The Telling (32 page)

The canal continued through open, marshy-looking fields, studded with sheep and cows. We passed a farm, then the canal was flanked with hawthorn and hazel hedgerows, heavy with berries and nuts, and it wasn’t easy to see beyond them. There were high buildings ahead, built of golden stone. I could hear a strange humming, clattering sound, and was just about to ask the bargeman if he knew what it might be, but then we cleared a bend and were between the buildings; the air was filthy with smoke and damp; it was dark. Walls rose up on either side of the canal like cliffs, but full of bright-lit windows. Men scrambled to unload cargo from the barges onto the banks; others shifted the loads and hooked them to ropes hanging slack from winches and pulleys; others hoisted them up into the air, others leaned out to grab at the bundles and guide them into the buildings. All the time insults and instructions were flung back and forth and up and down. The noise was terrible. The air was vile. The clattering and burring were too loud almost to talk over.

“What’s the noise?” I asked.

“Spinning,” he said. “And weaving. They’ve got power looms now. They’re the worst of it.”

We’d passed the first mill and were approaching a bridge. He called out to the man at the horse’s head, who spoke to her, slowed her to a halt. He lifted a pole from the roof of the cabin, and lowered it into the water, and pushed against it, moving the boat into the bank. They helped me off the barge.

“Up yon,” the bargeman said. “That’s Fell Lane.”

I could see nothing but a flight of stone steps up the bridge, the slab-fronts of mills on either bank, the buildings beyond blanking out the sky.

“Thank you: thank you very much.”

He shrugged. “Nay bother. Take care of yourself.”

The horse walked placidly into the shadows of the bridge, and the first man went with her, and then the barge slipped into the darkness, and the bargeman waved at me, and they were gone. I climbed the steps up to the street; I felt faint now that I was nearing the journey’s end; I couldn’t catch my breath. I came out through a narrow gap; below me the street swept down through mills and warehouses and shops; above, there were flat-fronted terraced houses built in stone.

I checked the number on my slip of folded paper. 108. I made my way up hill, the paper clutched in my hand. The sound of the mills grew a little fainter. I’d never been to a house with a number before. It was new-looking, as if it hadn’t yet settled onto its foundations, but was already streaked with damp. The front door opened straight onto the street. I knocked.

I waited, listening. A baby’s cries, sharp and demanding. I felt
something inside me cleave towards it, an urgency to comfort it, to stop it crying. I heard footsteps, and a murmuring consoling voice. The door was opened by a woman; she was carrying the baby. Too old to be the baby’s mother, she was broad-hipped and broad-shouldered, with neat features; she had probably once been pretty. The baby was pressed to her shoulder, and as we spoke she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, swaying slightly back and forth. We pitched our voices over its cries.

“I’m here to see Mr. Moore.”

She looked at me, tilting her head a little to one side.

“Mr. Moore. Is he in?”

I glanced past her into the dark, distempered hallway. A child came out of a back room; two years old perhaps; his head was a mop of straw-coloured hair.

“You’ve got the wrong house,” she said.

I held out the folded paper for her to look at. “I don’t think so. 108. That’s what it says here.”

She didn’t even glance at it, just shook her head. I felt oddly cool and disconnected. All I had to do was find the right form of words and she would understand, all would suddenly come clear. She would smile and step aside and usher me through to him.

“I’ve come a long way; I do need to see him.”

The baby’s crying intensified. “I’m sure you do,” she said.

“His friends, they live here, he gave me this address.”

She just shook her head and shifted the baby. “There’s just us. Family. I’ve never heard of your Mr. Moore. But then, we’re not that long moved in.” She laid the baby face down along her arm, its head in the crook. She stroked its back. It still squalled. I felt the first prickling possibility of alarm.

“My daughter’s at the mill,” she continued. “So’s her husband. Shift’s not long started, and the babby’s already starved.”

The baby’s face was turned outwards, away from the woman’s body. It was puce, outraged, the mouth a dark red gummy hole. My body wanted him; I wanted to take him, to soothe him somehow, his need seemed so overwhelming. “What’ll you give him?”

“Sugared water, till she gets in.”

I nodded. My own need pressed his aside: “The people here before you, do you know where they went?”

She shrugged. “There were chairs broken, the door kicked in, all sorts. Our Davey had to fix the lot.”

And that was when I knew. He was not here, he would not be here. He couldn’t be. He had stayed with me too long. When I spoke again my voice sounded strange to me, half whisper, half croak.

“Was it the Militia?”

She shook her head and shrugged, and the baby let out a howl, and she glanced down at him, and back at me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to try and get him settled. Good luck.”

“Good luck,” I murmured back.

She stepped back into the hall, and closed the door. I noticed then that the wood had been recently patched: cheap boards had been hammered across the timber, at the bottom and top, where the night-time bolts would fasten. The door kicked in in the middle of the night; men dragged from their beds. I turned away. Cobbles rose up steeply to my left, cobbles sloped down steeply to my right. The buzz and clatter of the mills, the rough air full of smoke. I had no strength, no will for anything. I thought of
the baby, starving and furious and unfed. I thought of the baby’s mother at the whirring bobbins, her breasts filling with milk, soaking wadded cloths so that her frock was patched with damp, and at dinner break she would have to wring out the cloths into the privy. Back home the baby wailing and wailing and wailing with hunger, until it was at last too tired to cry.

