The Telling

by Jo Baker

  “You’re a joiner, on the new house up at Storrs,” I said.

  He looked up, nodded. It was only afterwards that I learned that he was Master Carpenter, and was in charge of seven men, and saw the grandness of the house that was built, and the staircase that flowed like a stream, like birdsong, and realized the meanness of Reverend Wolfenden’s mind in calling him a joiner. The ledger lay open on the windowsill while he arranged his writing things. I could see that the left-hand page was half-full, covered with densely written words; not dotted with numbers, dashes, single words, the rows and columns of income and expense, as one would expect. His eye caught the direction of my sight. He slid the ledger off the windowsill, drew it onto his writing slope, so that it was inclined towards him, away from me, and I could no longer see it.

  “You’re a domestic, I believe,” he said.

  “At the vicarage.”

  Could I say that I had been cleaning in his room, that Robinson Crusoe had fallen open when I was dusting; I had not meant to pry, there had been no intention at all, just accident? But then why would I need to dust the contents of a newly delivered box?

  “There are books about the house. Whose are they?” He glanced across towards the dresser: Fox’s Martyrs, Pilgrim’s Progress, Saints’ Rest, the family Bible.

  “I like to read.”

  “Of course you do.”

  He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes. He closed the ledger and set it down upon the floor. He wiped the last drops of ink from his pen, stoppered the ink pot and closed the writing set. He put it down on top of the ledger.

  “So the abridged Robinson Crusoe, that’s yours, and the ballad sheet, and the tale of Jack the Giant Killer? They belong to you?”

  My chapbooks. His air was calm, but I knew he must hold them in contempt. A man with books like that, with so many; of course he must hold my few slight things in contempt.

  “There are others,” I said, “but they’re lent out, and the Pilgrim’s Progress was my school prize. Fox’s Martyrs and Saints’ Rest were my grandfather’s, but he’s dead.”

  Mr. Moore nodded, but didn’t comment.

  “No doubt you think them foolish,” I said.

  “Of course not, no.”

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  It was a faint flicker of a smile; it plucked the flesh up at one corner of his lips. It irritated me.

  “It’s strong meat, all those martyrs and saints and pilgrims, that’s all. And the chapbooks; well, you may as well eat sugar straight from the bowl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that I fear such a diet would upset even the soundest of constitutions.”

  “I suppose you’d tell me I have no constitution at all for reading?”

  “Indeed no, I wouldn’t dream of saying such a thing.”

  I was conscious that my hands were motionless, the fingers curling into fists, the knuckles pressing in at the sides of the basket. I was angry, like a child whose toy is snatched away in the middle of a game. If he understood the difficulty of acquiring the few books that I possessed; if he knew how hard I had to beg my mam to get a few pennies back from my wages; if he could see the magic-lantern-show I saw when I began to read; if he could have understood what a rich treasure it seemed to me, that box of books lying upstairs, overflowing with mysteries; if he could have glimpsed a fraction of how much this meant to me, then he would not have chosen the company of men like Thomas and my father over me, and he would not mock me now.

  “I don’t like being laughed at,” I said.

  “No, of course not.” There was a pause. My face was hot. “Did you think that I was laughing at you?”

  I shook my head. He regarded me with a level gaze, and I did my best to return it.

  “It wasn’t my intention—” he went on; and he drew a breath as if to say something more. After a moment, he nodded. “I’ll leave you in peace,” he said.

  He bent to gather his things. He stood up. I wanted to say something, to protest, but the words would not come. He ducked his head to pass under the low lintel, and climbed the stairs. I was left alone. My work lay neglected a long while.

  —

  The library bell jangled, but it was not my duty to answer the library bell. I had a rag and sand and was scouring burned sugar and fruit off a baking pan; Mrs. Briggs would have been more careful if she’d had to clean her pans herself. I was thinking of Mr. Crusoe, I was thinking of Mr. Moore; I was muttering to myself, chagrined, at the memory of our parting. There was someone at the scullery door. I glanced over my shoulder. Mrs. Briggs leaned against the doorjamb, her round face creased and red with the heat of the kitchen. There were damp patches on her frock. She looked at me suspiciously for a moment, her lips bunched.

