The Telling

by Jo Baker

  I saw Thomas. He saw me too and smiled. I looked away, hoping he would think I hadn’t noticed him. But he made his way towards me, threading between dark Sunday coats and Sunday hats and fresh Sunday dresses. He was there, rosy, eager, asking how the pace-egging had gone for us. I smiled for him.

  “Did Sally roll this year?” he asked. “Or is she too much the lady now?”

  “She did. The last time, I reckon.”

  He nodded, and smiled broadly. The sun was glowing through his ears, making them pink. I could smell his smell; warm, grassy, of the byre. He asked if I was going on the walk, and I nodded, and he asked if he could walk with us, and I said I supposed so, and I glanced over at my mam, but she was talking to Aunty Sue.

  —

  It was the usual Easter way, down the Glebe and across the hay meadow, through Thrush Gill woods and down the slope to the parish marker, where we would spread rugs and eat our dinner. My brothers and sister raced ahead with the other children, playing games of tig across the open spaces, dogs barking and leaping around them. Now and then they’d start a hare, and the dogs would turn on a pin and go flying after it. We’d watch the chase across the hillside, watch each dog in turn slow and then wheel around and turn back, knowing themselves outrun, returning to the children’s games.

  I carried the basket. Thomas was at my side. I’d lost sight of my mam and dad in the crowd. By Bainsbeck I had given in to Thomas’s persuasion, and surrendered the basket to him. After this, he did not seem to feel the need for further talk. When I glanced around at him, he was striding along through the grass, leaving the worn-bare path to me, and there was a smile on his face like a sunbeam, brilliant, painful to look at.

  I spread the family rug with the others, and Thomas helped, bending to tug the cloth straight and flat. Aunty Sue and Agnes’s mam were looking at us, and speaking low between themselves, and when they saw me notice, they smiled little sly smiles, and I looked away. Sally was down at the water’s edge, skimming stones with Ruth. Mr. Forster was going over to join them, clambering down the bank in his tight black clothes to get to the shilloe.

  Thomas settled himself down on our family blanket. I stood watching as Mr. Forster said something to Sally and her friend, then bent and fished up a stone. He planted his feet wide apart, crouched, swung his hand back to show how to turn, how to flick the wrist around to give the stone the necessary spin. Even from that distance I could see the girls wilt under his instruction. He loosed his stone and straightened up to watch it skip across the water. I counted ten. Mr. Forster had taught me to count, but my father had taught me to skim stones. I used to be good at it. Once in a while, I’d get a bit of slate to curl across the river without seeming to bounce at all, as if the water became, for just that moment, a sheet of rippling silk, but that was when I was a girl and there were long summer evenings down at the river with my dad. Skimming stones is one of the things you grow out of, if you grow up to be a woman.

  I watched the girls have another few throws, watched them pick through the shilloe looking for skimmers, watched Mr. Forster crouch again to demonstrate the necessary swing. The girls’ hearts were no longer in it; it was clear they were only waiting for him to leave. When he did, clambering up the bank, wiping his hands on a handkerchief, beaming at his wife, they pulled off their clogs and stockings, hitched up their skirts and waded into the water, bending over, arms in deep to turn over stones, looking for bullheads and caddis-houses and eels; I would have been doing it too, if I’d been twelve years old.

  On the walk back through the woods, the leaves on the beeches were so new that the sunlight streamed right through them. Thomas was beside me again, my mam following behind trying to keep my dad upright and steady. The younger ones were trampling the garlic, making it stink. Ahead and behind and all around me, I knew everyone, I knew the weave of their shawls, the wear of their clogs and the way they tied their hair, and whose breath was particularly foul and which of the men would try and get a hand up your skirt if they got half a chance, and I knew that Thomas, with his easy smile and his red ears and his gentle ways, was as good a man as any there, and that he didn’t have a single quality that I didn’t know, and that he was decent, and that I couldn’t, I really couldn’t ever think of marrying him. But as I was thinking this, he was speaking, and what he said seemed to chime with my thoughts, so I looked around at him, and felt for the first time that day warm and well-disposed towards him, because after all, none of it was his fault.

  “That bit of land,” he was saying, “down near the ford, I planted it with willows just last year. There’s a fine crop coming on; it’ll make some good whitework. My father says the money’s all in the supply these days, he’s making twenty pound a year on the raw willow and it’ll not be long before I’m making twenty pound myself, and that’d be on top of the cow money.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “You’re doing well.”

  He nodded, and we went on walking, him at my side, and as we walked he shifted the basket so that it hung from his arm and brushed against my hip, a bridge across the space between us. “How’s work at the vicarage?” he asked.

  “It’s not too bad, I’m well used to it.”

  I knew what would come. I knew it was like something spoiling in his belly and that he could never quite be at ease until he’d rid himself of it. I couldn’t let him speak, not here, now, with my mam and dad following just behind and the whole village around us. His face went red. I felt my own face redden. I looked away.

  “Do you remember,” he said, “that day at school, I couldn’t say my lesson and I got a thrashing from Forster?”

