The Telling Read Free Page A

flowers, tree, Agnes’s four windows and brown front door – were all painted on the glass, and not real at all. It was like looking at the windows in the church, of St Hilda and St John, too deeply coloured, too neat, too calm to be anything like real.
    My work lay beside me on the flags, a book was neglected in my lap. I had my shawl wrapped tightly around me; it was cold away from the fire. No one came, and no one left, and I shivered in the draught, and Mam scolded me for mooning about and wasting the day. The light began to fade.
    She left for the evening milking, and the boys were playing out somewhere, and Sally was at the Forsters’ for her tea, and the house was empty.
    I had wanted to stay with Agnes, but they wouldn’t let me. I’d asked her mam to let me know when it was over, and she had said she would send me word the first chance that she got. What good did I think I’d do anyway, my mam wanted to know. Hanging about, getting in the way? I’d only scare myself, and be put off ever marrying, and end up an old maid. But it seemed to me that it would be better to be with her, to know how things went with her, however badly they were going, than remain in ignorance for so long.
    Dad would be back soon. Once he was back, and given his tea, I would just slip across the street and gently knock, and if someone answered I’d ask after Agnes, and if no one answered then I would just come home, and no one need know I’d been, and I’d be no worse off than I was now.
    I had the kettle hot on the stove, the teapot standing with the tea spooned in, the canister with its picture of a Chinaman and a lion put back on the dresser. The bread and the cheese were cut, and a clean cloth laid over them. There was nothing more to do. I leaned against the table, chewed a fingernail. Of my mam’s confinements that I could remember, none had taken as long as this.
    My father’s cap came bobbing slowly along the far side of the garden wall. I poked up the fire, got the kettle steaming. He scraped his way up the steps, and came in. His cheeks were flushed: he brought a pool of cool spring air with him, and the smell of his work, of horse and tobacco and beer. He was in one of those slow, philosophical moods that he gets into when he’s had a drink or two. He saw the steaming kettle and the tea things set out on the table, and shook his head, as if it were some fancy of mine to make him his tea, but he was prepared to humour me and play along with it. Then he saw my book lying on the windowsill, saw the work half done and lying on the floor, and his mood turned sharply.
    ‘If you’re going to waste your time reading that old nonsense again,’ he said, his breath sweet with malt.
    ‘It’s Sunday, and it’s Pilgrim’s Progress , which is a fine book for Sunday,’ I said quickly. ‘And it’s better than many ways of spending the Lord’s Day.’
    He gave me a look, sat down in his chair, and kept himself bolt upright in a poor imitation of sobriety. I made the tea and I gave him his bread and cheese. I left him to pour his own cup and slipped out to stand on our top step, and look over to Agnes’s house. No candles lit there, as yet.
    It was a lovely soft evening, a little way off dark. The sheep were calling up in the back field, and someone was chopping logs up at Goss House. A curlew flew overhead, giving its shrill repeating cry. I went down the front steps, crossed the road, the loose stones crunching loud underfoot. I peered through the front window, but couldn’t see anyone. I rested my ear to the front door. I heard nothing but the beat of my own heart. I thought that she had died. That she lay cold and dead upstairs. That they could not bring themselves to tell me. I lifted the latch; the door creaked open, and I stepped inside, on to Agnes’s clean-sanded kitchen floor.
    The room was stuffy; I could smell something sweet and rich and spiced. There were figures slumped at the kitchen table. I moved closer in