  “You’re to lay a fire in the library.”

  I nodded, set down the pan and rag.

  “You, in particular, he asked for. Maggie went up, but he sent her back to ask for you.”

  I wiped my hands on my apron. “I’m good at it,” I lied. “The way I lay a fire, it lights easy, straight away, every time.”

  “But it’s roasting out.”

  I shrugged. “It’s easy to get chilled, if all you do is sit.”

  I carried up a coalscuttle and kindling, and knocked on the library door.

  The Reverend was sitting in his wing-backed leather chair, a closed book in his hand, his thumb stuck in and squeezed between the pages to mark his place. The same binding as all the other ones; they arrived like that from his bookseller. I bobbed a curtsey to him, then knelt to lay the fire, and he sat and watched me, and let me work, until I had set the last of the coals upon the wood.

  “Don’t light it,” he said.

  I sat back on my heels.

  “Well, my child?”

  I looked around at him. I don’t quite know what it was that did it, whether it was the dirt on my hard hands while his hands, holding his book, were soft and white as Mrs. Briggs’s dough; or if it was that I was kneeling on the floor while he sat in comfort in a leather chair; or if it was because he’d set me about a pointless task, or that he’d used a contrivance to get me there which would not fool a child and would only serve to set the women downstairs against me; I don’t know if it was one of these, or all; but whatever caused it, the feeling was new and unexpected: I wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel angry like that towards a clergyman.

  “Did you find out what was in the box?” he asked.

  I brushed my hands together, but it did not brush the coal dust off them, it just rubbed it deeper in.

  “Well?”

  I could have told the truth then, and gone back to the scullery, and worn my nails to the quick scouring baking pans, and my part in it would have been over, and whatever happened as a result of what I said would not have been my fault, since I was only doing what my pastor asked of me. But, instead, I lied.

  “No.”

  The Reverend’s lips narrowed to a line. “And why not?”

  “He was in the house, he kept to his room; I did not get the opportunity.”

  “Then why did you not return to your work?”

  “I thought it best to wait, in case he left.” It was as though I stood outside my body, and watched myself there, kneeling by the unlit fire, lying like a heathen. “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  “Good girl.”

  All he had to do to discover my deceit, was to enquire of Mr. Greaves, the Oversbys’ overseer, what work Mr. Moore had done that day. I was too far in the lie to retreat from it now; the practicalities concerned me, not the stain on my soul. I didn’t even blush. I shifted the coalscuttle to one side.

  “I’ll leave that for you should you need it, sir, and matches,” I said, as if it were all the same to me, setting unnecessary fires, spying on the lodger; all just services performed to ensure the Reverend’s comfort.

  “Very well,” he said distractedly. “Very well.”

  He set his book down on the desk
, and steepled his fingers against his upper lip.

  I stood up from the fireside. I tucked my coal-dirtied hands beneath my apron.

  “Do you wish me to go again today?”

  He glanced at me, preoccupied. He meshed his hands together, and held them against his upper lip a moment, as if praying. Then his hands fell to his lap, and lay there, soft and white against the black cloth of his britches.

  “I do not think I ask too much of you,” he said, “but before I ask more, you should know what you are dealing with, what manner of viper it is that has crept into your nest. I am informed of Mr. Moore.” He took a breath, sucking it in through parted teeth. “He is an agitator, a democrat, a Chartist. That much is known, and I hope soon to know more; but if you were to discover anything, anything at all—” His voice had grown passionate; he was leaning forward from his seat. He stopped, and seemed to correct and calm himself, leaning back, reaching up a hand to touch the linen at his throat. “You will have noticed that he does not attend church. I have it from Mr. Brakes that he is not part of the Wesleyan congregation either. As a good Christian girl,” he said, “it is your duty to watch him, with all modesty and discretion, and to report your discoveries to me.”

  I could say it. I could defend him with just a few words. Whatever his faith, whatever Chartist or an agitator or democrat might mean, I could reveal Mr. Moore to be a decent and educated man, a man whose interest in books was not very far divergent from the Reverend’s own.