  “That’s a long time ago now, that’s years ago.” There was a tightness in my throat, making my voice strange, but Thomas didn’t notice anything.

  “He said I’d get another thrashing too if I didn’t know it by the next day, and I tried and tried but I couldn’t learn it, nothing was going in, and you met me at the hay barn after school, and the two of us sat there till it was dark, going over and over the lesson.”

  “I remember.”

  “You must have missed your tea that night; I’ll bet you got into trouble with your mam.”

  “No more than usual.”

  “The next day, when Forster had me stand up in front of the school and say the lesson, I could say the whole thing without stumbling once, because you’d helped me, and because I knew you were there, in the schoolroom, and were wishing me well.”

  “It’s so long ago now, I don’t really—”

  Thomas cut me short. “Not so long that I couldn’t tell you every word of that lesson now if you wanted me to, and that was more than Forster could ever do, he could hardly hammer anything into me at all. I’m not quick like you, nothing else has really stuck, but for that one lesson.”

  I walked on in silence at his side, and he said, “Lizzy?” and I looked up at him, and he looked down at me, and he must have read the unhappiness on my face, because his expression changed, and it seemed as if for a moment all awkwardness was gone, and there was something else there, something sore and grown up and strong. A moment passed.

  “This isn’t one of your father’s baskets, is it?” he asked, and I laughed, because my dad’s baskets were a byword in the village, thrown together in half an hour, looking like a jackdaw’s nest, and rarely lasting beyond the job that they’d been made for. This one was as neat as a lady’s braids.

  “I made it,” I said.

  “It’s very good.”

  After that we walked on side by side in silence, and after a while he handed the empty basket back to me, and we went on like that, and then some of the lads came up and he fell into talk with them, and then joined them, striding long-legged back to the village, to the public house, and soon he was far ahead and out of sight among the crowd, and I walked on alone.

  The last time it happened, I’d found myself standing in the canned goods aisle, holding a tin of chickpeas, my trolley already half-full of all the usual weekly s
tuff, Cate in the child-seat mouthing at a bit of baguette. Nothing led up to that moment, no intentions spooled out ahead of me. I just said something cheerful to Cate, and put the tin in the trolley, and pushed it on, around the end of the aisle, into the next: pasta, oils, and vinegars. I got on with the shopping. I paid, drove home, unpacked the groceries, fed Cate her lunch of avocado mush and all the time I was searching for one moment. One clear moment’s memory of before, before the chickpeas in Sainsbury’s and the doughy gummed bit of baguette, and Cate’s drooled-on fist and perfect thoughtful clear wet eyes. I found an image of me at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, staring out of the window at the squirrels as they raided downstairs’ bird table. But it was from the outside; I could see myself sitting there, hunched over one of our blue mugs, my head turned to look out of the window, and I don’t know if it was true. But while I was filling my trolley with the usual stuff, and turning up where I needed to be, and doing the things that needed doing, and finding my way home again—so long as Cate was happy and thriving—there seemed no need to talk about it, no need for anyone to know about the dark space. The blanks I couldn’t fill in.

  This time I surfaced looking at the bookcase, thinking how the wood grain seemed almost rippled, like sand where the tide has pulled away. I had no notion of what led up to that moment, or what should follow next. I was aware of the pressing need to pee, and grasping on to this sensation as if it were a rope that would haul me up, I was on my feet and heading for the bathroom, and pushing at the bathroom door.

  I sat, my head in my hands, and peed for ages. I washed my hands and the soap was veined with grey. I ran a bath. The tap coughed, spluttered, poured scalding water. I tipped Mum’s Radox into the water, swirled it with a hand. There was a dead spider plant on the windowsill. The papery transparency of the leaves was beautiful. I picked one off and rolled it between my fingertips. The room filled with steam, the window veiled itself in condensation. I sat down on the edge of the bath to take off my boots. I shivered; a deep muscular shiver, my teeth gritted together. There was a trail of dried mud across the bathroom floor. I remembered the drizzle. The scramble through the woods. Getting back. I looked down at my feet: same boots. Same jeans stuck with dry mud. Same jumper.

  “Jesus.”

  I’d not dealt with these basic, animal needs. I’d not noticed my own discomfort. Perched on the bath’s edge, steam rising around me, I bit at the skin beside a thumbnail, tearing away a tiny strip, leaving the flesh bright and oozing. My whole body was clenched tight with cold and fear. What was happening to me?

  The bath was so hot that my nerves misfired, and for a moment the water seemed cold, almost freezing. I eased myself warily into it, onto my knees, and my skin flushed up, almost scalded. I slid my legs out from underneath me to sit, wincing at the heat, and then slowly, carefully I lay down, sweat salty on my upper lip, and it was almost painful.

  My scar looked awful in the water. It flushed up bright pink, bulged at the right side, where the join is not quite right. The water cooled, and I lay on, till it was the temperature of blood. I could only feel its heat by stirring it, by bending a leg, by lifting a hand, by shifting myself higher and then sinking lower in the water. The air was colder than the water. I couldn’t bring myself to get out.

