The Telling

still had to go to the dance with Thomas; it seemed unjust, it seemed ridiculous, it seemed almost funny.
    Agnes stood with us a while, and the baby, swaddled tightly, its head hidden in a white cotton cap, butted at her shoulder.
    ‘He’s hungry,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to keep him hungry for a little while, so that then I can fill him up completely, otherwise all I ever do is feed him day and night, little dribs and drabs.’
    Thomas flushed up. ‘I’d best be gone,’ he said, and he went off down the village street towards his mam’s house with that long-legged lope of his.
    ‘How are you now?’ I asked Agnes. She shook her head, and looked puzzled, and was almost laughing.
    ‘Every day he changes,’ she said. ‘It’s as though he becomes more like himself. It’s stupid, but I already miss him, the tiny little him, I miss yesterday’s him, and tomorrow I will miss today’s.’
    Mam opened the door behind me, and I pressed back against the handrail to let her pass. Her right arm was weighted with a covered basket. She greeted Agnes and commented on the baby’s size. She was at the bottom of the steps when she turned back to me.
    ‘When your dress is finished, will you pick the damsons, and bring them with you when you come up to the green? I haven’t had a minute, but they’re good and ripe and sweet as anything.’ Then she went off up the street.
    ‘Well, I must go and feed the little man then,’ Agnes said. I stepped down on to the street and kissed her, and said that I would call for her soon.
    ‘I’ll be at the dance,’ she said, ‘though I doubt that I’ll be doing much dancing.’
    *
     
    The damsons were warm and soft and bluish-bloomed. They came away easy from their stalks. I was thinking of the last spate of books that Mr Moore had left me, of the bewitched Medea sailing off with Jason, her dismembered brother’s body drifting in their wake. I was thinking of the smell of crackling fat, the skin stretched crisp and golden, a roast child on a platter carried into a wedding feast. These things of such horror and gravity and darkness, that had, at the same time, a kind of conviction and certainty that seemed wonderful to me. A poet lost in a forest and confronted by wild beasts; Ulysses lashing together tree trunks on Calypso’s island; Ophelia adrift in the water, trailing flowers, because there was really nothing left for her to do but die.
    Once I had picked the damsons, I would have to finish the dress. There was only the hem left to turn. Then I would wash and dress and pin up my hair and go to the dance, and I would dance with Thomas. And Mr Moore would leave, if not today then very soon; he had to leave; he had to be made to go. I would stay, and Thomas and I would marry, unless I could think of some way out of it, and I was beginning to see that I could think of no way out of it at all. I felt angry with Dad, and with Thomas, and with Mam, and with Mr Moore, but most of all, I felt angry with myself. Other hands may have cut out the pieces, but I had sewn every stitch of my situation.
    I was standing underneath the drooping damson branches, my bowl not yet half full. I had stood there I don’t know how long, without picking a single fruit. I closed my eyes and took a long slow breath. The gentry were fled. The clergy were gone. The strike continued. The troops were on their way, no doubt of it. However little I wished him to be gone, he had to be made to see that he must go. He had stayed too long already. I had to make him leave; I had to know that he was safe, even if that meant I could never see him again. He could not be sent half a world away to die. I would not let it happen.
    *
     
    He’d left the door open. He was sitting on his bed with his legs stretched out over the counterpane and his patched boots dangling over the edge. He was leaning back against the wall, so that he could look up the village street, at the passers-by, the flower garlands, the corn dollies, the streamers. I watched him in silence for a moment, then he turned from the window to look at me. His face was drawn; it seemed to be in strange contrast to the childlike way that he was sitting.
    ‘There you are,’ he said.
    I nodded. He had been thinking of me: the realization made other thought difficult.
    ‘Did you get your dress finished?’
    The question was even more unsettling. I watched his right thumb stroke the back of the left, following the length of the white scar.
    ‘I