The Telling (24 page)

“So, what’s first?” she asked.

“I’m trying to find out about the occupants of a particular house.” I could feel my cheeks begin to flush. I gave her the name of the village. “This would be, I imagine, around the middle of the nineteenth century.”

“What diocese?”

“I have no idea. Sorry, is that important?”

She shook her head, already flipping through the file: “It’s all right.”

She ran a finger across a page, then turned to the cabinet, lifted out an envelope. She held it out to me.

“Is that it?”

“Census records for 1851. Slap bang in the middle of the century.” She gestured for me to take it. My hand shook. My arm ached, all the way up to the shoulder, from the cut. “Have you used a microfiche-reader before?”

I shook my head.

She gestured me over to a nearby desk, on which stood one of the screens I’d seen other people using. She leaned over me; I caught her perfume, something fine and sweet and faintly woody. She showed me how the microfiche-reader worked. It was proportioned like an old TV, but simpler, lighter, and more elegant. She shook the envelope and a transparency fell out. About the size of a postcard, it was printed with rows of smaller black rectangles, like miniature X-rays. She slipped it between two sheets of glass, like a microscope slide, at the base of the device. She flicked a switch, a light went on underneath the slide, and the
images were projected onto the screen in front of me. I watched her hands, the neat clear-painted nails, the diamond solitaire on her ring finger; I couldn’t bring myself to look at the records with her there. She demonstrated how the slide could move in any direction on a plane, bringing different records into view. She showed how a lens could be adjusted to sharpen the focus of the image.

“Got it?”

“Yep. I think so.” I smiled up at her. Her skin was creamy, soft and clear. I felt grubby, grey and really tired.

“Any problems, I’ll be over at the enquiries desk, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you for your help.”

I watched her go. The neat shape of her pencil skirt, the neat hem of her cardigan. A grey-haired gentleman straightened up and turned to catch her eye. She stopped, studied the records he was viewing, and they dropped into muted conversation.

I slipped the slide around in its orbit, murky images rearing up onto the screen. I focused the lens with a twist. It still didn’t seem quite real.

The handwriting was fine and regular and careful. The first record for the village was that outlying farm beyond Storrs. The name of the house was not given; it was just listed as number one. Living there was the patriarch (farmer, fifty-five, widowed); a son (farmer, thirty-six, married), daughter-in-law (thirty-five); a grandson (farm worker, fifteen), and a granddaughter (scholar, eleven). I wondered if the official had been brought in and given tea. I wondered if the girl was doing well at school. If they were, more or less, happy.

I shifted the slide across, counting out the house numbers,
noting landmarks: Storrs Hall, Public House, School House. I shunted the slide on: for a moment the screen was just swirling white space, dust-motes the size of cherry-blossom petals, trapped fibres big as millipedes. I glanced down to the mechanism and lined up a dark rectangle beneath the lens. Then I looked back up, at the screen.

It was number 14.

In 1851, the head of the household, the individual who accounted for all the occupants of the house was a man called Thomas Williams; the man whose name appeared on that grave. He lived there with his wife, Elizabeth, whose name had crumbled half away beneath the moss. They lived in that house. To read it here made my throat constrict with unaccountable tears. She was twenty-seven at the time of this census. And then I saw it.

Their son, James. Eight years old. A scholar.

I hadn’t considered the possibility of him.

Outwardly, it all seemed so normal, so everyday. Afternoon light streamed in through the window, making the hanging strips of the blinds glow and casting a wedge of brightness across the top of the wooden Parish Records cabinet. It seemed to me that there was something wonderful about this human conspiracy of order, that everything should be catalogued and housed and copied and filed, just to serve the possibility of future significance, the idea that this might matter, at some time, to someone.

There was just one envelope: the best part of a hundred years of baptisms, marriages and deaths all recorded on one slip of film.
The parish must have been so small, the population so scant. I drew the transparency out of the envelope and tried to slide it into place between the sheets of glass, but my hands were clumsy, and it juddered and crumpled. I took a breath, straightened it, smoothed it and tried again. It slotted into place.

An image reared up onto the screen; a copy of the Parish Register cover. Flaking leather, heavy gothic type, and a crest of a lion and a unicorn. I pushed the slide away, careening through decades of blessed release, better places gone to, patters of tiny feet and doesn’t she look beautifuls, to get to the end of the century. The records were in negative. The dark grey pages were traced across in white ink, like the writing in an old photograph album. It was difficult to read. I hunched forward, squinting to pick out the names, the dates.