  “You will do this for me, yes?” the Reverend asked.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “If he is there, come straight back. Don’t waste your time waiting.”

  —

  I took Robinson Crusoe, and I lay down on the bed, my head on the pillow, my body stretched out in the dip left there by his body, my stockinged feet on the heaped bedding at the foot; the pillow smelt of wood dust. As I lay there reading, a sweet comfort descended upon me; the book grew too heavy for my hands, and my eyelids too heavy to keep open. I kept blinking; the weight of the book made it teeter towards my face. I thought I’d just close my eyes for a few minutes. I laid the book down on the bed beside me and curled around on one side. The pillow was cool beneath my cheek, the scent was pleasant. I closed my eyes; I must have slept, or nearly slept; I dreamed. It seemed to me that Mr. Moore was there, in the room with me, his jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled, his collar unbuttoned, and that there was nothing wrong or strange or frightening about it, that I was dozing in the bed, and he was half undressed, and we were alone together. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He said something.

  The church clock: a quarter bell; what hour I didn’t know. The words of the dream slipped away like smoke. The room was empty, glaring with sun, and I was sick and foggy with untimely sleep. I heaved myself out of bed, shoved the book back with the others.

  I ran out the back way, through the stinks of midden and the pigsty and the privy and out the field gate. I cut through the fields, hoping to go unnoticed. There was a breeze; the long grass whispered. My mind was elsewhere, caught in the dream: the hint of words, the ghost of a touch. I was angry at myself, at what I’d wasted: my last chance.

  I reached the back wall of the vicarage garden and unhooked the gate. I waded up through the long grass of the orchard. The kitchen garden was thick with greens: asparagus, pea and beanstalks; the air full of the scent of growth and fresh-dug earth. As I crossed the stable yard the grey mare flared her nostrils at me and huffed. Perhaps the Reverend would not call for me again that day. Perhaps no one would have noticed I was gone. If I told him some urgent order of Mrs. Briggs’s, some kitchen emergency had detained me at the vicarage, then he would be obliged to send me again. And I would be deeper in the deception. Was it worth it, for an hour’s holiday, another chance to read?

  I reached the kitchen yard, the scullery door. Maggie had left the family’s boots in the hallway for me to clean. I sat on the stone bench underneath the scullery window, and polished the boots till they shone, setting them in neat pairs on the ground at my feet. I turned over possibilities in my mind, but could think of no contrivance that would not readily be discovered. The church clock chimed two. I had been gone from the kitchen nearly three hours. It could not escape Mrs. Briggs’s notice.

  I carried in the boots, and left them for Maggie to take up, and changed back into my slippers. I went into the kitchen without washing, hands smudged with bootblack, to give the air of time spent busily at outdoor tasks. As it happened, Mrs. Briggs was occupied with the roast, and didn’t pay me any heed. I spent the remaining hours of my working day labouring furiously at whatever I was set to, jumping at shadows, alert to every jangle of the bells. Mrs. Briggs didn’t speak to me until much later, when dinner had been served and eaten and she had a moment’s pause. I was scouring roasting pans, and she came to smoke a pipe at the scullery door.

  “He got his fire, then?” Her cheeks were red as rhubarb, her face shiny from the long day’s cooking.

  “I laid it for him, but then he changed his mind.”

  She nodded, the pipe-stem clamped between her teeth. “Funny that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Funny.”

  Everything was changed since that morning. I had lied, and read, and slept, and dreamed, and lied again, and everything was different because of it.

  —

  They had been setting up the games for days. Sheep had wandered among the booths and stalls, scratched their heads on the posts of the wrestling ring. That evening, work done, women walked down with baskets of refreshments, tea services, urns. I could hear people passing; their voices, their clogs clattering on the stones. The house was empty. I was in a fireside chair, with my Pilgrim’s Progress.

  I had read that book a hundred times; the title page was as familiar as the gate across the way: I’d slip past it every day without even considering it. Now, as I looked at it, I saw it as if for the first time, as something fresh, and unknown: I saw the words as what they were, and not as an opening, a gateway to something else.

