The Telling

more distant and then one day you’ll just be – gone.’
    I took his arm. He shook me off, reached down and grabbed his boxers off the floor.
    *
     
    Standing at the bookcase, I listened to the car pull away. Underneath jeans and jumper, my body was still conscious of his, still tender from the night before. The coffee in his cup gave off a faint curl of steam. I felt the air soften and settle around me. For the last two years my mind had turned in a loop: if only, if only, if only. If only the scar would melt away, if only the beads would fade to pinpricks and dissolve, if only her breath would come easier, her pulse steady, the morphine surge back into the syringe, her eyes flicker and open, and she’d be back with me, and we’d move from there down a different track, towards recovery and health and years of each other’s company, decades of loving and being loved. But the clock ticks on. There is just now, and that’s all that anyone could ever hope to have.
    ‘I am sorry, you know,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
    I held myself quite still, listening, my nerves alert. But there was nothing. The air was soft and cool; the room was empty, and gave nothing back.

 
     
     
     
    I WENT TO WORK; I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO; IT was what I always did. The village was stirring. Women were mending fires: smoke drifted from chimney pots, curtains were drawn back. The world had been turned upside down on Sunday, and it seemed that no one knew what to do about it, but to carry on as if the sky were still clear above our heads, and the ground still firm under our feet. That there could be troops sent for, or the Riot Act read, or that a man might challenge the vicar in mid-sermon and spit on the church floor; none of it seemed to belong to the same world as this morning, when Agnes’s mam was shaking last night’s crumbs from the tablecloth out of the front door, and chaffinches and sparrows hopped and fluttered after them.
    The vicarage windows were dark and blank. I crunched up the gravel driveway, and in through the servants’ door, and I felt my skin tighten at the chill.
    I had died for them on Sunday, and now I was a ghost. Mrs Briggs was elbow-deep in a goose and didn’t even look up. Maggie’s gaze skimmed over me, and didn’t settle, and she left the kitchen without seeming to notice me. I went about my usual tasks. When I lit the bedroom fire the Reverend and his wife were still sleeping: when I came back with the water he was gone, the blankets lying neat and flat where he had lain. I set the ewer down on the washstand. Mrs Wolfenden slept prettily, her breathing gentle; I was thinking about how she’d said the Reverend would protect her. Then he bustled back into the room from his dressing-room door, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown, looking as if he’d forgotten something. He started when he saw me.
    ‘What –’ he said, and then he faltered and looked away. He went over to his side of the bed, and picked up a book from the bedside cabinet, then he returned to his dressing room, the skirts of his dressing gown rustling.
    *
     
    I was chopping onions. My eyes stung with the vapours, but I was happy to be at the task. After all that had been asked of me lately, it seemed beautifully simple to be chopping onions. I was so reluctant to be done with them that I’d reduced them to almost a paste when the bell rang. I was wanted in the morning room. Mrs Briggs’s plump face was pink and she didn’t meet my eye. She stripped leaves from rhubarb stems, sliced the stems briskly into quarter-lengths. ‘Go on then girl,’ she said. I think she knew what was coming; I think she might have been feeling sorry for me.
    Mrs Wolfenden was sitting in her chair. I clasped my hands behind my back, could smell the onions even then. Alice was nearby, perched on an upright chair at a sewing table, an abundance of soft brown merino heaped in front of her. An autumn dress for Mrs Wolfenden; the fabric was beautiful, but I wasn’t sure that it would suit her light colouring. Mrs Wolfenden herself was at some smaller work; a piece of crisp white linen in her hands; she was trimming it with white silk ribbon. She barely raised her eyes from this work when I came in; just a flicker of a glance, though her cheeks and throat flushed red. When I came to stand in front of her, she spoke without looking up, and it was in a kind of breathless rush, as if she had it all committed to memory, and