I was back home by the middle of the afternoon. My father was sleeping. I went to my room and lay down, and slept, a cold black sleep, a void. I was too heartsick for dreams. I woke towards evening, to the sound of Mam coming in, and I brought myself downstairs to her, expecting a fury and bowing my head before it. But she was calm, and tired, and didn’t ask where I had been, and I realized that she hadn’t known that I had even gone. She must have left in the morning without looking in on me, and had got back after I’d returned. She hadn’t noticed my absence, and yet it had seemed ages-long to me.

The next time I walked out with Thomas, I took him to the hay barn, where we had sat a lifetime ago, when I had helped him learn his lesson for school. He kissed me, and I lay down with him, and let him coax my skirts up. He must have taken my awkwardness for innocence; he didn’t seem to know enough to know that he was not my first. Afterwards, he said that we would be married in December, and that he would not take no for an answer. I did not say no.

Having seen Agnes in her throes, I thought I knew how bad it could be, and that I could get through it, but it is always different, and there is no way to know. Agnes was telling me it would be all
right, that it would be all right, and she should have known that it was far beyond all right already, and could never be all right again. I wanted to say his name. I just wanted to say his name. I had to bite my lips from speaking it out loud, from shouting out his name with each dark hard squeeze of pain. I wanted him. But I could not say a word. The cowed, shambling, painful steps up to the room, where my mam had spread an old blanket on the floor, and the strange silence of the house, since Dad had died in the winter, and the boys were gone to their masters’. I knelt at the side of the bed, the bookcase looming dark and empty beside me, my brow pressed into the quilt, and I said it to myself, my lips moving where Mam and Agnes and Mrs. Skelton couldn’t see them, pressed into the coverlet. Robert James. Robert James. Robert James Moore. Then there was the need to push, a need more overwhelming even than the pain, and the slow burning tear, and then the child was there.

They wrapped him up, and gave him to me, and he was so odd-looking, his face purple-blue and his head squashed, and I looked at him, the poor ugly little scrap of humanity that he was, and thought, I am going to have to love you, little boy. I am going to have to love you so very much.

The photographs were all
in one bag, wrapped loosely. Some of the frames were newly bought, and held pictures culled out of photograph albums. Most were old and familiar, had been lifted from Mum and Dad’s sideboard, dresser or bedroom wall. The images were etched deep into me from years’ exposure. Dad, Mum, Lucy and me in a rowing boat on a day out at the seaside; I’m about four, Lucy’s two, she’s in navy blue dungarees; Dad’s squinting in the sun, heavily moustached; Mum’s hair is dark as treacle, her skin still smooth and pale, she’s smiling carefully, waiting for the shutter’s click. Lucy and me in school photographs: disastrous fringes and adult teeth too big for the rest of our faces. Nana in the back garden at home, in the sunshine, her
hair still salt-and-pepper grey, smiling a perfect false-teeth smile, holding a tiny baby in her liver-spotted arms. The photographs that Mum had selected, the moments of her life that she had wanted to keep, to return to, to experience again. I laid them out on the carpet around me, an array of family images. There were just two pictures left in the bag, their backs turned to me. The first was in an old battered frame, the cardboard backing stuck down with crystalline-brown Sellotape. I lifted it out, half-knowing what it would be. She can’t be more than twenty-four. She’s wearing the coat; the empire-line, double-breasted, slate-grey woollen coat. It’s snowing; she’s laughing; shoulders up, hands raised to cup the falling flakes. She’s beautiful. I found myself smiling back at her. I leaned the picture up against a box, was still smiling at it when I reached in for the last one. I took it out, glanced down at the back of a newish-looking clip frame, its brown hardboard and silver clips still unscuffed and shiny. I realized then that she must have brought the photos here quite recently, perhaps the last time that they came, in a break between treatments. She must have hoped, even then. She must have hoped there would be other times, that there could yet be years to come. I turned the clip frame around in my hands. I saw the picture. Black and white. A frail eggshell skull. Tiny translucent grey bones. The twelve-week scan. The scan of Cate.

I crushed the picture to me, leaning forward over it, cramming it into me; I couldn’t breathe. Winded, choking, my lungs heaved out all their air, till I was empty and perfectly still, as if for a moment my heart ceased to beat, my lungs stopped their fluttering. Then, somehow, I drew a breath, a deep ragged breath,
full of the smell of old carpet and dust, and curled around upon myself, curled around on the hard-edged picture frame, I began to cry.

