The Telling (23 page)

Miss Boyd was a small, sturdy woman in her sixties, dressed in jeans and an RSPB sweatshirt. She hustled me through to the living room and asked me to take a seat, offering me coffee, tea. She’d disappeared off to put the kettle on before I could refuse.

Patio windows looked out on smooth lawns, a willow. The room had a precise kind of dryness to it. Spare green furniture, an upright piano backed up against a wall; a music stand and two dark curvaceous violin boxes propped up in a corner. I’d have thought she was giving music lessons to the village children, if the village hadn’t been singularly empty of children; empty of everyone but the elderly.

She was clattering about in the kitchen. I couldn’t settle. I went over to her bookcase. Music, gardening, handicrafts, history. I recognized one of them; the local history book I’d bought. No use. Nothing specific. Except. Except. The photograph.
Last of the Lune Valley Basket-weavers
. The house had looked like Reading Room Cottage. And the name—Williams. The same family as was in the grave? I twitched the book off the shelf, was whisking through the pages. She bustled in with a tray, looked at me. I felt my cheeks flush up.

“You can borrow it if you like.”

“Sorry.” I put it back. I came over towards her, standing awkwardly as she put the tray down on the pristine teak coffee table.

“It’s really good of you to see me at such short notice.”

She wafted the idea away with a weather-tanned hand. “More than happy. Please, have a seat.”

I sat down on the edge of the sofa. She collapsed into an ancient green Parker Knoll armchair, sighing in relief.

I leaned in to reach my coffee, took it in my left hand and sipped carefully at it. Everything was difficult: to smile, to drink, to hold anything steady, to make casual conversation. She was picking up sugar lumps and dropping them into her cup. She looked at me, smiled broadly and stirred her coffee.

“So,” she asked.

“So.” My voice creaked.

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s the cottage, Reading Room Cottage; we’re going to sell it, but I—” I cleared my throat. “We don’t know anything about it, and I wanted to find out about the people who lived there. The family. I was wondering if you could help.”

“Well, obviously there will have been lots of different families living there down the years. It was built as a labourers’ cottage, part of the Storrs Estate; they were still renting it out till the late seventies, when the estate was split up and sold. A lot of this’ll be on your deeds. The Huttons had it next: it was Jack’s place when the kids were small, and then the parents—Margaret and Charlie—retired there when Jack took over the farm. And then there were your—” She hesitated, smiled cautiously. “Your parents. Is it a particular family you’re interested in?”

She lifted her coffee, drank.

“No, no, it’s just—” I felt myself grow hot. “I don’t know anything, really, don’t know how to go about it. I wanted an overview, a sense of who might have been living there. Just to start with.”

“That’s easy enough.” Miss Boyd set down her cup. “Census records, parish records. That’s what you’ll need. Mind you, it’ll just be the bare bones.”

“Bare bones?”

Her expression was easy, open, suggested nothing out of the ordinary.

“Of their lives, I mean; all you’ll get is their names, and their date of birth, marriage, death, and their occupation. If you’re lucky.”

“Right. Of course. And how do you do that?”

“You can get to a couple of the censuses online, but the parish records are held at the local record office at Preston. They house census records too, so you’d be best off heading down there. Get it done in a day. And you’ve got the archivists on hand if you run into difficulties.”

She pushed herself out of the chair, crossed over to the sideboard, opened a drawer, took out a spiral-bound notepad and a steel biro, and the phone book. She flicked through, running her finger down the columns. She opened another drawer, lifted out a train timetable and studied it a moment. She spoke over her shoulder.

“You’re better off taking the train,” she said. “Parking’s a nightmare.”

There were precise creases across the backs of her knees. I picked a scrap of loose skin by a thumbnail. My cheeks still burned.

She brought the notepad over to me and I rose from the chair. Her fingers were swollen and distorted with rheumatism. I thought of the violins, their dark clipped-shut cases.

She said, “Direct train from Carnforth. The next one’s half past twelve. If you hurry you might just make it. Funny, you asking about Reading Room Cottage.”

“Why’s that?” I asked; it came out too abruptly. She didn’t seem to register.

“When I first came to the village, thirty odd years ago, I had this theory, that with the name surviving like that, the reading room itself must have been recent, that there would have been memories, oral history.”

“And there wasn’t?”

