The Telling (27 page)

“I should have had more sense,” he said. “I should have seen where this was tending.”

“No.”

I came over to the fireplace and sat down opposite him. He didn’t speak. Half his face was lit from the embers, the other half in shadow. He looked worn and tired. He looked unloved.

“That scar,” I asked. “How did you do it?”

He shook his head, not understanding.

“On your thumb; that white scar running the length of your thumb.”

He glanced down at it. “I’ve had it since I was a lad. I did it with a chisel; I was holding it wrong. My master let me find out for myself.”

“That’s cruel. To do that to a boy. How were you to know?”

“He didn’t have to tell me twice.”

We both looked at his scarred hand. It was a moment before I could raise my eyes to meet his.

“You said there would be troops. What will happen to you if—”

He shook his head. “The other side of the world. Tasmania. It’s beautiful, but it’s hard. The winters are cold; people get sick, and I’m not a young man anymore.”

“But you said so yourself, to Wolfenden, you haven’t committed any crime.”

“You’d be surprised how circumstances can conspire against you, how things can be construed. This place was quiet as the grave till I arrived. If someone gets hurt, someone gets killed, then—with my reputation—”

I had to say it. The words were freighted with misery, but they had to be said. “You must leave now. Before anything can happen,
before there is any charge to lay against you. You must get away from here.”

He looked at me. “I’ve been telling myself that all day, telling myself that for weeks. It’s suicide to stay here, in this house, your father’s house, of all places.” He shrugged. “Yet here I am.”

I could feel my face warming as I spoke, but it didn’t matter in the near darkness: “Your wife, having supported you through everything, would she have wanted—”

He gave an abrupt laugh. “If there is a heaven, and Jane is there, she’ll be splitting her sides laughing at me now.”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t believe that.”

“I wouldn’t blame her. I’m not an easy man—I was not a good father.”

“You—” I said. “I am sure you—”

He interrupted me again. “They died, Elizabeth. They died in misery and squalor. Had I been there to look after them—”

“But you were
transported
.”

His eyes fixed on mine; they caught the fire’s glow, and glittered. “And for what? That poor girl still walks with a limp; my wife and child are dead; that policeman is probably all the keener to strike the first blow. I am a very stupid man, and the older I get the more stupid I become; it took far too long for me to—”

The door crashed open and my father tumbled in, his cap pushed back and his shirt-tail hanging out, his face blank with drink. He started to say something, but the words were slurred. He staggered. Mr. Moore stood up to help him, and was brushed off. He tried again, taking my father under the arms and speaking mildly. He helped him upstairs to bed, a slow dragging shuffle, way-marked with outbursts from my dad. Afterwards, I heard
Mr. Moore’s careful tread through to his room. He did not come down again. I went up and checked on my mother and the boys, and listened for a moment outside his door. He’d left a light burning; there was no sound from within, so I hoped he’d managed to lose himself in reading, or in his writing, in something that would give him peace and satisfaction. I went back down, and made my bed, and tried to sleep, but my mind would not be calmed; it raced through everything, revisiting every moment from his arrival back in Lent to the meeting of our eyes across the church this morning. I flinched at the recollection of scolding him about religion when his faith had had so many challenges, and mine had had almost none. I’d asked him about his travels, when he had been
transported
. I remembered the way he’d looked at me under the oak that day, when I had left him to go to Thomas simply because it was easier than staying and risking being seen. He should wear a sign, I thought; a paper pinned to his lapel, listing his wounds, the damage done, the raw places that must not be touched. It was the only way to give fair warning. I wished I had been kinder to him.

Evening. The light dim
in the Reading Room. The give of the mattress and quilt beneath my weight. The dry smell of dust and the quiet of the street beyond. Eyes unfocused, head bent, I was aware of blurred floorboards, the peripheral pulse of blood. I was looking at nothing, concentrating on nothing. I had this feeling that what happened here was like a puzzle-picture, meaningless dots until someone lost focus, stopped looking directly, and the image swam into clarity.

Perhaps it took me being there to make this happen. To catalyze the air into a fizz, to elicit shapes from the shadows. The house didn’t have a reputation. Mum and Dad had noticed nothing odd. In all their excited talk about the place, there wasn’t a
shade, not even a moment of unease. There had been no mention of the air’s electric charge, voices, unaccountable scents. And Margaret; she’d lived a life here; it was only when things began to spiral apart into dementia that she started to notice the scents of wet linen, wood shavings, liquorice. So
us
being here made this happen. Me and Margaret. Each of us with our own particular condition. Our blank spaces. Our lapses.

I lifted my head, mentally addressed the empty room: does our absence somehow allow you to be present? Do you slip into the gap we leave when we depart?

My ears strained for sound. There was no noise from outside: not a bird, not a sheep, not distant traffic. Indoors, the faintest suggestion of a hum, which might just have been the sea-shell sound of the inner ear.

Charlie died, and Margaret went looking for him in her nightdress. Mum died, and I saw her in the bookshop. I saw her in Cate’s concentrating frown. I saw my hands becoming her hands. I caught myself laughing with her laugh.

