The Telling

must not pause for risk of losing the pattern, of finding herself interrupted. She said that they had hardly thought to see me there that day, after the disturbances on Sunday.
    ‘It was my father, madam, not me, who caused the furore.’
    Her cheeks pinkened deeper; I could see the choice of word had piqued her.
    ‘Well,’ she said, and looked up, delivering her reasons in a list, ‘it’s nonetheless clear that you cannot be trusted, that you have become unreliable, and are clearly not the kind of girl that we could possibly keep on staff, not coming from a family like that; the Reverend Wolfenden expressed his doubts to me some time ago, but I had suggested generosity, and restraint, and watchfulness , and how have I been rewarded?’
    ‘Perfectly adequately,’ I said. ‘You have nothing to complain of. I’ve done my work, and done it well, even though it has suited you often enough to pretend otherwise.’
    She shook her head. ‘The Reverend said to expect insolence. I am sorry that things have come to such a pass, but we will have to let you go.’
    She set her sewing down and lifted a clutch of coins from a nearby table: my pay. I looked at it a moment. It would have been a great satisfaction to tell her to put it in the poor box, but prudence got the better of me. I held out my hand; she slid the coins into it, not letting our hands touch. Her hand was tugged back as if by a jerked cord and rested on her belly; and then I noticed. The cut of her dress did much to disguise it, but there was the unmistakable swelling, the filling out of breasts, and when I looked again into her face I saw the glowing plumpness of the lineaments, the softness of the jaw. She saw me notice, and blushed deeper still. I jangled the coins in my hand. I smiled at her. I padded out of the room in my felt slippers. Things were about as bad as I could imagine them, but nothing in the world would have persuaded me to exchange my place for hers.
    *
     
    I took off my slippers and put on my clogs. I left my cap and apron there. Going out through the scullery door, into daylight and on to the doorstep, I was surprised to find that my heart was lightened at the loss of my place, even though I had no notion of what I would do to find another one. I’d never have to wear those felt slippers again; I’d never have to curtsey again, not unless I chose to. I stepped down on to the gravel path just as someone came briskly around the corner; we nearly collided. Thomas; he blushed right to his ears.
    ‘I was just delivering –’
    I nodded and began to turn away. I didn’t have the goodwill in me at that moment to hear another story of his success, his accumulating profits.
    He followed me, skipping a step to keep up.
    ‘What’s up, where are you off to?’
    ‘Nowhere.’
    ‘What do you mean nowhere? It’s the middle of the day.’
    ‘I’ve been dismissed.’
    He grabbed my arm, and stopped me, and turned me to him, and I just looked at him blankly. He put his arm around my shoulder, and tried to pull me close, but I pushed him away.
    ‘Times will be hard,’ he said.
    ‘I know.’
    I turned again, heading for the vicarage gate, and he followed me, the sound of our paired feet noisy in the morning quiet. We passed Mr Fowler, who was raking the gravel. He looked at us askance.
    ‘If you need help, I can help,’ Thomas was saying. ‘Give you work, whatever you want.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
    I clutched the coins tightly, the metal edges pressing into my palm. As we strode down the drive, my mind was turning on the possibilities: farm work and domestic work and leaving for the mills; what I could get without a good word from my former employer, who also happened to be the vicar. The future did not look rosy. And whatever work I managed to secure, whatever else happened, Mr Moore would be gone. He must leave; he must be made to see that he must leave, before it was too late. I flung the gate wide, and it crashed back on its hinges, and I set off up the village street; Thomas stayed to fasten it, and then dashed after me. When Mr Moore goes, I was thinking, I will have nothing. I will have nothing left at all.
    The crowd almost blocked the road where it crested Brunt Hill. Irebys and Robinsons, and some of the Gorst boys, and Thomas’s cousins, and men down from the hill-farms, almost strangers; it was uneasy to see them gathered there; another clear indication that the changes of Sunday were leaching into the