“Not a thing.”

“Can you think,” I said carefully, “why would that be? Why there would be no stories?”

She shook her head. “It must have been short-lived. That kind of thing was often set up in a spirit of self-help, to give people a
wider education than the church offered. It was sometimes done by groups, sometimes by an individual with strong political motivation. But these institutions, they’re relying on subscriptions from working people, so if wages take a slump, then people are faced with a stark choice…and if you’re a political radical, and there’s a crackdown…It makes you realize how vulnerable that kind of thing is, how those lives, working-class lives, they’re just so—”

“Perishable,” I said.

Her eyes were bright, hazel, acute. I was conscious that my own were dry and sore, my cheeks were burning and my hand throbbing hot. I was not managing to do normal, not remotely, not at all.

“And yet the name survives,” I added.

“Indeed.”

“So it must have mattered to someone.”

She looked at me a moment too long. It was a moment of assessment. She ripped off the sheet of notepaper and handed it to me.

“I hope it works out for you,” she said.

A spider had made its web between the window-seal and the wing-mirror. It was poised there like a hand on piano keys. I cupped it in my fingers and set it down on the garden wall, beside the tiny creeping thyme plant. It picked its way across the stone and slipped into a gap. I slid into the car.

It was as though I were moving through the pre-programmed environment of a computer game, shifting gear, depressing the
clutch and accelerator in response to changing constellations of pixels. The road swooped me up the hill, and through the woods, past Storrs Hall, out into open fields. Solitary wind-twisted trees, and sheep clustering with lambs, and cows just standing as if in a trance, and then the farm, and a tractor lazily grinding across a field.

The road brought me down into the blustery, blackened little town. I coasted through and pulled to a halt in the station car park. There was no queue in the ticket office. Seconds later, ticket bought, I was loping down the ramp to the underpass, my stride stretched by the slope, passing beneath the silent railway lines before climbing back into daylight.

Above me, the ceiling was a glass-and-iron canopy. A clock, massive, weighty, was tethered with cables to the castiron ribs. Five minutes to wait till my train. I sat down on the edge of a bench. The light gleamed off the rails. There were railway lines in front of me and railway lines behind. A single tick; the minute hand clunked forward. I watched the clock’s steady, authoritative care of minutes; seconds were left to shift for themselves. The railways had relied upon time. They’d whisked time from village to village, dragging it along in their slipstream like dandelion down or the fluff of old-man’s-beard. Before railways, communication was confined to the speed of a galloping horse. To walking pace. The church clock stood alone, unchallengeable, eccentric as it liked. Ticking away the minutes, the hours and the days. It seemed just minutes ago that my daughter was this starfish thing, her eyes wide, wrenched from the wound, her arms and legs flung out, shocked by existence. Just moments before that, my mother’s
pulse was fading, her eyes moving under thin eyelids, dreaming morphine dreams.

The clock’s hand jolted forward.

Suddenly, an express train punched through the space behind me. I turned to follow its rush. It thundered on and on, heading north, and was gone, dragging its pocket of dust and noise with it, leaving a tear in the day.

A couple climbed the slope from the underpass together. They stood, in matching anoraks, unusually close. The minute hand jumped again. A young woman came up out of the shadows, pushing a pushchair in which a toddler slept, his head flung back, his eyes squeezed tight, as if making a serious and well-considered wish. Cate: I could only see her in fragments; the luminescence of her cheek, a red bulge in a wet gum, a dimpled hand. The smell of her: milk and apple and ammonia and skin. The minute hand clicked. The woman pushed the sleeping child across the platform and stood in a square of sunlight. She took her mobile phone from her bag and cupped it in her palm, tapping buttons with a thumb. A hooped earring caught the light. Her head, bent to peer at the phone, was beautiful. The child slept on. I wanted to go over to them, to crouch at the pushchair’s side and run the back of a finger over the child’s cheek, just for the memory of how it felt, for the sheer wonder of the reality of a new being.

We were sitting at the traffic lights when I told Mark. I’d just picked him up from the station. He said, You’re very quiet, and I said, I’m sorry, and he said, How’s your mum, and I said, I’m pregnant. He laughed. A big, happy, laugh. I turned to look at him, pleased, almost puzzled, and he kissed me, his hand on my hand on the gear stick. Then a horn beeped behind us, and
I glanced ahead: the light was green, swimming with the dampness of my eyes. We drove home, the atmosphere odd. Mark kept starting little streams of talk, to which I tried to contribute. He was conscious of my quietness, conscious of the reasons for it, but unable to quite contain his happiness.