My vision clicked sharp on the bookcase, a knot in the back panel. The room was still, its breath held. The bookcase stood tall and dark; the knot stared back at me.

Loss. It had stopped both of us in our tracks. The world continued, the clock ticked on; snowdrops broke the soil, daffodil blooms burst from their paper-casing and shivered in the wind; roses budded, unfurled, and dropped their petals to the ground. But we were caught in the moment before change, unable to move forward with the clock’s tick; still waiting, still expecting a return.

The hum built; I could feel it gathering in the air.

This room. The name of the cottage. The bookcase. Is that
what happened here? Is she caught in that moment, in this place, in that year, still waiting, still expecting someone to come back?

“Who was it, Elizabeth?” I asked out loud. “Who did you lose?”

I got up from the bed and crossed over to the bookcase. I rested my hand on an empty shelf. The electricity prickled my arms, made the faint hair on the nape of my neck stand on end. I could have sworn that she was there, just out of sight, just beyond the edge of my vision. I didn’t look.

“I lost my mum,” I said. “She was fifty-seven.” My voice sounded strange and dusty in the silent, attentive room. I hadn’t expected to speak.

“They never had much money, but when her mum died they sold her little house in Clapham and had enough to buy this place. They were here a couple of times, but they didn’t live here, they never got the chance.”

My nose was prickling. I rubbed at it with the back of a hand.

“She found out that she had cancer. I found out that I was pregnant just after she got the news. For a while, after the first operation, we were hopeful, and I was going to tell her about the baby, but then they found secondaries. She had to have chemotherapy. Medicine so strong it makes you ill. We both got thin: I had morning sickness. We both had scans. On hers, there were these grey-white beads; they looked like a broken string of pearls. On mine, we’d seen tiny bones glowing translucent grey, a skull like an eggshell. I could see her on the screen, flipping around like a caught fish, though I couldn’t feel anything inside me yet. And I didn’t tell her.”

Instinctively, my hand descended to my belly and rested on the scar. My throat and palate ached with the threat of tears.

“The nurse gave her wristbands, tight grey cuffs with plastic beads sewn onto the inside: they pressed between the bones of her wrists, and wore red marks there; they looked like stigmata. They were supposed to help with the nausea. I asked her if they did any good, and she said, I kind of hope not; if they’re working I can’t imagine how shit I’d be feeling without them.”

My vision swam with the wetness of my eyes. And still the words kept coming, hard lumps of words, retching out of me, hurting.

“She got so thin: she didn’t want anything; the flesh just fell off her, her hair came away in clumps. Her skin went grey; you could count the bones in her hands. She faded. And I got better. I bloomed, like you’re supposed to. It felt obscene. There was never going to be a good time to tell her. There was never going to be an all-clear. She was back at home. She was resting on the bed, propped up with pillows, a blanket over her legs. We’d been talking for a while, and I was too nervous really to remember what was said, until I said, I have something to show you, and I took out the print-out and held it out to her, and the paper was trembling in my hand. Her hand looked so mechanical, you could see every shift and movement of the tendons—”

The words seemed somehow to slice through into the dark; it was an agony to speak them. They grasped hold of my grief, wrenched it out into the air. It was raw, skinless, bloody; it didn’t want to be born; it had tried so hard not to be.

“It was ages while she looked at it. The whites of her eyes were yellow. Then she asked, When are you due? I told her, End of January. I watched her register the fact that I was halfway gone, and had left it till then to tell her, and there was a flicker of something.
I couldn’t quite see what it was. Anger, or frustration, or resentment, I don’t know. I don’t know that it was directed at me, but I could have been sick there and then, I really could. She laid the picture down, her lips peeled back from her gums; she smiled at me.”

There was a faint tickling sensation on my cheek. I pressed a hand to it; my fingers came away wet.

“Sweetheart, she said. Sweetheart. She lifted up her thin arms for me to hug her. I laid myself against her gently, afraid of my own weight. I pressed my face half into the pillow, half into her throat and hair. I was afraid. I wanted to be forgiven. She smelt sour. She stroked my back. Then, after a moment, she said, Is this okay for the baby? And I asked, What? and she said, All the chemicals in me. I nodded and sat down, and she held my hand—hers was so cold—and she smiled at me again, and started to talk about the baby, and I joined in, but all the time I knew that part of her was sealed up, was somehow contained in her disease, and that she just could not be reached.

“And I’ve been stuck too. Stuck in that year, when she was dying and I was pregnant, and if things could have been different—I—”

Outside, in the street, a car drew up; the engine cut off, the door slammed. I pressed my eyes then glanced around the room; whatever had been there, if anything had been there, was now gone. I rushed over to the window, glanced out.

Mark.

“You’re here.”

“Yes.” He came up the front steps to me.

“Where’s Cate?”

“She’s with my mum.” He stopped short, a step down. His voice was tight. “You didn’t come, Rache. You didn’t come. I waited, and I waited, and you didn’t come. I rang you. A million times. I checked with the AA in case there’d been a motorway pile-up. I drove five hours and didn’t even know if you’d be here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You said you were coming back. You said you would get help.”

