The Telling

smell like moss and oatmeal. Willow, on the other hand, retains through all processes a bitter yellow taint: it seems to linger on the senses, remain a sourness in the throat.
    Robert Moore smelt of oak.
    I know I smell of willow, it is worn into my skin.
    *
     
    We ate the damsons, sucked the melting toffee flesh from the stones. We lay there without speaking, lying on the bed, on my old bed, on my old patchwork quilt, me in nothing but my shift and loosened stays, him in nothing but his shirt. I felt shy of him, very conscious of the sounds of my eating, and of the places where our limbs still touched. I turned a damson stone around on my tongue, and picked it from my lips, and held it warming in my hand with the other ones, not knowing what else to do with them. The street was quiet below, and there was distant gentle music from the green.
    He touched the cool flesh of my arm with his scarred hand. I glanced around at him. He smiled an awkward, shy smile.
    ‘Now you have to marry me.’
    My future had seemed set in stone, but we had thrown that stone into the air, and it had landed with a smash and shattered, scattering into a thousand little pieces, and the pieces had rolled and tumbled, and were settling into a new pattern; a beautiful new pattern, any pattern at all: I could arrange it as I wished.
    ‘Do you remember how you told me about that shrew?’ he asked.
    He lifted the empty damson bowl and held it to me: I dropped the fleshless stones into it; he tumbled his palmful in after.
    ‘I remember.’
    ‘And you said, We flicker into life, and out again, like candle flames . Do you remember that?’
    He put the bowl down beside the bed; I closed my hand, feeling the fruit-juice film of stickiness.
    ‘I think so.’
    He turned back to me. ‘And you said about fishes turning into stones, and everyone going about from day to day ignorant of the fact?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I always thought that you were pretty. But since that day, the idea of you with that boy –’ he shook his head.
    A thought blossomed in my head, making me smile: ‘Is that why you kept lending me the books, to keep me from my sewing?’
    He smiled back at me. ‘My motives there were purely scholarly .’
    The clock struck the half-hour, and he asked what o’clock it was, but I didn’t know. He said that we should get dressed and I agreed, but neither of us moved. We lay in silence for a while. My shyness had melted entirely. He reached out an arm, and I pressed myself to him; his arm under my head, my cheek on his chest, a knee curled on to his leg, an arm around his waist. His hand touched my hair.
    ‘It’ll be unsettled, Elizabeth. Our life together; it’s bound to be.’
    ‘I don’t care.’
    ‘It’ll be difficult.’
    ‘I don’t care.’
    And I really didn’t. No obstacle was insurmountable; anything could be achieved.
    ‘I’ve been thinking about America. Could you fancy America?’
    America. The boy had sailed there in the ballad. In a ship with sails that bellied out like linen on the line.
    ‘I think I could.’
    The three-quarter bell struck, and he stirred, slid his arm out from underneath my head, and he got to his feet, and then took my hand and I stood up with him, and he took a step back from me, and just stood looking at me as I stood there, and he was so serious and sober in manner, that I didn’t feel ashamed, and I knew that this was a time more real than any other, and unchanging, permanent. He pulled me to him and held me again, the length of his body pressed against mine.
    ‘Did you know, before Eve, Adam had another wife? God made her out of clay, just like Adam.’
    I smiled against the soft linen of his shirt, the warmth of his chest. ‘Nonsense.’
    ‘No, it’s just not in our Bible. They left it out.’
    A moment passed while I considered this. ‘What happened to her?’
    ‘They didn’t get along so well.’
    ‘That’s a shame.’
    ‘Adam was a fool. I love you.’
    *
     
    He helped me with my stays. He drew them just tight enough, making me breathe high and shallow, but not pinching too much. I found myself wanting to ask about his wife, about the child, but I knew that it was not the time. He bent close to peer at the tiny hooks and eyes of my new dress.
    He would leave that evening and walk to Lancaster, taking the footpath along the riverbank, avoiding the main roads. He could go unobserved that way, he said. The most he’d be likely to come across would be a poacher or a