The Testament of Mary Read Free Page B

table aside and pulled out the chair, which I had carefully trapped against the wall so that it would not be defiled by my visitors. ‘You can use the one beside it but not that one.’
    ‘I cannot use a chair?’ he enquired, as though addressing a fool. ‘What else are chairs for? I cannot sit on a chair?’ The tone now was more insolent than menacing, but it had an element of menace.
    ‘No one sits on that chair,’ I said quietly.
    ‘No one?’ he asked.
    I made my voice even quieter.
    ‘No one,’ I replied.
    My two visitors looked at each other. I was waiting. I did not turn away from them and I tried to seem gentle, someone hardly worth defying, especiallyon what might have seemed to them like a whim, a woman’s notion.
    ‘Why not?’ he asked, with a sort of sweet sarcasm.
    ‘Why not?’ he asked again as though I were a child.
    I could hardly breathe now and I rested my hands on the back of the chair that was nearest me and I realized from the way my breath came and the sudden slowness in my heartbeat that it would not be long before all the life in me, the little left, would go, as a flame goes out on a mild day, easily, needing only the smallest hint of wind, a sudden flicker and then out, gone, as though it had never been alight.
    ‘Don’t sit there,’ I said quietly.
    ‘But you must explain,’ he said.
    ‘The chair,’ I said, ‘is left for someone who will not return.’
    ‘But he will return,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ I replied, ‘he will not.’
    ‘Your son will return,’ he said.
    ‘The chair is for my husband,’ I replied, as if he this time were the fool. I felt content when I said the name, as though the very saying of the word ‘husband’ had pulled something back into the room, or a shadow of something, enough for me in any case, but not enough for them. And then he went to sit in the chair, he turned it towards himself, he was ready to perch there with his back to me.
    I was waiting. Quickly, I found the sharp knife and I held it and touched the blade. I did not point it towards them, but my movement to reach for it had been so swift and sudden that I caught their attention. I glanced at them and then looked down at the blade.
    ‘I have another one hidden,’ I said, ‘and if either of you touch the chair again, if you so much as touch it, I will wait, I am waiting now, and I will come in the night, I will move as silently as the air itself moves, and you will not have time to make a sound. Do not think for a moment that I will not do this.’
    I turned then as though I had work to do. I washed some jugs that did not need to be washed and then I asked them if they would get me water. I knew that they wanted to be alone with each other now and when they had gone out I put the chair back against the wall and then the table against it. I knew that maybe it was time I forgot about the man I married, as I would join him soon enough. Maybe it was time to consign this chair to nothing, but I would do this on a day when it was not important. I would break its spell in my own good time.

    I move now between the things of this world that are precise, sharp and close by, and some bitterimaginings. On those Sabbath days once the prayers were intoned and God was thanked and praised, there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth. I had a sense on some of those days, after hours of silence, of my mother struggling to come towards me, reaching out from somewhere very dark, reaching towards me as though looking for food or drink. As darkness fell on those Sabbath days I saw her sinking back into a cavernous place, a huge, wide-mouthed space; over her were things flitting and flying and there was the sound of the rumbling earth beneath her. I do not know why I imagined this, and it would have been easier to imagine her slowly turning to dust in the warm earth close to the places that she loved. And it was always easy to