He stepped up, and I moved back into the house. He took my arm and looked at me closely. His eyes were tired, his skin soft with fatigue. I wiped my free hand across my face, wondered what he could see there. I’d rinsed my skin quickly with cold water, taken deep shaky breaths to calm myself, but my face still felt sore and exposed. I willed him not to notice.

Because it all seemed different now. The air was softly thrumming, my head was swimming; everything seemed charged, every molecule of the place vibrating on a new frequency. I was thinking of the records reproduced on microfiche like tiny X-rays, the microfiche stuffed into envelopes and crowded into card-files. I was thinking what mine and Mark’s would come to show eventually, if someone encountered them in a hundred years; how it wouldn’t add up to anything like our lives. How we could have decades or a week or minutes left, but one day it would all be over, and irretrievable, all those moments unrecorded and gone forever. And I knew there was just this. Just the moment, the fragile, vulnerable moment.

I put my arms around him. I remember lifting my face to kiss him, and the way his face softened into tenderness. The feel of his cropped hair. Eyes closed on the darkness of tongue, and lip, and coursing blood.

He broke away. “I missed you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I missed you. Jesus, Rache; I’ve missed you.”

The smell of him: coffee,
Eau Par Kenzo
, mint. The taking of hands and the climbing of the stairs, each tread marking a deepening conspiracy between us. The smile that he caught from me, and offered me back. The peeling off of clothes. Skin, and the press of his mouth on mine. I remember my stomach muscles contracting, my breath caught. The warm silk of his skin. It could have been before; before all of it, before Mum and before Cate, when there was just us. And now, for a moment, there was nothing else but us.

Afterwards, I lay looking up through the uncurtained window, at the sky as it darkened to deep night, as the stars pricked out. I felt grateful for this. He lay next to me, his hand on my belly, just above the scar, his head on my arm. He slept. I watched him sleep. He was so beautiful.

In the morning I dressed without waking him, made coffee and brought it up to him. I put the tray on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. I skimmed my hand over his hair, kissed his cheek with dry lips. He stirred; I reached down and lifted his coffee cup. He leaned up on an elbow. The covers rumpled. He looked gorgeously soft with sleep. He took the cup, rubbed his face and smiled at me.

“Thanks,” he said.

I got back into bed fully clothed. We drank coffee. The distant sounds of livestock, birds.

“Odd,” he said, “waking up without a radio.”

“I like the quiet.”

He was quiet for a moment, as if listening. “So,” he said after a while, “what’s the plan?”

“You go back today,” I said carefully. “I’ll follow soon as I’m done.”

“But—” He sat up, slopped coffee over his hand and onto the sheets. “Shit. Shit.”

I reached to take the cup from him, but he moved away, set it down on the windowsill.

“You need to run that under the tap. It’ll hurt.” I reached for his hand. He pulled it away.

“I thought you were coming with me. I thought, last night—”

I heard the certainty in my own voice. “Soon as I get this sorted out.”

“What about Cate? Jesus, Rache, what about your daughter? Don’t you think you’ve left her long enough?”

My voice edged itself with guilt. “It won’t take much longer.”

“She needs you.”

“She doesn’t need me doped up on tranks.”

“Do you think I want that?”

I considered this for half a second too long: he narrowed his eyes at me.

“Sometimes I think you just want me to be okay,” I said.

“
Just
?”

“I mean—”

“If that’s what you think—”

He swung his legs out of bed and grabbed his T-shirt off the floor. He pulled it on, the fabric tensing drum-tight as he pushed his arms through, softening to ripples as he tugged it down over his belly.

“I mean, it’s not something that can just be fixed,” I said. “There’s no magic pill that’ll make it all better.”

“I know,” he said. He sat there, half-covered, half-naked, and rubbed a hand over his hair. He shook his head, and his speech came falteringly, as if he didn’t know what he thought, and was waiting for the words to tell him.

“Sometimes I just feel that you’re disappearing,” he said. “That you’re making yourself fainter and fainter and more and more distant and then one day you’ll just be—gone.”

I took his arm. He shook me off, reached down and grabbed his boxers off the floor.

Standing at the bookcase, I listened to the car pull away. Underneath jeans and jumper, my body was still conscious of his, still tender from the night before. The coffee in his cup gave off a faint curl of steam. I felt the air soften and settle around me. For the last two years my mind had turned in a loop: if only, if only, if only. If only the scar would melt away, if only the beads would fade to pinpricks and dissolve, if only her breath would come easier, her pulse steady, the morphine surge back into the syringe, her eyes flicker and open, and she’d be back with me, and we’d move from there down a different track, towards recovery and health and years of each other’s company, decades of loving and
being loved. But the clock ticks on. There is just now, and that’s all that anyone could ever hope to have.

“I am sorry, you know,” I said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I held myself quite still, listening, my nerves alert. But there was nothing. The air was soft and cool; the room was empty, and gave nothing back.