  If something’s broken, you fix it. If it’s torn, you stitch it up. But you always know the mend is there, ready to tear again. You can feel its rawness.

  —

  I dressed in clean dry clothes and sat down on the bed, my back against the wall, the street window to my side. I was looking at my hands. I felt too fatigued and apathetic to do much else. The skin was dry and cracked from housework and the weather and the bathwater and neglect. It had already thinned across the backs, tendons rising to the surface like rock through eroding soil. I pinched it; it didn’t spring, it seeped back into place. My hands have become my mother’s hands.

  The stack of bags and boxes in the next room. The daffodils fading in the pewter jug downstairs. The soap by the sink worn to a sliver by cupped palms, cracked and hardened by disuse. It all needed sorting, dealing with, finishing. But first I had to claw my way back towards the beginning, to find a place to start.

  I remembered that Saturday morning, in Waterstone’s. I was pushing Cate through towards the Children’s section. The woman was standing in Crime Fiction, her quarter-profile to me as I came up the central aisle. Her hair was dark and curly and salted with grey and she was slim as a hound, dressed in navy blue, a brown leather bag hanging at her hip, and she was looking down at a book, reading the blurb on the back cover. It was a moment of brilliant instinctive happiness. Mum. I wheeled the pushchair around, headed straight for her. I was going to grab her arm, shake her, scold her. Look, I was going to say, Look at your granddaughter. Look how beautiful she is. But when I touched her, and she turned and looked at me, her face was strange, birdlike, blue-eyed, nothing like Mum: it winded me. I stammered an apology, wheeled the pushchair away; I had to get out of her curious gaze, away from anyone who might have seen. At the back, near the Children’s section, I stopped the pushchair abruptly; I ducked down to kiss Cate, and told her she was my lovely girl, and we wheeled off towards the picture books and I bought her more than we could really afford.

  Mum had been dead just over a year by then. She died on the fourteenth of December. In the days between her death and her funeral, I carried my belly like a medicine ball around the Christmas-rush shops, trying on coats. I didn’t have a decent one to wear to the funeral; my parka was the only thing that would fit over the bump. Nothing fitted, nothing seemed right, anything that was nearly okay was also vastly expensive. I’d come home heavy and sore, my feet and ankles swollen, and Mark would put my feet up on the sofa, and stroke them, and tell me to give up on it. People understood, no one would think twice about it, I should wear whatever felt comfortable. I’ll go in tracky bottoms then, I said, and slippers, would that make him happy? Better that than make myself ill, he said. Better that than harm the baby. I told him to fuck off. He said that my mum wouldn’t have minded what I wore anyway, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted me unhappy over it. I cried. He held me, and after a while I felt better. It worked, him doing that. He must have forgotten how easy it was.

  The day before the funeral, Dad brought me the coat, still wrapped in its wardrobe polythene. Empire line, double-breasted, slate-grey wool. There’s a photograph somewhere of her wearing it; she can’t be more than twenty-four. It’s snowing; she’s laughing; shoulders up, hands raised to cup the falling flakes. Dad handed it to me and waited for me to put it on, so I put it on, and his face crumpled and I put my arms around him in the slate-grey sleeves and his face rested on the collar. It was an uneasy moment. She got it when she was pregnant with you, he said. I let go of him, and slid it off my shoulders. It was a little tight, with the extra pregnancy-flesh. I said I didn’t want to spoil it.

  We drove Lucy to the crematorium, via the airport to pick up her boyfriend from the Paris flight. They’d be heading back together on the Sunday; she’d been back and forth almost every week during Mum’s final illness. We’d left too much time and got to the crematorium early. Outside, I shifted and swayed in my good boots as my heels sank into the gravel. The smell of the coat was neutral, dry cleaning and wardrobe lavender, and I felt dragged to the earth by the weight of the baby inside me. Dad arrived with Aunty Val and Uncle Peter. Val squeezed me, saying that she didn’t know what to say. I kept saying, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, my hand pressed to her back, feeling the padded nylon of her coat, the painful press of her breasts against mine. There was the smell of someone else’s burning in the air; hints of ashes catching in my throat. I saw Lucy, her face buried in Louis’s coat collar, her body slim and straight and dark against the grey of his coat. Dad’s face was bleached. Mark was standing silent nearby, his blue eyes the only colour I remember in that day. He stretched out a hand for me to grab, to pull me to him like a tired swimmer through resisting water. Th
en I was walking into the crematorium beside him, our hands clasped dry and cold together, the bulge of my belly making me feel grotesque and embarrassed. I was wearing Mum’s coat, unable to catch the scent of her, unable to feel anything at all. Her coffin lay at the top of the aisle, the lid screwed into place. We sat in the pew, and I felt pinned down by gravity, as if I might never get to my feet again. Dad got up to speak, his voice thin; Lucy choked on the poem she had chosen, and I just sat there, swollen and heavy, and didn’t say a word. They’d said that it was fine; no one minded if I didn’t want to speak. People understood. Later, when the coffin rolled off into the darkness and the flames, I remember feeling an uneasy kind of relief. That we were not burning my mother’s body, but burning the sickness out of her.