  THE

  PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  from this world to that

  Which is to come

  delivered under the similitude of a dream.

  Similitude: I had read the book a hundred times, and I had never noticed that; but now I worried at it as a dog worries at a rat. Delivered under the similitude of a dream. I turned the page, to the Author’s Apology For His Book. I’d tried reading it before, but had found it dull, and had given up, and turned forward to the story, and since then I had always started where the story itself began, with Christian. But now I read the apology word by word, carefully. It made me uneasy.

  Read my fancies, I read. They will stick like burs.

  Similitude. Fancies. I was beginning to see the book in a new light; the experience was uncomfortable, and vexing to the eyes.

  The front door opened, a pillow of evening air touched my face, and Mr. Moore was coming in backwards, his jacket off, in waistcoat and shirtsleeves. A slow blush rose up my throat. Mr. Moore cradled the end of a sheaf of planking, holding it low. He backed into the room, hoisting the weight up to his hip, as someone outside lifted the other end high, onto a shoulder, to clear the steps.

  His arms were bare, the hair there caught the sunlight, and was gold. I stood up. He noticed me and nodded.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  He turned his attention back to the work. I set my book down on the windowsill, but did not know whether to stay or leave, stand or sit. The wood moved back into the room, bringing Sammy Tate, the lad from Storrs Farm, up the steps and into the house, shifting his end of the wood down from shoulder to hip. Dad followed after, came and stood in front of the fireplace, his hands pressed into the small of his back, his elbows wide, and said that it was a fine bit of timber that Mr. Moore had there, and that it must be worth a good deal, and that Mr. Moore would make a grand job of it no doubt. Dad was in the way; I could see that he was in the way; Sammy would have to pass
too close to him, if Mr. Moore was to get his end of the timber past the kitchen table, but Dad didn’t seem to notice it himself. He just kept on nodding sagely, talking, and it was only when Sammy moved around right in front of him that he finally shifted himself to go across the room and stand at the foot of the stairs, taking up station there to admire and comment. He didn’t seem to notice the brevity of Mr. Moore’s answers, or the obstacle he formed as they edged the wood up into the stairwell.

  “Dad—”

  He swung around to look at me, his expression blank. My book was lying on the windowsill. I moved in front of it.

  “What?”

  I could think of nothing to say. All of them were looking at me.

  “What?” He looked at me a moment more, and I remembered a time when I was very young, when he had carried me in his arms through the big barley field, up above the hay meadow, where Mr. Oversby now keeps his sheep, and the barley was as green as anything could be, and seemed to stretch endlessly, and the sky was wide and blue above, and at my cheek my dad’s shirt was soft red wool. I remembered the green barley, the blue sky, the red shirt, and feeling safe and happy and proud. He’d said, Your father’s barley is the finest barley in the whole field.

  “Sitting idle,” he said. “Can’t you do something useful, for once in your life?”

  My eyes turned to Mr. Moore; he was watching me. It can’t have been more than a moment; I was vividly conscious of every inch of my frame, from the sore patch on the back of my left heel where my clog rubs, to the pull of my hair at the nape of my neck where it’s twisted into a braid, and the sheen on my nose, and the dry soreness of my hands. I put my hands in my apron pocket. My cheeks burned.

  Then Mr. Moore said, “Come on, Sam, let’s be at it. You go at the top.”

  They moved with brisk purposefulness. They swapped places. Sam went backwards up the stairs, guiding the planks, and Mr. Moore took the weight, and directed his attention upwards.

  My dad followed Mr. Moore upstairs. I heard shuffling and scraping and the brief, low sounds of Mr. Moore’s instructions, the ongoing roll of my dad’s talk. I sat down and lifted my book again. Up above, they were sorting and arranging the wood. Then there was silence as chalk marks were made, plumb lines tried. The certain sound of wood on wood: a chisel struck with a mallet. Another patch of scuffling movement. A few gentle taps; pegs being hammered home, perhaps. I knew what he was doing; I didn’t need to be told. He was making bookshelves; bookshelves for his books.