Burial
1881	John Ireby aged 71 yrs	Febry 5th    Jn.° Tatham Vicar

I shunted the slide sideways, the records flicking past.

Burial
1887	Catharine Barns Infant	Febry 6th    Jn.° Tatham Vicar

Deaths clustered at the beginning of the year, as if there were a season for death, as there is for making hay, or buying swimwear. Infants, children, women, men. I shifted the slide again, down a
row. A trapped hair slipped across the viewing screen, monstrous, wormlike. And there she was.

Burial
1897	Elizabeth Williams Aged 73	September 14th    Jn.° Tatham Vicar

She was seventy-three. She was buried in September, out of season. Her coffin—if she’d have had a coffin—her shrouded body, wrapped in a wedding sheet perhaps, was let down into the Williams family grave. She was laid on top of her husband’s bones. The sextons filled in the earth, and someone chipped her name into the remaining clear inches of stone. No space for dates. No space for anything more than the defining phrase,
his wife
. And for the first time I wondered was there more to that phrase than met the eye; was there a hint of defiance to it, an undertone of assertion? Was it her son who had insisted it be carved? Her husband was dead, after all, and couldn’t comment.

The son. Conceived when she was nineteen. I flicked back, looking for his birth. The neat accounting for the souls received, united, dispatched. The Reverend Jonathan Tatham’s careful double-entry bookkeeping for God. I found myself warming to the man; the unassuming abbreviation of his name, the smooth looping quality of his handwriting.

There was a season for babies too. James Robert Williams was christened in the summer of 1843, between a Stephen Goss, plump son of George and Mary Goss, farmers, and a Dorothy Anne Hollings, bastard daughter of Anne Hollings, domestic, pinkly bawling as the water washes her ill-begotten soul.

June 23rd

James Robert

son of Thomas Williams & Elizabeth Williams

There it was, in black and white, though the words were white and the background black, like text on a computer screen, highlighted before deleting.

I was in that moment’s stillness before gravity bites. I was looking at the boy’s name, the boy who grew up, and died, and was buried somewhere other than the family grave, and was long rotted away to bones. Whose own grandchildren will have been of an age to be ploughed into the mud at Ypres or picked apart by fishes in the Dardanelles. Far worse than the burials, the baptismal records: the freight of heartbreak they carried; the inevitable grief of living. Then I noticed the handwriting; that it was different. It was not so neat, it scrawled and scratched; the signature was practically illegible. Initials R. and G., possibly W. Not Reverend Jonathan Tatham anymore. The clergyman before him.

A baby suspended over the font, water dripped over his head, the muttering of benedictions. A young woman standing in the background, weak, pale, fierce. The vicar’s blue-shaven wattles shaking with the words:
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen
.

A baby born in June.

I scrabbled at the microfiche in its slide, my hands clumsy with haste. June June June June June. If he was christened late June 1843, he must have been conceived…

There was no wedding recorded in September between Thomas Williams and Elizabeth. The year scrolled back through harvest-time and hay and dog roses in the hedgerows, back through May
blossom and cherry blossom and bluebells, back through daffodils and snowdrops and wind-chased clouds, and there was no wedding between Thomas Williams and Elizabeth. I shifted the slide again, scrolling back through that same summer again, through other weddings and babies and unseasonable deaths, and the days shortened, and the leaves began to turn, and they fell, and there was frost in the mornings, and my hands were shaking. They married in December.

December the 12th, 1842. Elizabeth was nineteen, must have been two, nearly three months pregnant, and must have known that she was, since there was no blood when there should have been, and there was sickness and fatigue. She would have seen these signs in other women, and have known what they meant.

Elizabeth Parke
,

her mark

The X was large, out of proportion, displayed the cautious awkwardness of someone unused to a pen. It shocked me more than anything else. More like a denial than an assertion, it seemed to make a kind of sense.

I passed the counter on the way out. The same girl, sweet creamy skin, who looked up to give me a concentrated and concerned look that made me almost love her.

“I—” I tried.

She lifted a box of tissues from underneath the counter, but I shook my head.

“I just wanted to know—” I cleared my throat. “I found this thing. A young woman, mid-nineteenth century, she marked a cross by her name rather than signed. I thought that there was basic education, pretty much, by then. Sunday schools and stuff.”

The assistant nodded sympathetically. “It wouldn’t have made her illiterate, necessarily. Some church schools, they’d teach the kids to read, but not to write. People often learned to write in later life.”

“I don’t understand.”

The grey-haired man had come up to the counter. He was leaning in to catch her eye, smiling impatiently. Her attention flickered to him, back to me.

