The Telling

was broad-hipped and broad-shouldered, with neat features; she had probably once been pretty. The baby was pressed to her shoulder, and as we spoke she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, swaying slightly back and forth. We pitched our voices over its cries.
    ‘I’m here to see Mr Moore.’
    She looked at me, tilting her head a little to one side.
    ‘Mr Moore. Is he in?’
    I glanced past her into the dark, distempered hallway. A child came out of a back room; two years old perhaps; his head was a mop of straw-coloured hair.
    ‘You’ve got the wrong house,’ she said.
    I held out the folded paper for her to look at. ‘I don’t think so. 108. That’s what it says here.’
    She didn’t even glance at it, just shook her head. I felt oddly cool and disconnected. All I had to do was find the right form of words and she would understand, all would suddenly come clear. She would smile and step aside and usher me through to him.
    ‘I’ve come a long way; I do need to see him.’
    The baby’s crying intensified. ‘I’m sure you do,’ she said.
    ‘His friends, they live here, he gave me this address.’
    She just shook her head and shifted the baby. ‘There’s just us. Family. I’ve never heard of your Mr Moore. But then, we’re not that long moved in.’ She laid the baby face down along her arm, its head in the crook. She stroked its back. It still squalled. I felt the first prickling possibility of alarm.
    ‘My daughter’s at the mill,’ she continued. ‘So’s her husband. Shift’s not long started, and the babby’s already starved.’
    The baby’s face was turned outwards, away from the woman’s body. It was puce, outraged, the mouth a dark red gummy hole. My body wanted him; I wanted to take him, to soothe him somehow, his need seemed so overwhelming. ‘What’ll you give him?’
    ‘Sugared water, till she gets in.’
    I nodded. My own need pressed his aside: ‘The people here before you, do you know where they went?’
    She shrugged. ‘There were chairs broken, the door kicked in, all sorts. Our Davey had to fix the lot.’
    And that was when I knew. He was not here, he would not be here. He couldn’t be. He had stayed with me too long. When I spoke again my voice sounded strange to me, half whisper, half croak.
    ‘Was it the Militia?’
    She shook her head and shrugged, and the baby let out a howl, and she glanced down at him, and back at me.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to try and get him settled. Good luck.’
    ‘Good luck,’ I murmured back.
    She stepped back into the hall, and closed the door. I noticed then that the wood had been recently patched: cheap boards had been hammered across the timber, at the bottom and top, where the night-time bolts would fasten. The door kicked in in the middle of the night; men dragged from their beds. I turned away. Cobbles rose up steeply to my left, cobbles sloped down steeply to my right. The buzz and clatter of the mills, the rough air full of smoke. I had no strength, no will for anything. I thought of the baby, starving and furious and unfed. I thought of the baby’s mother at the whirring bobbins, her breasts filling with milk, soaking wadded cloths so that her frock was patched with damp, and at dinner break she would have to wring out the cloths into the privy. Back home the baby wailing and wailing and wailing with hunger, until it was at last too tired to cry.
    I was back home by the middle of the afternoon. My father was sleeping. I went to my room and lay down, and slept, a cold black sleep, a void. I was too heartsick for dreams. I woke towards evening, to the sound of Mam coming in, and I brought myself downstairs to her, expecting a fury and bowing my head before it. But she was calm, and tired, and didn’t ask where I had been, and I realized that she hadn’t known that I had even gone. She must have left in the morning without looking in on me, and had got back after I’d returned. She hadn’t noticed my absence, and yet it had seemed ages-long to me.
    The next time I walked out with Thomas, I took him to the hay barn, where we had sat a lifetime ago, when I had helped him learn his lesson for school. He kissed me, and I lay down with him, and let him coax my skirts up. He must have taken my awkwardness for innocence; he didn’t seem to know enough to know that he was not my first. Afterwards, he said that we would be married in December, and that he would not take no for an answer. I did not say