook his head, not understanding.

“For explaining,” I said. “For taking the time.”

He smiled, his face breaking out into a map of lines, making me smile back at him.

“Pleasure,” he said. “A genuine pleasure.”

I went out into the sun’s glare, and down the path towards the wash-house where the ways meet, and waited there, leaning against the gatepost, my heart hammering against the stone. Thomas approached across the water meadow. Mr. Moore came down the hill, and crossed the beck; I glanced up to watch him pass. He had his hat on; it shaded his eyes.

He touched his hat, and passed me without speaking. He climbed the hill towards the village, leaving me there.

I walked there, through
the fields. I went down the track to the point where the ways part, then climbed up past the oak standing in its own quiet shadow. Storrs Hall stood clear among the trees. I climbed up the open hillside to a narrow wooden garden gate; beyond, the path was squeezed between laurels and rhododendrons. The hinges were stiff, the wood soft and damp; it left algae on my hand.

I should have been going home. I should have done what Mark said I should do. Got a good night’s sleep and packed my stuff into the car and come straight home and gone and got the pills and forgotten all of this, forgotten everything. The wine had switched me off, but only temporarily. When I woke my hand was
throbbing under the plaster, and my head was sore and there was the sourness of a hangover in my mouth, and the edge of anxiety that came with it infected everything that had gone before and been dismissed: the reflection in the glass last night; the flood of images at the gravestone; the breath drawn as if someone were about to speak. What if I’d held my breath and listened, instead of running away? A woman’s voice from an empty room. The static. If I were losing my mind, then it was a very specific madness. I had to find out what happened here; only then could I know what was happening to me.

And if anyone would know, it was Margaret.

The building was sheer and dark, flanked by close-growing shrubberies. I followed the path around the side and came to a broad sweep of gravel, parked with cars. I knew that what I was about to do was almost certainly wrong: procedurally, socially, possibly even ethically wrong. But I didn’t have time to follow the proper channels, and wouldn’t have been able to explain myself if required to. I didn’t mean any harm: I kept telling myself this as I climbed the broad stone steps, as I pressed the intercom. It might not be, strictly speaking, appropriate, but it certainly wasn’t malicious. I didn’t mean any harm.

The intercom crackled.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice.

I leaned in. “My name’s Rachel,” I said. “I’m a visitor.”

There was a buzz and click; I pushed the heavy wooden door, and was through into the lobby. The room was panelled in dark wood; a flight of stairs curled up the wall; the carpet was old and thick and crimson. I just stood there, staring up at the smooth curve of the staircase; it set off an echo of something I couldn’t place.

A vacuum cleaner kicked into life, making me turn. A long corridor opened off the lobby. At the far end, a young man in a green polo-shirt and jeans was swivelling a Dyson around, rearing it back on its wheels and flapping a length of cable out of the way. The corridor carpet was dusted with Shake ’n’ Vac, as if there’d been a frost indoors. The place reeked of synthetic peach.

“Who are you here to see?”

It was the woman’s voice again. I turned towards it. She leaned through the gap between a door and doorframe, revealing a wedge of nurse’s uniform and a cluttered office beyond. She had a pleasant, young, worried face. The Dyson started to drone back and forth.

I smiled. “I’m here to see Margaret.”

“Okay.” Her intonation left the word open; she needed something more.

“Margaret Hutton? I’m Rachel; I’m from down in the village. I’ve been meaning to come for ages. You know how things are; always so much else to do.”

She glanced back over her shoulder, towards the office; priorities were shifting; she was accepting this. She turned back to me, her expression easy.

“She’s in the Day Room. She’s in pretty good form today.” The young woman gestured down the corridor, towards the cleaner, who was moving back and forth in that leisurely vacuuming dance. “You won’t mind finding your own way, will you? I’ve got a mountain of paperwork to get through, and they’re due their meds at ten.”

I thanked her, headed up the corridor. The cleaner swept the Dyson back to let me past. I walked white Shake ’n’ Vac footprints
onto the clean carpet. I turned to look back, to mouth the word “Sorry” at him. He was just a lad, his skin blotched and sore-looking with acne. He shook his head at me, and grinned. His smile was catching: I found myself grinning back at him.

The Day Room was full of armchairs; they were lined up along the walls, circled around coffee tables and spread in an arc in front of the television set. Nets covered the window so the light was filtered and dulled; the TV was on with the volume down low. The ladies occupied almost every chair. Their clothes and hair and skin were the same muted shades as the furnishings. One was sleeping, her head thrown back, her mouth open on dark wet tongue, pastel-pink plastic gums, white teeth. The others were all looking at me.