It may have been hours later, I don’t know. The day was brilliant, the sky hard blue. I carried the pewter jug out into the garden, blinking, set it down on the low stone wall. My eyes felt raw against the light. I was as exhausted as after labour, my limbs limp and soft as sponge. My movements were slow and careful, but my mind felt fresh, as if filled with cool clear water. Across the lawn, the grass was long and tangling, unkempt. I waded through it, getting my Converse soaked. Details caught and held me. A twist of pink and green, tiny entrails that a cat had left after a kill; the fat digestive progress of a slug across a leaf. I lifted drooping shrubbery out of the way, and there were a dozen skeins of flowerbuds hanging underneath; all they’d need was time and bees and sunshine and water to make them fatten and swell and darken into blackcurrants. I picked daffodils. A great heavy sappy bunch of them, each stem snapping with a satisfying puck. I lifted the pewter jug and walked down to the churchyard, my feet squelching.

I tore away the long grass, so that the name showed. I set the jug down, with the daffodils, on the flat earth. In the absence of any other ritual, I said her name, her maiden name, her nineteen-year-old name, out loud; there was no one there but me to hear it. No flicker of movement, no sense of someone hovering at the edges of my sight. The air was cool and soft; there would soon be rain.

I tidied up after, took the torn grass to the edge of the graveyard and lobbed it over the wall onto the heap. The sight of the wired-up gate made me glance down at my hand, at the dark scab on the ball of my thumb; it itched, but the flare of infection was gone and it was beginning to heal. I climbed over the gate, into the woods, and headed on, eyes on the dark earth, looking for my phone. I finally found it under the skirts of a holly bush, its battery completely flat, damp beading the surface. I wiped it dry and slipped it into my pocket.

Back at the cottage, I plugged the phone in to charge. It beeped with missed calls. Forty-three calls from Mark, others from Lucy, Dad, and from friends. I left them all unanswered, for the time being. I had to talk to Mark first, and a phone call to him seemed utterly inadequate. I made other, practical calls: I made arrangements with the estate agents, that furniture charity.

I took a last walk around the house, moving from room to room, following the grey tracks in the carpet, running my hand up the rough timber of the banister. I paused by the bookcase, stroking the grain of the wood as if it were skin or fur. The house felt serene, and empty. As if a charge had been earthed, somehow; as if a tension had been released.

I left a set of keys with Mrs. Davies. We agreed that it was better for houses to be lived in, and that a young family would be nice; she kissed me goodbye.

The front of the car was still cluttered from the drive up: Dad’s directions, half a packet of chewing gum squeezed flat at one end, a muddle of cassette tapes.

I drove for five hours, stopping only for coffee, sandwiches and petrol, the car rattling as I nudged it up to seventy-five, to eighty, to eighty-five. I swigged coffee through a plastic lid, eyes sharp for speed cameras, alert for a change in engine tone, for a hint of approaching breakdown. I was passed continually by bigger, sleeker cars. I wished I’d called Mark. At least then I would know what I was coming home to; I’d know if I could come home at all.

I elbowed my way through London traffic, sneaking through on ambers, nudging across carriageways, almost bouncing on my seat with frustration as I watched the traffic streaming past at junctions, thinking
come on come on come on come on come on
. I veered into Kirkside Road, and there was just one free space, right down at the far end. I had the car parked in one brisk and careless move. I’d slammed the door and was already heading for home, and then had to turn back and lock the car. I almost ran down the length of the street; a kind of hobbled run, eager and apprehensive, sick with nerves. I climbed the steps two at a time and got the key in the lock and was into the communal hall, and then I stalled at our front door.

I saw her. Through the textured glass, her figure was smudged and bleary. She was standing looking up at the table; there was something on it, something out of reach, something fascinating. Belly round in front of her, the soft bulge of her nappied behind. I turned my key, pushed open the door. Warmth; the smell of cooking, drying laundry. Cate turned towards the sound, away from the bowl of grapes that had been holding her attention. There was a moment. She looked at me, I looked at her. She pushed a finger
into her mouth and chewed on it. My heart was still with anxiety and love. I crouched down.

“Sweetheart?”

Then her face broke into a wet smile, and she wobbled towards me, and put her arms up and around my neck, and I squeezed her tightly, teeth gritted, burying my face in her neck. The milky, musky scent of skin; the apple of her hair, my heart full, my eyes filling. I looked up, and there was Mark. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, a blue and white checked teacloth hanging from his hand. The cloth was stained with tomato sauce. His eyes were tired. I stayed there, holding Cate, looking up at him. We didn’t speak for a long moment. Then he broke the silence.

“You’re back.”

“Yes.”

“How are you?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Really?”

I nodded.

“You look—” he said. He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Is it okay?” I asked. “That I came back?”

His reply was out before I’d even really finished speaking: “Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, his lips compressing, his chin dimpling. He blinked and pressed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was clotted with emotion: “Are you really okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “Getting there, yes. I got the house sorted.”

He nodded again. He just stood there, the tea towel still in his hand, his T-shirt dotted with sauce, looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I am really sorry.”

“Bad timing,” he said.

“Awful timing,” I agreed.

“Come here,” he said, with the first hint of a smile. I swung Cate up onto my hip, held her close. I went to him.