The Telling

through me: this was not what I was supposed to be doing. The bookseller flopped open the cover and checked the pencil-written price, keyed the figures into the till and set the book to one side. I tilted my head to look at the handsome old Everyman edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress , with a design of leaves and an armour-suited pilgrim on the front. When the bookseller lifted the cover to check the price, I read, upside down, an inscription in browning copperplate: Prize for Holy Scripture , but I couldn’t see the name beneath. The next book was a shabby tan-leather Robinson Crusoe , the edges rough where they’d been cut, and blotched and dark with age. A History of the Lune Valley , its porcelain-blue dust jacket worn white at the edges. The big red book was called History of the Chartist Movement . I couldn’t remember why I’d thought it was a good idea.
    *
     
    I was climbing the stairs to the Reading Room, to go and put the books on the bookcase. I held them in my hands, shuffling and reshuffling them as I climbed, so that one was on the top, and now another. I was ignoring my unease, indulging instead the rare pleasure of acquisition, the beauty of the books, tracing the embossing of the leather, lifting an opened volume to inhale the skin-scent of the pages. And then there was a voice.
    A young woman’s voice, speaking softly, urgently. I lowered the book and closed it. Not so much words as a suggestion of speech, like the burn a sparkler leaves behind when traced through the air. Then a pause, as if someone were replying, but the voice was too low for me to hear. I must have left the window open; there must be people out in the street. But there hadn’t been anyone on the street when I came in; no one at all. I pushed the door open, my books crushed to my chest. The room was silent. Both windows were shut; they gave a greyish, muted light. I set the books down on a shelf, went to look out of the window. The street was empty.
    The moment didn’t linger in my thoughts; when I turned away from the window I caught sight of the books, and they looked so right on the bookshelf, as if they’d always been there, that I felt an inarticulate urge to do more, to somehow soften the starkness of the place. I took the pewter jug from the box room, brought it downstairs and set it by the kitchen sink. I wandered down the garden, picking daffodils. The grass was long, rank, tangling around my feet. Shrubs sprouted gangling stems. Last summer’s dead heads wizened on the rose bushes.
    The daffodils glowed yellow on the windowsill. The air was fresh with their scent. I sat, legs stretched out along the worn blue sofa, and in the back of my mind was the thought that I should be scouring a Yellow Pages, calling charities to see which of them would collect a second-hand sofa, a pair of grotty single beds, and somewhere beneath my breastbone was an ache of Sunday evening homework-guilt: I should be getting on with this. I should be sorting things out. Instead, I was leafing through the local history book for a mention of this place. Not even reading, really: looking at the photographs.
    Farm workers, straight out of D.H. Lawrence; all beards and rolled shirtsleeves, squinting in the sun; a flat expanse of field behind them, and a heap of bleaching hay: Haytiming, Caton, 1911 . Just up the road from here. A massive horse with a floppy fringe, a boy in knee britches and bare feet at its halter, standing next to a moustached man in a stained apron, hands-on-hips; behind them, a dark low lintel and the white flare of a captured flame: The forge at Bentham, 1908. The next image was a sketch, not a photograph. In pen-and-ink. A woman sat on a stool by an open hearth. In her lap was a bristling palisade of sticks, like an unfinished bird’s nest. Basket-making, the caption read, Lancashire, 1840s .
    I heard a dog bark. A motorbike burned up a distant road, and was gone. The quiet settled again, and seemed even deeper. I turned back through the chapters to take a glance at the essay on basket-making. After a while, I flicked back to look at the drawing again and came upon a photograph that I hadn’t seen before. An old man, his head as bald as an egg, squinted in the light, the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. He was sitting on some stone steps, a half-made basket clasped between his knees. He sat on the third step up, and there were six. Handrail to the left, a glimpse of flower-border and the bottom