“They needed to read, for the scriptures. Writing; that’s a different matter. Teach people to write, and before you know it, people are asking questions, constructing arguments, communicating with each other over distances. It wouldn’t do.”

I don’t quite know how I got back. I bought a coffee somewhere, drank it on the train, chewed through a scone as dry as lagging, watched the fields and roads unscroll, the houses flick by. At the station, I got into the car and followed the ribboning tarmac back to the village, to pull in in front of the cottage, switch off the lights and the ignition, and slump forward onto the steering wheel, and rest my head on my arms, as if it were just momentum that had kept me moving, had kept me upright all this time.

I closed my eyes.

I’d got what I had gone for, but I hadn’t reckoned on how bare the bones would be. A marriage, a birth, a death. This wasn’t a
life. It was nothing like it. Life’s what happens in between. The tease of a flame at a dry twig. Snowflakes melting in upturned palms. The drip of chlorinated water from soaked curls, lips unsticking in a smile, outstretched arms with fingers crooked to coax a child into swimming. The dip of the tongue’s tip to the palm of the hand to lift a sweet blue pill from a skin-crease. These tiny things that change the world, minute by minute, and forever. These perishable moments, that are gone completely, if we don’t take the trouble of their telling.

WE WALKED OUT, THOMAS and me. Down to the water’s edge where he skipped stones and sent silk-ripples across the surface of the water. I sat on the bank and watched, and saw the swallows skim up and down the stretch of water, catching flies, and I wondered if they got their blue sheen from the flies they caught, all the little shiny insects that dart about the surface of the water, and how duck eggs are that fine pale blue, and mallards have the shot-silk heads, and the females flashes of blue amongst their wing-feathers, and how blue seems infused through all these things, all these manifestations, and I opened my mouth to say something, but didn’t, because it was Thomas. He sent a good throw out across the river, and watched it curl across the water
all the way to the far bank, then turned to me, brushing his hands together, his face flushed with satisfaction.

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

“What meeting?”

“The one at Caton Moor.”

His expression flickered. “How did you hear about it?”

“Something Dad said.”

“I might go,” he said.

We walked up the coffin lane towards the village; the rabbits were out in the low field, nibbling at the grass. We walked in such complete silence that the rabbits didn’t notice us, and continued to feed and lope about. It was getting dark, and the air had a nip in it.

“Did you know,” Thomas said out of nowhere, “that paper is made out of rags, and in cities men go about the streets, calling for old rags, and they are shredded and soaked and boiled and dried and pressed and turned into paper, and that in some places they can’t get sufficient rags and so are now making paper out of wood, turning whole trees, whole trees imagine, into paper.”

I looked at him. I’d never thought about it. “Did Mr. Moore tell you that?”

Thomas shook his head, and was trying not to smile. “No, I read it for myself in the
Penny Journal
.”

We walked back up the path to the church, the white gravel crunching underfoot. At the church side-gate, he took me by the hand, and stopped me, and turned me to him, and he grasped my arms, pinning them to my sides, and I didn’t really think that he would do it, but he kissed me.

His lips were soft and fat and damp. He stopped, and moved
away from me, still holding me by the arms. I couldn’t look at him; he sighed, and put his arms around me, drawing me close to him.

“Ah, Lizzy,” he said.

I pulled away and ran from him. He caught up with me, and kept talking all the way, more than I’d ever heard him say in one go before: what had he done wrong, if I was going to the Harvest Dance with him, and walking out with him, then I should expect to be kissed, I should expect to be held, and if I didn’t like it then I shouldn’t go out walking with him.

We’d reached the house. I wanted to tell him if I had the choice I wouldn’t, but that would only lengthen the dispute, so I just said goodnight then ran up the front steps, and in through the door, slamming it behind me, scrabbling at my bonnet strings.

Mr. Moore had left a book there for me on the shelf. Plum-coloured leather, fresh as a new glove. It was a collection of plays that a gentleman had translated from another language, from the Greek. The Greeks were heathens, I knew; the Reverend had some books in Greek in his library, filled back to front with a strange, impenetrable script. Now, coming upon the stories in plain English, clear enough for even me to read, I could see why the Reverend preferred to keep them locked up in those mysterious symbols. These were bloody tales, the people passionate and unwavering and cruel. I might have thought them unfit for a girl like me to read, if I had paused to consider the matter, and not rushed headlong into them. And if my thoughts had not begun to shift and alter, and become other than they had been.