The rumble of a train’s approach. The tannoy crackled, an announcement began and was overwhelmed by the judder and clank of the train, the screech of its brakes. The pushchair was swivelled towards the noise, the young woman’s face serious with calculation: deceleration, distance between doors, distance across the platform to be covered. A slight adjustment between the middle-aged couple; only one of them was travelling. The woman kissed the man, the coloured panels of their jackets pressing briefly together and parting. The young woman dipped the pushchair back onto its rear wheels, and I got up from the bench, and walked over to the slowing train.

The train ripped past backyard washing-line views. The brief grace of rivers and the slow panning shot of wide silver mudflats and the sea. At times, a canal flanked the railway; a barge moved at retirement’s leisurely pace. It was such ordinary beauty; I should not have been there to see it. I should have been on the M6, past Birmingham by now.

How long before Mark started to wonder? He’d have tried the mobile and been unsuccessful; he’d think I had the phone on silent while I was driving.

The carriage was half-empty. The anorak woman was sitting across the aisle from me, reading a soft fat paperback, its
cover folded back upon itself. Her jacket was off and bundled onto the luggage rack. Outside, the flat spread of a valley floor, and then moors rising ink-blue to the clouds, sunlight shafting down through cloud gaps to patch the turf with yellow. Then mills; red-brick, monumental, their windows reflecting back the sky. We came into the station. The light was dim. People stood on the platform, some scanning windows for a familiar face, others turning to move towards the carriage doors. I got up.

The wind blew sharp outside the station. Crisp packets and swirling paper coffee cups and fag ends in the gutter. Taxis lined up patiently, their engines burbling fumes out into the air. I was dazed by the travel, by the strangeness of being elsewhere, of being somewhere entirely unforeseen, like when the car broke down on the motorway and Lucy and Mum and me sat on the fence at the top of the embankment among the long grass and teasels, and watched Dad on the hard shoulder, bent into the hot engine, his glasses steaming, unable to wait for the tow truck to arrive.

I have to imagine her moment of knowing, years later, at the mirrored wardrobe door, her jumper and bra on the bed, her arm crooked back over her head, pressing with two fingers at a hard bead of flesh in the side of her breast. I wonder at the timing: whether her sickness had been slowly accumulating for years, a gradual accretion of mutation, or if it were quicker than that, if the cluster of madly splitting cells was the fault of some strange sympathy, as in the dark of my uterus, a faint speck of meticulously dividing cells drifted, settled and dug in, putting down its roots, beginning to grow. The thought always comes tainted
with guilt: it was her death, after all, and unknowable as someone else’s love, and here I am like a typical child, trying to make it be about me.

There was grit in the air, and the smell of petrol. I made my way through traffic cones and under scaffolding, across a patch of sad municipal grass. I had the instructions in my hand; the breeze caught the paper and ruffled it, pulling at the loose shreds along the top, where it had been torn from the spiral. I rounded a corner and there it was: a concrete cube held aloft by concrete pillars, sealed off and insulated from the grit and clatter of the town. A glass-walled stairwell dipped to touch the grey-slabbed ground below: the Public Record Office. I went up to the glass doors and pushed through, climbing the stairs into the concrete box.

The archivist murmured instructions. I followed her, half a pace behind, past rows of desks where figures hunched over books or leaned in close to illuminated screens. At the end of the room stood a wooden card-file cabinet and beside it, a table. Ring-binders were laid out in rows, each with a label giving the census date. The assistant told me that parishes were listed alphabetically in the folders, and assigned a number. All I had to do was find this same number in the filing cabinet: it would be typed onto an envelope and the census records for the parish, reproduced on microfiche, would be inside. The Parish Records themselves; the baptisms, marriages, burials—she gestured over to the side of the room—were catalogued in much the same way over there. They rarely brought out the actual documents nowadays, she said; it saved on wear and tear. You must only take one at a time, she warned me, and shrugged in a self-deprecating
way, tucking her loose blonde hair behind an ear. Otherwise, all hell breaks loose.