The Telling

such fierce attention, that I felt something like tenderness for him. I took his hand, and he helped me over, and the moment for asking him was gone.
    ‘Your hair is all fallen,’ he said.
    I stood, and began to gather it, divide it, twist it and pin it up. Thomas watched, and he touched the ribbon there, his fingers rough-skinned but gentle, and nodded to show when it was done. We were walking side by side towards the dance, towards the music and people. There were nudges and smiles. I touched at my hair uneasily. There was no remedy for the fallen hem.
    My mam didn’t say anything. I told her that I wanted to go home, and she gave me a long assessing look, and her face softened.
    ‘Come on then.’
    The bonfire was visible from the turn of the street; a dark bloody red, smoke that seemed to hang in a pool around the house. Indoors, the rooms reeked of strange smoke; of burning leather and paper and buckram and glue. Mam moved about, tutting, setting things to rights. I sat at the window in the dimming light, and watched the fire grow deeper red, and the plants and fruit canes wither and scorch, felt the vapours and mists of the unfinished stories burn away, and disperse with the smoke into the evening air.
    Mam brought me tea, and I blinked away tears. She dragged over a chair to sit with me at the window, and we drank our tea from the cups she was given when she was seventeen and left service to marry Dad, and we sat in silence while outside the books burned orange and green and blue, and cracked and spat, and the words peeled away into black ash, and tiny fragments of paper were caught by the wind. A word here, a phrase there, lifted to the sky and scattered.
    ‘Would the Wolfendens take you back, do you think?’ she said. ‘The Reverend was saying a lot about forgiveness today.’
    ‘I doubt it.’
    There was silence. Then she said, ‘Did he touch you?’
    I looked at her; her dark lined skin, her apple cheeks.
    She said, ‘Sweetheart?’
    There was just the soft sound of my lips unsticking, but I couldn’t speak.
    ‘I saw the state of you when you got back to the dance,’ she said. ‘Everyone did.’
    She meant Thomas.
    ‘There’s nothing you need to tell me about?’
    ‘No,’ I said, half-choked.
    She nodded. After a while, she said, ‘You’re tired, you should go to bed.’
    I rose, went to get the bedding from the chest.
    ‘No, honey,’ she said.
    I let the blanket fall back into the chest, let the lid fall shut. Upstairs, she meant; in my old bed, in Mr Moore’s bed. My face flushed with feeling: to hide it, and to show that there was nothing out of the ordinary, I went over to the dresser to get a book, as I had done every night since I was a little girl. There, pressed tightly between the black spines of the Bible and the Pilgrim’s Progress , was that little blue-backed volume of John Milton’s verse. Mr Moore had left it for me. In those last hurried moments before departure, he had risked himself, and his liberty, to leave me this. I slipped it off the shelf, and wrapped my arms over it, pressing it close to me. I went straight up to the room. The room bore the marks of the soldiers’ presence: the rucked-up rug, the empty shelves, the smell of burning. He had gone, but there were traces of him still: his empty box, the compression of the pillow, the bookcase. I stood in the middle of the room and opened the book that he had left me. On the flyleaf he had written, in his neat, practical hand,
    For Elizabeth
a loan,
until I see you again
Robert James Moore.  
     
    I lay down. I buried my face in the pillow, breathed deep the scent of him. Oak. Still in that dress, my ankles pricked and bleeding, my face tangling in my hair, worn out with crying, I fell asleep.
    *
     
    I had been as a salmon hatched and grown in a backwater, its flesh muddy and soft from the stillness of its pond. With Mr Moore’s arrival, a flood had thundered through my life, joining the backwater to the river’s flow, washing away the murk, bringing life and possibility, bringing evidence of a better life beyond, of an element that seemed my natural home. Having felt it, having tasted it, I knew it would be a joy to be alive in it. I could never settle again in the backwater, and be content. I knew now that I had never really been content before.
    Weeks passed, and I heard nothing. I stayed at home to nurse Dad, who had been laid low with a chill from staying out all night after the dance, carousing with