The Telling

home.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘She’s been in the home four years now. Up at Storrs. You’ll have seen it, the old hall, the big house with the tower. Jack’s her eldest, he runs the farm now; his wife Sandra told me that when he goes to visit his mum she doesn’t even know who he is.’
    ‘That’s really sad,’ I said.
    She looked at me in a precise, thoughtful way. Then she told me what had happened.
    It was about six years ago. It was windy, February, the middle of the night, and she was woken by someone shouting in the street outside. It sounded like a woman’s voice, calling for someone, calling out a name, but she couldn’t be sure whose name it was, it was too windy to hear properly. She had woken her husband Edward, and they’d gone out to see what was going on. It was Margaret Hutton out in the street, in her nightdress, blue with cold, the wind whipping her hair across her face. They asked her what she was doing, and she said Charlie had gone out earlier to pick the blackcurrants, and he hadn’t come back. She was barefoot; her feet cold and muddy on the dark wet tarmac. She said she’d looked all over the garden, but she couldn’t find him, she was still looking, could they help her. And that was how it began.
    ‘How what began?’
    ‘Well, her decline, really.’
    ‘She didn’t find him?’
    ‘Picking blackcurrants in February?’ she shook her head. ‘And anyway Charlie, well, he’d been gone a while by then. She was a widow, had been for the best part of a decade.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh.’
    ‘Me and Edward, we said to ourselves that she’d just been dreaming, sleepwalking or what have you, but I think we already knew that there was more to it than that. She seemed to come around somehow, and had a bit of a cry, and we sat with her a while, and then I put her to bed. It was just the start of it, really. It’s a cruel illness; what it does to you is cruel. We’d just find her, I don’t know, straying. She’d be talking about people and we’d have no idea what she was on about. Names we’d never heard; even Jack could make no sense of it. It got so she couldn’t really be left alone. She just kept on drifting off into her own little world, and couldn’t cope with this one any more.’
    I felt the words come out clumsy, overladen: ‘She must have been quite elderly by this time?’
    She smiled. ‘These things are relative! She was only in her mid-sixties , when she went into the home. But she’d been ill for years and years. People get good at hiding it, apparently. They can hide it for years.’
    The words seemed to fall slowly, as through water, catching and reflecting gleams of light. They can hide it for years . I could feel the hairs on my arms rise up and press against the inside of my sleeves.
    ‘It seems callous even to admit it, but it scared me. To lose all sense of yourself, like that.’ She shook her head, smiled. It was an unhappy smile. I watched the intricacies of the shifts in her skin, the neat ceramic teeth and the gold towards the back, the retreating gums. ‘You’re right; it’s really sad.’
    She sipped her tea. I lifted my cup in thoughtless echo, sipped, swallowed hard to get past the catch in my throat. I watched her hand set the cup on its saucer; I watched the press of the handle into the skin, the bulge of flesh around her wedding ring. Mum’s hands were frail and white, translucent, like the bones of fishes, bunched to lift off the loosened rings, to set them down on Dad’s broad palm for safekeeping. Her lips pale, her eyes big as saucers and bulging as a newborn’s.
    She was looking at me with a friendly, faintly puzzled expression. I cleared my throat and blinked.
    ‘The cottage. Mum loved it. I got some local history books, but I can’t find out anything about it. The Reading Room, I mean. Who lived there back then.’
    She shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything, I’m afraid. I’m a relative newcomer: only been here twenty years! If anyone knows, Margaret will. Born and bred in the village. You should see if you can talk to her.’
    ‘But I thought –’
    ‘When she’s having a good day, she can be as lucid as you or me.’
    For a half-second I was tempted to make a joke. I could have dragged the fear out into the open, mocked it, made it ridiculous, made it shrink. I just nodded.
    ‘If not, then there’s always Pauline; Pauline Boyd. She’s a newcomer like me, but local history is a bit of a hobby for her. She’d be