The room was warm, smelt of old milk, Shake ’n’ Vac, and pear drops. The vacuum cleaner hummed in the background. The TV prattled brightly.

The women’s collective gaze was mild, interrogative. No one spoke. I swallowed drily.

“I’m looking for Margaret Hutton,” I said.

“Margaret.”

“Oh, Margaret.”

“Margaret Hutton.”

Heads turned stiffly, eyes seeking other eyes, summoning consensus. At the back of the room, a bent head raised itself, fingers unlocked.

“Mrs. Hutton?” I asked. The woman nodded carefully. I threaded through the chairs towards her.

She was a tiny person, frail as wood ash. Age had bent her; she was hunched forward protectively around herself, her chest hollow underneath the patterned polyester of her dress. The other women resumed their conversations, their voices soft as crumbled cake. I sat down in the upright wood-framed armchair on Mrs. Hutton’s left and the seat sank deeply on its springs.

“Is that you?” she asked.

Her skin hung in swags beneath her eyes and at her jaw, in shades of translucent purple and manila. I felt myself choke up. Stupid, that this would make me miss my mum; she never got to be this old.

“No,” I said, and then didn’t know what to say, how to frame the question.

Mrs. Hutton studied my face. Her eyes were smudged with age, the whites marked with yellow and fine webs of pink, the irises watery blue. She shook her head. “I thought you were her.”

I felt my cheeks redden with guilt. She thought I was a friend or relative; a daughter-in-law, a granddaughter, a niece.

“No. Sorry.”

Her attention slipped to my hand curled on my lap; the pink swell at the base of my thumb, the plaster stuck inadequately across the infected cut.

“Been in the wars,” she said.

“A bit.”

“You have to watch yourself,” she said.

I smiled awkwardly. “A friend of yours sent me to see you. Your old neighbour from across the street. Mrs. Davies.”

Mrs. Hutton’s face cracked with pleasure. “Ah. Jean.”

“Yes, Jean.” I seized the name. “She sends her love.”

“That’s nice.”

“She said I should ask you about the house.”

“The house?”

“She said that you were the one to talk to.”

Margaret looked at me a moment, nonplussed. She raised a hand, the knuckles swollen like tree roots. She gestured to the room, frowned deeply. “This place? The Home?”

“No, I mean your cottage. My mum and dad bought it. I’m—”

“No,” she said, and frowned deeper still. “No.”

“Sorry?”

“I told Jack.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I told Jack, I said he mustn’t.” Her voice was raised in irritation. Other conversations fell away; attention was drawn to us.

I spoke low: “He mustn’t what?”

She looked at me sidelong, appraisingly. She seemed extremely lucid, needle-sharp.

“I was sure you were her,” she said.

“I’m not, honestly. We’ve never met. Your neighbour. Jean. She said that I should—”

“You look like her.”

I felt a prickling at the nape of my neck. “Who do you mean?”

Mrs. Hutton’s hand fixed itself around my wrist. Her touch was cold and dry.

“I got so cross with her,” she said. “Getting me up at all hours. Those tricks of sunshine and voices. The kind of smells that get you right here.” She tapped her concave chest with a thick fingernail; a shiver of electricity shot through my skin. “The smell of wet linen, and wood shavings, and woodsmoke, and liquorice.
There’d be someone talking downstairs, and I’d think Charlie was there, and I’d think the boys were home, and I’d think it was all back as it used to be, and I was young again, and if I could just find Charlie—”

Mrs. Hutton drew a ragged breath. Her eyes were brimming. She raised a loose-skinned finger to a lower lid.

“I couldn’t bear it anymore.”

She fumbled in a skirt pocket, raised a bunched tissue to blot at her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said clumsily.

She shook her head. “Oh, I like it here, I like it here. It’s a good place; it’s good to have the company—it’s just”—she squeezed my wrist, shook her head—“cruel,” she said. As she looked at me, her expression softened; her face seemed somehow to slacken. She shook her head again, gently.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, my voice thick, colluding with her tears.

“It’s never that, he didn’t mean—”

“He?”

She said something else; I couldn’t make it out.

“Mrs. Hutton?”

She didn’t seem to have heard me. Her eyes had clouded; she mumbled something about rain, and something that had to be brought, as if she were trying to convince herself, to set it straight in her own head.

“Are you okay?” I leaned closer. “Do you need anything? Shall I call someone?”

She shook her head, her eyelids sinking.

“Margaret?”

She didn’t respond. I lifted her hand from mine and laid it in her lap. Her fingers, with their loose skin, their swollen knuckles, curled upwards like coral.