The Thursday evening, Hornby Market-day, Thomas came to our house with red cheeks and the smell of river from the walk home. He was carrying a parcel tied up in brown paper. He’d made good money on his baskets, he told my mam; he said our dad should take ours to Hornby too; there’d been a lack of them further down the valley, with the building work at Storrs taking up so many. I was sitting at the window, with another of Mr. Moore’s books in my lap.
The Odyssey
, it was called; Odysseus’s men had been turned to swine; I didn’t want to leave the story, but I was worried by the sight of the soft parcel crushed in Thomas’s thick fingers. Had he formed no impression, had he taken no hint from the other evening? He was already right in front of me, and was laying his slight burden down on top of my open book. It was light and soft inside its wrapping. I glanced up at Thomas; he seemed at once gleeful and buttoned-down, like a child who knows he has been especially good, but must continue to be good, if he’s to get his treat.

“I brought you a present,” he said.

Mam bent eagerly to see what I’d been given.

“Go on, Lizzy.”

I knew what it was, and I knew what it was for. I picked at the knot and loosened the paper. The fabric was pretty. It was tea-dyed cotton, sprigged, with matching ribbons and braiding and thread.

He said, “You’re to make yourself a new dress for the dance.”

The cotton smelt of the warehouse and of camphor-wood and spice. My face felt numb and cold. My mam was saying what a
good boy he was, bringing me such a beautiful present, and that I’d need to ask Mrs. Wolfenden for a pattern to copy, and I would look lovely in something like the high-waister with the bell-shaped sleeves that Mrs. Wolfenden had worn last spring, and all the time I sat there, frozen, looking down at the beautiful rich colour, the wonderful soft folds of the fresh new fabric, hearing my mam’s voice as if through a blanket, and I wanted to fling the parcel away from me, the fabric, ribbons, braid and thread flying out like a fountain of spilled tea, and push past them and get out of the house and just run. Mam was chattering on about Mrs. Wolfenden’s old dresses and her generosity with patterns and such, and Thomas was nodding and agreeing as if familiar with the subject. My mouth was dry; I had to lick my lips before I could speak.

“There’s no need for this.” I said. “My Sunday dress will do quite well enough for the dance.”

“Nonsense,” Mam said. “What are you thinking? With this beautiful bit of cloth Thomas has so kindly got for you—”

She fingered a fold, and lifted a corner so that the bundle tumbled undone, and she lifted the fabric up to the light, so that tiny squares of sunlight shone through it, and it glowed. She and Thomas exchanged a glance, a little smile, and I was conscious of a fierce and sudden flush across my face and through my whole body. They were not conspirators, I remember thinking; the need for conspiracy was over. They were victors.

I didn’t ask Mrs. Wolfenden; not for weeks. I couldn’t. Not the way things were at the vicarage. Every day when I got home after polishing the hall floor twice, or being scolded for invisible dust, or having
fresh linen returned to me for re-laundering, my mam would look me over, seeking out the neat little parcel of patterns that she daily expected, and seeing nothing, would frown and start to scold. I was leaving myself scant time to get the work done, all the pinning and cutting and sewing. I’d end up having to go in my Sunday dress after all, and what would Thomas think of that. Perhaps he’d take the hint, I wanted to say, but instead I’d begin some half-hearted excuse; that just when I was going to ask, Mrs. Wolfenden had gone out on a morning call; my work had kept me from the house and out of the family’s company; the lady had been out of sorts and it hadn’t seemed right to trouble her; I’d speak to her tomorrow.

“If I were your age, and in your position,” Mam said, “I’d have asked her pretty smartish. I’d have the dress nearly finished by now. I’d have thought of little else.”

It was September already. There was only one meeting that month, when the moon was full, since it was too dark otherwise for people to find their way home afterwards without ending in a ditch. It was a noisy meeting: voices were raised behind the closed door, and three of the men left before it was ended. Mr. Gorst didn’t come, though his eldest boy did; and there were others who had often come before but didn’t now. There were newcomers too; Methodists and other non-conformists, people we never met from one season’s end to another, walking in miles from the hill-farms and the hamlets above Docker, walking back by moonlight. They arrived with furrowed brows and left in huddles, muttering.

There was a book waiting for me, every evening, squeezed between the
Progress
and the Bible on the dresser shelf. Some books were left for several days, giving me time to become so deeply engrossed in them that I moved in a haze, a dream of
them. Some books were there overnight, and disappeared like mist in the daytime, while I was at work. I’d go to the shelf when I got home, and there would be an unknown book waiting. It became almost a joke: Mr. Moore would sit, cool as the September day, and he’d glance up at me with his brown eyes, his gaze level and uncharged, as if he were innocent of everything, and I would take the book, and return his gaze coolly, and sit down to read. All the unfinished stories: they wrapped themselves around me like vapours, trailed after me like mist.

