The Telling

made the tea, and I watched the chip of light in the plastic dewdrop, its pink and green facets, and I felt as though I was going slowly out of focus; as if, when she came back into the room, she would find me fading, faint, dispersing into the surrounding air.
    She came in with a tray, placed it on top of the nest of tables, and began extracting the smallest table from underneath. She was solid and awkward and flustered, and I was half rising to help her, but was too slow, and sank back as she shuffled out the table and whisked it over to my side. She handed me a cup and saucer with a smile. The cup was patterned with poppies and wheat-ears. The tea was grey and milky and a clot of milk-fat floated on the top. I wanted to be back in the Reading Room. It was almost panic: if I was going to disappear, it had to be there, where I could lose myself completely and no one would even notice I was gone. I glanced up at the window, but the lower half was shrouded in creamy net curtains, and I couldn’t see out.
    She sat down with an old-person’s huff of breath, fidgeted with cardigan buttons and then with the metal watch strap that was pinching her skin. She glanced up and offered me a smile.
    ‘How are your mum and dad?’ she asked.
    Her skin had the soft translucency of age; her lips smudged and bluing, her cheeks traced with broken capillaries. She knew something was up; I could tell she’d noticed there was something wrong with me. It has a smell, I think: like diabetes, kidney disease, or cancer. I found myself suddenly aware of another scent in the air, raw and cool and dusty-sweet: icing. She’d been icing a cake.
    ‘You must have been wondering,’ I ventured. ‘The place standing empty so long.’
    ‘I saw you pottering around.’ Her voice was biscuity and soft. ‘I thought you were your mum. I was going to come over and say hello.’
    There was a pause. She sipped her tea, gently expectant.
    ‘She got ill,’ I said.
    ‘Oh.’
    She set down her teacup.
    ‘Not long after they bought the cottage. They came back a couple of times, after the diagnosis, but I guess she didn’t have the energy to do much.’
    She didn’t ask. She shifted forward on her seat, stretched out a hand.
    ‘It’s over a year ago now, since she died.’ I spoke quickly, knowing whatever I said the words were bubbles, fragile, weightless, bursting in midair between us. ‘Dad’s not been back. He couldn’t face it. I’m packing up and putting it on the market for him.’
    ‘Oh my poor love,’ she said, and shuffled forward again, her thin hand extended towards me. I didn’t take it. I smiled, my eyes open wide to accommodate the wet.
    ‘It seems lovely around here – I haven’t seen much, but what I have is really beautiful.’
    ‘It is.’ She retreated, put her cup down on the table and looked away. ‘Really. Some lovely walks. But it’s awfully quiet nowadays. A dormitory, really.’
    ‘It’s so quiet I can hear the electricity in the house. Do you get that over here, a kind of humming sound, you can barely hear it? I was thinking it must be the substation.’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘Or at least, not so I’ve noticed. I don’t recall Margaret mentioning it either. Perhaps there’s a fault in your wiring. You should have it checked.’
    ‘Margaret?’
    ‘Margaret Hutton. She lived there before your parents bought it.’
    She smiled, revealing her neat ceramic caps. There was a pause. She looked down at her hands, lifted her right hand, turned it over and ran a fingertip from wrist to knuckle. The silence stretched like chewing gum. I was reminded of myself, just a short while earlier, studying my hands like that.
    ‘It’d been a labourer’s cottage before they bought it; part of the Storrs Estate. It’ll say on your deeds.’ I noticed then the colour of her eyes, a soft clear tea-brown. The lower lids fell loose and looked sore and pink. ‘I just hope I can afford to go to as good a place as she did.’
    I thought she was joking. I thought this was a camel-through-the-eye-of-the-needle reference. I thought of the old lady whose slippers had worn the tracks into the carpet, whose Sunday dinners still lingered in those rooms; there was nothing ghostly about her presence: it was all very real.
    ‘I thought the less money you had the better?’
    ‘It certainly doesn’t help, it seems. Her boy Jack had to sell up just to pay the fees.’
    ‘Fees?’
    ‘It’s a good place, but it’s not cheap. The