The Telling

basket. Thomas was at my side. I’d lost sight of my mam and dad in the crowd. By Bainsbeck I had given in to Thomas’s persuasion, and surrendered the basket to him. After this, he did not seem to feel the need for further talk. When I glanced around at him, he was striding along through the grass, leaving the worn-bare path to me, and there was a smile on his face like a sunbeam, brilliant, painful to look at.
    I spread the family rug with the others, and Thomas helped, bending to tug the cloth straight and flat. Aunty Sue and Agnes’s mam were looking at us, and speaking low between themselves, and when they saw me notice, they smiled little sly smiles, and I looked away. Sally was down at the water’s edge, skimming stones with Ruth. Mr Forster was going over to join them, clambering down the bank in his tight black clothes to get to the shilloe.
    Thomas settled himself down on our family blanket. I stood watching as Mr Forster said something to Sally and her friend, then bent and fished up a stone. He planted his feet wide apart, crouched, swung his hand back to show how to turn, how to flick the wrist around to give the stone the necessary spin. Even from that distance I could see the girls wilt under his instruction. He loosed his stone and straightened up to watch it skip across the water. I counted ten. Mr Forster had taught me to count, but my father had taught me to skim stones. I used to be good at it. Once in a while, I’d get a bit of slate to curl across the river without seeming to bounce at all, as if the water became, for just that moment, a sheet of rippling silk, but that was when I was a girl and there were long summer evenings down at the river with my dad. Skimming stones is one of the things you grow out of, if you grow up to be a woman.
    I watched the girls have another few throws, watched them pick through the shilloe looking for skimmers, watched Mr Forster crouch again to demonstrate the necessary swing. The girls’ hearts were no longer in it; it was clear they were only waiting for him to leave. When he did, clambering up the bank, wiping his hands on a handkerchief, beaming at his wife, they pulled off their clogs and stockings, hitched up their skirts and waded into the water, bending over, arms in deep to turn over stones, looking for bullheads and caddis-houses and eels; I would have been doing it too, if I’d been twelve years old.
    On the walk back through the woods, the leaves on the beeches were so new that the sunlight streamed right through them. Thomas was beside me again, my mam following behind trying to keep my dad upright and steady. The younger ones were trampling the garlic, making it stink. Ahead and behind and all around me, I knew everyone, I knew the weave of their shawls, the wear of their clogs and the way they tied their hair, and whose breath was particularly foul and which of the men would try and get a hand up your skirt if they got half a chance, and I knew that Thomas, with his easy smile and his red ears and his gentle ways, was as good a man as any there, and that he didn’t have a single quality that I didn’t know, and that he was decent, and that I couldn’t, I really couldn’t ever think of marrying him. But as I was thinking this, he was speaking, and what he said seemed to chime with my thoughts, so I looked around at him, and felt for the first time that day warm and well-disposed towards him, because after all, none of it was his fault.
    ‘That bit of land,’ he was saying, ‘down near the ford, I planted it with willows just last year. There’s a fine crop coming on; it’ll make some good whitework. My father says the money’s all in the supply these days, he’s making twenty pound a year on the raw willow and it’ll not be long before I’m making twenty pound myself, and that’d be on top of the cow money.’
    ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘You’re doing well.’
    He nodded, and we went on walking, him at my side, and as we walked he shifted the basket so that it hung from his arm and brushed against my hip, a bridge across the space between us. ‘How’s work at the vicarage?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s not too bad, I’m well used to it.’
    I knew what would come. I knew it was like something spoiling in his belly and that he could never quite be at ease until he’d rid himself of it. I couldn’t let him speak, not here, now, with my mam and dad following just behind and the whole village around us. His face went red. I