“Not much more than a week now,” Mam said, jolting me out of my reading. “Till the dance. Sall’s coming home for her holiday, and can help with the trimming of the dress, if it’s ready for trimming.” She was folding linen, her face lined with vexation and bother. “Have you even spoken to Mrs. Wolfenden?”

“It’s not easy,” I said, my eyes pulled back down to the book.

“It’s perfectly easy. You just ask her. You’re a good girl. You deserve a treat once in a while.”

“It’s not my place. Alice is her maid. I’m just a housemaid; it’d be too much of a presumption. I’ll do fine in my Sunday dress.”

“If you don’t ask her tomorrow,” Mam said, “I’ll march down there and ask her myself.”

The ewer was warm and heavy in my hands. I walked carefully with it, conscious of each step of the stairs, looking at the pretty flower pattern and the shiny glaze; I tapped on the door, pushed quietly through and put the ewer down on the washstand. Mrs.
Wolfenden sat up from her pillows, all creamy cotton and frills, her hair in braids, and blinked around her.

I spoke softly. “Madam?”

She was startled to see me, and tried to conceal it. “I expected Alice.” She held to the sheets as if she were resisting the urge to pull them up over her head and hide, as if I were a penny-dreadful villain come to ravish her, as if I were the big bad wolf. That she could be so nervous of me made me nervous too.

“I was given some cloth, madam,” I said, clumsy and reluctant. “To make a dress, but there isn’t a pattern to be had that’s not been twice around the parish already, and we thought that I might ask you, since you would have something newer, and less seen, that would suit the fabric well.” She eyed me uneasily. “Not anything
new
,” I added; “last year’s, perhaps, or whatever you have that you wouldn’t mind me using.”

Her voice was dry with nerves. “What cloth have you got?”

“Tea-dyed,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The fabric was clearly too fashionable, too much of her world, to be thought appropriate for someone like me.

“Of course, yes.” She seemed to shake herself. “I have something that would do you well.”

She slipped out of bed, her feet soft in cotton bedsocks. She went over to the far side of her bed, to her workbox. She came back with three fat envelopes, each illustrated with a drawing of an elegant young woman in fashionable dress.

“They are cut to my size,” she said, and looked me over as if noticing for the first time that I had a shape, a figure, dimensions. “But then we are not so different after all.”

I watched the uneasy flicker of her eyes as she shuffled the parcels around in her hands. She selected one, and offered it to me. “Take this one. It will just suit the fabric, and your figure.”

I took hold of the nearest edge of the envelope. She did not let go. I glanced at her face, but her eyes were downcast.

“You’ll remember I was good to you?” she said.

“Madam?”

She glanced up. Her cheeks were pale. “Whatever happens, you’ll remember I was good to you?”

“Yes,” I said, puzzled. “Of course.”

She let go of the package. I fumbled it, then clutched it to my chest.

“The Reverend has told me,” Mrs. Wolfenden said, “he has told me he will protect me, but, Lizzy, I do not see how I can be protected, or anyone at all can be protected, not while men like Mr. Moore move freely in the world.”

I was caught between sympathy and laughter. We were as harvest mice in a corner of a field, I thought, wearing a summer’s worth of tracks through the wheat and thinking it a whole world, an eternity. She was afraid. She was afraid of change. I understood that; change is frightening.

Mam helped me with laying out the pattern on the kitchen table; Sally arrived as we were pinning the paper to the cloth. My heart skipped to see her; I went to hug her, but she was busy with taking off her smart bonnet, so I helped her off with it, and she took it from me and glanced about for somewhere to lay it. She set it on the dresser, and teased at the feather trim to smooth it, and when
she was satisfied with that, she took off her gloves and cloak, and came to kiss us both; and the kiss was not a kiss but the light brush of her cheek against mine. I put my arms around her, but she backed off, cautioning me against crushing her poplin, and I found myself standing there, slightly shy, and not knowing what to say, and glancing to Mam, to see if she were faring any better. She stood back, glowing with admiration at her handsome daughter.

“Don’t you look fine, my love? Don’t you look fine!”

Sally brushed down her skirts, said “Thank you.” She nodded to the cloth and pattern on the table. “Who’s that for?”

“Our Lizzy.”

A flicker of surprise crossed Sally’s countenance. “I thought you were taking in sewing. Mrs. Millard had a tea-dyed dress this summer.”