The boy was still swinging the vacuum cleaner back and forth. He smiled at me again, then saw my expression, and his smile collapsed.

“Where’s the nurse?” I asked.

He gestured me on, towards the lobby.

The staircase. The sweep of it like a waterfall, like birdsong, and somehow annoyingly, intangibly, important. A figure crossed the landing above; white tunic, navy trousers: the nurse. She came padding down the stairs, her mind elsewhere, her hand skimming the smooth curve of the banister. She noticed me; her smile went. She clattered down the final steps to join me.

“Problem?”

“She’s just—” I tried.

“Margaret?”

“She just. Went blank.”

She glanced down the corridor, glanced back at me. “I’ll check on her.” She touched my arm, gave me a quick smile. “Don’t worry. It happens. It’s not your fault.” She was gone, heading off down the corridor, breaking into a run. I turned, and left: I didn’t believe her.

I crunched down the driveway. Dark yew trees lined the way; overhead the branches of deciduous trees were heavy with buds. Crocuses sprouted underneath; celandines dotted the grass.

You look like her
.

I came out onto the road, turned towards the village. Hands stuffed into pockets, shoulders up, hand throbbing and hot between the press of my leg, the restriction of denim. Just a narrow grass verge and a wire fence between me and fields. Lambs stood in gangs. No cars passed. A rabbit had been smeared into pulp and fluff on the tarmac. A stray hubcap lay on the grass verge. The road swept down towards the village. Beech trees spread fine branches overhead. I was thinking of her wet blue eyes, smudged with age.

Those tricks of sunshine and voices
.

There was a bench on the green. I sat down, looked at my hands. At the backs; at the tracery of veins, the fan of tendons beneath the skin. I thought of Cate’s newborn rippling water-creature fingers, Mum’s darkening claws on white hospital sheets, Margaret Hutton’s tree-root swollen hands. The tricks of sunshine and voices. The tricks the mind plays on itself. The misfirings of synapses as the nerves fail, as the neurones decay. The vacancy that settles, clouding the eyes, softening the expression, making speech falter into meaninglessness. Is that what Cate saw? When I’d gone, did her clear eyes watch the blankness of my face? What would that do to her, to see her mother leave like that?

I wasn’t having it. I wouldn’t let it happen again. I couldn’t let it happen to Cate.

I stood on Jean Davies’ front step, sidelong to the door. Across the street, the windows of Reading Room Cottage looked at me blankly, catching no reflection.

She opened the door. She looked at me. I smiled for her.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

She wanted to give me tea and biscuits; cake, a sandwich, soup, anything at all. I thanked her and shook my head. As she spoke, I was conscious that I was scraping my middle fingernail rapidly back and forth across my thumbnail; I couldn’t stop. I was conscious of the throb underneath the plaster in time with my pulse. I was conscious of the fragment of pain underneath my skull, where the hangover still lingered. I was conscious of time dripping away, that I should be doing seventy, my hands wrapped around the steering wheel, my right foot on the accelerator, my mind calculating niceties of speed, of movement in the cars in front and behind, their shifting relationship to my own frail metal box, its slight cargo of flesh. But I was standing in this almost-stranger’s hallway, on the blood-and-blue lino squares, just beside the dresser, trying not to glance too often or urgently at the old burgundy Trimphone, the thumb-index address book. I spoke very carefully.

“That local history enthusiast. Could you remind me. What was her name?”

“Pauline, Pauline Boyd.”

“I’d love to have a chat with her.”

“I’ll give you her number.”

“Is there any chance you could call her for me? I seem to have lost my mobile.”

She pressed a fingernail into the B section of her address book and lifted the receiver. She glanced over at me, smiling slightly. I could hear, through the receiver, the faint ring of the distant telephone. It stopped, answered. She dropped her gaze.

“Hello, Pauline, it’s Jean.”

Normal, I told myself. Be normal, normal, normal.

The house was modern. It was down the street towards the church, with its back oriented towards the street and its face turned towards a wide open view of the valley. I stood on the doormat. It was made of thin strips of metal, laid on edge. They bit through the soles of my Converse, into my feet. Just facts. Just ask for the facts. If she knew who lived there, and when, and anything at all about them. Surnames, first names, a family called Williams, anything. Even in my own mind I refused to use the word
haunted
. The glass was rippled; I could see into a dim parqueted hall; there was a rectangle of light where a doorway opened into a brighter room. I pressed the bell, and it rang a little way off, in the hall, and there was silence, and I waited. Normal. Normal, normal, normal. There was a flurry of denim and navy blue, broken into ripples by the glass panes. The door opened.